Voss

8

BY now the tall grass was almost dry, so that there issued from it a sharper sighing when the wind blew. The wind bent the grass into tawny waves, on the crests of which floated the last survivors of flowers, and shrivelled and were sucked under by the swell. All day the horses and the cattle swam through this grass sea. Their barrels rolled and gurgled. All night the beasts were glutting themselves on dew and grass, but in the dreams of men the waves of grass and the waves of sleep were soon one. Dogs curled in pockets of the grass, shivered and bristled as they floated on their own dreams.

It was the dogs that first confirmed the German’s opinion that they must be in the vicinity of Jildra. On a certain evening, as the expedition continued to advance, the dogs had begun to whine, and gulp, and lift their legs repeatedly. Their muzzles had grown leaner, the eyes were bulging from their skulls, when, with very little further warning, suddenly foreign tails, then the bodies of foreign dogs were emerging from the grass. Thus having come together, the two parties of animals were stalking round and round, in stiff, shocked silence, awaiting some sign.

The members of the expedition had shaded their eyes with their hands, as an extension to the already broad brims of their hats, and eventually one of them, Mr Judd it was, remarked that he could see a man approaching on horseback above the waving grass. Other eyes were soon focused on this figure, who came on through the red light, firmly clamped by the thighs to the body of his strong, chestnut horse. As he advanced, erect, moving in the saddle just enough to emphasize the arrogance of ownership, it was disclosed that the man himself was of a reddish, chestnut colour, intensified by the evening sun.

There he was, at last, reining in. The suspicious horse snorted.

‘Boyle is my name,’ announced the man, on thick lips, holding out a hand that did not waver.

‘Of Jildra,’ added Voss.

‘That is correct.’

No further civilities were expended on the meeting, but Mr Boyle turned his horse and proceeded to escort the party along the track he had made by his coming. The band of sweating horses, straight mules, lowing, heavy-headed cattle, and parched, tingling men went on towards Jildra. By the time the homestead was reached, the western sky was of a blood red. The foreground had almost foundered, through which ran the figures of a number of individuals, if they were not animated, black sticks, to receive the reins from the hands of the new arrivals. Smoke was ascending, and dust fom the broad road the animals had trampled, together with the vapours of night. All was confused, nor did the approaching unity of darkness promise great consolation.

Mr Brendan Boyle was of that order of males who will destroy any distinction with which they have been born, because it accuses them, they feel, and they cannot bear the shame of it. In consequence, the station-owner had torn the boards off Homer to chock the leg of the table, and such other books as he had inherited, or even bought in idealistic youth, now provided material for spills, or could hope at best to be ignored, except by insects, dust, and mould. In his house, or shack of undaubed slab, that admitted day-and starlight in their turn, several pieces of smooth Irish silver stood cheek by jowl with pocked iron, the former dented somewhat savagely, in reprisal it seemed, for elegance. The dirt floor was littered with crumbs and crusts of bread. Birds and mice could always be relied upon to carry off a certain amount of this rubbish, but some lay there until it became petrified by time, or was ground to dust under the hard feet of those black women who satisfied the crude requirements of Brendan Boyle.

‘This is my mansion,’ indicated the latter, waving a lantern so that the room rocked, and the dimples which came when he spoke flickered on either side of his mouth. ‘I suggest that you, Mr Voss, and one or two others, peg your claims here on the floor, and allow me the pleasures of conversation, while the rest of the party enjoy the luxury of their own tents. There are plenty of blacks here, bustin’ themselves with meat and damper, who will lend a hand. Here, Jem, where the deuce,’ he grumbled, and shouted, and went outside, causing the whole neighbourhood of grass and trees frantically to rock in that same disturbed lantern-light.

Voss and Palfreyman, who were left standing in the skeleton shack, in the smell of old, hard bread and that morning’s ash, did not regret that this was the last hospitality civilization would offer them.

Later, when these two had shared with their host a lump of salt beef and some cold potatoes, which a pair of shrieking black women, naked as the night, had set on the table’s edge, he proceeded to make the conversation he craved, or rather, to disgorge out of his still handsome throat chunks of words, and opinions he was not used to confess to other men in all that vastness.

‘It is ten years now since I came to this something country,’ said Brendan Boyle, swilling the rum, to which he seemed addicted, from an ugly, iron pannikin. ‘I have done nicely,’ he said, fascinated by the eddies in his pot of rum, ‘as nicely as most people, and will do better; yet it is the apparent poverty of one’s surroundings that proves in the end to be the attraction. This is something that many refuse to understand. Nor will they accept that, to explore the depths of one’s own repulsive nature is more than irresistible — it is necessary.’

He had opened the shirt on the hair of his chest, and had sat forward, and was holding his head in his hands, and was twitching with his mouth to release the words, or some personal daemon.

‘To peel down to the last layer,’ he yawned. ‘There is always another, and yet another, of more exquisite subtlety. Of course, every man has his own obsession. Yours would be, it seems, to overcome distance, but in much the same way, of deeper layers, of irresistible disaster. I can guarantee,’ he said, stabbing the table with two taut fingers, ‘that you will be given every opportunity of indulging yourself to the west of here. In stones and thorns. Why, anyone who is disposed can celebrate a high old Mass, I do promise, with the skull of a blackfeller and his own blood, in Central Australia.

‘High Harry!’ he laughed, more for himself, and added, in a sigh: ‘Ah, dear!’

Palfreyman, who had been shifting about, thought that he would turn in, and Voss, who was growing increasingly glum, agreed that this could be a solution.

‘If that is the extent of your ambition,’ said Brendan Boyle, and spat upon the floor.

His two guests got between their blankets, where they were, while himself was gone out on last errands.

The anatomy of the house was such that, by night, it resembled a warped skeleton, so that, for a long time, Voss lay looking at the stars on the other side of that cage of bones.

Meanwhile, Mr Boyle had returned to the room which he was pleased to refer to as the Bedchamber, beyond the chimneypiece, and which was the only other room of the house. He was blundering about a good deal, and making animal noises, and exploring the darkness for its distinctive grain. His bed, it seemed, was full of giggles.

Palfreyman was already asleep, but Voss continued to stare at the restless stars until he was no longer able to identify himself.

Next morning, when host and guest of honour were standing together upon the veranda, it was possible to compare the two men — at least their outward appearances, since their souls were temporarily gathered in. Now Brendan Boyle was reminiscent of the big, rude, red potatoes, the shapely ones, but hard, with the fine red dust coating them, which is akin to the patina the man had encouraged to coat those persistent traces of aristocracy. Where these lingered formally, as in the head and throat, of course he could not destroy them. There they were; it was both sickening and sad for him. But his hands, as he spoke, or on any occasion, waited, were stroking the accretion of red dust on the bare skin of his forearms. It could have afforded him some pleasure, but his eyes, which were of a cold, unchanging green, would not convey his feelings by daylight.

At his host’s side, on the rudimentary veranda, which was all splinters, just as it had been split, stood the German, also in disguise. Blackened and yellowed by the sun, dried in the wind, he now resembled some root, of dark and esoteric purpose. Whereas the first man was composed of sensual forms, intended to be touched, flesh to be rubbed against flesh, it would not be presumed to use the second except in a moment of absolute necessity, and then with extreme caution. He stood there moistening his lips, and would have repudiated kinship with other men if it had been offered. In the presence of almost every one of his companions, and particularly in the company of Brendan Boyle, he was drawn closer to the landscape, the seldom motionless sea of grass, the twisted trees in grey and black, the sky ever increasing in its rage of blue; and of that landscape, always, he would become the centre.

The two men were evidently expecting something or someone to appear. The host was balancing on the veranda’s edge and, from annoyance at being made to wait, could very easily have toppled off. The delicate wobbling of his barely controlled body made him look ridiculous.

‘I cannot recommend these blacks as infallible guides and reliable companions,’ Mr Boyle was saying. ‘Like all aboriginals they will blow with the wind, or turn into lizards when they are bored with their existing shapes. But these two fellers do know the tribes and the country for a considerable distance to the west. Or so they tell a man. Standards of truth, of course, vary.’ Then, realizing, he added: ‘But you do not know their lingo. Dugald — that is the elder feller — has a little English. But you will not be able to make much of an exchange.’

‘In general,’ Voss replied, ‘it is necessary to communicate without knowledge of the language.’

Then the two men were looking and laughing at each other insolently, their faces screwed up, their eyes splintering. Each would consider he had gained the point.

Before they had recovered themselves, two blacks came round the corner of the house. Their bare feet made upon the earth only a slight, but very particular sound, which, to the German’s ears, at once established their ownership.

‘Well, now, since they have condescended,’ said Mr Boyle, who was not really of bad temper; if he raised his voice to a bellow, it was only because he was addressing blacks, and it made his meaning clear. ‘You, Dugald, you, Jackie,’ he said, ‘I tell you this Mr Voss go far places,’ waving his arm towards the west, ‘find new country, do good all of us, black and white feller. You stick to Mr Voss do you hear, even if you drop, you old beggar.’

Then he laughed, and spoke to the men in a few phrases of their own tongue, in a very English accent, to which they listened with that same politeness with which they received intelligence in any shape or form.

The elder native was most serious and formal. He was wearing what appeared to be a very old and floury swallowtail coat, but deficient in one tail. His black skin, which had been gathered by age into a net of finest grey wrinkles, was not tramelled further, except by a piece of bark-cloth, the colour of nature, in an appropriate place. A similar piece of cloth did cover his colleague a little; otherwise, the latter was naked, of a youthful, oily skin, and flattened features. This one, Jackie, was really quite young. He stood about with the delicacy of a young girl, looking away while absorbing all details, listening with his skin, and quivering his reactions. It was not possible to address him directly, nor would he answer, but through his mouthpiece, Dugald.

In other circumstances, Voss would have liked to talk to these creatures. Alone, he and the blacks would have communicated with one another by skin and silence, just as dust is not impenetrable and the message of sticks can be interpreted after hours of intimacy. But in the presence of Brendan Boyle, the German was the victim of his European, or even his human inheritance. So he got down from the shaky step, and advanced on the old black with his rather stiff, habitual gait and said:

‘This is for Dugald.’

It was a brass button that he happened to have in his pocket, and which had come off a tunic, of military, though otherwise forgotten origin.

The old man was very still, holding the token with the tips of his fingers, as if dimly aware in himself of an answer to the white man’s mysticism. He could have been a thinking stick, on which the ash had cooled after purification by fire, so wooden was his old, scarified, cauterized body, with its cap of grey, brittle ash. Inside the eyes moved some memory of myth or smoke.

The youth, on the other hand, had been brought to animal life. Lights shone in his skin, and his throat was rippling with language. He was giggling and gulping. He could have eaten the brass button.

On an afterthought, Voss again put his hand in his pocket and offered Jackie a clasp-knife that he was carrying.

‘Na, Junge,’ he said, with a friendliness that could not avoid solemnity.

Jackie, however, would not receive, except by the hand of his mentor, and then was shivering with awful joy as he stood staring at the knife on his own palm.

Voss, too, was translated. The numerous creases in his black trousers appeared to have been sculptured for eternity.

As all of this scene was a bit unexpected, not to say peculiar, to Brendan Boyle, the latter was itching to cut it short.

He jabbed with a finger in the old man’s shoulder-blade, and said:

‘Plenty valuable button. You take good care.’

After which, he spat, and was easing his clothes.

Boyle then proposed to Voss that they should spend the morning inspecting the sheep and goats he had selected for use of the expedition, and which would probably be found somewhere in the vicinity of a string of waterholes a mile or two north of the homestead. Voss agreed. It soon became clear that he and his host were continually humouring each other. In this way each hoped to hide the indifference he felt towards his companion, though each remained humorously aware that the other was conscious of his attitude. The agreeable part was that neither harboured actual dislike. No one could have disliked Brendan Boyle in spite of his peculiarities, and he was quite incapable of disliking for long anyone but himself.

