Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

by Miller, Alex

  She moved about quietly, hunting up the few items they would need to take with them. It was more than twenty years since she had climbed the mountain. It had always been for her such an important experience (the more it receded in time, the more its significance had grown within her mind) that now she almost wondered if she had really climbed the mountain that day or had only imagined herself doing it. The thought of returning with Robert and coming face to face with the white sandstone crag stimulated in her a feeling of physical strength, as if goodness were being released into her muscles, as if this was the one perfect thing that she had ever wanted to do, the only possible thing that could engage the whole of her interest and her abilities.

  She knew that she would not be making the journey even now, however, if it hadn’t been for her need to make it with Robert. The expectation of going there with him was making her feel unassailable by the ordinary world. Every other consideration was being rapidly washed out to the edges of her mind by her enthusiasm. The rest was meaningless—dull at its best and at its worst oppressive and threatening.

  She put on a pair of strong, well-made twill slacks and rummaged for a pair of thick socks in the bottom of her cupboard—among clothes she now seldom wore and which for a moment brought happy memories to her mind. The only slight regret she felt while she was dressing, and it was only slight, was that Gil would no longer wholeheartedly applaud the exploit as he would have once. It was too late. He had changed. He would be enthusiastic, she knew that, but his enthusiasm would not be as spontaneous. He had become too circumspect to rejoice; he’d begun to calculate his actions as if for some kind of permanence. She had seen it at Christmas. It did not worry her, it was a pity, but she didn’t dwell on it. They would all no doubt decide that she had gone mad. Perhaps Gary, her eldest brother, might privately understand but he would not let anyone know. The only member of her family who would have understood completely, but who also would have resisted it, was her mother. But she was dead. It was too late for her too. Ida found the socks she was looking for and put them on.

  •

  Alistair sat up in bed suddenly, listening. He had been aware for most of the night of movements down the passage near his mother’s room. He had listened and dozed and been woken a dozen times, alert to the slightest noise. Now he was sure she had gone out the back door, very quietly, without letting the flyscreen squeak at all. Day was just breaking. He got up and went to the kitchen. Looking out the window he was in time to see her going through the garden gate. He watched her take the path to the stockman’s quarters. She was carrying two light packs and had her left hand bandaged. Alistair hurried down the steps and, keeping well out of her line of sight, he stalked her, waiting until she had woken Crofts and been let in to his hut before going over and pressing his ear to the thin fibro wall. He could hear their voices clearly. At first low, careful and filled with eagerness, their tones then began to get louder and more emotional.

  As the red dawn light spread across the broken base of the clouds, Alistair crouched against the wall, wearing only his pyjama shorts, and listened with rapt, frightened attention. A low line of mist lay over the paddocks, and every blade of grass and every leaf was dripping wet. A rash of goosebumps rose on his skin. He hugged himself and shivered. The dogs sat at the entrances to their kennels watching him. He had been crouching there with his ear pressed to the wall for almost fifteen minutes, while his mother’s voice became more and more impatient, when suddenly she lost her temper and shouted angrily at the stockman, bitterly accusing him of being a weak fool. A second later she emerged from the hut and, without looking back, she hurried towards the creek.

  Before she had reached the bank Crofts rushed out and ran after her. He was carrying the other pack and as he reached the creek he looked nervously back over his shoulder, catching sight of the house; and perhaps at the very last second he glimpsed Alistair huddled against the side of the hut.

  The boy stayed where he was, trying to convince himself that the stockman had not seen him. After a few minutes, he slowly got to his feet. Still he watched the creek bank, more than half expecting Crofts to return and confront him. Then he went and looked over the bank and along the creek in the direction he knew they would have taken. There was no sign of them, except for the dark tracks which they had left in the drenched silvery couch grass, tracks that overlay each other at first then separated and continued side by side, until they eventually vanished beneath the branches of the tea-trees. He stood gazing down at these smudgy marks across the lower terrace of the bank for several minutes, lost in thought, wondering why his mother had taken Crofts to the mountain that had been forbidden to all people except those few who had been taught to resist its beauty. He had never seen the mountain in real life, his only image of it was the one his mother had given him in her story. He was wondering what her true reasons were, for he was sure she had not taken Crofts there for the reasons he had overheard her give to the stockman a few minutes ago.

