Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  Throughout the day I had been troubled by intermittent but piercing headaches; otherwise my physical condition was good. And that night I slept dreamlessly. But in the morning I was so stiff that I guessed my muscles had been more accustomed to riding than tramping.

  On the second and third days I must have made some twenty miles a day. Thereafter, the billy being empty, I travelled by night. That I was moving almost due south I had no doubt and at the end of my third night-march I knew that I could not have seen the sea: my goal had been mirage or some lake now behind me. Everywhere about me still was the same unchanging emptiness, the same endless iteration of sand and scrub. Occasionally I sighted kangaroo in the dusk; once by daylight I hurried to meet two natives who proved – so deceptive was the light – no more than two lonely magpies perched on stumps. And then at dawn on the seventh day, when my water and provisions were both exhausted, I came upon the unmistakable tracks of a white man – the imprints, too often repeated to be a trick of nature, of a booted foot just distinguishable in the loose surface of the sand. I realized that they must be fresh – a breath of wind would have obliterated them – and I hurried forward with a dreadful fear that in my weakness I could never overtake the stronger man in front. My heart leapt when I saw, not a quarter of a mile ahead, the thin smoke going up from a camp fire. I ran forward, sobbing and trying to call out from a parched throat.

  The man was dead. He lay with an empty water-bottle – his sole unabandoned possession – beside him. His body, still warm, was sprawled on its face, one arm stretched out towards the smouldering fire and the hand closed round a few dry leaves. Death had taken him in the act of feeding his last desperate signal.

  Something broke in me – a barrier I had built up not against the thought of imminent death or my present extremity of weakness and thirst, but against the silence of the bush. The barrier broke and I heard the silence, the hot heavy silence untouched for hours either by the dry cicada or the rustle of a breeze in the parched grass. I called out and my voice was horrible; I threw down my haversack and ran, horribly calling out, into the encompassing emptiness away from that silent and vastly-vaulted tomb. The frenzy brought me some final access of strength and I must have stumbled forward for hours. My head was swimming and shot with piercing pains; there was a great roaring in my ears, a roaring as uninterrupted as the silence of days had been. The roaring grew to thunder. There was a moment with the quality of blinding revelation when I knew that the thunder was not within but without. Then I found myself standing on the very verge of a high cliff against which, far below, thundered the breakers of an open sea.

  East and west the cliffs stretched in unbroken line, great battlements and bastions of rock glittering in the morning sun. The prospect was of a magnificence that seized me and calmed me; and with the coming of a new clarity I realized the tremendous fact of a well-defined native track running eastward along the verge. I followed it painfully for some two miles to a point where the cliffs receded a little from the sea, leaving a valley of barren and sandy ground to which the path conducted by way of a narrow and precipitous gorge. I descended – with the greatest difficulty in my weakened state – and in little over an hour had found in the sand hills a couple of recent native wells. There was moreover a low scrub with a plentiful growth of red berries, and a flight of white paroquets – the first animal life I had descried for days – rose from feeding on them as I watched. I ate and had the wit to eat sparingly. After an interval I found a warm pool and bathed. My strength returned. Later and in another pool I succeeded in landing a couple of fish with my hat. Though my haversack was gone I had still the water-bottle and billy and in my pocket matches. My evening meal was a revelation of the sheer joy of taste. And that night I was lulled to sleep by a melody of waves.

  For two days I travelled east along a firm beach, with sand hills and beyond them the cliffs on my left – a highway obstructed only occasionally by massive drifts of sea-weed. I had some days’ supply of water and for the rest I lived on berries. My confidence had returned and I was in the constant hope of coming presently within some fringe of settlement. Land birds were becoming more plentiful, a sign of some changing character in the upland country ahead.

  On the third day the cliffs narrowed to the sea and I had eventually to spend hours finding a practicable route to the top. I was again in great danger. The berry-bearing scrub was giving out; I had no means of carrying a considerable supply of the berries; moreover they could not be a satisfactory diet for many days. And – what was yet more serious – I had found no further water. Twice I awoke early and experimented with collecting the light dew on the scrub; I found that with an improvised grass sponge and severe labour I could gain between a quarter and half a pint in a morning. The effort shortened my marches and I knew that it was toil for less than a subsistence supply. My one hope was in the rapidly changing character of the country through which I struggled.

  The scrub was becoming denser and ran to the very edge of the now unscalable cliffs, so that I was at times afraid lest I should be unable to make any headway at all. But in places it was diversified by considerable growths of timber and I took this as a further sign that I was approaching a more productive soil. The gum trees moreover yielded me an unexpected source of food in a species of large white grub revealed by tearing off the ragged bark. I ate these cautiously and found they brought on considerable gastric disturbances; nevertheless I believed I gained strength from them. It was in following the lure of this food that I somehow lost the sea. A hot and leaden afternoon found me wandering in the heart of a maze of eucalyptus, my water for the second time wholly exhausted. And in the evening, abruptly, my nerve broke. Some subtle poisoning from the grubs may have been an immediate exciting cause, but it must chiefly have been a matter of accumulated strain. With some physical strength to stumble on, I had not the strength of will to rest with the closing in of night. I wandered among the great trees, possessed by the panic I had long dreaded, until I finally dropped to the ground.

