Chapter 18 – The Ending
Mark found himself surprised at how much this elfin slip of a girl had grown on him. He had been surprised when she had come to sit next to him for that Coober Pedy breakfast. As their eyes joined and minds connected he had sensed something in her that was a kindred spirit to his. It was a wild fearlessness, the sense that all things were possible if one had nothing to lose. He read in her eyes that she also saw this in him, he also saw the reflected sense of danger she perceived in him.
He understood it, not that he would set out to hurt one such as her, but he had a capacity to create danger for others in his life, it was a law of unintended consequences. His sixth sense said he should walk away, that for her he was danger too and she would be safer to stay well away. But he was as drawn to her as she was to him. So, really, walking away was a non-option. Instead he decided to bring her with him and share his wild ride through the world with her.
Their first lovemaking had been an adventure into the wild side, she did not cry out or complain at the prickles in her buttocks on the hot hard ground, she had not sought his help to escape from the mud, she had stood there totally trusting in her nakedness as he cleaned it from her body.
So, beginning in that first night of togetherness, he told her of his life with no details spared and she had told him equally of hers. She had told him her name was Elin, but almost from the outset he had renamed her Elfin, his Viking Fairy Goddess, she with the hair of gold and a willowy body, slim but full. Her head came only to his shoulder; when he lay on her he covered all of her with his own self. But there was steel inside that wiry frame, she like him would give no quarter when a fight must be had. He most loved the indomitable braveness in her, one who would go to any place and suffer all things without reproach.
Within two days she had told him she preferred to stay with him than return to the ship, her life had moved on and she now wanted to be here, to be with him. He had said he wanted her to stay too. Neither spoke the love word but both knew that best described it. When he looked at her he felt fiercely protective, when she sat nestled into his side, as he drove, he wanted to drive on and on forever.
But in another part of his soul he sensed that, as a fairy queen of the otherworld, she was only his to keep and hold for some short time, and then she would vanish as if she had never been. He could see no clouds, he could see no danger, but his soul he knew that, for her, he was danger. She was too fragile for her bravery. Somehow it would break her with he serving as its instrument. He knew he should leave her for her own safety, but yet could not. He knew she would not let him even if he tried. It was a journey together to the end, whatever and wherever it came. He hoped it would come for them together; somewhere out in the wide ocean as she chased a Viking dream. Whatever life they had together it would be life enough for him.
They were heading for an opal field in south-western Queensland, part of the Winton field, a vast area of former inland seas where opals had been laid down over millions of years past. Mark had been told of a mine out there, long abandoned, and given a map of it by an old timer in Coober Pedy. It was a place this man had always planned to go back to, having found a seam which promised great riches, but which he had been forced to leave by heavy rain and flooding decades before. He had always promised himself he would go back. Now he had admitted that his health was failing and it was beyond him to revisit the place he had not been to for almost forty years. So he had asked Mark to do it for him, giving him the map that he had scratched out way back then.
Mark had promised him a half share of anything he found and made a plan to travel there in secrecy, when the heat of summer kept most other visitors away. He would reopen the old shaft and clean it out to a point where he could access the seam. He was told by the old miner that it was about 30 feet down and the soil was treacherous and would need careful propping, but if he could manage it the reward would be great.
So now his Elfin queen was travelling with him, his partner in this search. Not only would he share half what they both found with the old man, they would share the other half equally between themselves.
He had not told this to his Elfin queen but his mind was set that way. If the rewards were as promised perhaps they would buy a boat together and go off and sail the world’s oceans, wherever the fancy took them. He now promised himself he would be very careful, as her safety depended on it, and he wanted to share a future with her.
After Birdsville, where Mark met with old miner locals to get tips about mining the boulder opal of this country, he cut back east, coming out onto the Cooper Creek system with its multitude of channels and flood ways. A New Year cyclone had come down the Queensland coast and gone inland around Rockhampton a month before. This rain slowly ran through the river channels and the flow was now filling the innumerable swamps. A wealth of waterbirds was now starting to breed in these wetlands.
Mark and Elin took their time as they came east, stopping to enjoy the isolated scenery. The days were still hot, but cloud was drifting from the north east, offering the promise of a storm and this moisture in the skies eased the baking heat. They were heading for a somewhere near the channels of the Bulloo River, where it spread out across its own mass of swamps south of Quilpie, a small town in far western Queensland.
