Next morning I took off at 6.45, circled, and picked up the railway that I followed for 300 miles through the bush. It was a good landmark, with the bush felled for a width of over twenty yards on each side. After the railway petered out at Daly Waters, I followed a telegraph line just as easily, because of the clearing through the bush, to Newcastle Waters, 425 miles from Darwin. At Newcastle Waters it was hot, bumpy, and the visibility was bad, because of a thick haze. Here I had to leave the telegraph line, and follow a track across the plain to the east. While I was circling to look for this track, I was tempted to land for a break after six hours' flying, but it was so hot in the air that each time I put my face out on the exhaust side of the aeroplane I felt scorched. I wondered if the upper wing, which gets blackened by the exhaust in ordinary weather; might catch fire. I decided that if it was so hot in the air, it must have been grilling on the ground, so I turned down the idea of landing. Refuelling was not an inducement, because the description of Newcastle Waters read 'Petrol and oil can be obtained at Anthony Lagoon 178 miles away. Nearest town Gamooweal 375 miles.' There were tracks leading in every direction. I chose the one that looked right, and followed it along the rim of a great expanse of flat country, which had nothing growing on it, and looked from the air like a vast dried-up lake.
The track consisted of two wheel marks. During the first 50 miles I met one or two drovers. I was flying low, because of the haze, and we saluted as if I, too, had been on a horse. I passed the spot where the homestead of the Eva Downs Cattle Station should have been but could see no sign of it. (It had been burned down.) When I was due to arrive at Anthony Lagoon, the next cattle station by my reckoning, I came to a bore, a tall iron windmill for pumping water from an artesian well into a square water hole. There was a tin shed beside it. I thought that the shed was a store, shown on the map at Anthony Lagoon. There were tracks leading in every direction from it. I followed the most likely for a few miles, then decided that it was not the right one. I went back, and wasted twenty minutes circling at 100 feet above the ground in the thick haze, looking for the track. In the end, I was sure this could not be Anthony Lagoon, and I flew on in the same direction as before. A few miles farther on Anthony Lagoon showed up without doubt. There were several buildings on the edge of a permanent lagoon.
This was the homestead of another cattle station. I circled; and picked up the track for the next homestead, Brunette Downs. Once or twice I lost the track, and wasted time circling for it. When I reached Brunette Downs I had been told to land on a gravel patch north of the homestead, instead of on the landing-strip which was in bad condition. This required a cross-wind landing, which I thought dangerous. I had not only been flying for eight and three-quarter hours, but the last 240 miles had been in rough bumpy air close to the ground, requiring snatchy use of the control-stick, and it was difficult to make a smooth landing after that: I picked the best place on the gravel for landing into wind, but at the first approach overshot, and the second time bumped badly. The patch was not wide enough to land across it. The intense heat made me annoyed and irritable. I flew across to the landing-strip, and had a good look at it flying low. It seemed in good condition, and I made an easy landing on it. I drank all the water I had left, and lay on the ground under the shade of one wing. After twenty minutes a man strolled towards the aeroplane. At first I thought that he had an enormous black beard, but in fact he was a youth with a black flyproof net round his face, with a cloud of flies which at once transferred to me. I wished that he had brought some netting for me as well as the flies. I asked him a lot of questions, and he answered 'I don't know' to nearly every one of them. He did not know who the next neighbour was, he thought there was some petrol here, but if so, it was locked up. There was no one else there except himself, the manager was expected back, but he did not know when. Everything on the ground seemed maddeningly slow after long hours of flying.
