Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Our legs are full of the sharp ends of the spinifex. Large numbers of crows are following the baggage train, apparently for the sheep's offals.

  April 5th

  We have left a note in a bottle as to our progress in the message hollow of the great gum tree at Sadness Creek, per our arrangement, to be collected and carried back to Adelaide by a native sent for that purpose. The bottle is marked with indelible ink South Central Australian Expedition, R. M. Beadle.

  The animals have been watered and are resting under fair and mild skies. We have been so anxious to proceed at all speed that I have not set down in these pages the full catalog of our expedition. In the matter of personnel, I can state without equivocation that I was given a free hand, and chose a crew of twelve, counting myself, out of over three hundred able-bodied men who applied for positions. Any group of men isolated on a long journey is entirely dependent upon one another, and we will be no exception. Accompanying me on this undertaking are:

  Officers.

  James A. Browne. Second in command.

  Richard Scott Hill. Expedition physician.

  Philip Mander-Jones. Expedition draftsman and surveyor.

  Men.

  Edgar Beale. In charge of stock.

  D. K. Hamilton &

  Charles Mabberly To man the whaleboat.

  John Gould. In charge of the horses.

  Robert Cuppage. Armorer.

  Francis Purdie. Cook.

  John Mack &

  H. L. Moorhouse. Bullock drivers.

  We carry five tons of provisions and equipment on three bullock drays and two carriages pulled by draft horses. One of the carriages transports the whaleboat. Each of the loaded drays weighs over two thousand pounds. We began with a ton of flour alone, three hundred pounds of bacon, and a quarter ton of sugar. We carry for safety a pairing of sextants, artificial horizons, prismatic compasses, and barometers. A ream of foolscap, this book for journal-keeping, sealing wax, camel's hair brushes, an inkstand, ink, goose quills, colored pencils, and a sketch palette. Five revolvers and two rifles. For ornithological specimens, a shotgun. As well as all the necessary ammunition. Also a trunk of trade and gift items, primarily hats and knives, for the aborigines. In the back of the train are four extra horses, one hundred head of sheep for provision, and four dogs for herding the sheep. Our procession extends more than a quarter of a mile.

  We have been empowered to strike north from Mt. Arden into the great interior as far as the 28th parallel of latitude. This in order to determine whether a mountain range or other major height of land exists in that vicinity. The governor and Lord Stanley have to that end approved a budget of two thousand five hundred pounds for an undertaking not to exceed twelve months.

  If such a height of land does exist, then everything north of it must necessarily flow into an as yet undiscovered watershed: a vast inland sea.

  April 7th

  Today's resolution: “Strive, and hold cheap the strain.” We have set a guard, and impressed upon the men the necessity of vigilance. And the danger of the journey ahead. Tomorrow we step off into the first truly daunting territory, leaving the southern watershed behind. The aborigines call our resting place Dead Man's Flat. The men in high spirits, the animals in good order. Up late, too agitated for sleep, my mind full of a thousand small tasks, and marveling on this strange, strange country, where even the celestial sphere is the wrong way about.

  April 8th

  Even as a child, I'd pressed my hand to the map of Australia in my Boys' Atlas, palming the blank upon its center. Our biggest cities are but specks perched on the extreme southern and eastern tips of a vast unknown. Men of perseverance and resource have failed to penetrate that remote and oblique vastness. Stowitts set off from the NE coast with the idea of crossing to Perth, and together with his entire expedition was never heard from again. The entire area seems so fearsomely defended by its deserts, one might suppose Nature has intentionally closed it to civilized man.

  Browne has pointed out to me in the privacy of my tent that the governor's charge says nothing about an inland sea. My father too tried to strike the boat from the budget list. Browne believes, with them, that the great center is likely to prove in its entirety to be inhospitable desert. But I paid the cost of the whaleboat with my own funds. Explorers have recorded countless westward-flowing streams, none of which empty into the southern ocean. Where do these waters go if not to an immense sea or lake to which there must exist a navigable entrance? I believe the continent to be fashioned like a bowl, with elevated sides and a sunken center, a bowl whose lowest points are likely to be filled with water. “A bowl,” Browne said with some unhappiness when I outlined for him my thinking.

  And imagine if that sea disembogues into the northern ocean, by way of some strait, I reminded him. “The Beadle Sea,” he smiled, as though indulging a child he loved very much. We were together relashing the bundle containing our charter and various maps, such as they were. “The Browne Strait,” I added, in order to see him smile again.

  April 10th

  Browne too has had a vexed relationship with his father, whose unfortunate speculations in corn when Browne was still a child left the family nearly without resource. He admitted during his interview that he had reaped few benefits, emotional or financial, from his parents. He has, nevertheless, turned himself into a young man of no little account. He brings to our group an artist's spirit and a Zouave's resourcefulness. As well as an apostate's skepticism. During a supper gathering of the officers, I listed the altogether beneficial ways in which our various virtues interacted. Hill, I pointed out, besides his skills as a healer, is also a man of refined manners, a genteel disposition, and a sensitive temperament. Mander-Jones has a scientist's exactitude and love of order. Our virtues together, I suggested, comprise one ideal explorer. “Of frustrated ambitions,” Browne pointed out. A short while after our discussion, one of the men shot what Mander-Jones informs us is a new sort of butcher-bird, very scarce and wild.

