The river is Down

by Walker, Lucy

  Alas, she didn’t want to go out to the coast! She wanted to stay, and keep her job at the construction camp.

  Oh, dear! How did she manage to keep her job in all this dilemma?

  Her face looked strained as she watched the postmaster reading the message. She was no longer worrying as to whether he thought it was sense, or code. She was wondering if one person could really be two people at one time, after all.

  `One dollar ten,’ the postman said. He passed her telegram as fit to be transmitted. Cindie paid over the money and walked slowly away, out of the cool building, over the wide street to the pub opposite.

  There she found a note waiting for her. It was written in Nick’s clear neat hand. Like Nick, it was short and to the point.

  There was no need for her to attend the conference this morning. the other members were now on affairs peculiar to their own business. He, Nick, was called away. Would she see Flan as he had arranged for her to visit the Gorges while there was opportunity. Flan would give her the details.

  She stared at his signature. Unlike the rest of the writing it was scrawled at an angle across the lower corner of the page—Nicholas Brent.

  That, of course, put her bang in her place. He wasn’t Nick, or even ‘the boss’. He was Nicholas Brent.

  All right, Cindie thought. Message received! She meant this in more ways than one. Erica, the Queen of the Spinifex,

  was about to arrive, and Cindie must nip back in her shell, and be nobody all over again. Orders by Nicholas Brent Esquire.

  She went upstairs and brushed her hair again. Then took off her make-up with cold cream, and applied a new lot. All this she did without even knowing she was doing it. It was unnecessary anyway. It was still only nine in the morning.

  Then she went downstairs; out of the main door and round the corner to the open square on the far side of the hotel. She had only seen Flan at the pyjama parade these mornings since they had arrived in Mulga Gorges. Now he was busy polishing the Land-Rover as if it were a Rolls-Royce or a Jaguar.

  She sat on the steps of the side veranda and watched him in silence.

  `My, you’re pretty silent for a young lady that has herself a nice unexpected day off!’ Flan said at last, looking up. He folded and refolded his polishing cloth to make a pad of it.

  `How did you know I have a holiday to-day, Flan?’

  He looked puckish. ‘The boss told me, of course.’

  Cindie rested her elbows on her knee and cupped her chin in her hands. `Oh, you mean Nicholas Brent Esquire?’ she inquired.

  `I’ve seen that name on the mail now and again, if that’s what you’re getting at, young miss.’ He went on fiercely polishing, talking as he rubbed and wiped. ‘Come to think of it, it was on a radio message the housemaid was hawking round the upstairs corridor ‘ he looked up, mimicking a female voice-Mr. Nicholas Brent! Mr. Nicholas Brent, please! Anyone seen Mr. Nicholas Brent? A radio message

  `So what did you do, Flan?’

  `I said “Give it to me, and I’ll give it to the boss”. So she did; and I did, and here you are with a holiday on your hands.’

  `It’s not because of the message. The holiday, I mean. It’s because Nick’s share in the conference is probably at an end.’

  Flan bent himself to polishing again. ‘Quite a coincidence, eh? I never did think Nick took that conference seriously. All he wants to do is build his section of the road in peace. In one piece, too. A thousand miles of it.’

  `What was the coincidence, Flan?’ Cindie had not moved

  her position, nor varied the half-dead beat in her voice. `Miss E. coming in by chartered plane. And Miss E.

  taking Nick along with her to that place up next to Marana.

  Forgotten the name. The one that’s about run out of sheep.’

  Cindie did not move. She said nothing, for she had a cold stone for a heart, and it hurt her as it froze her. Funny, because it was blazing hot sitting here in the sun on the veranda step. That east wind drying out Bindaroo?

  ‘You and me for the Mulga Gorges proper, anyway,’ Flan said, looking up. He put a cheerful note in his voice, because he noticed the pallor in Cindie’s face. ‘Girl, you haven’t seen anything till you’ve seen those gorges. I bet you something

  `Yes? What do you bet, Flan?’

  `You think we go out to those ranges and find the gorges tucked in amongst those red rock mountains

  `Where else?’