So they set out from the slatternly settlement of Jildra, to which Voss had grown reconciled, just as he had come to accept certain qualities of his host. The smoky setting of the early morning was not unpleasing, even touching. Columns of blue smoke were ascending, a long cloud was lying flat above them, and the wisps of smoky grass, suggested an evanescence of the solid earth, of shack and tents, iron and hessian, flesh and bone, even of the rather substantial Brendan Boyle. They rode out of the jumble of grey sheds, past several gunyas, at which black women were standing, and little, red-haired boys with toy spears. Over the skins of the natives, the smoke played, and through. A yellowish woman, of spreading breasts, sat giving suck to a puppy.

‘Dirty beggars,’ coughed Mr Boyle — it was the smoke, ‘but a man could not do without them.’

Voss did not reply to what appeared, in his host’s case, obvious.

The two men rode on, in hats and beards, which strangely enough had not been adopted as disguises. In that flat country of secret colours, their figures were small, even when viewed in the foreground. Their great horses had become as children’s ponies. It was the light that prevailed, and distance, which, after all, was a massing of light, and the mobs of cockatoos, which exploded, and broke into flashes of clattering, shrieking, white and sulphur light. Trees, too, were but illusory substance, for they would quickly turn to shadow, which is another shape of the ever-protean light.

Later in the morning, when the air was beginning to solidify, the two riders were roused from themselves by sight of the promised waterholes. These might have been described more accurately as mud-pans, or lilyfields, from which several grave pelicans rose at once, and were making off on wings of creaking basket-work.

‘There are the sheep now,’ said the station-owner, pointing.

These dirty maggots were at first scarcely visible in the yellow grass, but did eventually move enough, and mill round, and stamp.

‘They are a rough lot,’ said Boyle, ‘but so is your undertaking. I am glad it is you,’ he had to add, sniggering, because in very many ways he was a schoolboy.

‘It is almost always impossible to convince other men of one’s own necessities,’ Voss said. ‘Do you believe you were convincing to us last night when you attempted to explain yours?’

‘I? What?’ exclaimed Boyle, and wondered whether his obscurer self had been caught in some indecent confession, or even act; he suspected it, but could not remember. ‘What a man lets out at night, you know, is a different thing from what he would say by day.’

He was protesting, and redder, as he searched his mind.

‘I cannot think what you are referring to,’ he concluded.

On such a mild and bountiful morning, Voss would not reveal what it was.

All this time the sheep, in their yellow wool and wrinkles, went on milling round and round, trying to find, or to escape from one another. Two black shepherds, at a distance, gave no indication of wanting to come any closer.

‘There, I think, are the goats,’ indicated Voss.

‘What? Oh, yes, the goats,’ Boyle replied.

About a hundred of these animals had gathered on the farther bank of a second waterhole, where they were climbing and slithering on the hulks of fallen trees, stretching their necks to pull at the fronds of live leaves, scratching at remote pockets of their bodies with the tips of their horns, skull-bashing, or ruminating dreamily. As the horsemen approached, the goat-mind was undecided whether to stay or run. Several did remain, and were staring up, their lips smiling, looking right into the faces of the men, even into their souls beyond, but with expressions of politeness.

‘Descendants of the original goat,’ Boyle commented rather crossly.

‘Probably,’ answered Voss, who liked them.

One aged doe had searched his mind with such thoroughness as to discover in it part of his secret, that he was, in fact, only in appearance man.

He held out his hand towards her subtle beard, but she was gone, and all of them, with hilarious noises, and a rain of black dung.

‘Come on,’ said Boyle.

If he could have attacked or accused his guest in some way, he would have, but the German had assumed a protective cloak of benevolence. As they rode homeward, the many questions that the latter asked, all dealing with the flora and fauna of the place, were unexceptionable, expressed with that air of simple benevolence. His face wore a flat smile, and there were little lines of kindness at the outer corners of his eyes.

Yet there was something, Boyle knew. He rode, answering the German’s questions, but absently flicking at his horse’s shoulder with the skein of reins.

During the remainder of their sojourn at Jildra, Boyle tried to read the faces of the German’s men for some clue to their leader’s nature and intentions. But they, if they knew, would not be read, or else were spell-ridden in the hot, brown landscape. As they went about the tasks that had been allotted to them, such business as arises during an interval of preparation and rest, the men appeared to have little existence of their own, unless it was a deeply buried one. There was Palfreyman, in a cabbage-tree hat that made him look smaller, with a clean, white handkerchief to protect his neck and throat, but which exposed, rather, his own innocence and delicacy. There he was, riding out, an old woman of a man, with the boy Robarts perhaps, and one or two natives, to secure the ornithological specimens which he would then clean and prepare by candlelight. Nothing more simplified than Palfreyman. So, too, the others were tranquilly occupied. Judd had become an immense rump as he busied himself at shoeing horses. Others were oiling firearms, greasing leather, sharpening axes, or sewing on buttons.

Except once or twice, nothing untoward occurred. On one occasion, to give the exceptions, Boyle had gone into the men’s tent, admittedly to satisfy his curiosity, and there was Frank Le Mesurier, sprawled out upon his red blanket, writing in a notebook. As Boyle was a big man, he was forced to stoop to enter the rather low-slung, oiled calico tent, then to stand hunched. He was so obvious that he made no attempt to behave casually. The blood was too thick in his fingers. Le Mesurier stopped writing, and rolled over on his book, which he could not hide effectively, because it had been seen.

‘Where is Mr Voss?’ asked Boyle.

Although he had not been looking for Voss, it was true the German was always somewhere in his mind.

‘I do not know,’ answered the young man, darkly returning the intruder’s stare. ‘He has gone out somewhere,’ he added in a hollow voice, which suggested that the speaker had but recently woken.

Then Boyle squatted down, as an opportunity seemed to be offering itself.

‘Have you known him long?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Le Mesurier answered at once, and at once began to hesitate. ‘Well, no,’ he corrected, prodding at a seam of the tent with his stump of lead pencil. ‘Let me see now. I knew Mr Voss at Sydney.’

Then he blushed and was confused.

‘It was much longer than that,’ he said. ‘It was on board the ship. Which does make it a very long time.’

Boyle’s suspicion increased. What was this young man trying to hide? Had he, perhaps, participated, or was he still participating in the German’s crime?

Le Mesurier lay there blushing dark, and resenting the intrusion more than ever. Now, as on that evening under the scrubby trees of the Domain, he felt that he did share something of his leader’s nature, which he must conceal, as, in fact, he was hiding the notebook that contained the most secret part of himself.

Boyle suspected this, but could no more snatch away the book than tear out by bleeding roots those other secrets of personality.

‘I was thinking of taking the gun down to the river, to look for a few duck that I saw making that way. Will you come, Frank?’ he now asked.

He wanted to kill something.

The young man agreed to come, rolled over, and grabbed for his hat. In the folds of the blanket there was no sign of the notebook that both knew to be there.

So they went down to the river, which had almost dried since the last rain. A brown heat was descending like a flat lid. Jildra, with its squalid pleasures of black flesh and acres of concealed wealth, was reduced to a panful of dust and stinking mud, in which Brendan Boyle himself had chosen to stick.

Once during those days, the latter approached Voss and almost asked to take part in the expedition, as if death in unpredictable circumstances were suddenly preferable to slow rotting.

Instead, they discussed water-bags.

This man has a favour to ask, the German knew, and in consequence grew wily. All, sooner or later, sensed his divinity and became dependent upon him. There was young Ralph Angus, Sanderson’s grazier-neighbour, blushing like a girl to ask an opinion. The armour of youth and his physical strength had not protected him against discovery of his own ignorance during the journey north. Turner was abject, of course, and Harry Robarts an imbecile. But Angus might prove a worthy sacrifice. The young bull of pagan rites, he would bellow and cast up his brown, stupid eyes before submitting.

Of all the company, Judd remained least changed. Voss was encouraging, but amused. The day he found the convict tarring a horse’s swollen pastern, the German’s upper lip was as long in amused appreciation as a hornet is in legs. He looked at the stooping man, and said:

‘Is it a solution you are putting, Mr Judd?’

‘It is,’ replied the latter, chasing some insect away from his face with his tar-free arm.

‘You have not omitted the oil?’ asked Voss.

‘No,’ said Judd.

Voss was whistling a little tune of insect music.

‘That is excellent,’ he said.

He continued to whistle until, Judd could feel, he was drifting on. Then the convict’s empirical nature was glad of the stench of tar, and the heat which was for ever descending and ironing the dust still flatter.

Heavy moons hung above Jildra at that season. There was a golden moon, of placid, swollen belly. There were the ugly, bronze, male moons, threateningly lopsided. One night of wind and dust, there was a pale moonstone, or, as rags of cloud polished its face, delicate glass instrument, on which the needle barely fluttered, indicating the direction that some starry destiny must take. The dreams of men were influenced by the various moons, with the result that they were burying their faces in the pregnant moon-women, or shaking their bronze fists at any threat to their virility. Their dreams eluded them, however, under the indicator of that magnetic moon. The white dust poured out from between their fingers, as they turned and turned on hairy blankets that provoked their nakedness. On the other hand, there were some who lay and listened to their own eyelids grate endlessly.

Such was the predicament of Palfreyman on one particularly white night. Unable to sleep, he had passed the time reviewing houses in which he had lived, minor indignities he had suffered, and one tremendous joy, a white eagle fluttering for a moment on the branch of a dead tree and almost blotting out the sky with the span of its wings.

The sound of the strong feathers, heard again above the squeak of mice and groans of sleep in Boyle’s squalid shack, had almost freed the wakeful Palfreyman, when Voss rose. There he was, striped by moonlight and darkness, the stale air moving round him, very softly. Voss himself did not move. Rather was he moved by a dream, Palfreyman sensed. Through some trick of moonlight or uncertainty of behaviour, the head became detached for a second and appeared to have been fixed upon a beam of the wooden wall. The mouth and the eyes were visible. Palfreyman shivered. Ah, Christ is an evil dream, he feared, and all my life I have been deceived. After the bones of the naked Christ had been drawn through the foetid room, by sheets of moonlight, and out the doorway, the fully conscious witness continued to lie on his blanket, face to face with his own shortcomings and his greatest error.

But there was an end to this unhappiness, he was surprised to find. The moonlight returned Voss to the room. As he was moved back, his bones were creaking, and his skin had erupted in a greenish verdigris.

Palfreyman nearly put out his hand, to recall them both to their normal relationship, but was restrained by an access of cold.

Next morning he remarked:

‘Mr Voss, do you know you were sleep-walking last night?’

The German was engaged in putting on his socks, his backbone exposed to his accuser.

‘I have never been known to, before. Never,’ he replied, but most irritably, as if refusing a crime with which he had been unjustly charged.

Boyle, who had just then come through the partition, scratching an armpit, felt compelled to say:

‘We welcome you, Voss, through the gate of human weaknesses.’

And was glad at last. He remembered how the yellow woman had flattened her belly against him the other side of sleep.

But Voss was grumbling. He had grown livid. All that day he remained bones rather than flesh.

All his days were wasting away in precise acts. His feet were heavy with dust as he tramped between shed, tent, and stockyard. Now his distaste for men returned, especially for those with whom he had surrounded himself, or, to be more accurate, with whom an ignorant jackass had surrounded him against his will. Blank faces, like so many paper kites, themselves earth-bound, or at most twitching in the warm shallows of atmosphere, dangling a vertebral tail, could prevent him soaring towards the apotheosis for which he was reserved. To what extent others had entangled him in the string of human limitation, he had grown desperate in wondering.

So he was chewing his pen over that journal of acts and facts, which he did keep meticulously, he was holding a narrow oblong of clean, folded paper to protect the page from other eyes and dust, at the moment when Boyle came into the room, crunching over stale bread, smelling of sweat, and said:

‘Now, Voss, I do not want to meddle in anybody’s affairs, but I would suggest you are missing the best of a good season by delaying.’

‘Yes. Yes,’ said Voss, flicking at the page with the paper shield that he held between his long, clean bones of fingers. And frowning. ‘In two, three days we shall be prepared to leave. I have a report to write,’ he added.

‘I do not want to suggest you are in any way de trop,’ said his host, and could have become sentimental, for anyone at all, even for this scraggy guest whom he did not understand, suspected, and at times had even disliked.

Boyle was not resentful. Of loving flesh, he could not have wished for better than a close companion on the same dung-heap, to sit beside, and touch.

‘Understand that, old man,’ he said, patting the German on the knee.

