Voss

10

SEVERAL of the mules had disappeared. Unlike such major disasters as the theft of the cattle on Christmas Eve, and the quiet death of the first sheep, with its neck outstretched along the ground, the latest incident was passed over lightly by the members of the expedition. Riding on towards the west, they were, naturally, the lighter for each loss, and so, must gain more easily on that future which remained a dusty golden to each pair of eyes.

They rode, and they came eventually to a ridge of abrupt hills, dappled and dancing with quartz, at the foot of which some black women were digging with their sticks for yams. Such meetings had come to be accepted by all. The blacks squatted on their haunches, and stared up at the men that were passing, of whom they had heard, or whom they had even seen before. Once, the women would have run screaming. Now they scratched their long breasts, and squinted from under their bat’s-skin hands. Unafraid of bark or mud, they examined these caked and matted men, whose smell issued less from their glands than from the dust they were wearing, and whose eyes were dried pools. As for the men, obsessed by their dream of distance and the future, they glanced at the women as they would into crevices in hot, black rock, and rode on.

By some process of chemical choice, the cavalcade had resolved itself into immutable component parts. No one denied that Mr Voss was the first, the burning element, that consumed obstacles, as well as indifference in others. All round the leader ranged the native boy, like quicksilver, if he had not been bronze. Jackie was always killing things, or scenting a waterhole, or seeing smoke in the distance, or just shambling off on his horse and standing on the fringes of liberty.

Some way behind the advance party would come the spare horses and the pack-mules driven by Le Mesurier and Palfreyman. These two exchanged all manner of kindnesses and sympathy, but not their thoughts. Palfreyman was not sure which god Le Mesurier worshipped. Le Mesurier would address Palfreyman very distinctly, and smile encouragingly out of his dark lips, as if the ornithologist had been a foreigner. Well, he was, too, in that he was another man. Grown paler beneath the scales of salt, Palfreyman was sad, who would have melted with other men in love. Whenever he failed, he would blame himself, for he was by now persuaded of his inability to communicate, a shortcoming that made him more miserable, in that the salvation of others could have depended on him.

Sometimes Palfreyman would leave Le Mesurier to bring on their mob of mules and horses, and ride ahead with the apparent intention of joining Voss. Then, keeping a discreet distance, he would wait for his leader to call him forward. But the German would not. He despised the ornithologist, for obvious reasons, which Palfreyman himself knew. Of rather delicate constitution, failures of this nature, together with the pains of prolonged travel, would often cause the latter to suffer tortures. So he would force upon himself all kinds of menial tasks, as penance for his disgraceful weakness. He would scour the fat from their cooking utensils with handfuls of the dry, powdery earth; he would strain the scum from any water they found; he even treated Turner, who had broken out in boils, presenting an appearance of the most abject human misery.

All this the ornithologist taught himself to endure, and the voice of Voss saying:

‘Mr Palfreyman, in his capacity of Jesus Christ, lances the boils.’

Mercifully, such incidents could occur only at their resting-places, dubious oases in the shimmering plain of motion. For the most part, personal feelings were numbed by the action of the animals that carried the party on.

Behind the spare horses and the pack-mules would stumble the few skeletons of cattle, with Judd in attendance, and Harry Robarts. The convict could coax a flagging beast most marvellously. These shocking steers and one or two udderless cows would have laid down long ago, if little reflections of the man’s will had not continued to flicker in their fixed eyes. As from his cattle, the beef had dwindled from the man, but he was still large, because big-boned. Heavy, too, he would change horse frequently, to rest the back of the one he had been riding. If his frame appeared to have suffered less than that of any other human member of the expedition, undoubtedly this was because his earlier life had tempered it. His mind, moreover, had returned to his good body, and was now in firm possession, devoted to all those objects on which the party was dependent, as well as to the animals in his charge.

Judd remained, besides, intensely interested in natural forms. For instance, he would pick at the black fruit of trees to release the seed; with the rough skin of his hand, he would rub a hot, white bone, whether of man or animal, as if to re-create its flesh; he would trace with the toe of his boot a footprint in the dust to learn its shape and mission. Afterwards, he would climb back upon his horse, and sit there looking indestructible. Seldom did the action of the sun reduce him to dreams of the future. Judd, it would sometimes appear, was himself an element.

Once Voss and Jackie had discovered in some trees a platform of leafy saplings fastened together with strips of bark. They were still examining it when Judd and Harry caught them up.

‘These dead men,’ the native boy explained, and it was gathered that his people laid their dead upon such platforms, and would leave them there for the spirits to depart.

‘All go,’ said the blackfellow. ‘All.’

As he placed his hands together, in the shape of a pointed seed, against his own breast, and opened them skyward with a great whooshing of explanation, so that the silky, white soul did actually escape, and lose itself in the whirling circles of the blue sky, his smile was radiant.

Those who had heard and witnessed were thoughtful as they rode on. It was easy in that landscape to encourage thoughts of death.

But the thick Judd, whose own soul had achieved fulfilment not by escaping from his body, but by returning to it, preferred to interpret the aboriginal illusion in terms of life. He who was wedded to earthly things would often invoke them as he rode along, and so, on the day they began to climb those quartz hills, he was thinking of his wife, who smelled of bread and soap, and who had the mole beside her nose, with the three little hairs sprouting from it. This he now saw with wonder, and much more from the years they had lived together, before he woke. Yet, he had got life in his sleep. His sons were evidence enough of that. Golden-skinned, they galloped the horses bareback down to water, and folded sheep at smoky dusk, and cut the lambs’ tails in season, with the blood spurting in little fountains into their laughing mouths. Suddenly his ribs were aching, and the welts of old punishment. The cat of love smote him in the hands of his great sons.

In his craving for earthly love, Judd struck the stirrup-iron of Harry Robarts rather roughly with his own, and bruised Harry’s knee with his, for they were riding side by side.

‘Move over, son,’ the man complained. ‘You are riding that close we will be joined for ever at the stirrup-irons.’

The boy lowered his eyes, and removed himself.

‘It was not a-purpose,’ he sulked.

‘Whichever way, it is not safe,’ said Judd.

He had developed an affection for the sawney boy. It was out of pity, so he explained it, and in camp would cut for him choicer bits of starved mutton, or dried beef, and put them on the lad’s plate, and go away. Formed by circumstances, their relationship remained upon the whole respectful, although the boy was inclined to accept it for want of a better, and the man, often impatient, was sometimes even contemptuous of his mate.

Now, as they rode together, it appeared that the boy was still thinking of the tree-platform recently discovered, and of the migration of aboriginal souls, for he murmured tentatively, dreamily:

‘Did you notice it go, Mr Judd, when Jackie opened his hands?’

‘Notice what?’ asked the man.

‘It was a white bird, like, very quick.’

‘Now, you have been seeing things,’ said the man.

The boy sniggered, and slapped at his horse’s withers with the bundle of reins.

‘Did you not see?’ he persisted.

‘Nao!’ said the man.

Then a steer stumbled, and fell, and they pushed and kicked it to its feet again. When it was walking, Judd resumed their conversation.

‘You had better tell Mr Voss of this here experience of yours, Harry, with birds. It would interest him.’

For, if wax has to be wax, then it is difficult to resist a squeeze, and Judd was only human.

‘Not Mr Voss,’ said Harry. ‘Not on your life.’

‘Mr Voss would understand such things,’ smiled Judd.

‘That is why I would not tell him.’

‘Or he would take it out on yer for ever.’

‘Yes,’ Harry replied.

It was obvious that all possibilities were contained for him in the single form of Voss.

Judd had become as silent as a piece of leather. He would have liked to give the boy a present, and remembered a magnifying-glass with ebony handle that he had kept for years, in a shammy leather bag, in a box.

They were riding and drowsing in perpetual dust, and stumbling on the rocky sides of the hills they were ascending, when Judd reached over and grabbed something from the trunk of a tree.

‘There you are, Harry,’ he said, and offered his closed, hairy hand. ‘There is a present for yer.’

In the absence of ebony he was forced to such measures.

‘What is it?’ asked the boy, advancing his own hand, but cautiously.

‘No,’ laughed Judd, blushing under dirt. ‘Open your mouth, shut your eyes.’

Then, when his suggestion had been followed, he popped a little lump of gum into the lad’s open mouth.

‘Aoh!’ cried Harry, wrinkling up.

‘No,’ insisted Judd. ‘Go on.’

He was putting into his own mouth a similar knot of gum, to demonstrate his faith in the token, or else they would both die of it.

So they rode, and sucked the gum, which was almost quite insipid in flavour, if slightly bitter. Yet, they were both to some extent soothed and united by its substance and their act, and were prodding the rumps of the broken cattle gently with their toes, as they rode back and forth in their oblique ascent of the glaring hill, until the boy glanced up, and there was Voss, looking not at him, but forward into the distance from a crag.

As the lad stared at his leader, the sun’s rays striking the surrounding rocks gave the impression that the German was at the point of splintering into light. There he sat, errant, immaculate, but ephemeral, if he had not been supernal.

‘We will never get that far,’ muttered the gloomy Harry Robarts.

‘He would not want you to,’ said Judd.

But the boy would have jumped from his horse, and torn his knees open on the rock. As it was, aware of some disloyalty to his leader, he spat out the remains of the bitter, and now offensive gum.

‘I will stick closer than anyone, in the end,’ said Harry. ‘I will sit under the platform. I will learn languages.’

‘That is mad talk,’ protested Judd.

Both were uneasy over what had been said, because either it could have been the truth, or only half of it, and which was worse it was difficult to tell.

‘Mad,’ repeated Judd, hitting his horse with the hard, dirty flat of his hand. ‘First birds, and now languages. What languages will you learn, Harry? German?’ He had to laugh.

‘It does not matter; German or any other. I will learn to speak what Mr Voss will understand, and tell what I have inside of me.’

‘What purpose will it serve?’ asked Judd, looking at the closed rock.

He had grown gloomy.

‘Some people can write it down,’ continued the boy. ‘But I cannot write no more than speak. Not like Mr Le Mesurier. He has written it. I seen the book.’

‘Oh?’ said Judd. ‘What has he written?’

‘How do I know?’ cried the exasperated Harry. ‘If I cannot read but big print.’

So that man and boy were plunging heavily on identical horses amongst the rocks.

‘He is keeping a journal,’ the man decided, finally. ‘Like Mr Voss.’

‘It is not that,’ said the boy. ‘He has a different look. I have watched him writing it.’

‘Then we will see, I expect, some day,’ sighed the man.

‘Not us,’ sneered the boy. ‘These here deserts will see it, the pages blowing about, till the sun has burnt ’em. We will not be here.’

‘I will not die. Though I may not know enough to read,’ said the man through his blunt teeth.

‘We will all die.’

‘You are mad, Harry!’ cried Judd.

‘I know as I am somewhat simple,’ confessed the boy, ‘and cannot put things good.’

He had even forgotten Voss, who, when he looked again, was gone over the other side, and in his place were the swords of the sun, slashing at the quartz, and with less spectacular effect at a long, soft cloud of celestial wool, such as the men would not have imagined after looking so long at the dirty stuff on their own sheeps’ wretched backs. However, the cloud itself grew dirtier with the afternoon, and was increasing, and changing uglily.

Towards evening, men, horses, mules, and cattle had crossed the ridge, and were gathered at a point where a gully, descending upon a plain, joined the dry bed of a river.

‘Sure enough it will rain,’ said the men, whose eyes were already shining with moisture, and lips filling, while horses whinnied painfully, and blunt noses of cattle were snuffing.

In hopes that the river would be restored, it was thought to camp there where they were, and to beat a retreat if necessary to higher ground.

‘There are still the sheep, though,’ remembered Palfreyman.

Then, with his arm, Voss flung away the sheep.

‘We must abandon these,’ he frowned. ‘They do not keep up. They are costly in time.’

Because rain must fall at the expense of time, he frowned even at the clouds which would soon revive his own skin.

‘Given feed and water, the sheep will travel faster,’ Judd submitted.

‘No,’ said Voss. ‘No. There are too few. It is not worth it.’

A flash of green lightning cut the brown air.

‘All sheep must be sacrificed,’ shouted the German against the thunder, and inhaled until it began to appear he might burst. Then he added, more practically: ‘There is nothing to prevent Ralph and Turner from killing a couple for our own use. We will dry the mutton and carry it on.’

The hills were jumbling and rocking.

‘Somebody must inform Ralph,’ the German continued to shout, of necessity, at those others who were unbuckling girths, unknotting knots, hobbling horses, or stretching pathetic squares of canvas, to cover their unwillingness to return across the ridge.

