CHAPTER TEN
THE desert was neither flat nor monotonous; nor I was it like so many other deserts – the Gobi, the Steppes, or certain parts of the Sahara – featureless and devoid of colour. Its formation was varied: patches of sand, outcrops of rock, dried-up watercourses, salt-pans, faults, and frequent belts of vegetation. And its colours were strong: bold and harsh and sharply-defined: belts of yellow, blocks of bottle-green, patches of fire-flame red and fields of blood.
The bush boy led the way unhesitatingly: across the salt-pans, through the scattered yellow-jackets – poor relations to the gums – around the outcrops of quartz and granite. It was eight years since his tribe had last passed this way. He’d been little more than a toddler then; but small as he was his memory and instinct had been at work, recording landmarks, storing up information that might be of use for the future – information that was proving invaluable now.
Soon they came to a valley, gently-rising, coiling like a lifeless snake aslant a range of low granite hills. Here the country was heavily timbered: stately white-barked eucalyptus, tatty yellow-jackets, saw-leafed banksias, and occasional patches of sandalwood – source of the incense-shedding joss-sticks that smoulder beneath the images of a million oriental gods. And as the trees increased in number, so did the birds. There hadn’t been many beside the hill-that-had-fallen-out-of-the-moon; but here, in the shade of the eucalyptus, they were in their thousands: gang-gangs and finches; honey-suckers and soldier-birds; budgerigars (love-birds to the romantically-minded; tiny flitting gems of mauve and olive, gold, jade-green, and cobalt-blue); and, perched on the branches of the gum trees, row after row of wonga-wongas: sad-faced, motionless, silent as the desert itself.
After the children had pushed some way into the valley, another type of bird made its presence known: a strange, sorrowful bird that followed their tracks, hopping from branch to branch with piteous, heartrending cries.
‘It isn’t yours,’ he wailed. ‘It isn’t yours.’
The children paused; looked back. At first they could see nothing. Then, with a sudden fluttering swoop, a red-breasted pardalote swept over their heads to settle on the branch of a nearby eucalyptus.
‘It isn’t yours. It isn’t yours.’ The mournful cry echoed among the leaves.
The bush boy turned to Peter, explaining by mime the pardalote’s behaviour. Ahead was water – thirstily the bush boy gulped – where the bird was accustomed to drink; and he was loath to share his private reservoir with strangers. For the pardalote was a bird with an abnormal thirst; he drank eighty to a hundred times a day, and not by the normal process of imbibing through the beak, but by settling himself on top of the water, spreading his wings and absorbing liquid through the delicate membrane of his skin. No wonder he wanted to keep his pool to himself! Yet by his very loquaciousness he guided others straight to the water he sought to hide. The bush boy led on, knowing that should he take a wrong turning the pardalote’s contented silence would warn him of his mistake. And soon they came to a small, fern-ringed basin, fed by an underground spring.
The pardalote, by now, had stopped his wailing. In angry silence he watched the children drinking his water, refreshing themselves at his pool.
It was midday. The sun was hot; and the boys scooped up great palmfuls of water and sloshed them over their heads. Mary too. But she wouldn’t go near the bush boy; and whenever he looked at her, she shrank away.
For lunch they ate the worwora: uncooked.
During the meal Peter tried to comfort his sister: asked her what she was frightened of. But he soon gave up. She was, he decided, in one of her incomprehensible moods. Girls were like that. Sometimes the only thing to do was to leave them alone. He wandered across to the bush boy and lay down beside him, in the shade of an outcrop of rock.
They stayed by the pool for three hours, avoiding the worst of the heat; then the bush boy decided it was time they moved on. Soon they were again on their way, traversing the upper slopes of the gently-sloping valley.
That day they covered fifteen miles. The bush boy could have walked twice as far. But Peter tired easily; and the Aboriginal adjusted his pace accordingly. Also Peter had lost his shoes – had left them together with his shirt somewhere beside the billabongs – and his feet, unused to hard going, had started to blister.
