Golden Soak

FOUR

It wasn’t as easy as that, of course. Duhamel didn’t have any work for his rig until January 26, when he was due back at Mt Goldsworthy. He was a decent enough sort, but he had wages to pay and he insisted on completing the programme we had originally agreed. I was stuck up on that spur another three days and the joke of it was we did strike the reef. They broke through into softer rock that Friday evening and at dawn on the Sunday Josh Meyer called me to examine the first dust sample to show the white of quartz crystals. They were then just on 700 feet and the gold in the quartz was visible to the naked eye. But in less than five minutes the compressed air was bringing up granite dust samples. We had struck the reef, but only through a drill hole length of about 3 inches. And less than an hour later the dust samples ceased and the drill slowed. We were down to the water table and it would need a diamond bit and the lubrication of wet mud to drill further. Whether it was the edge of the reef we had struck or whether it dwindled here to a mere 3 inches in width there was no means of knowing without drilling another hole alongside. It would have been exciting, a cause for celebration, if that bastard Culpin hadn’t got in ahead of me. And all Duhamel could do was pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘You’ll catch on, mon brave. You’re in Australia now and they don’t use the word crook for nothing. Everything’s crook here — the climate, the country, the people.’ He was grinning, his wild bright eyes laughing at me. ‘You put it down to experience, hnn? And next time you make dam’ sure you got a claim registered before you start drilling.’ But he had the decency not to insist on double rates for striking the reef first go. We started packing up then, and by sundown we were off the ridge and camped at the foot of the gully in sight of the mine buildings. After the evening meal I took a torch and climbed with Kennie the sides of the gully. The rock drawings Ed Garrety had talked about were everywhere. Some of them were painted, some just scratchings on the surface of the outcrops, the best of them in what looked like waterworn caverns. It was a strange, haunting place — the ghostly presence of long-dead people substantiated by their primitive ritual drawings. And below us the embers of the cook fire glowing through the ghost-white boles of the gum trees, the faint sound of Josh’s guitar and the mine buildings pale in the starlight.

We slept stretched out beside the Land-Rover and I was woken in the middle of the night by a black man on a horse. It was one of the two Jarra Jarra boys. He sat his horse in the darkness calling my name in a way I barely recognized, and when I stood up, he said, ‘Come, you come quick. Jan say you come.’ The others were awake by then and to my surprise Duhamel knew something of the language — one of the few people I met in Australia who ever bothered. ‘It’s not a dialect I know, but far as I can gather the Boss has disappeared and the girl’s gone to Lynn Peak to look for him. She told this feller to come down here and get you.’

Put like that I could visualize her panic, the native boy riding through the night and Janet heading for the Andersons’ place, driving the ute flat out in the hope of catching up with her father. We got going straight away. We were sleeping in our clothes and all we had to do was roll up our swags and toss them in the back, say goodbye to Georges Duhamel and his drillers and hit the track.

I was thinking then of the rock drawings, of the Soak as it had been before the white men came, a source of water for ritual gatherings of life in time of drought, and remembering all that had happened there since Big Bill Garrety started blasting that quartz for gold. I knew that if I were Ed Garrety I’d leave the mine alone. I knew exactly what I’d do, and as I drove through the night up that track I was determined to turn the homestead inside out in search of the missing pages of that Journal.

Oh yes. I knew they were missing. Whatever Janet might say, you don’t end your life story like that — not when you’ve been keeping a record as long as he had. He might conceal the truth about Mcllroy’s death from his son, but I couldn’t believe he hadn’t confided it to his Journal. And Ed Garrety, reading it after his death, had done the only thing he could; but whether he had destroyed those pages, or merely hidden them away — that was something I couldn’t be sure about. Janet said she had searched the house, but she would hardly have searched her father’s den, not without his permission, and she certainly wouldn’t have gone through his private papers. If he hadn’t burned them, that’s where the missing papers would be, in that room amongst the litter of papers that had strewn his desk, the chairs, even the floor, when I had last seen him.

I was thinking of the Gibson then, clear of the dry watercourses and driving flat out, the dirt track faintly red in the headlights. Why else would he want me to witness a new will? And the Land-Rover loaded for a two-week journey, the faithful Tom waiting beside it. I knew nothing about the Gibson, only that my tourist map showed it blank, apart from the Canning Stock Route, and the end of summer not a good time to drive the red wastes of one of Australia’s worst deserts. Was he bent on suicide? Or did he really believe in the Monster? Pushed to the point of desperation, did all Australians clutch at straws? ‘Ever been in desert country?’ I asked Kennie.

‘The edge of the Nullarbor, that’s all.’

‘Not the Gibson?’

‘Jesus! no.’

‘What about your father? He ever been in the Gibson?’

‘Part of the Canning, yes. But no dogger goes into the desert and no white man strays from the Woomera Range tracks if he can help it.’

We crossed the grid into the paddock, the Windbreaks a familiar outline against the stars. There was nobody about as we drew up by the poinciana trees, no sound when I cut the engine, the outbuildings silent shadows. The house was open, her bed not slept in, no sign of life and the door of her father’s den locked, but nobody there. Back in the cool house Kennie had lit a candle and was staring at the table still laid for two.

‘Doesn’t look as though they had any supper.’

I went into the kitchen. Two steaks uncooked beside the paraffin stove, potatoes in a pan and onions already sliced. She had obviously waited supper for him, hoping against hope that he’d return, and then about eleven, or a little after, had finally decided he wasn’t coming back. It would have taken the boy about an hour and a half to ride to the mine and he had woken me shortly after one.

‘Well, what do we do now?’ Kennie asked.

‘Wait till she gets back,’ I said. There was nothing else we could do, and I told him to see if he could work the petrol pump. ‘If you can, then fill the Land-Rover’s tank, the jerri-cans, too, and we’ll need spare cans for water. Then get some sleep.’

‘And you?’

I told him what I was going to do. ‘And if I find what I’m looking for, and Janet doesn’t bring him back, then we’ll have a lot of driving ahead of us, so get some sleep.’

I went outside then, round the house to the window of his den. There was no glass, only the flyscreen, and that was easily dealt with by slipping the blade of the knife up the edge of it to release the catch. I had brought candles with me and, once inside, I lit one, the soft glow showing the room much as it had been when I was last there, an untidy litter of files and papers. The only difference was that the desk top had been cleared except for a sealed envelope marked Will and beside it a brief note written in a rather shaky hand:

My darling Jan,

This may be goodbye — in which case do not grieve. It will be a merciful release. I am going on a long journey now and I have little hope that it will prove successful. If it does, then maybe we can find some happiness. But I am very tired now, too tired to face any longer the hopeless struggle to keep Jarra Jarra.

And you, though you love the place as I do, must be tired of the struggle too. Little of happiness I have been able to give you and to say that it was not all my fault is no answer.

God bless you, my child, and do not fret. Tom will see me to the end, and after that I pray you will make a new and better life for yourself. Your loving father, He had signed it simply ‘Ed’, and standing there in the candlelight, reading it through again, I felt a lump in my throat. It was such a desperate, sad letter. I put it back on the desk beside the will, wondering whether Janet had read it before she left.

I moved the candle from the desk and began going through the piles of papers, the silence of the house reminding me of Drym, a waiting stillness. And as the candle burned lower and the past, with its deeds, its birth and death and marriage certificates, its accounts and correspondence, filled the silence with the hopes and fears of those that had peopled the house for more than half a century, a feeling of depression settled over me, my eyes growing tired with peering at dusty papers faded with age. And reading what I had no right to read, I began to realize how hard a struggle Ed Garrety had had, the debts he had paid, the effort he had made to restore the land, the constant battle to rebuild from nothing. Above all, the loneliness of the man, and all the time the sense of hopelessness growing.

In the end I sat down at the desk exhausted. No sign of the missing pages of the Journal. I added a fresh candle to die old, not caring any more. Somewhere to the east of Lake Disappointment, deep in the Gibson Desert…. If Janet didn’t find him, then that’s where I would have to look. But should I? What was the point of bringing him back? He had fought his battle and now he was finished. To bring him back would be like resuscitating somebody who had deliberately thrown himself into a river. I must have fallen asleep there at his desk for the next thing I knew the candle was guttering with the draught from the open door and Janet was standing there, the pale first light of dawn showing through the empty window, her face white with exhaustion. ‘You didn’t find him.’

‘No. The Andersons hadn’t seen him.’ She came a few steps into the room, her eyes on the letter. ‘You’ve read it?’

‘Yes. I shouldn’t have, but I did.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She was surprisingly calm. In the long drive to Lynn Peak and back she seemed to have come to terms with the situation. But accepting it had meant putting her emotions in cold storage, so that there was an almost frozen quality about her calmness. She had guessed where he was headed. ‘I thought he’d take the track east from Ethel Creek. That’s twenty miles south from where our backtrack joins the Highway. But they hadn’t seen him either and there wasn’t a sign of any tyre tracks. Anyway, I had Yla with me and I think she’d have known.’

‘Could he make it across country?’ I asked.

But she didn’t think so. ‘In the Gibson, maybe, but between the Highway and the desert it’s hill country and I’m sure he’d go for one of the tracks.’

I turned to the world aeronautical chart on the wall. It was the Hamersley Range chart, No. 3229, and though the Highway was almost on the edge of it, it did indicate the start of another track running east from Mundiwindi. But that was nearly a hundred miles south of Ethel; a hundred miles of ribbed gravel, dried-up creek beds and bulldust. It would have taken her half a day at least.

She came and stood beside me as I tried to project it on to the big tourist map. It certainly looked the most direct route to Lake Disappointment, through Mt Newman, then south from the Sylvania homestead and east from Mundiwindi. But when I pointed it out to her, she shook her head. ‘That track only goes as far as the old rabbit fence. That’s what I’ve been told anyway. It stops at Savory Creek. After that it’s just desert.’ She pointed to a second track running almost east from Sylvania. ‘I think he’d more likely take that. It isn’t shown on this map, but it continues across the Highway to the Murramunda homestead and on to Jiggalong Mission, again on the line of the rabbit fence. Daddy knows it. He’s been to the Mission. And there’s another track goes from Murramunda up to Walgun. He might have taken either.’

I asked her when he had left, but she didn’t know. She had been over beyond the Windbreaks with one of the boys most of the day.

I went back to the desk and flopped into the chair again. He already had at least half a day’s start. Not much hope of catching up with him and none of finding him once he was into the Gibson. ‘I was looking for the rest of the Journal,’ I said.

‘Yes, I guessed that’s what you were doing.’

‘If we had that, we might know the location he’s headed for.’ I leaned back, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, staring round the room. ‘You got any ideas?’

‘You’ve been through all the papers?’

I nodded. ‘Most of them.’

She sighed. ‘Well, I’ll go and make some tea. I need something to wake me up.’

Dawn broke as we sat there drinking it in that untidy office, both of us certain he was heading for the Gibson, but neither of us knowing quite why or what to do about it. ‘Janet.’ I was staring down at my empty cup, feeling unsure of myself and not at all happy about what I was going to say. ‘Your father was right, wasn’t he, when he said McIlroy disappeared in the desert?’

‘You’ve heard then.’ Her voice was a whisper, barely audible. ‘What they’re saying — this rumour. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

I looked at her, her face frozen and pale. ‘Yes. Are you quite sure in your own mind that McIlroy didn’t die here at Jarra Jarra?’

‘You’re suggesting my grandfather killed him?’

‘No. No, I’m not suggesting anything. I wouldn’t know. But you, living here, growing up here … I just want to know what you think really happened.’

She looked away towards the window, the colours flushing with the dawn. ‘I don’t know,’ she said after a while. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot these last few days, ever since the inquest.’ The tears suddenly started to her eyes. ‘Oh God!’ she breathed. ‘It’s horrible — horrible. All these years. Why can’t they let it rest?’ And she bowed her head slowly, her hair all limp and dusty and falling across her face. ‘If they’d only forget it. That wretched man still haunts the place. Her hands clenched. ‘I hope he’s rotting in hell, the bastard!’