‘Let me see,’ reflected the Voss who was as exultant as the storm.

He was never so hateful as when identifying weakness, and now, in this brown storm, almost anybody could have been accused.

Then, strangely, he altered his approach.

‘You, Frank, will better go,’ he ordered Le Mesurier, but making it a conspiracy between themselves.

For he had already sensed, early in their association, that the young man was possessed of a gristly will, or daemon, not unlike his own. Now, smiling his approval, the German’s lips were tinged with the green of lightning.

Le Mesurier, however, did not return the smile, but got upon his horse, which had remained saddled, in readiness, it seemed, and went.

From the beginning, the rider had to urge his horse. As the almost dislocated withers in front of him proceeded to toil back up the ridge, the mare’s ears remained sad, her body had become a slab, or muleflesh, for horses do associate themselves with the more rational behaviour of men, mules with none. Through the irrational, brown dusk, premature by two hours, man and horse were moving. Clouds were now so close their weave was visible, bundles of ever dirtier stuff, that were swirling and fraying, even tearing in places on the rock summit. Rocks of thunder were rolling together, so that at times the man did duck his head to avoid collision with the approaching storm, and in doing so, the brim of his hat became more ridiculously ineffectual, beating on his eyelids, and causing him pain.

Then he dragged the hat off, and stuffed it into his saddle-bag.

At once his matted hair began to stream out, and as the wind encircled the pale, upper half of his forehead, he seemed to be relieved of some of the responsibility of human personality. The wind was filling his mouth and running down through the acceptant funnel of his throat, till he was completely possessed by it; his heart was thunder, and the jagged nerves of lightning were radiating from his own body.

But it was not until the farther side of the ridge, going down, and he was singing the storm up out of him, that the rain came, first with a few whips, then with the release of cold, grey light and solid water, and he was immersed in the mystery of it, he was dissolved, he was running into crannies, and sucked into the mouths of the earth, and disputed, and distributed, but again and again, for some purpose, was made one by the strength of a will not his own.

Angus and Turner, who had crawled under a rock ledge, which provided almost a small, uncomfortable cave at the foot of the hills, looked out as darkness fell, and saw Frank Le Mesurier descending the slope. They called, and he headed towards them, the mare carefully picking her way.

The faces of the troglodytes were shiny like their own rock, as their skins had become soaked before reaching shelter. To the messenger who had just descended through the cloud, they also looked repulsively human. Sheep were huddling in the deluge, in which some of them had lain down with the obvious intention never to rise. Against rocks and scrub, lean goats were flattening their sides. The goats were most shocked by the uncompromising rain.

Le Mesurier delivered his message without dismounting.

‘Well, you had better hobble your nag, Frank, and come inside. It is good in here, and you will be one more to carry a supply of mutton in the morning.’

Thanks to their rock roof, and a handful of comparatively dry sticks, the drovers had even succeeded in starting a modest fire, and had begun to put away some stale damper and shreds of fibrous meat to the accompaniment of its sputtering. They were happy, their eyes suggested, but within human limits, so that Le Mesurier, who had been admitted to infinity at times, did not wish to enter their circle.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I shall go straight back.’

‘You are mad,’ shouted Angus, who had learnt to cherish his own limitations as a sure proof of sanity.

‘You will break your bally neck in the dark,’ shrieked Turner, hoping to encourage that possibility by his warning.

Then the lightning leapt again. For a moment the green horseman looked down at the faces of the two human animals in their kennel of rocks. However, as wind and rain were stopping mouths, he did not open his, but turned his spindly horse. Nor did he know how to address those individuals into whose souls he saw most clearly; he was too startled by them.

The mare was whinging but hopeful as she started back through the teeth of rocks. The rider gave her her head, and trusted to her instinct. By this time he was rather sunken, as if he had been so firmly contained by his envelope, that he had failed to burst out and rise to the heights of the storm. And now Voss began to go with him, never far distant, taunting him for his failures, for his inability to split open rock, and discover the final secret. Frank, I will tell you, said his mentor, you are filled with the hallucinations of intellectual power: I could assist you perhaps, who enjoy the knowledge that comes with sovereignty over every province of illusion, that is to say, spiritual power; indeed, as you may have suspected, I am I am I am …

But the young man had been submitted to such a tumult of the elements, and now, of his own emotions, he failed to catch the divine Word, only the roll of thunder departing upon the drums of wax. So he shook his numbed head, until his ears rattled.

Voss was grinning. The rider could see the mouth, for the rain had been folded away into the outer darkness. All around there was a sighing of wind, and a moon, the loveliest of all hallucinations, had slid into being. Its disc spun, and was buried, and recovered, cutting the mad, white hair of the clouds.

On the edge of the ridge, the mare paused for a while, and was swaying, and raising her head. Then she plunged down towards what, she knew, was certainty. But in that interval of rest upon the summit, Voss and the rider had touched hands, the same glint of decomposition and moonlight started from the sockets of their eyes and from their teeth, and their two souls were united in the face of inferior realities.

So like clings to like, and will be saved, or is damned.

Riding down the other side, the young man conceived a poem, in which the silky seed that fell in milky rain from the Moon was raised up by the Sun’s laying his hands upon it. His flat hands, with their conspicuously swollen knuckles, were creative, it was proved, if one dared accept their blessing. One did dare, and at once it was seen that the world of fire and the world of ice were the same world of light; whereupon, for the first time in history, the third, and dark planet was illuminated.

As he let himself be carried down the shining hillside, that was shown to be strewn with snares of jet now that the moon was fully risen, Le Mesurier was shivering. He who had carried the sun for a moment in his breast was frozen in his own moonlight. His teeth were tumbling like lumps of sugar. Any hope of salvation was, ironically, an earthly one, a little smudge of light from a candle-end, from behind a skin of canvas, at the foot of the hill.

More ironically still, the light came from the tent of Voss, who was writing in his journal, like a methodical man. The others, on that night of rain and discomfort, had made an effort to overcome the darkness, but had fallen at once into a steamy sleep; they had not bothered even to sort out the bodies, and were bundled all hugger-mugger in the second tent.

‘Is that you, Frank?’ called Voss.

‘Yes,’ said Le Mesurier, addressing the luminous canvas.

‘Did you give this message?’ the German asked.

‘Yes.’

‘In what way will the sheep behave, when they are finally abandoned?’ the light asked. ‘Do you suppose they will be in any way aware, as they stand amongst those bushes? The silence, for one thing, will sound more intense as it penetrates the wool. Still, there will be water, and grass, and they will drink and graze before they lie down and die. It is, in any case, perfectly normal for sheep to die.’

‘Yes.’

‘And we shall enjoy the advantage of the mutton from those that Ralph and Turner kill. We shall dry the meat in the sun. If there is a sun. Do you suppose, Frank, that the weather will permit of drying the meat?’

But Le Mesurier had gone.

And Voss, the man who was left alone, continued after a while to write in his journal.

After hobbling his tired mare, Le Mesurier, the still-possessed, bundled into the second tent, in which the others were sleeping, their white bellies afloat upon the darkness, together with their dreams and snores. The young man, after dropping his wet and wrinkled rags, wrapped himself in a blanket, but continued to shiver. He was tortuously stooped in the low tent, as in a womb. When he had rummaged in his pack, and found a little candle-end — very precious — and the rather dented tinder-box, and the flame was at last trembling on the wick, he lay down, but still shivering and gritting his teeth, struggling in the grip of a fever, it would appear.

Watching through his eyelashes, Harry Robarts saw Mr Le Mesurier take out that book in which he wrote so frequently. As he tossed and shivered, he was at great pains to form the words, Harry observed. Or the man’s dry mouth would suck at the air for some renewed sweetness of suffering. Until the boy, who shared the same transparent womb, longed to burst out into a life he did not know, but sensed. He was throbbing with excitement, while also afraid, as the teeth of the moon sawed away at the sodden canvas, as the slippery earth continued to heave, and the man to write in painful forms. At last Le Mesurier fell back with his head upon the saddle, and Harry Robarts watched the transparent fingers pinch the flame off the stinking wick.

Soon there was not a man awake on either side of those sharp hills, for Angus and Turner had quickly fallen into a stupor against their bit of a hissing fire.

Recently these two had become inseparable, if only through appreciation of each other’s mediocrity. In consequence, neither could apprehend the nature of their relationship, and each was flattered by it. The seedy Turner, who could not see straight except by squinting, and then was crooked in his final vision, who was spewed up out of what stew nobody had ever heard, and who had begun lately to suffer from the suppurating boils, this Turner was in love with the rich young landowner, and could not let him go from his side without he felt the draught. Ralph Angus, who had been so glossy, whose whiskers in normal circumstances wore a gallant, reddish curl — he was, in fact, the colour of a chestnut horse — would have been amused at Turner’s friendship if he had not become grateful for it. They could speak together, he had discovered, of little things. They would talk about the weather and the state of their stomachs, and end up feeling quite elevated by conversation. They would sigh like dogs, and enjoy the silences. If each had something to conceal, for Turner was possessed of cunning, and had been a pickpocket at times, and perhaps had even killed a man, while Angus had known the Palladian splendours — his godmother was the daughter of an earl, his nose had been wiped for him, and his father had grabbed several thousand colonial acres, by honest means — these running sores in their past lives had been mercifully healed by that nothingness to which their long journey had reduced the two friends.

On the night of rain when they had made themselves at home beneath the rock ledge, they were noticeably united, the splendid, glossy gentleman, who had by now acquired the colour and texture of a coconut, and the yellow reprobate, whose body was crying out through the mouths of his boils. After they had lit their little fire, of which the spitting alone was a comfort, they began to say kind things to each other.

‘Here is a pinch of tea,’ Turner said. ‘You take your quart, Ralph, and brew for yerself. I have not got the stomach for even a hot cup of tea.’

‘But you are eating,’ Angus pointed out.

‘By George, so I am. It is from habit, I assure you,’ said Turner, crooking his finger a bit from proximity to the gentleman.

‘Then you will drink from habit, too, idiot,’ said Angus. ‘Or I will pour it into the ground.’

‘If you please, then,’ said Turner, with genteel resignation.

The quart pot was soon sighing on the damp sticks. As the scum rose from the water, the men would knock it off. Each was seated tailorwise, sticking the fragments of food into his mouth, and staring far too intently at the pot, the alternative of which would have been his mate’s face.

It was at this point and from this position that they had looked out and seen the horseman descending the hill.

What they had always suspected, the lightning at once made evident: that the rider was not of their own kind. Even before he was gone, each of the cave-dwellers was raging, and longing to communicate his rage. They were brought together closer than before. Each wondered what the other had seen, although neither would have dared to speculate on the nature of his vision. Thought is very disturbing when it lights up the mind by green flashes.

Some time after Le Mesurier had left, while Turner was still picking his teeth and digesting what he had eaten, he did remark:

‘That is one I cannot cotton to, Ralph.’

The young landowner winced, and was loth to criticize a man who might possibly be considered a member of his own class.

‘He is an odd sort of cove. He is different,’ finally he replied.

‘Not so different from some,’ Turner said.

‘What do you imply by that?’ asked Angus, who did not care to become involved in any unpleasantness.

He was what you would call a pleasant fellow, no one had anything against him, and now he did a little repent of his rash friendship.

‘Eh?’ mumbled Turner, resentfully.

‘What do you mean, then?’

‘Voss is what I mean. And Le Mesurier.’

Angus tingled.

‘In this expedition, which is what it is called,’ Turner said, or whispered, rather, from habit, ‘we are made up of oil and water, you might say, and will not run together, ever.’

The whites of the young grazier’s eyes had remained very clear.

‘I have every intention,’ he said, ‘of running together with Mr Voss, who is the leader of the expedition.’

‘Oil and water,’ Turner chanted.

The fire hissed.

‘We understand each other, Ralph, you and me.’

The rich young landowner did sincerely yearn for understanding with his friend.

‘As that is a quart pot, there is no mistake about it,’ Turner assured him, and the black pot did look most convincing. ‘But that there Le Mesurier’ — how the speaker hated the name, and would roll it between his tongue and his palate, more often than not, as if to gather up a bad taste, and spit it out — ‘that Le Me-sur-ier would keep a cove guessing for years. Then you would wake up one fine day, and find as the pot was not at all what you and me thought it to be.’

The grazier was fascinated by the pot.

‘How so?’

He smiled to hide his intense interest.

‘People of that kind will destroy what you and I know. It is a form of madness with them.’

