This Golden Land

by Wood, Barbara

  Hannah looked toward the south, where unseen green fields and civilization beckoned. She scanned this forbidding wilderness that was a wasteland with a few trees and some scrub, hilly and full of flies. She espied a low range of hills to the west which, recalling Neal's expedition map, she knew were named the Baxter Range, and it lay north of a place Edward Eyre had named Iron Knob. Hannah thought of Neal, long gone with Sir Reginald's expedition, making wondrous discoveries and photographing them. Finally, looking at the injured leg she had just subjected to a highly experimental medicine, and knowing she had a responsibility to this man and to the outcome of her test, she said, "I will stay. I want to make sure Mr. O'Brien is all right."

  "Suit yerself," Maxberry said, then he addressed the others. "All right, you lot. We'll stay here the night and get a move on in the morning."

  As they headed back to the camp, Hannah said to Maxberry, "You can't move Mr. O'Brien! He has to remain immobile for at least two weeks."

  "Sorry, lady, but we have to keep a move on. Jamie himself'd be the first to say so. We've a long way to go yet."

  For the first time Hannah noticed the other wagons heaped with supplies, the horses and firearms. She estimated there were twelve, thirteen men, as well as Nan. "Where are we going?" Hannah asked.

  Maxberry gestured in the direction of the northwest. "But," Hannah said in disbelief, "there is nothing out there."

  He laughed and sauntered to the campfire where a billy can boiled over the flames.

  Hannah turned her face into the wind, in the direction Mr. Maxberry had pointed. Northwest. Not the route Neal was taking, who was traveling west with Sir Reginald. They, at least, were holding to a parallel route to the coastline, should they need to resort to a ship in an emergency. Mike Maxberry had pointed to an unknown expanse that not even so seasoned an explorer as Sir Reginald Oliphant would dare to attempt.

  What on earth could be out there that was worth risking Mr. O'Brien's life, all their lives?

  22

  N

  EAL SCOTT AWOKE TO A NIGHT OF TERROR.

  He was brought out of a black void by the chanting of voices, and as he slowly regained consciousness, the voices grew louder, and then his other senses woke up. There was a pungent aroma in the air, familiar and yet unidentifiable. And he was hot—very hot. But it was a moist heat, as if he were enveloped in steam. A foul taste filled his mouth, and his head throbbed. And the singing—it grew louder until he was finally able to open his eyes and see where it was coming from.

  He stared in horror.

  Black devils, their naked bodies painted with white stripes, were dancing crazily around a blazing fire. Others sat in a circle, hitting sticks together in a frenzied rhythm.

  Neal realized in shock that he, too, was naked. And he was tied down. His back prickled. He lay on something strange—made of sticks, and he was hot and damp.

  And then he realized: he lay over a pit.

  Dear God, they are going to eat me!

  Neal struggled against his bonds, but he was too weak. All he could do was lie helplessly in his restraints, like a sacrificial beast, and watch his captors perform a savage dance while Neal Scott, late of Boston, slowly cooked . . .

  Blackness swallowed him as he sank back into the merciful void. And then he felt pain in the eyes. Sharp, like knives. And his mouth—so dry! The singing had stopped. Was this the moment they started carving him up? Weren't they going to wait until he was dead?

  Wait! I am still alive!

  Neal opened his eyes to bright, stabbing sunlight. He squinted until his sight adjusted to the daylight and the sharp pain went away. He blinked up at a face looking down at him.

  "How do you do, sir?"

  Neal frowned in confusion. He was no longer tied over the roasting pit but lying on the ground under a shelter of branches. And beneath his bare skin he felt soft fur. He stared up at the face. She was smiling. "Jallara," she said, tapping her chest. "I, Jallara. How do you do, sir?"

