End of the Road

by Jonathan Oliver

  In the night they are attacked, suddenly and without warning, by men on camels racing through the dunes. He draws his gun and fires, a horse beside him tumbles and falls as its leg breaks with a terrible crunching sound. Its rider drops to the ground, face white in the moonlight, fingers bloodless where they grip the gun. They fire at the marauders men whose faces are obscured by cloth who shoot with old guns but dart close and quick with blades flashing silver and they meet like two primeval armies in the sand, horses and camels clashing, the donkeys braying with a pitiful sound. He fires and kills a man and the corpse rolls still fresh on the sand and blood in bright arcs shoots upwards, collecting within its fading vitality the light of the stars and the moon. The camels run sure footed on the sand but the men riding them perhaps having not expected this opposition drive them away. They disappear as quickly as they’d come, like desert ghosts, leaving behind them the corpse of a camel and three men. On their side one horse dead, one lame, and two men down. He takes his gun and walks to the wounded horse and aims and pulls the trigger. Blood and brain explode on the sand and on his face, wet and salty like tears. They bury the men in makeshift graves. Jerusalem seems to have never existed, the coastal cities are as fabulous and impossible as Ophir.

  They move on, through darkness and sunrise, the light suffuses the horizon like a curse. Downwards and downwards still, Aaronsohn making measurements, scribbling in a book, excited. They keep an eye out for marauders, in the sand he sees the droppings of camels, the signs of a fire half-buried in the sand. They push on and crest at last a dune and look down upon the valley and a sea as flat as a mirror in the distance down below, reflecting the sky perfectly. Mountains behind it, all around it the land is bare and rocky, nothing lives, a dead sea.

  The Jordan Valley lies before them and across it they can see the locusts migrating in great big apocalyptic clouds like black angels of death but they are alive, hungry and alive, and all Palestine lies before them, its wheat and orange trees and olives, mulberries, pines, cypress, St. John’s Bread, figs, phoenix, za’atar and cotton. He watches them move soundlessly along the land away from the Jordan mountains towards Jerusalem and the coast, an unstoppable hand reaching across vast distances to devour and destroy all in its path. How do you fight it, Aaronsohn says, but it is delight not despair in his voice. They travel on, through dunes rising like camel humps and a sky as black as space in which the stars are numinous. At night standing guard pale coal fire behind him he goes around a dune to piss and a leopard passes, so close he can feel its fur on his skin, the animal padding softly on the sand making no sound, for a moment it turns its head and regards him with eyes like gemstones with an alien intelligence behind them. He holds his breath, somehow he is still urinating, the leopard yawns and walks into the darkness and disappears.

  They reach the shores of the dead sea on a day as hot as the ovens which haunt his dreams. Aaronsohn is first to strip off, straight from the horse he slides onto the ground naked, wading towards the water, a stocky man with a dark face and a pale stomach. They run at the water and enter it and float, surprised and laughing, for a moment they are boys again. He too floats in the water of the dead sea on his back, if you attached a sail to him he could be a ship traversing this ancient place. On this sea the Nabateans skimmed asphalt from the surface to sell to the Egyptians to use for mummies, here David hid from Saul, here lay Sodom and Gomorrah, those cities of sin.

  Aaronsohn releases another bird into the sky, where do they go, those birds, what messages do they carry? They ride on, following the shore, at night the stars fall into the water in trails of flame.

  On the second day the scouts return, the Bedouins confer with Aaronsohn, gesturing to the south. On the third day they reach a temporary settlement of Bedouins, of which tribe he doesn’t know. Aaronsohn sits down with their sheikh by the fire, the men stand outside the camp, the children naked run, a drove of goats, a flock of camels. He watches a falcon sail across the skies. A small Bedouin boy sitting on his haunches studying him, saying, in Arabic, what is your name. David, he says to the boy.

  At night the Bedouins roast a goat its stomach stuffed with rice the women make flatbread on the fire, under the stars flocks of birds travelling, fan-tailed ravens and Dead Sea sparrows, Arabian babblers, blackstarts, pale crag martins, sand partridges, trumpeter finches, desert larks and scrub warblers, at night the sky sometimes is full of migratory birds fleeing Europe as from a great evil, dark clouds against the waning moon.

  Aaronsohn confers with the scouts, again they set off, there is no soul in sight the desert lies silent and vast all about them and the sea as dead, the Jordan at their back. The cliffs rise above them and at night when he sleeps he dreams no dreams.

  Author’s note:

  Aaron Aaronsohn (1876-1919) was a botanist, map-maker and spy. In 1915 a plague of desert locust devastated the crops across Palestine. Aaronsohn was set in charge of battling the invasion by Jamal Pasha, then-governor of Syria and Palestine.

  THE TRACK

  JAY CASELBERG

  Australia is a country more than familiar with the traditions of the road story, especially in cinema – Mad Max, Long Weekend, and Walkabout all explore the form in various ways. Caselberg, an Australian writer living in Germany, sets his story in the desert, on a stretch of haunted road. The harsh environment is as much a character as either of the two protagonists, but there is something else out there in the parched landscape. Caselberg uses a real-life tragedy as the basis for his chilling story, and reminds us of the risks to be found on the road when a long long way from home.

