by Zane Grey
“Yes, our lords and masters, we’re here. What’s that roar?” replied Beryl.
“It’s the storm, an’ a humdinger. Don’t forget when the dust seeps in bad to breathe through wet silk handkerchiefs. If you haven’t handkerchiefs, use some of them folderol silk things of Beryl’s thet I seen once.”
“Well! You hear that, Leslie? Red Krehl, I’ll wager you have seen a good deal that you shouldn’t have.”
“Shore, Beryl. When it was accidental on purpose shoved right under my eyes! Turrible bad for me, too. Adiós now, for I have no idea how long.”
“Sterl, don’t keep us caged up this way very long. Hang the storm,” protested Leslie.
“Wait, child. You’ll be glad to stay.”
By this time the duststorm was almost upon them. Sterl saw the sweep of the tree boughs and the wave of the bleached grass. Sterl’s last glimpse, as he crawled under the wagon, was the striated, bulging front of the dust cloud. Red seized the wet sheet and crawled under the wagon. Sterl was on his heels. They closed the entrance, and, tying the wet sheet, they weighted it with rocks and billets laid there for that purpose.
The storm enveloped them, and there was twilight in that canvas-enclosed space under the wagon.
“Roar an’ be damned,” drawled Red, as he began to divest himself of boots and shirt. “This is duck soup for us, pal. But it’ll shore be harder’n hell on the girls.”
“Maybe it’ll be thick duck soup.”
“Aw, hell! Always a killjoy! I know I’m gonna damn’ near croak, an’ I hope I do.”
“Because I won’t let you smoke?”
“Yass. It wouldn’t be so bad, if you could croak while you’re smokin’.”
“Say, wonder where Friday is?”
“Search me. But I reckon thet old boy is snug as a bug in a rug.”
“And now to wait it out,” Sterl said with a sigh as he lay down on his bed. “We have a lot to be thankful for. Suppose we were out in it.”
“Suppose thet mob rushes? There wouldn’t be no sense in goin’ out to stop them.”
“I’m curious, too. But the drovers weren’t worried. Let’s not borrow trouble.”
They settled down to endure. It was pretty hot inside. Sterl attended to the storm. The encampment had been enveloped in a freaky gale of wind, heavy enough to carry pebbles, sticks, and bits of wood, and a rustling, seeping, silken, sifting dust. After a while invisible dust penetrated the pores and cracks in the canvas. Red had covered his face with a wet scarf, and Sterl concluded he had better do the same. It was harder to breathe, but the dust did not penetrate the silk. Red promptly fell asleep. Sterl dozed, during which time he seemed to hear the roar of wind, the pelting of gravel, the threshing of boughs.
Patience and resistance, the experience that always held out however much worse anything could get, kept that long day from being unendurable. After sunset the wind lulled. The cowboys went out. An opaque gloom cloaked the scene. The dust was settling. The drovers were astir; a fire had been started. The Slyters were getting supper.
Sterl approached the girls’ tent to remove the sheet. It was dry and caked with dust.
“Girls, if you’re alive, you can come out now. It’s not so bad.”
They burst out of the tent with violence and vociferation that attested to much. They were disheveled, too.
“Sterl, it has been a perfectly detestable and horrible day,” Beryl cried. “My nose and lungs are full of dust.”
“Sniff a little, weak, salted water,” advised Sterl. “And don’t chafe so bitterly. We are stuck here. This ordeal may knock that one at the Forks into a cocked hat.”
By supper everything had cleared a good deal and cooled off. After supper, tasks that had been neglected during the day were attended to. Sterl and Red went out with the drovers to look for the horses and cattle. They had not strayed, but Dann ordered guard duty that night in three shifts. When they returned, Friday sat by the fire with a meat bone in one hand and a piece of damper in the other.
“How long the storm last?” asked Red.
“Mebbe day, mebbe more. I tinkit long,” Friday replied.
“Friday, I wish the hell you’d be wrong once in a while,” complained Red.
“Bimeby,” said the black.
“Red, let’s keep the girls up till we go on guard,” suggested Sterl. “That won’t be long. If this duststorm gets to hanging on at night, the girls will be stuck in that tent all the time.”