Voss frowned at the dust which had spurted through the open doorway and dirtied his clean paper. It was about sundown, and the blaze of light was blinding him.

‘I do not intend to inconvenience you above a day or two,’ he repeated.

With these words, spoken thus, for a second time, he realized that he was staking all. Thus, he could blame no one else for his own human weakness. He had delivered up his throat to the long, cold, glistening braids of her hair, and was truly strangling in them.

‘That is very reasonable,’ commented Boyle. ‘And Thorndike should be here by then. A black from Cubanong has just come in. Thorndike has arrived there. If they have sent up anything for you, as an afterthought, Thorndike will have it.’

‘Who is this Thorndike?’ the German asked, although he was not interested in knowing more.

‘That is difficult to answer. Thorndike is just a man. Comes and goes. Does a job here and there. He is of no importance, but useful. Brings things, you know. Mail.’

The simplicity of the clay-coloured landscape was very moving to the German. For a moment everything was distinct. In the foreground some dead trees, restored to life by the absence of hate, were glowing with flesh of rosy light. All life was dependent on the thin lips of light, compressed, yet breathing at the rim of the world.

‘That will be convenient then, and I shall leave at once on the arrival of Thorndike.’

Never had an issue of greater importance been decided so conclusively by an apparently insignificant event.

‘Take it easy, though,’ laughed Boyle, who began to suspect that other spurs had been applied to his particular friend.

‘Oh, it is natural to regret the waste of time,’ Voss shrugged and fenced. ‘And to wish to make amends for it.’

So he explained, but did not tell, absorbed as he was in his discovery: that each visible object has been created for purposes of love, that the stones, even, are smoother for the dust.

As darkness fell upon a world emptied for its complete reception, the German began to tremble in a cold sweat, with the consequence that, when the black woman brought the inevitable leg of charred mutton, he announced to his astonished host:

‘I do not think I will eat tonight. I am suffering from some derangement of the intestines.’

And avoided further explanation under cover of the difficulties of language.

For an hour or more he proceeded to pace up and down by himself, only interrupting his walk to stoop and pat the station dogs. These animals were quick to sense a desire to express tenderness, and, indeed, he was shaking with it.

To what extent would he be weakened? He could not help but wonder, fear, and finally resent.

As they waited for Thorndike, the strange moons continued to hang above Jildra, and even by day there would appear to be a closed eye, which signified the presence of a moon. Voss was for ever biting his whiskers and cracked lips. How thirsty the days were already, the ground opening in cracked mouths, in spite of that good rain, which people will always tell you has fallen. The German would go to the water-bag, and drink down pannikins full of the tepid canvassy water, which flushed his stomach. He already felt physically sick. Somewhere behind his knee-cap a time was beating, as he waited for the man Thorndike to arrive.

Early on a certain morning, the leader was suddenly moved to issue orders.

‘I will have all cattle, goats, and sheep that we are taking with us, mustered and driven into the vicinity of the homestead,’ he announced to Boyle. ‘Dugald and Jackie must go with Turner and the boy. Ralph’ — he addressed the young grazier — ‘I will put in charge of these operations. Tomorrow we will make a start.’

‘You are not waiting, then, for this feller Thorndike?’ Boyle asked.

‘Yes,’ said Voss. ‘It is certain. He will come before evening.’

Boyle was rather diverted by this intelligence.

‘The smoke messages have got going?’ he inquired lazily.

‘Mr Judd,’ Voss called, going out into the languid morning of young, silky air, ‘I wish you to make a careful count of all firearms, tools, instruments, und so weiter, that nothing is overlooked. You, and Frank, will see that horses and mules are brought in and securely hobbled tonight.’

Soon dogs were barking, children laughing, threads of dust weaving in and out of one another as a pattern began to form upon the bare earth at Jildra. Harry Robarts was by now brave enough to jab spurs into his horse’s sides, so that it would leap into action and execute proud and important figures. Harry himself had become leaner, for the distance had thinned him out. Yet, paradoxically, his once empty face was filled with those distances. They possessed, but they eluded him; he was still, and perhaps would remain always, lost.

Now, however, Harry and those with him were riding forth. Their purposes were set in motion.

Mr Judd went immediately, with his quartermaster stride, and began to account for such tackle as was in his charge. Frank Le Mesurier had already spotted the mules and horses, and their attachment of tails, occupied in the shade some little distance off. He would ride over later, as they moved to open pastures with the cool, and turn them with his whip, and they would drum the depths out of the earth as they raced up the flat towards the homestead, and pull up sharp at the yards, on their knees almost. The sky would be peacock-coloured then.

In the heat, after the men had left to muster, Mr Judd was proceeding methodically. He had a scrap of crumpled paper, on which he would make his own signs. There was a stub of lead pencil in his mouth. One of his thumbs had been badly crushed by a sledge-hammer long ago, and had grown, in place of a nail, a hard, yellow horn. Now as he worked, he experienced a sense of true pride, out of respect for what he was handling, for those objects, in iron, wood, or glass did greatly influence the course of earthly life. He could love a good axe or knife, and would oil and sharpen it with tender care. As for the instruments of navigation, the mysticism of figures from which they were inseparable made him yet more worshipful. Pointing to somewhere always just beyond his reach, the lovely quivering of rapt needles was more delicate than that of ferns. All that was essential, most secret, was contained for Judd, like his own spring-water, in a nest of ferns.

Sometimes he would breathe upon the glass of those instruments, and rub it with the cushiony part of his hand, of which the hard whorls of skin and fate were, by comparison, indelicate.

But now he complained:

‘Frank, I cannot find that big prismatic compass in the wooden frame.’

‘It cannot have got far, a big thing like that,’ answered Le Mesurier, who was not greatly interested.

‘These blacks would thieve any mortal thing, I would not be surprised,’ the convict said.

He was sweating, as big men will, in sheets, but his upper lip was marked by little stationary points of exasperation, anxiety, even cold despair.

He was looking everywhere for that compass.

‘Frank,’ he said, ‘it has got me bested. It will not be found.’

Then he went down to the gunyas, and cursed the black gins that were squatted there, looking in one another’s hair, laughing with, and tumbling the small, red-haired children. The black gins did not understand. Their breasts became sullen.

To Judd, the peculiar problem of the lost instrument was as intricate as the labyrinth of heat, through which he trudged back.

Mr Voss was furious, of course, because he had been expecting something, if not necessarily this.

Judd went away.

In the late afternoon when the other men rode in, and were watering their horses and coiling their whips, they were closely questioned, but there was not a single one could honestly feel the compass concerned him personally. At best amused, at worst they were irritated at having to turn out their packs.

Voss, who had come down to the tents, a prophetic figure in his dark clothes, said that the instrument must be found.

Boyle, too, had come across. He had questioned the blacks at the camp, and was pretty certain no native was withholding the prismatic compass.

‘Then there is no explanation,’ Judd cried, and flung his own saddle-bags from side to side, so that some of the onlookers were put in mind of the flapping, of a pair of great, desperate wings.

‘It is as if I was dreaming,’ the convict protested.

For almost all, the situation had begun to assume the terrible relevant irrelevance of some dreams. They stood rooted in the urgent need to find the compass.

Which Judd, it now appeared, was drawing out of his own saddle-bag.

‘But I never put it there,’ said his shocked voice. ‘There was no reason.’

His strong face was weak.

‘No reason,’ he added, ‘that I can think of.’

But he would continue to fossick in desperation through his memories of all evil dreams.

Voss had turned and walked away. The incident was closed, if not to his positive advantage, to the detriment of some human being. Yet, there were times when he did long to love that which he desired to humiliate. He recalled, for instance, the convict’s wife, whose simplicity was subtle enough to survive his proving of her lie. He remembered, with some feeling, the telescope that Judd himself had rigged up, and found unequal to its purpose of exploring the stars. Associated with such thoughts, of human failure and deceit, the German’s shoulders narrowed as he flumped across the dusty yard. Judd’s humiliation over the discovered compass forced him up the side-tracks of pity, until, suddenly, he jibbed. Delusion beckoned. His throne glittered achingly.

Down at the tents, Judd said:

‘Mr Palfreyman, I did not put that compass there.’

‘I believe you,’ answered Palfreyman.

‘There was no reason.’

There is always a reason, Palfreyman corrected silently, and would continue to search for this one.

Their stay at Jildra had become for the ornithologist a season of sleep-walking, dominated by his dream — it could have been — of tortured moonlight and rustling shadow, that retrospect had cast in lead. This brooding statue stumped horribly for him under the glass moon, but although Palfreyman watched — in fact, he continued to do so long after they had moved on — Voss the man did not walk again.

And now, at Jildra, something else was about to happen. Blacks scented it first upon the evening air, and dogs were half inclined to snarl, half to fool with one another. Then some of the white men, who had washed their necks and faces of dust, and who were smelling of dried water and soap, and an aggressive, crude cleanliness, came up formally from the tents to announce that a team was approaching. Distantly already the barking of strange dogs was going off like pop-guns, and the dogs of Jildra had begun to whine and to bite at one another’s shoulders, to express their joy and solidarity.

‘It is Thorndike, then,’ said Voss, running out without a hat, which left the white of his forehead exposed: he could have been emerging from a mask.

‘Damn me, if you were not right,’ contributed Boyle.

The latter was now permanently good-tempered, indifferent, acceptant, and, above all, amused.

In time the team was straining into Jildra, with that gallantry of animals reaching a goal. The bullocks groaned to a stop, and were turning up their eyes, dilating their nostrils, and, to the last, resisting the heavy yokes with their necks.

Thorndike, a scrawny, bloodshot individual, did not make any great show of pleasure, so insignificant and regular were his habits. Nor did he pay much attention to the German, about whom people had been talking; he merely handed over, as he had undertaken. For Thorndike brought, in addition to the expected provisions for Jildra, an axe that had been left behind at the station of a Mr McKenzie with whom the expedition had camped some miles farther back, as well as a bundle of mail, tied with a bow of string, for the German cove.

Voss took the mail, and was striking his leg with it as he asked Thorndike questions, flat ones about his journey and the weather, at which the other rasped back in some amusement. Thorndike had never seen a German, but was determined not to look at this one. So he spat, and worked his adam’s apple, and went about freeing his bullocks.

Presently, Voss went inside and untied his letters.

There were instructions and digressions, naturally, by Mr Bonner. There was a friendly line from Sanderson; newspapers; and a lady had contributed a fly-veil, made by her own hands, out of knotted, green silk.

There was also the letter, it would appear, from Miss Trevelyan.

When he had read or examined all else, throwing pieces of intelligence to his host, who had by this time pushed back his plate, and was picking his teeth and mastering his wind, Voss did break the seal of Miss Trevelyan’s letter, and was hunching himself, and spreading and smoothing the paper, as if it had been so crumpled, he must induce it physically to deliver up its text.

Finally he read:

Potts Point,

— Nov., 1845

Dear Mr Voss,

I must hasten to thank you for your letter, which arrived at its destination several days ago, by Newcastle packet. If the length of time needed for mine to reach you should make you suspect an utter unwillingness on my part to reply, you must take into account great and exonerating distances, as well as the fact that I have been compelled by the substance of what you have written to give it the deepest possible consideration. Even after such thought, I confess it is not clear what answer one in my position would be expected to return, and, since it is one of my most stubborn weaknesses to try to reach conclusions without the benefit of advice, I must, I fear, remain at least temporarily confused.

Your letter was unexpected, to say the least of it: that anybody possessed of your contempt for human frailty should make so unequivocal a proposition to one so well endowed with that same frailty! For, on at least one memorable occasion, you did not attempt to conceal your opinion that I was a person quite pitiably weak in character. Having formed a similar estimate of myself, I could not very well reject your judgement, even though the truth one has perceived is, if anything, more distasteful when confirmed by the mind of another, a mind, moreover, that one has held in some esteem. That you made me suffer, I cannot deny, but the outcome or purpose of that suffering still remains to be understood. In the meantime, if nothing else, my lamentable frailty does accuse my arrogance.

Arrogance is surely the quality that caused us to recognize each other. Nobody within memory, I have realized since, dared so much as to disturb my pride, except in puppyish ways. Men, I am inclined to think, are frightened if their self-importance does not impress. You, at least, were not frightened, but ignored me so coldly that I was the one to become alarmed — of my insignificance and isolation.

