—
WE DROVE NORTH, out of the main test zone, towards Emu Field, across 150 kilometres of peak-and-trough sandhills. Occasionally camels could be spotted milling in mobs between the trees. Towards evening the vegetation began to clear and the land became flat, and ahead of us was the claypan, a two-kilometre-wide disc of red like an unglazed plate glowing in a kiln. Emu Field. The sun was low in the sky, but still dazzling. Once we had set up camp in the lee of a sandhill—dead mulga limbs dragged behind the Land Cruiser and stacked between our two swags for a fire—I took off to the pan for the last minutes of light. In its clarity the air was to normal air as normal air is to water. It was as if I had been given back the vision of childhood. It is a characteristic of arid places, this clarity caused by the absence of vapour. Claypans are ephemeral lakes, basins into which surface water will drain when there is sufficient precipitation, carrying with it fine sediment. In arid environments, where evaporation exceeds precipitation, such basins are usually covered with water only briefly and shallowly for a few days each year. What chiefly characterises claypans—like their counterparts, playas—is their flatness, their surface being graded and swept afresh with each inundation of water.
A raven came to see me, circled, then vanished over the low dunes that surrounded the pan. Seek thy brother. The floor of the pan, scarcely rising or falling so much as a centimetre in elevation across the entire five square kilometres of its expanse, was cracked into irregular polygons and scurfing like a eucalyptus, and each of its palm-sized scales shone with a fine and perfect salt-glaze. It was like walking over the surface of an old oil painting. The gloss added to the illusion of wetness; where it reflected the sky, the ground was blue. A last cruelty to the dying traveller. The appearance truly was of water, even from a fairly short distance, like the ghost of its last flooding.
I followed a line of prints, camel prints made when the pan was wet, gouged deep and messy, the pan-surface littered with the scuffed-up clay. Despite their soggy appearance the prints and the clay alike were, of course, hard and unyielding as terracotta. The pan had been named “Emu” by the army surveyor on account of a footprint he’d found in its surface. The smaller pan nearby was named “Dingo” for the same reason.
I knelt and lowered my head to the varnished surface, suddenly conscious of the enormous flatness expanding around me, and when I looked up, the raven had brought its mate. They quacked and wheeled. I could not see them as ill-omened—as I might were they to alight on the rail of a ship at sea, say. In its lushness their blackness was the opposite of morbid; plus, the presence of other perceptive beings seemed like something to celebrate. I loved them. I walked for two minutes, eyes shut tight, towards the sun. When I opened them the ravens had gone and the sun had sunk behind the horizon. The world was assuming the mauve tinge of night. It was a beautiful place, the constancy of it, and those waiting for the mushroom cloud in 1953 must have found it so too.
* * *
—
WE WOKE BEFORE DAWN. The ground where we were camping was sparsely wooded—mulga, some she-oak, beautiful in silhouette and filled with dovelike birds whose wings squeaked as they took flight—and studded all over with the characteristic raised rings of mulga ants’ nests. There are thousands of species of ant in arid Australia. The night before, I’d gone collecting firewood and had returned to the camp to find my hand crawling with them. That was the Aussie desert: a glove of ants and a mask of flies. I ought to have been more careful. A few weeks earlier a man’s body had been found in the Northern Territory alongside his bogged car with a note: he’d been collecting brush to put under his wheels for traction, and had been snakebit.
After breakfast we climbed the dune that rimmed the claypan and looked across the flatness. The pan was not the fizzing orange of yesterday evening but a livid purple. Two kilometres away was a column of dust, white in the morning sun, and that dust was being taken up by first one small whirlwind, then a second, and carried across the pan. Willie-willie was the Australian term. In the Gobi they are thought to be demons. The cause was a mob of camels, twenty or more suddenly visible through a clearing in the dust, heads hung low, on the move.
The two bombs had been detonated fifteen kilometres south-east of the pan, which itself had been used only as a landing strip for supplies and personnel. The clean-up effort had been more cursory even than that made 160 kilometres south at Maralinga. The eastern shore of the claypan alongside the landing strip was heaped with industrial waste, and beyond it a raised platform of rutted earth covered who knew what. Lengths of bore-pipe; a tank’s rusted caterpillar track; a loop of steel rope; an S-shaped rod hung from the stump of a tree; dozens of rusted drums labelled “Aviation Gasoline”; and a mechanic’s vice stamped “Made in England.” All this crap. It made it easy to forget how isolated you were, two hundred kilometres from the nearest town.