  YOU HAD TO do it. Well, that’s what he’d said, anyway. It was just one of those things you just had to do – the stuff of legends. Jason tapped at the tiny fan stuck to the dash, sitting there beating at the heat. The car’s fan was blowing too, but any extra was a necessity at this point. The car rumbled across the dirt surface, chipped stone and hard packed earth tinged with red stretching in every direction. Behind them, a plume of orange-red dust billowed in their wake, fanning out to obscure the endless nothingness that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  “How many did you say had died out here?” asked Kevin.

  “What’s that?” said Jason, one hand draped lazily over the top of the steering wheel.

  “Deaders. How many?”

  “I don’t know. Countless, probably. It’s not what it used to be. There are one or two famous cases, that family in the ’60s, but look at it. It’s not hard to imagine. Something happens, you break down. It’s not as if you can flag down a passing motorist.”

  “So tell me why we’re doing this again?” said Kevin, only half joking.

  Jason turned to look at him, one eye still on the line of rutted dirt road that stretched on before them.

  “I thought you were up for this.”

  “Yes, I was, or I am. It’s just different once you’re out here, I guess. The difference between what you might imagine and the harsh reality.”

  Jason turned his focus back to the road ahead, if it could be called a road. “Some might call it reality,” he said. “The blasted plain. It’s like, I don’t know, some sort of surrealist hell.”

  Kevin stretched beside him. Their old wagon, though reliable, wasn’t exactly top of the range in the comfort stakes.

  “Maybe we can stop in a bit and stretch our legs,” he said.

  “Here? Are you kidding me?”

  “Christ, did you see that?” He was pointing off to the west. “It’s a bloody dingo.”

  “Where?”

  Jason eased his foot off the gas and let the car slide to a stop. Kevin was right. In the middle of a stony expanse stood a solitary four-legged creature staring at them from the distance impassively. The car pinged and ticked around them, the only other sound that of both fans labouring against the temperature. Neither of them moved for several seconds, the dingo standing there as if carved from the landscape itself. Then, as if they had been dismissed, it turned and loped away, across the
plain, growing smaller and smaller.

  “What the hell?” said Kevin. “Surely it can’t live out here.”

  “Well, it didn’t seem to think much of us.”

  “Ha! Would you?” Kevin said with a short laugh. He pushed open the door and the heat shoved into the car like a giant hand, slapping them both in the face.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I need to stretch my legs. We’ve got more water in the back, right?”

  “Of course we have. Shut the bloody door,” said Jason, then watched as Kevin wandered off the track a bit, to euphemistically stretch his legs, giving the desert liquid where there was none apart from the deep artesian water below. Their next bore was about thirty kilometres further on, but they had plenty of water with them and shouldn’t need it. Jason reached into the back, snagged a bottle and took a healthy couple of swallows, feeling the sweat beading on his forehead even from the brief exposure to the outside air. Hot inside, but even hotter outside, it discouraged the temptation to open the car window and drive, letting the rushing air cool his skin. The dust was enough of a discouragement on its own. You could taste it, you could smell it, and it got over everything – inside your mouth and nose, filling you with that chalky taste that robbed even more moisture from your tongue.

  Kevin got back into the car, followed by another blast of heat.

  “Geez, it’s hot out there,” he said. “So tell me why we’re doing this again?” He settled back into his seat, and then turned and reached for a water bottle as well.

  Jason gave him a pained look and then shook his head. “You know as well as I do. It’s just one of those things you’ve got to do, isn’t it?”

  One of those things you’ve got to do...

  Kevin and Jason had been friends for years. All of those things you’ve got to do, like the bungee jumping, the white water rafting, the rock climbing, and now this. One of those things you’ve got to do.

  Kevin slapped his hand on the dash a couple of times and then pointed. “Okay, then, James. Forward!” he said.

  Forward into the wastelands.

  He kicked the car into gear and pulled out onto the road again. The Track ran from Marree to Birdsville, crossing Cooper Creek and Mungerannie, among others. Jason remembered from one of the guides where someone had written that the main problem with The Track was that it took you to Birdsville, not the heat, the risk, the deaths, or the desolation, but Birdsville itself. Destination Birdsville; nothing much there but the famous pub. In the middle of nowhere and nowhere else to go except on or back, just like the cattle men, the mail carriers or the camel trains from all those years ago.

  But it was one of those things you had to do. Even now, he was still telling himself that. He glanced over at Kevin, but his friend had settled into the zone of passing sameness again, just staring out at the featureless plains and fanning himself with an old newspaper they’d picked up along the way.

  About twenty minutes more of rumbling dust and nothingness, and one of the regularly placed bores hove into view to one side. Little more than a tin roof over some posts and the pump.

  “Should we stop?” asked Kevin.

  “No, I think we’ve got enough,” said Jason. “Can’t stand the taste of bore water anyway. It’s always salty.”

  “At least they’re here, though. Imagine when they were doing the mail route with horse and carriage. Not even a fan, and only the bores to look forward to. They must have been mad. Can you imagine it?”

