Turning Back the Sun

by Colin Thubron

  He raised his hand in greeting, and the old man lifted both his in reply. Rayner had not noticed the conical hut sheltered against one cliff. The pair watched him coming. He had not bargained for this. Mentally he had dissociated the holy place (if that is what it was) from the people who had worshipped here, as if he were visiting somewhere long dead, a property of the wilderness. But now the townsman”s fear surfaced in him: a tingle of revulsion and alarm. In the half-minute that he took to reach the natives, the axed-in heads came floating against his shins again.

  As Rayner reached him, he saw an old man of barbarian majesty. He wore a shabby pair of trousers rolled up at the ankles, and was clasping a flimsy stick. He looked huge. His flaccid shoulders and torso, dusted in grey hair, sloped without interruption into passive arms and stomach, before slipping away toward the delicate feet and hands of all his people. And his face was extraordinary. It nested in a tumult of hair and beard, as if he were staring from grey flames. Under their overhung brows the eyes were nearly invisible—Rayner couldn”t even see their whites—but his skin glittered an igneous blue-black, as though its pigment had turned mineral.

  The girl stood behind him in a torn white dress and a necklace of seeds. She looked about eighteen. The extremities of her hair had been twisted to ginger rats” tails.

  Rayner said, “I hope it”s right my coming here.” He did not even know if they spoke his language. “I thought it was empty.”

  “Is empty,” the man said gruffly. “You go where you like, but go careful. Is blackfeiler place, but okay you look.”

  He turned and said something to the girl. She ran forward and held out a wooden mixing dish filled with yams. He took one, and she darted back. She might have been the old man”s wife or granddaughter, it was impossible to tell. Only her bird-like movements expressed her. Her face looked blank, except for the savage”s expression of distant puzzlement.

  Rayner said, “Are you living here alone? Are you the guardian?”

  “We just living with our living,” the man said. “But this like whitefeller say, retirement job. This old feller”s job.” He gazed at Rayner as if at a landscape, impassively, through his overcast eyes. “But sometimes we go into town too, buy trousers, buy shoes, buy the other things.”

  Rayner”s unease had gradually merged into curiosity. Because these people were not of the town, he found an obscure release in them. Even the shabbiness of the savages was interesting, because it was not the town”s shabbiness. “You speak our language.”

  “I got the stock farmers” language, you know, worked for three, four years, fencing and yarding. Big farm downriver. Bloke by the name Ellis. You know Ellis? But I like to keep one place now. I can”t throw the bullocks no more.” He swept out one arm in an arc. “Living is all right till a feller gets old. So I stay here now and look after the places.”

  “What places?” Rayner asked. “Painted places?”

  “Ancestors,” the man said. “I can show you ancestors. There not many to see, eh, but I show you. Some of them gone now, is gone by rain and wind, and some. But most is staying, not too much.”

  He lumbered over to the scarp that Rayner had just left, moving with a leaden, broken gait which suddenly reduced him. Then he stood in front of the rock face. “You see them?”

  But Rayner saw nothing. Over the surface spread a web of hairline fissures, and the confusion of colors between them looked like blemishes of the living rock. The old man struck his hip. “You come stand here. Look now. Is different shadow, eh?” Rayner went and stood by him. The man pointed with his stick. “See there … there?”

  Rayner looked again. And before his eyes, the figures awakened out of the stone. The whole surface lit up into new patterns: hunters, warriors, women, herders…. He was astonished that he had not discerned them before.

  “Now you see.”

  The figures were elongated and graceful. They floated in random patterns across the rock. Where its face had flaked away, they left amputated legs or heads. Rayner could make out a hunting party pursuing the miniature gazelles of the wilderness; a line of men on the march; a circle of women who seemed to be talking or preparing food; and higher up, where the pigment had oxidized and half gone, a phantom battle raged.

  He asked in amazement, “How did they get these colors?” Some of the tones looked unfaded: white, yellow and blood red.

  The man said: “They opened stones.”

