‘Hey, Mary! There’s food in the pool.’
The girl came running. Eagerly. But when she saw the ‘food’ she wasn’t impressed.
‘He’s awfu’ small, Pete. And all arms and legs.’
‘Maybe there’s other ones.’
Together they peered into the brackish water, but saw nothing.
‘Say, Mary!’ – it was Peter’s turn to think back now – ‘ ’Member how the darkie killed all them fish. Throwing stones. Couldn’t we do that?’
‘No good here, Pete. Stones would go squelch in the mud.’
They stared disconsolately at the pool. Then the girl hit on the answer.
‘I know. Let’s stir up the mud. Anything in the pool will get all choked. Will have to climb out.’
It worked like a charm; better than they had dared to hope. They collected a couple of branches, plunged them into the pool, and churned up the mud. In seconds the water took on the consistency of soup: thick soup; brown and heavy: creamed with mud and scum. And almost at once the yabbies – diminutive crayfish of the bush – came bobbing up to the surface. Choked and blinded, they fled their mud-bed haunts; desperately, like drowning men, they struggled for the bank. Bedraggled, they hauled themselves up –out of the frying-pan into the fire. For on the banks the children were waiting for them. They snatched them up; smashed their heads against the earth; killing them instantly. On and on the slaughter went, till a full three dozen yabbies (each between four and eight inches long) lay dead beside the pool.
It was Mary who called a halt.
‘That’s enough, Pete. Let’s not kill any more.’
The yabbies, roasted on fire-heated stones, made a delicious meal. The children ate their fill, and still had enough left over for breakfast.
Soon, curled close together, they settled down for the night.
It was cooler in the hills, and they were glad of the warmth of the fire. The girl had dragged up an extra large supply of branches; and from these she picked out a couple of arm-thick trunks, and tossed them on to the fire. The sparks flew skyward; wreaths of wood-smoke drifted across the stars; down-valley a dingo howled at the crescent moon. Charleston was in another world.
They woke cold and coated with dew; but the resurrected fire warmed them quickly, and a breakfast of yabbies put them in good heart. They collected another two dozen of the crayfish out of the pool – for the way ahead looked barren and devoid of food – then, Peter leading, they hit off across the hills, skirting the pyramid of wine-veined quartz.
The hills had a primeval grandeur. They had been old when the Himalayas were first folded out of the level plain. Their rocky slopes were hard; enduring; unchanging from aeon to aeon. The children traversed them slowly: ants on a gargantuan tableau.
In the clear, hazeless light distances and angles were hard to judge. Slopes that looked an easy ten minutes’ stroll turned out to be an hour’s exhausting climb. And always at the top of one rise was another: wave after wave of swelling hillocks, always steepening, always climbing; never dropping away, never falling into the longed-for valley.
In silence the children plodded on, watched by blue-wrens and moffets that tucked their pin-thin legs beneath them and scooted about the flattened rocks like mice on inset wheels.
Soon the rocks became increasingly rugged and broken, cut into lopsided rifts and faults, as though a giant with an axe had used the hill-top as a random chopping-block. Among the faults strange colours glinted: the dull crimson of garnets, the yellow flame of topaz, the white of moonstone, and, very occasionally, the fleck of blue-green beryl. Unmined wealth. A jeweller’s shop of semi-precious gems; undiscovered; unexploited.
The girl’s fingers ran round the base of a moonstone.
‘They’re beautiful, Pete. Let’s take some with us.’
‘Come on, Mary. We can’t eat stones.’
Reluctantly she followed her brother among the desiccated rocks. But the jewels were something she didn’t forget.
Then, quite suddenly, as the children rounded a shoulder of granite, they stopped: stopped dead in disbelief. For in front of them rose a whole hillside aglow with shimmering colour: every shade of the spectrum sparkling, flickering, and interchanging: a kaleidoscope of brilliance rioting in the midday sun.
Mary’s eyes widened, her mouth fell open.
‘Jewels, Peter! Jewels! Millions and millions of them.’
But they weren’t jewels. They were something even more beautiful.
