‘And that track.’
The note of sarcasm in his voice, the little worried laugh — neither of us believing now in its existence.
‘When we’ve found the Rock, we’ll cast around for the treadmarks of his Land-Rover.’
‘Use a lot of petrol,’ he murmured.
‘Not as much as stopping and starting and driving slow the way we have been.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go then.’ His voice was pitched a little high, nervous and uneasy.
We got to our feet, and while he topped up the radiator, I took a bearing on the tracks running out ahead of us. Converted from magnetic to true they were headed 103°, slanting across the sandplain towards the next ridge. According to the chart, 103° was the correct bearing for the Winnecke Rock. The track bearing, on the other hand, was nearer 110°, so we were almost certainly north of it, heading direct for the Rock. I took the speedometer reading and then we got going.
Steering a compass course required concentration and it was difficult driving because of the spinifex. The clumps were small and widely spaced, but each clump the size of a mole-hill, hard as concrete, so that, riding them, the jolting was incessant, and Kennie at the wheel twisting and turning to find the easiest route, the strange opaque light making it difficult for him to pick his way. Three miles of this, and then the spinifex thickened, forcing us into four-wheel drive, the going slow and the tracks lost, the needle of the speedometer flickering between nought and five. We found the tracks again on the slope of the next sandhill, deep-scored where he had taken it fast. We made it to the top, but only just, the engine labouring in four-wheel drive, the wheels spinning in the soft sand of the crest. Another sandplain, much wider, full of spinifex and here and there the skeletal remains of wind-uprooted mulga lying prone, their spiked roots like tank traps, like the battle maces of medieval giants.
We had lost his tracks completely now and our course, slanting across the lie of the sandridges, meant that every few miles we had to turn into the face of a petrified sandwave, take it at a rush in four-wheel drive, both of us clinging on for dear life, our heads bumping the roof. Twice we had to stop on the far side of a ridge to let the engine cool. It was a nightmare drive, but at least our course was generally parallel to the line of the self dunes, and in the sandplains between the ridges the going was less difficult, fairly flat and the spinifex patchy, so that there were moments when we almost touched 15 mph. I am told we were lucky, that the area we were in must have been better than most of the Gibson, but, even so, dawn was paling the eastern sky before we had completed those thirty-five back-breaking, exhausting miles.
We stopped on top of a sandhill that was about 40 feet high, the desert rolling all around us, a long undulating sand-swell, the ridges showing like pale red waves above the green-gold sea of spinifex. Lizards scuttled dryly through a patch of scrub, ants moved busily in the sand and we saw our first scorpion. But it was the fantastic surrealistic beauty of the scene that held me spellbound, the breathless cruelty of it, the hardness of the colours in that clear dry air, above all the terrible infinity of it, the sense that it went on for ever. There was no sign of anything that could be described as a rock, only limitless sand and scrub, the waves of the ridge rolling endlessly to the horizon.
We gathered enough material to make a fire, had tea and a short rest, and then as the sun rose and the contrast of colour and shadow heightened the sense of having become part of some mad artist’s canvas, we began our search, driving north across three ridges, east 6 miles along an easy sandplain, then south across the dunes, their backs less steep going in this direction. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the Rock we found, but the tracks again. We were 2.4 miles on the southward leg, in a particularly bare sandplain between two ridges and they were quite clear, still bearing 103°.
The sun was well up by then, all the colour gone out of that terrible landscape and the heat already so violent that every movement was an effort. Even so I wanted to drive straight on, catch up with him and get it over, or at least reach the area of that pencilled circle.
But Kennie, his head bent over the chart, the skin of his nose peeling and his hands trembling, insisted it was madness. ‘It’s all of fifty miles, nearer sixty.’ He looked up at me, his eyes slitted against the glare. ‘Driving in daytime, it’ll just about finish us. The rad’ll boil. The engine’ll probably overheat again, and if we hit soft sand or have a puncture. … It could take us all day.’ He didn’t want to drive on through the heat.