  Neal could only stare. Jallara was the most exotic girl he had ever seen. Although she was clearly Aboriginal, her unusual features bespoke a mixed ancestry. Back in America, Neal had encountered people who were half African and white, and half Indian and white, but this girl was like none of those. She stood over him and she seemed tall, with long limbs. Her face was round with dimpled cheeks, thick black eyebrows above large black eyes, a soft nose and a sensuous mouth. Not exactly beautiful, but intriguing. Her skin was a dusky brown, her hair silky-long and black. She wore a strange costume, Neal noticed—a grass skirt that ended at her knees, and a loose covering above the waist that eluded identification. Was it a woven mesh tunic of some sort? A loose bodice, perhaps, made of the fibers of a white plant? Neal tried to get his eyes into focus when it struck him that it was no garment at all, but body paint, applied in lines and dots and swirls and with such density that it appeared to be a garment.

  The girl was bare-breasted and it so shocked him that a startled sound escaped his throat.

  "Sick?" Jallara said in concern, dropping to her knees. "Pain?"

  She smelled of animal fat, and her sudden closeness stopped the breath in his lungs. Jallara could be no older than seventeen. Her skin appeared to be smooth and supple, her eyes sparkled with dark lights, and when she smiled, twin dimples framed her lips so perfectly—

  Neal turned his head, startled by his thoughts and his physical reaction to her presence.

  He was further shocked when she slipped an arm under his neck and brought a possum-skin bag to his mouth. At the feel of the few drops of water, Neal immediately drank. At first he was aware only of the blessed water, cool and sweet, filling his mouth and running smoothly down his parched throat. And then he was aware of two bare breasts, firm and creamy brown, near his face.

  His thirst slaked, Neal said, "Thank you," and then said, "You speak English."

  Jallara's smile broadened to reveal strong white teeth. "How do you do, sir?"

  Neal returned the smile. "Limited English, I see." As his head began to clear and he detected the delicious aroma of meat being cooked, as he stirred his limbs and found that he could prop himself up on an elbow, he shook his head to clear it, becoming aware that he was under a shelter that was part of a camp. He saw men, women and children. He looked around the lively encampment of thirty or more Aborigines—a makeshift settlement of lean-tos and shelters and campfires beside a water hole. The clan ranged in age from babes in arms to old gray beards, with the men engaged in making and repairing weapons, while the women nursed babies, crafted baskets and nets from string and fiber, and the children played with dingo puppies. Neal saw the leafy gum trees that stood at the water's edge—he knew they were ghost gums by the white trunks and peeling bark—with galahs and cockatoos in the branches, and on the ground, wildflowers and patches of grass. A veritable Garden of Eden in the midst of a barren wasteland.

  "Where am I?" he asked.

  Jallara frowned, as if struggling to recall words long-forgotten. Taking in the facial features that indicated possible white ancestry, Neal wondered if the girl had spent time at a Christian mission school, or possibly had lived on a cattle station. Finally she said, "You here, Thulan."

  "Thulan? That's the name of this place?" Neal swept his gaze over the dusty boulders rising from the red sand, the few struggling gum trees beside the water hole, and beyond, vast desert as far as the eye could see.

  She shook her head and tapped his chest. "You Thulan."

  He frowned. "Why do you call me Thulan?"

  "Thulan take us to you."

  "What do you mean?"

  She thought hard, searching for long-lost words. Then she said, "We hunt. We follow Thulan. He find you . . . asleep . . . eyes closed."

  "Yes, I was unconscious."

  "Thulan your spirit-guide. Maybe you walkabout. You Thulan Dreaming? He protect you."

  "Neal Scott is my name," he said, tapping his chest. "I am Neal Scott."

  She struggled with the words, but
her native language did not seem to possess the letter S, and when it came out Neel-ah-kaht and seemed a struggle for her, Neal said, "Never mind, Thulan it will be," wondering what a thulan was, secretly hoping it wasn't something embarrassing or comical.

  "We think you dead," she said. "Gum tree spirit save you."

  "Gum tree?" And then he remembered the pit and the elusive smell. He realized now it had been the scent of eucalyptus leaves. The Aborigines had not been cooking him but treating him with the same sort of healing steam with which Josiah Scott had treated Neal's boyhood colds, using camphor and pennyroyal.

  He rubbed his jaw and felt a young beard there. And then, remembering the rest of himself, quickly looked down and was relieved to see a gray kangaroo skin covering his loins. Perhaps it had been done because these people knew of white man's physical modesty—because the men in the camp, as far as Neal could see, did not cover their private parts—or maybe the kangaroo pelt was another stage of the cure.