We ate a whole roast chicken, with our hands, off the tailgate of the truck, then drove out to the first site, Totem 1, where a ten kiloton bomb had been exploded on 15 October 1953. We passed a plot of a dozen concrete blocks, tonne-heavy, used to tether Hurricane jets that were brought in to determine the effect upon them of the blast. The jets themselves, intact but irradiated, had been buried along with the exposed jeeps and tanks and mannequins. Crossing the track ahead of us a line of camels snaked away from the proving ground.
In the planning of Totem 1 there was an acceptance that it was not possible to determine precisely what might happen—how high the mushroom cloud might rise, how far or where it might drift, how heavy any fallout might be. It was in the nature of a test, after all, that it was done without full knowledge of its implications, and this was only the second nuclear bomb Britain had exploded, and its first on land. In its report the Royal Commission concluded that Totem 1 “was fired under wind conditions that…would produce unacceptable levels of fallout. Measured fallout from Totem 1 on inhabited regions did exceed the limits proposed.” In its criticism of the decision to fire Totem 1 at that time, the Royal Commission noted particularly that it “did not take into account the existence of people at Wallatinna and Welbourn Hill downwind of the test site.” Those stations lie some 195 kilometres north-west of Emu Field, in the northern part of South Australia.
“I was thinking it might be a dust storm,” Yami Lester told the enquiry, remembering the black mist, “but it was quiet, just moving through trees and above the trees. It was just rolling and moving quietly.” That ghastly, implacable quietness, the quietness of a lava flow; it is this that struck others who witnessed the phenomenon, too, desert people white and black, who were accustomed to the phenomena of the desert and knew that dust storms did not make their approach in windless silence. Lester’s stepfather, whom we know only as Kanytji, hearing the explosion, had associated it with Wananpi, the water serpent of the Dreaming, creator and guardian of waterholes. The cloud, he said, “was from the ground and it was black…there was like a sprinkling rain, like dropping of dew…We felt cold and shivering.” Kanginy, another resident of Wallatinna, said it was “a bit like the sort of smoke when you burn a tyre.”
Ellen Giles, at Welbourn Hill station, recalled a “big, coiling, cloudlike thing.” In its aftermath “the orange and lemon trees were coated in this dust. It was an oily dust. You could see it on the walls too. We tried to hose the trees down, but they just withered and died.”
In Lester’s camp there was a searing fear; the vomit was green, the shit was green. There were terrible headaches. Puyu, the Anangu called it—“black mist.” It is not known precisely how many died, but the camp moved at least twice, a practice undertaken each time there is a death. Like other children who were exposed to the cloud, Yami Lester found he was unable to open his eyes. He had to be led around holding the end of a stick. His eyesight deteriorated over the following years, until he lost the sight in first one eye, then both.
Ernest Titterton, one of the senior Australian scienti
sts, had been present at the explosion of the world’s first nuclear bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945, and helped to devise the system that activated it. It is possible that the weight of that responsibility warped some part of him. In a letter written in the 1980s, when reports of the black mist began to reach the Australian public, he asserted that “the story is laughable from physical, meteorological and medical points of view.” In an interview with Australian radio he added that “if you investigate black mists you’re going to get into an area where mystique is a central feature.” By mystique I don’t think he meant mystery, but rather something like the supernatural or allegory or magic or—had he known the word—mamu.
The Royal Commission was not inclined to disregard the numerous witness testimonies, and found that the cloud was more than mere “mystique.” While it discovered no evidence that the fallout had caused serious or long-term injuries, it conceded that “at Wallatinna the vomiting of Aborigines may have resulted from radiation, it may have been a psychogenic reaction to the frightening experience, or it may have resulted from both these.” It was incomprehensible to the commission, as it was to Titterton, that a “psychogenic reaction,” or even “mystique,” might themselves be catastrophic; that they could kill.