  ‘Ah, ha! That’s caught you like it catches most people. True we go out thataway. And we go in through the prettiest mountain folds you ever saw. Trees, flowers, birds—everything. Then we come to a crack in the ground. Well, you wait and see—’

  `Yes, I’ll do that, Flan. When do we go?’

  ‘We go tomorrow morning, but only on one condition. You get a nice smile on your face, young Cindie girl. I’m not taking any sad-puss out for a day’s ride.’

  Cindie did indeed smile, straight away.

  ‘I’m sorry, Flan,’ she said contritely. ‘I had worries on my mind. I’ll shake them off, here and now. Tomorrow I’ll rise with the sun, and feel like the sun’s rays. That suit you? I’m dying to see those fabulous gorges anyway.’

  ‘Good girl. Now forget you’re a certain somebody’s secretary, and a front-dining-room guest—for the next half an hour. You nip round to the back kitchen and say Flan ordered two mugs of coffee—with cream on the top, too. It pays to be back-stairs in these parts. You get real attention. For nix, too.’

  ‘I’ll do that, Flan,’ Cindie said cheerfully. ‘I think coffee’s all I want

  She broke off. Round the corner of the building she could see a man coming across from the post office with a red-edged envelope in his hand. He was looking over the lawn and through the patio towards her.

  ‘Something for Mr. Brent?’ she asked as he came up.

  ‘No, for you, Miss Brown. I recognised you as the young lady who sent that message to Baanya this morning. Here’s a reply. Nothing faster than the radio, eh?’

  She took the envelope from his outstretched hand. ‘Thank you very much for bringing it over,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Easy done,’ he answered with a grin. ‘Saved me telephoning it through to the hotel manager.’

  She tore open the envelope and read quickly. Flan watched her out of the corner of his eye.

  HOLDEN WELL PROTECTED FROM THE HEAT AND IS IN GOOD ORDER STOP HAS MANY RUNNING MILES IN IT FOR THE FUTURE STOP NOT TO WORRY CINDIE STOP PLENTY OF TIME STOP LOVE JIM

  Cindie, standing there in her blue dress, a backdrop to the brilliant flame of the bougainvillea growing against the fence, read the message again and again and again. What could it mean? Didn’t Jim understand

  She looked at the heading on the form. It read—‘CONSTRUCTION CAMP VIA BAANYA OUTPOST.’

  ‘Flan ‘ Cindie asked, turning round sharply. ‘Could

  Jim Vernon be at the construction camp?’

  ‘Why not? There’s a beaut flying-fox rigged up across that river. It’ll last quite a time. The weather news says the river water’s going down, anyway.’

  ‘But why would he go back to the construction camp?’ Flan shrugged.

  ‘Please, Flan. You know something—’

  ‘I don’t know something. I just guess. Same as everyone else on that raking site guesses, or bets. And I’m not telling. Go and get that coffee, Cindie, like I said, and quit worrying about Jim Vernon. He knows his own business best.’

  But he knows I’m not there: I’m here! Cindie thought, puzzled.

  It was a waste of time, guessing. There were too many riddles in the air this morning. Flan was right. A good cup of coffee, with cream on the top. was the thing she needed most right now. She did believe in a little self-help—and determined uplift, too. It was this spirit that had made her come north in the first place. At home, all she and her mother had done was worry.

  She would be cheerful for Flan’s sake. She would, she

  would!

  Cindie did not go in
to dinner that night. She did not want to see Erica, nor watch the two of them dining side by

  side. She went to the one small café opposite the general store instead, and ate baked beans on toast. She bought a packet of biscuits so that she would have something to eat with her early-morning cup of tea. She’d be there first so as to avoid certain other people in the pyjama parade. She didn’t intend to go to breakfast because she wasn’t two-faced enough to greet Erica with a smile. Well, not if Erica was en route to Bindaroo—taking Nick with her.

  She thought of Jim’s optimistic message. He had sent that to cheer her up, of course. Perhaps, this time, he didn’t really know what was going on.

  Cindie’s absence from breakfast was a gesture in vain, for Nick and Erica had taken off in that plane at midnight. With the speed of air travel, they would probably be at Marana, or Bindaroo—long before breakfast.