I put my hand out to touch hers and her fingers gripped hold of mine. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘that’s what your father is trying to do — lay Mcllroy’s ghost.’

She nodded, holding my hand hard. And then she suddenly lifted her head, staring at me a little wildly. ‘But how would he know where to look?’

‘The Journal,’ I said. ‘Those missing pages.’

‘Maybe.’ But there was doubt in her voice and her eyes were troubled. And then she said a strange thing. She said, ‘I’ve had this hanging over me all my life. The rumours. I mean. Daddy wouldn’t talk about it — ever. Not even when I was grown up. If I mentioned it, he’d close up like a clam and a sort of terrible blank look would come over his face. I thought when I typed out that Journal — I thought somehow I’d be able to read between the lines. But there was nothing. And when I began turning the house upside down for the missing pages, he got very angry, said I was wasting my time, that I already had all that Grandpa had ever written.’

Silence then and her eyes staring. ‘You believe these rumours.’ She said it accusingly. ‘Well, don’t you? Why not be honest, you believe what they’re saying — that Big Bill Garrety killed him and buried his body in the mine.’

I didn’t say anything. What could I say? It fitted, and the Pilbara was a tough world in those days with not much chance of the law catching up on him. I pushed back the chair and got to my feet. ‘You’ll radio a report on the morning sked, will you?’

She hesitated, half shaking her head. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Not yet, Alec. If I do that…. No, I can’t.’ And then she was standing, very close, her hand on my arm. ‘Alec. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be relying on you like this.’ She hesitated, staring up at me, all her loneliness laid bare as she added, ‘But I can’t help it.’

I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ve nobody either.’ I said it lightly, squeezing her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll catch up with him.’ I don’t think she was convinced any more than I was, and of course she wanted to come with us. But I told her it was essential she stayed with the radio. ‘If you don’t hear from me after a week, then do your best to get an air search organized. We’ll be going to Mt Newman for petrol and stores first. Then the Sylvania homestead. After that we’ll head for this other homestead you mentioned.’

‘Murramunda?’

‘Yes.’ I left her then and went to wake Kennie.

While he was getting dressed I checked the Land-Rover, now heavily laden with jerricans of petrol and others marked ‘water’. The guns were there, the shovels and the sand mats, food containers, bucket, axe, saw, petrol funnel. I went across to the workshop, gathering into an old sack all the Land-Rover spares I could see. Janet came to see if she could help and I sent her off to look for more containers, anything that would hold water and petrol.

I was checking that the compass we had used on our geophysical was still in the dashboard locker when I remembered we would need the map from Ed Garrety’s den. At least it would take us as far as the Highway. I went back to the little room littered with papers and ripped it off the wall. That was how I discovered the Gibson desert map. It was another aeronautical chart — Oakover River No. 3230 and the same size as the Hamersley Range chart so that it had been completely covered by it, the two of them Sellotaped to the wall together.

I stood there for a moment, staring at it, vaguely wondering why he hadn’t taken it with him. Had he forgotten it was there? Kennie called to me he was ready and I took the charts out and spread them on the bonnet of the Land-Rover. The Oakover River chart showed the track eastward from Sylvania crossing the Highway and then splitting in two at the Murramunda homestead. Both tracks led to the Walgun homestead, the left-hand one direct, the other via the Jiggalong Mission and turning sharply north to make two sides of a triangle. There was nothing to the east of it, only desert. But from Walgun a track ran through the abandoned rabbit fence to the Talawana homestead and then due east between the Horsetrack and Poisonbush ranges and on through the Wells, Emu and McKay ranges to join the Canning Stock Route north-east of Lake Disappointment at Well 23. The Stock Route ran diagonally right across the chart as far as Well 45. But at Well 24, which was marked Karara Soaks, another track ran eastward into an area that was a topographical blank, and it was here, 40 miles or more beyond the Midway Well that I noticed a faint mark on the paper. It was in the form of a rough circle and looked as though it had been made by the point of a pencil and then rubbed out, the surface of the paper very slightly roughened.

‘You found a map then?’

I looked up to find Kennie at my elbow. And then I saw Janet coming out of the house. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’ll take us to the Lake anyway.’ And I folded the charts and tossed them into the Land-Rover.

She had a Thermos full of coffee and two skin waterbags, the sort you hang on the side of your truck so that the water sweats through the bag and keeps cool. ‘Don’t forget,’ I said as we climbed into the Land-Rover, ‘if you haven’t heard from me after a week, then you’ll know we’re in trouble.’

She nodded dumbly, standing there, the Alsatian beside her and one hand absently stroking its head. And as Kennie started the engine, I leaned my head out of the window. ‘Better get started on those cattle. You’ve only got till the end of February.’

‘You know there’s no water for them this side of Coondewanna.’

‘Have a look at Golden Soak then,’ I said. ‘There was plenty of water at the four level and now the mine’s collapsed that soak might start working again.’ And I nodded to Kennie to get going. Not much of a chance, but anything was better than having her hang around the place with nothing to do but wait.

We took the backtrack to Mt Newman, colour flooding the landscape as the sun’s light grew behind the Ophthalmia Range. And two hours later, in a garage in Newman township, we got news of Ed Garrety. He had brought his Land-Rover in for servicing just before lunch the previous day and had finally set out around five-thirty.

I had talked to enough Aussies, seen enough of their country now, to have no illusions about what lay ahead. The bush was the nearest thing to hell on earth, they said, and bush bashing like trying to drive through barbed wire entrenchments. But surely that depended on the locality. It couldn’t all be as bad as that, and the desert wasn’t the same as the bush. Surely to God it would be more open. I ordered a set of new tyres and instructed the foreman to give the Land-Rover a thorough overhaul, tipping him a ten-dollar note to get the job done in a hurry. After breakfasting at the Walkabout, we shopped for stores, then went in search of more jerricans, loading them full of fuel into the back of the Land-Rover until there wasn’t an inch of space left. It was almost midday before we were finally ready, everything checked, and on our way.

We reached the Sylvania homestead shortly after one, but Ed Garrety had not called there and they had seen no sign of his Land-Rover. We were in flat country then, the hills behind us as we took the eastward track, and an hour later we had crossed the Highway and were at Murramunda. The heat was intense, the place abandoned. The track continuing eastward was fairly good and we were able to make Jiggalong in two-wheel drive. Ed Garrety had not called there, but we found an abo who had seen the dust streamer of a vehicle heading for the Walgun homestead shortly after sundown. We had a cooling drink of water and then drove on, the track running northward now.

The sun was setting as we reached Walgun, and though the place seemed deserted, an abo in a singlet and shorts eventually answered the blare of our horn. No whitefella had stopped there, the previous night, but he showed us the fresh tyremarks of a vehicle heading up the track to Balfour Downs.

There were low hills to the north of us now as we drove through the gathering dark and it was night when we passed by the Balfour Downs homestead. We did not stop, driving east-north-eastward to the old abandoned rabbit fence and the source of the Oakover River, still in two-wheel drive. But though the going had been pretty fair, we were utterly exhausted by the time we reached the Talawana homestead. No lights, no sign of life. We camped by Talawana Pool, which was dry in the starlight. A meal and a couple of hours’ sleep, then we were on the long drive eastward towards Lake Disappointment, and in about ten miles we were reduced to four-wheel drive, the track invaded by spinifex and saltbush, the going slow.

Dawn found us in the low hills of the Wells and Emu ranges, the sun coming up in a fire-ball blaze of brilliant light and the McKay Range standing black in silhouette like humped up islands in a desert sea. By then we could hardly keep our eyes open, and when we hit the sand I was driving so carelessly I stalled the engine. It took us a good two hours to dig ourselves out and get clear of the soft patch, using the sand mats, and a mile or two further on I drove the Land-Rover into the sparse shade of a small grove of snappy gums. We didn’t eat, just drank some of our water that was warm and tasted of metal and then fell into the back and lay there dozing, too tired and listless to sleep properly. I remember looking at my watch, the time ten-thirty. Except for the breaks at Mt Newman and Talawana we had been driving steadily for twenty-four hours. According to the chart we were within 60 miles of the Stock Route with the Lake less than 40 miles to the south-east. Vaguely I wondered how far ahead of us Garrety was now. Even with Tom driving, and used to the country, could he stand it continuously, hour after hour?

I wondered whether I could, and I was fit, the heat exhausting and my mind wandering. And the desert still ahead of us. Did anybody still use the Stock Route? And that other track — would we be able to follow it? I was thinking then of the faint mark of that circle on the Oakover River chart and McIlroy dead these thirty years. Was that where he had died? Or was that the rough position of his copper monster? Was it all a dream, a mirage? Then why the mark? And the chart itself — it was an aeronautical chart. It couldn’t have existed in Big Bill Garrety’s day. So his son Ed had made that mark, and then thought better of it and rubbed it out. Why? And how had he known?

So many questions, my mind wandering and the heat enclosing me, weighing me down, my skin prickling and my eyes gritty as though clogged with sand. The desert. Soon we would be in the desert. And the wells all dry most likely at this time of the year. It was madness, this driving into the unknown, following a man whose sanity I began to doubt — in search of what? And for what? What the hell was I doing it for? For Janet? For a chit of a girl with a turned-up nose and a freckled face? Or was I, like McIlroy, risking my life for the vague chance of a fortune?

Over and over, around and around, the questions rattled in my throbbing head. Never an answer, only questions, and the heat burning up my sleep, destroying the rest I needed. And then Kennie started talking to himself — some row with his father. Talking in a sort of delirium from which he woke suddenly with a cry, sitting up wild-eyed and staring at me in the hooded glow of the interior. ‘Pa — I thought he was here.’ He leaned forward, lifting the back flap and peering out at the sand-glare. ‘Dreaming, was I?’

‘Something like that,’ I murmured, the glare red through my closed eyelids. ‘Close the gap for God’s sake.’

‘It’s hot in here.’

‘Close it.’ I snapped irritably.

Silence and a moment’s pause, then the red glow was gone from my eyeballs as he let it drop. ‘We must be out of our minds,’ he mumbled. ‘The engine’s only got to pack in …’

‘Why should it?’

‘Well, a spring then.’

‘I brought a spare.’

It silenced him, but only for a moment. ‘You should’ve hired a plane, searched for him that way. The shade temperature must be all of 120°. We get bogged in sand or lose our way — men die every year trying to walk out of the bush in summer. Twenty-four hours. That’s all you got if you start walking. Twenty-four hours without water and you’re done, finished. It’s crazy.’

I stretched out my hand and gripped his arm. ‘You didn’t have to come. Now shut up. Try and get some sleep.’ I looked at my watch. Only eleven-fifteen and the worst of the heat still to come. ‘We’ll brew up at the nice conventional hour of five o’clock and start again at sunset. Okay?’ I could feel his body trembling, the skin of his arm hot to my touch and damp with sweat.

He nodded his head. ‘I suppose so. At least it isn’t September. September is the worst — blows like hell Pa always said.’ And he added, ‘I wish Pa was here. He knows this country.’

‘And I don’t. Is that what you mean?’ God! How irritability got one by the throat in this heat. But he was right. I’d never been in a desert in my life. And I lay back, wondering whether Ed Garrety had ever been in the Gibson before, remembering that letter of his, the note of hopelessness, thinking that whether he had or not it didn’t matter a damn, for there wouldn’t be much help from him. We were on our own, and dozing the slow, burning minutes away I couldn’t get the thought of the Gibson out of my head — the knowledge that it was out there waiting for me, stretching endlessly away into the Red Centre of Australia. The hot midday wind began to get up, drifting sand, a rustling hard-grained reminder of endless desert miles to disturb my restless sleep.