The young landowner clucked with his tongue against his teeth. He was unhappy once more. A runnel of rainwater, besides, was trickling down his neck. He was for ever shifting.

‘I know,’ pursued Turner, ‘because I have looked in the book.’

‘What book?’

‘Why, the book that Frank is always writing in.’

Angus was not aware that such a book existed, but pretended that he was. Thus he would conceal his ignorance of most things.

‘If it is his private property,’ he mumbled.

‘Naow, naow, Ralph,’ said Turner. ‘What is that?’

The hair stood up on the back of the young man’s neck. He avoided an answer.

‘What was in this book?’ he asked, unhappily.

‘Mad things,’ Turner replied, ‘to blow the world up; anyhow, the world that you and me knows. Poems and things.’

‘Poetry can be very enjoyable,’ said Angus, who had memories of young ladies seated after dinner beside lamps.

‘I do not deny that,’ Turner hastened to agree; ‘I am partial to a good read of it meself. But this was like, you might say, Ralph, like certain bits of the Bible. They are cut up, like, but to make trouble, not to make sense.’

As trouble was Turner’s own particular province, his mouth was now watering, and his eyes shone.

‘We have no right to make such comparisons, you know,’ insisted Angus, whose doubts of his friend had grown great.

‘Go on, Ralph,’ said the latter. ‘If a man don’t assume his rights, nobody is going to give ’em to him.’

The young grazier looked out into the night, on which a moon had risen. Black wings were continually sweeping the surface of the silver plain. It was the wind hustling the clouds, of course. But on several occasions during the journey, his own thoughts had developed a span that had carried them almost out of his control.

‘This is what I think, Ralph,’ Turner was saying, ‘mind you, in confidence, seeing as how we are mates. I think that Le Mesurier will in the end turn out to be in league with Voss. It is the oil, see? And that barmy boy, why, Harry would not harm a fly, but oil, oil, see, he must go over, too.’

Ralph Angus tossed what had been his handsome head. So horses will discourage the March fly.

‘I will not discuss Mr Voss,’ he said. ‘Besides, there is no question of going over to him. We are all with him.’

‘Discuss Mr Voss?’ spat Turner. ‘You cannot discuss what is not.…’

His spittle appeared white-hot, as it curled and twisted on the embers of the lost fire.

‘Do you believe in God, Ralph?’ asked Turner.

‘I should think there are very few individuals so miserable as not to,’ answered the upright young man.

Turner might have been rehearsing such a situation all his life.

‘I do not believe in God,’ he said.

A water was dripping in the silver silence.

‘Not in nothing that I cannot touch.’

He gave the quart an angry poke.

‘Do you think as Voss was reading my thoughts when he set hisself up? But I was not deceived.’

‘Are you not most unhappy?’ asked Angus, whom the disclosure had shocked considerably.

‘Oh, there is plenty of other things to believe in,’ Turner cried, looking in anguish at his friend’s face, which, however, avoided him.

‘Without dependin’ on God, who is the Devil, I would say, to have got us into a mess like this. There!’ cried the angry man. ‘That is what I think of Mr Bloomin’ Voss!’

Young Ralph Angus was so shaken he felt he could no longer call upon his own considerable virility for support.

‘Mr Palfreyman has faith,’ he remembered, with the relief of a pious girl.

‘Oh,’ shrugged Turner, ‘Mr Palfreyman is a good man.’

Consequently, he cancelled out.

The rocks in the moonlight were on the verge of bursting open, but failed.

‘There is still Albert Judd,’ murmured Turner, becoming dreamy. ‘He is ours, Ralph. He will lead us out. He is a man.’

‘I have every confidence in Judd,’ Angus agreed, but shifted his position.

‘Of course you have,’ cried Turner. ‘You only have to look at his hands.’

The young man, inside himself, in the most secret part of him, was disgusted. He could not have given himself into the hands of the convict. Something almost immodest was required of him.

Finally, he laughed it off, showing his immaculate, man’s teeth.

‘How we are talking through our hats!’ he protested. ‘I expect we are all become a bit mad by this.’

But Turner, whose mouth was stuck open, would have had to contradict his dreams. What remained of life was upon the lips, the slight, white rime of salt, which will also embitter dreams. He was snoring brokenly.

Then the young man realized the distance he had come from the Palladian façade and emerald turf into that desert country, and how he had sunk himself almost gratefully to the level of his sleeping companion. If he even sensed the existence of levels higher than that to which he had been born, he was left to wrinkle his forehead at them. So he drowsed, and wondered. And looked quickly at the sleeping Turner. He would have condemned his friend for his own thoughts. For just then Ralph Angus had been seated, rather, at the convict’s side, and together they were mending hobble-chains. The jingly chains were delightful as a childhood game. The convict could do many simple, but fascinating things: he knew tricks, and rhymes, and could take a wart off by magic. Then the young man, who had by this time crossed right over, from the outside, into the circle of sleep, watched the hands take the rope, and lasso the chestnut horse. He had learnt it at Moreton Bay, Judd explained; while the horse fought back with all his strength, the vein bursting from his glossy neck.

*

The morning that followed the storm was set in a splendour of enamels. The two stiff men were practically strutting as they performed their early ritual. Afterwards they killed two of the more respectable sheep, or rather, Angus did, while Turner offered advice in such a way that it did seem as if he were taking part in the operation. This accomplishment he had acquired while employed as a labourer at Sydney.

Once the sheep had been dressed and cut up into convenient quarters, they loaded their horses as best they could, and prepared to carry the meat across the hills, to be dried at the main camp.

The weather and the prospect of comparative comfort had rendered Turner quite merry. As he rounded up the already skipping goats, which, it was presumed, would continue to accompany the expedition, as they had received no order to abandon them, he was belabouring his horse’s rump with his hand, and singing:

‘A-jew, a-jew kind sheep,

The fatal hour has come.…’

‘Poor beggars,’ he added, ‘how glad I am to see the last of ’em.’

And settled himself in the saddle for the ascent.

As they slowly climbed, driving their small herd of goats, Ralph Angus looked back at the brown sheep standing in the plain, but turned at once, for he did not care to show any concern over what must be considered a commodity rather than an animal. Although this young fellow was possessed of great decency, naturally there were limits to what he was permitted to reveal.

Nothing untoward occurred during the short journey, except that the two horsemen were soon caught in a black net of flies that had fallen upon the meat dangling from their saddles. This caused Turner to curse and kick, and his nag in consequence to sidle and pigroot. Each provoked the other to worse.

‘By cripes,’ the man screamed at the horse, ‘one or other of us will break his neck, and both of us is fly-blown; I can feel the maggots strolling on me skin. Ralph, can you not feel ’em?’

Ralph made a face. As steam had begun to rise from the sodden earth, and the mind was already languishing, he decided it was unnecessary to reply to his friend. Besides, one of the advantages of such a friendship lay in the freedom to choose silence. Animals do not discuss. So the two men toiled on, each accepting the other’s shortcomings in gratitude for the continued enjoyment of his own. Small figures on the same mountain, they were more alike than not.

When finally the party descended into the camp, it was found that Voss, Palfreyman, and the native boy were absent on some mission of a scientific nature, it was not specified what, and that Judd was unofficially in charge. The convict decided at once to cut the mutton into strips, and to light a fire, both to hasten the curing of their meat with smoke and to keep the flies away in the process. All of this he accomplished himself, for the others were not interested. Or else they had put themselves in his hands.

There was an air of peace at that camp, since rain had drowned many doubts. Thick, turbulent, yellow water was now flowing in the river bed. Green, too, was growing in intensity, as the spears of grass massed distinctly in the foreground, and a great, indeterminate green mist rolled up out of the distance. Added to the gurgle of water were the thousand pricking sounds of moist earth, the sound of cud in swollen cheeks of cattle, and sighs of ravaged horseflesh that looked at last fed and knowing. There was the good scent of rich, recent, greenish dung. Over all this scene, which was more a shimmer than the architecture of landscape, palpitated extraordinary butterflies. Nothing had been seen yet to compare with their colours, opening and closing, opening and closing. Indeed, by the addition of this pair of hinges, the world of semblance communicated with the world of dream.

However, the moment Judd pronounced the mutton sufficiently preserved by the combined action of smoke and sun, Voss decided they must strike camp the following morning, although there was not a man amongst them who would not have preferred to lie longer on his back and contemplate the scene. As for the German himself, he had been rejuvenated by the rain, and was making little jokes of a laborious nature. During the days of gathering green and kinder light, Laura had prevailed upon him to the extent that he had taken human form, at least temporarily. Like the now satisfied earth, he was at last enjoying the rewards of wedlock. His face was even fat.

It happened on the eve of their departure from the camp beside the river that Voss and Palfreyman were seated in the brigalow shade much occupied with specimens they had taken. Palfreyman with the skins of a collection of birds, Voss with some of those butterflies which would shatter the monochrome by opening in it. Even dead, the butterflies were joyful.

‘Tell me, Mr Palfreyman,’ Voss asked, ‘tell me, as a Christian, was your faith sufficient to survive until paradise was reached?’

‘I am a poor sort of Christian,’ replied Palfreyman, who was handling a small bird of a restrained colour. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘paradise may well prove to be mirage.’

‘Admittedly,’ laughed Voss, because it was a gay day. ‘I myself am skeptisch,’ he said, waving his hand to embrace both the present landscape and his mosaic of dead butterflies, ‘although I confess to be fascinated by delusions, and by those who allow themselves to be convinced. But you, it appears, are not convinced.’

He said this quite kindly.

‘I am convinced,’ Palfreyman replied at last. ‘I believe, although there is a great deal I take on trust, until it is proved at the end. That it will be proved, I know.’

‘That is indeed faith,’ said Voss, again not unkindly, because the green plain had laid its mantle on him.

‘So my wife speaks,’ he added, from a distance.

‘Then you have a wife?’ asked Palfreyman, looking up.

‘No, no!’ protested Voss, with apparent amusement. ‘If she would exist!’ He laughed. ‘Such are the pitfalls of grammar. I acquire a wife by simple misuse of a tense.’

Palfreyman suspected this simplicity, while knowing grammatical error to be a source of great amusement to the German.

The latter now asked:

‘And you, Palfreyman, have no wife?’

‘No,’ the ornithologist confessed.

‘Not even a grammatical one,’ his companion murmured.

This was a statement rather than a question. His mirth had obviously subsided, that laughter rickety in structure which belied the well-founded voice. People would remember the German’s voice, whereas they were briefly, nervously haunted by his laughter.

Palfreyman also had exhausted a mood, it appeared, and was putting his work away, packing specimens and implements into the battered wooden cases. His celibacy was suddenly a miserable affair, that once had seemed dedicated.

‘No wives,’ he said, fastening a case firmly with a sharp, brass hook. ‘When I am at home, I live usually with my uncle, a Hampshire clergyman, for whom my sister keeps house.’

Here Palfreyman paused in telling, and Voss, in spite of his natural inquisitiveness, hesitated to encourage more. Each man realized how little he knew of the other, for each had respected his companion’s privacy out of jealousy for his own. Besides, the country had absorbed them to a great extent, and now, in the deepening shade of evening, on the edge of the brigalow scrub, they were diffident of confessing to their own lives.

Palfreyman, however, since he had dared a little, was being sucked back by the dreadful undercurrent of the past. As he could no longer hope for rescue, he continued.

‘My uncle’s vicarage would astonish any stranger expecting to find a house given up to normal human needs. Nor does this vicarage truly suggest the home of an inadequately rewarded, but devoted servant of God. Certainly it is noticeable for the advanced dilapidation of its grey stone, that the vines are opening up, or holding together, it is difficult to say which, but there are signs that the decay is not so much unavoidable as unheeded. If the roof should fall, as it well might, the neighbourhood would be roused by the most terrible shattering of glass, for the rooms are filled with glass objects, in a variety of colours, very fine and musical, or chunks with bubbles in them, and bells containing shells or wax flowers, to say nothing of the cases of humming birds. You see, my uncle, although a clergyman by name and intention, inherited a small fortune from a distant cousin. Some say that it was his downfall, because he could afford to be forgetful, but my sister, who is poor and dependent, suffers from the same disease — as well as from her infirmity, of which I will tell you.’

The narrator’s life, it seemed, was so cluttered up, he could not easily make his way between the objects of threatened glass.