  "Where are my clothes?" he asked, and when Jallara did not seem to understand, he pantomimed until she nodded in understanding. Pointing to a large campfire, she pinched her nose and made a distasteful face.

  Neal's eyebrows arched. "You burned them because they smelled?

  She nodded with a smile.

  He looked down at his feet and saw in relief that he still wore shoes. Neal knew that his tender white man's feet were no match for this harsh terrain.

  He sank back. "Thank you for saving my life, Jallara . . . I don't know what happened to me . . ." He rubbed his eyes. What had happened to him? His memory was foggy. There had been a sandstorm. And then he had wandered for days. Terrible thirst and hunger. But what was I doing out in the middle of nowhere?

  He closed his eyes and tested his memory. "My name is Neal Scott," he murmured, "adopted son of Boston lawyer, Josiah Scott. My mother—or someone in her family, an angry patriarch most likely—left me on Josiah Scott's doorstep. I have a university degree in geology. I am a scientist and photographer. I am madly in love with a midwife named Hannah Conroy. I came to Australia to make discoveries and solve mysteries. I was part of an expedition . . ."

  Here, his memory grew hazy. He remembered faces of men around a campfire, one in particular, an older man, ruddy-faced and white-haired in a white pith helmet—

  Sir Reginald Oliphant, famed explorer!

  Neal breathed a sigh of relief. He had not lost his memory. He was just a bit foggy on the details. Dehydration affected the mind, he knew. Neal suspected that, in time, it would all return.

  And then he thought of Hannah. Saying good-bye at the Australia Hotel. The feel of her lips on his, her supple body in his arms . . .

  Exhaustion overcame him and he drifted off into deep sleep. The next time he awoke it was late afternoon. Jallara was not there, but three fierce looking men gazed down at him from beneath heavy brows. They were black with wiry limbs and sinewy torsos, and yet they were old men, with white hair and long white beards. Their bodies were painted in white stripes, they carried spears and looked as if they had just materialized from an era long past. Their physical fitness impressed him.

  Before Neal could speak, Jallara was there, kneeling next to him with the possum-skin water bag, and seedcakes formed into dark, round balls.

  The three men squatted while Neal ate, and despite their ferocious appearance, they were friendly and smiled as they questioned him with Jallara translating. Neal had questions of his own. How long had he been with them, and where had they brought him? The answer, as nearly as he could figure, was days, and they were far from the place where they had found him.

  The seedcakes were surprisingly delicious but he could not eat much yet as his stomach had gone for too long without food. Neal was amazed at how weak he felt. Thanking Jallara for the meal, he sank back and looked up at her. "Where did you learn to speak English?"

  She smiled. "Yes. English."

  "Where? At a mission?"

  She seemed not to understand. He thought a moment, then said, "Jesus," as that was the first word missionaries generally taught the natives. But she did not seem to understand that either. Then where had she picked up her English, and her non-Aboriginal blood?

  The oldest of the three men who continued to sit with Neal—a black man with snow-white hair and beard, wearing animal teeth necklaces and a sliver of wood piercing his nasal septum—said something to Jallara and she pointed to Neal's chest and said, "Thumimburee ask, what is?"

  He looked down in surprise. It was still there! The emerald-glass tear catcher that he had disguised in a leather pouch and hid beneath his shirt in case it caught the interest of someone in the expedition. The Aborigines hadn't removed it. And then he realized they must have thought it was personal magic, since they too wore necklaces bearing amulets with what he surmised were spiritual and mystical powers.

  He managed to convey that it was a receptacle containing his mother's tears and the man named Thumimburee, through Jallara, said solemnly, "Very strong magic, Thulan."

  That night the clan held a corroboree to celebrate the recovery of the white man they had found near death. The men and youths were adorned in feathers and bone, shells and animal teeth, their lithe bodies decorated with white paint, and they danced around a sturdy fire while the women and children clacked sticks together in rhythm.

