The Secret of Emu Plain & The Face of the Abbot

IT so happened that business called me to Queensland in the late October
of 1894, and hearing that my old friend, Rosamund Dale, was about to be
married, I determined to present myself at Jim Macdonald's station on the
Barcoo District in December, in order to be present at the ceremony. I
had seen a good deal of Rosamund when she was a child, and it was an old
promise of mine that, if possible, I was to be one of the guests at her
wedding.

I arrived at Macdonald's a week before Christmas, and when a hot wind, or
sirocco, was blowing in from the west. I little thought, as I did so,
that the strangest, and most terrible adventure of my life was about to
take place in the Queensland bush. But so it was, and this is the story
just as it happened.

I had been delayed on my journey, and on the evening of my arrival the
wedding was to take place. Macdonald's property was about seven hundred
and fifty square miles in extent, and was in the heart of the hills,
which are the fountain-head of the countless creeks that run south, and
join to form the Warrego, and eventually the Great Darling River, some
four hundred miles away. It was good grazing country on the whole, but
contained one enormous tract of arid sand, some forty square miles in
extent, which went by the name of Emu Plain. Skirting one corner of this
plain ran the coach road from Blackall to Charleville, along which ran
Cobb & Co.'s coach once a fortnight. Almost in the middle of the plain
stood in solitary grandeur the great Emu Rock, a grotesque, bare,
perpendicular crag of limestone, rising a sheer three hundred feet from
the ground.