‘My sister spends little enough time in the house, and probably could not remember in any detail the contents of its rooms. Dust would head her attempted list, I expect. I do not doubt her acquaintances are surprised that anyone so neat and clean, of dress and person, should be able to endure the ubiquitous dust. Moreover, thanks to my uncle’s comfortable means, she enjoys the services of two maids. What her critics fail to remember is that she constantly omits to give orders to her easy-going maids, in her great hurry to rush outside, into the garden, or the woods. My sister is particularly fond of woodland and hedgerow flowers: violets, primroses, anemones, and such-like. She will venture out in the roughest weather, in an old grey cloak, to see her flowers, and will often return with an armful of the common cow-parsley that she has been unable to resist, or a string of scarlet bryony to wear round her neck.

‘As my uncle’s tastes are similar — he is always bringing in mosses to dry, and plants to press — the parish suffers the most shocking neglect. But the sheep remain fond of their shepherds, and will go to great lengths to protect them. I have noticed that if a man is afflicted with what one might call an honest weakness, people do tolerate that fault, and will love its victim, not in spite of, but because of it. Then, there is my sister’s infirmity.’

This sat upon the brother also, the German saw.

‘My sister is several years older than I. She is become rather frail, although she continues to drive herself with her astonishing will. She is a very passionate woman. She will smash things deliberately, and cry over them afterwards, and try to fit the pieces together. Some of those glass ornaments of which I spoke. Once, when I was a boy, she flew into a rage, and threw me out of an upper window. It happened like this. On hearing a suspicious silence, I had crept into the room, and found my sister at her looking-glass. She had outlined her lips completely in red ink, giving them the arch of a perfect, but horrifying mouth. I was very frightened, which impressed itself upon her the moment she noticed me, and she immediately rushed, in her passion, and pushed me through the open window. Then, when I lay upon the ground below, calling breathlessly that I had broken my back, she raced down, screaming that she had killed me, or else I would recover, and for the rest of our lives I would be her image. It was her shoulders, she meant,’ Palfreyman explained. ‘My sister is deformed.’

Miss Palfreyman stood over the two men. She was twisting a bunch of small flowers, violets they could have been, which were her offering, but from which the flesh was coming away in terrible jerks. Of all the blots and distortions of evening, the shadow of her hump upon the ground was the most awful.

‘She was kissing me, and crying, and blaming herself, and hoping,’ Palfreyman said, ‘until I became more terrified of her love than of my own condition. Especially when the pain subsided, and I got up. For the fall had only knocked the wind out of me. Then my sister was ashamed. We both were. Only, she was resentful too. On thinking it over since, I am convinced that she would have liked to keep me in her own image, as she expressed it, so that I should be completely hers. The most I can do for her is pray constantly that I may take some of her suffering upon myself, and that I may learn to return her love in the measure that she needs. But so far, I have failed. I know when I watch her stooping on the borders of the garden, to look at flowers, or to pull a piece of southernwood or rosemary, and smell it, and throw it away, useless, and glance over her shoulder, and walk on. Or she will fly at the duties she has been neglecting: the work of the parish; and the parishioners, like uneducated people who have inherited a book they cannot read, but which flatters their pride, will be quite pleased to have her amongst them, in spite of her strangeness. None of this, unfortunately, alleviates the pain of my sister’s situation. She feels that she is doomed to remain unique. I forgot to say she has had all the mirrors removed from the house, for her reflection is a double that she has grown to hate. Of course, there are all those other objects in glass, which I have mentioned, but they, she says, distort in any case.’

‘And your uncle,’ the German asked, ‘has he not taken note of the disappearance of the looking-glasses?’

‘My uncle has been engaged for many years on a key to the Revelation of St John the Divine. I doubt he would notice the disappearance of my sister, let alone a mirror.’

The evening in which the two men were sitting had dissolved into a vast oblivion. The grey had consumed the green mist by natural process. The men themselves were cornered by it at the roots of the tree, from where the face of each appeared to the other as desirable as rafts to shipwrecked sailors.

‘Where I have failed most wretchedly,’ Palfreyman continued, ‘is in my inability to rescue my sister from her hallucinations. She cannot believe in the possibility of redemption for herself, because she does not feel she is acceptable to God. She is too plainly marked with the sign of His disapproval. Recently, she attempted to take her own life by opening her veins.’

‘And was trailing through the rooms that are filled with the jewels of glass,’ dreamed the German. ‘Her hump is less noticeable in the warm, grey cloak. By the time you reached her, she was already rather weak but glittering with blood, as she spattered the humming birds and other musical instruments.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you rescued, or condemned, your sister,’ Voss accused, ‘by denying her the Gothic splendours of death. Her intention was glorious, but you rushed and tied a tourniquet, when all you had to offer was your own delusion.’

‘You cannot destroy me, Mr Voss!’ Palfreyman insisted.

‘Then,’ continued Voss, ‘not very long after, you left for the Antipodes, and retreated farther and farther from your failures, until we are sitting beneath this tree, surrounded by hazards, certainly, but of a most impersonal kind.’

‘Yes,’ said Palfreyman. ‘Yes.’

He broke a stick.

‘I think I have realized all this,’ he said. ‘And that I did not have the strength to endure it. And must make amends.’

Then Voss, who had been watching his companion’s blurry face, knew that Palfreyman could never rescue him, as he had almost hoped during the story of the hunchback sister. Although the brother would be saved, by the strength of his delusion, the hunchback sister, together with himself, were reserved, the German suspected, for the Gothic splendours. So the moon rose in the thicket of the brigalow, and was glittering in the eyes of the condemned.

Next morning the expedition rose, and proceeded along the southerly bank of the rejuvenated river, that wound in general direction westward. Green disguised the treacherous nature of the ground, and in places, where heavier rain had fallen, there was the constant danger of pack animals becoming bogged, which did occur at intervals. Then the German’s hatred of mules became ungovernable. He would ride a hundred yards off his course in order to arm himself with a branch from a tree. At such times, the animals would smell danger from a distance, and would be sweating and trembling against his return; there were even some mules that would snatch at him with their long teeth as he passed, and jangle their bits, and roll their china eyes.

Of dogs, however, Voss showed every sign of approbation, and would suffer for them, when their pads split, when their sides were torn open in battle with kangaroos, or when, in the course of the journey, they simply died off. He would watch most jealously the attempts of other men to win the affection of his dogs. Until he could bear it no longer. Then he would walk away, and had been known to throw stones at a faithless animal. In general, however, the dogs ignored the advances of anyone else. They were devoted to this one man. They could have eaten him up. So it was very satisfactory. Voss was morbidly grateful for the attentions of their hot tongues, although he would not have allowed himself to be caught returning their affection.

By this stage of the journey the number of dogs had been reduced to two, a kind of rough terrier, and Gyp, the big mongrel-Newfoundland that had given good service as a sheep-dog in the days of sheep.

‘Gyp is in fine condition, sir,’ Judd remarked to Voss one day as they rode along.

He knew the leader’s fondness for the dog, and thought secretly to humour him in this way.

The black bitch had, indeed, flourished since the sheep had been abandoned and the ground had softened. She led a life of pleasure, and would trot back and forth on spongy feet, her long tongue lolling in pink health, her coat flashing with points of jet.

‘She has never looked better,’ Judd ventured to add.

‘Certainly,’ Voss replied.

He had ridden back for company, and now sensed that he had done wrong; he must suffer for it.

‘Yes,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘She is eating her head off, and I have been considering for several days what must be done for the common good.’

Both men were silent for a little, watching with cold fascination the activities of the fussy dog, who was passing and re-passing, and once laughed up at them.

‘I have thought to destroy her,’ said the fascinated Voss, ‘since we have no longer sheep, hence, no longer any earthly use for Gyp.’

Judd did not answer; but Harry Robarts, who was riding close by, at the heels of the cattle, looked up, and did protest:

‘Ah, no, sir! Kill Gyp?’

He was already dry of throat and hot of eye.

Others were similarly affected when they heard of the decision. Even Turner suggested:

‘We will all share a bit of grub with Gyp whenever she don’t catch. She will be fed out of our ration, sir, so there will be no drain on the provisions.’

Voss was grinning painfully.

‘I would like very much to be in a position to enjoy the luxury of sentiment,’ he said.

Accordingly, when they made the midday halt, the German called to his dog, and she followed him a short way. When he had spoken a few words to her, and was looking into the eyes of love, he pulled the trigger. He was cold with sweat. He could have shot off his own jaw. Yet, he had done right, he convinced himself through his pain, and would do better to subject himself to further drastic discipline.

Then the man scraped a hole in which to bury his dog. As the grave was rather shallow, he placed a few stones on top, and some branches from a ragged she-oak, which he found growing there beside the river.

From a distance the members of his party could have been watching him.

‘What does it matter?’ said Turner at last, who had been amongst the most vociferous in Gyp’s defence. ‘It is only a dog, is it not? And might have become a nuisance. It could be that he has done right to kill it. Only, in these here circumstances, we are all, every one of us, dogs.’

After going about for several days like one dead, Voss was virtually consoled. Burying other motives with the dogs, he decided that his act could but have been for the common good. If he had mystified his men, mystery was his personal prerogative. If Laura did not accept, it was because Laura herself was dog-eyed love.

As they rode along he explained to that loving companion who lived and breathed inside him: he had only to hold the muzzle to his own head, to win a victory over her. At night, though, his body was sick with the spasms of the dying dog. Until the continuous lovers felt for each other’s hand, to hear the rings chatter together. Truly, they were married. But I cannot, he said, stirring in his sleep, both kill and have. He was tormented by the soft coat of love. So he at once left it, and walked away. He was his former skeleton, wiry and obsessed.

At night now it would rain like bullets into the embers of the fires, and the sleeping men would stir at the report on canvas, as if they had been hit. The rain fell for the most part at night, but on one occasion men and beasts were humped against it for a whole day. Their misery continued into the night, until, suddenly, the blackness opened for the cold stars.

Then it began to rain again, and did not hold up. Nobody could conceive of eternity except as rain.

Men and beasts were grown very thin as they butted with their heads against the solid rain. Some of the men were hating one another worse than ever. Animals hate less, of course, because they have never expected more. But men grow green with hatred. Green slime was slapped upon the ground across which they were floundering. On that side of the river there were trees of shiny green with long, dark lances for leaves, which threatened the eyes and eardrums. Yet, in the condition to which they had come, the men’s souls were more woundable than flesh. One or two most dispirited individuals confessed to themselves that their greatest pleasure would have been to die.

For, by this season the land was cooling off; cold days would alternate with others of a fitful steaminess, while nights were unequivocally cold, in which flapped the wet rags of canvas and miserable flesh. Chills and fevers had broken out, besides. There was scarce one man who was not chafing the shreds of his shivering, frayed flesh, that had first been desiccated to the substance of salt cod. Greenish-yellow teeth were rattling in the skulls, from which men looked out, luminous, but deceived.

Frank Le Mesurier was the worst, who had begun the soonest, in fact the night of his ride across the mountains to deliver the leader’s message to the shepherds. He was soon mumbling of dried peas that he could not spit out of his mouth — they were fixed there in his aching jaws — and of some treasure, great chunks of smouldering ore, that would tear his hands as he tried to fetch it out of his chest, and which he must not lose at any cost.

He had grown very frail and thin, yellow, and transparent; he had the appearance of a yellow lily, but hairy, and stinking. Noticing one day how he was swaying in his saddle, Voss ordered the young man to camp inside his own tent at the next resting-place, and himself dosed him with quinine, and wrapped him in his own blankets. He was all tenderness for the patient, as if he must show the extent of his capabilites. To dispense love, he remembered suddenly. If nobody was impressed, it was not that they suspected hypocrisy, but because they could expect anything of Voss. Or of God, for that matter. In their confused state it was difficult to distinguish act from act, motive from motive, or to question why the supreme power should be divided in two. To kiss and to kill are similar words to eyes that focus with difficulty. So the others watched gravely as the German tended the sick man. His back turned to them, the physician himself was trembling, from the pains with which he was racked as the result of repeated wettings, but more especially for fear that his stock of love might be exhausted, or the bungling of divinity recognized.

When evening at last came, for they had camped early on account of the indisposition of most of the company, he ordered Jackie to come with him and lasso several of the goats which had recently kidded. While the blackfellow wrestled with the caught goats, Voss milked them — it would have been ludicrously angular on a less heroic scale — and hurried back to his patient with the rain battering the foaming pot. As night fell Le Mesurier was persuaded to swallow a few mouthfuls of the warm, hairy milk, laced with rum from a little store the prudent German had been hoarding against sickness.

As the sick man tried the milk on his tongue, Voss watched longingly, upon his hands and knees, on the tamped mud floor of the straining tent.

‘Tell me, Frank,’ he asked, ‘do you feel any easier?’