Mark realised his knowledge of this country was not a strong suit, but he bought the best maps available and matched them to the miner from Coober Pedy’s hand drawn document. As they travelled he explained his mission to Elin. He made her promise that, if she came to help him, she would follow his directions with care as it would be dangerous work. She agreed though he doubted she really meant it.
At last, five days after Birdsville, with a few missed turns, they came to a place that matched his map. It was several abandoned mineshafts in a rough area of scrubby hills that lay between fertile channels and swamps fed by branches of the Bulloo River and used by the surrounding stations. There was a waterhole on the river about a mile from the old mines which still ran water from the same rain which had run the Cooper. The mine area was fenced to stop cattle from the surrounding stations wandering into a disused shaft.
It was a messy place of broken machinery, abandoned timber and hut remnants and a scattering of mullock heaps and other mining detritus. The mine of interest was abandoned decades ago when a big rain storm drove a wall of water down the gully it was in, destroying the mine and filling the shaft up with rubbish and silt.
At that time the former miner was the only one on site. He had told Mark that by then the other mines nearby were deserted. It looked like, in all the time since, nobody had done anything here. Now it was just one of many old abandoned mine sites, a memory long lost.
There was little food for cattle here on a barren ridge, and with the danger from old shafts to man and beast, the nearby stations avoided this place. In the world of prospectors, opinion was these mines had never yielded much of value. So only a few people ever came to this place. Even fewer came in the summer heat.
Mark had stocked up with provisions, enough for a month, when in Birdsville. They could add to this with birds and animals from the hunt. Mark marvelled how quickly Elfin had mastered the skills of a bushman, snaring birds, shooting or spearing a kangaroo, anything he did she would attempt too. She mastered things much faster than anyone else he had seen, with a mix of intense concentration and fearless desire to improve.
Once at their destination they built a bower shed of branches to shelter in along with a second rough structure to cover the car, making it nearly invisible from air or the ground unless someone came close. Mark wanted no one disturbing them should their mining find good results.
On the second day after their arrival, with all their above ground preparations done, they started work on the mine. They knew the shaft they were after, by its description and location. But, after almost four decades, there was little to show for it. Just some remnants of broken head timbers, marked the top, part buried under a pile of r
efuse, branches, old tin, soil and the like. They started by clearing this all away taking care that the ground below them did not collapse. Even though it seemed safe to Elfin, Mark insisted they both wear a harness which was tied by rope a solid tree in the gully. As they began to clear away the rubbish they found a portion of the side wall had collapsed and most of the shaft was filled with debris. Despite the water flowing down the river channel nearby it had not rained here for a long time. So the surface soil was dry and crumbly, with parts breaking away under their feet as they walked near the mine edge.
They took turns, one excavating in the shaft while the other stayed above and hauled the rubbish to the surface and carried it down slope out of the way. For the heavy items Mark rigged a block and tackle. If required he would use the Toyota winch but this had not been required to date. They scouted for new straight and strong pieces of timber to shore up the wall and roof once they were fully down. Mark had come prepared with a chainsaw for this purpose, but they would await what they found below before they started cutting. The first ten feet was done in a day, the next ten feet took two days and the final ten feet took three days, as they painstakingly cleaned everything away until they both stood on the solid floor at the bottom of the old shaft. It was a long way up to the light.
They built a bush timber ladder to make the coming and going easier. The uphill wall of the shaft was the part which had fallen in, whereas the down side seemed solid and safe to work from. So they put the ladder there and hauled away the fill from this side, avoiding the upslope side where the soil was very crumbly, with small parts continuing to break off and fall into the shaft.
They thought of trying to shore up the vertical shaft walls but it was a big job. So they decided they would work carefully and not disturb the place where the soil was loose. After a couple days the crumbling of the soil stopped and their concern about it collapsing into the shaft abated. They made a lever structure, allowing them to swing the buckets of soil away the from the edge of the shaft as they hauled them to the surface with the block and tackle. They each took a turn about, alternating between the top and bottom. It was good to break the drudgery of working in the near dark of the pit with standing in the fresh air and hauling the soil away, though this was heavier work. A few times they used the vehicle winch to haul up heavy objects, but mostly by keeping loads small they could do it by hand. After a week of work they had an accumulation of debris on the down slope side of the shaft. They piled it up a starting a couple metres back from the edge.
After working nonstop for the week they decided they were due for a rest day. It was a Sunday, just coincidence, but they both laughed and joked that God had worked six days and rested the seventh and now after seven nonstop days they had outdone God and were having their own day of rest on God’s day of rest.