That evening, as the sun set and the sky ahead darkened to purple, a velvet mantle with the diamond-hard glitter of stars, we passed through the McKay Range, heading about 100° east with the Harbut hills fading as we neared them in the increasing darkness. The track was difficult to follow in the headlights, at times almost non-existent, only a faint lessening of the vegetation indicating where it had been, and spinifex everywhere, hard and spiky. Little but brumbies, donkeys and camels appeared to have used it in living memory. Indeed but for the animals I imagine it would have disappeared entirely. We saw their tracks and their droppings everywhere, camels chiefly, and when we paused in sand halfway between the McKays and the Harbuts I found in torchlight the faint marks of a vehicle. But though they looked recent, there was no way of knowing whether it was the Jarra Jarra Land-Rover or some survey party.

The going was slow as we probed for indications of the track, not daring to drive across country on a compass course. And when the moon came up it was little better. It was an old moon, and though it revealed the dead dry desiccated country through which we were driving in a pale translucence that washed all colour from the scene, it only confused us, dimming the headlights and straining our eyes.

We never saw the junction with the Canning Stock Route. I didn’t know it then, but the track marked on the chart as the Stock Route doesn’t exist. There never was a track, just a series of wells, the stockmen driving their cattle cross-country from one well to the next. Whoever marked that track on the chart had certainly never been within a thousand miles of Canning’s route. I cursed him as we strained our eyes for a sight of the well marked No. 23, finding it more by luck than judgement, a draw wheel on an upended post leaning drunkenly over a pit boarded with desert oak. The water when we got it up in our billycan was brackish.

From this well to Karara Soaks was only seven miles and the survey track we were now on led straight towards it. The country was hilly — mesa and butte formation sprawled like miniature Table Mountains along the skyline. It was on this section that we found the wheelmarks again. They were clear and sharp in the dawn and the same width as our own.

The sun was coming up ahead of us as we reached the Soaks, which was not a soak at all, but another derelict-looking wellhead between low hills of red broken rock with a dry creek bed skirting them. The hills had small trees on them and there were trees in the distance beyond the creek bed, and around the wellhead there was saltbush and the sered wispy remains of grass killed by drought and the salt in the wind. The water, when we got it up, proved surprisingly good. It was also refreshingly cool. We topped up our containers, then stripped and washed ourselves down.

Before turning in and lying up for the day’s heat, we drove to the base of the hill nearest us and clambered the broken rock to the small trees at the top, taking our personal clouds of flies with us. The sun was already blazingly hot and away to the south-west a salt-white glimmer marked the flat immensity of Lake Disappointment. All to the east now was nothing but desert, speckled with the golden yellow of spinifex, and the sandridges like a flat red swell coming in from the north-northeast. High overhead two wedge-tailed eagles worked the air currents, soaring on great wingspans, intent, searching for anything that still had life in that arid hell of drought-ridden sand.

We drove back to the wellhead, had a brew and a large breakfast and then turned in. The height above sea level was about 1200 feet, but it made no difference, tiredness and heat catching up with us as we lay in the back of the Land-Rover, the flap closed and the sweat drying salt on our bodies, unable to sleep.

Two miles to the north of us the Stock Route was joined by the lone track coming in from the east. The chart showed it coming in at right-angles, and in its whole length of well over 100 miles there was only one feature marked, the Winnecke Rock. And there was only one well, the Midway Well, and that about five miles south of the track. I doubted whether we could find it, and even if we did it would probably be dry. It was midway between our present camp and a track that ran north-south across an area of the chart that was completely blank, not even the lines of the sandridges marked. That track looked fine on the chart, but Kennie didn’t think it was any more of a track than the Stock Route, and in such featureless country it was most unlikely that we could ever find it.

I didn’t need to look at the chart as I lay there restless and hot and completely naked. It was all in my mind, every detail clearly imprinted. There were so few, and the faint pencil indent of that rubbed-out circle. Before sundown that evening, two miles to the north we would have to make our decision — continue on the line of the Stock Route where at least we had the chance of water or turn east into the empty featureless desert, banking on that faint circle mark being Ed Garrety’s objective. Dizzily I wondered where he was camped now. He couldn’t be far ahead of us surely. Perhaps camped at the track junction. Would we have caught up with him if we had driven these two extra miles?

All that blistering day the evening’s decision nagged at my mind, the hot wind drifting the sand and the flies crawling. And that was the measure of my tiredness, for we really had no alternative. The Stock Route was known. If there was, in fact, a big copper deposit, then it had to be in the unknown part of the desert, and so I came back again and again to that pencil mark. To find it we would have to locate Winnecke Rock and then work our way eastward. I didn’t know how high the sandridges were or what the going would be like. I just hoped to God we could follow his tracks. If we could follow his tracks we might catch up with him before he was dangerously deep into the desert. It was the Canning Desert really. The Gibson was more to the south. But the name didn’t matter. It was all the same — the Great Sandy, the Canning, the Gibson. All sand and sparse, dried-up vegetation, and once into it we only needed to have one breakdown …

I dozed and woke, dozed and woke, fear of the waterless oven of sand and the days ahead twisting at my mind like a drill. And all for what? For a man who wanted to die. Or was it the Monster? Was I, too, willing to risk my life for a pot of gold under a burning sky? I didn’t know. I just didn’t know what my motive was. My mind was too confused. Heat and exhaustion, my bare skin covered in salt from the sweat I couldn’t feel, the pores of my body prickling and Kennie naked beside me, turning restlessly and mumbling in his sleep. Why the hell didn’t we turn back now, while it was safe, while we still could?

But shortly after five I started a fire going, woke Kennie and we brewed tea and had a meal with large ants pestering us and a small goanna playing hide and seek in and out of a clump of spinifex. And then we drove north up the Stock Route until the speedometer showed we had covered a mile and a half, when we slowed, watching for the eastward track. Here and there tyremarks showed faint in the sand. We found the turn-off, the tyremarks clearer as he had swung away to the right. I looked at Kennie. ‘Well, we can’t be far behind and if he’s gone east …’ I waited, watching him, his face red and blistering with the sun, his greenish eyes wide as he tossed his bleached hair back and gazed into the flat empty land ahead. I saw him swallow jerkily, his adam’s apple rippling the silky beard where it ran down across his throat. ‘Then we’d better get cracking,’ he said quietly. ‘The sooner we catch up with him the less desert we’ll have to cover.’

So we drove east, following the faint intermittent wheel-tracks, driving slower and slower as the light faded and it became more difficult to pick them out, driving on the edge of a confusion of piled-up dunes, the salt pans of small lakes bordering our route — outriders of the great dead lake now behind us. Soon we were having to stop repeatedly and search for the wheeltracks on foot by torchlight. Sometimes they were concealed in the hard dry vegetation of long-forgotten rains, at others they were lost in a harder surface or on the everlasting damnable spear-pointed spinifex. Going slow like this, we were using a lot of fuel, and it was hard on the vehicle, hard on ourselves. In five hours we had covered no more than twenty I

miles by the speedometer, the engine overheating, the radiator boiling. And then we bogged down in soft sand. Kennie voiced my own feelings: ‘Hell!’ he said. ‘We can’t go on like this.’

We dug ourselves out and got moving again, the tracks still faint, the sandridges rolling shallow in the headlights, but getting higher, the flat sandplains between them wider. And then we came to a broader plain, dead flat but covered in spinifex, and the tracks vanished. We found them again half a mile ahead, over the top of a sandridge, but it was more by luck than judgement and it cost us the better part of an hour. I stopped then. Nothing but a jumble of sandridges now, very confused, the track running in a straight line through a flat plain between the ridges, but very faint. The engine was sizzling hot, steam showing from below the radiator. We had some food, sitting there in the sand waiting for the engine to cool, not saying much, only thinking about the miles of desert that lay ahead. The stars were very bright, the ghost of a moon just risen. It was airless and still and hot, so still and silent that the sad featureless landscape surrounding us seemed petrified. In that weird pale light it had the stillness of death. It scared me, and I knew Kennie was right — we couldn’t go on like this.

I lit a cigarette, noticing that my hand trembled slightly, and then I got the chart out and sat there with it spread out on my bare knees, staring at it in the light of my torch. ‘Only one thing to do,’ I said, my voice slow and uncertain. I held the chart for him to see, pointing to the Winnecke Rock. ‘It’s thirty-six miles. If we drive a compass course just short of it, say thirty-five miles, we should be able to locate it in the dawn.’

He nodded. ‘You think he’s making for the Rock?’

That was when I showed him the rubbed-out mark of that pencilled circle. ‘I think that’s where he’s heading. If it is, then he can only locate it by a compass bearing from a known position, and the only features shown here are the Rock and the Midway Well.’

‘And that track.’

The note of sarcasm in his voice, the little worried laugh — neither of us believing now in its existence.

‘When we’ve found the Rock, we’ll cast around for the treadmarks of his Land-Rover.’

‘Use a lot of petrol,’ he murmured.

‘Not as much as stopping and starting and driving slow the way we have been.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go then.’ His voice was pitched a little high, nervous and uneasy.

We got to our feet, and while he topped up the radiator, I took a bearing on the tracks running out ahead of us. Converted from magnetic to true they were headed 103°, slanting across the sandplain towards the next ridge. According to the chart, 103° was the correct bearing for the Winnecke Rock. The track bearing, on the other hand, was nearer 110°, so we were almost certainly north of it, heading direct for the Rock. I took the speedometer reading and then we got going.

Steering a compass course required concentration and it was difficult driving because of the spinifex. The clumps were small and widely spaced, but each clump the size of a mole-hill, hard as concrete, so that, riding them, the jolting was incessant, and Kennie at the wheel twisting and turning to find the easiest route, the strange opaque light making it difficult for him to pick his way. Three miles of this, and then the spinifex thickened, forcing us into four-wheel drive, the going slow and the tracks lost, the needle of the speedometer flickering between nought and five. We found the tracks again on the slope of the next sandhill, deep-scored where he had taken it fast. We made it to the top, but only just, the engine labouring in four-wheel drive, the wheels spinning in the soft sand of the crest. Another sandplain, much wider, full of spinifex and here and there the skeletal remains of wind-uprooted mulga lying prone, their spiked roots like tank traps, like the battle maces of medieval giants.

We had lost his tracks completely now and our course, slanting across the lie of the sandridges, meant that every few miles we had to turn into the face of a petrified sandwave, take it at a rush in four-wheel drive, both of us clinging on for dear life, our heads bumping the roof. Twice we had to stop on the far side of a ridge to let the engine cool. It was a nightmare drive, but at least our course was generally parallel to the line of the self dunes, and in the sandplains between the ridges the going was less difficult, fairly flat and the spinifex patchy, so that there were moments when we almost touched 15 mph. I am told we were lucky, that the area we were in must have been better than most of the Gibson, but, even so, dawn was paling the eastern sky before we had completed those thirty-five back-breaking, exhausting miles.

We stopped on top of a sandhill that was about 40 feet high, the desert rolling all around us, a long undulating sand-swell, the ridges showing like pale red waves above the green-gold sea of spinifex. Lizards scuttled dryly through a patch of scrub, ants moved busily in the sand and we saw our first scorpion. But it was the fantastic surrealistic beauty of the scene that held me spellbound, the breathless cruelty of it, the hardness of the colours in that clear dry air, above all the terrible infinity of it, the sense that it went on for ever. There was no sign of anything that could be described as a rock, only limitless sand and scrub, the waves of the ridge rolling endlessly to the horizon.

We gathered enough material to make a fire, had tea and a short rest, and then as the sun rose and the contrast of colour and shadow heightened the sense of having become part of some mad artist’s canvas, we began our search, driving north across three ridges, east 6 miles along an easy sandplain, then south across the dunes, their backs less steep going in this direction. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the Rock we found, but the tracks again. We were 2.4 miles on the southward leg, in a particularly bare sandplain between two ridges and they were quite clear, still bearing 103°.

The sun was well up by then, all the colour gone out of that terrible landscape and the heat already so violent that every movement was an effort. Even so I wanted to drive straight on, catch up with him and get it over, or at least reach the area of that pencilled circle.