‘No,’ replied the yellow face, from which a string of milk hung. ‘It is very distressing. Everything fluctuates, and my mind and body will not coincide.’

As it continued to rain, the German retired early. Then their common fever filled the tent. But Voss was in some measure eased by the love he had dispensed; it had done more good to him than to the patient. So, with its white salve, he continued to anoint. She was dressed on this occasion in a hooded robe, of full, warm, grey rain, that clothed her completely, except for the face. He was able to diagnose from experience that her illness was that of celibate paralysis. Her stone form did not protest, however. Or expect. But awaited her implicit physician. At this stage of the sickness, he said, I will administer this small white pill, which will grow inside you to gigantic proportions. Please note: the act of giving is less humiliating than that of receiving. Can you bear to receive what will entail great suffering? He saw the smile crack open in honey-coloured stone. If I have suffered the Father, she smiled, then I can suffer the Son. Immediately he sensed the matter had attained flesh-proportions, he was nauseated. He was no Moslem. His trousers were not designed for parturition. I am One, he protested, forming the big O with his convinced mouth. And threw the pill upon the ground. But she continued to smile her inexorable smile, which signified they had been married an eternity, and that stone statues will survive the years of the Turk.

Upon waking, the German saw that they were still at sea in the night of rain, bobbing and straining, with groaning of ropes and shivering of canvas, but that there was a tallow candle, one of those he had been keeping for an emergency, set in the middle of the darkness. Le Mesurier evidently had lit the candle, and was now hoping to resist chaos. The cone of yellow light was the one reality.

‘Oh, I am sick, sir,’ he complained, when he realized he was being observed.

‘There is no need for you to tell me that, Frank,’ said Voss.

‘I do not know how to attend to myself. I have not the strength of a fly.’

In fact, he fell back then, to lie in his own misery.

Very soon Voss understood from the terrible stench that his companion had lost control of his bowels, and that, in the circumstances, he must turn to and clean the man. So he set about it, woodenly. Prospective saints, he decided, would have fought over such an opportunity, for green and brown, of mud, and slime, and uncontrolled faeces, and the bottomless stomach of nausea, are the true colours of hell.

When he was finished, and had set down the iron dish, he said:

‘But I am no saint, Frank, and am doing this for reasons of necessity and hygiene.’

Le Mesurier was shielding his eyes.

‘How you are in my debt! Do you hear?’ laughed the German.

The sick man, perceiving the vestige of a joke, did glimmer and murmur. He was grateful, too.

After Voss had thrown out the contents of the dish, he administered a little rhubarb and laudanum, with the result that the patient began to doze, but every now and then his mind would come forward out of the distance.

Once he sat up, and said:

‘I will repay you, I promise. I will not cheat you.’

And once:

‘I will let you count it over one day, perhaps, in advance, when we are together in the cave. Shall we boil the quart, Mr Voss?’

‘Not in this downpour,’ answered the German. ‘We would never succeed to coax the fire.’

‘But in this cave,’ persisted the sick man, who appeared incandescent, and added: ‘You must give it to me, though. I will put it under the blanket for safety’s sake.’

‘Give what?’ asked Voss, who was by this time drowsing again.

‘The book,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘It is in my saddle-bag. Give it to me, Mr Voss. It is the book with marbled edges.’

Like camellias, Voss remembered.

‘May I look in it?’ he asked, cautiously.

To read the past? Or was it the future?

‘No,’ Le Mesurier said. ‘It is too soon.’

Rummaging in the saddle-bag, amongst the dry crumbs of bread and splinters of petrified meat, Voss did find the book.

How powerful he was, he realized, as he knelt there holding it. Never before had he held a man’s soul in his hand.

‘Will you repay me with this, Frank?’ he asked.

‘I am not yet ready,’ Le Mesurier said. ‘Do you remember the other evening, under the trees in the Domain? I can only give you what you have given me. Eventually. But you do not know how it must be dragged up out of me, or you would not ask for it. Can you not see that it is bleeding at the roots?’

‘Go to sleep now,’ Voss advised. ‘We shall speak about it another time.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Le Mesurier, and did seem disposed to sleep, the notebook bundled for safety under the blanket.

But he sat up again, almost at once, and began to speak with comparative lucidity, wetting his feverish lips at first, for fear they might obstruct the words:

‘In the beginning I used to imagine that if I were to succeed in describing with any accuracy some thing, this little cone of light with the blurry edges, for instance, or this common pannikin, then I would be expressing all truth. But I could not. My whole life had been a failure, lived at a most humiliating level, always purposeless, frequently degrading. Until I became aware of my power. The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.’

Voss did not care to be told the secrets of others. He preferred to arrive at them by his own intuition, then to pounce. Now he did not have the advantage.

So he said:

‘You have developed a slight fever, you know. It is better that you should try to rest.’

Also he was trembling for those secrets of his own, of which it now seemed the young man might be possessed.

‘Rest!’ laughed Le Mesurier. ‘I must remind you again of the evening we spent together in the Domain, when we did more or less admit to our common daemon.’

The German was unable, then and there, to think of a means to stop the conflagration.

The sick man was burning on.

‘Of course, we are both failures,’ he said, and it could have been a confession of love.

They lay and listened to the long, slow rain, which did not quench.

‘If you were not sick, Frank,’ said Voss at last, ‘you would not believe your own ears.’

But now the young man’s eyes obviously saw.

‘It is the effect of the drug,’ explained Voss, who was himself fast succumbing.

‘You will not remember anything of what you have said. For that reason,’ he added, quite dryly, and wriggling his scraggy neck, ‘I will agree that it could be true.’

So that these two were united at last.

Le Mesurier, whose mission it was, he was convinced, to extract the last drop of blood out of their relationship, leaned forward, and asked:

‘Since I am invited to be present at the damnation of man, and to express faithfully all that I experience in my own mind, you will act out your part to the end?’

‘There is no alternative,’ Voss replied, addressing the grey-green body of his sleeping companion.

Not long afterwards the German, who had intended to examine the notebook, but refrained out of dislike, almost fear of reading his own thoughts, fell asleep, too, in the pewter-coloured light.

That morning the leader of the expedition resolved to take only the aboriginal boy and push on in search of a more suitable place in which to fortify themselves against the wet, and treat the sick. After only a couple of miles’ travel they were rewarded by sight of what appeared to be the entrance to some caves on the opposite bank of the river.

‘You go, Jackie,’ said Voss, ‘make sure this place good dry.’

But the black boy, whose naked body was shivering and chafing in a shroud of hard, wet canvas, immediately replied:

‘Too black. This feller lost inside.’

‘Dugald would not be frightened,’ said Voss.

‘Dugald no here,’ answered Jackie truthfully.

Voss cursed all black swine, but at once persuaded himself it was the rain that had made him lose his temper, for he clung to a belief that these subjects of his kingdom would continue to share his sufferings long after the white men had fallen away.

As there was no avoiding it, he spurred his unhappy horse down the yellow bank of the river, and into the flood, of which the breathtaking cold swallowed every thought and emotion. Otherwise, they were drifting deliciously. No dream could have been smoother, silenter, more inevitable. But the wretched horse, it appeared, was trampling the water, or swimming, for eventually he did scratch a foothold, heave himself up, and scramble out upon the opposite bank, there to shake his sides, until his bones and those of his rider were rattling together terribly. Jackie, who had followed, holding the tail of his brown gelding, soon stood there too, smiling and chattering with cold, his nakedness running with light and water, for he had lost his canvas cloak. Of bronze rather than the iron of most other blacks, fear and cold had refined him further into an imperial gold, so that Voss was reconciled to his slave, especially since the river had been negotiated by his own courage.

‘Now,’ he announced, ‘we will inspect the caves.’

The black boy did not refuse, but would not have gone ahead of that exorcizing magic the white man possessed. Night was terrifying, and was never quite emptied out of pockets such as these caves. He would not willingly have gone through darkness without carrying fire. Even moonlight was suspect, full of the blandishment of malicious fur, and treacherous teeth that snapped at black skin.

‘Blackfeller belong by these caves,’ said Jackie, beginning to scent something.

‘How?’ asked Voss.

The black boy could not explain his instincts, so he smiled, and swayed his head, and avoided the expectant eyes of his superior.

‘We shall soon see,’ said the German, stooping.

Immediately he entered, there was a flitting of bats. The bats flew out, screamed at the rain, circled, and for want of an inviting alternative, returned to their disturbed darkness. Alone in the landscape, the black boy began to feel it was probably preferable to follow the bats, and rejoin his master. How fortunate he was to have one. The rain was sighing with him.

It transpired that the caves were neither very deep nor very dark, for in addition to their general shallowness, a shaft descended through the cliffside into the most important chamber, and down this sleeve a dusty light poured. The floor was deep in dust, which deadened footfall, and made for reverence. There was a smell of dust and age, also possibly of human bodies, but ancient ones, and passionless at last.

Under the influence of the reverent light, the black boy was murmuring, but in his own tongue, because he was moved. Now the cave began to smell also of his live, youthful body. It appeared from his unguarded face and dreaming muscles that the place was full of a good magic.

Then Voss caught sight of the drawings.

‘What do these signify, Jackie?’ he asked.

The boy was explaining, in his own language, assisted by a forefinger.

‘Verfluchte Sprachen!’ cried the German.

For he was doubly locked in language.

As the boy continued unperturbed, the man had to recover from his lapse. He was looking.

‘Snake,’ Jackie explained. ‘Father my father, all blackfeller.’

‘Gut,’ added the boy, for the especial benefit of the German, and the word lit the whole place.

The man was yielding himself up to the simplicity of the drawings. Henceforth all words must be deceitful, except those sanctioned by necessity, the handrail of language.

‘Kangaroo,’ said the boy. ‘Old man,’ he smiled, touching certain parts.

These were very prominent, and befitting.

Although initiated by sympathy into the mystery of the drawings, of which the details fulfilled needs most beautifully, the German did retreat from the kangaroo.

He now said, rather primly:

‘Ja. Natürlich. But I like these better. What are they?’

These appeared to be an assembly of tortuous skeletons, or bundles of bones and blowing feathers. Voss remembered how, as a boy, he had flown kites with messages attached to their tails. Sometimes the string would break, and the released kite, if it did not disintegrate in the air, must have carried its message into far places; but, whatever the destination, he had never received a reply.

Now, however, looking at the kite-figures, his heart was hopeful.

‘Men gone away all dead,’ the boy explained. ‘All over,’ he waved his arm. ‘By rock. By tree. No more men,’ he said, beginning to comb the light with his dark fingers, as if it had been hair. ‘No more nothink. Like this. See?’ He laid his cheek upon his hands, seed-shaped, and his eyelashes were playing together. ‘Wind blow big, night him white, this time these feller dead men. They come out. Usfeller no see. They everywhere.’

So that the walls of the cave were twanging with the whispers of the tangled kites. The souls of men were only waiting to come out.

‘Now I understand,’ said Voss gravely.

He did. To his fingertips. He felt immensely happy.

Why can it not remain like this, he wondered to the woman who was locked inside him permanently, and who would answer him through the ends of her long, dreaming hair. She suggested: the souls of those we know are perhaps no more communicative than their words, if you wind in the strings to which they are attached, and that is why it is arranged for those to break, and for the liberated souls to carry messages of hope into Bohemia, Moravia, and Saxony, if rain has not erased; in that event, the finders must content themselves with guesses.

The man in the cave should have felt wet, and aching, and cold, but the woman’s smooth, instinctive soul caressed his stubborn, struggling spirit. Secretly he would have liked — or why secretly, for the boy would not have understood — he would have liked to contribute to the rock drawings, in warm ochre, the L of happiness.

But time was passing, bats were stirring, the boy had tired of the drawings, and was standing at the mouth of the cave, remembering that substantial kangaroo, of which he had stuffed into his belly the last singed squares of hide ten days previously. He was hungry now.

‘Nun wir müssen zurück,’ said the man, emerging from his thoughts.

Language did not bother the black: that is to say, generally he would not listen. Now he waited for the man to act. Then he followed.

During the afternoon the main party was conveyed as far as the providential caves, Le Mesurier still very weak, swaying on his horse, with Turner, Angus, and Harry Robarts by now also debilitated, though to a lesser degree. Arrived at the point where Voss and the native had swum the river, it was decided to build a raft on which to ferry to the opposite bank any stores that could suffer from a wetting. Accordingly, Judd began to fell some saplings, of which there were few enough in the neighbourhood, and those none too straight. However, he was able to hew down a bare necessity of timber. Rain could not quench him. Water had become his element, as his shining axehead swam through the wood. The saplings were soon bound together, and upon floats of hollow logs, by means of thongs cut from a cowhide that Judd had saved against the day when such a situation should arise.

