by Peter Corris
I looked at the vast expanse, reduced to a matter of inches on the map, but I knew what the shadings and other symbols meant. This was as arid a landscape as any on earth, a thousand miles of it. 'Is it possible, Basil?'
He folded the map up and stuck it in his pocket. Basil had adopted the easy dress of the Australians—collarless shirt, belted trousers, tennis shoes. 'Of course it's possible. Providing the men and the gear are right. Camels and Afghans, that's what we need.'
'And what's my job this time?'
Basil stretched his legs so that his feet extended out beyond the canvas canopy into the bright sunshine. His face showed very few lines and the jut of his nose and jaw reminded me of the old Basil—the school bully, the Oxford bravo. He looked around to ensure that he could not be overheard. 'Our masters want you to test for everything, Dick. Everything! They say the area we're travelling through could be the greatest mineral storehouse in the world.'
'It's impossible to test for everything.'
Basil threw back his head and unloosed a bellow of laughter. An Aboriginal boatman, baiting a hook twenty feet away, looked up alarmed as if he had never heard such a sound before. 'Use your imagination,' Basil said. 'I'm going to teach that nigger a thing or two about fishing.'
As usual, when travelling with Basil, logistics presented no serious problems. The ability to organise resources and direct them precisely to his end in view was one of his great talents which had made him so useful to the entities he called 'our masters'. But that phrase, once used almost respectfully, now dripped with scorn. I recall that I wondered whether these beings might not be yet more fictions, and I tackled Basil about it.
'Have you ever met one of these masters, spoken to one face to face?'
Basil scowled. 'Never. Intermediaries only. There was once talk of my joining the inner circle, but I showed too much independence. And now, of course, we are at daggers drawn.'
A typical response. With Basil, who can say where fact and fantasy overlapped?
At Roebuck, a down-at-heels sort of place, half fishing town, half mining camp, Basil quickly set about confirming arrangements already made and making others. In very short order we had a team of six camels, two Afghan drivers and a half-caste roustabout assembled and equipped. Basil, who was an expert on camels, pronounced the Australian beasts excellent, 'better than those in Africa.'
I confess that I had taken a dislike to Australia. I found the citizens lazy and ill-mannered, the food uninteresting and the flies intolerable. I was not in the mood to accept that Australia could produce anything superior and said so.
'You're quite wrong,' Basil said, 'these camels are very excellent stock, mostly wild until recently. They are disease-free and have no bad habits. I confess to being surprised myself. Perhaps this place has more interesting genetic possibilities than I thought.'
Ill-humouredly fanning away flies and watching the half-caste slowly roll a cigarette as he squatted on his heels in a patch of shade, I paid no attention to the remark.
'Time to meet the journalists,' I said.
Our business in the town had attracted less attention than one might think. Roebuck was a transient sort of place, with miners constantly entering and exiting and a good deal of traffic passing between it and Port Hedland and Marble Bar. Australians, on the whole, appeared to be an incurious lot, disinclined to probe into other people's business or to invite enquiries about their own. Basil attributed this to the convict heritage. Whatever the reason, the easygoingness extended to the journalists who we met that day in the bar of the Roebuck hotel.
'Bit of a jaunt, really,' Basil said after buying a round. 'We'll just see how far we can get. First sign of a problem and we'll come back quick and lively.'
One of the scribes, a short, intense-faced young man, looked disappointed. 'Can't see the point,' he said.
Basil nodded. 'No point? Well, who can say? We might make it all the way to Alice Springs. Hasn't been done often, you know, crossing from the west to the east.'
The oldest of the trio, a middle-aged hack, almost finished his beer in a gulp. 'Haven't you blokes done this sorta thing before? Seem to remember you got up to the same lurk in Africa or somewhere.'
'Lurk?' I said.
The hack swilled his dregs. 'Same game, same trick. Didn't you cross some mountain or another and then a bit of the desert?'
I thought Basil was going to explode but he controlled himself and bought another round.
'Don't fancy your chances of making the Alice,' the third journalist said. 'Hell of a long way.'
Basil shrugged.