  Satisfied that they really had set off and that he was safe, Alistair returned to the stockman’s hut. He didn’t need to go in, he could see everything from the doorway. The interior had been transformed since he had last seen it. It was no longer the squalid hole where he had watched Janet and Crofts playing the games which had so disgusted him. One of the beds had been placed on its end out of sight against the wall behind the door, and in the space that had been created stood a green baize-topped card table and two comfortable canvas chairs. On Crofts’ bed there was a colourful spread which Alistair had never seen before and an identical piece of material hung at the window as a curtain. A black wooden bookcase stood behind one of the chairs next to the chest-of-drawers. It was more than half-filled with books and on its upper shelf was a brass ashtray, a half-empty bottle of Corio whiskey and two glasses. On the table were several more books, some papers and pencils.

  The room retained the smell of his father—not only of his tobacco and liquor but also his father’s peculiar spiciness. Then he saw, on the chest-of-drawers, a small shagreen and silver hip flask and its unique companion, a delicately fashioned silver cup which had belonged, so Alistair had been told, to his great-great-grandfather, which that remote ancestor had regularly used for taking a drink when out riding. These objects were so intimately associated with a particular period of his childhood, and he had not seen them for so long that Alistair got a shock to see them here now. He stared at the little cup with its perfect surfaces and remembered how he had played with it endlessly when he was a small child, locking and unlocking its concentric rings, fascinated with the magical ability of the object to change from a flat disc to a hollow vessel. He could hear now the silvery sliding sound concluded by the tight click it made when he had pulled it open, and he could feel its smooth shape under his fingers. Its unexpected reappearance by the stockman’s bedside brought back to him the emotions he had lived with so happily at that distant time of his life. He hated Crofts so deeply that he despaired of ever achieving sufficient revenge.

  There were no more secrets here. It was time at last for him to go and tell his father of their plans. To hand it all over to him. To tell him everything in such a way that his father would feel utterly betrayed by this English workman by whom he had been beguiled into giving everything decent that he had cherished all his life. It was as if Alistair had been working his way towards this moment since the day Crofts had arrived on the station. He had carried his suspicions and his fear and eventually his hatred of the stockman all on his own, dragging the dreadful load of it around with him ever since he had looked over Janet’s shoulder and seen Crofts lying there on the bed with his hands behind his head gazing at the ceiling of the hut as if no one but himself existed in the world. The startling beauty in the stockman’s face had immediately aroused in Alistair an instinctive revulsion—he had sensed a threat to himself and to his family behind the allurement of Crofts’ shining beauty.

  He had not known why he had felt as he did that day. He had neve
r bothered to ask himself why it should be so. He had simply watched while his fears had become real. And he was increasingly isolated by what he alone had seen and understood. Even Janet had been blind to it. He had been unable to convince her that his fears were anything more than jealousy. She had laughed at him and had begun to distance herself from him in an attempt to get closer to Crofts. But when she had seen that she could not hope to involve the stockman in her ambitions, she had tried to find ways to humiliate him. But he had not been vulnerable to her and she had soon sought to escape, for good, from both of them. She had been no help.

  Alistair realised he would at last be able to share his dreadful insight with his father, with whom he had never consciously shared anything before. His father, he felt certain, would deal with Crofts with the kind of force that Alistair could never have hoped to muster on his own—his pathetic attempt to shoot Crofts at the rock pool seemed to him now to have been a narrow escape: had he succeeded in killing the stockman he would have been forever misunderstood, and his story would never have been believed by anyone. But he had escaped that fate and now his father would do it properly. A great feeling of relief, of happiness almost, as if a benevolent power—God or something—had intended it to turn out this way all the time, swept through Alistair. He started to cry, overwhelmed by gratitude and relief. He turned away from the stockman’s doorway and went along the path towards the house. He folded his arms across his chest and bowed his head and wept freely: everything had changed, but it would all be made right again.