In the meantime, the men had begun to curse and bludgeon cattle, mules, and spare horses into swimming the river. The animals were begging for mercy in piteous strains, but did finally hump themselves, and plunge. Goats were next shooed into the water after a preliminary scampering. This operation was nearer murder, for the rational creatures were crying as though the knife was in their throats; indeed, some of the murderers promptly felt the blade in their own. But the goats were bobbing and swimming. Their horns were ripping up the air in vain. Then it was seen that at least five of the animals would not scramble out. As they were carried past and away, one old horny doe was beseeching Voss, who began calling out:

‘Mr Judd, have you not yet prepared the raft? We shall not be across and dried before darkness overtakes us.’

Because nothing could be done for the goats.

‘Mr Judd,’ he called, ‘are you aware that flour will turn to paste in water? Put it on the raft, man!’

To such an extent was the German distressed by the fate of the goats, he was determined to make every member of his party hate him, as he pretended not to watch those decent animals descending into hell.

Presently it was the turn of the raft. This was launched with difficulty owing to the steepness of the bank and weight of the green wood, Turner complaining that his guts were busted open, but eventually the craft was bumping on the water, and its cargo loaded, for the most part flour, ammunition, Mr Palfreyman’s ornithological specimens, and plants and insects which were the property of Voss himself. While several pairs of hands steadied the tossing timbers, Judd and Jackie swam their horses across the river, bearing ropes previously secured to the dubious craft.

At this point Voss did foresee the catastrophe that would overtake them, and did almost lift up his voice, but it was too heavy. Fascinated by the doomed raft, he continued to stare. That which he apprehended almost in physical detail had to happen, so he watched, with his chin sunk upon an old woollen comforter that the sharp change in the weather had persuaded him to wind round his neck.

Judd and the blackfellow had moored the raft to a tree on the opposite bank. The plan was that the remainder of the party should swim their horses across, and join in hauling in the ropes. But this was not to be. The current took the raft, once released by hands, and as it bobbed top-heavily at the end of the ropes, solemnly tipped it up. The scene was almost exactly as Voss, in that flash, had visualized, and by this time every member of the party, watching the ridiculous object of the raft, was convinced by his own helplessness that it had to happen thus.

‘Crikey,’ Turner cried at last, ‘there goes our flour, that we could at least have used to paper the walls of the bally caves, for what looks like being a lengthy visit.’

Voss, who had ordered the loading of the flour, did not say anything. Nor did Judd.

Some of the party appeared not to care, but were spurring their horses recklessly down the bank, for, in any event, this most personal river still had to be crossed.

‘Do you think you can manage it, Frank?’ asked Palfreyman, who had already forced himself to accept the loss of his specimens as some form of retribution.

Le Mesurier, who had dismounted during the foregoing operations, was seated on a rock, holding his head. He looked very ill.

‘I cannot sit any longer on a horse,’ he said.

‘You will have to. At least a few more hundred yards,’ Palfreyman replied.

‘He will hold to his horse’s tail, and be drawn across,’ Voss decreed, and continued to explain, and to organize.

Turner, Angus, and Harry Robarts, who were clearing the water from their dazed eyes, had formed a little group with Judd. They were sheltering against one another’s bodies, and watching from the other side.

‘If you are to die, Frank,’ said Voss, ‘it will be more comfortable to do so in the cave.’

‘I do not care if I lie down here and die,’ Le Mesurier answered.

But they got him to his feet.

Then the last of the party was streaming silently, slowly, across the flood. Somewhere on either flank floated Voss and Palfreyman, each holding to his horse’s tail. But it was the central figure, or head, rather, that cut the breath, that played upon the imaginations of those who watched. Le Mesurier was pale as water. Some of the spectators wondered whether they had ever known him. He had plaited the yellow fingers of his left hand into the sharp, blue-black horsehair, but with his right he held above his head a notebook wrapped in a piece of waterproof sheeting. More than anything, he suggested a man engaged in celebrating the most solemn ritual.

Such an emotional intensity underlay this mystic crossing, that the intrusion of solid ground beneath his feet was a violent shock to the invalid. As the horse lunged free, the man was wrested out of his entranced state, and would have fallen into the mud but for the hands that were receiving him.

Seeing everyone delivered safe, Palfreyman would have liked to offer up a prayer, only this, he realized, would not have been politic, and moreover, since his immersion in the water, he doubted whether he could have found the words, so cold was his body, and unresponsive his faculties. In his numb confusion, his mind began to grope after some substitute for prayer with which to express his thankfulness, when he happened to catch sight of a battered quart pot, and cracked and swollen saddle-bag. These objects, of simple form and humble purpose, that exposure to the elements had emphasized, strengthened his sense of gratitude and trust to the extent that he resolved to proffer their images to God, and was at once consoled to know that his intention was acceptable.

Meanwhile, all those who could, had begun to haul on the moorings of the capsized raft, and after considerable struggle, succeeded in bringing it to shore. Any cargo that rope had restrained while it was upside down in the water was in such a sorry condition, it was doubtful whether it could be of further use. What remained of the flour had become a bluish paste.

Then Judd approached the leader, and with unexceptionable modesty, said:

‘Mr Voss, I must tell you I took the liberty to divide the flour into equal quantities. The second half has crossed the river on muleback. What condition it is in remains to be seen, but some of it may serve to fill a corner of our bellies, sir, when they are crying out for it.’

To which Voss made the formal reply:

‘You did right, Judd, to have the foresight.’

But he preferred to leave it at that.

Every man of them was by now the worse for the privations he had endured, and as soon as mules and horses had been unloaded and unsaddled, then hobbled, and turned free, the whole human company was glad to huddle in the shelter of the caves. It was only later that evening, after they had dried themselves at the fires that had been lit, and eaten a little of a skillaglee of flour which Judd had been able to prepare, that any real attention was given to the rock drawings. These appeared immense as the reddish light shifted over the surface of the walls. The simplicity and truthfulness of the symbols was at times terribly apparent, to the extent that each man interpreted them according to his own needs and level.

So there was ribaldry rising out of Turner, who spat, and said:

‘There is no mistaking the old man kangaroo. They have seen to that.’

He spat again, this time at the drawing itself, but the stone and ochre quickly drank his spittle down, and nobody was long humiliated.

‘Women too, eh? Or is it cricket bats?’

So he was brooding in the firelight, and wondering how he might cheat his celibacy.

Ralph Angus, who was seated beside his bawdy friend, had glanced at the drawings, and almost at once looked away. The young landowner would have been afraid of what he had seen, if he had not quickly convinced himself that he was superior to it.

On the other hand, Harry Robarts understood immediately what the drawings were intended to convey. Privation, which had reduced the strength of his body, had increased his vision and simplicity of mind, so that he was treading through the withered grass with the horde of ochrous hunters. Morning stole amongst the trees, all sound wrapped in pearly fog, the kind that lies close to the earth. The pale soles of his feet were cold with dew.

Or he stood in front of another drawing, which he proceeded to interpret:

‘See, this man is going to die. They have planted a spear in his heart. It has gone in at the back through the shoulder-blades.’

In fact, the little fishbone in faded red ochre had entered the wizened pear, that would soon be rattling in its cage of bones. The boy poked his finger between the bars, in order to touch the leathery thing.

‘Are you sure it is through the back, Harry, that the spear entered?’ the German asked, ironically.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Harry Robarts. ‘That way you do not know it is about to happen. The others prepared a plan behind his back.’

‘Other feller no like this feller. Draw picture. This feller die,’ said Jackie, who was squatting with his knees under his chin.

‘Convenience! You have only to draw the picture of your enemy, Turner, and he will die. It is simple as that,’ Voss said, and laughed.

Although addressing Turner, he was sharing his joke with Judd and Angus, who were seated at the same fire.

But there were occasions when some people refused to share the jokes of Voss.

So the latter called to the blackfellow, and went in the rain and the dusk in search of the surviving goats, and when they had caught a couple, and drawn off the little milk they had made, busied himself for the rest of the evening with his patient, who had grown delirious since the afternoon.

Le Mesurier was moving great weights. He was groaning, and pushing the sweat off his face. He was running through forests of hair. Trees let down their tails, but, repenting of their generosity, cut through his hands as far as the last shred of watery skin. Which protested and shrieked repeatedly.

‘I cannot lie and listen to this,’ cried Harry Robarts, and went and hid himself in a far corner that bats had dunged, but which was preferable, in that the silence held.

Others, too, were grumbling, though decently.

Towards morning, Le Mesurier was wrestling with the great snake, his King, the divine powers of which were not disguised by the earth-colours of its scales. Friction of days had worn its fangs to a yellow-grey, but it could arch itself like a rainbow out of the mud of tribulation. At one point during his struggles, the sick man, or visionary, kissed the slime of the beast’s mouth, and at once spat out a shower of diamonds.

‘No one will rob me,’ he shouted, and was gathering the dust with his yellow fingers, as far as the fire.

He was collecting embers, even, until Voss rose and restrained him, administering a more concentrated dose from the laudanum that remained.

In that tormented cave the German was a scraggy figure, of bare legs with random hairs upon them, but his shadow did dominate the wall.

The sleepers were ranged round two separate fires, with the exception of Palfreyman, who had spread his blanket somewhat apart, at equal distance from the two. For a long time he could not drop off, or did, but woke, and tossed, and drowsed. He would most willingly have maintained a balance; indeed, it was his one thought and desire, who was a small, weak, ineffectual man that his sister had flung upon a bed of violets. There, upon those suffocating small flowers, he had failed her kisses, but would offer himself, as another sacrifice, to other spears. The close cave intensified his personal longing. One side of him Voss, the other his lady sister, in her cloak that was the colour of ashes. Towards morning her hand, with its unnaturally pronounced finger-joints, took his hand, and they walked into the distant embers, which hurt horribly, but which he must continue to endure, as he was unfitted for anything else.

About the same hour, Voss went to the mouth of the cave. If he was shivering, in spite of the grey blanket in which he had prudently wrapped himself, it was not through diffidence, but because each morning is, like the creative act, the first. So he cracked his finger-joints, and waited. The rain was withdrawn temporarily into the great shapelessness, but a tingling of moisture suggested the presence of an earth that might absorb further punishment. First, an animal somewhere in the darkness was forced to part with its life. Then the grey was let loose to creep on subtle pads, from branch to branch, over rocks, slithering in native coils upon the surface of the waters. A protoplast of mist was slowly born, and moored unwillingly by invisible wires. There it was, gently tugging. The creator sighed, and there arose a contented little breeze, even from the mouth of the cave. Now, liquid light was allowed to pour from great receptacles. The infinitely pure, white light might have remained the masterpiece of creation, if fire had not suddenly broken out. For the sun was rising, in spite of immersion. It was challenging water, and the light of dawn, which is water of another kind. In the struggle that followed the hissing and dowsing, the sun was spinning, swimming, sinking, drowned, its livid face, a globe of water, for the rain had been brought down again, and there was, it appeared, but a single element.

The natural sequence of events soothed the superior being in his cave, to the extent that he might have fallen asleep if the gelatinous, half-created world had not loomed too close, reminding him of disagreeable things. He had to recall the soup the convict had prepared the night before from flour hidden on the backs of mules. The gelatinous mess was even less palatable in retrospect, the cook more hateful than his soup. So that the erstwhile creator was fiddling with his blanket-sleeves. Moreover, he began to have an inkling of a confession he had made, in a tent, at night, under the influence of laudanum, and in human terms.

So the divine spirit fled out, into the swirl of blown rain. The man that remained continued to watch the shiny grey soup of the prevailing flood, and for want of a better occupation, crushed an earthworm that had crawled for protection as far as the rocky platform on which he sat.

In the circumstances, it was not altogether surprising that a human figure should appear, and that this figure should develop into Judd, his head down to the new-blown rain, as he carried a quart pot.

‘I could not sleep, and as it was not raining at the time,’ the convict explained when he had approached, ‘I decided to find the goats, and have brought back a drop of milk for Mr Le Mesurier.’

Voss was furious.

‘Maybe such quantities of milk are not correct treatment for a man whose bowels are in a delicate condition.’

Judd did not answer at once. When he did, he said:

‘At all events, there is the milk.’

And he set the pot upon the floor of the cave.

