The Naked Country

by Morris West

  During the night the last wind dropped. Moonlight lay placid on river and plain and the ramparts of the Stone Country. The glacial cold of the desert crept across the swamp-land.

  The cold was a trial to the kadaitja men. They were accustomed to going naked, night and day, but at night they slept with fires at their bellies and their backs, with the camp dogs curled beside them and their women-folk lending them the warmth of their bodies. This night of solitary, hungry walking was a ritual pain, another symbol of the sacred character of their mission. They must endure it until the cycle had been completed with the death of Mundaru.

  The moonlight and the still air were other symbols – proof that the magic of Willinja was working in their favour. When the moon was high the man with the whipbird voice called them together and they converged on him accurately, although he was hidden from their sight. When they were all assembled, he had them hoist him on their shoulders, so that he stood, dark and massive in the sky, like a man walking on a moonlit sea.

  For a long time he stood there, the light playing on his daubed body, quartering the grassland with his sacred spear, scanning every quadrant with eyes made keener by the aura of power within which he moved.

  The whole country was wrapped in a silver dream. The swamp was flat as ice; the tree-boles were grey sentinels against the sky-line; their foliage drooped motionless against the stars. The grass was an unbroken carpet from the river to the lagoon and away to the dark ridges.

  No bird sang. No animal stirred. Only the frogs and the crickets made a mystic chorus, punctuated now and then by the distant howl of a dingo and the haunting cry of a mopoke. The kadaitja man waited and watched while his companions grunted and braced themselves under his feathered feet.

  Finally he saw the thing he had been expecting. Half a mile away, the grass was stirring as if a little wind were running through it, or an animal were nosing its way through the undergrowth. But the kadaitja man knew that the animal was a man and that his name was Mundaru. He knew more – that the magic of Willinja was working and drawing the buffalo man towards a sacred place, where the Tjuringa stones were hidden in a deep cave at the roots of a bottle tree and where the painted poles stood weathering round the leaf-covered entrance.

  Before he reached it, they would take him. And when the spirit snake had been planted in his body, they would drive him towards it, so that he would die in the shadow of the power he had flouted.

  It was enough. It was time to go. They lowered him back into the pit of grasses, and he told them where they must walk and how quickly, to come up with Mundaru at the first light of the new sun.

  Some time in the small hours of the morning, Lance Dillon woke, cramped, chattering and agonised, but lucid for the first time in many hours. The place in which he found himself was strange to him. The ground was hard and pebbly and dotted with small tussocks of coarse grass. When he turned his head painfully from side to side, he could see the shapes of stunted mulga trees, white and skeletal, under the moon. Ahead lay a low, tufted ridge of limestone, at whose foot was a thick clump of trees. When he tried to look back to see how far he had travelled from the grass-land a spasm of agony shot through his shoulder, and he lay flat on the harsh ground trying to recover himself.

  He knew very well that the lucidity was only temporary, a trough in the wave-like pattern of the fever. He must hold to it as long as he could. In the bleak radiance of the moon he saw how far he had strayed from the river and how his last hope of rescue had dwindled to nothing. It surprised him that he was not more afraid – that he was even relieved to be absolved from further effort and agony. The most he need do was dispose himself to die as comfortably as possible.

  Many times in the years of his maturity he had been troubled by the question: ‘What would I do if I were to lose this and this – my hope, my ambition, my wife? How would I react, if tomorrow a doctor told me I had only six months, six weeks, a week to live?’ Now, in this brief interval of reason, the answers were plain to him. The hardest thing to accept was the inevitability of pain and loss and death. Before one accepted there were the haunted nights when one lay awake thinking of money and overdrafts, and bank managers and the wise faces of the bar-room prophets who knew all about bankruptcy except what it did to the innocent victim.

  There were the bitter days when one was too proud to ask for a kiss or a word of understanding, the silent evenings when a man and a woman sat together in a room, yet in heart a million miles apart. There were the hours when they lay a foot apart in bed, each waiting for the other to make the first gesture of reconciliation – and finally slide dumbly into sleep.

  And when one day, the seed of death was planted in the body, there was the racking fight to dislodge it – the fight he had just endured and which had brought him to this place – waterless, barren, a hundred yards from the limestone ridges. One had to submit in the end, but once the submission was made there was calm, the calm of the silver age, the last quiet time before the lights flickered out altogether.

  One more effort was demanded of him – to drag himself the final hundred yards into the shadow of the trees. Once there, he could compose himself decently in the shade and wait for death.

  He raised his head again and sighted on his target a large bottle tree whose bloated trunk stood out from all the others in the clump. This would be his lodestar, the last goal of the last journey in the life of Lance Dillon. Summoning all his strength, he began to drag himself over the shaly ground towards it.

