After a ride of three hours the party began to approach a steep wall of rock, where the horses were left, as they had now to prosecute their journey on foot, till at length they came to a confused mass of coarse, breccia-like sandstone, constituting what is known as the Sugar Loaf, whence they had to toil laboriously among the rocks till they reached the summit. A marvellous panorama was spread out before them; the whole county of Northumberland, with its green forest clothing, was stretched out at their feet in all its sunlit splendour. To the left far in the distance was visible the township of Maitland, and the navigable part of the Hunter River, which wound along like a silver band till it was lost in the distance, where it fell into the Pacific, on whose seething billows the stately ships looked like small white specks on a confused, uncertain back-ground. Far in the distance to the right, half concealed by the forest, was Lake Macquarie. The colonial members of the party described the latter as very difficult of access, but as a veritable paradise for the sportsman, since it is frequented by black swans in hundreds, the Australian stork, curlews, the hook-billed creeper, cormorants, and an infinite variety of water-fowl. The Blue Mountains formed the back-ground of this splendid landscape. The whole neighbourhood is pretty well settled and cultivated. Here and there wreaths of blue smoke indicated where the huts of industrious colonists lay concealed in the forest. Their conductors were not a whit behind the strangers in their appreciation of the panoramic effect; they had never scaled the summit before, although the elder had lived 15 years at Ash Island, and had often been as far as the top of the first rocky ascent in search of strayed cattle.
Lost in delighted contemplation of the beauties of nature, no account was made of the passage of time, so that part of the return journey had to be made in the twilight. It was a delightful, clear, moonlight night. The deep stillness in nature was only occasionally broken by the shrill cry of the curlew (_Numenius arquata_), from the neighbouring swamps, or the rustling of Wallabies disturbed by the tread of the advancing horsemen. Buried in a sort of dreamy charm that could find no utterance, the riders left their horses to choose their own pace over the sward, hardly able to realize that they were indeed under the unclouded brilliancy of an Australian sky, traversing the forests haunted by the timid kangaroo and the swift but shy emu.