As the children approached the hill they heard a low, high-pitched rustling; a soft vibrating hum that trembled the air. Then, to their amazement, the blaze of colour began to move: shimmering: palpitating: rising and falling, as the butterflies opened and shut their wings. Suddenly, like bees, they swarmed – disturbed by the children’s approach – and in a great rainbow-tinted cloud went swirling south: south for the Victorian plains.
The hill lost its magic. The sun streamed down. The children plodded on.
At midday they rested for a couple of hours in the shade of a steep-sided ravine. Here they ate the last of the yabbies. To both of them, the prawn-like creatures tasted vaguely salt. And they had no water. The girl dozed, drugged to immobility by the heat of the sun: but the boy was restless. Soon he got to his feet.
‘Come on, Mary,’ he urged. ‘Kurura. Maybe that valley’s over the next hill.’
But it wasn’t. Nor over the next. Nor the next. Nor even the one after that, which they reached in the golden sunset.
They camped for the night beneath a low shelf of granite. They were hungry and thirsty; exhausted and disillusioned. There was no wood for a fire, no water for a drink. The sunset wind was cold; and so, when they came out, were the stars: cold and uncaring : cold and uncaring and very far away.
Before they slept the children talked awhile in whispers.
‘Pete!’ The girl’s voice was anxious. ‘You think we oughta head back tomorrow? Back for the waterhole?’
‘Course not!’ The little boy was scornful. ‘The darkie said there’s water over the hills. We’ll go on.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DAWN brought wreaths of mist, as the heat of the sun warmed the dew-wet rocks, making them steam like tarmac after summer rain. The children woke damp and cold, hungry and thirsty, their mouths dry and their voices hoarse.
‘Come on, Mary,’ Peter’s croak was harsh as a kookaburra’s. ‘I don’t like this place. Let’s push on.’
He led off, round a shoulder of smooth-grained granite. Both children moved a deal more slowly than the day before. Every step required a conscious effort.
They found that the shoulder joined on to a solid massif, a great wedge-like block of hills flanked by a subsidiary ridge which ran directly across their line of advance. Atop this ridge little puffs of cloud, sun-tinted fawn and pink, were rising and falling to the breath of unseen air draughts. Mary looked at the clouds: thoughtfully: hopefully. She tried to remember her geography lessons – in hot climates weren’t clouds supposed to form over water? Maybe beyond the ridge they’d come at last to the longed-for valley. She said nothing to Peter – disillusion, if it came, would be too cruel – but somehow her eagerness communicated itself to the little boy; he quickened his stride.
But the ridge proved unexpectedly steep, especially its last hundred feet. Here the rock was smooth, devoid of vegetation, swept clean by wind, scorched bare by sun. Toe-holds and foot-holds were hard to find.
‘Careful, Pete.’ Mary paused, wiped the sweat out of her eyes and pointed to the left. ‘Over there. It’s not so steep.’
Slowly, painfully, they inched their way higher.
The clouds had changed colour now, changed from pink and fawn to a dazzling white. Like puffs of cotton wool in a sky of Reckitt’s blue, they bobbed and curtsied along the farther slope of the ridge, almost within the children’s hand grasp. And below them Mary could see more cloud: strato-cumulus: layer upon layer. Her hopes rose.
‘Careful near the top, Pete. T’ot
her side may be a cliff.’
They reached the crest together – the longed-for crest, swept by a cool, moisture-laden wind – and stood, hand in hand, looking down on the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth.
They couldn’t see much detail in the valley itself, for it was blanketed in cloud, but the general layout was clear. It was a rift valley, steep-sided, about three miles wide, splitting the hills like an axe-cut. Through occasional breaks in the cloud the children could see belts of woodland and the distant gleam of water.
Peter danced on the crest of the ridge.
‘Just like the darkie told us, Mary. Food and water. Yeemara and arkooloola.’
The girl nodded.