* * *
—
A KILOMETRE FROM the Totem 1 site, Robin and I stood on the promontory from which the detonation had been viewed by Penney and Titterton and the dignitaries who accompanied them. Fixed into the ground were the steel pegs to which the viewing tower had been tethered, and there, across a stretch of glittering ironstone, was ground zero. We walked the rest of the way. Close to ground zero, weathered to near illegibility, there was a yellow sign, its warning in Italian, Greek and Polish, as well as English. The few trees were black and etiolated. A tangle of warped steel was all that remained of the bomb tower.
“I know I’ll come across skeletons one day,” said Robin. “MacDougall once found seventeen people walking on West Street and turned them back.” West Street was one of the grid of service tracks that crisscrossed the Maralinga test zone. “This is recorded in one of his reports. And as he left they were heading back towards Western Australia. Well, those people never made it back to Western Australia, and they never made it to Ooldea, where they were initially going. Those people literally disappeared off the face of the earth. They either were caught in a bomb blast and it vaporised them, or they were caught in the radiation and got very sick and then passed away somewhere in the desert.”
That night, rummaging in the pocket of my rucksack, I cut my finger on something—it was a fine, clean, stinging cut. I shone my headtorch into the pocket. Those glassy chips of trinitite I’d picked up glimmered back. There wasn’t much blood.
* * *
—
THE FOLLOWING DAY, in the hospital building at Maralinga, Robin played me a DVD, a copy of a publicity reel made by Britain’s Ministry of Defence in the 1960s. He wanted one day to set up a museum in one of the mess huts, including a multiple-rocket-launcher that currently adorned the patio, and other artefacts picked up from the ranges. The film would be played as an introduction. He’d like people from Yalata and Oak Valley, whose land this was, to be guides, to “tell the Anangu story.” But employment was not enough to tempt them to set foot here. It was not just that Tietkens’s Plain and Emu Field had been made hazardous places and places of grief, or that they were haunted, exactly (the mamu wasn’t like a ghost); it was more that to go there was akin to necrophilia. The land was dead, and only the mad consort with corpses.
And here, in the film, to the sound of quavering strings, was the land being put to death.
“The biological group prepares thirty articulated dummies,” says a perky British voiceover, and a dummy is shown being hoisted upright by a cable hooked to an eyelet in the top of its head, “which are to be suitably clad in normal service dress, and will be exposed to the first round at distances up to six thousand feet from the weapon.” A dummy is shown “standing in a slit trench to assess the degree of protection,” and then pictured gazing manfully from his station. “Others will be exposed in three positions: standing, crouching and prone, with dummies both facing and side-on to the blast.” A dummy is shown on its hands and knees. “The object is to confirm theoretical predictions about the distances men in these positions will be thrown by the dynamic blast effect.”
We see the mushroom cloud; we see the sky gridded with contrails from dozens of smoke-rockets fired to make the blast-wave visible; the next day, we see the aftermath. It might be footage from an antinuclear campaign:
Two dummies wired upright on posts, their overalls shredded and their hands ripped off, only their gas masks still intact and in place; then a steel crucifix carrying nothing but a singed torso, the ground around scattered with a wreckage of arms, legs and heads; next, a pile of melted plastic and blackened clothing; then a beheaded figure strapped to a pole; sundry others tossed across an acre of ground. And finally, after these visions, the devil, white from head to toe save for that black snout, clutching his ticking box, making his way across the hazard zone.
