The River is Down: (An Australian Outback Romance)

by Lucy Walker

  Flan told Cindie all about this later, as he packed her, together with the hamper made up for them by the hotel chef, into the Land-Rover.

  The other secretaries had been green with envy when Cindie, meeting them in the hotel foyer earlier, told them she had a day off because her chief was away: and where she was going.

  ‘I told you so,’ Sylvia, the ever-smiling blonde, said. ‘You have the King Chief of all. I heard him ordering a hamper at the desk after dinner last night. Only the best ‒ he said. My, oh, my, Cindie! He must value your services some ‒’

  ‘More likely that of his “chauffeur”,’ Cindie replied with a laugh. ‘Flan is his right hand and so devoted it would take a knife-edged saw to sever them apart.’

  ‘Somebody ‒ absolutely dashing ‒ must have achieved the feat to-day. She was in for dinner last night. And did the hotel staff look up! You were right, Cindie. She’s quite a gal!’

  Cindie thought about this as she went through the door to see if Flan was ready.

  Yes ‒ that was exactly what Erica would do. Everyone would look up, including the three secretaries. She had been afraid to go in to dinner because she had known, deep down inside her, that Erica would have had that effect on herself too. The honest part of herself would have had to give in to admiration.

  Flan sat in the polished Land-Rover: everything about him polished too, except the old wide-brimmed dusty rouseabout’s hat. That was his most loved possession, and he disdained the cotton jungle hats Nick and the other men wore on the road-site.

  ‘Come on, Cindie! Up, girl!’ he called. ‘We’ve quite a day in front of us. At least three gorges to visit.’

  ‘We’ll enjoy every minute of it, Flan,’ Cindie promised as she levered herself into the passenger seat. It was quite a step up into the Land-Rover. She meant what she said. All else but the scenery would be forgotten. She might never come this way again.

  Some shadow of events had cast itself before her, but she did not recognise it. She little dreamed how the day would end.

  They drove out along the road leading to the west for more than thirty-odd miles, then turned into a gully where magnificent trees, with white papery bark, stood at a great height. It was so cool and beautiful in this tree-shaded gully that Cindie could hardly believe they were only a few miles from nothing but semi-desert plain.

  ‘Cadjebuts,’ Flan explained. ‘They only grow in gullies near water.’

  ‘I don’t see any water.’

  ‘Like most other place in this country, the water’s always underground,’ Flan grumbled. ‘Wait till we get to the real gorges. You’ll see water there all right. You’ll never see the like of it elsewhere: always coloured because it catches the reflections of the walls above it. Have patience, Cindie.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised.

  They drove out of the low gully on to a wide expanse of flat land. For a few minutes Cindie thought they were back on the original plain. In the near distance in front of them were the queer mesa-shaped mountains with their red blocks at the top, their sides striped with alternate barren rock and swathes of green spinifex grass.

  ‘It’s the strangest, weirdest country in the world,’ she said.

  ‘A thousand million years old, those rocks,’ Flan said. ‘So the geologists say, anyway. They’ve got a fancy name for them ‒ Pre-Cambrian. You know what that means?’

  Cindie shook her head. ‘Don’t blind me with science, Flan. That happened to me once before. Never again! Let’s just call them “rocks”!’

  Flan pulled up to a sudden stop beside a small isolated grove of white-trunked gums. As far as the eye could see, the mullas coloured the ground like a frail mauve mist.

  ‘But where are the gorges?’ Cindie asked, puzzled.

  ‘Hop out now,’ Flan advised. ‘Then walk round those black-hearted gums. But mind your step. You’ll see a crack in the ground. That’s the first gorge. There are others ‒’

  ‘A crack in the ground?’ Flan had spoken of the gorges that way before, but she’d thought he was joking.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ he grinned.

  From where Cindie stood, looking across a waste of dried-out grass, the crack looked like a mile-long snake winding over the land. Clumps of white-trunked gums grew in small groves here and there by its side. One or two of these trees had a broken branch which showed the black heart under the bark. Nothing was blacker than that heart, and nothing ‒ not even snow ‒ was whiter than the outside trunk.