We drank some water and had a meal, talking it over in the shade of the Land-Rover. But I couldn’t persuade him. ‘What the hell’s it matter whether we catch up with him now in daylight or later when it’s a little cooler?’ Mirages were already forming, the scant, desiccated vegetation swimming on the flat horizon, the dunes bobbing crazily on the skyline. In the end I agreed. What the hell did it matter? We stripped and lay in the back, our bodies burning with the growing heat of the sun, the back of the vehicle glowing like a furnace. And then, when I’d just got off to sleep, a hornet’s drone woke me, growing gradually to a roar, ripping like a buzz-saw into the muzzy drowsiness that still engulfed me.
I sat up, pulling back the flap and peering out. The blinding white of the sky hit my eyes and I could see nothing, the sound fading. Kennie slithered naked to the ground, yelled as his bare feet touched the burning sand, and then the noise was back, growing again from the south. And suddenly I saw it - a small twin-engined plane coming in low across the sandridges, and as it roared over us, barely 100 feet from the ground, the pilot waggled its wings.
So Janet had got scared and notified the authorities. That was my first thought. I had thrown Kennie his shoes and now we were both of us standing naked in the sun watching the plane. ‘One of the new Cessnas,’ he murmured. We watched it as it banked to the north of us, circling and then banking again as it picked up the tracks of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover to the east of us and followed them, still flying low. The sound of it dwindled, fading into the immensity of desert space till the plane itself was no bigger than a fly on the horizon. ‘Well, that’s one thing,’ I said. ‘They know where we are now.’
‘Who?’
‘The authorities.’
Kennie smiled at me sourly. ‘You’re joking. The Administration up here runs on a shoe-string. They don’t hire planes to search for fools who go driving around in the desert.’
‘Who then? Somebody has.’
He shrugged. ‘Prospectors. Maybe it’s a survey party.’ But he sounded doubtful and his face had a troubled look.
It seemed too much of a coincidence that a survey party doing an aerial magnetic or a mapping job should have happened on our tracks by chance. The same thought seemed to have occurred to him, for he said, ‘You’re a mining consultant. Not many mining consultants operating on their own like you. And going off into the desert in summer. They’d think you were on to something.’ He hesitated. ‘It’d be all round Mount Newman, and the Conglomerate in Nullagine… . That bar’d be full of talk.’
‘What are you getting at?’
He hesitated again, as though unwilling to put his thoughts into words. ‘Pa,’ he said at length. ‘Pa might hire a plane. You’re lucky, see. First Blackridge, then Golden Soak. And he knows about the Monster.’ He started to climb back into the Land-Rover, but then he stopped, his eyes on the horizon to the east. The plane was still there, a speck circling.
‘Do you think he’s found something?’ My voice sounded strange, a dry croak, my eyes riveted.
He nodded. ‘I reck’n.’
I reached for my shin and shorts and put them on, the plane still circling. He did the same, and we stood in the sun watching it, our eyes screwed up and the minutes passing. Then it was going back, still a speck and climbing. It was flying high and fast as it passed over us, the sound of it barely audible. ‘Must be near 10,000 feet,’ Kennie said. It was slightly to the south and took no notice of us. We watched it until it had disappeared, a speck high in the
sky to the west.
I got into the driving seat and started the engine. The position over which it had been circling was not more than 10 miles away and the tracks led straight towards it. Half an hour, an hour at the most. The engine couldn’t overheat in that time, not with the breeze beginning to blow, a hot little wind from the southeast. We got going, following the tracks in four-wheel drive, the breeze increasing until sand was glowing like a tide towards us along the desert floor. This wasn’t the normal heat wind. This was more like a gale and in an instant the tracks were gone. One minute they were there, the next they had vanished, overlaid by the wind-blown drift of the sand. Kennie leaned towards me. ‘Bedourie,’ he yelled. ‘Sandstorm. No wonder that pilot was in a hurry.’