The description I had of Brunette Downs read, 'Nearest railway station Dejarra, Queensland, 320 miles. Nearest town, Camooweal, 210 miles.' My top tank was nearly full of petrol, so that I had just over three hours of flying left. That ought to be plenty to reach Camooweal. Now I had all the makings of a drama; I decided to fly on. I drank the juice of a tin of pineapple, and gave the rest of the fruit to a couple of blacks who had turned up. I emptied three quarts of oil into the motor, and took off again, muttering curses. I continued to follow the track by which I had arrived. It was not going in the right direction, but I thought that it would swing round later. After a while, when it did not, I turned, and headed south. This was by far the most difficult country that I had come across for navigating – or ever have come across, for that matter. There were no distinctive landmarks at all. There were wheel tracks in places, but they could be most deceptive. For example, when an area became flooded, the tracks were obliterated, and the lorry or whatever had made the tracks, had to detour round the edge of the water. As the water receded, the lorry on its next visit would make tracks perhaps half a mile away from the last lot. The next lot might be half a mile away again. Tracks were apt to leave a water hole in all directions. I had two maps, one cut from a schoolroom map of Australia, and a large-scale strip map, a white print from a linen tracing covering the route from Darwin to Cunnamulla, which the Australian Civil Aviation Department had sent up to Darwin for me. These maps marked places in a grand manner, and where I expected to find a town of 5,000 people, there would be a house and one or two sheds. The strip map showed a great number of rivers, but in nine hours of flying I had not seen a single one. They were, in fact, dry watercourses, which held water only occasionally after heavy rain. From the air they looked like the rest of the country, which was all monotonously similar. The bush of evergreen gum-trees was sparse; the individual trees could have been counted from above. The general result of all this was that my target for each leg of the flight was a spot in a featureless landscape, and I would not be sure what the spot consisted of – whether it was a house, a house with sheds, or merely a bore. The haze shrouded everything, and cut down visibility to about a mile.
After flying 5 or 6 miles south without seeing another track, I decided that I had overshot, and turned north-east again. I picked up the track a few minutes later. There was one landmark between Brunette Downs and Camooweal-Alexandra, the homestead of a 12,000 square mile cattle run. I duly located this, and passed over it at 5.05 p.m. They had just had rain here, the first for several years, and the mud colour of the ground I had been flying over was changing to a faint greenish tinge, where grass was beginning to sprout. I flew southeast, and picked up a bore with stockyards as shown on the map, 18 miles from Alexandra. Tracks led from this bore in various directions, and I circled time after time before feeling sure that I had chosen the right one. I was burning petrol in a way I had not allowed for.
The terrain was changing; downs now alternated with stretches of red soil, with a few trees dotted about. I came on another bore, and an engine shed, but too soon, according to the map. The track ought to leave there in a south-easterly direction but, though I circled several times, the only sign of a track that I could see was one going due east. I flew along it for 7 miles, but it did not deviate from east, and I concluded that it must be the wrong track. I turned, and headed south. Every minute hunting for the track seemed an age. How foolish I had been to leave Brunette Downs without refuelling! I flew on south for 10 miles without crossing as much as a sheep track. I had lost the track, and I was in a nice fix. I had not enough petrol to return to the bore and start afresh. I turned east again, and decided that the track I had first followed from the bore must be the right one, and that it was going to turn south-east in due course, and that if I kept on heading east I must come across it. However, after flying east for 12 miles without any signs of the track and looking anxiously at the petrol gauge, I decided that I was too short of petrol to search any longer, and that I must head direct for where I reckoned Camooweal to be.
I was now flying close to the ground,
forced down by the haze that had thickened, and the plane was being badly bumped about. The wind had freshened from south-south-east, and I was drifting between twenty and twenty-five degrees to port. The plane required careful flying, being tossed about close to the ground, and I was keeping an intent look-out, except for too frequent glances at the petrol gauge, now showing practically empty. I had not time or opportunity for working out what had gone wrong with the navigation. By then I no longer cared a damn about reaching Camooweal. If only I could see a building!
