Urn Burial

CHAPTER TWELVE

Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted

the living ones of Methuselah, and in a yard under

ground, and thin walls of clay, out worn all the

strong and specious buildings above it.

Urn Burial, Sir Thomas Browne, Chapter V.

DOT COLLECTED Phryne’s early-morning tea and met Li Pen’s eyes as he loaded a cup onto his tray. By mutual agreement they both came to the same door, which Dot unlocked.

She walked across the room, drew the heavy velvet curtains, and said, ‘Morning, Miss Phryne. It’s a nice day.’

She pulled the curtains of the four-poster back and stopped.

Like an engraving from a pillow book, thought Li Pen. Like a painting from one of them old-time artists, thought Dot.

Phryne, her black hair falling across Lin Chung’s chest, lay naked to the waist, turned so that one small breast was bared to their gaze. One of her hands was curled open against his cheek, and his face had turned to her, so that Dot could see a stylised man; his nose and cheekbones, and the delicate black line of brow and eyelash and hair, as if drawn with a very fine brush. His other arm embraced Phryne even in sleep, long fingers splayed across her white back which was bruised from her fall.

‘Hmm?’ asked Phryne, swimming to the surface.

‘Hmm,’ agreed Lin Chung, waking all of a piece, languorous with pleasure. He noticed Dot’s flabbergasted face and the appreciative countenance of Li Pen behind her. He was showing remarkable interest for a warrior-monk vowed to holy poverty, vegetarianism and chastity. But then Li Pen had always admired art.

‘Silver Lady, we’ve got company,’ said Lin, and Phryne woke. The picture dissolved. Dot handed her a robe and she sat up against Lin’s chest to accept her cup.

‘Good morning, Dot,’ she said calmly. ‘We’re going to the caves. Are you coming, too?’

‘Yes, Miss,’ Dot replied. ‘I’ve cleaned your clothes but they aren’t dry. You’ll have to wear the parrot jumper again, and the velvet trousers.’

‘Fine.’

Li Pen said in Cantonese, ‘She is as beautiful as the Manchu Princess of which you spoke, Master. More beautiful, because of her jade eyes.’

‘Good, I’m glad you enjoyed the picture,’ replied Lin. He repeated the remark to Phryne and she said, ‘Thank you,’ to Li Pen, who bowed. The whole transaction was so incredibly improper that Dot decided it had never happened.

Li dressed his master in a robe and Lin Chung took his leave. Phryne washed briefly in the washbasin, pulled on her caving clothes, and went down to breakfast.

She was starving.

Breakfast was almost over when Mr Hinchcliff announced, ‘Mr Jenkins,’ and a strange figure was shoved into the breakfast room.

He was small, no more than five foot six, perhaps, and he appeared to be covered in hair. Phryne decided that he must have been cultivating his beard, which was of the general dimensions of a bathmat, since puberty and possibly before. The only person she had previously seen who was that furry was Jo Jo, the Dog-faced Boy. He was wearing moleskins and a blue shirt under a tweed jacket which had seen better centuries and was largely composed of patches. His feet occupied large hobnailed boots and his long wild hair was crowned with a shapeless felt bag which might, at a venture, have been called a hat. The modish colour of the season for swaggies, it appeared, was washed-out grey.

‘Harry, my dear chap, sit down and have some breakfast,’ called Tom Reynolds. So this was the famous Dingo Harry. Phryne hadn’t recognised him without his trail of scalps. Tom Reynolds had obviously settled the quarrel about trespassing, probably in favour of Dingo Harry ignoring any boundary he wished to cross.

‘Thanks, Tom. I haven’t had a civilised breakfast for many a long year,’ said Dingo Harry, giving Phryne her first surprise of the day. He spoke in a deep, pleasant, educated voice.

Dingo Harry was given free range amongst the edibles. He sat down next to Phryne, carrying his plate with some effort and setting it down carefully so that the bible-thick layer of ham would not fall off the edifice of toast and the scale model of Mont Blanc composed of scrambled egg.

Phryne watched him eat. This was usually instructive. She had seen wharfies and sailors eat as daintily as ladies, and ladies shovel food in as though they had spent a long day humping sacks up a gangplank. Dingo Harry secured his hair with a piece of string, then ate solidly but tidily through the whole menu. Then he wiped his mouth politely on a napkin, combed crumbs out of his beard and observed, ‘You’re Miss Fisher, the detective? You do nice work, Miss. I heard about the murder on the Ballarat train. Are you interested in caves?’