  Flan told Cindie all about this later, as he packed her, together with the hamper made up for them by the hotel chef, into the Land-Rover.

  The other secretaries had been green with envy when Cindie, meeting them in the hotel foyer earlier, told them she had a day off because her chief was away: and where she was going.

  `I told you so,’ Sylvia, the ever-smiling blonde, said. ‘You have the King Chief of all. I heard him ordering a hamper at the desk after dinner last night. Only the best—he said. My, oh, my, Cindie! He must value your services some—’

  `More likely that of his “chauffeur”,’ Cindie replied with a laugh. ‘Flan is his right hand and so devoted it would take a knife-edged saw to sever them apart.’

  `Somebody—absolutely dashing—must have achieved that feat to-day. She was in for dinner last night. And did the hotel staff look up! You were right, Cindie. She’s quite a gal!’

  Cindie thought about this as she went through the door to see if Flan was ready.

  Yes—that was exactly what Erica would do. Everyone would look up, including the three secretaries. She had been afraid to go in to dinner because she had known, deep down inside her, that Erica would have had that effect on herself too. The honest part of herself would have had to give in to admiration.

  Flan sat in the polished Land-Rover: everything about him polished too, except the old wide-brimmed dusty rouseabout’s hat. That was his most loved possession, and he

  disdained the cotton jungle hats Nick and the other men wore on the road-site.

  `Come on, Cindie! Up, girl!’ he called. ‘We’ve quite a day in front of us. At least three gorges to visit.’

  `We’ll enjoy every minute of it, Flan,’ Cindie promised as she levered herself into the passenger seat. It was quite a step up into the Land-Rover. She meant what she said. All else but the scenery would be forgotten. She might never come this way again.

  Some shadow of events had cast itself before her, but she did not recognise it. She little dreamed how the day would end.

  They drove out along the road leading to the west for more than thirty-odd miles, then turned into a gully where magnificent trees, with white papery bark, stood at a great height. It was so cool and beautiful in this tree-shaded gully that Cindie could hardly believe they were only a few miles from nothing but semi-desert plain.

  `Cadjebuts,’ Flan explained. ‘They only grow in gullies near water.’

  `I don’t see any water.’

  `Like most other places in this country, the water’s always underground,’ Flan grumbled. ‘Wait till we get to the real gorges. You’ll see water there all right. You’ll never see the like of it elsewhere: always coloured because it catches the reflections of the walls above it. Have patience, Cindie.’

  `I will,’ she promised.

  They drove out of the low gully on to a wide expanse of flat land. For a few minutes Cindie thought they were back on the original plain. In the near distance in front of them were the queer mesa-shaped mountains with their red blocks at the top, their sides striped with alternate barren rock and swathes of green spinifex grass.

  `It’s the strangest, weirdest country in the world,’ she said.

  ‘A thousand million years old, those rocks,’ Flan said. `So the geologists say, anyway. They’ve got a fancy name for them—Pre-Cambrian. You know what that means?’

  Cindie shook her head. ‘Don’t blind me with science, Flan. That happened to me once before. Never again! Let’s just call them “rocks”!’

  Flan pulled up to a sudden stop beside a small isolated

  grove of white-trunked gums. As far as the eye could see,

  the mullas coloured the ground like a frail mauve mist.

  `But where are the gorges?’ Cindie asked, puzzled.

  `Hop out now,’ Flan advised. ‘Then walk round those

  black-hearted gums. But mind your step. You’ll see a crack in the ground. That’s the first gorge. There are others

  ‘A crack in the ground?’ Flan had spoken of the gorges that way before, but she’d thought he was joking.

  `What did I tell you?’ he grinned.

  From where Cindie stood, looking across a waste of dried-out grass, the crack looked like a mile-long snake winding over the land. Clumps of white-trunked gums grew in small groves here and there by its side. One or two of these trees had a broken branch which showed the black heart under the bark. Nothing was blacker than that heart, and nothing—not even snow—was whiter than the outside trunk.

  Low bush and dry grass sprawled between the trees and the broken rock rubble right to the edge of the crack. Looking along the horizontal plane of the landscape, Cindie expected the gorge might be only a few yards wide.