But Kennie, his head bent over the chart, the skin of his nose peeling and his hands trembling, insisted it was madness. ‘It’s all of fifty miles, nearer sixty.’ He looked up at me, his eyes slitted against the glare. ‘Driving in daytime, it’ll just about finish us. The rad’ll boil. The engine’ll probably overheat again, and if we hit soft sand or have a puncture. … It could take us all day.’ He didn’t want to drive on through the heat.

We drank some water and had a meal, talking it over in the shade of the Land-Rover. But I couldn’t persuade him. ‘What the hell’s it matter whether we catch up with him now in daylight or later when it’s a little cooler?’ Mirages were already forming, the scant, desiccated vegetation swimming on the flat horizon, the dunes bobbing crazily on the skyline. In the end I agreed. What the hell did it matter? We stripped and lay in the back, our bodies burning with the growing heat of the sun, the back of the vehicle glowing like a furnace. And then, when I’d just got off to sleep, a hornet’s drone woke me, growing gradually to a roar, ripping like a buzz-saw into the muzzy drowsiness that still engulfed me.

I sat up, pulling back the flap and peering out. The blinding white of the sky hit my eyes and I could see nothing, the sound fading. Kennie slithered naked to the ground, yelled as his bare feet touched the burning sand, and then the noise was back, growing again from the south. And suddenly I saw it — a small twin-engined plane coming in low across the sandridges, and as it roared over us, barely 100 feet from the ground, the pilot waggled its wings.

So Janet had got scared and notified the authorities. That was my first thought. I had thrown Kennie his shoes and now we were both of us standing naked in the sun watching the plane. ‘One of the new Cessnas,’ he murmured. We watched it as it banked to the north of us, circling and then banking again as it picked up the tracks of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover to the east of us and followed them, still flying low. The sound of it dwindled, fading into the immensity of desert space till the plane itself was no bigger than a fly on the horizon. ‘Well, that’s one thing,’ I said. ‘They know where we are now.’

‘Who?’

‘The authorities.’

Kennie smiled at me sourly. ‘You’re joking. The Administration up here runs on a shoe-string. They don’t hire planes to search for fools who go driving around in the desert.’

‘Who then? Somebody has.’

He shrugged. ‘Prospectors. Maybe it’s a survey party.’ But he sounded doubtful and his face had a troubled look.

It seemed too much of a coincidence that a survey party doing an aerial magnetic or a mapping job should have happened on our tracks by chance. The same thought seemed to have occurred to him, for he said, ‘You’re a mining consultant. Not many mining consultants operating on their own like you. And going off into the desert in summer. They’d think you were on to something.’ He hesitated. ‘It’d be all round Mount Newman, and the Conglomerate in Nullagine…. That bar’d be full of talk.’

‘What are you getting at?’

He hesitated again, as though unwilling to put his thoughts into words. ‘Pa,’ he said at length. ‘Pa might hire a plane. You’re lucky, see. First Blackridge, then Golden Soak. And he knows about the Monster.’ He started to climb back into the Land-Rover, but then he stopped, his eyes on the horizon to the east. The plane was still there, a speck circling.

‘Do you think he’s found something?’ My voice sounded strange, a dry croak, my eyes riveted.

He nodded. ‘I reck’n.’

I reached for my shin and shorts and put them on, the plane still circling. He did the same, and we stood in the sun watching it, our eyes screwed up and the minutes passing. Then it was going back, still a speck and climbing. It was flying high and fast as it passed over us, the sound of it barely audible. ‘Must be near 10,000 feet,’ Kennie said. It was slightly to the south and took no notice of us. We watched it until it had disappeared, a speck high in the sky to the west.

I got into the driving seat and started the engine. The position over which it had been circling was not more than 10 miles away and the tracks led straight towards it. Half an hour, an hour at the most. The engine couldn’t overheat in that time, not with the breeze beginning to blow, a hot little wind from the southeast. We got going, following the tracks in four-wheel drive, the breeze increasing until sand was glowing like a tide towards us along the desert floor. This wasn’t the normal heat wind. This was more like a gale and in an instant the tracks were gone. One minute they were there, the next they had vanished, overlaid by the wind-blown drift of the sand. Kennie leaned towards me. ‘Bedourie,’ he yelled. ‘Sandstorm. No wonder that pilot was in a hurry.’

Away to the south the horizon was blurred, the white of the sky turning sepia. In moments the sand had lifted from the surface, rustling against the bonnet of the Land-Rover, millions of grains on the move, a drift waist high and the broken twigs of dry shrubs blowing against the windscreen. And then it hit us, the sky darkening, the desert world turned suddenly brown. I stopped then. I couldn’t see a thing, only the sand like brown smoke, the howl of the wind, the noise rasping at the aluminium panels like the sound of a train as I cut the engine. Nothing to do now but sit in the tight-closed Land-Rover, handkerchiefs tied round our mouths and nostrils, wrapped in the hot protection of our blankets, the noise indescribably vicious. And nothing visible through the windscreen but the sand pouring like a sea, the occasional wreck of desert vegetation uprooted and whirling by.

We didn’t talk. We just sat huddled there, desperately trying to breathe, while the sand got into our nose and ears, into our clothes, and the floorboards were gradually covered inches deep with the brown wash of the storm. The noise. … I don’t know which was worse, the clogging, insufferable sand or the noise. And it went on and on, the hot wind blistering and abrasive, the minutes dragging into hours. To look at it was to get one’s eyeballs seared with grit, and as we sweated, the sand clung to our bodies, a perpetual irritant.

It lasted all day, and then died in the evening as quickly as it had started. From nil visibility and daylight drab as a nut-brown night, suddenly there was stillness, the sun showing as a faint pale circle there in the west and the desert taking shape around us. It was like breaking surface after being half-drowned in the brown tide of a swollen river. Another moment, and everything was still, not a sound in the world, and the air becoming crystal clear in the slanting sun. Far away to the north anvil tips of cu-nim showed above the horizon.

We shook ourselves out and had some water, the first we had had for over six hours. We were dried up, desiccated, exhausted by the battering. The tepid water cleaned our mouths, but did little to refresh us. We opened a tin of baked beans and wolfed them cold. I would have given anything for a bath. Kennie’s skin was coated red with dust and sweat. I was the same and we couldn’t even wash our faces. Instead, I lit a cigarette, my nerves crying out for it more than food, even though my nostrils were still clogged with sand.

It was then, as I inhaled the first long drag of that cigarette, staring at the clear, impersonal hostility of the desert, that I saw it. Away to the north-east, just short of the horizon, like a rock awash in a petrified sea. I thought it must be the Winnecke Rock and I called to Kennie, who had started clearing the sand out of the back of the Rover. But then I realized it couldn’t be the Winnecke. The sun was slanting, a softer light, the desert golden red, the white heat of the sky paling to an ephemeral blue, and my eyes were tired. ‘That’s not a rock,’ he said. And in that instant I saw it for what it really was, a vehicle hull-down below a ridge of sand, just the rectangle of the canopy showing.

I moved to the driving seat, but he stopped me. ‘Better top the rad up first.’

We did that and cleaned some of the sand off the engine. Then I turned the ignition key and for a long minute the starter whined and nothing happened. Sand, I thought. My God! All this way, and then, just when we’d sighted him … The engine coughed, lost itself, then coughed again and roared into life. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. Kennie swung himself in beside me, grinning with relief. ‘Bit of luck that.’ We were both of us grinning as I put her into gear and headed north-east across the line of the next ridge.

I had forgotten to put her in four-wheel drive and within minutes we were up to our axle in a fresh sand drift. Heat exhaustion slowed us badly and it took a long time to dig ourselves out and get moving again, everything an appalling effort. Kennie drove the rest of the way, the sun sinking to the horizon, the flaming ball of it reddening the desert to the colour of blood, the cu-nim gone from the horizon ahead and the sky to the east taking on that egg-shell greenish tint of evening. It was a Land-Rover all right, stuck halfway up a dune, its bonnet raised and facing east. A canopy had been rigged against one side of it, and as we neared it, I could see a solitary figure in a broad-brimmed hat collecting vegetation for a fire. No sign of anybody else.

We drew up in the trough below the sandridge on which it had stalled and a figure emerged from the lean-to shelter and staggered to his feet. Tall and stooped, he was instantly recognizable. I got out and went to meet him. ‘You, is it?’ There was no welcome in his voice, only tiredness, a touch of resentment even. ‘What d’you want?’ His voice was slower than ever, a little slurred with the effort of speaking.

‘I came to look for you.’

‘No need. I’m perfectly able to look after myself.’

I glanced at the Land-Rover, nettled by his reaction to our arrival. ‘Trouble?’ I asked, nodding at the lifted bonnet.

‘Sand in the fuel line, that’s all. I’ll deal with it — later.’ The weariness in his voice was very apparent, his body swaying slightly with exhaustion and Tom standing defensively a few yards off, the black face below the wide hat wrinkled in a puzzled frown.

The sun was almost gone now, a red wound gaping along the horizon to the west. I turned to Kennie. ‘Better see if you can fix it before the light goes.’

‘Did you send that plane out looking for me?’ There was a distinct note of hostility in Ed Garrety’s voice.

‘No.’

‘Who did then?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

He nodded slowly, then looked about him and folded his long thin legs, collapsing on to a bare patch of sand. He said something to Tom, who answered, ‘Yes, boss,’ and set about getting a fire going. ‘We’ll have a brew-up together, then we’ll see,’ Ed Garrety murmured. ‘Come and sit down.’ He patted the sand beside him. ‘You look tired. Not used to the desert, eh?’

I sat down beside him, both of us silent for a long time. The sun had gone, the sky a lurid blaze of colour, except in the east where it was already darkening to the velvet purple of dusk. There were questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know how to begin and so I remained silent, and he said softly, ‘You would I

play upon me — you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘But you’re no Guildenstern come to trick me. You’re honest. Or I believe you are.’ He peered at me, still with that tired smile, his face wanned by the sunset colours so that the skin below the stubble no longer had that parchment look. ‘But I don’t know your motive, do I? Why are you here?’

‘To get you back home.’

‘Think I can’t make it on my own?’

‘Janet’s worried.’

‘Ah, yes. Janet.’ He paused.

‘I read the letter you wrote her.’

‘That was a private letter.’ The hostility was back in his voice.

I told him how one of the boys had woken me in the night. ‘Janet had gone to Lynn Park looking for you. The house was empty. I read it because I wanted to find out what had happened to you.’

‘And you followed me, knowing I wanted to do this on my own.’

‘Janet was worried,’ I said again.

‘And that was all? No other motive?’

‘I was curious, of course.’

He nodded. ‘Of course. You want to know what happened.’

He was silent then, staring into the desert. The colour was fading now, the washed-out look of dusk creeping over the sand. And then abruptly he said, ‘D’you love her?’

I stared at him.

‘My daughter — d’you love her?’ He was looking at me very intently, his eyes searching my face.

‘I’m fond of her,’ I muttered, my eyes shifting from the directness of his stare, uncertain of myself and what he expected of me.

‘Fond?’ He leaned a little forward. ‘You’ve never been in an Australian desert and you risk your life for an old man because you’re fond of his daughter?’

‘There’s Kennie,’ I said, nettled by his words. ‘He’s here, too. Why don’t you ask him if he loves her?’

‘That boy.’ He shook his head, the dulled blue eyes still staring at me out of the drawn, tired face. ‘I wonder if you realize how attractive you are to people. It’s a quality that’s rare. But you have it. That boy, the drillers, Janet — even myself, and I’ve had a lot of experience of men.’ He lowered his head, staring down at the sand. ‘And you want to know what happened.’

‘Not if you don’t wish to tell me,’ I said.

I saw him smile. ‘That’s the trouble. I do. All these years …’ He didn’t finish, but continued staring down at the sand. There was sweat on his forehead and he suddenly looked very old and alone. Then Kennie called to me that the union to the carburettor was threaded. The moment was gone and he murmured, ‘Later. We’ll talk about it again later.’

‘You’re a sick man,’ I said.