So, Mr Voss, we have reached a stage where I am called upon to consider my destroyer as my saviour! I must take on trust those tender feelings you profess, and which I cannot trace clearly through the labyrinth of our relationship. Can you wonder that I am confused? All the more since I have remained almost morbidly sensitive to the welfare of one whose virtues do not outweigh the many faults I have continued to despise.

Now the question is: can two such faulty beings endure to face each other, almost as in a looking-glass? Have you foreseen the possible outcome? And have you not, perhaps, mistaken a critical monster for a compliant mouse?

I, personally, to assume a most unseemly candour, would be prepared to wrestle with our mutual hatefulness, but mutually, let it be understood. For I do respect some odd streak of humanity that will appear in you in spite of all your efforts (after reading poetry, for instance, or listening to music, while your eyes are still closed), just as I regret most humbly my own wretched failures to conquer my unworthiness.

Only on this level, let it be understood, that we may pray together for salvation, shall you ask my Uncle to accept your intentions, that is, if you still intend.

In any event, Mr Voss, I do thank you once again for your kind letter, and shall intercede as ever for your safety and your happiness.

Your sincere,

LAURA TREVELYAN

Then Boyle, who had been dozing in a pleasant apathy of tobacco and half-digested meat, opened his eyes, and asked:

‘Nothing bad, I hope, Voss?’

‘Why should it be bad? No,’ said the German, who was getting up, and mislaying and dropping other papers. ‘On the contrary, I have received nothing but favourable news.’

And he tied the string tightly and methodically on his papers.

‘I am glad of that,’ answered Boyle. ‘Nothing can upset a man’s digestion like doubtful news. For that reason, I am glad I no longer receive letters, except those in black and white.’

‘None of my acquaintances is in the habit of corresponding with coloured inks,’ said Voss. ‘I think I will turn in soon, Boyle, so as to make this early start that we have anticipated.’

Now he went out into the darkness, ostensibly to issue last orders to his men, though in fact to hide himself, and failed in his real purpose, as he embraced the past tremblingly beneath a vast audience of stars.

On his return he began to notice Palfreyman, who had been there all the time, seated within the candlelight, sketching for his own pleasure a big, dreamy lily propped in a tin mug.

‘What is this?’ asked Voss, with unduly warm interest.

‘It is a lily,’ said Palfreyman, with grave concentration on his silvery sketch, ‘which I found in the red soil along the second of the waterholes.’

Voss made a lazy guess at the variety.

‘With these seeds?’ asked Palfreyman.

Voss squinted. They were of a distinct shape, like testes, attached to the rather virginal flower.

When the German had undressed and was lying in his blanket, he and Palfreyman began to recall other botanical specimens they had found, of unorthodox seed formation. Boyle had retired by now, and it was a pleasant, drowsy conversation that drifted between the two men, containing friendship, because it made no effort to.

Perhaps it is I who am frequently to blame, Palfreyman decided, and would not move for fear of breaking the spell.

‘Will you not go to bed, Palfreyman?’ Voss yawned at last. ‘We start tomorrow early.’

‘It is the lily,’ Palfreyman said, and sighed. ‘We may never see it again in all its freshness.’

Voss yawned.

‘It may be very common.’

‘It may,’ Palfreyman agreed.

Their voices were somehow complementary to each other. Like lovers.

Then Voss began to float, and those words last received. But together. Written words take some time to thaw, but the words of lilies were now flowing in full summer water, whether it was the water or the leaves of water, and dark hairs of roots plastered on the mouth as water blew across. Now they were swimming so close they were joined together at the waist, and were the same flesh of lilies, their mouths, together, were drowning in the same love-stream. I do not wish this yet, or nie nie nie, niemals. Nein. You will, she said, if you will cut and examine the word. Together is filled with little cells. And cuts open with a knife. It is a see seed. But I do not. All human obligations are painful, Mr Johann Ulrich, until they are learnt, variety by variety. But gold is painful, crushing, and cold on the forehead, while wholly desirable, because immaculate. Only resist the Christ-thorn. Tear out the black thing by the roots before it has taken hold. She was humbly grateful for it, however. In her kneeling position, she continued to bathe her hair in all flesh, whether of imperial lilies, or the black, putrefying, human kind.

After one of those pauses, in which the sleeper dries up, in which his tongue is a little pebble, and the blanket is grafted on his side, he said:

I do accept the terms. It was the sweat that prevented me from seeing them.

You are in no position to accept. It is the woman who unmakes men, to make saints.

Mutual. It is all mutual.

It was his tongue that would not come unstuck.

You have gained that point, the mouth was laughing.

Two zusammen should gain by numbers, but lose in fact. Numbers weaken.

The weaker is stronger, O Voooos.

So that the sleeper sat up, the better to look into the mouth of the lily. Instead, he found darkness and the smell of a wick, for Palfreyman was finished, and had gone to bed.

Then Voss lay down again, and pretended his sleep had not been interrupted, for he did not wish to be told that he had spoken during his dream. He was dubiously happy. He remembered whole lines of Laura Trevelyan’s letter. And her voice speaking. He would have liked to be told, in that voice, what to do next, since consummation is not an end in itself.

Next morning, in a tunnel of red light and bowed grass, Voss took his leave of Boyle, who, as the cavalcade moved forward with a surge of sacrificial animals and dedicated men, stood for a long time looking sorrowfully like something that had been abandoned on the edge of life. An old boot, in fact.

With very little warning the day opened like a square-cut, blazing jewel on the expedition, holding it almost stationary in the prison of that blue brilliance. Its progress and humble dust did begin to seem rather pitiable. The goats were obviously bewildered by the extreme imprudence of man. The sheep, on the other hand, could have possessed some understanding of foolishness, as they pushed on scraggily, staggily, through the tussocks, leaving bits of wool on the bushes, their pulsating throats already resigned. Round and about moved the magnificent men, correcting any blunders on the part of the cattle, in whose horns the long whips were frequently entwined. The men were impressing themselves, although towards noon their sense of purpose was less definite, and what had been a compact mob of moiling beasts had worn into a thin trickle.

So that after the midday halt, which was spent in the shade of some brigalow scrub, Voss called his men and divided his strength into several parts, of sheep together with goats, of cattle, and of pack animals. Thenceforth they followed at their several speeds the river-bed which Boyle had identified for Voss as the C—. Voss himself rode forward with the two blacks, Dugald and Jackie, and in that way was freed momentarily from further responsibility, and strengthened by his vision of uninterrupted space.

He was happiest with his loyal subjects.

‘You were foolish to bring along that fine coat,’ he said to the old native. ‘Now, if you lose your life, you will lose your coat too.’

Then he laughed.

The old native followed suit, bouncing lightly on his grey horse. No one had ever spoken to him like this. There was a certain absence of the expected in the white man’s words which made him shy, however.

The white man was singing:

‘Eine blosse Seele ritt hinaus

Dem Blau’ ent-ge-gen.…’

He would pause, and think, and continue to sing.

‘Sein Rock flog frei.

Sein Schimmel mit den Wol-ken

Um die Ehre rrrann.…’

He was very pleased with his song. He was singing it at the sky.

‘Nur der edle Rock zu Schaden kam,

Die Fetzen fie-len,

Den Hi-im-mel ent-lang.’

All the time the young native was keeping up a chatter to his mentor, Dugald, who was lost between several worlds.

The white man was laughing.

‘Ach, Dugald, Wörter haben keine Bedeutung. Sinnlos!

‘Nonsense,’ he added, and asked: ‘Do you understand non-sense?’

Dugald smiled. He was shy. But they were happy together.

By now the light had softened and was beginning to reveal more. Voss thought how he would talk eventually with Laura Trevelyan, how they had never spoken together using the truly humble words that convey the innermost reality: bread, for instance, or water. Obsessed by the struggle between their two souls, they had threatened each other with the flashing weapons of abstract reasoning, while overlooking the common need for sustenance. But now we shall understand each other, he said, glancing about. At that hour fulfilment did appear to prevail, in the dry river, with its recurring pot-holes of greenish-brown water, in the drifts of white flood grass tinkling on bushes, in the ugly, thumping lizards and modest birds. Through the marriage of light and shadow, in the infinite distances of that dun country of which he was taking possession, all, finally, would be resolved.

His almost voluptuously hopeful vision was broken by the younger native, who had slithered from his horse into a saucer of bare earth, and was there belabouring something with a stick. The lights in his skin were flickering frenziedly.

‘Jackie kill lizard,’ Dugald explained.

It was, in fact, one of the short, knobbly-tailed lizards. Surrendering up its life quickly and decently to the grinning Jackie, it lay with its paler belly exposed. A very little of its dark blood had trickled out of the battered mouth.

The three men rode on. The two blacks were chattering to each other. The naked Jackie dangled the stiff lizard by its tail.

‘What will he do with the lizard?’ Voss asked of Dugald.

The old man popped a bony finger into his mouth. All his grey stubble laughed.

‘It is really good to eat?’ asked the German.

Dugald restricted that possibility by waving the same, long, black stick of a finger.

‘Blackfeller.’ He laughed.

And Jackie joined in.

The two blacks jogged along, a little to one side of Voss, as if the subjects of his new kingdom preferred to keep their distance. They could even have been rejecting him. Their voices were for each other, and twining with the dust.

Other figures were beginning to appear, their shadows first, followed by a suggestion of skin wedded to the trunk of a tree. Then, at a bend in the river’s bed, the dusty bodies of men undoubtedly emerged. Dugald and Jackie averted their faces. Their cheeks were sulking as they rode. Once the old man did exchange words with some of those who had come, but tentative language, of a great formality and coldness. The strange natives looked at the white man, through the flies, and the whisks of grey leaves, with which they brushed them away. The explorer would have liked to talk to these individuals, to have shown them suitable kindness, and to have received their homage. But they disappeared. Once or twice he called to his escorts, who had decided, apparently, not to hear. They were riding faster now. The increased pace robbed the white man’s voice of its roundness: it flickered flimsily with the motion of his horse. If he turned in the saddle, and attempted to communicate directly with the strange blacks, he found himself beckoning to those same shadows which had accompanied their approach.

This was, of course, a temporary state of affairs. New hope convinced him that he would interpret the needs of all men, the souls of rocks, even. In that more tender light the bare flesh of rocks was promisingly gentle.

As evening was approaching, he resolved to camp there in the elbow of the river, and sent the natives back to convey his intention to the other members of the party. In consequence the leader was left alone for some little time, and then the immensity of his presumption did accuse him. The dome of silence was devoid of all furniture, even of a throne. So he began pulling logs together, smashing sticks, crumbling scrub, and was building their first fire. Sympathy, brilliance, warmth did not, however, immediately leap forth, only a rather disappointing flame. It was a very human fire. Walking up and down, its maker was overcome by the distance between aspiration and human nature. The latter, it appeared, was almost inescapable, like those men whose dust he could already see. Fidgeting in a similar dust, his spurs accused him of his own failures.

Of which we must make the most, Laura Trevelyan implied.

From where he was standing, he could watch the secret place at the nape of her neck, of infinite creaminess, and the swathe of greeny-white veil round the hard, dark crown of her hat. He had never yet dared to touch, except through those formal gestures society expects, or else, the formless, self-explanatory liberties of sleep. Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest. And here was the little fire that he had made. How it flickered on the smile of this girl, or woman, as she was becoming. Her throat and shoulders were both convincing and convinced. He could not see the eyes, however. Because, she said, you cannot remember. It was true. He remembered her chiefly by the words and ideas they had offered each other, and by a certain poignance of her Italian hand. So that her form remained indistinct. While suggestive of hopefulness. As she turned her rather pointed face with the unremembered eyes. He did not encourage her to approach, for he was afraid that he might receive the impression of ungainliness, dressed as she was in her thick, travel-stained habit.

Then the cries of men and animals began to break in.

Ralph Angus had cantered up, and was at once correctly informative.

‘Mr Voss, sir,’ he said, and his brick-coloured skin was very respectful, ‘the sheep are quite done up. They are a mile back, still.’

‘Good, Ralph,’ replied the German. ‘You will take Dugald or Jackie and camp near them tonight. It is late now. We shall see in the morning.’