  Low bush and dry grass sprawled between the trees and the broken rock rubble right to the edge of the crack. Looking along the horizontal plane of the landscape, Cindie expected the gorge might be only a few yards wide.

  Then she walked forward.

  Less than three feet from the edge she stopped, and gasped. The great gash in the earth surface was many hundreds of feet wide. Looking down it was almost impossible to see the bottom for the small stunted trees that sprouted out of the sides of the canyon, and the buttresses of denuded red, blue and green rock that formed the near wall. Down near the bottom, on the far side, were wreaths of thick, delicately green ferns. Climbing up the far sides were assortments of the strangest growths, growing out from the crevices. Here and there, even a tall tree had found a foothold and was reaching with its great green arms to a sky far, far above it.

  But it was the cliff-face of the gorge that made Cindie hold her breath. Never had she seen such colours. Awe silenced her.

  Sheer slabs of shining rock, wet from seepage from above, lined the gap. They were striped in flashing blue, jade-green, and here and there, a brilliant red. Sometimes the colours ran horizontally, nearly the length of the canyon. The whole was carved by cracks into vast rectangular, striated patterns.

  The sound of water, wind-sheltered, touching gently against a gravel bottom somewhere down, down, down there in the gorge, was as eerie as faint bunyip music.

  ‘See what I mean?’ asked Flan, grinning with amusement at the picture of wonder in Cindie’s face. ‘How about going down?’

  ‘Down there?’ Cindie asked, puzzled. ‘But how? It’s almost perpendicular.’

  ‘There’s a path ‒ if you know it. Quite a few people come here from time to time. Occasional travellers. Geologists and rock-hunters, mostly. Have you plenty of strength in your sinews to-day, Cindie?’

  She nodded. ‘Lots. I can go down where others have been.’

  ‘Good girl, because this one’s the toughest. I reckoned we’d do the hard one first. The others’ll be easy. It’s a case of character, tackling this feller. How are you for walking and climbing bare-footed?’

  ‘Excellent,’ Cindie said, kicking off her flatties at once. ‘I do all the gardening at home in bare feet. It’s a way of life, isn’t it?’

  ‘The things you young people do!’ Flan declared.

  Cindie laughed. She threw back her hair and looked towards the gorge with challenge in her eyes.

  ‘My, you have a lovely face when you laugh like that, Cindie. How come it makes me think of sun shining through rain, or something?’

  ‘Because sometimes I feel a bit rainy. I’ve had troubles. I’ll tell you about them some time. But darling Flan, right this minute, I’m happy. That’s because you’ve brought me out to this gorgeous place. How Jinx and Myrtle would love it! I wish they were here!’

  ‘Not me. I’d have to chain ’em to a rock to make sure they stayed alive.’

  They were standing side by side, near the opening to the path now.

  ‘You go first, Flan,’ Cindie suggested. ‘You’re the one who knows the way.’

  ‘I do, too. Most of the path you can’t see from one buttress to another. You’ll see the bottom, with green water in it, when we get over a few of these top boulders. About half-way down there’s generally a rope hanging about. That’s for novices. Just follow me and keep your eyes skinned for where you put your feet.’

  Cindie had never dreamed of anything like the descent into this heart of the gorge. Every now
and again she paused to look around. The sight was beyond description. It was fairyland, no-man’s-land, moon-land, and a child’s haven of fantasy. The light and shade ‒ the colours were unbelievable. Strangest of all were the trees that oddly sprouted out of rock clefts here and there. Occasionally a single one stood sentinel-high on a fallen mountain of rock ‒ clinging with its roots to ‒ what?

  Below, she could now see the great pool of water lying still as a dead lake, reflecting the brilliant colours of the walls. It was guarded in secret silence by fallen rock, bright green ferns and the glistening sides of the gorge.

  The path they were gradually descending ran diagonally across the cliff-face. Here and there it changed course a little round some bluff or curve into some bay in the wall. There were some places that required long step-downs: others where they had to clamber over rocks.

  ‘You all right, Cindie?’ Flan asked, turning round and looking up at her from time to time. ‘You want a hand, or can you manage this one? Sit on your backside and slide down it. Easier that way. Safer, too.’