He didn’t answer and in the end I got up and went to help Kennie repair the union, while Tom brewed a billy of tea over the fire. We got the engine going in the end and backed the Land-Rover down the ridge, parking it on the flat beside our own.

We fed in the last of the light and then drove on, following in the wake of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover. Tom was driving it and the bearing varied between 100° and 105°. We were held up only once by sand and that only briefly. Otherwise we made steady progress, all in four-wheel drive with two pauses to let the engines cool. Shortly after midnight we stopped. We were just short of the pencil mark on the chart. Ed Garrety’s face appeared at my window, lit faintly by the light from my torch shining on the chart. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘From the wall of your den.’

‘You searched the place then.’ His voice was strangely detached, no resentment in it.

‘I was looking for the rest of the Journal.’

‘You knew, did you — that it was incomplete?’

‘I guessed.’

‘Does Janet know about that map?’

‘No.’

He seemed relieved.

Kennie leaned forward. ‘He stopped here, Mr Garrety?’

‘Yes. We’ll camp here.’ His gaze returned to the chart. ‘I should have brought that with me.’

‘I only found it by chance,’ I said. ‘It was under the Hamersley Range chart.’

He nodded. ‘I forgot all about it.’ He leaned his head in at the window, looking down at it. ‘The mark’s still visible.’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’d have come straight here.’ And he added, smiling, ‘Well, perhaps it’s for the best. I’m not a mining man myself.’

‘This is the position then?’

He gave me a long slow look, then nodded and turned away. ‘We’ll have a look round in the morning, eh?’

I got out and followed him as he moved slowly back to his own vehicle. ‘How did you know?’ I asked.

We were alone then, midway between the two Land-Rovers. He stopped, a shadow in the gloom.

‘Did McIlroy get as far as this?’

I saw him nod his head, slowly, almost reluctantly.

‘How do you know?’

He didn’t say anything, his eyes glinting in the starlight, the outline of his body sagging.

‘And that chart left there on the wall. You didn’t need a map to find your way here.’

‘I brought a quarter mil map along.’

‘But you didn’t need it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I knew the way.’

The truth was staring me in the face, but I didn’t recognize it. Instead, I thought it was the Journal. ‘The missing pages,’ I said. ‘Your father gave the position in his Journal.’

He stared at me and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer that. But then he said, ‘No, he didn’t know that. But everything else. He wrote it all down, everything, just as … as it was told to him. He was a great one for keeping records. He should have been a diarist.’

‘Where is it then?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the rest of his Journal? Have you got it with you?’

He shook his head. ‘I burned it. When the old man died I burned all the last part.’

‘Why?’

‘Still curious, eh?’ He patted me gently on the shoulder. ‘All in good time. Don’t rush me.’ He stood for a moment in complete silence. ‘Ever been in a desert before?’

‘No.’

‘Then you wouldn’t understand.’ And then so softly I could barely hear him, ‘But Christ did. He understood … the peace, the solitude, the immense impersonal hostility that cleanses the soul. I was a young man, hot-blooded, and full of the certainty that justice …’ His voice trailed off. ‘Now I’m old before my time, my body worn out by a twist of fate that was equally unjust. In Burma I had a lot of time to think, and death all round me. Since then it’s been a long hard struggle, and no time to think. But now … now I want to make my peace.’ His hand was on my arm again. ‘We’ll talk again — later. I’m a sick man, as you say. Only one lung left and that’s going now. Janet doesn’t know. She only suspects. I’ve never told her.’

‘And the copper deposit?’ I asked.

‘A chance, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Like you drilling at Golden Soak. We’re all of us gamblers, y’know.’

‘You’re not certain then?’

‘About what?’

‘That it’s here.’

‘How could I be?’

‘So McIlroy never saw it.’

He shook his head slowly. ‘All he ever had was the rough position given him by a black feller.’ And when I asked him how an abo could possibly have known what copper looked like in the ground, he said the man had been employed at one of the mines near Nullagine. And he went on to repeat the story of how the aborigine had been walkabout in the Gibson and had come back into the bank to trade the information for cash. And after that he closed right up on me, wouldn’t say another word and went off to give Tom a hand.

That night we had bully beef and damper and thick sweet Indian tea. And afterwards the four of us sat for a while by the glowing ashes of the cook fire. Ed Garrety slumped in a camp chair and Kennie questioning Tom about the desert people and their spirits. But Tom was a Pukara. His parents had lived and died in the Turee Creek area halfway between Jarra Jarra and what is now the iron mining township of Tom Price. He had only met the desert people — the Ngatatjara he called them when he had been walkabout, crossing the Gibson Desert to the Clutterbucks. He had done this twice as a young man, the second time to attend a corroboree at Ayers Rock. ‘Before me talk’im desert people. Forget’im plenty.’ And his broad black face cracked in a grin that showed his broken front teeth. But he knew the names for the ghosts of their dead that haunt the desert at night. ‘Call’im mamu.’ He cocked his head on one side, affecting to listen, bugging himself with laughter. ‘Plenty mamu, but keep’im far going, no trouble us.’ And then he was telling a long story about a mamu that had taken the shape of a watersnake. It was I think a story from the Dreamtime of his own people, but it was complicated and I was too tired to follow his uncertain English. The last of the firelight flickered and died, my head nodding.

The back of our Land-Rover was fusty with the smell of sand and our own sweat. We slept in the open that night, a small breeze blowing hot from the north-west, no flies and the stars shedding a ghostly light on the desert around us. It was very quiet. I had a last cigarette, wondering what we’d find in the morning, and then I fell into a deep sleep. Something woke me shortly after two, but I was too tired to lift my head, glancing at the gold hunter tied to my handkerchief and falling asleep again in the same moment, vaguely conscious of a sound fading. And then the sunrise hit me, heat again and flies crawling on my face, seeking the moisture of eyes and nostrils.

I sat up, bleary-eyed, still half asleep, my limbs cramped by the hardness of the sand. A large centipede was feeling its way over my feet, a reptile slithering sluggishly to the shelter of a brittle bare bush. Nature called and I got up, walking a few yards before relieving myself. Kennie stirred as I came back, stretching himself. ‘Christ! It’s hot.’ He sat up then, his face burned red beneath the beard, his eyes looking wildly about him. ‘Where’s that Rover gone?’

I thought he was still half asleep, the Land-Rover right in front of us, not a dozen yards away. But then he was on his feet, moving to get a clear view beyond it and suddenly I realized what he meant. There was just our own vehicle there, the other had gone. He pushed his hand up through his tousled hair.

‘When did he go? I didn’t hear him.’

I stood there for a moment, too surprised to do anything but stare vacantly at the empty desert. ‘Something woke me. Just after two.’

‘You saw him go?’

‘Of course not. Something woke me, that’s all. I was dead asleep again before I’d time to think about it.’

We walked to where his Land-Rover had been, the tracks of it clear in the sand heading east.

‘What do we do now?’

‘Follow him,’ I said.

‘In this heat? You’re joking.’ He turned to me, his eyes still wild, his voice trembling. ‘Playing hide-and-seek in the desert like this. Are you mad?’

I turned then, a sudden premonition sending me stumbling back to our own Land-Rover. The bonnet catches were undone, a sheet of paper lying white below the steering wheel. I grabbed it. Sorry, but I didn’t ask for your company. You ‘II have to wait here. Back in two days. ‘What is it? What’s he say?’

I handed Kennie the pencilled scrawl and lifted the bonnet. The distributor head was off, trailing its four cables, and the rotor arm was gone.

We had no spare, of course, and I stood there helpless, wondering why the hell he had done it. To immobilize us, yes. But why was he so determined to be on his own? We are all of us gamblers. I remembered his voice, slow and tired, but if he found the Monster he must know he couldn’t keep it to himself. A copper mine in the desert wasn’t something like Golden Soak. To develop it would require big company finance. Kennie was swearing softly to himself. ‘Two days,’ he muttered. ‘Two goddamned blistering days. And not a thing we can do about it.’

‘No.’ We’d just have to stick it out.

‘And how do we know he’ll be back?’

‘He could hardly leave us to fry here indefinitely.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt he intends to come back. But will he be able to find us again?’

‘He’s got Tom with him. He should be able to backtrack along their own tyremarks.’

‘And suppose there’s another sandstorm?’

The thought had occurred to me, but it wasn’t one I wanted to dwell on. ‘We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed.’ I said lamely.

‘Well, you keep yours crossed. I’m going to see if I can file a piece of metal down and rig a replacement for that rotor arm. And if I succeed, we’re getting out. Okay?’ And he went to the back of the Land-Rover and began rummaging among the bits and pieces of spare I had picked up in the workshop.

All that day, through the long fly-ridden heat, the rasp of his file sounded as he worked at a piece of brass clamped in a vice on the tailboard, while I lay and dozed in the back. I knew it was no good. Such a small, insignificant thing, but a rotor arm is a machine-made, precision job with the metal contact arm insulated in a barrel of oven-hardened bakelite. But at least it kept him occupied, his mind off the deadly danger of our situation, as the dust devils he called whirlies twisted and twirled in an endless sand dance and the dunes stood on their heads in blinding pools of throbbing heat.

Night came and he sat there, exhausted, the glow of his cigarette lighting his face. ‘It won’t work. I can’t get it accurate enough, and I’ve nothing to make the barrel outa.’

‘We’ll just have to wait,’ I said. A week I had told Janet. ‘If he doesn’t come back tomorrow, then we’ve only two more days before they send out a search party.’

‘A fine job they’ll have, searching for our tracks under a fresh layer of sand! But the plane may come back.’

‘Perhaps.’

Nothing to do but wait. I thought of the desert war, men frying in tanks, living like nomads and fighting in the heat. I had only just been born then, but Rosa’s father had been with the Desert Rats. We had talked about it over the port the few times I had visited him. I had read about it, too. If they could stand it, then so could we. But it’s different when you’ve no organization behind you, nothing to do but wait, and all the time that secret niggling fear that nobody will bother and you’ll be left to die of thirst. I checked the water before I turned in, doing it surreptitiously. We had 20 gallons at least. And though it was tepid and tasted of metal, it was enough to see us through if Janet did what I had asked.

That night, as the sun set, the sandhills ceased their heat-throb dance and colour crept back into the landscape, the temperature dropping back towards the hundred and the atmosphere clearing, so that our world of blinding, desiccated emptiness had form again and beauty, a terrible lonely beauty, but still beauty, with its shades of red and gold and the translucent unbelievable green of the eastern sky. But for the heat and isolation, the extreme discomfort of our situation, I could have sat there everlastingly entranced, believing it to be the most breathtakingly beautiful sight I had ever seen. Instead, it was a sort of frozen hell, all that red and gold, and the sun a great disc blazing on the lip of the desert, sinking till its lower rim touched the horizon, melting along it like some great steel mould pouring molten metal. There was a movement away to the east, a drifting of strange shapes. Emus. There must have been a hundred in that flock, flowing northward like a dark tide merging with the lengthening shadows.

‘Must be water somewhere,’ Kennie muttered.

Night fell and we watched the stars grow brighter, lying sprawled beside the glowing ashes of our fire, plagued by ants and too exhausted to sleep. And in the morning, nothing to do but wait, with the heat building and the sand moving with the midday wind, the dust devils swaying to their twisting sand dance, mirages turning the desert upside down. It was a long day that frayed our nerves. Too tired to talk, we just lay fending off the flies, hating ourselves and the desert, frustrated beyond endurance. And then, as colour flooded back into that deadly waste of petrified sandhills, sound invaded the desert silence. It was a long way away, but we both of us knew what it was, both of us starting to our feet, searching the sky to the west.

Nothing. Nothing but the blaze of the slanting sun — blinding. Kennie seized his shirt and started up the sandhill behind us. I followed him, the sound of the plane growing as I stumbled up the slope, needle-sharp spines of spinifex pricking my bare knees. I reached the top and there it was, to the north of us, a flash of sunlight on its fuselage and Kennie waving his shirt frantically. But it kept going, flying eastward at about 1,000 feet.