Judd the convict was more reproachful, who came up then behind the spent cattle.

‘We did ought to camp earlier, sir,’ said Judd, but still respectful.

‘Yes, yes,’ Voss agreed. ‘We have come far. It is a mistake not to camp earlier. You are correct, Judd. If you are offering me advice I shall take it for the next occasion.’

Judd had not expected to be thus mollified by reasonableness and smiles.

With the exception of Turner, who was grumbling because his thighs were chafed, everybody was contented at the sight of fire. Cattle lumbered to a standstill, holding their masks close to the ground. Horses rubbed their faces on their wet legs. A mule dragged at the branches of a tree. And the men, though white about the mouth from thirst, jumped down, and at once assumed ownership of that corner of the dusk.

After Mr Judd had mixed flour and water, and hidden it in the ashes, and taken from that unpromising bed a huge, rude loaf, and they had cut themselves chunks of salt beef, an offering from Boyle of Jildra, and were burning their mouths on the red tea, there was little else to be desired.

‘Except that tea without milk,’ Turner grumbled, ‘is not much above medicine.’

‘If you will walk back a mile in the dark,’ suggested Voss, ‘to where the goats are camped with Mr Angus, you may have your milk, Turner, if you care to pull it.’

Some people considered this a joke of the leader’s, and laughed accordingly, but Turner spat out the bitter tea-leaves, which tasted of metal, besides.

‘Poor old Turner,’ laughed Harry Robarts. ‘You are out of luck. Better turn in.’

The boy could not stop, but continued to laugh beneath the stars. The apparent simplicity of space had deceived his rather simple mind. He was free, of past, and future. His hilarious body had forgotten its constricting clothes.

‘Turn in, Turner! Eh?’

He was so pleased, this large boy, of laughing throat.

But Turner had turned sour. He was harbouring a grievance, against no one in particular.

‘I will turn in, all right,’ he answered. ‘What else would I do?’

For a long time that night Harry Robarts continued to enjoy the joke that he had heard and the joke that he had made. Lying with his head in the crook of his arm, he discovered, moreover, that he could draw a line through certain stars, and create figures of constellations. He was dazzled in the end, if not delirious with stars. Their official names, which Mr Voss had taught him on board, he had long since chosen to forget, for the stars themselves are more personal than their names. Then he who had been dazzled became puzzled. It seemed that he had not spoken with Mr Voss for several days. So that someone else fell asleep with a grievance, and in his sleep licked the hand, licked with the tongue of a dog, down to the last grain of consoling salt, but was fretful rather than comforted.

The country round them reduced most personal hopes and fears until these were of little account. An eternity of days was opening for the men, who would wake, and scramble up with a kind of sheepish respect for their surroundings. Dew was clogging the landscape. Spiders had sewn the bushes together. And then there were those last, intolerably melancholy stars, that cling to a white sky, and will not be put out except by force.

After breakfast, which was similar to other meals, of salt meat, or of meat lately killed, with the tea they made from scum of waterholes, or from the same stuff brought on in canvas, Voss, attended by Judd, would take readings from their instruments, and attempt to assess their current position. Judd would bring out from their cloths those trembling devices in glass and steel and quicksilver. Judd was the keeper of instruments, Voss indulging his subordinate’s passion with the kindness of a superior being. He himself would sit with the large notebook upon his knees, recording in exquisite characters and figures, in black ink, the legend. Sometimes similarly black, similarly exquisite spiders replete from their dew-feast, would trample in his hair, and have to be brushed off. These small insects could affront him most severely. By this time the air was no longer smelling of dew; it had begun again to smell of dust. Men were buckling girths, and swearing oaths through thinner lips. As the sun mounted, the skin was tightening on their skulls. Some of them winced, and averted their eyes from those flashing instruments with which Voss and Judd professed to be plotting, in opposition to Providence. The sceptics would ride on, however, because they were committed to it, and because by now their minds and limbs had accepted a certain ritual of inspired motion.

So they advanced into that country which now possessed them, looking back in amazement at their actual lives, in which they had got drunk, lain with women under placid trees, thought to offer their souls to God, or driven the knife into His image, some other man.

Then, suddenly, Voss looked in his journal and saw that the following day would be Christmas. By some instinct for self-preservation, he would not have spoken of it, and most of his men, dependent on him for every judgement or calculation, would have ridden quietly by.

Palfreyman realized, but as he was not a man to act, an observer, rather, or sufferer of life, he was waiting to see.

If, in the case of Voss, it was the instinct for self-preservation that warned him to avoid Christmas, in Judd’s case it was the instinct for self-assertion that caused him to remember. Since his death by whips and iron, he had aspired longingly at times to be reborn, and when more hopefully than at that season, at which, he sensed now, they had arrived. If he had not succeeded all those years, in the loving bosom of his family, it was perhaps because he was shy of eyes that had witnessed something of his sufferings. But to these mates, and even to the knowing German, he was a stone man. Then it would be easier, given the opportunity, to crack open and disclose all manner of unexpected ores, even a whole human being.

So the emancipist was expectant. He was always urging his horse forward, and hesitating, and reining it back. He must only choose the moment, but would speak soon, he knew. His shirt was shining and transparent with sweat, over the old wounds, and clumsy labouring of great ribs, as he tidied the edges of his mob of cattle, and watched the point at which the German was riding with Mr Palfreyman. The backs of the two gentlemen ahead remained quite flat and unconscious, while the figure of Judd, labouring always with his cattle and his thoughts, loomed like sculpture.

They had entered, as it happened, a valley sculptured in red rock and quartz, in which a river ran, rather shallow and emotional, but a river of live water such as they could remember, through the valley of wet grass. Heat appeared to intensify the green of a variety of splendid trees, some sprouting with hair or swords, others slowly succumbing to a fleshy jasmine, of which the arms were wound round and round their limbs. These deadly garlands were quite festive in immediate effect, as they glimmered against the bodies of their hosts. The breath of jasmine cajoled the air. Platters of leaves presented gifts of moisture. And there were the birds. Their revels were filling the air with cries and feathers, rackety screams of utter abandon, flashes of saffron, bursts of crimson, although there were also other more sombre birds that would fly silently into the thoughts of men like dreadful arrows.

When it was almost noon, and the valley had narrowed to a neck, the convict left his cattle, which were tired and unwilling, and rode forward.

He said:

‘Mr Voss, I reckon it is near Christmas. If it is not tomorrow, it is soon after.’

Then they listened to the silence.

If he had been given to irony, Palfreyman would have indulged in it at this point, but as he was not, he looked at the grass, and waited.

‘Yes, you are correct, Judd,’ said Voss.

The birds were screaming and ascending in red riot.

‘It is tomorrow,’ said the German precisely.

All round this group hung the heat in sheets of damp silence.

‘It did not occur to me to mention it,’ said Voss. ‘You know, in such circumstances.’

He let his hand fall limply, as if his own body were as much to blame.

‘But if this festival will mean anything to you, Judd, personally, or to any of the other men, then certainly must we celebrate it.’

‘I would like to celebrate Christmas, sir,’ said Judd.

Once he would have looked to Palfreyman, even last week he might have, but did not now. This rather massive man, sitting astride his caked horse, was not in need of support for the present.

Instead, it was Palfreyman who felt the need to follow. He hastened to add:

‘I, too, would like to celebrate Christmas.’

It was perfectly natural that any Christian should wish to join the emancipated convict at this season of complete emancipation, yet Voss, who feared union, most of all one in which he himself might become involved, suspected snares.

‘Good,’ he said, wetting his lips, and smiling painfully. ‘Then, what would you suggest, Judd?’

He waited to hear something he would hate.

‘I would suggest, sir, that we call a halt just where we are. It is a pleasant spot,’ the convict said, and indeed, it was reflected in his face, a place of large leaves and consoling water. ‘If you agree, I will kill a sheep, that we will eat tomorrow. I will make a pudding or two, not the real thing, like, but to deceive ourselves. I am not going to suggest, sir, how we should spend Christmas Day. Every man will have his own ideas.’

‘We could read the service,’ he did add, as a careful after-thought.

‘Let us, at least, call the halt,’ said Voss, and, riding into the shadow of a tree, flung his hat down, then himself.

Judd took command. His face was glad, Palfreyman saw. Calling to his mates as they approached, throwing out his thick, hairy arm, signalling to them to dispose of beasts and baggage in a final halt, the convict had become a man of stature. Little signs of hopefulness were playing round his mouth amongst the lively points of perspiration. The strength of innocence can but increase, Palfreyman realized, and was himself glad.

Then, as he was exhausted by the luxuriance of unwonted green, by the habitual heat, as well as by the challenge of souls that he had just witnessed, the ornithologist went and joined the German in the shadow of his tree.

‘It is not splendid?’ asked Voss, admiring the prospect of sculptural red rocks and tapestries of musical green which the valley contained.

Palfreyman agreed.

‘Ennobling and eternal,’ persisted the German. ‘This I can apprehend.’

Because it is mine, by illusion, it was implied, and so the ornithologist sensed. By now, moreover, the latter had learnt to read the eyes.

‘Yet, to drag in the miserable fetish that this man has insisted on! Of Jesus Christ!’

The vision that rose before the German’s eyes was, indeed, most horrible. The racked flesh had begun to suppurate, the soul had emerged, and gone flapping down the ages with slow, suffocating beat of wings.

As the great hawk flew down the valley, Turner did take a shot at it, but missed. It was the glare he blamed.

During the afternoon Voss continued in his journal the copious and satisfying record of their journey through his country, and succeeded in bringing the narrative up to date. As he sat writing upon his knees, the scrub was smouldering with his shirt of crimson flannel, the parting present of his friend and patron, Edmund Bonner. If there were times when the German’s eyes suggested that their fire might eventually break out and consume his wiry frame, as true fire will lick up a patch of tortured scrub, in a puff of smoke and a pistol shot, on this occasion he was ever looking up and out, with, on the whole, an expression of benevolent amusement for that scene in which his men were preparing a feast.

‘Do you appreciate with me the spectacle of such pagan survivals?’ he called once to Palfreyman, and laughed.

For Judd had seized the lamb, or stained wether, and plunged the knife into its throat, and the blood had spurted out. Several of his laughing audience were splashed.

Judd himself was painted liberally with the blood of the kicking sheep. Afterwards he hung its still carcass on a tree, and fetched its innards out, while the others lay in the grass, and felt the sweat stiffen on them, and talked together peacefully, or thought, or chewed the stems of the fat grass. Although they appeared to ignore the butcher, they were implicitly but the circumference of that grassy circle. Judd was the centre, as he plunged his arms into the blue cavern of the sheep.

Watching from his distance, Voss remembered the picnic by the sea, at which he had spoken with Laura Trevelyan, and they had made a circle of their own. As he saw it now, perfection is always circular, enclosed. So that Judd’s circle was enviable. Too late, Laura said, or it was the shiny, indigenous leaves in which a little breeze had started up. All the immediate world was soon swimming in the same liquid green. She was clothed in it. Green shadows almost disguised her face, where she walked amongst the men, to whom, it appeared, she was known, as others were always known to one another, from childhood, or by instinct. Only he was the passing acquaintance, at whom she did glance once, since it was unavoidable. Then he noticed how her greenish flesh was spotted with blood from that same sheep, and that she would laugh at, and understand the jokes shared with others, while he continued to express himself in foreign words, in whichever language he used, his own included.

Laura Trevelyan understood perfectly all the preliminaries of Judd’s feast. It would be quite simple, humble, as she saw it; they would eat the meat with their hands, all of them, together, and in that way, it would become an act of praise.

As the day grew to an end, and preparations for the feast were completed, Voss grew angry and depressed.

The same night, after the fires had been lit, and the carcass of the sheep that would be eaten for Christmas was a sliver of white on the dark tree, Judd took fat, and tossed the liver in a pan, and when it was done, brought it to his leader.

‘Here is a fine piece of liver, sir, done as nice as you would see it.’

But Voss said:

‘Thank you, Judd. I cannot. It is the heat. I will not eat tonight.’

He could not. The liver stank.

When Judd went away, which he did as respectfully as ever, he had a glittery look in his eye, and pitched the liver to the dogs.