This day they swam in the river waterhole and hunted ducks for dinner. They would have started back the next day but they had enjoyed their day of rest together so much that neither wanted it to end. So they both agreed, over roast wood duck, that time was not of the essence and they would treat themselves to a second day off as well.
Elfin had an idea for a boat to use on the waterhole, made from some old tin sheets and a timber frame. Mark grumbled at first that it was pointless to build a boat for a river in the desert which only ran one year in three. However Elfin was at her persuasive best. By lunch time of their second day they had built a serviceable boat. It was not pretty to look at, made with old, rusted sheets of iron, nailed to a timber frame with old rusted nails. The seams were stuffed with wet clay. But it floated and together they poled it a hundred yards along their waterhole and back. Elfin announced that for today, as they were on the ocean not the desert she was the ship’s captain, Queen Elfin and King Mark of the Desert was her loyal servant. She named their boat “Ran, Goddess of the Sea,” which Mark painted on the bow in wet white clay.
In this manner they passed an afternoon of play, followed by a night of love before they awoke in the morning to start their work again.
The next week they started on the side tunnel, by description it was about as long as the shaft was deep before it came to the place of opals. Now they shored the walls and roof as they worked. They would dig out a small amount, no more than half a metre and then place a two wall pieces and a roof piece of bush timber, cut to length by the chainsaw and jammed tightly into place. The soil down here was also mostly dry and crumbly, predominantly sandy, with mixed pieces of mud stone, sandstone and ironstone. In some places it seemed to be packed solidly together but in others it seemed like old seepage down the gully had hollowed out spaces and places which were a mixture of air and loose bits. The shaft ran away from the line of the gully into the side of the hill, sloping gently downwards. As they progressed there was moisture in the soil, not wet but damp. It seemed to be more stable and less prone to collapse. There were also tree roots to cut away which seemed to have found this new place of soil and debris more to their liking.
It took five more days until they had reached the end of the old tunnel and came to the face which the miner had described. Here the ground changed into densely packed mudstone with layers of heavy ironstone nodules running through it. This was what they were seeking, nodules accumulated as this gully filled with the soil washed away from the surrounding hills. Miners said these were the best place to find the boulder opal for which these Queensland fields were renowned.
Now they started working together, side by side on the face, chiselling away the pieces. Once they had a good pile they would bring them above to sort and examine properly. It was late in the day when they first came above with a hoard to sort, two bucket loads of heavy nodules, with flashes of colour, under a patina of soil. They rinsed it off and stared to chip surface encrustation away to see what lay below.
Elfin was working with a nodule of stone about a handbreadth across, lightly tapping with a hammer to flake off the surrounding rubbish. She hit a little harder and the rock split through the middle, along a natural fault into two similar sized pieces. As they fell apart she held her breath.
It was the most perfect summer blue, a Nordic summer sky tinged with flecks of gold and red as the sun lit up the highest clouds. She gasped as she saw what she had found and called Mark over. He was sitting with his own pile a few feet away He whistled with excitement, saying. “A stone truly fit for an Elfin Queen. It is marvellous to behold and alone makes our whole trip worthwhile. As you are the first finder, this one is for you and you alone. It will be yours forever.
Now they both felt the excitement of a wondrous discovery flowing through the veins. They brought their collection together and by the light of a gas lamp worked through what they had found. It was extraordinary, another ten large pieces that all had wonderful opal colour scattered through them. They cleaned off the best of them and placed them underneath the end of the bed mattress they shared. They worked for three more days before this patch of colour ran out.
By now they had several buckets full of wonderful opal pieces. Neither could grasp the true value, though Mark knew more from his work in Coober Pedy. The best he had found before was far below anything here. These best pieces were each worth tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even more.
Both knew this stuff was fabulous, it was worth more than anything either had ever owned or held in their own hands before. They placed all the best pieces in a steel box that Mark owned and placed a lock on it, to deter any casual observers. It took a lot of effort from both of them to lift this box and place it on the back of the truck. Then they took all the inferior pieces and brought them to a hole they had dug near the swamp. After that they removed all the things they could find that indicated their presence from the site. Lastly they started to refill the shaft with rubbish.
There may be more to find here and they did not want to make it easy for any visitors in their absence. They discussed what to do now. Mark knew a gem trader he trusted in Brisbane, a thousand kilometres to the east
, on the coast.
So the decided that they would make their way from here to there, following a leisurely and circuitous route, to ensure that the place of their findings was difficult to trace. Then once there they would work out what to sell and what to do with the rest. Mark had suggested they should not market it all at once as this much material of high value was bound to raise lots of questions. Instead they should store it safely and slowly release pieces for sale. Once they had sold sufficient they could decide whether to recover the remainder or just to bless their fortune, cash to their chips and go and travel and enjoy the world together from here.