3
TROUBLEMAKERS
The Gobi Desert and the Taklamakan Desert, China
If the desert is a hiding place for human crimes it is also an abyss into which those who shame, disgust or threaten us may be swept. In Australia I had been reading about the Qing dynasty’s annexation of territory to the north-west of China in the 1750s. Throughout Qing rule of that region, which continued intermittently until 1911, tens of thousands of criminals and dissidents were sent to the newly annexed land. The threat of banishment to and enslavement in a place so distant and inhospitable, so alien to one nurtured in the watered heartland, was a deterrent; but the tactic was not only penal: such a vital political buffer, it was understood, could be secured only through colonisation and through land reform. The same strategy had been followed by Britain in Australia. Where colonists will not go willingly they must be sent. The severity of a person’s crime was reflected in the remoteness of their exile: “very near” (1,000 kilometres from the convict’s homeland); “to a nearby frontier” (1,600 kilometres); “to an insalubrious region” or “to the furthest frontier.” The deserts of the far west, the Gobi and the Taklamakan, being both insalubrious and as distant from centres of population as it was possible to be while remaining in Chinese territory, were reserved for the gravest cases. Those exiled fell into two groups. First, ordinary criminals, who would usually be sent into slavery. As well as convicts who had committed crimes themselves, this group included the families of those who had been executed for, say, murder, or incest, or treason. The second, smaller, group consisted of disgraced government officials, or weifei—“troublemakers”—who had criticised official corruption or had associated with convicted traitors. Convicts on departure would be tattooed on both temples like a double stamp of lading: your crime on the right; on the left your destination. The far west was colonised not only by murderers, thieves, rapists, counterfeiters and sectarians, but by bureaucrats, army generals, eunuchs, and wenzi yu an or “literary cases.” The exiled scholar Ji Yuan, writing to his wife in 1769, described it as “another world.”
Whereas for indigenous Australians the desert is an infinite mosaic of symbols and stories, the hyper-arid deserts of China have figured in that country’s popular imagination as mere interstices, or collectively as a dread realm entered under duress or to reach the next oasis, even among those who populate the desert’s edge. One of the earliest recorded crossings is that of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang. Born in 602, he became a novice at the age of twelve and was soon recognised by his elders as a student of uncommon brilliance. Aged twenty-seven, sick of the disputing among his fellow monks on matters of dogma, he determined to travel across the great deserts of north-west China to India, the cradle of Buddhism, where he would retrieve scriptures that would resolve these disagreements. “Dangers and untold difficulties lie ahe
ad of him,” wrote his contemporary biographer. “He will be sorely tested but he is ready to depart.” Xuanzang is warned by a “venerable greybeard” that “the Western roads are difficult and bad; sand streams stretch far and wide; evil sprites and hot winds, when they come, cannot be avoided.” As the monk and his nag make their way west, guided only by piles of bones and horse dung, they arrive at an expanse of desert where, according to the monk’s biographer, “there are no birds overhead, and no beasts below; there is neither water nor herb to be found.” Xuanzang went on to spend fourteen years travelling and studying in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, before recrossing the Taklamakan in 645 with twenty-two horses carrying more than seven hundred works of Buddhist scripture.
* * *
—
I RETURNED FROM Australia to find the living-room window boarded up; I’d been burgled, but my neighbours had been unable to get hold of me. When I tidied up the mess I realised how dusty the flat was: all the surfaces grey with it, and accumulations of grey-blue fluff under the bed and behind the radiators and along the skirting. My laptop had gone, but apparently there was no market for a heap of old books about deserts.
One of those inspired by Xuanzang, 1,300 years later, was a British missionary named Mildred Cable. Among my remaining books was a Virago reprint of her most famous volume, The Gobi Desert, originally published in 1942, in which she wrote: “The utter loneliness of the monk’s journey…bred a strength and endurance which carried him through every ordeal, and the long silent desert stages taught him the ways of meditation better than any monastic rule could have done.”
The epiphany happened in summer 1893. Following some “unaccountable impulse,” fifteen-year-old Mildred went alone to a talk by a member of the China Inland Mission. The speaker is unidentified, but seems to have been one Emily Wiltshire. She wore a collar, Cable recalls, embroidered with the words “Jesus He shall save.” Afterwards, she took the abashed young Cable aside: “I think the Lord wants you in China.” In 1860, thirty-three years earlier and following the Second Opium War, treaties signed by Peking had granted foreign missionaries in China the right to preach and build churches. Five years later, the China Inland Mission was founded in Shanghai by a Yorkshire Protestant named James Hudson Taylor. The CIM, as it was known to its members, would differ from other mission organisations. While the established Chinese missions concentrated on the coastal cities, the CIM’s stations would be scattered across the hinterlands—the minority lands; lawless, far from imperial power, far from Christian influence: Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Ningxia, Gansu, Xinjiang.
The Immeasurable World Page 11