For a moment the clouds drifted away, revealing a broad, slow-moving ribbon of water, reed-lined, dotted with water-birds, and beautiful as the river that ran out of Eden. Then the layers of strato-cumulus closed up. But the children had seen their vision: knew they’d been led to the promised land. Hand in hand they scrambled and slithered into the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE girl lay on her side, propped up on one elbow, cutting the fourteenth notch into a branch of yacca. The boy watched her.
‘How long you reckon we been here, Mary?’
She counted the notches, first those on one side, then those on the other.
‘Eight days in the desert. Six in the valley.’
It seemed to both of them far longer. The past, especially to the boy, was like another world.
They lay beside a shallow lagoon, both of them naked – for on their third day in the valley the girl’s dress had been torn beyond repair by the claws of a koala. In front of them the reed-fringed water, motionless as glass, went looping away down-valley; behind them the hills towered up, their summits wreathed in cloud; on either side of them the virgin forests, dark as a cathedral vault, sprawled almost to the water’s edge. It was midday, and the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth lay motionless, asleep in the heat of the sun.
For six days the children had wandered slowly up-valley, exploring the curving lagoons, the reedy marshlands and the belts of semi-tropical forest. They had found a number of animals, fish, and reptiles; and a great multitude of birds; but of human beings there was never a sign. They had had plenty to drink and plenty to eat – not always what they’d have chosen (for the water duck eluded their every trap and snare) – but at least something: fruit or vegetable, reptile or fish. Now they had come to an especially beautiful reach of the valley, and the girl – much to her brother’s disgust – was preparing to make a home –‘just a hut of reeds,’ she had said, ‘in case we want to come back.’ Peter had jibed at the idea of home-making. ‘Gee, Mary,’ he’d said, ‘what we wanna house for? If it rains, we can shelter in the forest.’ But the girl had seemed so disappointed, that he’d agreed to call a halt until the reed-home was made.
He wasn’t, in one way, the least bit sorry to have an excuse to rest; to lie back in the lush, sun-hot grass and assimilate all that had happened in the last few days. They had seen such wonderful things; especially since they had come to the valley….
They had gone first to the lagoons: to the chain of looping billabongs, fed by underground springs, that lay like a string of sapphires spilt into the hollow of the valley. At first they’d had eyes for nothing but the water: the clear-blue, longed-for water, that in a few wonderful moments took the harshness out of their voices, the aching out of their throats, and the fear out of their hearts.
Then they had noticed the birds.
They were everywhere: in water and reeds, trees and sky; and they were quite fearless. The children stared at them, wandered among them, watched and observed them with a wonderment that increased with every hour of every day.
They saw the wood-ducks; the ducks that nest in trees; that carry their young to water by the scruff of their necks, as a cat carries her kittens. They saw the tail-less swamp coots, nibbling wild celery as they floated by on self-made rafts. They saw the snake-birds, with their long rubbery necks and pointed-dagger bills. And the jacaras – the legendary Jesus-birds – walking the water on their long, disproportionate toes (that use the fragile underwater lily-leaves as stepping-stones). They saw dabchicks and zebra-ducks: marsh-bitterns and pelicans. And late one evening they saw the dance of the brolgas.
They were looking for a place to camp when Peter saw them: a cluster of eight or nine long-billed, stalk-like birds, slim, silver-grey, and elegant, standing one-legged on the water’s edge. As the children watched them they saw no sign; but suddenly – as if at a clearly understood command – the brolgas came to life, moved gracefully into a circle. One bird took up position in the centre. He was the leader: the leader of the ritual dance. Opening wide his wings, he began a stately pirouette, a slow-motion quadrille. The others followed his lead; in stylized step they pranced solemnly around the circle, their feet moving in perfect time, their wings rising and falling to the beat of unheard music. The dance went on for several minutes – more than five, less than ten – then, quite suddenly, it ended. As if at another command the brolgas broke circle, moved into a random duster, and took up their original one-legged stance gazing peacefully across the lagoon. The children passed within six feet of them, but they never turned their heads.
And the birds of the forest were as strange and wonderful as the birds of the lagoons.