  ‘I’m doing fine,’ Cindie declared happily. ‘You keep your eyes in front, Flan. It might be you who needs a hand.’

  It was only a joke, of course ‒ a riposte to his challenge ‒ but it was almost as if she had put the shadow of a dark wish on him.

  They had reached the place where a rope dangled as hand-help over a bad spot. The rope was maintained there by officialdom in Mulga Gorges. Flan made the gap, then Cindie, pulling on the rope, joined him.

  ‘Curl your toes in, hereabouts, Cindie,’ Flan advised. ‘There’s loose pebbles on this stretch. Balled-up toes act as a brake ‒’

  He slipped on those same pebbles as he spoke.

  It was only a little slip, and nothing might have come of it, except Flan did the natural thing. He leaned with his back to the cliff wall and grasped a point of jutting rock to steady himself. Alas, the rock was loose in its bed, and came away in Flan’s hand. Worse, it had supported a heavier boulder above it.

  ‘Oh, Flan!’ Cindie warned.

  It was too late. The boulder crashed down, smashing on to Flan’s foot, then it hurtled madly down into the gorge below. The noise, as it hit the bottom, sounded like the crack of doom.

  Flan, spread-eagled safely enough for the moment, had a face sheet-white under his deep-burned skin: his foot had taken more than a hundred-pound crack on it.

  Suddenly, by the roll of his head, Cindie knew he might faint any minute. That falling boulder must have pulped his foot.

  ‘Flan … Flan … hold on! I’m coming!’

  She could not make haste because of the narrowness of the track ‒ with its gorge on one side and the rock wall on the other.

  She had to go slowly: edging towards him carefully. There the path was all pebbles and the incline was steep. A rock had to be rounded, and another climbed over.

  ‘I’m coming, Flan!’ Cindie went on saying, as she crept forward. She looked up once. He was leaning back, still spread-eagled to the wall, but his eyes were shut. His head was lolling just that frightening little bit. ‘Hold on, Flan darling … hold on!’

  As she neared him, inch by inch, she glanced at his foot. Once only was enough. Shoeless, as were her feet, it was a red, white and black mess. That was all.

  She wished the memory of Erica’s brilliantly striped dress ‒ as she left the plane ‒ didn’t make her sick. These were the colours of Flan’s foot.

  If Erica hadn’t come, perhaps Nick would have been here ‒

  Now poor wounded Flan had only Cindie Brown.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cindie’s hand touched Flan’s left hand where it stretched out on the rock-face, his fingers clinging with effort to some sprouting bush.

  ‘Flan?’

  He opened his eyes and nodded.

  With her right hand she held hard to a jut of rock: a firm part of the whole rock-face.

  ‘Take my hand, Flan … slowly … instead of that bush. I’m safe and I have a tight hold on the cliff.’

  Second by second his hand closed gradually round Cindie’s, as he released the bush.

  ‘Now ‒ keel over slowly on your left side, Flan. I’ll pull gently and you come with my hand. Put your weight on my arm as you come. It’s very strong, and you’re only a teeny little wisp of a man. It’s easy, really ‒’

  It was not so easy, but it was not too hard either. It was the timing that mattered. He had to keel over inch by inch so that his body would lower gently to a bed on the path.

  Cindie knew he mustn’t fall to the ground. He must ease to it. He mustn’t faint, because he had to control his movements. If he fell, he could so easily roll. The gorge break was only two feet away ‒

  ‘Keep using your mind ‒ wide awake ‒ Flan.’

  He opened his eyes wide. ‘I am,’ he grunted. ‘What kind of a raking fool you think I am, Cindie?’

  She could have cried with relief. He was in agony: his face was sheet-white, but his spirit was alert and fighting.

  Minutes later, he was lying on his side on the path below Cindie, his head touching her feet.

  She slithered down to a sitting position and gradually, by taking his shoulders, she turned him on to his back. She gritted her teeth while doing this, for she suffered in her heart the awful pain she knew Flan was enduring while he had to move that crushed right foot.

  At last it was over.

  Flan lay, his head in Cindie’s lap, her slacks-covered legs, one on either side of his shoulders, wedging him firmly.