  The artists, Rayner guessed, had used pigments of charcoal and pipe clay and the ochreous local ironstone. The images were all in silhouette: incarnate shape and movement. They appeared less like people than ideas of people. Even when fighting, they seemed to be engaged in an aerial ballet.

  He asked, “What kind of men painted these?”

  The old savage thought a while before answering. “Priests.”

  Rayner had no idea what the paintings were trying to do. They portrayed everyday life—but as if it were paradise. He could not resist the idea that they contained some secret, something known also to the savages sitting motionless on the town steps, gazing into an inner distance. But knowing how compulsively he laid his own ideas on neutral things, he asked, “Are these life without the white man?”

  The old man encircled the paintings with a wide flourish of his stick. “This life our people always. This is life after the tree come down.”

  “Tree?”

  The man pointed at what appeared to be a white river wavering between the paintings. “The tree come down. Who brings it down? Maybe some devil bring it down, maybe the people from the other place, the salt marsh people, I don”t know. But it got cut and there”s no more climbing up and down, only the sky like you see. This is the story now.”

  Rayner wondered if the savage was confusing him on purpose. Perhaps he had enquired too closely. And now the man was pointing to the far side of the imaginary tree, tracing a surface whose paintings looked fainter and older. “Is the time before Time.”

  In this bleached space, animals were the same size as men. They seemed to inhabit a region without gravity, and a few were upside down. Hare, lizard, human, antelope—they floated together in stressless equality. Some of their heads were turned, as though they held conversation. But compared with the other figures they looked full-blown, static, as if they had reached completion or perhaps not begun. Hunters froze by their spears. Animals just sat.

  The savage said, “This is happiness.”

  Even the dancers described only hieroglyphs of dance, with their hands raised hieratically above their heads—although the loosened pose of one woman reminded Rayner bizarrely of Zoë, who had slept last night in his arms.

  The man said, “The animals painted in their own blood. Gazelle is in gazelle blood, hare is in hare blood. That”s how they painted, eh.” The native was now breathing audibly, and Rayner noticed that he was starting to sweat. “Maybe these things painted by God.”

  Rayner stepped back in frustration, to view the whole rock face from a distance. He felt he was gazing, illiterate, at a crucial text. It seemed to portray a felicity from which the white man had been excluded at some primordial time: a kind of lost knowledge. And the savage could only explain it in riddles. But if this was the inner world which these people inhabited, Rayner thought, why did they axe people”s heads in?

  He asked, “What is this tree?”

  “This tree, I not seen it since I was young.” The man flung out one arm toward the south. “Those people not my clan.”

  Rayner looked foolishly to where he pointed. “What people? Where?”

  “Out there, I don”t remember how far. Maybe five days away, maybe ten. I don”t know. They”re not my people, like I say. But most blackfellers been there one time or other. Tree place is like the world”s middle, eh.” He touched his stomach-button. “The navel of the world.”

  Strange how many people imagined they lived at the center of the world, Rayner thought, while for him it was always somewhere else.

  The savage turned an
d started back heavily towards the hut. Rayner said quickly, “May I use a camera?”

  “Camera?”

  “Yes.” He took it from its case.

  The old man frowned at it. “What does this do?”

  “It makes pictures of things.” Cameras were commonplace in the town now.

  The savage took the black box delicately in his hands, and peered into the lens. His forehead had depressed into inky corrugations. He handed it back. “You show me.”

  Rayner pointed the box along the cliff face. He had left its hood and tripod in the car. The old man listened to its clicking and waited for something to happen. After Rayner had finished he asked, “Where is the painting?”

  “The painting is in the camera. They take it out in the town.”

  He was not sure if the man believed him. They walked back slowly to the hut. It looked makeshift: just myrtle boughs and straw. Behind it, sprinkled with chips of painted bark, was a fresh grave. The girl was cooking outside, but jumped up as they approached, and pulled some grass-seed cakes from the ashes. The man said, “My daughter has made you welcome-cakes.” They sat down opposite one another, and he broke one. The girl disappeared into the hut, and after a while Rayner heard the clacking of a loom.