  They roasted a kangaroo and produced honey on the comb with wild fruit, all shared out, Neal observed from his twig shelter, in a complex system of priorities and taboos. There was no grabbing for food or fighting over it; portions were distributed according to a strict protocol that Neal had heard about during his time on the survey vessel out of Perth: the man who killed the kangaroo first gave servings to his own and his wife's parents, to his brothers, and to the men who had hunted with him. They in turn shared with their families, or with men to whom they owed a debt, sometimes leaving nothing for themselves. Neal knew that the boy who had caught a goanna could not eat it himself but had to give it to his parents, and a girl could only receive food from a man related to her by close kinship.

  Jallara herself brought food to Neal, offering shyly the succulent slices of meat, bits of comb dripping with honey, and fat witchetty grubs roasted in the embers. He was ravenous and ate with such gusto that people stared, until he realized he was being rude, and slowed himself down. The only fluid the clan drank was water, but after his days of thirst, to Neal it was like the finest wine.

  Every time he glanced Jallara's way, he found her watching him through the smoke and the sparks, her large, deep-set eyes fixed on him, and each time he felt a strange and shocking stirring deep within himself. He was intensely curious about her, drawn to her in an inexplicable way. Perhaps it was simply that she spoke English, making him feel at ease and less a stranger among these strange people. Or perhaps it was something deeper which he was not yet mentally fit to fathom.

  He slept uneasily that night, waking up from nightmares in which he was lost in the wilderness. He lay in a sweat, staring up at the stars that peeked between dried brush and twigs, wondering where he was, to what place Jallara's people had carried him while he was unconscious. What had happened to Sir Reginald and the other members of the expedition? Were they dead? Neal thought of young Fintan Rorke, who whittled flowers out of wood, and prayed that they had survived. If they had, then surely Sir Reginald and his men were searching for him. Or had they given up the search by now and resumed their westward trek?

  Or were they lost and wandering in this godforsaken wilderness as he had been, but hadn't the luck to be found by Aborigines?

  The next morning the clan woke up to industriousness, with the men going off to hunt while the women foraged near the water hole. By afternoon they were back, the men with a kill, the women with grubs, roots and the occasional lizard. They slept through the hottest part of the day, and then took up their never ending tasks of whittling spears, carving boomerangs, making stringy baskets, all the time laughing, singing, talking.

  With the
help of two boys, Neal was able to stand and shuffle to a place behind boulders to answer the call of nature. Now he had a better view of the terrain that surrounded this oasis, and all he saw was red sand, low lying orange hills, and spinifex—tall clumps of hummock-grass resembling giant startled porcupines.

  He got a better look, too, at his exotic hosts. Although Neal had observed Aborigines during his short time in Australia, he had never been in such close proximity to them. He had heard them referred to as "blacks," "savages," "natives," but Neal's scientist's mind looked at them in a different way. It occurred to him that the Australian Aborigines resembled no other people on earth. They were unlike black Africans, and certainly did not resemble the Polynesians, their closest geographical neighbors. The nearest that Neal had come to seeing someone with the same features was a guru from India, a turbaned mystic he had met in a Boston drawing room, a man whose heavy brow, wide nose, deep-set eyes, flowing hair and prodigious beard were similar to those he saw in this camp.

  A memory suddenly came to him, long forgotten: Eight-year-old Neal exploring the world globe in Josiah Scott's study, looking at the continents and thinking how they resembled puzzle pieces. The eastern shore of South America looked as if it could fit neatly against the western shore of Africa, and the southern shore of Australia could fit neatly against Antarctica. When Neal later attended university and studied geology, he heard an intriguing new theory about continental drift. The theory was that, millions of years ago, only two huge land masses covered the earth before breaking up and drifting apart to form the continents that existed today.

  Was this why Jallara's clan, with their hair that was wavy instead of tightly coiled or "frizzy," made him think of the Indian guru he had once met? Was it possible that somehow, long ago, a migration from the subcontinent of India led Jallara's distant ancestors to Australia?

  As Neal watched Jallara's clan at their evening activities, other issues crowded into his mind. He thought of Hannah. Had she perhaps heard about the sandstorm? Did she think him dead? And what did happen after the sandstorm hit? As Neal searched his foggy memory, trying to find answers, he began to realize that something was bothering him, but he could not put a name to it.