‘Yes,’ said Phryne, flattered at how far her notoriety had spread and perfectly prepared to be interested in caves if they proved interesting.

‘Buchan Caves are a lump of Middle Devonian limestone that was once the bottom of the sea – it’s very rich in marine fossils – sandwiched between the granite shelves on either side, so that they lie in a ring of mountains. All the interesting caves are limestone and there’s hundreds of ’em here. That’s why I originally came, to study the caves.’ He gulped down his tea. ‘Well, thanks for breakfast, Tom. Let’s be going. Might I escort you, Miss Fisher?’

He offered his arm and Phryne took it. As they walked out of the house, she said quietly, ‘I thought you would have seen me as a bloated member of the Capitalist classes,’ and the man smiled, as far as one could see through the foliage.

‘I’ve got a few friends and I hear things, even out here,’ he said. ‘Your maid talks to the kitchen staff and my old mate Terry hears and he tells me. You’ve got two friends who are red-raggers like me. You didn’t instantly leap to the conclusion that I killed Lina, even though a wandering hermit tramp is a Godsend to anyone who wants a nice quick solution without revealing any family secrets.’

‘Have you seen Lina or the Major?’ she asked, and Dingo Harry shook his head. Either he hadn’t, or he wasn’t going to trust Phryne yet.

The dray had been repaired and even washed, and Terry Willis had prevailed on the carthorse to cooperate. Phryne was surprised to see that Paul Black was driving, large as life and twice as repulsive in an oilskin and hat. She let go of Mr Dingo’s arm and grabbed her host’s, asking, ‘What happened about Black?’

‘Can’t throw him out for a joke, even a mistimed joke,’ said Tom uncomfortably. ‘I’ve docked his wages and he won’t come near you or Lin again, Phryne darling. There’s no work in the countryside – I can’t throw him out to starve or steal.’

‘Can’t you?’ asked Phryne, and Dingo Harry chuckled.

‘Always been soft, Tom,’ he said.

‘Now,’ Dingo Harry told the assembled house party as the dray started with a jerk and they plodded along the road, ‘these are the Buchan Caves. They weren’t named after a place in Scotland, but after the Aboriginal word for dillybag, bukken. Because that’s what they’re like; a dilly-bag of limestone in the porphyry of the hills. Of course, there’s an argument about the name. It might also be bokkan, which means plenty, or a form of bakang, which means dark. Anyway, they are made like this. Rain falls on a limestone shelf. There is nothing stronger than water.’

‘Impeccable Taoism,’ said Lin Chung.

Dingo Harry looked at him and nodded, continuing. ‘Then the limestone weathers, see, because the rain picks up carbon dioxide from the air and forms a weak acid – carbonic acid. Limestone splits and dissolves and there are pits and holes and arches cut through it, until we have your basic cave. Then water drips through the roof. Each drop contains a minute amount of calcium carbonate, dissolved limestone, and it leaves a little ring of carbonate of lime on the stone. Everywhere the percolating waters form stalagmites and stalactites and dissolve the rock along fracture lines. After a while – twenty years, maybe – a stalactite begins to form. Water drips down that and the same thing happens when it hits the floor; a stalagmite, growing up. When they join in the middle they become a column. Sometimes, where the water lies in little hollows, the mineral calcite is precipitated, and that’s a hexagonal crystal, making pyramids, or spread all over in little points of light. The basic colour of limestone is white. When there’s an admixture of iron or other oxides, it’s coloured. Now, we’re going down. Have you all got torches?’

The party exhibited a variety of tow-wrapped torches and candles.

‘Good. Don’t stray away. It’s black dark under the earth, darker than you’ve ever seen. Sound moves oddly in caves and it’s very hard to find anyone who gets lost. Also, there are pits and shafts so deep they’ve never been plumbed, and they’re full of icy water. We’re going to Slocumbe’s Cave. It was named after the man who found it. He was a grazier, a friend of Moon who was a prospector. Only a fifth of these caves have been excavated, and we’re going to this one because it’s nearest and deepest. We can’t get to King’s Cave, it’s on the other side of the Snowy.’ He flung out a hand. It was clearly impossible to get across the river. Between romantic chasms lined with trees taller than cathedrals, the river snarled and foamed, grey-blue water roaring through the abyss.

‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea’, murmured Miss Mead, enthralled. Dingo Harry awarded her an approving look.

‘That’s where I found the bay mare,’ observed Miss Fletcher, as the dray rocked and swayed on to a grassy siding next to the gravel road. A low opening with a barred gate in the side of a hill was visible. A small sign told them that this was SLOCUMBE’S CAVE NO TRESPASSING NO SHOOTING VISITORS PLEASE MIND YOUR HEADS.

‘I hope Will Luttrell hasn’t gone into the caves,’ said Tom.

Dingo Harry remarked, ‘If he has, only chance will find him.’

By this statement, Phryne learned that Mr Dingo was an atheist, as all the best red-raggers were, reserving their spiritual devotion for Marx and Engels. Paul Black drew the patient horse to a halt and let down the backboard, still grinning in a way which made Phryne itch to belt him with a picnic basket. Why on earth had Tom allowed this excrescence on the fair face of Australian labour to continue in his employ after his murderous assault on Phryne and Lin Chung?

She evaded Mr Black’s greasy hand and leapt down from the dray without help. Dot followed, handing down Phryne’s bag; a large leather pouch with a highly unfashionable shoulder strap. Miss Fisher had been trapped in the dark once and did not mean to encounter any confined spaces without adequate preparation.

Mr Black secured a nosebag to Dobbin’s resigned countenance, put up the backboard, and sat down on the dray. He took out a clasp knife and a block of soft wood, and began to strip precise curls of bark off it, whistling ‘Oh Susannah’ through the remains of his teeth. Phryne turned her back on his slimy grin.

‘Mind your heads,’ said Dingo Harry as the party filed in through a passage some three feet wide and five feet high. Phryne, in the lead, had only to crouch a little, but the taller members of the group were bent almost double as they crept along the close-smelling tunnel and down an iron ladder bolted into the stone. Lin Chung, beside her, drew in a slow calming breath. Phryne remembered his fear of enclosed spaces.

‘Wouldn’t you rather wait outside?’ she asked lightly. ‘Nothing much to see down here and we won’t be long.’

Lin, on whom the clay walls were closing in so that he could hardly breathe, would not be rescued. He said curtly, ‘I’m sure that it will be most interesting,’ and continued on. His face in the glare was as pale as limestone. Phryne gave him points for courage and, in charity, stopped watching him.

She wondered what strange concatenation of circumstances had brought Mr Slocumbe down this unpromising way. She was just deciding that he must have fallen in when she reached the floor and stepped away from the ladder. She switched on her electric torch and other lights sprang behind her as the rest of them came into the cavern.

It was vast. She could feel the elevation before she saw it. The ceiling was high, airy, and strangely figured. This might have been where the makers of Cave House had got their Gothic inspirations. Miss Fletcher said, ‘I say!’ and the poet gasped, ‘Me`re de Dieu!’

It was as large as Westminster Abbey and decorated in rose, grey, white and salmon pink. Lengthy columns like melted wax candles as thick as Phryne’s waist rose to unguessable heights. Across one corner was a sheet of pure white stone, almost as thin as cloth, which might have been expected to bear the Byzantine face of Christ. The moving lights across the floor combined in a sufficient glow to pick out formations like angels with spread wings, heraldic animals, and a wall of diamonds, shooting prismatic rays, which must be the mineral calcite.

It was like nothing that Phryne had ever seen; majestic and grotesque. The underground air struck chill, smelling of chalk and depths and cold water.

‘Oh, wondrous,’ murmured Lin Chung. ‘Oh, water, mistress of earth, valley spirit, eternal feminine!’

‘Taoism again?’ Phryne leaned close to hear what he was whispering.

‘From the Tao Te Ching. The old Master should have seen this. All made by water, the female, cold, moon principle.’

‘Yin,’ said Phryne. ‘This is the womb of the earth.’

‘Indeed.’ He took her hand. ‘Completely foreign to all male, hot, sun creatures.’

‘Like you?’

‘Like me. Yang can only admire and tremble.’