  ‘You can faint now, sweetie,’ she said softly, leaning over him, nursing him as if he were her child. ‘We’re safe. Two peas in a pod ‒’

  ‘Never … fainted … in … my life …’

  ‘Okay. Go to sleep instead. I’ll keep watch.’

  They stayed like that, not talking, for a long, long time. Once Cindie lifted his eyelid to see if he was conscious. His eyeball flickered.

  She leaned back against the same boulder she had had to climb over earlier. Up in that Land-Rover was the two-way radio. She didn’t know how to use it, but she could try.

  Of course, when she and Flan weren’t home by nightfall, they would be missed from the hotel. Someone would come ‒ some time ‒ to their rescue. Meanwhile, Flan was in appalling pain. He was silent, unmoving, but he was not unconscious. So he suffered.

  In the Land-Rover there was water and food. There was the Standard Outback First Aid Kit, which meant that in that kit there’d be a pain-killing drug.

  Cindie leaned forward and searched in Flan’s pockets for his penknife. She found it and opened it. Hurray! It was as sharp as she had hoped Flan kept his knife.

  She eased herself back from him, till her legs were free of his shoulders, and she was sitting on the boulder instead of leaning against it. She waited a few minutes to see if Flan stirred. He lay quite still.

  With great care she climbed the few yards back up the path to where the rope was hanging. She had to take care because becoming a casualty herself wouldn’t help Flan.

  The rope was very thick and very stout, and it took quite some effort to sever it. When this was done Cindie put Flan’s knife in her pocket and slithered back carefully, over the pebbly part of the path, and once more over that boulder.

  Again she had to sit down, her legs on either side of Flan in order safely to get a loop of the rope around him, under his arm-pits. It wasn’t quite long enough to reach strong holds on the cliff wall.

  Cindie pulled her blouse over her head and tore it into shreds ‒ with some help from Flan’s knife. She tied these strips together, then the whole length to the rope. It was long enough now.

  Flan’s eyes flickered open. ‘What … the hell …?’

  ‘I’m tying you up, darling. To these tree-roots here. There’s a loop round a perfectly safe jag of rock, too. That’s in case you do fall asleep, and roll over the wrong way. Flan?’ she asked, more urgently. She had to do this. ‘You do know what is on your left side, don’t you?�
��

  ‘The gorge.’ He barely nodded.

  Cindie finished the job of securing him. She knew very well Flan wouldn’t fall into mere sleep. Not in that pain. But he might become unconscious. She had to tie him to be sure.

  ‘I’m going up to the top to radio for help, Flan. I’ll bring water, and other things we might need ‒’

  ‘I hope someone taught you never to make granny knots,’ Flan said unexpectedly. The longest sentence yet.

  ‘Yes. At first-aid classes. Don’t worry, my pet. All my knots are reefs or sheep-bends. You’re tied up good and sure. My very own prisoner.’

  ‘Good for you!’

  ‘Flan, I’m sorry I said you were only a teeny little wisp of a man. Actually you have the heart of a lion.’

  ‘Watch out … I might … roar …’ His voice faded to nothing. The effort of speech was too great.

  ‘I’ll take care. You know that, don’t you, Flan?’

  His eyelids flickered. Cindie knew he had said ‘Yes.’

  She crawled to a standing position. Then she turned, eased herself over the boulder once again, and began the steep climb to the top.

  It was cooler, this way, without a blouse, she thought. In her bag in the Land-Rover she had shorts. She’d brought them because Flan had said something about a swim in one of the lesser gorges; and she didn’t have a swim-suit.

  When she reached the top she’d change her slacks for the shorts. That way she’d look more like a bikini-girl than the way she looked now ‒ only a bra on top and long pants below. Somehow, this way looked undressed: the legs of her slacks were stuck to her with perspiration, too. The other way would look sort of natural ‒ for someone picnicking, anyway ‒ and cool.

  Who cares, she thought, desperately clambering up a particularly high step. I’m so hot ‒

  She was puffed out, too. She had to stop every few minutes to get her breath.

  At long last she reached the top. There were the white trees with the black hearts! And the Land-Rover sticking out on the great flat area like the Sydney Harbour Bridge!

  At least whoever came to their rescue would know where she and Flan were.