The link Quotes

“The whole district of Australia where I lived was just a small plot in the immensity of the huge continent whose fringes only had been explored. Berrima, in fact, was merely a little paddock which had been carved out of the wilderness. Yet even here in the stillness of the early evening I had a feeling that as a human being I was an intruder in the forest. For these dense forests belonged to the pale ghostly trees and to the strange creatures that were hidden in them. Then, suddenly, I would jump as if a gun had been fired close to me, as the silence was rent by the piercing din of the kookaburra, screeching and screeching from the branches of a tree above, until the menacing sound changed to a mocking laugh. The low, hoarse laugh would seem unending. Abruptly it would finish in an obscene, deep-throated chuckle, which had an odd quality of knowingness and familiarity, suggesting an intimate awareness of the stark fear of the man walking through the undergrowth below, and a malicious pleasure at the prospect of some inevitable and terrible doom.”
― Robin Maugham, The link: a Victorian mystery