‘Come along.’ She led him into the centre of the huge space. ‘We don’t want to get lost in the earth-mother’s insides.’

They followed the trail of lights across the floor to another tunnel, barely wide enough to fit Phryne and her bag. Lin’s grasp on her hand tightened until it hurt. They came into a chamber of white stone, joined by a single slender column, and lined with basins of gems. A million facets threw back the different lights; cold electric-blue and white, warm-red, yellow and orange fire, dazzling the eyes. A trail had been trodden through gypsum roses, pink as any springtime, in the middle. Dingo Harry was in the lead, and Phryne could hear his voice, educated and rich, discussing the chemistry of limestone with Doctor Franklin as they walked through the rocky flowers up a gentle slope towards another dreamscape.

‘They call this London Bridge,’ said Dingo Harry.

They stopped in a body at a wide bridge, which looked like it had been thrown up by some convulsion of the earthmother as she turned in her sleep. It stretched, five feet wide and perhaps thirty feet long, over a chasm. ‘Differential solution,’ commented Dingo Harry. Someone, mindful of the nervous, had made a waist-high handrail out of hemp rope and pitons for the panicky to hang on to. Phryne was not afraid of heights, and hung over the rope, listening to the millwheel churning of water in the depths below, and admiring the way that pink colouration gave way to bands of black and grey as the light receded down the walls of the cliff.

‘Miss, Miss, be careful,’ wailed Dot, who had shuffled across, holding on to the rope with both hands and resisting an unworthy urge to crawl.

The house party’s variation in courage was interesting. Phryne noticed that Miss Mead and Miss Cray walked across without trouble, as did Mrs Reynolds and her husband and Li Pen, Miss Medenham and Mrs Luttrell. Mrs Fletcher baulked, caught her daughter’s stern eyes, and managed the walk with only a subdued whimper. Dot didn’t like it at all, whereas Lin Chung was utterly unafraid of heights, though he was not keen on depths. The poet had to be coaxed and the Doctor almost dragged. He was really afraid. Phryne saw a sheen of sweat on his bony face and his wide eyes caught the torchlight. Miss Fletcher almost led him over by the hand, talking to him gently as one would to a nervous horse. She seemed much more relaxed now that she did not have to strain at being a good girl. Phryne almost warmed to her as she and the Doctor went by.

As they passed through another junction, Phryne began to hear footsteps. They never coincided exactly with the noise the house party was making. Every time they all paused to survey some new marvel, the following feet tapped on a little longer than an echo would, then stopped.

She began to feel eyes on the back of her neck, and rubbed a palm over the prickling hair. Li Pen dropped unobtrusively back through the crowd until he stood beside Lin Chung. The slim valet said something to his master in Chinese and Lin replied quickly.

‘Yes, I can feel it, too,’ said Phryne, grasping at the meaning of the high, slurred dialect. She would never really get the hang of a toned language but she was beginning to pick up the sense of the speech.

Lin, surprised, said, ‘You understood what he said?’

‘Not really, but there’s someone behind us. I can sense them.’

‘You were certainly a warrior in a previous life,’ said Lin. ‘He says there is a wild animal in the cave. As this is Australia and I have assured him that there are no large predators here, he has decided that a human with the heart of a beast must be stalking us.’

‘I almost wish you hadn’t translated that. Li Pen, you remember the night we came here – is it the same hunter?’

Li Pen nodded. Phryne shook herself.

‘We say nothing to the others,’ she decided.

‘But I go last,’ insisted Li Pen. He fell in behind and followed as they walked into the new cave.

The sound of his cat footsteps behind her made Phryne feel much safer.

The new cave had teeth.

Instead of the massive, melted-looking columns of the cathedral, this one was newer and the stalactites and stalagmites were almost sharp. They dipped over Phryne’s head like icicles, thin as blades, striking up through the soft floor and down from the roof like incisors, white as bleached bone. It was a little unnerving and Phryne felt Dot draw closer.

‘In the mouth of the beast,’ said Lin, and Phryne snapped, ‘Less mysticism and more light. If this place was strung with electric lights it wouldn’t be so alarming. It’s the contrast. White teeth and black shadows.’