  The old man started cramming the bread into his mouth. He said, “I heard some blokes been making trouble round town area.”

  “There”ve been murders in the outlying farms. You heard that?”

  “Yes, I heard that. These bad fellers make like they get rid of white man. One bad bloke makes it wrong for all of us. They grow angry because no rain. They go a little out of their heads. That”s how it takes them, the drought. Is hard if rains don”t come and cattle all dying, one there, one here, dying.”

  “The people in town are getting angry too,” Rayner said. “They think they live at the earth”s center!”

  The man did not understand. “That”s another place, the earth”s center, long way south.” He extended his arm again. Rayner saw that he was shaking slightly, his whole body shaking. He kept ramming his stick in and out of the embers, as if to raise heat. His breathing had become a sad, nasal sighing. He said, “But that tree cut now. Nobody climbs up and down no more. It”s just sky now.” He pulled his stick from the cinders and inscribed something in the dust. “That”s the tree now.”

  As his stick withdrew, Rayner saw that he had outlined a tall stump, like a phallus: some early object of worship, perhaps. But even in the crude medium of dust, his shaking hand had invested it with nervous, quivering lines.

  Rayner said, “Are you feeling unwell?”

  “I get bad from the hot heat.” The man spread his hand over his chest. “And sometimes in my left eye, if I looking at my hand, I see two hands, one top, one bottom.” He did not try this. “But I”m okay most days. My daughter gets medicine grass and sometimes whitefeller stuff. I”ve been lucky in my living, not like some.”

  He became silent. Rayner went on hearing the clack-clack of the loom. Through the hut opening, beyond the girl”s back, he glimpsed their possessions: a skin rug, some articles of western clothing, and in the center, incongruously beautiful, the carved headrests on which these mysterious people slept. At the girl”s feet were a few bowls of roots and tubers, and a little beyond, exorcised of any threat, a short-handled axe.

  Rayner wondered what the girl would do after her father had died. He badly wanted to give them something. He felt suddenly, illogically grateful to them—simply for their difference, their enigma. But as he got to his feet he realized he had nothing useful to give.

  He took the old man”s arm. “Next time you”re in the town, you come and see me. I”m a doctor.” He printed out his address on a scrap of paper. “You show this to people, they”ll tell you where to come.”

  The man laid the paper flat on the palm of his hand, then turned without a word into the hut.

  Rayner scrambled up the slope to his car. It was already dusk. The wilderness seemed to be sucking the light out of the sky. As he drove back, the lamps of the mines ascended in front of him in constellations of white and amber, and the mammoth smelting chimney, picked out in red against the stars, still spread its waste in a long, fine dust across the night.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Rayner found himself saying things to Zoë which he had never intended. Often when they were together her stare fell on him like a vivid but innocent searchlight, and he was touched by a kind of impetuous tenderness. They had slept with one another after only their second evening together, and within two weeks, a little bewildered at himself, he had asked her to join him on holiday. It was the animal exuberance of her, he thought, which was so elating, mixed with an intangible sense of suffering. Her vitality struck him as a kind of courage. For all her frankness, he felt he did not know her.

  He chose the town”s most sophisticated resort—a lake in the northern hills—because he imagined that she was urban. But during their few days” holiday neither of them entered the little casino or nightclub, and it was she who sank into a dream by the water, and seemed physically to imbibe its colors and changes. For hours she would paddle along the shore in one of his shirts and a straw hat, then lie spreadeagled on a rock under the flailing sun, with her hair swept over her face. She said that it reminded her of home, and certainly the lake was so huge—on hazy days the farther shore vanished altogether—that it resembled some tideless stretch of the north coast where she was born.

  There was nothing like it for hundreds of kilometers. Through the naked hills it lay in a sheet of brilliant blue, death-still. Under its near slopes, fed by small streams, the littoral burst into a rain forest of mangrove and silkwood trees, where parasite ferns ran amok and hundreds of pale trunks leaned askew. The resort”s villas were nestled privately among them along a near-empty beach. Even in June it was silent. Out on the water only a few transparent-looking islands interposed themselves between the shore and the far hills, and occasional flights of duck gashed the surface.