Left alone, Voss groaned. He would not, could not learn, nor accept humility, even though this was amongst the conditions she had made in the letter that was now living in him. For some time, he sat with his head in his hands. He did truly suffer.

Except for the dogs scratching and sighing, the night had grown silent, the fires had fallen into embers, when grass began to rustle, feet approached the leader, and there was Turner’s face upon the darkness.

Why did I bring the man? Voss wondered.

‘Look at this, sir,’ Turner invited.

‘What is it?’ asked Voss.

Then he saw it was the handle of the frying-pan.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘How does this concern me? Is it of any interest?’

‘It was him,’ laughed Turner.

‘Who?’

‘The cook, or Jack-of-all-trades. Lord God Almighty!’

‘I am not interested. You are foolish, Turner. Go to bed.’

‘I am not all that foolish.’ Turner laughed in going.

He should have been drunk, but his stomach would sometimes turn sour without all that assistance.

As he prepared for sleep, Voss continued to feel incensed against the miserable fellow. Though it was Judd who had roused his anger. It is Turner, he said, but he knew that it was Judd.

And Turner knew, in the tent that was shared by several.

Some were already snoring as Judd lay fidgeting against the pillow of his saddle.

‘Listen, Albert,’ Turner said. ‘You are awake, I can hear that.’

He rolled over, so that his long thin body was close against the thicker one. His long face was very close.

‘Remember that there compass, that was lost at Jildra, or not lost, it was in your bag?’

Judd did not have to remember, for he had not forgotten.

‘It was put there, see, on a moonlight night, by a certain Prussian gentleman, who was innocent on account of he was sleep-walkin’.’

‘I do not believe it,’ Judd said.

‘No more do I,’ Turner continued. ‘He was as naked as moonlight, and bony as the Lord. But his eyes did not convince this one.’

‘You did not tell,’ said Judd. ‘Not till now.’

‘I have been caught before,’ Turner replied. ‘And this was valuable.’

‘I do not believe it,’ said Judd. ‘Go to sleep.’

Turner laughed, and rolled over.

Judd lay in that position until his bones had set, but did also sleep at last.

Then everyone was sleeping, or waking, to remember that it would soon be Christmas, and fall into a deeper sleep.

About midnight, however, wild dogs had begun to howl, which woke the dogs of the expedition, and these were soon moaning back in answer. The night was grown rather black, but with a flickering of yellow from a distant storm. A thin wind ran along the crest of things, together with the high yelping of the increasingly uneasy camp dogs.

Himself disturbed, Voss got up at last, and stumbled in search of their two native guides, tracing them by the embers of their fire, against which they were rolled like animals. Their eyes were open, he could see, upon some great activity of their minds. If only he could have penetrated to that distance, he would have felt more satisfied.

Dugald, the old man, immediately turned away his face, and said, before other words could be spoken:

‘I sick, sick.’

And was rubbing his belly under the remnants of his ridiculous swallowtail coat.

‘Have you heard something, Dugald, perhaps? Could it be wild dogs?’

‘No dogs,’ said Dugald.

These sounds were made, he explained, by blackfellows who intended mischief.

Just then there fell a few big drops of flat rain, and there was a sudden thumping of the earth, and protesting of grass.

‘That is cattle,’ said Voss.

It could have been the sound of cattle in motion, of frightened cattle, a little farther up the valley where the herd had been left to graze.

‘Blackfeller no good this place,’ Dugald moaned.

Voss now returned to his tent, and fetched a gun. He called to the two natives.

‘You come, Dugald, Jackie. We go look cattle.’

But the two men were fascinated by the fire. They turned their faces from the darkness, and stared closer into the coals, rubbing their cheeks against the dust. Darkness is a place of evil, so, wisely, they avoided it.

Voss continued up the valley for what seemed like some considerable distance, encountering only a vast, dark humidity. Once a cow and calf propped, and snorted at him, and lumbered away. There was no further sign of cattle.

‘Nutzlos,’ he said, coldly furious, and discharged his weapon once or twice in the direction the herd must have taken.

When he returned, Le Mesurier and Palfreyman had come out, awakened by the shots and a hysteria of dogs.

‘It is probable that blacks have driven off the cattle,’ Voss announced. ‘There is nothing we can do for the present.’

Beside their fire Dugald and Jackie were listening to these words. The voice of the white man could have been issuing from the earth.

So Christmas began.

In the morning, it was learnt that more than half the cattle had been driven off. Dugald, who had resumed possession of his ancient grace and a kind of sad resourcefulness, said that Jackie would take his horse and search — Jackie had eyes for stolen cattle — and Voss accepted this suggestion as a temporary measure, if not a way out of their dilemma.

The others were secretly glad that, for the moment at least, they need not exert themselves on such a radiant, pigeon-coloured morning. After breakfast — a subdued, though contenting meal — Harry Robarts fetched out a flag they had brought with them, and fastened it to a sapling-staff, from which it hung rather dank. At once somebody began to mumble, then almost all joined in, and they were singing ‘God Save the Queen’.

The German in his crimson shirt observed them with amusement, but quite kindly, holding himself erect by instinct, if not from approval.

Afterwards, Mr Palfreyman produced his prayer-book, and declared his intention of reading the Church of England service.

Then Voss said:

‘It may not be the wish of everyone, Palfreyman, to be forced to worship in this way. It is preferable if each man does his own part, and reads in his own book. There,’ he concluded, looking at them.

It was not altogether unreasonable, and Palfreyman made himself condemn certain of his own thoughts.

Soon, one or two who possessed prayer-books had taken them out, and were attempting to follow the words, in that place where the wild jasmine was sweetly stifling a sense of duty, and the most dogged devotions were shot through with a glint of parrots. Turner, frankly, whittled wood, and recalled how the rum was far more efficacious than prayer as a means of refreshment. Judd went away.

‘The old beggar,’ Turner was quick to call. ‘What will yer ma say? Church is not out.’

‘I have things to do,’ Judd mumbled. ‘There is the mutton.’

‘Then, I will come and lend a hand,’ Turner proposed.

But he was not encouraged by the convict, who went from there, shambling and mumbling.

‘There is no need,’ he said, surlily. ‘I have my own methods, and will be ready by noon.’

So that Ralph Angus looked up from his dry book, and his mouth was full and moist in anticipation.

Judd was soon hidden by the blessed scrub. He who could squeeze the meaning out of a line by pressing on it with his finger-nail, always hastened to remove himself from the presence of true initiates when they were at their books. All the scraps of knowledge with which he was filled, all those raw hunks of life that, for choice, or by force, he had swallowed down, were reduced by the great mystery of words to the most shameful matter. Words were not the servants of life, but life, rather, was the slave of words. So the black print of other people’s books became a swarm of victorious ants that carried off a man’s self-respect. So he wandered through the bush on that morning, and was only soothed at last by leaves and silence.

Then he was glad again. He would have expressed that gladness, but could not, except by letting the smooth leaves lie upon his stubbly face, except by being of the stillness. In this way he offered his praise. For a short space the soul returned to his body, from which it had been driven out by whips, and he stood there looking through inspired eyes into the undergrowth.

When Harry Robarts discovered Judd, the latter was already at work upon the sheep’s carcass. He was cursing the flies.

‘Urchhh!’ cried the disgusted boy.

‘Why, Harry,’ said Judd, ‘those are only maggots.’

‘And what about our dinner?’

‘Why, it will be on your plates, as promised.’

‘Maggots and all?’

‘Maggots knock off very easy,’ Judd replied.

He was, even now, engaged in knocking them off.

‘Filthy stuff!’ cried the boy.

Certainly the meat was already of rather a green appearance as the result of such a damp heat.

‘You wait and see,’ coaxed the convict. ‘You will be surprised. If you do not eat your mutton, then I will eat my hat.’

But the boy was not consoled.

‘My stomach is turned up,’ he complained.

‘Not everyone is queasy by nature,’ answered Judd. ‘Still, Harry, I will ask you not to mention this to anyone else.’

Other incidents prevented the boy from breaking his promise.

During the morning a party of blacks appeared, first as shreds of shy bark glimpsed between the trunks of the trees, but always drifting, until, finally, they halted in human form upon the outskirts of the camp.

‘Did you ever see such a filthy race?’ asked Ralph Angus, whose strength and looks prevented him from recognizing anything except in his own admirable image.

‘We do not understand them yet,’ said Le Mesurier.

The latter’s doubts and discoveries could have been leading him towards the age of wisdom.

‘You are morbid, I believe, Frank,’ Angus said, and laughed.

He was all for driving out the wretched mob of cattle thieves.

The blacks were watching. Some of the men even grew noble in the stillness of their concentration and posture of their attenuated limbs. Their faces betrayed a kind of longing. Others, though, and particularly the old, could have been wallowing beforehand in the dust; they had the dusty, grey-black skins of lizards. Several of the women present had had the hair burnt from their heads. The women were altogether hairless, for those other parts which should have been covered, had been exposed by plucking. By some perversity of innocence, however, it did seem to emphasize the modesty of those who had been plucked. They had nothing left to hide.

Turner, naturally, was provoked to immoderate laughter, and was shouting:

‘What will you bid for the molls, Mr Le Mesurier?’

And when Le Mesurier was silent:

‘Or are they not to your taste?’

Finally, he took the handle of the iron frying-pan, which he still had about him from the previous night, and presented it to one of the more impressive blacks.

‘You sell wife,’ he demanded. ‘I buy. But the pretty one. The one that has not been singed right off.’

Everyone was by this time repelled by Turner, and by the blacks that had so inspired him.

The blacks themselves were disgusted by those of his gestures which conveyed a meaning. Several of the males made hissing noises, and the pan-handle was flung down.

Hearing the scuffling and flumping that followed, and curses from Turner, and gibberish of natives, the German had come out of his tent, and entered into the situation.

‘Turner,’ he said, ‘your behaviour will always live down to what I would expect. You will please me by not molesting these people who are my guests.’

Someone who had begun to snigger did not continue. It was often thus in the presence of Voss. His laborious attitudes would fill the foreground and become the right ones.

Now he approached the black whose instincts had rejected Turner’s offer, and, holding out his hand, said stiffly:

‘Here is my hand in friendship.’

At first the blackfellow was reluctant, but then took the hand as if it had been some inanimate object of barter, and was turning it over, examining its grain, the pattern of veins, and, on its palm, the lines of fate. It was obvious he could not estimate its value.

Each of the white men was transfixed by the strangeness of this ceremony. It would seem that all human relationships hung in the balance, subject to fresh evaluation by Voss and the black.

Then the native dropped the hand. There was too much here for him to accept. Although something of this nature had been expected by his companions, Voss appeared somewhat saddened by the reception his gesture had received.

‘They are at that stage when they can only appreciate material things,’ he said in some surprise.

It was he who was in the wrong, to expect of his people — for as such he persisted in considering them — more than they were capable of giving, and, acknowledging his mistake, he promptly instructed the boy to fetch a bag of flour.

‘At least, sir,’ said Ralph Angus, ‘let us question them on the subject of the stolen cattle.’

Dugald did exchange with the natives a few, unhappy, private words. Then all was mystery, in a concert of black silence.

‘No know,’ said Dugald, in that sick voice he would adopt for any of his failures.

By this time the boy had lugged the flour into their presence, and Dugald was ordered to explain its virtues. This he did briefly, as people will confess unwillingly to the lunacy of some relative.

The blacks were chattering, and plunging their hands into the flour, and giving floury smiles. Then they swooped upon the bag, and departed through the valley, laughing. While yet in sight, some altercation of a semi-humorous nature arose, and many hands were tugging at the bag. One old woman was seizing handfuls of the flour and pouring it upon her head. She stood there, for a moment, in veils of flour, an ancient bride, and screamed because it tickled. They were all laughing then, and running through a rain of flour, after which they trailed the empty bag, until it was dropped, finally, in ignoble rags.

Such an abuse could have been felt most keenly by Voss, the benefactor, if at that moment the smells of roasting mutton had not arisen.

‘It is the dinner,’ cried Harry Robarts, quite forgetting the earlier stages of its preparation.