  For hours I must have lain semi-conscious, aware that the night was airless and oppressive beyond the ordinary. The agony of my thirst was shot through by the distinct pains of hunger and I must have groped up the tree by which I lay in the darkness in some hope of securing the familiar grubs. Suddenly my body quivered as if it had received an electric charge. The tree was ring-barked. I had come on my first trace of man.

  I was unable to cry out and the night was utterly starless and obscure. I could only await the dawn, time and again reassuring myself of the reality of the bite of the axe. Dawn came, and to this day I cannot recall without bitterness and terror the irony it brought. The tree had been ringed and killed, as had half a hundred others. But the effort at clearing had been ill-judged; whoever had attempted it had long since been beaten back; the only sign of man was an empty and ruined humpy. I had resigned myself to dying on the very fringe of settlement when the storm broke above me.

  Within five minutes I was sheltering in the humpy, soaked to the skin and with my billy brimming with water. Only a few minutes later the corner of the little shack remote from me was smashed by the terrifying impact of a falling tree. And I found that once more danger had brought salvation in its train. In the fallen tree – in this tree, it must have been, among thousands – the wild bees had been building. I was master of many pounds of honey.

  I had come from some great solitude to the fringes of settlement; I had only to find the sea once more and continue east to reach safety. And that night when the storm had passed I heard the murmur of the waves. I found the cliffs again no more than a mile away.

  Where the great gum trees grew the soil retained no virtue for the nourishment of an undergrowth and the ground was tolerably clear. But when I left the trees behind me I found the scrub growing denser every mile; soon it presented an almost impenetrable barrier that ran to the very edge of the still stretching and unbroken cliff. Below me, between cliffs and sea, ran a narrow valley of sand hills that see
med to promise the possibility of water, and beyond this – save at high tide – there lay once more a highway of firm sand. I resolved to descend by the first practicable route, risking the chance of the cliffs again converging on the sea and forcing a tedious return journey.

  I was confident and impatient; at the same time my nerve was wavering and my judgement, I suppose, beginning to fail. I took the first route that offered. It proved exceedingly hazardous; all the way down I had to fight both for foothold and against the premonition of approaching dizziness. And at length – it must have been near the bottom – I fell.

  Of what happened after that I have only fragmentary memories. I remember walking without any sense of direction or of a goal along the endless beach. I remember a flock of sandpipers, rising and settling in their oblique and beautiful flight before me – perhaps leading me on when I should otherwise have fallen. I believe I had lost both billy and water-bottle: I remember finding water, retained from the storm, in a natural cistern of limestone rock. Vividly I remember a long nagging debate with myself as to whether I had heard the barking of a dog. And finally I remember lying in the dark and knowing I was in a delirium – knowing this because all round me warm night air was heavy with the scent of carnations.

  The boy was bending over me. His face, golden-browned by the sun, had the massive quality, the more than natural concreteness and weight, of a great painting. He laid down the pannikin among the carnations in the little garden won from rock and sand and called out joyfully to someone in the shack beyond: ‘Dad – he’s come round!’

  Then again he lifted the pannikin to my lips. ‘

  You nearly did a perish that time, mister. But you haven’t run your final yet.’

  I must have murmured something about being lost for weeks. His eyes grew round. Then he smiled, and his smile was like a sudden sunlight on a brown highland pool.

  ‘Yeah? Things do get a bit quiet west of Desperation Bay.’ I think he was ten or eleven; and his voice had all the pride of the pioneer.

  Suddenly he sprang to his feet and gazed towards the sea. Then he cried out in an excitement in which I was quite forgotten: ‘Dad, dad – the Anson cutter’s over the bar!’

  2

  I shall not here write at length of the humanity and eccentricity of Richard Anson. He took me to Port Lincoln and listened on the way to the strangely brief story I had to tell. I was a grown man – of twenty, perhaps, or twenty-one – with no history save one of a fortnight’s wandering by the shore of the Great Australian Bight. I had not as much as a name; and it was as we rounded Cape Catastrophe that Anson took the whim to give me the surname of the first navigator to chart those waters. Thus, in that February of 1893, was Richard Flinders born.

  I can see now that Anson believed finding to be keeping; that his plans, in the innocence of subconscious motivation, were directed to keeping me. I had been found on what was then the south-western fringe of settlement in South Australia: from Port Lincoln we sailed to Port Augusta and travelled thence to the largest of the Anson stations in a farther corner of the state; the doctors who attended me were brought – it must have been at great expense – from Sydney on the eastern verge of the continent. Had Ian Guthrie’s disappearance continued a mystery I should certainly, despite my own obstinate loss of memory, have been discovered and identified. But within a few weeks, as I now know, that lonely body had been found stretched beside the ashes of its signal fire, my haversack with its few identifiable belongings lying nearby. All doubt as to the fate of Ian Guthrie ceased; his only existence was at some unavailable level of Richard Flinders’ brain.