Late in the evening they came to the head of the valley, to where it petered out on the edge of a million-acre plateau. The trees were still with them, though not so thickly-growing now. So were the birds. The chat-chats, the corellas, and the sweetly-singing bellbirds; and, a little before dark, the bustards. There were three of the bustards. Foolish, inquisitive birds, rather like scraggy turkeys, they followed the children almost at their heels: sniffing, scratching, and pecking. The bush boy watched them thoughtfully, calculating their food value. One was smaller than the others: the chick: he would be tender, and plump enough to satisfy the hunger of three. Slowly, imperceptibly, the bush boy dropped behind; edging ever closer to the foolish birds. Suddenly – as if it had been thrown – his hand flew out. His fingers closed round the baby bustard’s neck; cut off its life in a single twisting jerk.
Swinging his victim carelessly, the bush boy went up to the girl. Before she realized quite what was happening, he had thrust the bustard, wings and body still a-twitch, into her arms. For wasn’t she a lubra: a carrier of burdens ?
A drop of blood from the broken neck splashed darkly on to the girl’s dress. But she didn’t drop the bustard. She held on to it: tightly: though her face puckered in nausea with every twitch of its wings.
Peter saw her distress.
‘Say, Mary! He should’a given it to me. I’ll hump it for you.’
He tried to take hold of the bird, but the girl turned away.
‘It’s heavy,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll take it.’
In single file they pushed on, over the rim of the plateau; ebony silhouettes against a sunset sky.
That night they camped in a fault, a broad slab-sided rift that split the plateau like a crack in sun-dried mud. There was no water; but the rocks retained the warmth of the sun, and the twilight wind passed high over their heads.
The bush boy again made fire, though this time there was little yacca wood, and it proved more difficult to light. But by the time the sun had set flames were flickering cheerfully, their shadows duplicated on the firelit rocks of the fault; and by the time the Southern Cross had tilted up, low on the horizon, the bustard was cooking in the fire-heated ash. They would eat it, the bush boy indicated, in the morning.
As they lay down to sleep, all the day’s constraint – which had ebbed somewhat away during the lighting of the fire – came flooding back. The girl kept moving about, keeping the fire between herself and the bush boy. Peter, worn out by the day’s exertions, quite lost patience with her.
‘Stop fidgeting, Mary!’ His voice was peevish. ‘I can’t get to sleep.’
‘Sorry, Pete.’
For a while there was silence. The bush boy moved quietly about the camp, banking down the fire, brushing aside random splinters of wood. Watching him, the girl tossed and turned. At last she could bear it no longer.
‘Peter!’ Her voice was low, and somewhat different from usual. Pleading: almost frightened.
‘Yes?’
‘Come and lie close to me. Please.’
‘What for?’
‘I’m cold.’
Reluctantly he crawled across, and the two children snuggled closely together.
The girl insisted on lying with her face to the fire. From where she lay she could see the bush boy, silhouetted against the firelight; he was standing on one foot, staring into the moonlit valley. She wondered what he was thinking: wondered if he was waiting for her to fall asleep. But I won’t sleep, she promised herself. Not till he does. She said it over and over again. Not till he does. Not till he does. But at last her eyes started to droop, her breathing to deepen; and a little before midnight, in spite of her resolutions, she slept the s
leep of the utterly exhausted.
But the bush boy didn’t sleep. Hour after hour he stood there: silent: motionless: a shadow carved in ebony and moonlight.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PHYSICALLY the Australian Aboriginal is tough. He can stand any amount of heat, exposure, or cold; and his incidence to pain is remarkably low. But he has his Achilles Heel. Mental euthanasia. A propensity for dying purely of autosuggestion.
Experiments have proved this: experiments carried out by Australia’s leading doctors. On the one hand a group of Aboriginals – voluntarily of course – have spent a day in the desert at a temperature of roughly 95°-100° Fahrenheit, and have spent the night in a sealed-off chamber, thermostatically controlled to a temperature of minus 15° (47° of frost). They slept well without any sort of protection; and, though they were naked, felt no cold. On the other hand, Aboriginals who are a hundred per cent physically fit have been known to die purely because a tribal medicine man has put the death curse on them. One such man was admitted to a state-capital hospital. Thorough tests proved that there was nothing the matter with him; psycho-analysts tried to instil in him the will to live, the will to fight. But in vain. The medicine man had said he was going to die. And die he did: of self-induced apathy.