Judd had fixed the carcass above the coals of a fire, in a kind of shallow trench, and now the golden sheep was rustling with juices and spitting fat. Slabs of hot meat were presently hacked off for the whole company, who for once omitted to gnaw the bones before throwing them to the dogs. All were soon bursting, but still contrived to stuff down some of the hard puddings that Judd had improvised out of flour and currants, and boiled in water; even these were good on that day. Afterwards the men lay in the grass, and embroidered on their past lives, stories such as nobody believed, but to which they listened contentedly.

Even Voss descended from his eminence, and was reviewing the past through benevolent gauze.

‘I can remember in the house of my parents a green stove. It was composed of green tiles, you understand, of which the decoration was rampant lions, though they more resembled thin cats, it occurred to me as a boy.’

Everybody listened to the German. Exhausted by food, mellow with Christmas, they no longer demanded narrative, but preferred the lantern slides of recollection. Into these still, detached pictures entered the simplest members of the party as into their own states of mind.

‘Round that green stove we would sit on Christmas Evening: the relatives, some acquaintances, old women living off friendship, one or two boys apprenticed by my father. We would sing the Christmas songs. There was always a tree, a Tannenbaum, smelling as such trees will when they bleed from fresh wounds. Between all this festivity, and sweet things that were passing round, and the hot wine, I would hear the streets. It was the snow, filling and filling the empty streets, until we were lost, it seemed, in Christmas.’

The German paused.

‘So,’ he said. ‘It was not altogether different. Except for the snow, selbstverständlich. There was the snow.’

‘And except that we are not lost,’ Judd felt compelled to add.

Some of them laughed, and said they were not so sure. At that moment they would not have cared.

‘What did you use to eat, sir?’ asked Harry Robarts.

‘At Christmas, a goose. But on the Christmas Evening, always a fine carp.’

‘What is a carp, sir?’

But how could the German answer, who was so far distant?

In the cool of the evening, when those who had been feasting rose from their stupor of meat and dreams, Voss asked Judd to come with him, and they took horses, and rode out in the direction in which Jackie had gone to look for the lost cattle. It was not long before they had left behind all trace of that pleasant valley where they were camped, entering a dead country, in which the horses were continually stumbling, for they would plunge their feet into burrows or hidden pot-holes, and sink up to the pasterns in the crumbly earth.

Once in the course of this hard going, the horse which Voss was riding shied at a snake. The fact that it was a live one was surprising, for all else in the landscape appeared to be dead. The horse was immediately protesting, with his breath and his forelock, and the whites of his eyes. In that sudden leap, the German’s left temple and part of his forehead were scored by the branch of a dead tree, nothing serious, indeed, he would not have thought anything more of the matter, if the blood had not begun to trickle down into his eyes.

‘You should attend to it, sir,’ said Judd, on noticing that his leader was brushing away the blood.

‘It is nothing,’ Voss replied.

And frowned. With the result that the blood was again gushing, and tumbling down into his eyes.

‘Wait,’ said Judd.

Astonishingly, Voss did. They were both reining in. They were jumping down upon the ground. The convict took a handkerchief that he had but lately washed in the river at the place where they were encamped, and with which he was now preparing to bind the German’s head.

Should I let him? wondered the latter.

But he was already submitting. He was bowing his head. He could smell the smell of the crumpled, but spotless handkerchief, which had been dried on spikes of grass, at leisure, in the sun. He could hear the convict’s breathing, very close.

‘Is that too tight, sir?’ Judd was asking.

Although expert in being of service to others, frequently on such occasions he would experience a weakness so delicious that his skilful hands would bungle.

‘That is right. As it is,’ said Voss.

To surrender itself into other hands is one of the temptations of mortal flesh, the German knew, and shivered for an instant.

‘Do you say that somebody is passing over your grave?’ he laughed.

‘There is some such saying,’ replied the convict, whose eyes were examining his work with a detached affection.

When they had remounted and were riding on, Voss wondered how much of himself he had given into her hands. For he had become aware that the mouth of the young woman was smiling. It was unusually full and compassionate. Approbation must have gone to his head, for he continued unashamedly to contemplate her pleasure, and to extract from it pleasure of his own. They were basking in the same radiance, which had begun to emanate from the hitherto lustreless earth.

‘We will find it pretty rough going from now on, I expect, sir,’ interrupted Judd, who was ploughing forward somewhat in advance.

‘I have every confidence in our company,’ said the German.

They rode on, and it could have been the gentle silence of evening that made them both grateful.

Not long after this, on the banks of a dry creek, they came upon Jackie with seven head of cattle, or what remained of the lost herd.

‘You look all over?’ exploded the infuriated Voss.

‘All over,’ said Jackie, reasoning that this was what the white man wished to hear.

‘We could fan out in the morning, the whole lot of us,’ suggested Judd, ‘and perhaps snap up a few more.’

As it was growing late, nothing else could be done for the present, but fall in behind the exasperating rumps of the recovered few, and return to camp.

In the morning the convict’s plan was adopted by all but Palfreyman, who was occupied with the ornithological specimens he had taken while in the valley. He sat at work beneath a tree, brushing the flies off his neatly folded birds with a switch of leaves. So that the German was irritated to see him.

‘Perhaps it is as well you should remain, Palfreyman,’ he did say, contemplatively, ‘to guard against possible marauders.’

But he continued to be furious with all, especially with Gyp, the big, half-Newfoundland bitch, that got beneath his horse’s feet, and then shrieked.

Except that they discovered the hacked carcasses of two steers, the search for the missing cattle proved fruitless, and after several days it was decided to strike camp and push on without them. Only Palfreyman, it now appeared, had profited by their stay in that pleasant place, for the interlude of Christmas had faded, Turner was suffering from a fever, and two of the others from insect bites. Palfreyman had to try hard to conceal his personal contentment, but did not succeed in hiding it from Voss.

‘What shall we do,’ grumbled the latter, ‘when the back of the last mule is broken under the corpses of birds?’

Palfreyman accepted this as a joke.

And they pushed on.

They were riding eternally over the humped and hateful earth, which the sun had seared until the spent and crumbly stuff was become highly treacherous. It was, indeed, the bare crust of the earth. Several of the sheep determined to lie down upon it and die. Their carcasses did not have much to offer, though the blacks would frizzle the innards and skin, and stuff these delicacies down their throats. The white men, whose appetites were deadened by dust, would swallow a few leathery strips of leg, or gnaw from habit at the wizened chops. Their own stomachs were shrivelling up. In the white light of dawn, horses and cattle would be nosing the ground for any suggestion of leaf, any blade of grass, or little pocket of rock from which to suck the dew. The ghosts of things haunted here, and in that early light the men and animals which had arrived were but adding to the ghost-life of the place.

But it is what we expected, the German assured himself.

His features had grown thinner, his eyes, of that pale, pure blue, were the clearer for this confirmation of vision by fact.

Once they came across a party of blacks, trooping gaily over the grey earth. The blacks approached, laughing, and showing their white teeth. Unlike their fellows farther back, they proceeded to hail Dugald and Jackie. An exchange of cheerful civilities was taking place; then the thin line straggled on into the vastness. The women were carrying nets and children, but the men were free.

It was afterwards learnt from Dugald that the party was on its way to eat the fruit of the bunya bunya.

‘Where?’ asked Le Mesurier, to whom those dark trees promised paradise.

‘Very far. Blackfeller walk,’ answered Dugald, growing sad. ‘Many sleeps,’ he added.

So the white men continued westward through what could have been their own perpetual sleep, and the fruit of the mystic bunya bunya contracted in their mouths.

Several days from there they came to a ridge, of hills even, at which a brigalow scrub whipped their flesh back to waking. Mules began to buck. The udders of those goats which had kidded were slashed and torn by twigs, and the glassy eyes of the most rational of all animals were seeing far too clearly as they advanced into chaos. On the farther side of the ridge, however, there was the suggestion of a creek, that is to say, a string of pools, filled with brown water or scum, for which the expedition made with all the speed it could muster, and but for curses, and skill in horsemanship, would have been trapped in it.

As it was, two of the more obstinate mules succeeded in becoming bogged, and were only dragged out by concerted strength at the end of their leading ropes, and blows on the rump from the torn-off branch of a tree.

One of these animals, it was seen, had staked itself. Dark blood was mingling on its fetlock with the slime of mud. It limped ostentatiously.

Voss approached the animal with that directness which comes from controlled distaste, a thin figure possessed by will, and was immediately lying on his back, his face even thinner.

Most of his party appeared as if drugged by circumstance, but Palfreyman was quick to dismount and run to their leader.

‘What is it, Mr Voss?’

‘It has got me in the stomach. The devil of a thing!’ the German did manage to convey, as he lay twisting his lips.

At this point Judd arrived at his side, and the tortured man was carried back up the slope, and laid in the shade of some scrub, over which the convict rigged a sheet of canvas as additional shelter.

As the German continued to bite his lips, and seemed incapable of uttering any but his own language, Judd took it upon himself to call a halt, and they camped there several days, treating the sick, for the fever-ridden Turner had contracted the diarrhoea, from the milk of a goat, he insisted, and there was, besides, the staked mule.

Judd had soon organized the camp. He sent the supple Jackie out along a log to scoop the scum-water with a pannikin. Dugald unearthed the roots of trees, from which he shook a quantity of crystal water. Soon all were meagrely refreshed. Only the beasts were dissatisfied with their portion of scum; they would stand and murmur, with their heads held low, nosing for celestial dew.

One evening when the pain had begun to leave him, and the skin of his face was less yellow, Voss sent for Judd and thanked him formally.

‘For your personal attention, Mr Judd, and kindness,’ said the stiff German, who was still stretched upon the ground like a breathing corpse, looking from beneath his eyelids.

‘A man does what he can,’ said Judd, and would have accepted the cat rather than the scourge of recognition.

‘But with no water,’ he blurted.

A most shameful tenderness was taking the shape out of his mouth.

He had, indeed, been forced to boil in a pot of scum the rags he had used to foment the German’s belly. Tinged by the mule’s hoof with saffron and purple, this part of his anatomy must originally have been ivory in colour, very thin, moreover, and private, so that, as he worked, the convict had been forced continually to turn his head, and turn his head, to look out into the haze, and thus avoid violating further the privacy, that almost sacrosanctity of which he was aware.

Voss, who had felt more exposed on some less physical occasions, despised all sickness; he despised physical strength; he despised, though secretly, even the compassion he had sensed in the ministrations of Judd. His own strength, he felt, could not decrease with physical debility. But, was Judd’s power increased by compassion?

He was continually observing the convict as the latter applied the miserable hot rags, and now, from beneath his eyelids, as he thanked the man for his services.

‘And particularly for seeing fit to assume command.’

Judd stood there.

‘I did not take command, not intentional like.’

‘But it is for this that I commend you,’ answered Voss, looking ever deeper into Judd.

‘I did round up a few mules,’ the convict confessed. ‘And tell the men to see as the canvas was pegged down. And kill a beast. And send the blacks to look for water. Because I am a practical man.’

‘And mules must be rounded up. And men, men must be driven, although they blind themselves to the truth.’

Then the convict protested with great vehemence:

‘Not men. It is not so with men.’

This man was shaking, as if the wounds were opening in him.

‘Good, Judd,’ laughed Voss. ‘I will exonerate you from any such designs.’

But when the fellow had gone away, he continued to suspect him of exercising great power, though within human limits. For compassion, a feminine virtue, or even grace, of some sensual origin, was undoubtedly human, and did limit will.

So the German was despising what he most desired: to peel the whale-bone off the lily stem and bruise the mouth of flesh.

Ah, he cried, rubbing his face against the leather of the saddle-bag.

Then he lay more tranquilly upon the barren hillside. He thought about the woman whose consent was making her his wife. All twisted lusts had gone out of his body and the stunted trees. The sky was flowering at that hour, and the distant fields of vision. He lay breathing gently in this union of earth with light. He lay thinking of the wife from whose hands he would accept salvation, if he were intended to renounce the crown of fire for the ring of gentle gold. That was the perpetual question which grappled him as coldly as iron.

In a few days Voss was up. His will walked erect, if not yet his emaciated body. As the others were cured of their ills, Turner of all but the grumbles, and the offending mule of its lameness, the German called Judd and Palfreyman and informed them of his decision to make a start on the following morning.

