Titus really enjoyed our visit. We had a lot more laughs. Even the po-faced man from Amadeus laughed. Then we piled into the Land Cruiser and hurried back to Cullen.
I spent the afternoon clearing up my papers. We were starting for Alice in the morning.
39
THE MAN FROM Amadeus wanted to be dropped at the Horn River Settlement, so Arkady volunteered to drive him by the back road. It was far less frequented than the other, but everything was drying out and the mining-company man had made it in a car.
We had stocked up with food and water and were saying goodbye to Rolf and Wendy, saying how we’d write and send books and always keep in touch, when Limpy strolled up and cupped his hands round Arkady’s ear.
‘Sure, we’ll take you,’ he said.
Limpy was in his best. He had a clean white shirt and a brown tweed jacket, and his hair and face were dripping with oil, making him look like a wet grey seal.
What he wanted was to visit Cycad Valley: a place of immense importance on his Songline, to which he had never been.
Cycad Valley is a National Park – though well protected from the public – where there are a unique species of cabbage-palm and ancient stands of Native Pine. The Horn River runs through its gorge; Limpy’s Dreaming, the Native Cat, ran straight down the middle of the stream-bed. The Native Cat, or Tjilpa, is not a real cat but a small marsupial (Dasyurus geoffreyi) with outsize whiskers and a banded tail held vertically above its back. It may, sadly, be extinct.
There is a story that a young Tjilpa Ancestor, somewhere north of the MacDonnell Ranges, watched two eagle feathers fall from the sky and wanted to know where they came from. Following the Milky Way over the sandhills, he gradually attracted other Tjilpa Men, who joined the troop. On and on they went. Their fur was ruffled in the winter wind and their paws were cracked by the cold.
At last they reached the sea at Port Augusta and there, standing in the sea, was a pole so tall it touched the sky (like Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory). Its top was white with sky-feathers and its lower half white with sea-feathers. The Tjilpa Men laid the pole on its side and carried it to Central Australia.
Limpy had never come here because of some long-standing feud. But he had recently heard over the bush telegraph that three of his distant relatives were living there – or, rather, dying there, alongside their tjuringa storehouse. He wanted to see them before they went.
We drove for seven hours, from seven until two. Limpy sat in front between the driver and Marian, motionless but for a quick dart of the eyes to right or to left.
About ten miles short of the Valley, the Land Cruiser bumped across a creek flowing south.
Limpy suddenly bounced up like a jack-in-the-box, muttered things under his breath, rammed his head out of the driver’s window (causing Arkady to swerve), repeated this on the other side, and then folded his arms and went silent.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Arkady.
‘Tjilpa Man go that way,’ said Limpy, pointing south.
At the road sign for Cycad Valley, we took a right hairpin bend and plunged down a steep track along the bed of the Horn. Pale-green water rushed over the white stones. We forded the river several times. There were river red-gums growing out of it.
Limpy kept his arms folded, and said nothing.
We came to the confluence of two streams: that is, we met the stream we had crossed higher up on the main road. This lesser stream was the route of the Tjilpa Men, and we were joining it at right angles.
As Arkady turned the wheel to the left, Limpy bounced back into action. Again he shoved his head through both windows. His eyes rolled wildly over the rocks, the cliffs, the palms, the water. His lips moved at the speed of a ventriloquist’s and, through them, came a rustle: the sound of wind through branches.
Arkady knew at once what was happening. Limpy had learnt his Native Cat couplets for walking pace, at four miles an hour, and we were travelling at twenty-five.
Arkady shifted into bottom gear, and we crawled along no faster than a walker. Instantly, Limpy matched his tempo to the new speed. He was smiling. His head swayed to and fro. The sound became a lovely melodious swishing; and you knew that, as far as he was concerned, he was the Native Cat.
We drove for almost an hour; the road twisted through the purple cliffs. There were gigantic boulders smeared with black streaks, and the cycads, like magnified tree ferns, sprang up between them. The day was stifling.
Then the river vanished underground, leaving on the surface a stagnant pool with reedy margins. A purple heron flew off and settled in a tree. The road had come to an end.
We got out and followed Limpy along a well-worn footpath which threaded round the rocks and the water and came out into a basin of dark-red rock with receding layers of strata, reminding one of the seats in a Greek theatre. There was the usual tin shack under a tree.
A middle-aged woman, her breasts ballooning inside her purple jumper, was dragging a branch of firewood to the hearth. Limpy introduced himself. She flashed a smile, and beckoned us all to follow.
As I wrote in my notebooks, the mystics believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a ‘right death’. He who has arrived ‘goes back’.
In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific rules for ‘going back’ or, rather, for singing your way to where you belong: to your ‘conception site’, to the place where your tjuringa is stored. Only then can you become – or re-become – the Ancestor. The concept is quite similar to Heraclitus’s mysterious dictum, ‘Mortals and immortals, alive in their death, dead in each other’s life.’
Limpy hobbled ahead. We followed on tiptoe. The sky was incandescent, and sharp shadows fell across the path. A trickle of water dribbled down the cliff.
‘Tjuringa place up there!’ said Limpy, softly, pointing to a dark cleft high above our heads.
In a clearing there were three ‘hospital’ bedsteads, with mesh springs and no mattresses, and on them lay the three dying men. They were almost skeletons. Their beards and hair had gone. One was strong enough to lift an arm, another to say something. When they heard who Limpy was, all three smiled, spontaneously, the same toothless grin.
Arkady folded his arms, and watched.
‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ Marian whispered, putting her hand in mine and giving it a squeeze.
Yes. They were all right. They knew where they were going, smiling at death in the shade of a ghost-gum.
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Copyright © Bruce Chatwin 1987
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The Songlines Page 30