  April 13th

  Today's resolution: “To love is to be all made of sighs and tears; to be all made of faith and service.” Named a dry creek bed of some size Beale Creek, to reward the fellow for the labor of having surveyed it. Sufficient saltbush, which the horses eat readily. Some small, fawn-colored kangaroo, of which the dogs have killed four. No elevation of any kind breaks the horizon or varies the sea of scrub ahead. At first there will be the appearance of improvement, then barren country again. During our evening meal Browne asked if the governor or Lord Stanley had any knowledge of the whaleboat. I told him that they had made clear to my satisfaction that they had every confidence in myself and my decisions. Cup-page reports that his pain is very bad when he mounts or dismounts. Browne considers it a poor sign that our armorer has managed to shoot himself.

  April 14th

  All day the sun through heavy clouds, which checked some of its fiery beams. Nothing about but a few coleopterous insects. “Beetles,” Browne corrects me, a little peevishly. After encampment we observed four or five signal fires. The aborigines are apparently retreating before our advance.

  April 16th

  No sign of a previous civilization. Not an arrowhead, not a flint, not even the remains of a cooking fire. Everything suggests an ongoing and immemorial enervation. A kind of trance in the air.

  April 17th

  Here in this wilderness, we intruded upon an extraordinary gathering: a group of five white men seated upon the ground, weeping. They seemed to have about them ample supplies, and to be without injury. Nothing would make them explain the cause of their grief. In the end we were obliged to continue on our way. Purdie, the cook, in particular, has remained quite upset by the incident.

  April 20th

  A stretch of better country, over which we have made good progress. Found a native wheat and a rye, and in hollows a purple vetch of which the cattle are very fond. Crossed an entire plain covered with perfectly spherical stones. Formed by the action of water, no doubt, when t
he plain was—or is—undersea.

  At times the land ahead is as flat as a table. The birds are remarkable: ibis with their coral eyes; emus, striding about like enormous indignant chickens on their startling claws; olive green and yellow butcher-birds circling on their updrafts to gain height. Something Mander-Jones calls a “ventriloquist dove,” which, with no movement of its throat, makes a sound that seems to come from the distant horizon. We are taking notes and collecting specimens whenever possible. We all feel the exhilaration of putting our other lives behind us. Mack, with Cuppage laid up, has had unusual success shooting pigeons. Today's resolution: “Look round the habitable world! How few know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.”

  April 21st

  A close, humid day which produced an incessant clamminess over the body and called forth innumerable insects. Mander-Jones bitten on the scalp by a centipede in his hat. The dogs killed a fine specimen of something that had been following us, but in the ensuing scuffle they tore off its head. It rained gently in the morning.

  April 22nd

  When I was less than five years old, I am told, I dragged around behind me on a cord a legless horse to which I was inseparably attached. The poor thing bounced and tumbled along in a most pitiful way, as I remember. No one knew from whence it came. It was a carved lump of pine painted with a blue saddle. It had a mouth but no eyes. I slept with it and named it My Captain, to the puzzlement of those who gave it any thought.

  April 23rd

  Plagued by the flies, and the rain has brought out the death adders and other snakes. Eight-inch centipedes with ghastly jaws, fearless, mouse-sized scorpions, ubiquitous stinging ants. Men glad of moving on.

  Browne at our officers' supper again lodged a complaint concerning the number of water casks we carry (two), which he sees as woefully inadequate. He reminded us all that we're doing what we've been expressly advised by those familiar with the country not to do: travel with no line of communication to our rear and no maps for our forward journey. His reassuring prudence was duly recorded. In order to demonstrate our congru-ency on this point I cited for him yesterday's resolution, which was “Take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves.”

  During heavy winds the dogs shelter in hollows, whining and barking to very little purpose.

  April 24th

  Finally, some natives. A small group: two men, four women, and a few children. They were camped on a sand hill and sat watching as we approached. The children were in a terrible fright, clinging to their mothers like opossum. The adults are very wiry and strong looking though they tend to be deficient in the front tooth. While we watched they cooked some mice in the hot sand itself and then devoured them entire, fur, entrails, and all, nipping off the tail with their teeth. I had with me a vocabulary of the language of the Murray natives but was unable to make them understand a word of it. We asked, by signs, where they derived their water, and they intimated that they depended on rain. They did so by lifting their hands and then pulling them quickly down while fluttering their fingers. Then they pointed where we were headed and shook their heads vigorously.

  They were much taken with our appearance, and some of us do present a sight: Mabberly with his great buccaneer's hat; Beale with his peculiar facial scar. Mander-Jones with his filthy beard. And Hill's spectacles, which are so very small that I constantly wonder how he sees adequately through them. Purdie, the only one of our party to have met aborigines on their home ground before, informed us after we had moved on that they believe Europeans to be black fellows returned from the grave, gone white because of their new status as ghosts.