It was a relief to put an end to inactivity on that scrubby slope. Life starts afresh with each fresh journey, even into the dust. So the forenoon and evening were filled with lively preparation.

Only Dugald was squatting inactive on the ashy fringe of a small fire. The old native was more than ever a man of ash and charred wood; his brittle hams might have crumbled at a touch.

‘What is it, Dugald?’ asked the German. ‘Are you not pleased?’

‘Blackfeller old,’ said the old man, in a voice that was his oldest. ‘This feller too old.’

How the notes of lamentation twangled on his bone harp.

‘This feller sick. Sick old. Wanta go back Jildra. This no place old feller die.’

‘I will not let you die, Dugald,’ Voss consoled lightly.

‘You let Mr Voss die. You no stop Dugald,’ answered the old black, looking gravely at the white man.

‘How let myself die?’

‘Not now. No ready. You no stop when ready.’

This melancholy conversation that was taking place at the fire’s edge had its gaiety for Voss.

‘You old devil,’ he laughed, ‘you will see us all put in the ground.’

Then the old man himself began to laugh.

‘No here,’ he laughed ashily. ‘Jildra. Jildra good place. Please,’ he said, quickly, quietly. ‘I go away Jildra.’

But the German dismissed that possibility with his hand, and walked on.

The old man continued to nurse what was, indeed, a sickness of foreboding and fear. He was holding his old ashen head as he squatted by the fire. The hostile spirits of unfamiliar places were tormenting him.

Later, in the camp which had begun already to dissolve in anticipation of the morning’s move, Voss caught something of the old native’s melancholy, and began to look about at their blackened pots, at the leather tackle which sweat had hardened, and those presumptuous notebooks in which he was scribbling the factual details of their journey. Then the palms of his hands knew a great helplessness. The white sky, for it was again evening, was filled with empty cocoons of cloud, fragile and ephemeral to all appearance, but into which he would have climbed, if he had been able. As he could not, he continued to walk about the camp, and his men looked up from whatever work they were engaged upon, searching his face with the eyes of children who have not yet learnt to reject appearances.

So Voss, who was exhausted, besides, by the illness from which he had not fully recovered, went and sat by his own fire.

‘Dugald!’ he called, when he had decided, and taken paper.

The breeze was lifting the stiff paper, and rattling it slightly against his knee, as if it had been bark or twig, but, without his protection, would have scrabbled and tormented it, for such white constancy is anathema to the mouths of dust.

The old native came.

‘Dugald,’ said Voss, who was by this time somewhat feverish, or irritated, ‘hör’ wohl zu. Tomorrow morning you will leave for Jildra. Verstanden? You will take the horse from Mr Turner. He old, poor horse, better to stay Jildra.’

‘Yes,’ laughed Dugald. ‘Old man same belong Jildra.’

‘That is exact,’ the German said. ‘Warte nur. Give Dugald’s horse to Mr Turner.’

‘Yes,’ murmured the old black, who was now preparing to suffer all else with patience.

‘I write paper, give Dugald letter,’ Voss explained.

How the unborn letter rattled against his knees.

‘Dugald take same letter Mr Boyle.’

His words were lead bullets.

‘Now do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man.

Darkness sighed.

When he was alone again, the German spread the sheet of paper, on which the whole darkness converged, spread it on the boards of a notebook, and was prepared to write. His knees were trembling, but, of course, he had been ill. And firelight flickers. Dugald had been gone a long time, but Voss still hovered over the heading of his letter. Had he been in fullest possession of himself, he would have consulted his neat journal and copied down their latest estimated position. He was not, however, at that moment, self-possessed. He was sitting in the middle of nowhere. Which, naturally, was of too fantastical a nature, too expressive of his nothingness. Yet, out of nothing, he did finally begin, smiling painfully at the prospect of certain words, of which the sentiments remained unfamiliar.

Voss wrote:

My dear Laura,…

Addressing her thus intimately, as if he knew her, again the man hesitated. He knew that part of himself, the weakest, of which was born the necessity for this woman. With the latter he was acquainted from several cold conversations and one heated argument. They had met, besides, by flashes of intuition and in dreams. Whether or not such knowledge, haunting and personal though it was from some aspects, sufficiently justified his attitude, he touched the L gently with his pen, and so continued:

… Your letter has brought me great happiness. I will not say my only happiness, since I am underway to accomplish my also great, and long-conceived ambition. All these prizes falling to me at last make me at times confused, so that you will see you have inspired some degree of that humility which you so admire and in me have wished for! If I cannot admire this quality in other men, or consider it except as weakness in myself, I am yet accepting it for your sake.

There are many points of criticism in your letter that I could answer, but do not here in the circumstances in which I am placed, for those arguments appear to me rather as subjects for the tea-table, and here I have no such furniture from behind which I might make a stand. Indeed, we are reduced almost to infinity. In consequence, I will pass instead to those of your sentiments which, you profess, underlie your arguments, and which have been the cause of so much cordial happiness, while accompanying me these many weeks. That we should love each other, LAURA, does at last appear inevitable and fitting, as I sit here alone in this immense country. No ordinary House could have contained my feelings, but this great one in which greater longings are ever free to grow.

Do I take too much for granted, my dearest wife? I have forgotten, perhaps, some of the pretences, living and dreaming as I do, but life and dreams of such far-reaching splendour you will surely share them, even in your quiet room. So we are riding together across the plains, we sit together in this black night, I reach over and touch your cheek (not for the first time). You see that separation has brought us far, far closer. Could we perhaps converse with each other at last, expressing inexpressible ideas with simple words?

I will send this shameful letter tomorrow by an old native, to Jildra, to Mr Boyle, together with all necessary information on the progress of the expedition for your Uncle, and the formal request of his niece’s hand. I would postpone this, Laura, to enjoy our privacy a little longer. Such a precious secret will be stolen only too soon. Am I mad? It is the gold that I have found in these rocks, in these desert places. Or I am delirious still, having been kicked in the stomach by a mule before several days, and suffered considerable pain.

You need not fear that I have not received every attention in my sickness, my chief Angel (a rather hairy one) being Mr Judd, an emancipist convict and neighbour of Mr Sanderson’s, of whom I recollect it was also spoken at your Uncle’s. Judd is what people call a good man. He is not a professional saint, as is Mr Palfreyman. He is a tentative one, ever trying his dubious strength, if not in one way, then, in another. It is tempting to love such a man, but I cannot kill myself quite off, even though you would wish it, my dearest Laura. I am reserved for further struggles, to wrestle with rocks, to bleed if necessary, to ascend. Yes, I do not intend to stop short of the Throne for the pleasure of grovelling on lacerated knees in company with Judd and Palfreyman. As for yourself, take care! At the risk of incurring your serious disapproval, I will raise you up to the far more rational position at my side.

So, we have our visions. Frank Le Mesurier has experienced something of importance that he is keeping hidden from me. On the other hand, Harry Robarts must tell all, while growing simpler, I sometimes feel, with distance. His simplicity is such, he could well arrive at that plane where great mysteries are revealed. Or else become an imbecile.

If I have not described every tree, every bird, every native encountered, it is because all these details are in writing for those who will not see beyond the facts. For you, our other journey, that you are now condemned to share, to its most glorious, or bitterest end.

I send you my wishes, and venture by now also to include my love, since distance has united us thus closely. This is the true marriage, I know. We have wrestled with the gristle and the bones before daring to assume the flesh.

Your

JOHANN ULRICH VOSS

In the morning, when the now shrunken cavalcade pushed westward, Dugald took the old horse which had been assigned to him, and which was gone in the feet, with girth galls, and saddle sores besides. The native was still standing at the stirrup looking shy when the last of the surviving sheep and a heavy, palpitating cow had shambled past. The men had finished calling, some correctly, others affectionately, one obscenely, to the old black. Now, all were gone, except the dust, and Voss.

‘Good-bye, Dugald,’ said the German from his horse, bending down, and offering a hand.

Then the old man, who was unskilled in similar gestures, took the hand with both his, but dropped it, overwhelmed by the difference in skin, while laughing for happiness. His face was filled with little moons of greyish wrinkles.

‘You will go direct to Jildra,’ said the German, but making it a generous command.

‘Orright, Jildra,’ laughed the old man.

‘You will not loiter, and waste time.’

But the old man could only laugh, because time did not exist.

The arches of the German’s feet were exasperated in the stirrup-irons.

‘You will give those letters to Mr Boyle. You understand?’

‘Orright,’ Dugald laughed.

‘Letters safe?’ asked the man in bursting veins.

‘Safe. Safe,’ echoed the scarecrow.

He put them in a pocket of his swallowtail coat. They were looking very white there.

‘Well,’ cried the writer of them, ‘was stehst du noch da? Los!’

The black mounted. Kicking his bare heels into the sides of the skinny horse, he persuaded it to stumble away.

Then Voss turned and rode in the direction of the others. Always at that hour he was a thin man juggling impotently with hopes. Those great, empty mornings were terrible until the ball of the sun was tossed skyward.

*

Dugald continued to ride. Several days he spent jogging on the back of the old horse, which sighed frequently, and no longer swished its tail at flies.

The old man, who was contented at last, sang to himself as he rode along:

‘Water is good,

Water is good….’

The truth of this filtered fitfully through the blazing land.

Sometimes the old man would jump down at the butt of certain trees, and dig until he reached the roots, and break them open, and suck out the water. Sometimes he would cut sections of these precious pipes, and shake the moisture into the cup of his hand, for the old horse to sup. The hairs of the drawn muzzle tickled his withered skin most agreeably.

The old man killed and ate goannas. He ate a small, dun-coloured rat. As he had reached an age when it was permissible for him to eat almost all foods, it was a pity so little offered itself.

He experienced great longings, and often trembled at night, and thrust his skin against the protecting fire.

When the horse lay down and died, one afternoon in the bed of a dry creek, the black was not unduly concerned. If anything, his responsibilities were less. Before abandoning the dead horse, he cut out the tongue and ate it. Then he tore a stirrup-leather off the saddle, and went forward swinging it, so that the iron at the end described great, lovely arcs against the sky.

The veins of the old, rusty man were gradually filling with marvellous life, as his numbness of recent weeks relented; and in time he arrived at good country of grass and water. He came to a lake in which black women were diving for lily roots. In the dreamlike state he had entered, it seemed natural that these women should be members of his own tribe, and that they should be laughing and chattering with him as he squatted by the water’s edge, watching their hair tangle with the stalks of lilies, and black breasts jostle the white cups. Nor was it unnatural that the strong young huntsmen of the tribe, when they burst through the wiry trees, clattering with spears and nullas, should show contempt, until they realized this was a man full of the wisdom and dignity that is derived from long and important journeys. Then they listened to him.

Only his swallowtail coat, by now a thing of several strips, was no longer dignified enough, with the result that the tallest huntsman solemnly tore off one of the strips, followed by a pocket.

Remembering the white man’s letters, Dugald retrieved the pocket, and took them out. The shreds of his coat fell, and he was standing in his wrinkles and his bark-cloth. If the coat was no longer essential, then how much less was the conscience he had worn in the days of the whites? One young woman, of flashing teeth, had come very close, and was tasting a fragment of sealing-wax. She shrieked, and spat it out.

With great dignity and some sadness, Dugald broke the remaining seals, and shook out the papers until the black writing was exposed. There were some who were disappointed to see but the picture of fern roots. A warrior hit the paper with his spear. People were growing impatient and annoyed, as they waited for the old man to tell.

These papers contained the thoughts of which the whites wished to be rid, explained the traveller, by inspiration: the sad thoughts, the bad, the thoughts that were too heavy, or in any way hurtful. These came out through the white man’s writing-stick, down upon paper, and were sent away.

Away, away, the crowd began to menace and call.

The old man folded the papers. With the solemnity of one who has interpreted a mystery, he tore them into little pieces.

How they fluttered.

The women were screaming, and escaping from the white man’s bad thoughts.

Some of the men were laughing.

Only Dugald was sad and still, as the pieces of paper fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos.

Then the men took their weapons, and the women their nets, and their dillybags, and children, and they all trooped away to the north, where at that season of the year there was much wild life and a plentiful supply of yams. The old man went with them, of course, because they were his people, and they were going in that direction. They went walking through the good grass, and the present absorbed them utterly.