  “Don’t think I want to,” said Jason. Secretly, he was wondering about their own madness around about this time.

  For another twenty minutes, they drove on in silence. Sometimes, between friends as long-standing as Jason and Kevin, you simply didn’t need words anyway. Red brown earth stretched in every direction, the pale yellow sky beating down upon them with its palpable heat and glare. Every now and again, there would appear that liquid shimmering: colourless, but bending the landscape behind it as the desert mirage showed them tantalising almost-glimpses of things that were simply not there. Somewhere, somehow in the far, far distance, there might be some reality behind the illusory curtains, but nowhere within reaching. He could only imagine what it must have been like, out here, dying of dehydration, being taunted by some promise of salvation that really wasn’t there. It would be the final torture after the realisation of your own stupidity for having left your vehicle in the first place. That’s what they always said: don’t leave your car, stay with it. People never listened though.

  The next artesian bore slowly grew shape as they neared. A pump, a tin shed, some signs, but a promise and the security of knowledge that it was there. It was enough. Nothing else. After their solitary accusing denizen of the wastes had wandered off, there had been nothing more either, just the endless stretch of road and plain in front, reaching to a flat-line horizon smudged by the yellow heat. He tracked the bore as they passed it by, looking up to watch its shape disappear, glinting through and then swallowed by the broad fantail of dust behind them. Even that was difficult, as by now, their rear window was coated with the fine particles.

  Kevin had watched the passing bore with a look of almost longing on his face, as if something as simple and unremarkable gave him some sort of inexplicable hope in the bleakness all around.

  “What are we going to do when we get there?” he finally asked.

  “Well, what do you think?” Jason responded. “There’s a pub there. Not much else. What do you think we might do?”

  “Yeah,” Kevin breathed. “A drink. A nice cold drink. And maybe something to eat. Something decent. But, oh, yeah, I can see that nice cold glass, those beads of moisture running down the sides. You’re just cruel, Jason. Simply cruel. I can almost taste it now.”

  All Jason could taste was the dust and the flat aftertaste of lukewarm water out of a plastic bottle. Kevin started drumming lightly on the dash with his fingers to some rhythm inside his own head. It merged with the thrum of rubber on packed earth and the staccato corrugations across the track’s surface.

  “And after we’ve done that?”

  “Well, I guess we come back. What else is there to do?”

  Really, neither of them had thought that far ahead. Stupid, really, but it was the sort of thing that happened when you did things on a whim.

  Isn’t that what had happened to those people all those years ago – not thinking far enough ahead? Or maybe it was simply a case of just not thinking. Ernie Page, a British migrant had worked in the area for a few years, knew the risks, but he ignored his own rules when their big old Ford broke down. Two days the family had stayed with the car, but then he left it. The story floated up in Jason’s head along with that last note that had been found with their abandoned car:

  The Page Family of Marree. Ran out of Petrel. Have only sufficient water for two days. December 24.

  What a way to spend Christmas.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “What?” said Kevin.

  “No, nothing, I was just thinking.”

  Ran out of Petrel. It could happen to anyone couldn’t it?

  There was another subtle irony to the story, too. Their bodies had been found under a coolibah tree, that particular tree that was so iconic in the old song. Under the shade of a coolibah tree. But it had given the Page family little solace on that Christmas or Boxing Day when they’d breathed their last.

  Jason tried to shake the thoughts from his mind. Maybe it was just the interminable sameness, inducing a sense of futility, or despair. The bleak landscape beat at his consciousness, sucking away purpose. He cleared his throat. As if to compound his feelings, Kevin asked something else.

  “When was the last one?” he said.

  “The last what?”

  “You know... deader.”

  “Jesus, Kevin, I don’t know. What’s with the morbid fascination anyway?”

  “Well, you know... it’s just...” He shrugged.

  Jason turned his gaze purposefully with set lips and na
rrowed eyes, but Kevin, oblivious, was just watching the road ahead. Jason sighed.

  “Actually, it was only a few months ago. I remember reading about it. He was just a kid.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He was working as a stockman on some station. He reckoned he wasn’t being treated fairly or something, and decided to pack it in. Took off on his own. That was it. They eventually found him, of course. He was only about fifteen.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not kidding. I reckon this place just eats people alive.”

  It was Kevin’s turn to clear his throat. “Did he have a horse?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, did he have a horse?”

  “I guess he did.”

  “So what happened to the horse?”

  “Jesus,” said Jason. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, something must have happened to the horse. Did the horse die too?”

  “It’s not something they exactly write about, you know. I don’t know what happened to the bloody horse. Maybe he didn’t have a horse. Maybe he took a car.” He paused, thinking. “You know, it’s a funny thing, though. The Pages apparently had a cat with them. It just wandered off into the desert. They wrote about that. I wonder what happened to the cat.”

  Kevin turned to look at him then. “A cat? You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well maybe it survived. Animals have an instinct, don’t they? Just like that dingo we saw. It can obviously survive out here. Maybe it’s just us humans who don’t cut it. The people-eating Track. That’s it.”