Away to the south the horizon was blurred, the white of the sky turning sepia. In moments the sand had lifted from the surface, rustling against the bonnet of the Land-Rover, millions of grains on the move, a drift waist high and the broken twigs of dry shrubs blowing against the windscreen. And then it hit us, the sky darkening, the desert world turned suddenly brown. I stopped then. I couldn’t see a thing, only the sand like brown smoke, the howl of the wind, the noise rasping at the aluminium panels like the sound of a train as I cut the engine. Nothing to do now but sit in the tight-closed Land-Rover, handkerchiefs tied round our mouths and nostrils, wrapped in the hot protection of our blankets, the noise indescribably vicious. And nothing visible through the windscreen but the sand pouring like a sea, the occasional wreck of desert vegetation uprooted and whirling by.
We didn’t talk. We just sat huddled there, desperately trying to breathe, while the sand got into our nose and ears, into our clothes, and the floorboards were gradually covered inches deep with the brown wash of the storm. The noise. … I don’t know which was worse, the clogging, insufferable sand or the noise. And it went on and on, the hot wind blistering and abrasive, the minutes dragging into hours. To look at it was to get one’s eyeballs seared with grit, and as we sweated, the sand clung to our bodies, a perpetual irritant.
It lasted all day, and then died in the evening as quickly as it had started. From nil visibility and daylight drab as a nut-brown night, suddenly there was stillness, the sun showing as a faint pale circle there in the west and the desert taking shape around us. It was like breaking surface after being half-drowned in the brown tide of a swollen river. Another moment, and everything was still, not a sound in the world, and the air becoming crystal clear in the slanting sun. Far away to the north anvil tips of cu-nim showed above the horizon.
We shook ourselves out and had some water, the first we had had for over six hours. We were dried up, desiccated, exhausted by the battering. The tepid water cleaned our mouths, but did little to refresh us. We opened a tin of baked beans and wolfed them cold. I would have given anything for a bath. Kennie’s skin was coated red with dust and sweat. I was the same and we couldn’t even wash our faces. Instead, I lit a cigarette, my nerves crying out for it more than food, even though my nostrils were still clogged with sand.
It was then, as I inhaled the first long drag of that cigarette, staring at the clear, impersonal hostility of the desert, that I saw it. Away to the north-east, just short of the horizon, like a rock awash in a petrified sea. I thought it must be the Winnecke Rock and I called to Kennie, who had started clearing the sand out of the back of the Rover. But then I realized it couldn’t be the Winnecke. The sun was slanting, a softer light, the desert golden red, the white heat of the sky paling to an ephemeral blue, and my eyes were tired. ‘That’s not a rock,’ he said. And in that instant I saw it for what it really was, a vehicle hull-down below a ridge of sand, just the rectangle of the canopy showing.
I moved to the driving seat, but he stopped me. ‘Better top the rad up first.’
We did that and cleaned some of the sand off the engine. Then I turned the ignition key and for a long minute the starter whined and nothing happened. Sand, I thought. My God! All this way, and then, just when we’d sighted him … The engine coughed, lost itself, then coughed again and roared into life. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. Kennie swung himself in beside me, grinning with relief. ‘Bit of luck that.’ We were both of us grinning as I put her into gear and headed north-east across the line of the next ridge.
I had forgotten to put her in four-wheel drive and within minutes we were up to our axle in a fresh sand drift. Heat exhaustion slowed us badly and it took a long time to dig ourselves out and get moving again, everything an appalling effort. Kennie drove the rest of the way, the sun sinking to the horizon, the flaming ball of it reddening the desert to the colour of blood, the cu-nim gone from the horizon ahead and the sky to the east taking on that egg-shell greenish tint of evening. It was a Land-Rover all right, stuck halfway up a dune, its bonnet raised and facing east. A canopy had been rigged against one side of it, and as we neared it, I could see a solitary figure in a broad-brimmed hat collecting vegetation for a fire. No sign of anybody else.
We drew up in the trough below the sandridge on which it had stalled and a figure emerged from the lean-to shelter and staggered to his feet. Tall and stooped, he was instantly recognizable. I got out and went to meet him. ‘You, is it?’ There was no welcome in his voice, only tiredness, a touch of resentment even. ‘What d’you want?’ His voice was slower than ever, a little slurred with the effort of speaking.
‘I came to look for you.’
‘No need. I’m perfectly able to look after myself.’
I glanced at the Land-Rover, nettled by his reaction to our arrival. ‘Trouble?’ I asked, nodding at the lifted bonnet.