Death, to the Aboriginal, is something that can’t be fought. Those whom the Spirit wants, he takes; and it’s no good kicking against the pricks.
That was why the bush boy accepted the fact of his impending death without question, without struggle. There was in his mind no flicker of hope. The lubra’s terror, to him, could have only the one meaning. He had seen tenor like hers before: in a woman’s eyes after prolonged and unsuccessful childbirth; in an old man’s face when he had become too weak to walk and the tribe had passed him by, leaving him alone, alone in the waterless desert. And so he now stood; without hope; passively waiting; wondering, as he stared across the moonlit valley, how and when the Spirit of Death would come to claim him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ALL night the bustard baked in the ashes, and by morning it was tender as broiled lamb. The children ate it hungrily.
Peter and Mary wanted to linger over the meal, would have liked to pick every succulent scrap off the bustard’s bones; but the bush boy was impatient to be off. Morning mist was still clinging to the sides of the rift valley, when he smoothed out the ashes of the fire, beckoned to the others and moved off along the fault. He set a fast pace.
Mary, not knowing the cause of his hurry, wished he’d be more considerate: for Peter’s sake. But, in spite of her misgivings, Peter’s vitality – at least in the early morning – seemed to be limitless, quite capable of measuring up to the bush boy’s long loping stride. Indeed, he apparently had energy to spare. For he hopped around the bush boy like an exuberant puppy, his shrill questioning voice echoing back from the rocks. And strangely enough the Aboriginal seemed to be understanding – and answering - his questions.
Peter had decided to learn the black boy’s language – it would be far more useful than the French his sister was always boasting about. He trotted up to the Aboriginal, holding a fragment of rock.
‘Say, darkie! What you call this?’
‘Garsha.’ The bush boy spoke with a grating harshness, hard as the flint itself.
‘And this?’ The white boy plucked at a tussock of grass.
‘Karathara.’ The word was whispered, liltingly, like the rustle of wind through a sea of grain.
‘Garsha. Karathara… Garsha. Karathara,’ Peter’s reedy treble echoed down the valley. He went rushing on ahead. Presently he came trotting back, and handed the bush boy a lump of quartz. Hour after hour the questioning went on. Mary felt very much alone.
For lunch they ate yams: queer-looking bushman-drakes that grew in dishevelled heaps beneath an outcrop of rock. Once again they rested through the midday heat – at least Mary rested; the boys chattered like gossiping kookaburras – then they were walking again, heading south-west across the red sandstone plateau.
The plateau was not a pleasant place for walking. It shimmered with heat; the children’s footsteps kicked up a cloud of fine red dust, and there was no water. Soon even the ebullient Peter was reduced to a sober plod. The dust hung for a long time in the motionless air; so that looking back the children could see behind them a winding haze of redness stretching far across the plain. After a while Peter started to sneeze. The dust was tickling his nose.
At the first sneeze the bush boy grinned (remembering their original meeting); but when the sneezing continued, becoming louder and louder as the dust inflamed Peter’s nostrils, the bush boy looked at him anxiously. He hoped the little one hadn’t caught the fever-that-comes-with-the-rains.
Peter, in fact, was starting nothing worse than a common cold – the type that is almost chronic among people who fly long distances and experience sudden changes in temperature – and this cold was now being aggravated by the plateau dust. He sneezed and sneezed and sneezed; he went red in the face; his eyes poured water. The bush boy regarded him with astonishment. Aboriginals know all about fever, but they never have colds and they seldom sneeze. Certainly the black boy had never witnessed such prolonged and noisy paroxysms as Peter’s.
