The Golden Soak

by Innes, Hammond;

‘Like hell! We’ve missed our chance, I tell you.’ I could hear his voice cracking.

  ‘Pull yourself together.’

  ‘And what about you? Shut up, you tell me. Well, shut up yourself for Chrissakes. I didn’t ask to come on this bloody trip.’ And he added, his voice still strained to a high pitch, ‘I don’t know who’s crazier, you or that old man. I want to get out of here. That’s all. Out of here, and alive, see.’

  I didn’t answer him. Better to keep my mouth shut or I’d end up striking the young fool. I began collecting sticks of vegetation, the sun sinking and the desert all on fire with the redness of light and sand. A dozen miles. Five hours in the cool of the night. Then search for him in the dawn light. It ought to be possible. Distance and bearing were both pretty accurate. I got the cook fire going, filled the blackened billy with water and put it on the flames. Midnight. I’d give him till midnight. If he hadn’t returned by then, I’d start walking.

  In fact, I started before midnight. Twelve miles doesn’t sound much, but in the dark, with the sand dotted with spinifex clumps, littered with dry vegetation – it would be like stumbling through a teeming mass of porcupines. And I was scared. I can admit that now. I was scared that in the dawn I’d find nothing. Nothing but that blinding emptiness, with the sandridges bobbing dizzily in the heat and no alternative but to retrace my steps. Fear feeds on inaction and the fear in me started the instant darkness clamped down. The headlights of a Land-Rover would be visible for miles then, but though I stood for a long time on the top of the ridge staring into the dark of the desert there wasn’t the glimmer of a light anywhere. Only the stars above, and all around me the frozen stillness, the empty silence of the desert.

  I began collecting my gear shortly after ten – waterbag, compass, torch, food, matches, cigarettes. And Kennie arguing all the time. It was crazy, he said. I’d lose my way, wander aimlessly till I died of thirst. First he tried to dissuade me, then he wanted to come with me. But how else would I find our Land-Rover again if he wasn’t there to light a bush signal to guide me in? He saw the sense of that, but he didn’t like it. He was scared, scared of being left on his own, stranded beside a useless vehicle. ‘If I don’t come back,’ I told him angrily, ‘then the plane will find you.’ But I don’t think he was very sure about that, any more than I was. ‘Well, what else do you suggest?’

  That shut him up because he hadn’t anything else to suggest. We couldn’t just stay there, waiting and doing nothing. Not when there was a chance Ed Garrety was only a dozen miles away. And then, just as I was leaving, he said a bloody stupid thing to me. He said, ‘If you started walking south instead of east, a few hours and you wouldn’t be all that far from where Gibson disappeared.’

  I rounded on him then. ‘I’m not disappearing,’ I said. ‘I’m going twelve miles, that’s all. And if I don’t find him, I’ll lay up during the day and walk those dozen miles back tomorrow night.’ And I told him to fire a patch of spinifex just before sunrise to guide me in.

  ‘Well, I hope to Christ you find him,’ he said.

  ‘So do I.’

  I left him then and started walking, the satchel with my gear bumping my hip, the compass in one hand and the waterbag in the other.

  The first hour wasn’t so bad. I had changed into a pair of khaki longs and the spinifex wasn’t very thick, plenty of sand between the clumps, and I was in a flat plain, walking diagonally across it with the next sandridge a good two miles away. At first I found it difficult to hold a course, the light of my torch blinding me every time I checked the compass. I solved that by lining the bearing up with a star, then I didn’t have to use the torch and could concentrate on where I was putting my feet.

  If it had all been like that I would have made it in four hours, but over the next sandridge the going was bad. I was in a narrow trough between two ridges, the spinifex thick, my feet stumbling and spines like darning needles stabbing through my trousers. Ridge succeeded ridge, almost no gap between, the slopes steeper and the sand soft. I was sweating, conscious of the weight of the waterbag and beginning to tire. A gap opened out and I was into a patch of dead mulga scrub, the roots like giant spikes. I had to make a long detour round it and in spinifex again I began to stumble.

  I paused then for a breather and checked my watch. One hour twenty-two minutes. I could have sworn it was longer than that. I went on again until I had done two hours, and then I sat down and smoked a cigarette. My knees were trembling and I was very tired. Two hours. Did that mean I had covered four miles? How fast had I been walking? I finished my cigarette and went on for another hour, the going variable with two long detours to the north across the ridges. It was easier after that, patches of open sand and gravel, but the stillness, the loneliness, getting on my nerves. I began to understand why the aborigines believe in their mamu. Time and again I could have sworn I saw a movement, shadows flickering in the desert. Kangaroo perhaps, or euros. I think they were really wallaby. But no sound, only the soft scuff of my feet in the sand, the scrape of the spinifex against my trousers.