The hack started on his second drink and appeared to have suddenly found the whole subject more interesting. He addressed me. 'What does Brian Glass say?'
'I beg your pardon.'
'The copper. What does he reckon?'
'He says he wishes he could come with us,' Basil said.
As far as I knew, Basil had had no communication with the police other than to leave certain letters and a sum of money at the station. But the answer seemed to satisfy the sceptic who guffawed and scribbled in his notebook. Another round, a few more questions easily fielded and the conference ended. Reluctantly, Basil agreed to pose for a photograph outside the hotel. We stood in the street under the burning sun and Basil so tilted his wide-brimmed hat that his face was all but concealed.
The young, intense type had doubled as the photographer. He sketched a salute when he'd finished. 'Thanks, Doc and . . . ah . . .'
'Richard Craft,' I said.
'See you when you get back.'
'Fool,' Basil muttered. 'We'll be getting the train to Adelaide.'
This was news to me. 'And then where, Basil?'
He clapped me on the shoulder. He had had two tots of overproof rum with his beer and was in high spirits. 'That's one of the things I plan to think about on the trip,' he said. 'One of the many things.'
39
ENTRY NINE
We set off from Roebuck on 23 March, late on a day which had dawned clear but grew gradually darker as it wore on. Rain threatened, but Basil would not hear of a delay.
'It's a good omen to be leaving in the rain,' he said. 'We'll see little enough of it on the track.'
I took several photographs of our departure and I have the reels with me still. Developed they would show Basil and Sali mounted on our camels, leading the small procession from the outskirts of the town. The other Afghan, Hamet, and Billy, the half-caste, walked alongside checking that the pack animals were properly loaded and observing their behaviour in order to devise the best order for them to march in. Both our riding and pack teams consisted of one female and two castrated bulls and, since camels are temperamental beasts and travel best when the right sequence is established, only experience would indicate the best order to march.
Basil was smart in starched, military-style khakis and a wide-brimmed hat; the Afghans wore headcloths and loose cotton clothes while Billy wore dungarees and a hat that resembled an American Stetson. I had decided views on desert clothing and favoured a peaked cap, a shirt with a number of pockets and a collar that could be turned up and moleskin trousers tucked into soft, loosely-laced suede boots. The pack camels were solidly loaded; we had two rifles, a shotgun, a pistol and abundant ammunition. We carried many maps, none of them viewed by Basil or me as satisfactory, a compass and a selection of geological equipment. Basil had packed enough brandy to see us, he said, to the Gulf of Carpentaria. I had been similarly expansive about cigarettes but I had not reckoned on the smoking capacities of Sali, Hamet and Billy.
Basil waved his hat at my camera. He was in high spirits and I fancy we made a brave showing. The publication of two reports deriving from our news conference had failed to arouse much interest in our expedition. It was 1960, after all, and the great days of exploration were well and truly done. Even Central Australia could boast of telegraph lines, tracks that could almost be called roads and man-made wells in certain areas. The wilderness had been tamed, or so it ple
ased people to think. The most unusual thing about our party was the reliance on camels and this was taken to be a piece of 'Pommy eccentricity'. To a man and a woman, Australians are undiscriminating racialists, and they were easily able to dismiss as insignificant a party consisting of two despised Pommies and three detested coons.
We set our course for the Hamersley Range to the south-east, and it rained buckets before we made our first camp. I remember remarking to Basil that the rain would wipe out our tracks.
'Good,' he said.
It was a prophetic exchange.
I do not propose to give a full account of the disastrous journey that brought us to this point. Suffice it to say that at first things went well and then misfortune dogged our tracks and that misfortune was compounded by a seemingly never-ending series of human errors. Until the largest error of all.
The Hamersley Range was the greatest deposit of iron ore on earth. The rocks were solid iron, sending the compass wild and filling the air with a strange smell of oxide as if the process that produced the ore was going on at that very time. Indeed the whole of the region called the Pilbara was a treasure-trove of minerals. I confirmed the presence of copper, gold, bauxite, mica, tin, lead and much else besides. Basil, who usually exhibited supreme indifference to my geological conclusions, was moved to a display of interest by my enthusiasm.