  He opened the door to his father’s bedroom without knocking and stood at the foot of the bed. Through the enveloping gauze of the mosquito net he looked down at the recumbent form. Because of his tears and the distorting effect of the folds of netting, his father appeared to be sloping away from him, to be lying downhill. Rankin’s head was protruding from the sheet and it was thrown back, with no pillow to support it. His chin stuck up in the air and his mouth hung open. He looked as though he expected to receive some infinitely sustaining reward at any second. The skin of his face was grey in the pale morning light, and the stubble on his cheeks glinted like metal filings.

  Alistair gazed at him and he stopped crying. Rankin looked so old and grey and without life that the boy thought his father must be dead; and he screamed, ‘Dad!’

  Rankin gasped and sat up. An excruciating pain tore through his chest. His heart hammered and he stared in bewilderment at the shivering figure of his terrified son. The boy’s horrible shriek had knifed into his brain, slashing his brilliant dream to pieces at the very instant of gratification.

  •

  An hour later Alistair stood at the gate to the paddock and watched the rear end of the jeep slewing and slipping around on the wet road. His father had told him to stay at the homestead and to wait for his return. He watched the jeep until it left the road and headed out across the open downs towards the black line on the horizon that was the edge of the brigalow scrub. The jeep travelled slowly, the whine of its low-ratio gearbox still clearly audible to the boy when it was more than two kilometres away. Alistair closed the gate and went to catch his pony.

  •

  They had been walking for over two hours, going fast, not talking, Ida a couple of paces ahead of Crofts. Now that they were on their way at last she felt there was no time to lose. It was hot and they were ascending a dry creek bed that twisted and looped as it led them deeper into the great flank of the main range, which rose steeply all round them. The towering red rocks, their surfaces shattered into a million cracks and fissures by repeated expansion under the blistering sun and contraction in the sharp frosts of the Highland nights, sheltered in many of their crevices ancient miniature pines and gum trees, tiny replicas of the giant lowland species. As Ida and Robert moved ahead over the broken surface of the creek bed, a pair of black kites circled less than thirty metres over their heads.

  The ground soon became steeper and the creek branched repeatedly, breaking up eventually into a maze of identical rocky gullies. Without Ida, Crofts knew he would be utterly lost now. He kept his eyes on her as she moved ahead confidently. He was sweating heavily. They continued clambering, penetrating deeper into this broken country until late into the morning. Except for the slight noises of their own advance there was no other sound, and the only other movement was the gliding flight of the accompanying kites. Robert had noticed the birds tailing them soon after they had entered the rough country. He looked up at them every now and again and they seemed to return his gaze.

  It was almost midday when Ida and Crofts came round a corner and were confronted by a wall of rock rising forty metres or more directly in their path, barring their way. Ida continued towards it without pausing and Crofts followed her. Only when he caught up with her at the very base of this cliff did he see a cleft no more than a metre wide, worn down through the pure sandstone by the eroding action of water. The cleft was several metres higher than the spot on which they stood and between it and them, scored into the sandstone base by rocks and debris brought down the creek through the millennia by countless floods, was a circular hole which resembled the inside of a huge jar. The hole was at least five metres across at the neck, and below the neck it widened, forming a great hollow bowl fifteen to twenty metres deep in the pure rock. Crofts stood on the edge and looked down into the cool dark interior, fascinated by the perfect symmetry of its erosion, as if it were human design. When he looked up he saw that Ida was on her hands and knees, crawling out into the narrow groin of smooth stone overhanging the hole, the only access to the cleft beyond. He watched her. If she were to slip the rock would offer no hold. Before she reached the narrowest point of the groin she paused and looked back at him and smiled, resting there for a moment. Then she looked down. ‘There are lots of them like this,’ she said, gazing into the hole below, her voice booming and echoing among the hollows of the rocks around her, as if she were in the sounding chamber of an instrument. ‘There’s a dead wallaby or something in there,’ she said.

