midnight
Not for him to see how , as he went up and on , the hardy Dicksoniae , still nestled in stunted tufts among the more sheltered side gullies , long after her tenderer sister , the queenly Alsophylla had been left behind . He only knew that he was a hunted wild beast , and that his lair was beyond the snow . The creek flashed pleasantly among the broken slate , full and turbid under the mid-day sun . After midnight , when its fountains are sealed again by the frosty breath of night , that creek will be reduced to a trickling rill . His horse 's feet brushed through the delicate asplenium , the Venus ' - hair of Australia ; the sarsaparilla still hung in scant purple tufts on the golden wattle , and the scarlet correa lurked among the broken quartz . Upwards and onwards . In front , endless cycles agone , a lava stream from some crater we know not had burst over the slate , with fearful clang and fierce explosion , forming a broad roadway of broken basalt up to a plateau twelve hundred feet or more above us , and not so steep but that a horse might be led up it .