Lament for a Maker

1

As consciousness came to me I was aware that the landscape was unfamiliar. And this awareness was for a space like Adam’s in the Garden: I recognized novelty without the aid of any of those contrasting memories which would seem essential to the formulation of the idea. More strangely, I was unperplexed by this. I suppose my mind had vigour only for the business of survival.

Before me was a rolling immensity of dark green vegetation, its dull lustre fading into purple distance under a vibrant blue sky. Behind me, I thought, was the roar of breakers, and heat as if the breakers were lava beating up from a subterraneous sea of fire. I struggled round. The sea was an illusion; the reality was a sweeping curtain of veritable flame, a great sickle of flame that reaped the tinder-dry vegetation with a motion perceptible as I watched. For a moment it was a spectacle only; then it realized itself as imminent peril. I got to hands and knees and saw, bounding before the blaze, a scattering of miniature prehistoric creatures – one grotesque form reproduced on every scale from the human to the rodent, like a child’s nest of bricks. Kangaroos and wallabies: with an immense effort my blood-soaked brain gave them their names. And at that much of my local knowledge returned to me; I saw that I was in the path of a bush fire and that I must find a break or be overwhelmed.

I was crouching where I must have fallen, half-way down an out-crop of limestone rock from which a dry gully dropped to lose itself in the scrub. Here and there the scrub gave place to a sparser growth of ti-tree, prickly bushes and salsolae, which in turn exhausted themselves round arid islands of sand. But nowhere was a denuded area large enough to promise security; my only hope was in a single massive ridge of rock that showed not more than two miles away, in startling isolation amid the low and endless undulations of green. It swayed and quivered as I looked – partly from refraction in the heat, partly perhaps to my own impaired sense – and I could be certain neither of its size nor of the practicability of ascent. It rose in sheer lines accentuated by an occasional perpendicular funnel or cleft. Up one of these I might scramble to safety.

I got to my feet and found myself – with a sort of detached surprise – not without considerable physical strength. The fire was partly checked by a veering wind; had it been sweeping directly towards me I should have had no chance at all. As it was, it was a grim race and I wasted no time. But before striking down the gully it occurred to me to discover if I had any possessions. There was evidence of a little encampment: a dead fire, an overturned billy, horse-dung. These meant nothing to me. But I found a haversack which I knew to be mine and took up. I knew too that there ought to be a water-bottle. In a swift and desperate search I failed to find it. T

Then I set out. The scrub was low and, when entered, not actually dense; I got forward without difficulty and with my mark always before me. A mile on I found a water-bottle – mine or another’s – three parts empty. This strange chance gave me a sort of irrational or superstitious confidence without which I should not be alive today.

By the time I reached the foot of the ridge there were already little fires about me. The heat of the conflagration was attracting a light headwind that blew in my face but through this the main blast was carrying forward showers of sparks that in places kindled flaring outposts of fire hundreds of yards ahead. Once I was nearly trapped by a sudden line of flame that leapt to life in a clump of yaccas about me – stunted spearlike growths of which the resinous butts will kindle with the force and rapidity of an explosion.

For agonizing minutes I explored the rock-face in vain for cleft or foothold: it seemed that my back, in a most horrible sense, was to the wall. But presently I found a possible chimney and began to climb. It is interesting that in that crisis I commanded all the lore though nothing of the memories of a mountain youth. And perhaps it was because my memory was like a freshly sponged slate that I can recall now with an almost hallucinatory power every step and strain of that desperate ascent. I emerged at length some nine hundred feet above an inferno of fire, and sufficiently shaken to fear that I might only have attained to a species of monstrously elevated grid-iron where I should perish like a martyr in a mad painter’s dream. I was however perfectly safe.

For over an hour I watched the fire sweep past. Though powerless against the barrier of rock it yet added appreciably to the burning heat of the sun and the scorching breath of the dry north wind that fanned it behind. The climb and the heat and the terror of the scene had momentarily exhausted me; I drank charily from my water-bottle and concentrated all the resources of my will on the next and all-important battle – the battle against mere despair. Many men who have wandered in wild places have found themselves in just such a perilous pass but few, except perhaps in some ultimate stumbling agony, can have experienced my peculiar distress.