'The devil you say,' he said when I told him my estimate of the wealth under the ground in these barren hills and plains. 'You might be right about Australia, Dick. The awful place might have a future.'
Whether it was cunning on Basil's part or simply the way events took shape, there always seemed to be incidents of this kind sufficient to give me some faith in a form of salvation for Basil and me. His satisfaction was further increased by his exploration of the country between the Robertson River and Lake Disappointment on the fringes of the Gibson Desert. Vast towering rock pillars formed a natural maze which, according to Billy, went on 'forever'. Basil questioned him closely about the maze: Had he ever ventured inside or did he know anyone who had? Had any white people ever explored the structure? Billy shivered at the thought of a human being passing beyond the first half dozen pillars.
'No, boss,' Billy said. 'S'pose white feller, blackfeller go long dere, him die finish.'
'Excellent,' Basil said. 'Is there any water in there?'
Billy shrugged. I encouraged him with a cigarette but he shook his head. 'Dunno, boss. Maybe.'
I looked at the pillars and tried to envisage the interior of the maze. 'There's bound to be moisture of some kind,' I said. 'Rock pools at some times of the year I should imagine. A spring or two, possibly.'
'Excellent,' Basil said again. 'That means vegetation and cover from the air.'
'Possibly.'
'No doubt about it. Look.'
A wallaby had skipped clear of the pillars. It stood, nose quivering, forty yards away, a grey-brown shape clearly visible against the near white of the rocks. Basil unslung his rifle, sighted quickly and fired but the camel chose that instant to dip its head and graze on a clump of saltbush. Basil's aim was thrown off. The wallaby bounded away before Basil, unused to missing such an easy shot, could fire again.
'Blast,' Basil said. 'Still, this would be good news for our masters, Dick, were they ever to receive it. I must say I'm enjoying this trip. Let's show this bloody desert who's boss before we decide what to do next.'
That was the moment of reversal for our fortunes. The Gibson Desert was the most alien place I had ever encountered. Not the most barren—spinifex bush and mulga scrub cover much of its surface—but a ghastly emptiness hangs over the whole landscape, as if nothing that moves and breathes is welcome there. Apart from this feeling of spiritual hostility, the desert is harsh enough physically. The spinifex spines tear boots to shreds and constantly threaten to lacerate the camels' pads. Only the skill of the Afghans, who can thread their way through the spinifex like a pilot taking a boat through a reef, prevented us from crippling the camels a hundred times over. Waterholes are infrequent, although the Afghans and the half-caste seemed to have little difficulty in locating them. The last few seasons had been good according to Billy, with the result that some, though by no means all, of the springs trickled and the holes held water. What a succession of bad seasons would do to the water supply was too terrible to contemplate.
We made good progress through the Gibson and Basil's mood remained buoyant, though tested by the frequent detours around patches of impenetrable mulga or hills covered with razor-sharp laterite that would have sliced the camels' pads like cheese. Our camps tended to be unsociable affairs—Basil drank brandy and whisky and I smoked. Billy hovered uneasily between us and the Afghans who occupied themselves by reading the Koran at night, praying in the morning and tending to the innumerable needs of the camels.
Indeed the camels were the cause of our only physical danger on this part of the expedition. After a particularly long and arduous day spent mostly in searching for water, Basil's nerves were stretched by the frequent and apparently unproductive consultations between Billy and the Afghans. They were hesitant and divided and became almost truculent under Basil's badgering. Eventually we located and camped by a waterhole which was little more than a muddy soak. The camels were thirsty and had to be prevented from rushing the water before we had filled our canteens and drawn off water for cooking. The day had been very hot and Basil was looking tired as he slumped on the ground under a twisted mulga tree with his tin dish of rice and curried rabbit. Hamet was the cook and tended to prepare very basic meals. We had been in the desert for five weeks and our diet was starchy and high in protein. We had ascorbic acid powder and vitamin supplements in pill form which we washed down with whisky. Our health was good but we had both lost weight and no doubt sufferd from certain deficiencies. I was aware of eyestrain and constipation; Basil twitched and snored in his sleep which was not something I had observed on earlier journeys. I fancy that he was subject to hallucinations when tired or under stress as we had been that day when our prospects for finding water had appeared so poor. We were not young men. But Basil was far from being a spent force as he proved when the wild camels invaded our camp.