  I was stopping every half hour, moistening my mouth with a few drops of water. The temperature was around 100°, and though I knew I was sweating, my skin was dry, only the scum of salt to tell me I was losing body moisture. I walked on, right through the hours of darkness, and as the sky began to lighten with the dawn I collapsed on to the ground at the top of a sandhill, lying there exhausted, watching the desert take shape around me. There were wallaby moving in the flat sand trough below me, grey shapes that shifted their position with slow movements, crouching as they browsed on the dry, desiccated vegetation. And a little kangaroo rat that seemed oblivious of my presence. But no sign of the Land-Rover, nothing to indicate the presence of another human being in all the miles that stretched away to the surrounding rim of the horizon. The night receded, the washed-out grey of early dawn quickly taking on colour as the light strengthened. The dunes were ‘braided’ here, the stark beauty frightening. I didn’t see the wallaby go. They just suddenly weren’t there any more. I was alone then, seemingly the only living thing in that great red frying pan of a desert – except the flies in a cloud around my head and the ants in the sand at my feet, and that little marsupial rat.

  I had some food and a slow, careful drink of water, and then, as the moment of sunrise neared, I began my search, keeping to the top of the dunes and walking on a bearing of roughly 120°. I couldn’t be sure how far I had come during the night; I thought just under the twelve miles, allowing for rests and detours. But while the idea that I could locate that Land-Rover on the basis of course and distance walked had seemed sensible enough at the outset, now that I was in the presumed locality I realized how near-impossible it was in practice. Parked in a trough below a sandhill, I could walk within a few hundred yards of it and never see it.

  The sun rose and I turned south, angling across the ridges, pausing on each top to search the valley between. It was my only hope. Even then I wouldn’t have seen it but for the fire. The sun had risen an hour ago and I was nearing the point of exhaustion, the heat intense and mirages beginning to haze my vision. My legs were trembling as I stumbled up the next ridge, nerves stretched and panic only just within my power to control. And those words of Kennie’s at the back of my mind. Coming out in the ship, I had read about the Warburton, Gosse and Giles expeditions, and how Gibson, going back for fresh horses, had lost his way and disappeared. As Kennie had said, it wasn’t all that far to the south, somewhere near the Alfred and Marie Range. But here there were no ranges, not the ghost of a distant blue range-top lipping the horizon to give me hope of shade and water. And then I had staggered to the top of that ridge and was standing there, the sun blazing, sand and vegetation dancing before my eyes, my body sagging and the flies crawling around my eyes.

  I knew I must lie up now, find some shade, fry to sleep. And then, when night fell, the trek back. I turned towards the sun, thinking of Kennie and the Land-Rover. Company at least. To die alone.… I suddenly had a f
eeling that I was in a void, hopelessly lost, with no hope of finding my way back. I was remembering how I had told Kennie to burn spinifex. But if I was lost, how could I see it? How could I possibly be certain I’d be near enough to him in the dawn – the next dawn?

  Panic was very close then. I wanted to run. I wanted to run all the way back, just to be certain. And then I saw it, beyond the next ridge – a wisp of black smoke. And for a moment I was crazy enough to think I had run those twelve miles back. Today – tomorrow … time had no meaning. I was too damned tired.

  The wisp of smoke was dying, and I was running, running down the slope of the ridge, across the floor of the trough, the smoke receding and the next ridge far away, hardly getting any nearer as my blood pounded and my feet staggered. Birds rose, flights of bright colours – budgerigars I think – and the wisp gone now. Christ! A mirage! That’s what kept me staggering at a shambling run, the fear that it was a mirage – a dream, my mind wandering, crazed in panic, dried seed pods rasping at my trousers and everything vivid in the blinding light. It seemed an age before I reached the top of the sand slope and then suddenly the scene had changed, the sandhills gone and in their place rough rock, red-knolled and eroded into little escarpments. And below one of these, far away and shimmering in the distance, my tired eyes glimpsed the blunt box-shape of the Land-Rover.