  Every few yards he had to stop and rest, feeling the fever-wave rising to extinguish the fire of reason. He would lie flattened from face to foot on the pebbles, weak, gasping and waiting for the mists of weakness to subside; then he would go on, heedless of the sharp stones that raked his belly and his chest into running wounds. Each time he moved, he took a new sight on the bottle tree, and as he came closer he saw, ranged in a semi-circle before it, painted poles, some flattened like palm-leaves, some tall as maypoles, others hollow and thick as a small tree. Between them the ground was piled thick with fallen leaves.

  Dillon had seen the like of them before many times. They indicated a sacred place: sometimes a burial-ground where the dead were stored in hollow palm-trunks, after their flesh had rotted away on platforms in the bush, sometimes a repository of sacred objects. The sight of it reminded him of the myalls who were coming to kill him. It was a casual reminder, tinged with irony. It was well that they should approach him with respect, walking over holy ground. Perhaps the ground might be too holy and they would fear to come to him – but he would still die and they could squat and watch him, just outside the painted poles.

  His last halt was only five yards from the edge of the ring. The bottle tree lay perhaps another five beyond it and the intervening space was a carpet of dry leaves. He wanted to reach the tree, because its knotted, bulbous trunk would give him a back-rest, and he had the idea that he wanted to sit upright to watch the dawn and the coming of his killers. A bushman’s caution told him that the carpet of leaves might well hide venomous snakes, but a second reflection urged him forward. A snake-bite might finish him quickly – truncate the final agony to a manageable limit.

  He crawled foot by foot over the last rough ground and into the dead leaves. There was a kind of pleasure in their touch on his scarred and naked skin. There was a dusty aromatic scent about them, as if an essence of life still lingered. He wondered whether anything of himself would linger after the final dissolution.

  The tree was only ten feet away now, and he was pushing towards it through leaves as deep as his face, when without warning, the ground gave way beneath him and he felt himself rolling over and over into blackness.

  Mary Dillon woke to moonlight on her face and the warmth of Adams’s body against her own. His breathing was deep and regular, and under the rough texture of his shirt she could hear the strong beating of his heart. Her head was still pillowed on his arm and she felt the stubble of his cheek on her forehead, just below the hairline. Hi
s free arm lay slack over her body and the dead weight of it held her to him like a bond.

  The last mist of sleep still clung to her and she surrendered herself to the comfort of his presence. She had slept three years in the marriage bed with Lance Dillon, but it was longer than she cared to remember since they had lain like this, relaxed, content, with passion a whisper away, yet dormant and unprovoked. It was a sour comedy that a day’s ride and ten minutes of terror had brought her to this point with Neil Adams, while three years of contract and companionship with her husband had taken her a lifetime away from it.

  Whose fault was it – Lance’s or her own? Whose fault was this moment of dangerous propinquity, when she shared the same blanket with a man who was not her husband. The love with which she had entered marriage had worn perilously thin under the chafing of time and circumstance. What drew her to Neil Adams was of new strong growth, hard still to define by name, harder still to deny, untested. Both situations carried a measure of guilt, but a greater one of accident and inevitability. In both the same question cried for an answer: where did she go from here?

  Neil Adams stirred, muttering in his sleep, and his arm fell away from her. Carefully, so as not to waken him, she eased herself up to a sitting position and looked about her. The moonlit river flowed placidly through the night, where the shadows broke, the sand and rock ledges lay silver to the sky, and fifty yards away Billy-Jo stood, a black sentinel staring across the river towards the hidden chorus of the bull-frogs.

  As if for the first time she saw the other face of the hated land – not hostile, but passive, not harsh, but empty and hungry for the touch to transfigure it to fruitfulness. What she was seeing now was what Lance had seen, in one mutation or another, and what he had tried vainly to communicate to her. In the first flush of revelation, it seemed she could get up and walk alone through the vastness without fear of man or bird or beast.

  Lance had urged it on her many times, telling her that there were no wild beasts in the Territory and that even the wild nomads lived in order and peace, so long as their beliefs and customs were respected.

  Then hard on the heels of the flattering illusion came the realisation that hardly a mile away was being enacted a drama of pursuit and killing, in which her own husband was one of the victims. As if to emphasise the pathetic fallacy, from far to the west there came the long mourning howl of a dingo. From the east another answered, then another and another, until the night was filled with a dreary graveyard chant, rising and falling like wind in the vacant air.

