"""It's possible to be damned without being dead,"" said Smith, as he drank his nobbler at the Pilbarra Hotel. ""And miners are the men who know it, in such a place as this."" He looked out of the reeking bar-room on the light brown glare of waterless desert, with a few thirsty trees scattered over it. ""We're in the pit, so to speak,"" he continued, ""but not the lowest, for there are drinks here still. Fill 'em up again, Bob, and have one yourself. As for me, I feel I could blue my skin and shirt for a last one before I tumble to pieces and rot finger by finger in this hole."" The men in the bar stood and drank with him silently. Yet one who was mad drunk with brandy and sunlight smashed his tumbler on the bar top, and pitched the bottom at a mongrel dog slinking outside in a thin shadow. ""What's the best news, Smith?"" asked Bob, who was the only cheerful man in the crowd. ""The best news,"" answered Smith, ""is that we are back, and the water's nearly done here, and the rain is not coming, and the camp is rotting. Tinned meats and fever water are doing for us. I might as well have stayed out yonder and got sun-dried in mulga and spinifex."" And he went off foolishly into the blazing sun, which came down at a slant of ninety degrees, and shone back from the hot dust with a glare that could blister a man under his chin. The town that he strode through was of boards and canvas and corrugated iron. It stank in the still air, and, as man, or horse, or camel went by, the dust rose thick, and empty cans rang. But into the stagnant desolation came men perpetually. They came in with gold fever, and went out with typhoid; and still their empty places filled up. The Western Australian papers screamed ""no water,"" and the Eastern papers copied them with jealous additions; but men came in to drink thick mud and rot like silly sheep piled against a windward fence in a dry season, when the creeks and tanks are dry, and grass is not. From Albany, Perth, and Freemantle, from Kimberley, Murchison, and Coolgardie, men rushed in, till New Find, so greatly boomed, was full of good men and thieves, of workers and loafers, of white men and of Chinamen, and they were all bent on gold, till the fever got them, and they yelled under canvas which was no shelter from the sun. But ants and spiders and scorpions gloried while men died, and the flies were thick on sick men's mouths, and ownerless dogs dug up corpses and died of blood-poisoning..."