During the morning, Voss administered another dose from the much reduced supply of laudanum and rhubarb. Then, after debating whether to throw out the contents of Judd’s quart, he decided on an opposite course. Seeing the convict seat himself in their vicinity, with the object of mending a broken bridle, the German persuaded the unwilling Le Mesurier to sip at the controversial milk, and was rewarded later by the patient’s suffering an access of diarrhoea.

‘Only as reason led me to expect,’ commented the physician, in pouring the milk away, again under the convict’s nose.

Judd, who had in his life experienced the cat, did not open his mouth.

‘Or else,’ said Voss, who could not let the matter drop, ‘one of the goats is sick.’

Then he began to clean up the invalid’s mess with equanimity, even love. Noble gestures of doubtful origin did stimulate him most of all. If they left him haggard, as from suffering — for he was aware of his human nature also — it was good that he should suffer, along with men.

So he looked deliberately at Judd. But the latter plied his saddler’s needle.

If it had not been for the journals that some of them kept, it would have been difficult for the members of the expedition to sense the passage of time. The days were possessed of a similarity, of sickness, and rain, and foraging for firewood, as they dripped slowly, or blew in gusts of passionate vengeance, or stood quite still for intervals of several hours, in which the only sound was that of passive moisture. Yet, a variety of incidents did also occur, or were created out of the void of inactivity, mostly quite trivial events, but which uneasy minds invested with a light of feverish significance.

There was the morning, for instance, when their cattle disappeared, such cattle as these had become, skeletons rather, from which the hair had not yet rotted. Then each of the shaggy men who had been abandoned began to wander about distraught, with his thumbs hung from the slits of his trouser pockets, looking for tracks, for dung, for some sign. If they did not communicate their distress to one another, it was because it was too great to convey, but a stranger would have read it in any of those faces, which were by now interchangeable, as the dumb creatures shambled up and down, snuffling after the rest of the herd.

A whole two days, Voss, Judd, Angus, and the blackfellow searched the country pretty thoroughly. Of all the expedition these men were the fittest, although in the case of Voss he would not have allowed himself to appear less. An effort on his part, it was an effort also on the part of Judd to continue to admire his leader, but as the convict was a fair man, he did make that effort. So they continued to roam the water looking for the lost cattle, and from a distance their employment appeared effortless.

Then they lost Jackie.

Ralph Angus cursed.

‘These blacks are all alike,’ he complained, and punished his horse’s mouth as the blackfellow did not offer himself. ‘In no circumstances are they to be relied upon.’

‘Some whites would pack their swags,’ said Judd, ‘if the road led anywhere.’

‘I have great confidence in this boy,’ Voss announced, and would continue to hope until the end, because it was most necessary for him to respect some human being.

The white men rode home, which was what the cave had become. Paths now wound from its mouth. Harry Robarts had washed his shirt, and was drying it on a string beside the fire.

The German was filled with terrible longing at this scene of homecoming. He was, after all, a man of great frailty, both physical and moral, and so, immediately upon entering the cave, he returned outside, preferring to keep company with the gusts of rain than to expose his weakness to human eyes, except possibly those of his wife.

She, however, was quite strong and admirable in her thick, man’s boots beneath the muddied habit. Her hands were taking his weakness from him, into her own, supple, extraordinarily muscular ones. Yet, her face had retained the expression he remembered it to have worn when she accepted him in spite of his composite nature, and was unmistakably the face of a woman.

Ah Laura, my dear Laura, the man was begging, or protesting.

As he stood in the entrance to the cave, he was resting his forehead against a boss of cold rock.

Thus he was seen by Frank Le Mesurier, who had recovered a little of his strength, and was moving on his bed, looking for some person with whom to feel in sympathy. Now he observed their leader. The young man was glad that Voss remained unnoticed by the others, since only those who have known the lowest depths are unashamed. For some reason obscure to himself, he began also to recall, as he did frequently in those desert places, the extraordinary young woman that had ridden down to the wharfside. He remembered her swollen lips, and what had appeared at that distance to be the dark shadows under her eyes, how she had been enclosed strictly in her iron habit, and how, while inclining her head to talk with evident sincerity to Mr Palfreyman, she had remained innerly aloof.

For some reason, obscurer still, the visionary felt carried closer to his leader, as the woman rode back into his life. He lay amongst his blankets, and let the moon trample him, and was filled with love and poetry, as is only right, between the spasms of suffering.

That night, when the rather tender, netted moon rose between layers of cloud, Jackie returned, herding the lost cattle. Moonlight was glinting on the pointed horns, that at intervals could have contained the disc itself. The skin of the boy, who sat thin and terrified on his sombre horse, was inlaid with shining mother o’ pearl.

They looked out and saw him.

‘Here is Jackie come back,’ some of them said.

At once Voss was stumbling over bodies, to reach the mouth of the cave, to corroborate.

How glad he was, then.

‘One cattle no find,’ said the boy, and was beginning to sulk at the darkness which had but lately frightened him.

His nakedness chafed the horse as he slithered silkily down.

‘Even so, you have done well,’ said the German, relieved on a scale the others did not suspect, out of all proportion to the incident.

He could not talk in front of other people, but brought a lump of damper, which was left over from their evening meal.

‘There,’ he said to the hollow boy, and, almost angrily: ‘You will have to make do with that, because there is nothing more.’

Then the German returned abruptly to his bed, and of all those present, only the aboriginal, who was well practised in listening to silence, did not interpret their leader’s behaviour as contemptuous.

Nothing was added to the incident. Voss recorded it without comment in his journal:

May 28th. Jackie returned at night with cattle, one head short. Before retiring, rewarded the boy with a ration of damper. He was quite pleased.

About this time there occurred also the incident of the mustard and cress.

Turner had been expressing himself in something like the following strain:

‘What would I not give for a nice dish of greens, cabbage, or spinach, or even turnip-tops at a pinch, with the water pressed out, and a lump of fresh butter slapped on like, or marrer from a good bone. But as long as there was greens.’

Greens they had had in small quantity, a kind of fat-hen that they would boil down occasionally, but in spite of this addition to their diet, Turner had become a scurvy mess, loathsome to see, and to smell, too.

Mr Palfreyman, who had overheard the fellow’s remark, remembered amongst his belongings some seeds of mustard and cress, which drought at first had prevented him from sowing, and which he had forgotten long before the weather broke.

Now, Turner was most repulsive to the rather fastidious Palfreyman, who, in normal circumstances, would have attended carefully to his hands, and changed his linen every day. In this he had been encouraged by his sister, whose clear, old-woman’s skin smelled habitually of lavender water or an essence of roses that she distilled herself, and whose tables were conspicuous for their little bowls of potpourri, and presses filled with the dry sheaves of lavender or yellow, crackling verbena leaves. It was, however, this same sister from whom he had run, at least, from her passionate, consuming nature, with the result that he was never finished wondering how he might atone for his degrading attitude, the constant fear of becoming dirtied, whether morally or physically, by some human being. Until the atrocious Turner, with greenish scabs at the roots of his patchy beard, and vague record of vice, seemed to offer him a means of expiation.

Once, in the cave that smelled of ashes and sickness, the ornithologist had suggested to the man that he should shave him.

‘To clean up your face and give it an opportunity of healing.’

Turner laughed.

‘I can see you shaving me, Mr Palfreyman, in the days before we lost our way.’

‘Do you not think we have found it?’ Palfreyman asked.

Turner made a noise, but submitted to being shaved.

It was a terrible operation.

When it was over, Palfreyman was sweating.

‘Seeing as it is Saturday night,’ Turner threatened, ‘I must make haste to find some moll, to lay with me on the wet grass and catch the rheumatics.’

Palfreyman flung the muck of soap and hair into the fire, where it proceeded to sizzle. His sister’s virgin soul winced; or was it his own?

Then, on this later occasion, Turner had confessed to his craving for greens. Miss Palfreyman, who preferred mignonette, was also in the habit of nursing up pots of mustard and cress, her brother remembered, and that he had those seeds in his pack, in an old japanned spectacle-case. At once he conceived the idea of sowing a bed for Turner and Le Mesurier, and went out on the very same day, into the rain, to look for a suitable site, and found one in a bed of silt, in a pocket of rock, some hundred yards from the eternal cave.

Here Palfreyman sowed, and the miraculous seeds germinated, standing up on pale threads, then unfolding. It was very simple and very quick. Several times on the crucial day, the man emerged from the cave to assist at the act, the importance of which was enormous.

So that, when he found that something had cut almost half his precious seedlings, Palfreyman’s eardrums were thundering. He began to watch for birds, or animals, and would hang about in the grey rain. His feet made sucking sounds as they changed position in the mud, while those seedlings which had not been cut continued to thrive in spite of the abominable conditions, and were growing even coarse.

But the ornithologist could not bring himself to cut. Curiosity and rancour prevented him. Until one day, as he watched from close by, Voss approached the vegetable bed, took a knife from his pocket, bent down, and cut a liberal tuft against the ball of his thumb. There he stood, stuffing the greenstuff into his mouth, like an animal.

Palfreyman was stunned.

‘Mr Voss,’ he said at last, coming forward.

‘Ach! Mr Palfreyman!’ said Voss, or mumbled greenly.

So a sleepwalker is caught, but will not understand.

‘Do you not realize how this greenstuff comes to be growing here?’ Palfreyman began.

‘It is good,’ said the German, stooping and reaping again, ‘but in such small quantities, it cannot give the greatest pleasure.’

Palfreyman was on the point of asking whether the leader knew that the seed had been sown by hand of man, but desisted. He felt that he did not wish to hear his suspicions confirmed.

When Voss was finished, he cleaned the knife of any traces of green by drawing the blade between his forefinger and thumb. Then he closed it, and put it away.

‘Tell me, Palfreyman,’ he asked, ‘are you very distressed at the loss of the specimens in the river?’

‘They were immaterial,’ shrugged the ornithologist.

‘They were the object of your joining the expedition,’ corrected Voss.

‘I am inclined to think there were other reasons,’ Palfreyman replied. ‘And we have not yet reached the most important.’

He was sorely tried, but would not yield to the impulse to believe that his leader’s behaviour or the loss of his specimens could be the ultimate in tests.

Voss was watching him.

‘Shall we walk back to the cave?’ Palfreyman asked.

He was determined to like this man.

Voss agreed that they could not benefit by continuing to stand about in the rain.

As they were nearing the cave he turned to Palfreyman and said:

‘I want you to be candid with me. Are you of Judd’s party?’

‘Of judd’s party?’

‘Yes. Judd is forming a party, which will split off from me sooner or later.’

‘I will not split off,’ said Palfreyman, sadly. ‘I am not of any party.’

‘Ach, you cannot afford to stand aloof.’

‘Perhaps I expressed myself badly. Shall we say: I am of all parties?’

‘That is worse,’ cried Voss. ‘You will be torn in pieces.’

‘If it is necessary,’ Palfreyman replied.

Voss, Palfreyman, and Laura continued to walk towards the cave. The selflessness of the other two was a terrible temptation to the German. At times he could have touched their gentle devotion, which had the soft, glossy coat of a dog. At other moments, they were folded inside him, wing to wing, waiting for him to soar with them. But he would not be tempted.

‘I will not consider the personal appeals of love,’ he said, ‘or deviate in any way from my intention to cross this country.’

Then Voss entered the cave, and Palfreyman followed, looking distressed.

As the rain continued, the prisoners were submitted to further trials, but it was still only trial by minutiae.

Whenever they remained long in any one camp, Judd invariably came into his own. He immediately found — or invented, his leader would have said — many important jobs that needed doing. He became the master of objects. So that, after they had settled into their quarters in the cave, it was not long before he decided to inspect all the leather equipment they possessed; saddles, bridles, saddle-bags, and so forth. He could be seen stitching and patching beside the slow fire, upon which a dusty yellow light descended through the shaft that served them as chimney; or else he would be mending a shirt; or he was making a series of small bags in oiled cloth for the safekeeping of their reduced stock of medicines during the interminable wet.

The flotsam Turner was fascinated by the idea of friendship with this man. Turner had lived in the streets, and made acquaintances, but the solider stuff of friendship, or the subtle colours of permanence, he had neither known nor coveted. In fact, anything that restricted sudden change had always been undesirable.

Yet, here he was, now grown wistful for the rock.

‘When we return from this here expedition,’ he said, stretching out and crossing his legs, for Turner was never occupied, ‘and have received our bounties and applause, I will get myself rigged out in something real gentlemanly, and come on a pleasure visit, Albert, to this property you was telling us of.’

‘If it is pleasure you are looking for, then you will be coming to the wrong place,’ Judd replied, with evident affection for his property as it stood.

And he held up a needle and squinted to thread it.