We watched it as it dwindled, the sound of it fading. ‘He never saw us,’ Kennie’s body seemed to say, his arms limp and the shirt dangling. ‘Christ all bloody mighty! The bastard wasn’t even looking.’

‘He was flying a course,’ I said.

‘But he’ll come back. He’s got to come back. Quick! A bush signal.’ He was suddenly galvanized into action, running down the slope, back to the Land-Rover.

I stayed there, watching. The sound of it died in the distance, but it was still visible, a speck and dropping to the horizon, and then it was gone. But only for a moment. I saw it again, much lower. It had banked, searching low down along the desert rim. I called to Kennie to take a bearing, but he couldn’t see it from where he was. He had one of the jerricans out of the back of the Land-Rover, a rag in his hand. I yelled at him to bring me my compass, my eyes concentrated on the plane. ‘The compass,’ I screamed at him.

The plane was still there, circling low down, when he thrust it into my hand. The bearing was 112° magnetic, the distance — what? Ten miles? Fifteen? It was difficult to tell. I slipped the compass into my pocket and stood waiting, the old gold hunter in my hand, holding it up so that I could see it and still keep my eyes on the plane. ‘Twin-engined, wasn’t it?’

‘I think so,’ he said.

The same plane then. ‘What’s its speed?’

But he didn’t know. ‘The small Cessnas do about 140, I reck’n.’

Say 160–180. It would be a question of counting the seconds. Out of the tail of my eye I saw him running back down the slope. He reached the jerrican, was soaking the rag in petrol. And then the speck was turning and heading back and my eyes were on my watch, counting aloud as it grew larger, the sound of it faintly audible again.

Fire blazed in a patch of spinifex, the crackle of flames momentarily distracting me. Thick oily smoke began to billow up. But slowly. Too slowly. And the plane a long way to the south of us, climbing steadily. The fire died and the smoke with it. Four minutes. Five. Six. And twenty-thirty-forty seconds. It was due south of us now, still climbing, the sunlight on its wings, but five miles away at least. Fire crackled again in the spinifex, the black smoke rising in a thick cloud. Six minutes forty-five seconds. Allowing for reduction of speed due to the angle of the climb, that made it just over a dozen miles to the point where it had been circling. Say five hours’ walking. If Ed Garrety failed to return by nightfall….

I was almost back at the Land-Rover then, suddenly conscious of Kennie yelling at me, blaming me for the fact that they hadn’t seen us. ‘You and your damned compass. If you’d left me to get that fire going …’

‘We know where it is anyway,’ I said.

‘And what good’s that do? Look at it now!’ The fire was racing through the whole area of spinifex, the resinous smoke rolling skyward, a thick black streamer. ‘They’d have seen us.’ He was almost crying with exasperation.

‘They couldn’t land,’ I said wearily. That damned boy! Why couldn’t he shut up? ‘Be practical.’

‘You be practical,’ he shouted at me. ‘You think you’re going to walk it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re crazy then. You’d never find him.’

‘Got any better ideas?’

‘If you’d left me to get that signal fired …’

‘Oh, shut up!’ I was sick and tired of him. ‘You waste your energies fooling around with a bit of metal. Then you expect a plane to land in this stuff.’ I could hear the high trembling in my voice, nerves screaming and the exhaustion of heat wearing my patience. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, forcing myself to speak slowly, rationally. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. We’re both of us tired.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘We’ll have some food — a brew-up. We’ll feel better then.’

‘Like hell! We’ve missed our chance, I tell you.’ I could hear his voice cracking.

‘Pull yourself together.’

‘And what about you? Shut up, you tell me. Well, shut up yourself for Chrissakes. I didn’t ask to come on this bloody trip.’ And he added, his voice still strained to a high pitch, ‘I don’t know who’s crazier, you or that old man. I want to get out of here, that’s all. Out of here, and alive, see.’

I didn’t answer him. Better to keep my mouth shut or I’d end up striking the young fool. I began collecting sticks of vegetation, the sun sinking and the desert all on fire with the redness of light and sand. A dozen miles. Five hours in the cool of the night. Then search for him in the dawn light. It ought to be possible. Distance and bearing were both pretty accurate. I got the cook fire going, filled the blackened billy with water and put it on the flames. Midnight. I’d give him till midnight. If he hadn’t returned by then, I’d start walking.

In fact I started before midnight. Twelve miles doesn’t sound much, but in the dark, with the sand dotted with spinifex clumps, littered with dry vegetation — it would be like stumbling through a teeming mass of porcupines. And I was scared. I can admit that now. I was scared that in the dawn I’d find nothing. Nothing but that blinding emptiness, with the sandridges bobbing dizzily in the heat and no alternative but to retrace my steps. Fear feeds on inaction and the fear in me started the instant darkness clamped down. The headlights of a Land-Rover would be visible for miles then, but though I stood for a long time on the top of the ridge staring into the dark of the desert there wasn’t the glimmer of a light anywhere. Only the stars above, and all around me the frozen stillness, the empty silence of the desert.

I began collecting my gear shortly after ten — waterbag, compass, torch, food, matches, cigarettes. And Kennie arguing all the time. It was crazy, he said. I’d lose my way, wander aimlessly till I died of thirst. First he tried to dissuade me, then he wanted to come with me. But how else would I find our Land-Rover again if he wasn’t there to light a bush signal to guide me in? He saw the sense of that, but he didn’t like it. He was scared, scared of being left on his own, stranded beside a useless vehicle. ‘If I don’t come back,’ I told him angrily, ‘then the plane will find you.’ But I don’t think he was very sure about that, any more than I was. ‘Well, what else do you suggest?’

That shut him up because he hadn’t anything else to suggest.

We couldn’t just stay there, waiting and doing nothing. Not when there was a chance Ed Garrety was only a dozen miles away. And then, just as I was leaving, he said a bloody stupid thing to me. He said, ‘If you started walking south instead of east, a few hours and you wouldn’t be all that far from where Gibson disappeared.’

I rounded on him then. ‘I’m not disappearing,’ I said. ‘I’m going twelve miles, that’s all. And if I don’t find him, I’ll lay up during the day and walk those dozen miles back tomorrow night.’ And I told him to fire a patch of spinifex just before sunrise to guide me in.

‘Well, I hope to Christ you find him,’ he said.

‘So do I.’

I left him then and started walking, the satchel with my gear bumping my hip, the compass in one hand and the waterbag in the other.

The first hour wasn’t so bad. I had changed into a pair of khaki longs and the spinifex wasn’t very thick, plenty of sand between the clumps, and I was in a flat plain, walking diagonally across it with the next sandridge a good two miles away. At first I found it difficult to hold a course, the light of my torch blinding me every time I checked the compass. I solved that by lining the bearing up with a star, then I didn’t have to use the torch and could concentrate on where I was putting my feet.

If it had all been like that I would have made it in four hours, but over the next sandridge the going was bad. I was in a narrow trough between two ridges, the spinifex thick, my feet stumbling and spines like darning needles stabbing through my trousers. Ridge succeeded ridge, almost no gap between, the slopes steeper and the sand soft. I was sweating, conscious of the weight of the waterbag and beginning to tire. A gap opened out and I was into a patch of dead mulga scrub, the roots like giant spikes. I had to make a long detour round it and in spinifex again I began to stumble.

I paused then for a breather and checked my watch. One hour twenty-two minutes. I could have sworn it was longer than that. I went on again until I had done two hours, and then I sat down and smoked a cigarette. My knees were trembling and I was very tired. Two hours. Did that mean I had covered four miles? How fast had I been walking? I finished my cigarette and went on for another hour, the going variable with two long detours to the north across the ridges. It was easier after that, patches of open sand and gravel, but the stillness, the loneliness, getting on my nerves. I began to understand why the aborigines believe in their mamu. Time and again I could have sworn I saw a movement, shadows flickering in the desert. Kangaroo perhaps, or euros. I think they were really wallaby. But no sound, only the soft scuff of my feet in the sand, the scrape of the spinifex against my trousers.

I was stopping every half hour, moistening my mouth with a few drops of water. The temperature was around 100°, and though I knew I was sweating, my skin was dry, only the scum of salt to tell me I was losing body moisture. I walked on, right through the hours of darkness, and as the sky began to lighten with the dawn I collapsed on to the ground at the top of a sandhill, lying there exhausted, watching the desert take shape around me. There were wallaby moving in the flat sand trough below me, grey shapes that shifted their position with slow movements, crouching as they browsed on the dry, desiccated vegetation. And a little kangaroo rat that seemed oblivious of my presence. But no sign of the Land-Rover, nothing to indicate the presence of another human being in all the miles that stretched away to the surrounding rim of the horizon. The night receded, the washed-out grey of early dawn quickly taking on colour as the light strengthened. The dunes were ‘braided’ here, the stark beauty frightening. I didn’t see the wallaby go. They just suddenly weren’t there any more. I was alone then, seemingly the only living thing in that great red frying pan of a desert — except the flies in a cloud around my head and the ants in the sand at my feet, and that little marsupial rat.

I had some food and a slow, careful drink of water, and then, as the moment of sunrise neared, I began my search keeping to the top of the dunes and walking on a bearing of roughly 120°. I couldn’t be sure how far I had come during the night; I thought just under the twelve miles, allowing for rests and detours. But while the idea that I could locate that Land-Rover on the basis of course and distance walked had seemed sensible enough at the outset, now that I was in the presumed locality I realized how near-impossible it was in practice. Parked in a trough below a sandhill, I could walk within a few hundred yards of it and never see it.

The sun rose and I turned south, angling across the ridges, pausing on each top to search the valley between. It was my only hope. Even then I wouldn’t have seen it but for the fire. The sun had risen an hour ago and I was nearing the point of exhaustion, the heat intense and mirages beginning to haze my vision. My legs were trembling as I stumbled up the next ridge, nerves stretched and panic only just within my power to control. And those words of Kennie’s at the back of my mind. Coming out in the ship, I had read about the Warburton, Gosse and Giles expeditions, and how Gibson, going back for fresh horses, had lost his way and disappeared. As Kennie had said, it wasn’t all that far to the south, somewhere near the Alfred and Marie Range. But here there were no ranges, not the ghost of a distant blue range-top lipping the horizon to give me hope of shade and water. And then I had staggered to the top of that ridge and was standing there, the sun blazing, sand and vegetation dancing before my eyes, my body sagging and the flies crawling around my eyes.

I knew I must lie up now, find some shade, try to sleep. And then, when night fell, the trek back. I turned towards the sun, thinking of Kennie and the Land-Rover. Company at least. To die alone. … I suddenly had a feeling that I was in a void, hopelessly lost, with no hope of finding my way back. I was remembering how I had told Kennie to burn spinifex. But if I was lost, how could I see it? How could I possibly be certain I’d be near enough to him in the dawn — the next dawn?

Panic was very close then. I wanted to run. I wanted to run all the way back, just to be certain. And then I saw it, beyond the next ridge — a wisp of black smoke. And for a moment I was crazy enough to think I had run those twelve miles back. Today — tomorrow … time had no meaning. I was too damned tired.

The wisp of smoke was dying, and I was running, running down the slope of the ridge, across the floor of the trough, the smoke receding and the next ridge far away, hardly getting any nearer as my blood pounded and my feet staggered. Birds rose, flights of bright colours — budgerigars I think — and the wisp gone now. Christ! A mirage! That’s what kept me staggering at a shambling run, the fear that it was a mirage — a dream, my mind wandering, crazed in panic, dried seed pods rasping at my trousers and everything vivid in the blinding light. It seemed an age before I reached the top of the sand slope and then suddenly the scene had changed, the sandhills gone and in their place rough rock, red-knolled and eroded into little escarpments. And below one of these, far away and shimmering in the distance, my tired eyes glimpsed the blunt box-shape of the Land-Rover.