“Shore. We’ll drag them around, if they holler murder,” agreed Red. “Plenty exercise, plenty water, an’ only a little grub…thet’s the ticket, pard.”
“Girls, would you like the devotion of two cavaliers who know how to beat this duststorm?” asked Sterl.
“Would we? Rather! Just try us, Sterl!” cried Leslie.
“Another day like this will be my last,” said Beryl.
“Humph!” ejaculated Red. “If you was gonna die so easy, you’d been daid long ago. Girls air tougher than they think.”
“I could die of unrequited love,” replied Beryl with no shadow of deceit in her.
“Wal, if you did croak for love, it’d only be squarin’ up for the blasted hopes an’ ruined lives you’re to blame for.”
“Monster! I tell you, Red Krehl, I’m not fooling.”
“Wal, I’m in daid honest, too. Let’s go peep at the abo’s.”
Sterl kept a smooth-backed piece of eucalyptus in his tent, and for every day that the dust blew and the heat grew more intense, he cut a notch. And then one day he forgot, and another he did not care, and after that he thought it was no use to keep track of anything because everybody was going to be smothered.
Yet they still carried on. Just when one of the trekkers was going to give up trying to breathe or go mad, then the wind would lull for a night, and they would recover. They could not eat any food to keep up their strength. Every morsel they ate was full of dust that gritted on the teeth. The drovers nightly circled the mob and horses, and butchered a bullock, now and then, for themselves and the aborigines. At night they had their meals and performed their tasks, but not every night. So much dust blew into the pools that they began to fill up. The situation grew terrible. The confinement in the heat, the clogged nostrils and lungs were harder to endure than hunger. Fortunately, their drinking water remained pure and cool, which was the one factor that kept them from utter despair.
Leslie, being the youngest and singularly resistant in spirit, stood the ordeal longest before beginning to go downhill. But Beryl seemed to be dying. On clear nights they carried her out of the tent and laid her on a stretcher. At last only Red could get her to eat.
Sterl considered it marvelous that she had not passed away long ago. But how tenaciously she had clung to love and life! It must have been love, Sterl thought, that kept her from giving up. At last, however, the spiritual succumbed to the elemental, as Sterl knew must inevitably happen to her, and to all of them, one by one. Shipwrecked men on a barren island never all died at once. The thing Sterl fought most bitterly and fiercely of all was the fading away in effort, the gradual alienation of thought, and, therefore, hope, faith, longing. Hours he would lie under their shelter as lethargic and inert as a hibernating animal. He had to drive himself to do anything. Red had become silent, grim, locked in his own thoughts most of the time, and then in his grief over Beryl. If they could only get out of their horrible prison, and breathe and start their sluggish blood again!
One night, after a scorching day that had been only intermittently windy, the air cleared enough to let a wan spectral moon shine down upon the camp. But the day had been so hot that all were practically prostrated. If it had been fiercely dusty as well, then the story of Dann’s trekkers might have ended. That night, however, there was a difference that Sterl imagined to be only another lying mirage of his brain. Friday touched Sterl on the arm and pointed up at the strange moon with its almost indistinguishable ring, and said: “Bimeby!” Did he mean death? How soon that must surely
come! But there seemed to be a hopeful portent in his posture, his meaning. The black man was beyond Sterl’s ken at this critical hour.
In the pale moonlight Beryl lay on her stretcher, a shadow of her old self, her dark little face lighted by luminous, lovely eyes that must have seen into the infinite. She was conscious. She knew she was dying. And she seemed glad. Dann, in his indestructible faith, knelt beside her to pray. Red sat at her head while the others moved to and fro, silently, like ghosts. He held her hand and watched her. Sterl could not tear himself away, although the sight was torturing.
“Red, don’t take it so hard,” whispered Beryl almost inaudibly.
“Beryl, don’t give up, don’t fade away!” implored Red.
“Red, you’d never marry me…because of….”
“No! Not because of thet. I’m not good enough to wipe your feet!”
“You are as great as my dad.”