I had flown 100 miles since the water bore, and must land within another 30 miles, whether I saw anything or not. Approaching nightfall was cooling the air, but I felt so prickly with heat that I ripped off the scarf protecting my neck to let air blow down my back. Suddenly I streaked across a scar on the ground. I banked steeply, and turned back to it. It appeared to be a formed road, running north. It was puzzling; why had I not known about it? I flew right down to have a good look. The odd thing was that it appeared to be unused. However, I stuck to it. I followed it south for a short distance, and came to a bore with an engine shed, and a sort of hut. I circled, looking for somewhere to land. There was a green patch beside the water hole; was it swampy? Everywhere else the ground was covered with stones and boulders. What about concealed tree stumps? There was a 25 to 30mph wind blowing, and I had been in the air for eleven hours; I must expect a rough landing. There was only a fifty-yard run of the green patch free of boulders, so I just had to make a good landing. I went round again, and put the plane down in the best landing I ever made. It rolled to a standstill among the first stones. I at once turned off the petrol cock, struggled out of the cockpit, and shuffled with dragging feet into the shed. It was an open shed, built over a pumping engine, and the wind sighed mournfully through it. Another shed, six feet square, stood over a fireplace. This one was made from the sides of petrol tins, which creaked and clanked dismally in the wind. It was a bleak, solitary spot in the twilight. I felt the ashes, and fancied they had heat in them, perhaps from a fire of two or three days before and my heart bounded, until I realised that it might be due to the heat of the day. The flies were terrible; I had never seen so many flies before. They crawled ceaselessly over my eyeballs, filled up my ears, and each time I forgot and opened my mouth (which I did frequently, for my tongue felt swollen and stuck unpleasantly to the roof of my mouth) they flew in. They tickled my tongue horribly, and I had to blow them out. Next, I looked at the mud-like water in the square water hole. I stirred the soft bottom with a stick, but it made no difference to the colour. I was parched with thirst, but decided not to drink till I had boiled the water. At first I could not find the wonderful road, where I hoped that lorries or cars would be passing. At last I found where it sprang out of the plain from nothing. This was queer, and after walking along it for 100 yards without finding any signs of traffic whatever, I felt that it was too much to take in, dismissed the whole thing from my mind, and turned back. I collected some chips and twigs and a piece of paper from the cockpit to start a fire going, the effort making my knees tremble. I rested before fetching more chips, and two logs. Then I scooped a half gallon tin of water out of the pool, and hung it over the fire.
I lifted the tail of the Gipsy Moth to move it to a more sheltered position, because the wind was strong, but I had lost the strength to move it that way, so I fished out some rope and, fastening it to the tail skid, I pulled the plane towards the shed with a series of jerks. It took me half an hour to shift the plane a distance that should have taken half a minute. At first, when I panted I swallowed flies. Mercifully, after dark they vanished. By the time that I had got the plane in the lee of the shed, I felt done. As I moved towards the fire the roaring in my ears ceased, and a black film seemed to cover my eyes until the fire faded away to a pin-point in the distance. I dropped on the ground and rested. I was exhausted and in a panic – at being lost – panic-struck so abjectly that I was disgusted with myself. I was lost, true; in bad country, true; I had no petrol, true; but compared with what might have been, I was well off. So I reasoned with myself, but it was no use.
I was so ashamed of this panic that at last I made a great effort, and determined to dismiss it from my mind until I had slept. I fetched wood for the fire, taking several rests on the way. I drank some of the Chianti I had brought from Tripoli, but it tasted nasty. I dragged out the rubber boat, pumped it half full, turned it upside down, flopped on it, and fell asleep at once. When I woke half the water had boiled away. I stood it in a corner, tilted it in the hope that the mud would settle, then half filled another can. It was only fifteen or twenty yards from the fire to the water hole, but I took spells all the way. I dipped in the top of my vacuum flask, and drank the boiled water as it cooled. It tasted like nectar. I finished it all, except for some mud and slime at the bottom. I could not eat anything. Now and then I heard a slight rustle among the wood chips beside me, so made an effort and fetched a torch to see if it was a snake. I could find nothing. I drank nearly half a gallon of water from the next lot when it was cool enough. Every few hours through the night I woke and drank again. In spite of this I was still thirsty in the morning. It was about 6 o'clock when dawn came, and I lay indolently on my back watching the sky, or rather the haze, change colour from dark to light grey.