With my senses in fair order and almost unimpaired physical strength, I yet found myself void of all memory of my own identity or of my whereabouts. Below me, I was massively aware, was a landscape not native to me – the landscape of Australia in one of its most appalling manifestations. I had plenty of knowledge – I could have read Latin or recognized the Parthenon or selected a fly for trout – but of knowledge organized round the fact of personality this was my whole store: I was a stranger lost in Australia. Beyond this I found it impossible to struggle. My consciousness of myself had no wavering boundaries which effort could push back: I was imprisoned in ignorance by walls as sheer as the rock up which I had recently climbed.

The fire had rolled away – by watching the dropping sun I judged roughly to the south-west. It had left behind it a smoking vastness which would be dangerous to traverse before a night had passed; my only present course was to take what bearings I could, find shade, and rest.

I estimated my horizon at about fifty miles. And in all that vast circle, save for the eminence on which I stood, was nothing but the empty and featureless bush, scarred by one long and diminishing trail of fire – a rolling and planless dapple of scrub and sand, diversified only by a sporadic growth of timber or by the swell of some undulation slightly more pronounced than the rest. Of clearing or settlement or homestead, white man or black fellow, there was no slightest sign; the scene was void, sullen, and sinisterly waiting in a way that caught and haunted the nerve. Only on the very verge of the southerly horizon lay a single level pencilled line. Long and anxiously I studied it through the treacherous heat. And finally I decided to call it the sea and make it my goal.

I turned to reckon needs and resources. Tied to the haversack was a hat, the primary need of all. Inside were a shirt, oatmeal, some biscuits, matches and a few personal belongings at which I could only gaze in perplexity. I had no compass. But in my trousers pocket I discovered a watch. And I had a two quart billy-can without a lid.

In the bewildering country below me I believed that the watch and the sun alone would be useless. I needed the watch roughly set at noon, a clear star-lit sky, country sufficiently open and a surface sufficiently safe to traverse in the cool of the night. I needed water within twenty-four hours, and food within three or four days. These points determined, I found a patch of shade, lay down and was almost instantly asleep.

I awoke in the brief Australian dusk to see below me a hundred points of smouldering fire. But the main conflagration had disappeared, caught and smothered perhaps in some chance funnel of sand, and I decided to descend and at least test the possibility of beginning my journey that night. The route down the chimney was doubly hazardous in the failing light but I was in the mood for taking chances. The decision nearly cost me my life. It also saved it.

Before I was half-way down the light had failed badly. Near the bottom the chimney forked; I misjudged a foothold in attempting to take the route by which I had come and fell perhaps fifteen feet down the other branch of the cleft. I lay at once dazed and in a curious agony of calculation: a broken limb or a bad sprain and I was done for. I felt no pain – but pain often comes later. I moved my limbs; they answered my will and a wave of relief passed over me. It was followed by a wave of fear. My legs were soaked in what I thought was blood. It was water. The discovery changed all my plans. I must carry with me every ounce of water that I could, half of it in an open billy. Until the billy was exhausted I must never once stumble. Such a strange variant of the egg and spoon race could be accomplished only in daylight. I judged that the gain in water would outweigh an extra twelve hours’ strain on my food, as also the risk of my not being able to hold a fairly straight southerly course by the sun. This decided, I lay down once more to sleep or rest. The night was cool but without extreme cold or frost. This encouraged me in the belief that I had seen the sea: it was unlikely that I was either at a considerable altitude or islanded in a great land-mass.

I was up at dawn and, accepting the dubious analogy of the camel, drank a good deal more water than was comfortable. There was a difficult climb from the spring by which I had fallen to the open ground and I found that my mind, though tolerably clear, had alarming blind spots in addition to that of memory. I wearied myself with trying to climb free with a brimming billy before I saw that I could fill the billy in the open from the water-bottle and then return to the spring and replenish that.

Apprehending this aberration, I spent some bad moments in sheer fear of fear – in panic lest I had discovered in myself a first symptom of that paralysing panic that can come on men who feel themselves bushed. Concentration on the first miles of my egg and spoon race conquered this feeling. The scrub was fairly open and the undergrowth too sparse to be treacherous. I allowed myself a pint of water that day and brought the rest safely to my evening halt. During the march I had eaten a few biscuits; I now kindled a fire and cooked myself a species of oatmeal bannock on a flat stone. I felt far from hopeless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then again he lifted the pannikin to my lips. ‘

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

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

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

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