The children never tired of watching them. They saw the mistletoe birds planting their crops: plastering tree trunks with the reeds of the parasites that would later provide them with food. They saw the hawks fanning their nests, bringing their eggs to the requisite temperature for hatching; the butcher-birds stocking their larders, impaling live beetles, moths, and fledgelings on the thorns of the iron-bark; and the rifle-birds, gilding their basin-like nests with the cast-off skins of snakes.
Every sunrise and every sunset the bird songs were near-deafening: a diurnal cacophony of notes clear and limpid, bizarre and unmelodious. The soft cadences of pilot-birds, the wolf-wail of soldiers; the croon of yellow-bellies and the sandpapery scour of scissor-grinders. While at night even stranger sounds echoed among the moon-white trees. The cow-like moo of the bittern, the yap of the barking owl, the coo-ee of the brain-fever bird, and rising above them all the nightmarish scream of the channel-bill: a maniacal shriek which terrified the water rodents into scurrying flight, making them betray their presence to the hovering bird.
No less wonderful than the birds were the trees of the forest with their parasitic flowers and vines.
The children had been a little afraid of the forest at first; it was so enormous; so dark and earthy-smelling, with tree trunks soaring skyward, and strange, evilly-fashioned plants choking each other to death in a slime of decomposing vegetation. To start with they had stayed on its edges, among maiden-blush of reddish brown and heartswood of emerald green. Then, becoming bolder, they ventured a little way in: to where sycamore vied with tulip-wood, and the cassias dug their quinine-producing roots deep into the fertile soil. And at last they dared the centre: the heart of the primeval wonderland.
Here they found a fantastic battleground of tree and creeper, parasite and vine; with the bodies of the vanquished decomposing in the humid soil. The trees soared skyward, slim and straight, seeking the life-giving sun. But around them, choking them to death, coiled the dodders – the predatory vines, sucking the nutriment out of their roots, gripping the trees with tentacles like tightening tourniquets. And intertwined with the dodders were the jikkas: headless, tail-less, rootless, vegetable snakes; growing on and on, from either end, wrapping their vampire arms around anything they touched.
But, as the children were quick to see, even such a charnel-house as the forest centre was not devoid of beauty – the staghorns, their leaves rearing skyward like the antlers of mating deer; the rock lilies, their bells as white as virgin snow; and the orchids, dangling like gossamer clouds out of the dark trees. They wandered through twisting tunnels, arcaded with vegetatio
n through which the sun had never penetrated, they smelt the rich humid soil which had never felt the stir of a drying wind. At first they were filled with awe and amazement, but eventually, after three or four days of exploration, they became as much at home in the forest as they had been in the desert.
Together they watched the ant-lion lying in wait for his prey, lurking at the base of his self-dug trap, waiting for a victim to come plunging in to his death. Together they watched the fisherman-spider, lowering his single thread baited with sweet-scented adhesive saliva; then when the bait was taken, hauling the thread in, hand over hand. They saw the stick-like praying-mantis, the blue-skinned, red-capped cassowary, and - on their third day in the valley – they saw the koala.
They were on the fringe of the forest, collecting hips from the bush-roses which grew in banks among the eucalyptus trees, the day Mary lost her dress.
‘Look!’
She pointed to one of the trees. Half-way down its smooth-grained trunk was a moving ball of silver-grey: a koala, shifting from tree to tree, from one supply of gum leaves to the next. Quietly the children crept to the foot of the eucalyptus. Slowly, steadily, one leg at a time, the koala descended.
It was a mother koala, and clinging to its back was a cub: a harmless, fist-sized teddy bear: fat, tufted-eared, button-eyed, and covered in smooth sheening fur.
When the bears were about three feet from the ground, Peter darted suddenly round the trunk. He grabbed the cub by the scruff of its neck, jerked it off its mother’s back, and thrust it into Mary’s arms.
‘Bet you never had a doll as nice as that!’ he grinned.
The mother bear was far too slow-witted to defend her offspring. But she didn’t run away. She hung on to the eucalyptus, blinking her eyes in surprise. Then she started to moan: a low, pathetic, sobbing moan.
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