‘Sand in the fuel line, that’s all. I’ll deal with it - later.’ The weariness in his voice was very apparent, his body swaying slightly with exhaustion and Tom standing defensively a few yards off, the black face below the wide hat wrinkled in a puzzled frown.
The sun was almost gone now, a red wound gaping along the horizon to the west. I turned to Kennie. ‘Better see if you can fix it before the light goes.’
‘Did you send that plane out looking for me?’ There was a distinct note of hostility in Ed Garrety’s voice.
‘No.’
‘Who did then?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
He nodded slowly, then looked about him and folded his long thin legs, collapsing on to a bare patch of sand. He said something to Tom, who answered, ‘Yes, boss,’ and set about getting a fire going. ‘We’ll have a brew-up together, then we’ll see,’ Ed Garrety murmured. ‘Come and sit down.’ He patted the sand beside him. ‘You look tired. Not used to the desert, eh?’
I sat down beside him, both of us silent for a long time. The sun had gone, the sky a lurid blaze of colour, except in the east where it was already darkening to the velvet purple of dusk. There were questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know how to begin and so I remained silent, and he said softly, ‘You would I
play upon me - you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘But you’re no Guildenstern come to trick me. You’re honest. Or I believe you are.’ He peered at me, still with that tired smile, his face wanned by the sunset colours so that the skin below the stubble no longer had that parchment look. ‘But I don’t know your motive, do I? Why are you here?’
‘To get you back home.’
‘Think I can’t make it on my own?’
‘Janet’s worried.’
‘Ah, yes. Janet.’ He paused.
‘I read the letter you wrote her.’
‘That was a private letter.’ The hostility was back in his voice.
I told him how one of the boys had woken me in the night. ‘Janet had gone to Lynn Park looking for you. The house was empty. I read it because I wanted to find out what had happened to you.’
‘And you followed me, knowing I wanted to do this on my own.’
‘Janet was worried,’ I said again.
‘And that was all? No other motive?’
‘I was curious, of course.’
; He nodded. ‘Of course. You want to know what happened.’
He was silent then, staring into the desert. The colour was fading now, the washed-out look of dusk creeping over the sand. And then abruptly he said, ‘D’you love her?’
I stared at him.
‘My daughter - d’you love her?’ He was looking at me very intently, his eyes searching my face.
‘I’m fond of her,’ I muttered, my eyes shifting from the directness of his stare, uncertain of myself and what he expected of me.
‘Fond?’ He leaned a little forward. ‘You’ve never been in an Australian desert and you risk your life for an old man because you’re fond of his daughter?’
‘There’s Kennie,’ I said, nettled by his words. ‘He’s here, too. Why don’t you ask him if he loves her?’
‘That boy.’ He shook his head, the dulled blue eyes still staring at me out of the drawn, tired face. ‘I wonder if you realize how attractive you are to people. It’s a quality that’s rare. But you have it. That boy, the drillers, Janet - even myself, and I’ve had a lot of experience of men.’ He lowered his head, staring down at the sand. ‘And you want to know what happened.’
‘Not if you don’t wish to tell me,’ I said.
I saw him smile. ‘That’s the trouble. I do. All these years …’ He didn’t finish, but continued staring down at the sand. There was sweat on his forehead and he suddenly looked very old and alone. Then Kennie called to me that the union to the carburettor was threaded. The moment was gone and he murmured, ‘Later. We’ll talk about it again later.’
‘You’re a sick man,’ I said.
He didn’t answer and in the end I got up and went to help Kennie repair the union, while Tom brewed a billy of tea over the fire. We got the engine going in the end and backed the Land-Rover down the ridge, parking it on the flat beside our own.
We fed in the last of the light and then drove on, following in the wake of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover. Tom was driving it and the bearing varied between 100° and 105°. We were held up only once by sand and that only briefly. Otherwise we made steady progress, all in four-wheel drive with two pauses to let the engines cool. Shortly after midnight we stopped. We were just short of the pencil mark on the chart. Ed Garrety’s face appeared at my window, lit faintly by the light from my torch shining on the chart. ‘Where did you get that?’
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