  Then she walked forward.

  Less than three feet from the edge she stopped, and gasped. The great gash in the earth’s surface was many hundreds of feet wide. Looking down it was almost impossible to see the bottom for the small stunted trees that sprouted out of the sides of the canyon, and the buttresses of denuded red, blue and green rock that formed the near wall. Down near the bottom, on the far side, were wreaths of thick, delicately green ferns. Climbing up the far sides were assortments of the strangest growths, growing out from the crevices. Here and there, even a tall tree had found a foothold and was reaching with its great green arms to a sky far, far above it.

  But it was the cliff-face of the gorge that made Cindie hold her breath. Never had she seen such colours. Awe silenced her.

  Sheer slabs of shining rock, wet from seepage from above, lined the gap. They were striped in flashing blue, jade-green, and here and there, a brilliant red. Sometimes the colours ran horizontally, nearly the length of the canyon. The whole was carved by cracks into vast rectangular, striated patterns.

  The sound of water, wind-sheltered, touching gently against a gravel bottom somewhere down, down, down there in the gorge, was as eerie as faint bunyip music.

  `See what I mean?’ asked Flan, grinning with amusement at the picture of wonder in Cindie’s face. ‘How about going down?’

  `Down there?’ Cindie asked, puzzled. ‘But how? It’s almost perpendicular.’

  `There’s a path—if you know it. Quite a few people come here from time to time. Occasional travellers. Geologists and rock-hunters, mostly. Have you plenty of strength in your sinews to-day, Cindie?’

  She nodded. ‘Lots. I can go down where others have been.’

  `Good girl, because this one’s the toughest. I reckoned we’d do the hard one first. The others’ll be easy. It’s a case of character, tackling this feller. How are you for walking and climbing bare-footed?’

  Excellent,’ Cindie said, kicking off her flatties at once. ‘I do all the gardening at home in bare feet. It’s a way of life, isn’t it?’

  The things you young people do!’ flan declared. Cindie laughed. She threw back her hair and looked towards the gorge with challenge in her eyes.

  `My, you have a lovely face when you laugh like that, Cindie. How come it makes me think of sun shining through rain, or something?’

  `Because sometimes I feel a bit rainy. I’ve had
troubles. I’ll tell you about them sometime. But darling Flan, right this minute, I’m happy. That’s because you’ve brought me out to this gorgeous place. How Jinx and Myrtle would love it! I wish they were here!’

  Not me. I’d have to chain ‘em to a rock to make sure they stayed alive.’

  They were standing side by side, near the opening to the path now.

  `You go first, Flan,’ Cindie suggested. ‘You’re the one who knows the way.’

  `I do, too. Most of the path you can’t see from one buttress to another. You’ll see the bottom, with green water in it, when we get over a few of these top boulders. About half-way down there’s generally a rope hanging about. That’s for novices. Just follow me and keep your eyes skinned for where you put your feet.’

  Cindie had never dreamed of anything like the descent into this heart of the gorge. Every now and again she paused to look around. The sight was beyond description. It was fairyland, no-man’s-land, moon-land, and a child’s haven of fantasy. The light and shade—the colours were unbelievable. Strangest of all were the trees that oddly sprouted out of rock clefts here and there. Occasionally a single one stood sentinel-high on a fallen mountain of rock—clinging with its roots to—what?

  )

  Below, she could now see the great pool of water lying still as a dead lake, reflecting the brilliant colours of the walls. It was guarded in secret silence by fallen rock, bright green ferns and the glistening sides of the gorge.

  The path they were gradually descending ran diagonally across the cliff-face. Here and there it changed course a little to round some bluff or curve into some bay in the wall. There were some places that required long step-downs: others where they had to clamber over rocks.

  ‘You all right, Cindie?’ Flan asked, turning round and looking up at her from time to time. ‘You want a hand, or can you manage this one? Sit on your backside and slide down it. Easier that way. Safer, too.’

  ‘I’m doing fine,’ Cindie declared happily. ‘You keep your eyes in front, Flan. It might be you who needs a hand.’