Sanity came back, all panic gone, and the going easier as I reached the bare rock surface. It was a conglomerate of some sort, rough and hard under my feet with only here and there a sparse covering of dwarf spinifex and grasses. I heard my voice, unrecognizable as I shouted, my mouth furred and my larynx sounding as though I had newly discovered the power of speech. A movement then, a figure coming out from behind the Land-Rover, standing staring and finally moving towards me. A black face and a wide hat, black hands gripping me as I reached for him, stumbling. The blessed certainty that he was real and not some mirage of my imagination. Tom.’ The black face split, his teeth showing in a grin of recognition. And then I passed out — not exhaustion, not shock, just pure bloody relief.

I was only out for a second. I didn’t even fall. Tom had hold of me and in a moment the grogginess was gone, the knowledge that I had found them giving me strength again. They were camped close under one of the little escarpments, a cavity hollowed out by the scouring action of wind and sand, Ed Garrety sitting there propped against the rough conglomerate wall and in the hollow at his feet the sand unbelievably darkened by moisture.

He nodded to me, smiling vaguely. ‘You made it, eh? I wondered whether you would.’ He didn’t seem at all surprised.

‘Two days you said.’

‘That’s right. But when we tried to get going again, we found the jets clogged with sand, and after we’d dismantled the carburettor and cleaned it that threaded union leaked so badly — we could only just start the engines. It wouldn’t give us any power.’ His voice trailed off, very weak, his breathing shallow and his skin paper-white.

‘I’ll try and fix it,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘No good. I’ve tried. Nothing to fix it with,’ He reached into his pocket and tossed me the rotor arm he’d taken from our Land-Rover. ‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so.’ I was stretched out now in the shade of the overhang, reaction setting in and a great lassitude creeping through my limbs. Outside, the blinding white of the sunlight fell on a straight, dark-trunked tree with bark like cork and feathery needles, an anthill mounded beneath it and the pests scuttling over the conglomerate, large, long-legged and wiry, busy at some unidentifiable task.

‘Bulldog ants,’ he said. ‘Find a kurkapi — that’s a desert oak — and there’s always one of their damned nests under it.’ His voice was so faint I could hardly hear him. ‘Glad you came. I had Tom keep a fire going from first light. To signal you in. But not much spinifex here to make a proper smoke.’

I closed my eyes against the glare, the lassitude deepening, my head nodding.

‘Who sent the plane?’

I think he asked me that several times before I dragged myself back to consciousness enough to give him an answer. ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Could be a prospector — that man Culpin perhaps, or Janet may have changed her mind and notified the authorities.’

There was a long silence and I drifted back into the lethargy of half-consciousness, not sleeping, not waking, just lying there in a state of exhausted oblivion. The next thing I knew I was being shaken and a black hand was thrusting a mug of tea at me. It was strong and sweet and very hot, and it did the trick. It woke me up and put a little energy into me.

‘Better?’

‘Yes.’ I took another gulp at the hot strong tea. ‘Yes, better, thanks. It was the loneliness. I bloody near panicked.’

He smiled. ‘I guessed it was that.’

He was looking at me, a very direct stare, his blue eyes wide. I dropped my own gaze down to the mug, looking down at the tea leaves floating and a dead ant, flies clinging with threadlike legs to the rim, realizing suddenly that I hadn’t bothered to conceal my fear. Somehow this sick, worn-out man, with a face so parched of blood it was like a lizard’s, had the knack of holding me to the truth. Something in his personality, or perhaps it was the wretchedness of his situation. Or was it the country? Was it the starkness of the red centre of this country that brought a man face-to-face with reality?

I stared at the rotor arm in my hand, the golden gleam of the brass bright in the strong light, the brown of the bakelite. Was that really what I had come for? If I made it back to our own Land-Rover in tomorrow’s dawn it meant release from the torture of this red desert. The engine would go again and we could get the hell out. I leaned back against the rough curve of the rock, flicking the flies off, sipping at the hot sweet contents of the enamel mug. All this way just to turn back. It didn’t make sense, though something at the back of my mind screamed at me to go — to go while the going was good, while I still had some reserves of energy left.

But man isn’t made like that. Given the faintest spark of energy there’s always that need to reach for something, regardless of physical discomfort, regardless even of the fear of death. I closed my eyes trying to concentrate, conscious all the time of Ed Garrety there beside me. Logic. A sensible decision. But my brain seemed incapable of that, and the man beside me — nothing logical there. A gamble, a last desperate gamble. But if it was that, why had he immobilized our vehicle? A dozen miles and on his own — why? Why, when he had a mining consultant at hand to confirm the nature of the deposit?

I sucked at the last bit of tea, spitting out the leaves and that dead ant, the flies buzzing. My eyes were open now, staring into the sun-glare at the red-scabbed rock, a petrified sediment of tiny fragments welded into a conglomerate and bared by the wind, worn by the blowing sand into a gentle undulation, a low swell frozen with sudden knoll-like outcrops carved in strange shapes. ‘There’s no copper here,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘A conglomerate — of no value at all.’ I looked at him, a thought taking slow shape in my mind. ‘Then why in God’s name — ‘ But something in his face stopped me. He was slumped there, his eyes closed, the muscle at the corner of his mouth twitching and an expression of extreme agony on his face. Behind his head a complicated pattern of concentric circles had been painted on the rock wall, the pigments faded now, but still showing faintly. White and ochre and some sort of blue — indigo perhaps. It was like an old frescoe, a primitive halo framing the parchment face, the saint-like effect emphasized by the lidded eyes, the suggestion of a death mask.

The lids flicked suddenly open and he was looking at me again with that wide-eyed unblinking stare, and I saw he was deep in some private hell of his own. Christ! I thought. He’s over the edge now. He’s mad like his father. ‘What is this place?’ I heard myself ask, my voice a whisper.

‘The blacks call it a rira. It’s a comglomerate, as you say.’ His words were slow, like a man talking in his sleep. ‘And this soak here — not many in the Gibson. It’s called the Kurrajong Soak. See that tree there?’ He nodded vaguely towards a brilliantly green tree. ‘That’s a kurrajong. It’s always like that. Not many of them, but even in a drought like this it stays green. The greenest thing in the desert.’

I waited, not saying anything. And then, very quietly, very matter-of-factly, he said, ‘The last time I was here this soak had water in it. We only had to dig down about a foot and we got all the water we wanted — good water, too. Not brackish.’ And he added, ‘There was a lot of game here then. But last night nothing. No emu. No wallaby.’ His eyes were closed again so that he was like a man talking in his sleep. ‘If I hadn’t come on this soak I’d have lost my camels. They’d just about reached the limit. I’d never have got out alive. I was crazed with thirst myself. And like you, on the verge of panic. But with more reason.’ He was living something that had happened a long time ago, silent once again. I kept my mouth shut, knowing it would come of its own accord or not at all.

A shadow moved and Tom stooped in under the overhang, took the mug from me and disappeared, back to some separate burrow of his own. And then the voice again, quiet in the silence: ‘He’d never have made it this far without Weepy. Weepy Weeli knew all the soaks. This was the second they’d camped at, so you might say he owed his life to my father.’

I don’t know whether he was conscious of me or not at that moment. He seemed to be talking to himself rather than me, talking for the sake of talking, perhaps the way people do in a confessional. I think he had to get it off his chest and it was just that I happened to be there. There was more to it of course, but I only realized that later, when it was too late — after the wind had died.

There was a long silence, and while I was considering the implications of what he had said, I think I dozed off, for the next thing I heard was him saying: ‘When I woke I was sitting about where you’re sitting now, right here in this hollow in the rock. And what woke me was the sound of a shot. I stumbled out and there he was with a gun in his hand and one of my three camels lying drumming with her legs on the lira. I can remember the smoke was still curling from the muzzle of the gun as he raised it to his shoulder again. I shouted at him and he wheeled round, the gun pointing at me. But I just didn’t care. The camel was the best I had. I’d broken her myself. I went straight at him and he was in such a state when he fired that he missed. The shot went just over my head. And then I was on him, my hands wrenching at the gun, tearing it out of his grasp. He wasn’t a big man and I was young. He hadn’t a hope after he’d missed me. And when I got hold of the gun I was in such a rage I shot him. I shot him through his forehead and I can still see the look on his face, the staring, horror-struck eyes as he realized what I was going to do. It’s haunted me all my life. For I did it in cold blood. I killed him quite deliberately.’ He paused then, his eyes wide, a distant look as he saw every detail of the scene he had lived with all these years. ‘He didn’t even twitch. He just folded up with a glazed, surprised look, and then lay out there in some thin grass, pitched forward on his face. I put the camel out of her misery, wishing I had been awake in time to stop him. The sun was just setting, everything blood-red, and when I moved that little bastard the wisps of spinifex he’d fallen on were red, too — the blood that had drained out of the hole in the back of his head.’

There was another long silence, his eyes closed, his breathing in quick pants. ‘Well, now you know. Funny that I should want to tell you when you’re on the run for something yourself. Or perhaps that’s why. But I still wanted to be on my own when I got here. You understand?’

I nodded. To make peace, he had said. I remembered that now. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

‘Well, d’you think I did wrong?’ He waited. And then he said, ‘All right. I killed a man. But what would you have done? In the circumstances. Jarra Jarra ruined. Everything I’d dreamed of gone. And all the fault of that grasping little crook. And then slaughtering my camel for meat. Would you have stood for it? That camel had carried me for six days. She’d have carried me to her last gasp. She deserved better than that. And McIlroy — did he deserve anything better than I gave him?’ Another pause, and then he said slowly, ‘No. The camel was just an excuse, the spark that triggered my hate of the man.’ He was silent then and I didn’t know what to say. What would I have done?

‘I think,’ I said slowly, that I might have killed him the moment I came up with him.’

I don’t know whether he heard that or not. As I have said, he was living his own private hell and I doubt whether it made any difference what I said. I was merely his confessor, and only because I happened to be there and had problems of my own.

‘It was ‘bout six in the morning when I went down to the blacks’ quarter to get Weeli. I was running a new fenceline and I wanted Weeli and two of the boys. But he wasn’t there. Father had come for him ‘bout two hours back. I found the old man in his den, a bottle of whisky in front of him and his eyes bleary with drink and lack of sleep.’ He paused for breath, licking his lips, his tongue coming out but no moisture there. ‘He lied to me,’ he went on slowly. ‘That’s what got my dander up right at the outset. I knew very well Weeli hadn’t gone walkabout.’

He found some saliva, licked his lips again, speaking fast now: ‘It took me the better part of an hour to get the truth out of him and by then I was so darned mad I’d have killed McIlroy with my bare hands — if he’d still been around. It took me six days — six days on a camel to catch up with him. It’s a long ride from Jarra Jarra here, the days burning hot, the nights beginning to cool. Autumn, y’see. It was March. All that time to think what I’d do if ever I caught up with him. Lucky for me it rained, the tracks of that old Austin truck of his showing quite clearly wherever the sand was soft.’

He stopped there, staring in space. ‘At the end of six days’ riding camel the desire to kill the man was overlaid by a lot of other things — the loneliness, the feeling of being lost at times, like travelling in a vacuum. And when it came to the moment … when I was standing here, confronting him … all I could think of was water. I hadn’t had any water for more than twenty-four hours; all the way from the Stock Route I hadn’t found a single soak. I was down there in the sand, lapping it up, the camels bellowing. And the blarney of the man, that damned tongue of his pouring out excuses, explanations, encouraging me to believe that it would all turn out for the best. He and I, we’d go on together. No need for the camels now. And we’d return rich. His Monster would solve everything.’

He gave the ghost of a laugh, half amused, half cynical. ‘Instead of killing him I went to sleep in the middle of his monologue, too damned tired even to give him the hiding that would have got some of the hate out of my system.’

He paused again there, and then after a moment he said quietly, in a flat, even voice: ‘It was still there, y’see — the hate I mean — all ready to explode inside me the moment that shot woke me.’

‘You buried the body?’