  Rayner usually avoided such resorts. During the Great War the place had been reserved for the local government élite and senior army and intelligence officers. Now it was patronized by executives and businessmen. After a day dispersed along the shore or among the islands, they converged on the dining room with their wives or mistresses, and the place became a microcosm of the town. It drank and danced and gossiped. To Rayner, who couldn”t dance and scarcely drank, all the place”s pleasure lay in Zoë. If any medical colleagues happened to be here, he decided, they could think what they liked. He was not ashamed of her. He felt proud, rather, of her public face: the slightly arrogant beauty of her, which seemed to be defying the world to uncover any weaker woman beneath. People in the town were so various now—the strata of the old society breaking up all over the country—that you”d expect nobody to trouble any longer about who consorted with whom. But you would, of course, be wrong. And the dining room by the lake was riddled with a cross fire of stares and inquisition.

  So at evening, after their amphibious hours along the shore, they had to reenter the town”s orbit. Zoë prepared for this as if she were going to war. Sitting at her dressing table, applying her fawn-colored foundation cream and diffusing over her eyelids the specks of rouge which mysteriously heightened her eyes” blue, she talked about creating her face as if none had been there before. Then came the matching lipstick and the small false eyelashes and the drawing-back of the hair from her highlit features. Without this, Rayner came to realize, she felt bared, whittled away. So each night she produced a version of herself which was at once emphatic, theatrical and a little poignant. He was reminded of the dancer who had gyrated on the nightclub stage, demanding recognition of herself, but only on her own terms.

  “Do I look all right? I think I look a mess.” In the long mirror the girl could not decide, and turned to Rayner.

  “You look good.”

  Then her chin lifted and she walked down the plant-lapped path to the dining room with a trace
still of the ballerina”s turned-out step, and her hand on Rayner”s arm. As they threaded between tables toward one overlooking the lake, and people turned to assess them, Rayner felt bemused that her fear of crowds and her defiance of them went hand in hand. Her way of coping was to re-create herself for them. It seemed neurotically brave.

  A three-piece orchestra was playing Glinka and Borodin on a dais, and a few couples were dancing. The women”s hair was stuck with the little gold combs fashionable that year. The men”s white dinner jackets were buttoned tight at the waist, and a few were still stitched with campaign ribbons from the Great War twenty years ago, when the nation was a colony.

  Already Zoë”s high spirits were discovering a humorous variety show in the people near them when somebody called out, “Rayner!”

  Her heart must have sunk as his did. She said, “Oh bloody hell. It”s Ivar and Felicie.”

  They were sitting alone at a table for four, wanting company. Ivar spread out his arms in amused welcome. At that moment his urbanity, his inability to be surprised by human affairs, came as a relief. He merely kissed them both perfunctorily and said, “How good to find friends!”

  But Felicie flung her arms furiously around Zoë. “You cheat! You didn”t tell me.” She turned to Ivar. “She tells me she needs a holiday but never says where or who with.”

  “You never listen,” said Zoë.

  Felicie said, “But I”d have listened to that!”

  So they settled at the table and lapsed into the ease of old friends. Their meal came and went, and they were left drinking the rough local wine from the hills. Rayner felt happy, and for the first time in years he drank too much. Felicie poured out news at Zoë as if they”d been parted six months, telling anecdotes, soliciting approval, and scattering all her chatter with reflex self-criticism. “I”m so forgetful, I … I”m so stupid, I … I …” Her voice fluted and piped. Rayner, watching from the corner of his eye, found the two laughably different. Mist-haired Felicie gave an illusion almost of transparency, while beside her Zoë was all color and bite. Several times it occurred to him that Felicie was some sort of ghost. In her irrecoverable loss of self, he thought, she was the person whom Zoë was refusing to become.