‘You can’t abolish all mystery with your modern machines, Silver Lady. Some very old part remains; some primitive Lin Chung who hid here when the ice sheet moved down, and feared ghosts and bears and shadows with fangs. He tried to fight his terror with fire, also, and it did not entirely work. If your electricity failed, the dark would return, as it has been since the beginning of the world.’

‘To banish fear with light has always been the aim of humans,’ agreed Tadeusz, breathing fast. ‘Yet we cannot exile the shadows, for they lurk in our own heart, our own mind.’

Phryne lifted her torch high, and the white teeth gleamed with the dust of diamond. The stone on her ring caught the light and blazed.

‘Miss Fisher . . .’ said Tadeusz, abandoning philosophical speculation with a jolt. ‘Wherever did you get that ring?’

‘I found it. Pretty, isn’t it? Do you know it?’

‘I do indeed. Though I haven’t seen it for years – diamonds are so seldom set in silver.’

‘I think it might be Indian. What do you think?’

‘No, it’s South African. Miss Fisher, I don’t think you should be wearing it, not in this gathering, it can only . . .’

Dingo Harry called them through into another cave. The poet lost his thread and said no more about the ring, although Phryne caught him glancing at it. She bit her lip in frustration.

The next cave was spacious and not too high, and the party sat down on convenient but damp stumps of stalagmites to drink tea and discuss what they had seen. Torches had been set in iron rings around the walls, and Phryne noticed that the smoke was blackening the pristine ceiling. Humans and caves did not go together. A few more years of human smirching and they would be sooty, smelly, grey and uninteresting. After which, presumably, humans would leave them alone, and the caves would repair themselves over a hundred years, patiently constructing more delicate alchemical marvels, to be ruined again by the next human who fell through the roof. Phryne was feeling most displeased with a species to which, she reminded herself, she belonged. She took an egg sandwich and a gulp of tea and strove to adjust her philosophy.

‘What a remarkable place,’ observed Miss Mead. ‘A demonstration of the multifold gifts of the Almighty.’ She trailed this unexceptionable tag at Miss Cray, who did not take her cue to launch into her usual speech on the Magnificence of God and the Necessity of Supporting His Work Amongst the Heathen with Immediate Generous Donations. Indeed she seemed altogether subdued, which would have been more interesting if Phryne had not felt as though something with talons was about to spring from the darkness onto her back.

‘Yes, there are names for most of the formations,’ Dingo Harry was saying in reply to a polite question from Miss Mead. ‘This is called Picnic Cave, for obvious reasons. The first cave is called The Cathedral, and the formations are like the trappings of organised religion; The Pulpit, The Nave, The Font. Then there is London Bridge, Gem Cave, and Undersea Cave where the limestone is twisted into forms like fish and coral and weed. Surprisingly, the shapes are like those which would have been here when this was the bottom of the sea. See, here is a fossil, and another. Have a look at this wall.’

Phryne finished her sandwich and joined Tom Reynolds and the Doctor. The torchlight showed regular furrows, dips and indentations like shells and strange bubbles. She saw wavering shapes like weed and a fronded, primitive strand of kelp.

‘Erinoids,’ explained Dingo Harry, his scarred forefinger caressing the surface without actually touching. ‘Don’t touch them, please – the acid in your skin eats into the chalk. See, here is a shell, just like you’d find at the beach, and another one – and there is the important one.’ The wall appeared to be blank. Phryne unfocused her eyes and blinked. An armoured creature five feet long sprang into view. Dingo Harry’s finger traced plates of shoulder and belly; the heavy, ridged, savage skull and the socket where a tin-plate eye must have gleamed. No room in that cranium for brain. Just reflexes, just the mindless hunting of any protein which moved. She saw it in a flash of insight, not frozen in grey stone but alive, slate-blue and monstrous, sliding through grey water like a pike or a shark, the lower jaw loose and shining with spiked teeth, the fins stroking lazily towards . . . what? A floating baby in a leaf? Her own unprotected and terribly vulnerable limbs, unaware of the killer beneath the placid surface? A pounce, a swirl of blood which would bring all the lesser meat-eaters finning to the feast, a tearing gulp, and no more strange little heavy-headed mammal which might eventually have become a human.

Lin Chung, catching her mood, slid a warm hand into hers. Phryne called herself to order. It was unwise to indulge freely in imagination this far under the ground.