Sterl led the weeping Leslie away from there. He could endure no more himself. Red would keep vigil beside Beryl until she breathed her last. How insupportable to think of consigning those speaking, violet eyes, that shining hair, that lovely frail flesh which housed a spirit so imperious and sweet, so wayward, to a lonely grave in this Never Never Land. Sterl seemed to crack over that last torturing emotion. He had no feeling left, when he pulled the clinging Leslie from him and slunk back to his prison under the wagon, to crawl in like animal that hid in the thicket to die. He fell asleep.
He awoke in the night and felt that it was owing to the intense silence. The moan of wind, the rustle of leaves, the swish of branches, the seep of dust, sounds that had been indelibly stamped upon his memory for all time, were strangely absent. The stillness, the blackness were like death.
Then he heard a faint, almost imperceptible pattering upon the canvas. Oh! That lying trick of his fantasy! That phantom memory of trail nights on the home ranges, when he lay snug under canvas to hear the patter of sleet, of snow, of rain? He had dreamed of it here in this accursed Never Never Land!
But he heard the jingle of spurs outside, and the soft pad of Friday’s bare feet.
“Pard…pard! Wake up!” That was Red’s voice, broken, sobbing.
“I’m awake, old-timer,” replied Sterl.
“It’s rainin’, pard! Beryl’s gonna live.”
The musical jingle of spurs moved away, leaving Sterl transfixed and thrilling. Emotion, life resurged. Friday shook the canvas flap, as was his wont to waken Sterl.
Then the pregnant silences of that night ceased. The drovers built fires and stayed up, with wild notes in their exultant voices. From the aboriginal camp came a low, rhythmic chant. The raindrops pattered softly, steadily. What a heavenly sound, thought Sterl. He opened the canvas door to let the cool air in, to hear the better. And sooner or later he fell into a slumber devoid of nightmare, of fevered blood, of gasping breath.
Morning disclosed many changes. The sky was dark, the air cool, the heat gone, the dust washed off trees, leaves, grass, rocks, logs, and, as Larry averred cheerfully, off the backs of horses and cattle.
What the weakened drovers lacked in strength, they made up in humble thanksgiving spirit. Dann, who had throughout been the least affected, nevertheless, seemed a changed man. Beryl could breathe and drink and smile. All, but she, went out into the rain to let it soothe their stiffened skins. Benson and Rollie killed a bullock, and Dann gave half of it to the aborigines. While the drovers sat at a merry meal, the aborigines had their first corroboree there.
“Old abo’ say tinkit rain come bimeby,” said Friday. “Black man say along all same. Bimeby rain come!”
It might have been a pathetic fallacy when Sterl imagined the trees, the grass, the pools shared the feelings of the drovers. But he swore he saw it.
For nineteen days it rained. At first it rained steadily, all day and all night. Before half that time was over the dry streambed was a little river, running swiftly. It had cleaned out the rock pools. No more dust-covered puddles! No more green scum! The dry odors and rank smells were gone.
After the steadiest downpour had ceased, the rains continued part of every day and every night. On the morning of the twentieth day since the fatal duststorm, the drovers arose to greet the sun again and gloriously saw a changed land.
“On with the trek!” boomed Stanley Dann.
He gave the aborigines a bullock, and steel implements that could be spared. Then the trek moved out of Rock Pools, and these black people, no longer scarecrows, lined up to watch the white men pass out of their lives.
The grass waved green and abundant, knee-high to a horse; flowers born of the rain bloomed everywhere; gum trees burst into scarlet flame; the wattles turned gold; kangaroos and emus appeared in troops upon the plains; and on all sides flocks of colored birds graced the scene. Water was omnipresent. It lay in league-wide lakes, with the luxuriant grass standing fresh and succulent out of it. Every depression in the land had its pond. Streams ran bank-full and clear, with flowers and flags bending over the water.
The Never Never Land stretched out on all sides, boundlessly. It was level bushland, barren in dry seasons, rich now after the rains. Eternal spring might have dwelt there.
Chapter Thirty
Only the black man Friday could tell how the trekkers ever reached Paradise Oasis, and his limited vocabulary did not permit a detailed description.
