Free Over the Blue Mountains by Mary Burchell

bushfire. The kind that travels along the ground, consuming everything in its path, but traveling at a manageable pace usually, if one gets fair warning. Then there’s the kind that catches the tops of the trees and scrub. That fairly whips along, not pausing to consume everything underneath, but just leaping from tree to tree, with sparks and odd bits of burning twig dropping along the path and setting fresh fires going. That’s almost impossible to deal with, so long as it’s raging in a heavily wooded area.”
    “And is there any possibility of escape if one is caught in one?” Juliet asked fearfully.
    “Not to outdistance it, if that’s what you mean. But people have been known to escape by taking shelter in a stream, particularly if it happens to run through a deep gully. Then the fire literally passes over them.”
    “But what a frightful experience!”
    “Pretty unpleasant,” he agreed, with considerable understatement.
    “Did you ever know anyone to whom it happened?” She was passionately eager for every personal detail of this new and unknown life.
    For answer he smiled and, taking one strong brown hand off the wheel of the car, he held it out, palm downward, for her to see. All along the back ran a smooth, irregular white scar that continued over the wrist and apparently beyond where the edge of his coat sleeve hid it.
    “That’s a reminder of such an occasion,” he told her.
    “It happened to you!” She looked at him with such a mixture of horror and respect that he laughed aloud—a thing she had never heard him do before.
    “Cheer up! It was twenty years ago,” he assured her amusedly, “when I was a schoolboy. The warning system is better nowadays.” And then he changed the subject and pointed to their left. “There—what do you think of that?”
    The ground fell away at this point, and as he drew the car to a standstill Juliet was able to gaze in wonder and delight across a great valley—almost a chasm—to the towering, flat-topped mountains that held in the depths of their shadows an unmistakable shade of misty, purplish blue.
    “How wonderful!” Juliet said on a long breath of admiration and satisfaction. For it was amid scenes of such beauty that she would now be living.
    “You’ll have plenty of views like that as we climb,” he promised.
    And sure enough, during the final hour’s drive before they came to Katoomba, Juliet was able to drink her fill of mountain views and clear, sweet air, and a range of beauty that was exhilarating and uplifting in its completeness.
    At Katoomba they lunched in the surprisingly good hotel that stood on a slope overlooking the wandering, hilly, rather raw township. And here again—particularly from the rooftop where they were invited to go—they were able to look across the wonderfully wooded valley to the three curious peaks known as The Three Sisters, and the beautiful Leura Falls.
    It was Max who finally said, “I think we should be pushing on now.”
    And then Juliet remembered that she was actually only an hour or two’s drive from Martin, and she wondered how she could have lingered, even for the most beautiful views in the world.
    “Oh, yes! Let’s go,” she agreed eagerly.
    And he smiled slightly and asked, “How long is it since you saw your fiancé?”
    “Just over a year. And now I can hardly wait,” she admitted with a laugh and a quick flush.
    Max Ormathon had not struck Juliet as an imaginative man, but he seemed to understand that during the last hour of the drive her thoughts were sufficient for her, without the necessity of talking. At any rate, he made no attempt at conversation. He just drove steadily onward, leaving her free to luxuriate in the fact that her long, long journey was almost over, and it was to end in the traditional “lovers’ meeting.”
    Juliet was almost supremely happy in that last hour. All the troubles and anxieties that had beset her at various points during the journey from England seemed so