‘It’s an armoured fish – the first crocodile, you might say, though there’s a lot of argument about that. Some say that sharks are the oldest, but they have no bones, they’re cartilaginous, whereas this fellow was definitely bony, and well provided with teeth.’ Dingo Harry’s hand outlined the monstrous shape again. ‘Life began in the ocean. Some experts suggest that the reason why no one’s found the missing link is because humans went back to the sea when the earth dried up – the sea, in fact, is in our blood. The concentration of salt is exactly the same as sea water. It would also explain some of the human adaptations, the differences between us and the apes, our ancestors.’

Miss Cray did not even rise to this bait, which Phryne felt was unprecedented. Dingo Harry, who might have been expecting an interesting argument about the Creation, paused before he went on.

‘Now, if we’re all rested, we go through here on our way back.’ He snuffed the wall torches and the shadows licked hungrily forward.

‘In here,’ he announced, leading the way into another cavern, ‘is a cave known as The Crypt.’

‘It certainly is,’ agreed Phryne.

The cave was almost square, perhaps twenty feet high, and lined with blocks which strangely resembled tombs. Some past wag had inscribed names on some of them with a penknife which a vigilant mother should have confiscated before the lad became a vandal. ‘Lillie Langtry’ said one, and ‘John Thomas’ – someone had a rustic and earthy humour. Phryne walked the length of the cave with her torch, and the names sprang up in blue outlines like indelible pencil. ‘Mary Ellis’ got a mention, though if the writer had really loved her as he asserted, it seemed like a macabre joke. Limestone water dripped sadly, making strange echoes. A rising sun with the inscription, ‘1914 Steve Tom Albie’. Soldiers had come here and left this army badge in limestone, which was already blurring. ‘Ronald Black’. ‘The Boys Were Here’. ‘Daisy, Bill and Johnno 1911’. Phryne wondered if they had ever come back again.

Some of the tables had occupants. Phryne saw draped figures lying on their last resting places, muffled in falling water which turned cloth into stone. Then she blinked and they were shapeless again. The floor crunched underfoot. She was destroying tiny precious crystals with her careless feet; with her human weight and warmth and breath, which had no place in this chill mausoleum.

‘You see, this cave has all the accoutrements of a crypt,’ Dingo Harry observed in some displeasure, clearly wishing that the earthmother had had better taste. ‘Here is The Funerary Altar, and the stalagmites stand like candles upon it.’

This was true. The salmon-pink, grey and pale-yellow candles had obviously been burning for a few hours before they had frozen, flames alight, in stone. Miss Cray, who was possibly disordered in her wits, dipped into a genuflection as she passed them. Mrs Reynolds came to the old woman’s side and took her arm. Phryne saw Dot cross herself almost without conscious volition. She herself was sobered and shaken by this underground place. She touched Lin and felt what he was feeling: the great weight and ancient bulk of the earth, pressing down over this unnatural hollow, groaning to be filled, bearing down, giving birth to boulders and rivers.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said bracingly. ‘I’m educated enough for one day.’

‘I’m all right,’ he said evenly.

‘I know you are, but I’m not sure that I am.’

He smiled at her, the bronze face creasing into precise metallic folds in the cold light.

‘The Altar, The Crucifix, The Censer,’ continued Dingo Harry, leading the way out of the cave. The house party followed him close, eager to get back to the surface. ‘And, of course, The Urn.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Phryne, as they passed close to a massive cup-shaped rock formation. ‘Lin, see if you can catch Tom Reynolds and bring him back without alerting the others. I know that smell of mortality.’

‘Me, too,’ muttered Dot, who had been to more funerals and lyings-in-state than was comfortable. ‘Smells like a meat-safe on a hot day. Not putrid, yet, but getting that way.’

‘That’s what they were trying to tell me,’ said Phryne slowly.

‘Who?’ asked Dot.

‘Whoever it was who has been leaving urns about with such elaborate casualness. I’m afraid, Dot, that this is where the murderer took Lina’s body. And I’m afraid . . .’

‘So am I, Miss.’

Phryne was climbing up the side of The Urn. She almost lost her balance half way up when a scream echoed and re-echoed through the cave, and something ragged and insane with fear or fury erupted out of a tunnel into The Crypt.