Somewhere along the way they would return to Coober Pedy and return the rightful share of the old miner, it was his just desert and they would do nothing to cheat fate.
They had now made an unspoken pact to join their lives together in a more formal manner, perhaps not marriage but being together for as far as the future would take them with whatever followed, perhaps children of their own. They had touched at the edges of this idea, walking around it on tiptoes, but had never gone to its core. But first they must leave this place of good fortune in a way that kept its contents safe. They decided to leave the side shaft alone but to fill the vertical shaft back to something like the way they had found it. They created a big pile of rocks, stones and rubbish, pieces of tin, broken timber and other debris just next to the lower side of the shaft. Their final act before leaving would be to pile it in on top of the dirt and other fill they had already returned to the shaft.
Mark was poring over his maps in the car, working out the detailed way to go from here when they drove away. He heard a little truncated cry. He looked around. No further sound came and there was no sign of his Elfin queen. He heard a little sound like a mewing kitten coming from over where the shaft was. He stood up and ran towards it.
As he came close he saw that lower side of the shaft had crumbled away, the side of the rubbish, perhaps the side where Elin had been standing. The noises, like a kitten crying, seemed to be coming from somewhere down the shaft¸ under the rubbish.
He realised she was down there. It had all come down on top of her. He called to her. “Hang on Ellie; I am coming to get you, my Elfin Queen.”
He worked furiously, clawing and tearing stuff aside as he fought his way down through the debris. Her voice seemed faint and sometimes it did not answer. An hour passed and then another. Her voice had gone. Finally he saw her, golden hair in the pale light. She was lying with her body mostly buried under rubbish, just her face, shrouded by hair, and one arm showing. She seemed barely alive, breathing still, but without awareness of what was happening to her.
With all his remaining strength he pulled the pieces of debris from her. Finally he had her uncovered except for a heavy stone, perhaps twice his weight which pinned her lower body to the ground. He stroked her face and said. “Hold on Ellie, one more thing to go until I get you out.”
With a last huge effort he rolled the stone to the side and lifted the broken body in his arms. He carried her, as gently as he could, to the top.
The late afternoon light was fading as he laid her on his bedding mat. He stroked her hair and face. He did not really believe in God, but yet he prayed, nonetheless, that she would open her eyes one more time so he could tell her of his love for her.
He turned away to look for some water to clean and wash the dirt from her face. As he turned, he heard her call faintly. “Mark, don’t leave me. I know my body is broken. I will not be here when the light is gone. Already my vision is fading. But I can see you and feel your touch and love. That is all I want to know and remember. Stay with me and hold me. When it is over place my body in the boat, the one we made together. Bury it and me under the ground down by the billabong. Then I can make my journey as your Viking Queen to another shore. Perhaps one day we can sail again in it, together.
So he returned to her and held her. She smiled a faint smile and touched his hand with hers. She told him, in a whispered breath, that something had made her climb to the bottom of the shaft, perhaps her soul knew it was her time. She thanked him for the happiest days of her life, the place where she had found peace and contentment with him. Then she said no more, her spirit light was fading away.
He whispered in her ear that he loved her and she whispered back that she knew and loved him too. Then they spoke no more, the effort was beyond her and she just wanted to be held. He put his fingers in her hair and she rested her hand on his face.
They sat like this for a few minutes until Mark realised she was not breathing anymore and her blue eyes now were opened so wide that she could only see the sky in another place.
He stayed with her in the night holding her cold and stiffening body to his and feeling the tears he had never cried for anyone before stealing down his cheeks.
In the morning he carried her to the side of the billabong where they had hunted to ducks in the reeds in their small tin and timber boat. He dug a big hole into the soft earth just back from the bank. He placed the boat at the bottom of the hole.
He took the two blankets from his bedding roll and wrapped her body into them. He laid her pack and her other things alongside her in the boat, that she may have her possessions for her trip.
He took out only her passport, it was the only photo he had to remember her by, and she would not need that in the place she was travelling. Then he opened his box of stones and found the two pieces she had broken apart when they first made their discovery. He placed one inside each cold hand, to give her a fare to pay the ferryman. Then he covered it all in, making a cairn of stones in the shape of a boat to mark the place where she lay. It was late in the day when he drove away, feeling as if his heart would break inside.
Lost Girl Diary Page 20