“Many moons,” repeated the black perplexedly. “Come alonga dere.” He pointed east and drew a line on the ground, very long, very irregular, with gestures that intimated incalculable things. “No black fella, no kangaroos, no goanna. This fella country no good. Plenty sun. Hot like hell. White fella sit down. Tinkit he die. Boss Dann an’ Redhead fightum. Cattle no drink, fall down. Plenty hosses go. White missies sleep like imm dead. White fella sit down. No water, no tucker. Friday find water. One day two day alonga die. Imm waterbag. Go back. Makeum come.”
That was a long dissertation for the black. Sterl pieced it together and filled the interstices. His mind was not a blank or a void. It seemed to be a labyrinthine maze of vague pictures and sensations made up of hot sun and arid wastes, of wheels rolling, rolling, rolling on, of a thousand camps all the same, of ghostly mirages, and forever the infernal monotony of distances, of water holes, and finally fading faces, fading voices, fading images, a horrible burning thirst and a mania for water.
He had come to his senses in a stream of clear, cool, running water. Gray stone ledges towered to the blue sky. There were green grass, full-foliaged trees blossoming gold, and birds in noisy flocks. Once more the melodious cur-ra-wong of the magpie pealed in his dulled ears.
Dann and Red and Slyter had not been quite so badly off as Sterl. But they, too, had only irrational and dim recollection of what this last and most terrible ordeal had been. Friday had saved the lives of the girls with a waterbag—and the drovers, the horses, and cattle by leading them to this oasis.
“God and our black man have delivered us once more. Let us pray, instead of thinking what has passed,” said Stanley Dann through thick, split lips from which the blood ran. All seemed said in that.
As great a miracle as the lucky star that had guided the trekkers here was their recovery through sweet, fresh, cool water. Even its music seemed healing. It gurgled and bubbled from under the ledges in many places to unite and form a goodly stream that sang away through the trees to the west. That place was the birth of a river which ran toward the Indian Ocean. It sprang from a range of hills and a high plateau. For Sterl—and surely all of them—it was the rebirth of hope, of life, of the sense of beauty, of an exquisite return of pleasure. On the second morning Leslie staggered up to gaze about, thin as a wafer and dark as a savage. She cried: “Oh, how lovely! Paradise Oasis!”
Beryl could not walk unaided, but she shared Leslie’s joy. How frail a body now housed this chastened soul. Hammocks were strung for them in the shade, and they lay back on the pillows, wide-eyed, while the drovers passed to and fro at their renewed tasks.
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nbsp; Wild berries and fruit, fresh meat and fish, bread from the last sack of flour added their wholesome nourishment to the magic of the sweet, crystal water.
“Let me stay here forever,” pleaded Beryl.
Leslie added: “Oh, Sterl, let us never leave!”
The drovers were content to bide there a while. A rich grass spread out over the rolling country. Soon the cattle would be restored. Already the gaunt flanks of the horses had filled out. No pests or vermin so far fouled the sweet air of this pleasant oasis. The haggard drovers took on a new lease of life.
One morning Friday sought out Sterl. “Boss, come alonga me.” And he led Sterl away from camp to the base of a high hill.
“What see, Friday?” queried Sterl eagerly.
The black tapped his broad breast with his lean, virile hand. “Black fella tinkit see Kimberleys!”
“My God!” gasped Sterl, suddenly pierced through with vibrating thrills. “Take me!”
Whereupon Friday started to climb the hill. Sterl saved his breath and tried to go slowly. The black halted here and there to rest. Sterl gazed back down at the camp. What a sparkling, gorgeous place! To his right, other hills, growing higher, scaled up a gray escarpment. At length they surmounted the foothill.
“Boss, look dere,” said Friday.
Sterl’s gaze, intense and keen, followed the impressive long arm of the black man. It seemed he looked far across a warm and colorful plain to an upflung purple range that rolled and billowed along the Western horizon, as far as he could see from north to south.
“The Kimberleys!” shouted Sterl in a frenzy of joy. “So help me heaven! We trekked far north…and then straight west. It has to be the Kimberleys!”
Then he wrenched his gaze from the haunting vision of dim blue domes and peaks to the plain beneath him. The shining stream wound away between green and gold borders out across the undulating desert; trained eyes traced it for a hundred miles, straight toward the mountains. He stood another long moment, his hand hard on his black comrade’s shoulder, his heart too full for utterance. If he had not loved this aborigine long before, he would have done so now.