  Sanity came back, all panic gone, and the going easier as I reached the bare rock surface. It was a conglomerate of some sort, rough and hard under my feet with only here and there a sparse covering of dwarf spinifex and grasses. I heard my voice, unrecognizable as I shouted, my mouth furred and my larynx sounding as though I had newly discovered the power of speech. A movement then, a figure coming out from behind the Land-Rover, standing staring and finally moving towards me. A black face and a wide hat, black hands gripping me as I reached for him, stumbling. The blessed certainty that be was real and not some mirage of my imagination. ‘Tom.’ The black face split, his teeth showing in a grin of recognition. And then I passed out – not exhaustion, not shock, just pure bloody relief.

  I was only out for a second. I didn’t even fall. Tom had hold of me and in a moment the grogginess was gone, the knowledge that I had found them giving me strength again. They were camped close under one of the little escarpments, a cavity hollowed out by the scouring action of wind and sand, Ed Garrety sitting there propped against the rough conglomerate wall and in the hollow at his feet the sand unbelievably darkened by moisture.

  He nodded to me, smiling vaguely. ‘You made it, eh? I wondered whether you would.’ He didn’t seem at all surprised.

  ‘Two days you said.’

  ‘That’s right. But when we tried to get going again, we found the jets clogged with sand, and after we’d dismantled the carburettor and cleaned it that threaded union leaked so badly we could only just start the engine. It wouldn’t give us any power.’ His voice trailed off, very weak, his breathing shallow and his skin paper-white.

  ‘I’ll try and fix it,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘No good. I’ve tried. Nothing to fix it with.’ He reached into his pocket and tossed me the rotor arm he’d taken from our Land-Rover. ‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I was stretched out now in the shade of the overhang, reaction setting in and a great lassitude creeping through my limbs. Outside, the blinding white of the sunlight fell on a straight, dark-trunked tree with bark like cork and feathery needles, an anthill mounded beneath it and the pests scuttling over the conglomerate, large, long-legged and wiry, busy at some unidentifiable task.

  ‘Bulldog ants,’ he said. ‘Find a kurkapi – that’s a desert oak – and there’s always one of their damned nests under it. The shade, y’see. It’s the best shade tree in the desert.’ His voice was so faint I could hardly hear him. ‘Glad you came. I had Tom keep a fire going from first light. To signal you in. But not much spinifex here to make a proper smoke.’

  I closed my eyes against the glare, the lassitude deepening, my head nodding.

  ‘Who sent the plane?’

  I think he asked me that several times before I dragged myself back to consciousness enough to give him an answer. ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Could be a prospector – that man Culpin perhaps, or Janet may have changed her mind and notified the authorities.’

  There was a long silence and I drifted back into the lethargy of half-consciousness, not sleeping, not waking, just lying there in a state of exhausted oblivion. The next thing I knew I was being shaken and a black hand was thrusting a mug of tea at me. It was strong and sweet and very hot, and it did the trick. It woke me up and put a little energy into me.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes.’ I took another gulp at the hot strong tea. ‘Yes, better, thanks. It was the loneliness. I bloody near panicked.’

  He smiled. ‘I guessed it was that.’

  He was looking at me, a very direct stare, his blue eyes wide. I dropped my own gaze down to the mug, looking down at the tea leaves floating and a dead ant, flies clinging with thread-like legs to the rim, realizing suddenly that I hadn’t bothered to conceal my fear. Somehow this sick, worn-out man, with a face so parched of blood it was like a lizard’s, had the knack of holding me to the truth. Something in his personality, or perhaps it was the wretchedness of his situation. Or was it the country? Was it the starkness of the red centre of this country that brought a man face-to-face with reality?

  I stared at the rotor arm in my hand, the golden gleam of the brass bright in the strong light, the brown of the bakelite. Was that really what I had come for? If I made it back to our own Land-Rover in tomorrow’s dawn it meant release from the torture of this red desert. The engine would go again and we could get the hell out. I leaned back against the rough curve of the rock, flicking the flies off, sipping at the hot, sweet contents of the enamel mug. All this way just to turn back. It didn’t make sense, though something at the back of my mind screamed at me to go – to go while the going was good, while I still had some reserves of energy left.

  But man isn’t made like that. Given the faintest spark of energy there’s always that need to reach for something, regardless of physical discomfort, regardless even of the fear of death. I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate, conscious all the time of Ed Garrety there beside me. Logic. A sensible decision. But my brain seemed incapable of that, and the man beside me – nothing logical there. A gamble, a last desperate gamble. But if it was that, why had he immobilized, our vehicle? A dozen miles and on his own – why? Why, when he had a mining consultant at hand to confirm the nature of the deposit?