‘Oh, it is not feather beds, nor nothink of that description you need worry about,’ Turner hastened to correct. ‘I can doss down as good as any on the floor, in that shed, for instance, where your old woman makes the butter.’

For, through conversation, the place did exist, solidly, naggingly, in Turner’s mind.

These fanciful, though humble plans tended to make Ralph Angus irritable and rather bored, for his own estate was considerable.

‘You would be a square peg, if ever there was,’ said the landowner, who had condescended to wax some thread for the use of Judd.

‘I would not,’ protested Turner. ‘I would learn things.’

In a return to childhood, if necessary. Because dependent, it even seemed the only state desirable. He was carving his name upon the trunks of those dusty she-oaks that grew in a ragged fringe round the shack. Although alone, he was not lonely, for he had remained, as always, within call of his friend.

‘Tell us some more, Albert,’ he said, as they sat in actual person in the cave. ‘Tell us about the time the fire would not be held back, and burned the wool shed.’

‘The wool shed?’ laughed Angus.

‘Yes,’ said Judd, ‘the shed, that is, where I and my boys shear our sheep.’

‘Oh,’ said the rich young man, and showed mercy.

‘Tell us about the fox you brought home, and had on a chain, to tame,’ Turner pursued.

‘That is all,’ said Judd, out of a mouthful of thread. ‘I had it on a chain. I never did tame it.’

‘What did you do, then?’ asked Turner.

‘I shot it.’

‘Go on,’ whispered Turner, and saw the whole incident.

‘It was a sick, mangy thing,’ said Angus, ‘if it was the one I saw at Judd’s.’

Yet, the young landowner had grown to like the lag turned squatter, and sensing this himself, Judd was made melancholy for his captive fox, which had flamed on occasions, he had seen it with his own eyes, at dusk, picketed on the edge of the scrub.

One day, not long after the lamentable incident of the mustard and cress, Voss approached the three men, who were seated together as usual at the fire. Turner and Angus, who were idle, at once began to look intently at the burning sticks, while Judd continued to patch the belly of a canvas water-bag.

‘Mr Judd,’ began Voss, ‘I have intended now for some time that we should take steps to preserve our navigation instruments from the wet.’

He waited.

Then Judd replied, forcing the needle through the canvas:

‘Nothing will preserve our instruments from the wet that they are getting.’

‘How so?’ asked Voss, although it was possible that he knew.

One of his knees was bent forward. It quivered very slightly.

‘They were lost aboard the raft,’ said Judd.

It did hurt him. He could have pricked himself to distract his mind.

‘It is unfortunate,’ said Voss, ‘that you did not employ your instinct on the instruments, instead of upon the flour.’

‘Ah, that flour!’ cried Judd, suffering, as, indeed, was intended. ‘Can you not leave it alone?’

This massive man was trembling.

‘You are very touchy, I fear,’ sighed Voss.

It was not known for certain whether he had achieved his whole purpose.

‘It is a sore point with me, sir,’ said Judd, ‘the instruments.’

There was a hissing of water upon the fire, from one single drop, that fell with the greatest regularity through the rock sleeve, or chimney.

‘There is one compass, sir,’ admitted the man who was again a convict, ‘that I was carrying in my own saddle-bag.’

‘One compass?’ said Voss. ‘That will be an embarrassment if, for any reason, we are compelled to form ourselves into two parties.’

Because the implications were so insidious, nothing more was said, and he returned to that side of the cave, almost a little alcove, which he shared with Le Mesurier.

In Ralph Angus, compassion for the convict began to struggle with the conventions he had been taught to respect. Always conspicuous for his manliness, he did, however, bring himself to say:

‘I must apologize to you, Judd. I mean, for the behaviour of others.’

Guilt experienced for past behaviour of his own stiffened his already wooden words.

‘Huh,’ spat Turner. ‘To form ourselves into two parties. If there is any question of that, we are with you, Albert. With or without compass. Ain’t we, Ralph?’

Angus did not answer. He did not yet know how far he was prepared to go, and was unhappy about it, although from that moment he was drawn closer to Turner and Judd.

The incident did not develop further, or so it seemed. There were other problems, of which Le Mesurier’s illness was not the least. The sick man was recovering slowly, while remaining weak. He had reached the stage where he could sit up again in clothes that appeared too large, the bones of his hands locked together. He had grown very yellow, and the eyes in his hairy, melted face were become quite visionary, as he stared out from the mouth of the cave upon the world of grey water and the sticks of trees.

Now, from time to time, the rain would lift, literally, he felt, of something so permanent and solid. Then, in the stillness, the grey would blur with green. In the middle of the day the body of the drowned earth would appear to float to the surface; islands were breeding; and a black dust of birds, blowing across the sky, seemed to promise salvation.

Voss, for ever observing his patient, was encouraged one day on seeing the latter attempt to hobble.

‘That is right, Frank,’ he said. ‘It is good that you should make efforts, so that you will be fit to push on with me when the wet season is past.

‘You will?’ he added.

As it had never occurred to Le Mesurier that there might be an alternative, he did not ask for explanations, but answered with a flatness that matched the blue-grey water with which the afternoon was filled.

‘Of course.’

He did not look at Voss, however.

There were occasions, this fever-gutted man suspected, when his leader was not sensible of their common doom, and so, he must see for him, he must feel for him. By now he was able to read the faintest tremor of blood or earth, the recording of which was perhaps his sole surviving reason for existence.

*

Exhausted by the first few steps he had taken, he was quick to drop off that night, and Voss, after he had listened long enough to his companion’s breathing, and watched the other shapes of sleep slowly form around him in the cave, decided at last to examine the notebook. This was done quite simply once the conscience had been overcome, for the book was protruding from a saddle-bag, within easy reach, and unprotected by its sleeping owner. Le Mesurier was lying in a state of fretful innocence, in the congested light from a fire as dull and still as dusty garnets.

Voss took the book. Then, he hesitated, as if about to look in a mirror and discover the deformities he most feared.

Never one to be advised by prudence except spasmodically, he did look, of course, and was at once standing in the terrible arena of childhood, deafened by the clapper of his own heart. These are the poems of a maniac, he protested rather primly, to protect himself. If the book had not been nailed to his hands, he might even have subjected the poet to some act of brutality. Instead, he had to read, one poem in particular which Le Mesurier had, in fact, called Childhood. Under the word was drawn a line so deep it defended like a moat.

Voss read:

When they had opened us with knives, they took out our hearts. Some wore them in their hats, some pressed them to keep for ever, some were eating them as if they had been roses, all with joy, until it was realized the flesh had begun to putrefy. Then they were afraid. They hung their flowers upon a dark tree, quickly, quickly.

As for the children, they break off their tears and put them in the parents’ hands. How the tears of parents flow, their innocence returned. The dead, red flowers go gaily on the water. Beside the river, a white tablecloth is spread to celebrate the feast of children. Everyone is chattering. Bees are bumbling down the golden tunnels. Sweets of honey bribe the children to forget. Sticky mouths no longer care. Children soon forget from whom they have learnt to use the knife.

There is another side of the house on which the pine-trees stand. Contradictory messages arise, some in songs of long, low voices, some in harsh bark. We carve our intentions, but lose the key. So the trees are full of secrets and moss.

It is not known that we shall rise above the trees any afternoon we choose. We are only waiting to pin the calico wings on our backs. Parents and governesses assemble to watch, and some old people, who do perhaps see. We run, and flap, and crow, and rise — one foot? Everyone applauds, and pretends, and disperses, unaware that we have flown above the pointed trees. We enjoy the immense freedom of dreams, in which nobody believes, except as a joke, to share on coming down to breakfast.

The house of nettles is sadder. It is choked with nettles. They are growing high beneath the windows. The plaster is falling from the cornices. In the summer afternoons it rains.

Men and women exchange ideas, and grow exasperated; they cannot lean farther forward, or they would. They accept that bread-and-butter knives do not cut, and have come provided with others, which are waiting in the bedrooms. Have you noticed the veins on the thick, thinking necks?

Children are not expected to think, but are allowed to suffer, and rehearse the future, even to practise kisses on the cotton counterpanes. In at the windows floats the scent of hot, wet nettles and the long summer. The yellow dressing-table drawers are smelling of emptiness. We have not aranged our things, who will not be staying long in this house.

O childhood of moonlight and monkey-puzzles, and the solid statues! How solid, I broke off an arm to prove, and the smell of the wound was the smell of gunpowder and frost. Often the footsteps were not mine that fell along the gravel paths, but yew and laurel intervened; other voices would carry my song out of my control; the faces were not the faces I knew. All were turning gravely in the dance, only I was the prisoner of stone.

When I no longer expected, then I was rewarded by knowing: so it is. We do not meet but in distances, and dreams are the distance brought close. The glossy mornings are trampling horses. The rescue-rope turns to hair. Prayer is, indeed, stronger, but what is strong?

O childhood, O illusions, time does not break your chain of coloured handkerchiefs, nor fail to produce the ruffled dove….

During the reading of the poem, Voss hated and resented it. As mad people will turn in the street, and stare, and enter into a second mind, and mingle with the most personal thoughts, and understand, so this poem turned upon the reader, and he was biting his nails to find himself accused.

If he continued to glance through the notebook, and peer at the slabs of dark scribble, on the smudged pages, with the fluffy edges, he no longer did so with enthusiasm. To be perfectly honest, he did not wish to see, but must. The slow firelight was inexorable.

So his breath pursued him in his search through the blurred book. At that hour of night, sound was thin and terrible. Even the sleepers, who would stir, normally, and call to one another, were turned to rock, a dust of pale sleep lying on their rigid forms, of pale brown.

Then Voss found the poem, and was tearing the book apart, the better to see it. This poem had been headed by the poet Conclusion, in the same rather diffident hand, with a deep, defensive line scored underneath. He had written:

I

Man is King. They hung a robe upon him, of blue sky. His crown was molten. He rode across his kingdom of dust, which paid homage to him for a season, with jasmine, and lilies, and visions of water. They had painted his mysteries upon the rock, but, afraid of his presence, they had run away. So he accepted it. He continued to eat distance, and to raise up the sun in the morning, and the moon was his slave by night. Fevers turned him from Man into God.

II

I am looking at the map of my hand, on which the rivers rise to the North-east. I am looking at my heart, which is the centre. My blood will water the earth and make it green. Winds will carry legends of smoke; birds that have picked the eyes for visions will drop their secrets in the crevices of rock; and trees will spring up, to celebrate the godhead with their blue leaves.

III

Humility is my brigalow, that must I remember: here I shall find a thin shade in which to sit. As I grow weaker, so I shall become strong. As I shrivel, I shall recall with amazement the visions of love, of trampling horses, of drowning candles, of hungry emeralds. Only goodness is fed.

Until the sun delivered me from my body, the wind fretted my wretched ribs, my skull was split open by the green lightning.

Now that I am nothing, I am, and love is the simplest of all tongues.

IV

Then I am not God, but Man. I am God with a spear in his side.

So they take me, when the fires are lit, and the smell of smoke and ash rises above the smell of dust. The spears of failure are eating my liver, as the ant-men wait to perform their little rites.

O God, my God, if suffering is measured on the soul, then I am damned for ever.

Towards evening they tear off a leg, my sweet, disgusting flesh of marzipan. They knead my heart with skinny hands.

O God, my God, let them make from it a vessel that endures.

Flesh is for hacking, after it has stood the test of time. The poor, frayed flesh. They chase this kangaroo, and when they have cut off his pride, and gnawed his charred bones, they honour him in ochre on a wall. Where is his spirit? They say: It has gone out, it has gone away, it is everywhere.

O God, my God, I pray that you will take my spirit out of this my body’s remains, and after you have scattered it, grant that it shall be everywhere, and in the rocks, and in the empty waterholes, and in true love of all men, and in you, O God, at last.

When Voss had finished this poem, he clapped the book together.

‘Irrsinn!’ said his mouth.

He was protesting very gutturally, from the back of his throat, from the deepest part of him, from the beginning of his life.

If a sick man likes to occupy himself in this fashion, he decided.

But the sane man could not assert himself enough in the close cave.

He lay down again on his blanket, and was trembling. His mouth and throat were a funnel of dry leather.

I am exhausted, he explained, physically exhausted. That is all.

There remained his will, and that was a royal instrument.

Once during the night she came to him, and held his head in her hands, but he would not look at her, although he was calling: Laura, Laura.

So a mother holds against her breast the head of a child that has been dreaming, but fails to take the dream to herself; this must remain with the child, and will recur for ever.

So Laura remained powerless in the man’s dream.