  Tested the water in their water-hole and found it to be 107.8 degrees. Tonight the dogs are barking toward the point from which the wind is coming. One of the horses kicked Moorhouse's gun on the stock and shivered it to pieces. Hill has broken my watch.

  April 27th

  Dreadful passage. For three days now our road has lain over these abominable and rotten lands on which water has evidently subsided and whose surface the sun has cracked into deep fissures. Whenever the dray wheels drop into the holes it shocks the animals greatly. We are flanked as we proceed by great ridges of basalt and ironstone. Nothing seems tempered by weathering; all edges seem razor-sharp. There is much eurite underfoot. Mysterious columnar formations off to the west. Nearly all we survey seems unsuitable for cultivation. The temperature yesterday rose to 111 Fahrenheit; this morning, it fell to 38. Nights we huddle in flannel pantaloons and greatcoats. Days we suffer in the heat. How it is possible that the natives can withstand such extremes, unprovided as they are against the heat and cold?

  Cuppage is now able to lift or carry very little. Hill fears his wound may be infected.

  May 1st

  Full of accidents today. Moorhouse's dray broke its axle-pole, and Gould's its rear wheel. The country is more open and worse in character. Rents and fissures so tremendous the cart-drivers are thrown from their seats. Mabberly has been admirably careful with the whaleboat, about which, considering the likelihood of her being so soon wanted, I am naturally nervous. Nothing cheering in the prospect to the N and NW.

  One of the dogs has been lost—swallowed—in a strange dry salt lagoon comprised of gypsum and black mud. Its compatriots were hysterical with grief and upset. The approaches to the place were most unpleasantly spongy. The wind blows salt from it over the flats behind us like smoke. Old Fitz, our best draft horse, has a swelling on his near hind leg.

  May 2nd

  Stopped to give the animals a day of rest and to repair the drays. At a dry creek bed, some white mallow, which Gould gave to the horses. Nearer the creek a plant with a striped and bitter fruit. Perhaps some kind of cucumber.

  The flies an affliction. Scaled a box tree to consider the path ahead with the telescope. Flies blocked and clogged the eyepiece. Attacked by ants, their bites like a bad sunburn throughout the night.

  May 5th

  I've directed that the bullocks be fastened by the noses to the carts, so that we might start earlier. The thermometer this morning at half past six stood at 102. Increasingly the only plants we encounter are differing kinds of atriplex with their terrible spines. The only water our advance parties were able to discover today was a shallow puddle so thick with animalcula as to be unfit to drink.

  Numerous insects about at night. During the day, the flies. Whether we are out taking bearings or in gullies searching water or in our tents, it is all the same. They watch our movements, and the moment our hands are full, settle in swarms on our faces.

  May 12th

  A new mortification: we have left behind all scrub and rock to confront gigantic sandy ridges which succeed each other like wave trains, and we climb and descend one just to confront another. Only the smallest, umbrella-shaped shrubs in evidence here and there, the intense surface heat having seared away the lower branches. The ridges are sixty to seventy feet high and as steep as swells in a heavy gale. They appear to extend many miles to the NW. Should we find a body of water in that direction, I am at a loss as to how we would negotiate the dray with the whaleboat that distance.

  Even so, the ridges exhibit a regularity that waves alone must have created. What we are struggling with, it follows, was not long ago a submarine position. “Oh, for the love of God,” Browne responded when I told him, his hat soaked through with sweat before our day had even begun.

  May 19th

  A week of stupefying labor. The heavily loaded drays sink deep into the sand, and the overheated bullocks just cease their struggles completely for minutes at a time. The days are scorching hot, and the animals are suffering greatly. Today the sheep came to a dead halt and would not move, while the dogs and horses huddled under and against the drays for such shade as they might provide, remaining there until evening.

  Winds and whirlwinds, all oven-hot. The horses are suffering even more than we might have expected. Their legs are pierced in a hundred places by spinifex, which has in the last two days begun to cover th
e ridges. Both Captain and the chestnut have had a running at the nose which I feared to be glanders, but Gould reports they are better. I have an ugly rash over my back and chest. The men complain of insomnia and sore eyes. This evening at sunset we remarked upon an extended haze of a supernatural blue on the horizon opposite the sun. The effect, we presume, of refraction.

  I have had some surprisingly bitter contentions with some of the other officers. More than ever I am convinced that the interior is to be achieved only by careful calculation and that additional headlong rushing about will lead us into further difficulty. As it is now, advance parties, usually captained by Browne, scout twenty to thirty miles ahead of us by horse. Both Browne and Mander-Jones believe we cannot maintain this unhurried pace with summer only four or five months away.

  I hope I will not shrink from the trials ahead. The day may come when I must face greater extremes, and I trust I will do so not the less firmly for having only the smallest notion of what I'm likely to encounter.

  May 22nd

  Cuppage feverish and laid up. A comfortable pallet has been arranged for him in the whaleboat. A few days' inactivity while the advance parties search for water. I have directed that the whale-boat be outfitted and painted.