  I sucked at the last drop of tea, spitting out the leaves and that dead ant, the flies buzzing. My eyes were open now, staring into the sun-glare at the red-scabbed rock, a petrified sediment of tiny fragments welded into a conglomerate and bared by the wind, worn by the blowing sand into a gentle undulation, a low swell frozen with sudden knoll-like outcrops carved in strange shapes. ‘There’s no copper here,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A conglomerate – of no value at all.’ I looked at him, a thought taking slow shape in my mind. ‘Then why in God’s name –’ But something in his face stopped me. He was slumped there, his eyes closed, the muscle at the corner of his mouth twitching and an expression of extreme agony on his face. Behind his head a complicated pattern of concentric circles had been painted on the rock wall, the pigments faded now, but still showing faintly. White and ochre and some sort of blue – indigo perhaps. It was like an old frescoe, a primitive halo framing the parchment face, the saint-like effect emphasized by the lidded eyes, the suggestion of a death mask.

  The lids flicked suddenly open and he was looking at me again with that wide-eyed unblinking stare, and I saw he was deep in some private hell of his own. Christ! I thought. He’s over the edge now. He’s mad like his father. ‘What is this place?’ I heard myself ask, my voice a whisper.

  ‘The blacks call it a rira. It’s a conglomerate, as you say.’ H
is words were slow, like a man talking in his sleep. ‘And this soak here – not many in the Gibson. It’s called the Kurrajong Soak. See that tree there?’ He nodded vaguely towards a brilliantly green tree. ‘That’s a kurrajong. It’s always like that. Not many of them, but even in a drought like this it stays green. The greenest thing in the desert.’

  I waited, not saying anything. And then, very quietly, very matter-of-factly, he said, ‘The last time I was here this soak had water in it. We only had to dig down about a foot and we got all the water we wanted – good water, too. Not brackish.’ And he added, ‘There was a lot of game here then. But last night nothing. No emu. No wallaby.’ His eyes were closed again so that he was like a man talking in his sleep. ‘If I hadn’t come on this soak I’d have lost my camels. They’d just about reached the limit. I’d never have got out alive. I was crazed with thirst myself. And like you, on the verge of panic. But with more reason.’ He was living something that had happened a long time ago, silent once again. I kept my mouth shut, knowing it would come of its own accord or not at all.

  A shadow moved and Tom stooped in under the overhang, took the mug from me and disappeared, back to some separate burrow of his own. And then his voice again, quiet in the silence: ‘He’d never have made it this far without Weepy. Weepy Weeli knew all the soaks. This was the second they’d camped at, so you might say he owed his life to my father.’

  I don’t know whether he was conscious of me or not at that moment. He seemed to be talking to himself rather than me, talking for the sake of talking, perhaps the way people do in a confessional. I think he had to get it off his chest and it was just that I happened to be there. There was more to it, of course, but I only realized that later, when it was too late – after the wind had died.

  There was a long silence, and while I was considering the implications of what he had said, I think I dozed off, for the next thing I heard was him saying: ‘When I woke I was sitting about where you’re sitting now, right here in this hollow in the rock. And what woke me was the sound of a shot. I stumbled out and there he was with a gun in his hand and one of my three camels lying drumming with her legs on the rira. I can remember the smoke was still curling from the muzzle of the gun as he raised it to his shoulder again. I shouted at him and he wheeled round, the gun pointing at me. But I just didn’t care. The camel was the best I had. I’d broken her myself. I went straight at him and he was in such a state when he fired that he missed. The shot went just over my head. And then I was on him, my hands wrenching at the guns, tearing it out of his grasp. He wasn’t a big man and I was young. He hadn’t a hope after he’d missed me. And when I got hold of the gun I was in such a rage I shot him. I shot him through his forehead and I can still see the look on his face, the staring, horror-struck eyes as he realized what I was going to do. It’s haunted me all my life. For I did it in cold blood. I killed him quite deliberately.’ He paused then, his eyes wide, a distant look as he saw every detail of the scene he had lived with all these years. ‘He didn’t even twitch. He just folded up with a glazed, surprised look, and then lay out there in some thin grass, pitched forward on his face. I put the camel out of her misery, wishing I had been awake in time to stop him. The sun was just setting, everything blood-red, and when I moved that little bastard the wisps of spinifex he’d fallen on were red, too – the blood that had drained out of the hole in the back of his head.’