He nodded. ‘In soft sand at the edge of the rira here. A sort of natural grave between two exposed edges of rock. Then Weeli and I started back. I got the Austin almost to Lake Disappointment. But the axle bust. There wasn’t much petrol left anyway. I dumped the old bus there and we made it back to Jarra Jarra by camel, travelling at night so nobody would see us. Father dealt with Weeli — made him swear never to tell a soul what had happened. Did it at the sacred place of his ancestors down in the Watersnake country. And then the cave-in — the last hope gone. After that the old man started drinking in earnest. McIlroy had broken him anyway. I got the hell out into the army. There was talk, of course. But nothing more. Four months had passed, the tracks covered by the time the police found that vehicle. And then the war, and we were overseas — boys from the outstations getting killed and captured. Mcllroy’s death wasn’t important any more.’ His voice faded, his eyes staring blankly. ‘Sometimes I wish I’d killed him the moment I saw him strutting towards me. Other times I try to make believe I never rode into the desert after him. The first would have been more honest. The second is what I’ve tried to live. Then Westrop, those rumours … after thirty years. I had to come.’

‘Why?’

He looked at me with a puzzled frown. ‘To see if it was true, of course. I didn’t know. After all those years I couldn’t be sure I really had killed him. Burma. Hospital, the old man’s death. It was in the Journal of course. It was all there, just as I had told it to him. But once I’d burned those pages … And then Janet’s mother, the years of trying to rebuild and make something of the station. It faded, y’see. It wasn’t real. Just something I’d read.’ And then haltingly: ‘The old man, y’see — out of his mind. You can’t live with a thought like that.’ There was perspiration on his brow, his face twitching and the effort of trying to put it all into words too much for him, his whole frame shivering.

‘And now?’

‘Now I know.’ His voice was back to a whisper. ‘Now I can’t fool myself any more. What I did — it finished him, broke him completely.’

‘The body, I mean — you found it?’

‘Not the body.’ He shook his head. ‘Not even the skeleton. He was just carrion as soon as the sand had blown off him, and the wedge-tails and the ants, they picked him clean. All that was left was a heap of bones, but lying exactly where I remembered, and of course it all came back to me, then. No room for doubt or self-deception any more.’

Silence and my head dropping on to my chest, my eyes closing; the rustle of sand grains moving, the heat winds stirring the desert. I should have said it didn’t matter any more. I should have encouraged him, given him the support he needed. But I was too tired, too bone-weary to care. What the hell did it matter after all these years? I was drifting into sleep, but not yet losing consciousness, the silence nagging. ‘And now,’ I muttered. ‘Now you’ve found him, what are you going to do?’

He didn’t answer, the silence heavy between us so that I was forced back to consciousness, my eyes open. He hadn’t moved, his head still framed by that strange motif on die rock wall, behind him — his eyes open and staring vacantly, his breathing shallow. He looked like death. It should have warned me. But I hadn’t come all this way to worry about a man who had died thirty years ago. I was thinking of Janet and Jarra Jarra and what a real big strike could do to get them out of the mess they were in. I thought, God help me, it was die future, not the past, that mattered, and so I said, ‘Well, what about Mcllroy’s Monster? Does it exist or doesn’t it?’ I thought it would help to concentrate his mind on something practical.

Silence still and I had to repeat the question before he turned his head and looked at me, his eyes still vacant as though fixed on some far distant horizon. Slowly he shifted his position, groping in the hip pocket of his trousers. ‘That’s something I shall never know.’ And he handed me a worn leather wallet. ‘I took that from Mcllroy’s body.’ And then he said something I didn’t understand till much later: ‘If it exists and if you find it, pray to God for guidance. This poor country has been raped too often by greedy whites and that — that Monster — belongs to them, to the aborigine of the desert.’ And he added softly, ‘I would like to think that my boyhood dream could be made a reality. Yes, I would like to think that, very much. I had it all planned — Jarra Jarra a nature reserve, the goodness of the land gradually restored and the blacks free to live their natural, self-sufficient lives.’ His breath came in a sigh. ‘It was just a dream, and dreams fade y’know — with age and the passage of time. But you’re young. You can still make it a reality.’ And then, looking at me very directly with those startling blue eyes: ‘Any man who uses that for his own ends will suffer a violent death. Or else he’ll end up with blood on his hands. I don’t know why I know that, but I do.’

I was fully awake then. ‘So you think it exists?’

He nodded his head slowly. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ And after that he wouldn’t say any more. He seemed exhausted, leaning back, his eyes closed. I didn’t examine the contents of the wallet. Not then. I just put it in my pocket, wondering whether he was sane or not thinking about his words, the strange prophetic sense he had intended them to convey. And shortly afterwards Tom came to tell us there was a storm brewing. He had blankets with him and he wrapped one of them around Ed Garrety, tucking it carefully as though he were nursing a sick child.

The wind came quickly, sand driving past our shelter, at first a river of small grains close to the surface of the rock, then a brown cloud engulfing everything, uprooted bushes whirling past, the air thickening until it was hardly possible to breathe, the sun-hot desert sand-blasted to hell. I buried my head in the blanket and sank into a mental oblivion, unable to think, scarcely able to breathe, yet not unconscious — not entirely.

The storm lasted right into the night. I was dimly conscious of movement, a body crawling past, but I was wrapped in a cocoon of misery and hardly noticed, lying there thankful for the shelter of the rock which protected my body from the full blast of the wind, the sand flood pouring over me and nothing to do but huddle close within the insufferable heat of the blanket.

It died at last, the howling of the wind subsiding slowly to a moan, the sand-filled air thinning till there was only the whisper of a breeze and the soft abrasive rasp of grains on rock. That was when I first realized I was alone.

It took time for it to sink in, and even when it did, I didn’t do anything. I was dazed and too exhausted. It was dark and the wind had gone, everything very still. My voice croaked his name. No answer, and when I reached out there was only the blanket half-buried in sand.

I got up then in a sudden panic. My limbs were cramped, my eyes and mouth all scummed, and as I staggered out a meteor, blazing a snuffed-out trail across the sky, showed me the Land-Rover still there. I stood for a moment, trembling with relief, and then, thinking perhaps he had been caught short and gone for a squat, I walked over to the Land-Rover and got myself a drink of water. I sipped it slowly, flexing my limbs and shaking the sand out of my clothes. The minutes passed and no sign of him. I started calling, but there was no answer. Tom had appeared like a dark shadow out of the ground, and after a while, with no response to our calls, we began searching.

We must have searched for an hour before giving up, and by then I knew it wasn’t an accident. He’d walked out into that sandstorm deliberately. Tom knew it, too. ‘Him sickfella golonga tingari.’ Tingari I guessed correctly were Dreamtime spirits. The old black didn’t talk much. He accepted it, may even have expected it, but he was deeply affected. He went off by himself and I didn’t see him again till dawn broke. Then we searched the whole of the rira and beyond it, out into the sand, until heat exhaustion drove me to seek shelter. Tom was all day searching, but without finding a trace of him. It was as though that storm had lifted him up and spirited him away.

Night fell again and we had a meal. Then we collected the things we needed from the Land-Rover and began walking. There was no point in staying there. No point in continuing the search. The sand had done what perhaps he had intended; it had buried him under a clean new drift. But why? Why had he gone like that, walking out into a sandstorm? I was thinking about it all night, feeling there was something I had missed. And then, as tiredness made me stumble and I began to fall, I developed a strange feeling that he and I had changed places; one moment I felt that all the problems that had sent him stumbling out into the storm had devolved upon me, the next it was I who was stumbling out into the desert to die.

I wouldn’t have made it without Tom. He stayed with me, and sometimes he talked to himself in his own tongue, not bothering with pidgin. In the end, all I could think about was the compass, which I clutched so tightly for fear I lost it in a fall that my fingers eventually had to be prised loose from it, the bone all bruised by the metal case. We kept to the reverse of the bearing I had followed two nights before, but when dawn broke and I flung myself down exhausted on the highest sandridge I could find, Tom said he didn’t think we had gone far enough yet, not more than nine miles, and so we went on, out into a wide plain between that ridge and the next with the heat increasing and the sky flaring to the moment of sunrise. And he was right. When the sun came up behind us the black of Kennie’s smoke signal was no more than a wisp far out on the horizon. It took us almost two hours — two hours before Kennie came stumbling towards us, shouting hysterically.

Another long day waiting out the heat, and then, the sun just dipping below the sand-sea horizon, we started driving, heading straight into the last of the daylight. There were new drifts of sand now, the going bad in places and frequent stops to cool the engine. We had two punctures that night and we only made 432 miles, a lot of it in four-wheel drive.

‘You in a more reasonable frame of mind?’

‘What do you mean?’

Tom had rigged us a shelter of sorts and Kennie was propped up on one elbow, staring at me, his sun-blistered body chequered with the light beams coming through the furze.

‘You were pretty crazed when I found you yesterday morning.’

‘You didn’t find us. We found you.’

‘Have it your own way.’

My hands gripped hard on the mug I was holding. ‘All right,’ I said, my mouth, my whole throat hurting. ‘You lit a fire so we knew where you were.’ The mug was hot, the tea too scalding to drink, and I was sweating, a feeling of nausea creeping up from my guts.

‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘All you said was he walked out into that sandstorm.’

‘That’s right.’ My throat was sore and I found it difficult to formulate my words.

‘Christ, man. You can’t just leave it at that. There must be something more.’

I shook my head and then he was leaning forward, gripping my arm. ‘For God’s sake, Alec — a man doesn’t just walk out — into a sandstorm — for no reason. That’s what you said. That he just walked out. While you were huddled in a blanket.’

There was a long silence. Finally he let go of my arm. ‘You don’t want to talk about it.’

‘No.’ How the hell could I explain to him the complicated motives of a man who had reached the point of no return. Even if I understood them myself.

He sucked noisily at his tea. ‘Okay, I’m your pal and you won’t talk to me. So what are you going to tell the police? And there’s Janet. What are you going to tell Janet?’

Oh Christ! I thought. Couldn’t he leave it alone? Just accept the truth of it. ‘God damn you,’ I muttered. ‘Shut up, can’t you.’ That strange feeling was there still, the feeling that Ed Garrety and I had changed places, that with his death I had somehow stepped into his shoes. ‘It’s crazy.’ I heard my voice, a hoarse whisper, and he had heard it too.

‘Did you find the Monster? Was it there, where he died?’ He was staring at me intently.

‘No. No, of course it wasn’t.’

‘Then why did Garrety stop there — a rira Tom said. That’s a geological formation.’

‘There was no copper,’ I said. ‘Now shut up, can’t you.’

‘But you know where it is?’

‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake,’ I screamed at nun.

His hand was on my arm again, shaking me. ‘He told you, didn’t he? You got it out of him — the location of Mcllroy’s Monster?’

Something in the way he said it made me hold my breath, staring at him. ‘What the hell are you getting at?’ In that moment I hated him.

He saw that, for he hesitated, licking his lips. And then he blurted out, ‘Only that you got the rotor arm out of him, and I thought …’

‘You stupid, mean-minded little fool!’ He was cringing away from me, scared of my anger and the croaking fury of my voice ‘What the hell do you know about a man like Ed Garrety? He didn’t go into the desert after the monster …’ I stopped there, leaning back, panting. Christ! The boy was right. If Ed Garrety wasn’t prospecting, then what the hell was he doing? I was thinking of Janet then, wondering how I could ever face her if I came out of the Gibson saying her father had taken his life because of a murder he had committed thirty years ago.

I drank the rest of my tea slowly, conscious of Kennie watching me all the time. Then I decided to close my eyes and tried to sleep. God, what a mess! And no way out that I could see.

We got going again shortly after five, and just before sunset a single-engine plane came over. It must have picked up our dust streamer for it came in very low from the north, circled us slowly, then headed back into the fireball blaze that was reddening sky and desert.

We made better progress that night, fewer stops and only one puncture. We caught a frozen ice-glint glimpse of the great salt lake in the dawn and by nine we had reached Karara Soaks The police were waiting for us there, a sergeant and a constable with two Land-Rovers and native trackers. The sergeant had a warrant for my arrest.

Fremantle Gaol, 30th April,1970.