All that afternoon and half the evening the little boy sneezed his way across the dusty plain; he only stopped when they came to the edge of the plateau and the soft redstone gave way to granite; smooth and hard, not to be kicked up by shuffling feet. By the time they stopped for the night Peter was utterly exhausted: too tired to help the bush boy with fire-making : too done-in to eat. He crawled wearily across to his sister, put his head on her lap, and fell instantly asleep.
The bush boy banked down the fire. He was pleased with their progress – that day they had covered seventeen miles. If they kept to this pace, another seven sleeps would see them to the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth. Once they got there, the strangers would be safe.
He didn’t go near the lubra – knowing that for some reason his nearness alarmed her (perhaps because she was ignorant enough to think that the Spirit of Death might pass, in juxtaposition, from him to her). Instead, he lay quietly down, on the opposite side of the fire.
He was just drifting into the dream-time when, quite unexpectedly, he sneezed.
Morning mist refracted the rays of the sun, tumbling them into the valley like a river of molten gold. Bathed in sudden light, the children stirred.
The bush boy was first to wake. He woke completely and instantly, every bit of him together: one second lost to the world, the next completely alert. He rose, flexed his muscles, sniffed the air, and walked quietly down-valley.
Peter woke next. He sat up yawning, rubbing eyes and nose. He’d have liked to blow his nose really (it felt all bunged-up) but having no handkerchief, he sniffed. Loudly.
His sister rolled on to her side and looked at him critically.
‘Peter.’ Her voice was disapproving. ‘Where’s your hanky?’
‘Lost.’
He didn’t wait for recriminations, but got up quickly.
‘I’m going to look for the darkie. Coming?’
She shook her head, and, lay down again. He wondered why she looked suddenly hurt: as though he’d slapped her across the face.
He wandered off; hands in pockets, sniffing loudly. Instinctively he headed down the valley, down the broad granite cleft that ran like an axe-cut from plateau-rim to fringe of plain. He had been too tired the night before to take notice of their camp site – it had been simply a place to go to sleep in; but now, the scenery’s bizarre grandeur caught his imagination. It was, he decided, just like the moon: just like those rocky, fierce-coloured lunar landscapes of the comic strips. He peered at the rocks a little apprehensively, half-expecting some Martian monster to come leaping out; indeed, from the far side of a jagged outcrop of granite, he could, now that he listened carefully, hear something that sounded rather like a Martian feeding: a sort of scrunching-mingled-with-heavy-breathing noise. Fear fought curiosity,
and lost. Cautiously he squirmed his way up the wall of rocks, and peered over the edge.
Twenty feet below him was a small pool, rock-ringed, crystal clear, and motionless as glass. And beside it was the bush boy, trundling a small boulder of quartz, about the size of a football (but ten times its weight). He saw Peter and grinned.
‘Yarrawa!’ He pointed to the pool.
Peter glissaded down. He saw the yarrawa at once. Fish. Silver-scaled, glistening, darting; ranging in size from three to fifteen inches; on their sides a row of small black dots, like the port-holes of a liner. He suddenly remembered that he’d had no breakfast.
‘Yeemara?’ He pointed at the fish.
The bush boy nodded.
The pool was shallow at one end, and Peter waded in. He could see the fish quite clearly; there were thousands of them – well, hundreds, anyhow – but whenever his hand snaked down to clutch them, they darted away. Like quicksilver. The bush boy laughed. He beckoned Peter out of the pool, and led him to a smooth circular rock, smaller than his, but quite as heavy, he suspected, as the little one could lift.
‘Kurura,’ he said. And started to trundle his boulder of quartz up to a shelving ledge of rock that overhung the pool. Peter followed him; and soon the boys and their stones were poised on the edge of the rock that jutted out, like a diving-board, over the water. The bush boy mimed his intention. Peter nodded in understanding; and together they hoisted up their boulders, staggered with them to the lip of the rock and hurled them into the pool. The splash was cataclysmic, loud as a whip-crack, echoing round the encircling rock; the spray was torrential, like the collapsing of a miniature waterspout; and the concussion, in the confined, rock-bound pool, was overwhelming, like the explosion of a depth-charge. The fish were stunned: upside-down they came floating to the surface.
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