  In the Anson home and way of life I recognized a tradition not alien to me. The life of the land, the rambling house with its dark surfaces of old furniture, its worn and faded fine fabrics, its shadowy lines of Anson portraits watching the present fleeting generation from the walls: these were things that stirred at my mind more effectively than any psychologist’s technique. Anson was a childless and unmarried man, and I saw a future opening to me that I yet had to reject. I had no wish for the life of a pastoralist; perhaps because of the experience I had been through, more probably because of hidden factors in my early years, I found the immensities of the ranges depressing and at times terrifying. I was absorbed moreover in the mystery of my own clouded mind and this gave rise to an overpowering desire to study medicine. Years later I was to publish, with certain necessary excisions and disguisements, My Analysis of a Case of Long-term Amnesia – a monograph that stands in odd isolation among my many attempts to further radiological science.

  The generosity of Mr Anson extended not only through my years of undergraduate study at Adelaide but through the long, lean and often fatal period that waits on the young specialist. He made Richard Flinders; and it was partly an impulse of piety, of which I cannot find it in me to be ashamed, that made me decide, when the time came, that Richard Flinders should not die.

  It was in my final year. I was walking one spring afternoon from the medical school to my lodgings, which lay some two miles away beyond the park lands that encircle the heart of the little city. A horse-tram drew away from in front of me and I became aware of a little crowd of people standing about a draped pedestal. They were unveiling a statue to some Scottish explorer – it may have been McDougal Stewart – and at the moment that I looked there came a skirl of bagpipes.

  I walked for some yards as if in a great darkness and then I saw before me, like the tour de force of an illusionist, the figure of my brother Ranald. I saw him standing on some eminence, gazing over the endless bush. And I heard him recite, with all the dark passion of his thwarted poet’s nature:

  ‘From the lone shieling on the misty island,

  Mountains divide us and a waste of seas;

  Yet still the blood is strong…’

  Voice and picture faded and I walked on with no more knowledge than before. But that night, as I looked out over the city drenched in moonlight in its lovely setting between hills and sea, I found veil after veil slipping from my mind. I knew that I was Ian Guthrie and I knew that, whatever accident had befallen, in the face of that bush fire Ranald had deserted me.

  Inquiry revealed that by the death of our elder brother’s children and by my own supposed death Ranald had inherited Erchany. I had always been the rudely healthy member of the family; the indecisions that mark the neurotic personality and which distinguished Ranald are unknown to me; and I remember it took me just two hours to reach my resolve. I was conscious of injury and injustice but did not think that these feelings should weigh with me. I had no desire for the life of a Scottish laird; I was already planning almost in full technical detail the steps of my medical career; I had no confidence in Ranald’s honesty and I saw only vexation and distraction in the possibility of a contested claim. Australia had already given the world the Tichborne Case and I told myself ironically that in it there had been sufficient of that sort of thing for a couple of generations. In addition I had my affection for Mr Anson, who was planning with me my career as an Australian surgeon. And I saw that it must be all or nothing; if I admitted my survival a score of embarrassments would appear and almost force me to claim the headship of my family.

  So it was that I came to live out my life as Richard Flinders – mostly in my adopted country but sometimes in England and once for a long period of time in the United States. I have never been the wealthy man that the regular practice of surgery would have made me; most of my own earnings, together with a generous bequest from Richard Anson, have been devoted to the costly business of radium research. I do not know that much of the world’s money is better spent. And my policy of letting no thought for my own future interfere with a possible benefit to knowledge has been amply justified. A few days ago I received a notice of a great honour; I have been elected as emeritus fellow of an American foundation I had the privilege to serve years ago. I shall live in California. It is the climate for a green old age, and I want ten years for the exploration of fields that have
been almost closed to me during a busy life in science. My work is over – in a sense even is rounded off in achievement – and my retirement from medicine, as from society, will be complete. In the course of my career I have had occasion to get a grip of many languages, and the literature of Europe is the right study for a man whose every second thought must be of the grave.

  Only as my life’s task slips from me into the hands of younger men the thought of Erchany comes back. And with the uprising of sentiment the rule of reason slackens; I am conscious again of past injustice and deprivation; I have an impulse to give Ranald a fright. If ever that impulse realizes itself I shall know my second childhood has come.

  But there is the call of the place. Fives in the moat, the tower, the thrill of the parapet walk at night, the gallery where we used to enact the exploits of those ancestors who looked down on our play from the shadows. The snows on Ben Cailie, the mists on the loch, the leaping and leaping again of the salmon at the falls… Still the blood is strong. Perhaps I shall see Erchany in more than dreams before I die.

  Sydney, NSW

  St Andrew’s Day, 1936.

  3

  Timor Mortis conturbat me… My brother has been chanting that – strangely, for it is I who am to die. I have myself very little fear.

  Having pen and the liberty of my limbs I take this narrative – brought to Erchany for Ranald’s information – and add to it what I can. If I hide it in some cranny of these ancient walls it may escape his vigilance and tell its story at some future time. I would have it told, dark page though it be in the long and chequered chronicle of the Guthries. All my work has been for knowledge: I believe in honest records.