I ran over all the data of the last flight, thinking over each item of evidence, and going through all the movements one by one, a mental dead reckoning. Had I overshot Camooweal? I imagined it an isolated blob of buildings in the centre of a featureless plain. Had I crossed to the north of the track from Alexandra to Camooweal? It seemed a likely thing to happen in the haze, flying low while I was distracted by the instrument board for a few seconds. I felt too tired to move until a buzz reminded me of the plague of flies. Then I jumped up, fetched the map from the plane, and began reckoning the details of last night's flight. I plotted all my movements carefully, one after the other. There was one discrepancy I could not understand. The water bore after Alexandra was shown on one of the maps, but I seemed to have reached it much sooner than I should have done. I had to let that pass. I made allowance for the drift on each of the courses flown, and in the end I reckoned that I was now 10 miles west of Camooweal.
Then I thought of petrol. The gauge showed empty, but the plane was tail down. I shook the plane by one wing, and I could hear a splash in the tank. I decided to measure it exactly. I fished out a hat and a shirt, and buttoned the shirt over the hat, so that only a small aperture was left open in front. It was rather difficult to see wearing this affair, but it kept most of the flies away; they disliked entering the shaded opening. I walked round the water hole and studied all the tracks visible. There were a number of old motor vehicle tracks coming in from different directions from the east, but they all stopped at the water hole. There were cattle tracks from the south and south-west. The track of a shod horse cheered me up, but it was two or three days old. Suddenly I spotted the fresh tracks of a wagon, and got excited. I followed them gaily, but my enthusiasm was short-lived; after fifty yards I found that I had been following the tracks of my own aeroplane.
I took the tin in which I had boiled water the night before and wiped it clean with my handkerchief. I climbed on the wing and held the tin underneath the petrol cock until the tank had slowly drained into it. Measuring with a foot-rule, I found that I had three gallons left. This was good for thirty-six minutes' flying, say 20 miles out and back allowing for warming up, starting and taking off. The reasonable course of action would have been to wait on the ground where I was; the haze might clear which would make it possible to spot Camooweal 10 or 15 miles away, instead of groping about near the ground with visibility of a few hundred yards. Then I should be able to have a rest, which would result in my thinking more clearly, and perhaps getting some good fresh ideas. But I dreaded the prospect of a search being started for me. I made up my mind to try for Camooweal.
I warmed up for three minutes, and set off on a fifteen minute flight to the east, d
etermined to return to the water hole if nothing had showed up by then. Every second of this flight was exciting. There was a strong wind blowing from the south, and the dust haze was thick. The minutes fled as fast as they had travelled slowly the night before. In eleven minutes I thought I saw a man ahead, but it turned out to be a small horse which bolted. At fourteen and a half minutes, I came to a creek. I had a feeling of relaxation. I must return to the water hole. I decided to cross the creek and turn on the other side. I was just going into the bank for turning, when I caught the dull glint of light on an iron roof: it gave me a jolt. Then I saw another – five, six, seven. I cursed and swore as I tore round the place at full throttle, and finally landed. A truck drove up with the station book-keeper and a load of station hands and blacks. I thought that his Scots accent was the pleasantest sound I had ever heard.
This was Rocklands Homestead (3,400 square miles) 4 miles north of Camooweal, and I had been at Cattle Creek water hole, 15 miles to the west, which probably would not have been visited for six weeks. The water hole where I had lost the track must have been an extra one, short of the one marked on the map. The perfectly formed road, which had puzzled me, was the work of a fire plough, I was told. This was my first serious exercise in mental dead reckoning. In 1943, during the war, one of my jobs at the Empire Central Flying School was to devise methods of teaching fighter pilots how to find a pin-point objective in enemy territory while jinking at zero feet. It had to be done by mental dead reckoning, because the pilot could not take his eyes off the ground ahead. It seemed easy after practice, and by using various tricks; it is the first time of doing anything that is difficult.
The Lonely Sea and the Sky Page 12