They came shortly before dawn, at least ten of them, attracted by the females but perhaps also agitated by the presence of foreigners at the precious waterhole. Sali was awake and the first to see them. His shout raised the camp and we looked to the east and saw them in a line on a rise a hundred yards away—huge dark shapes, distorted by the first glimmerings of light and the gnarled mulga trees behind them. Then the leader lifted his head and brayed in the long, harsh painful note the camel makes when angry or in pain. They charged straight down on us. Our beasts pulled at their ropes and threatened to tear the trees to which they were tethered from the thin earth. If they had reached us they would have broken equipment, injured us and scattered our camels. Basil faced them, brought his .3030 Sharps rifle to his shoulder and, at a range of sixty yards, dropped the leading bull dead in his tracks. Two others fell over the fallen leader and Basil fired three or four more times, bringing down a beast with each shot. The remainder of the herd milled in confusion before turning to gallop off to the south.
As we stood there the first rays of the sun broke from the horizon, blinding us. Had the camels charged a minute later Basil's superb shooting would have been impossible. I shielded my eyes as we walked towards the fallen animals. Three were quite dead but one lived. In his death throes he had disgorged his mouth bladder, the pink, purple and green balloon which is covered in foul mucus, smells abominable and attracts females. This animal bellowed and rose to its feet. A camel can kick lethally for a radius of six feet and we approached cautiously.
'Brave beast,' Basil said. He killed it with a shot to the head.
The Afghans butchered one of the camels and we ate heartily that morning. The camel flesh was good after the diet of rabbit, lizard and desert fowl which had been our staple. We pushed on to the east but wild camels continued to
harass us, following close behind and occasionally making a rush at a female. Basil shot several more over the next few days and they ceased to appear after we entered the desolate country south-west of Lake Mackay, which was, of course, a dry salt pan. (I realise that I have fallen into a narrative mode, almost as if this journal will have a reader. I hope that it will. No man likes to die leaving nothing behind him, and I have left nothing—no children, no property, no legacy beyond a few obscurely published essays. I am trying to clarify things in my own mind to give me peace. Perhaps, too, the construction of events as a story will provide me with answers to the questions I can never put to Basil, who sleeps peaceably beside me now. The stiffness seems to have gone out of his limbs and he lies almost as if he were relaxed under a tree at a cricket match. This is absurd, of course. It is fearfully hot in the cave, partly on account of the fire but I must keep that going constantly for the sake of the smoke which keeps the flies at bay. Here is another hazard—there is enough wood for . . . how long? The thought of the flies in the numbers we encountered before makes me tremble. I could not endure it . . .)
The heart of the Gibson Desert is indescribable. Geologically, it is infinitely old. The land is weathered so that only the spinifex holds the thin soil to the rock base. It is a land past the point of death. Even Billy and the Afghans began to look apprehensive as we trekked from day to day, reaching waterholes yielding barely enough moisture to keep the camels and ourselves alive. Hamet had long since ceased to find small game in the desert and we ate rice, damper and hard tack. The heat of the day was intense and shade for rest stops was a rarity. At night the temperature dropped to a point little above freezing and we could hear rocks cracking with a sound like a rifle shot.
Still, our progress was satisfactory and we were confident of reaching the MacDonnell Ranges where we would find better country, more water and game. The first disaster was the mysterious illness that beset the camels—an affliction which left them trembling and apparently unable to walk straight. Two collapsed and died in bellowing agony within twenty-four hours of the appearance of the symptoms. Two more were unable to stand the next morning. They sat, huddled, bowed down as if trying to burrow into the earth. Their motions became loose and they disgorged a vile green fluid that smelled like rotten-egg gas. The Afghans pleaded with Basil to shoot the suffering beasts and this he reluctantly did.