  Crofts looked into the hole again and realised that there was a still black mirror of stagnant water at the bottom of it, reflecting the trees and the sky perfectly. In the water, as if set in pitch, floated the carcass of an animal.

  ‘It’s a pig,’ he said. The sight of the drowned pig gave him the feeling that he had been through all this before. He looked up at Ida, who was preparing to edge her way past the narrowest spot. ‘Isn’t there some way round?’

  She kept going.

  ‘We ought to take a break,’ he called. But she ignored him, all her attention on getting past the tight groin of rock. If she fell there would be nothing he could do. He had an image of himself standing on the edge of the hole looking down at her thrashing helplessly in the disgusting water. It made his stomach go weak. There was a greenish scum around the top of the water. Just then a breath of the cold air from the bowl touched him and he thought, with horror: the hole is digesting the pig. Ida was through. She stood up in the keyhole crack in the rock beyond and waved to him. She was safe. ‘It’s not so bad,’ she called, but she sounded out of breath all the same.

  He was afraid as he got down on his hands and knees and crawled out onto the smooth, worn stone. He realised at once that it was much worse than it had looked when he had watched Ida. He was too frightened to glance sideways but could feel the black hole as if it were a weight pulling him off-balance. As he moved slowly forward, the hole below him seemed to have been waiting a million years for this moment, patient beyond human belief. If I went away, he thought, and didn’t come back until the end of my life, when I’m eighty the hole will be here just as it is now. Open, black, empty, fixed in the earth. Nothing will have changed. He wobbled towards the emptiness and caught a whiff of the stink from it. It made him gag. He stopped crawling and realised his mistake at once as a cold wave of fear washed through him.

  ‘Don’t stop there, Robert!’ Ida called, a touch of alarm in her voice, trying to sound unconcerned. ‘Keep going!’


  Instead of moving forward, however, he tried to cringe a little further away from the sloping edge, and above him the overarching rock brushed unexpectedly against the pack, pushing him down. He felt his knees slip a fraction, and sweat broke out on his forehead. He could move neither forward or backward and he knew that if he stayed where he was he would soon begin to slide further down towards the steepening incline that formed the mouth of the hole. An impulse to scream rose up in him and he closed his eyes. He heard himself call, ‘Help me, Ida!’ as if it were the voice of a stranger some distance away. His limbs had frozen, his joints locked into position. His knees slipped another fraction. His weight was dragging him inevitably across the rock and the cold gravity of the hole pulled him sideways: the realisation that horrified him more than anything was that nothing would change. In his panic a futile eternity of waiting began to close over him.

  Ida’s voice called softly, urging him, ‘Look up!’

  He opened his eyes. She was lying on her stomach in the keyhole above him holding out a long green sapling. A leaf on the end of it brushed his face and he smelt the eucalyptus oil.

  ‘Don’t take your hand off the rock,’ she said. ‘Grab the end of the stick in your teeth.’ Her eyes looked into his, looking down at him from only two metres away. ‘It’s got the pig. It doesn’t need us,’ she said, her voice intense, close to him, reaching intimately for him.

  The leaves brushed across his face again. He reached forward and gripped them in his teeth. Through the sapling he felt the steadiness of Ida’s hands. Slowly he began to crawl forward.

  They didn’t talk about it, and after another hour’s climbing they emerged onto the surface of a gently undulating plateau, on which grew a sparse forest of stunted trees. Directly ahead of them, no more than a kilometre away, the pinnacle of Mt Mooloolong rose three hundred metres in the air. They stood next to each other and looked at it. Neither spoke, but she reached out and held his hand. He had seen the formation before, from the bank of the earth tank in the brigalow that day when he had rescued Ward. He had not known then that it was Mt Mooloolong. From this angle it looked out of place in the landscape, as if it were not a natural part of the local geology but had been put there by another force.