  She shivered and slid back under the blanket. At the same moment Neil Adams opened his eyes. Their faces brushed. His arms went round her and the waste-land howling was hushed by his first whispered words.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IT IS NOT GIVEN to every man to approve the interior of his own tomb before he occupies it, and Lance Dillon was vaguely grateful for the privilege. He saw it from the position he would finally occupy in it – flat on his back on the sandy floor with a cone of darkness above his head and a moonbeam slanting downward from the hole through which he had fallen.

  The hole was high above him and he wondered, inconsequently, what he must have looked like, flailing through the air as he fell. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim twilight, he saw that he had rolled down a long sandy ramp on to the floor. Tentatively, he moved his limbs, his head and trunk. They were painful but articulating normally. He was whole in bone and still lucid – an uncommon triumph for a man lying in his own burial-vault.

  The air about him was dry, warm and clean, but tinged with a faint fusty odour which he could not identify, until his straining eyes caught the outline of the bats hanging from the fretted limestone above him. One or two of them disturbed by his fall were dipping about in the darkness with faint mouse-like squeaking. They were odd timid creatures, well-made for this graveyard dozing, but they were harmless and infinitely better company than the kites who would have come wheeling about him at the first warmth of dawn above ground.

  He closed his eyes and let his fingers scrabble in the sand. It was fine and powdery, with no hint of moisture. Sluggish reason told him the rest of the story. He had stumbled into a cave, scored out by one of the underground rivers that had run centuries ago, beneath the surface of the Stone Country. Beyond this cave would be others, large or small, linked by a tunnel which was the course of the ancient river. If he wanted a deeper grave, it was here waiting for him, given the strength and the drive to find it.

  But for the present he was content. The sand was soft. The warmth was grateful after the bitter cold above ground, and after the moonlight there would be the sun, striking through the peep-hole of the vault. He might not be alive to see it, but it was pleasant to think of, a hope to hold, while reason remained with him.

  Slowly the vague shapes of his surroundings solidified; the groining of the rock roof, the pendant points of stalactites, the narrowing gullet of darkness where a tunnel ran downward into the bowels of the earth, the niches in the walls, stacked with stones, and bundles wrapped in tree bark. These last he could not identify, but he guessed that they were the weapons and bones of long-dead warriors cached by the myalls in their sacred place.

  He wondered whether they would accord him the same privilege after they had killed him – whether even this primitive decency would be denied him. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered now, except a comfortable exit from the ruins of his life.

  He had never had any religious faith. Philosophy was a scholastic mystery to him. His whole life had been dominated by the pragmatic cycle of birth, increase, acquisition and death. A man’s only survival was in his offspring, and he was lucky if he died before they disappointed him. Death was the ultimate fear, but once one passed beyond this fear, there was only the calm disappointment that life had meant so little.

  Suddenly the arid stillness of the air was broken by a sound; a single clear note, as if someone had flipped a finger-nail against a crystal goblet. The overtones hung a moment in the conical cave and then died. For a full minute Dillon lay listening, but the sound was not repeated. His thoughts drifted away from it.

  …The drover’s son who wanted to be a cattle king… The snot-nosed boy holding a stirrup-leather for the great Kidman himself and gaping in wonder at the gold half-sovereign tossed for him to catch… The stripling stock-rider, plugging his first thousand head of beef over five hundred miles of drought-stricken country to the rail-head… The leather-faced gunner in the Japanese war, trading his cigarette and beer ration for a few extra pounds in his pay-book… Keeping away from the girls on leave, because a night on the town was half the price of a yearling heifer… The day his number came up in the repatriation ballot for a lease of Crown Land in the Territory… The tent in the middle of nowhere, while his stock grazed on the river flats… All the years of sweating and penny-pinching and denial, of meagre cheques and lean credit, until he could build his first house and pay off his first mortgage and make his first trip to the east to buy decent stock. So long as he was small and struggling, dealing in scrub bullocks and stringy beef, the big combines were prepared to leave him alone… But from the day he made his first leap into the breeding business, they began to put pressure on him – always on the same tender spot: credit. When he married and began to build a household and a staff, the pressure increased, but the greater the pressure the tougher he became, the more determined and single-minded, so that in the end his whole hope of life, security and happiness became centred in the genitals of a bull.

  Looking at it now, in the thin twilight of his burial-place, he saw it as a monstrous folly, next door to madness. Yet it was the truth. Other men had laughed and kissed and got drunk and bred sons they couldn’t afford and laid their last shillings on a filly hammering down the straight; while he had lived, disciplined as a monk, in the service of a sacred animal. Who now was in profit – he or they? Who would be mourned longer, with more of love and pity?

  As if to punctuate the unanswe
rable question, the tiny musical note sounded again. He strained at the tenuous echoes, but the next moment they were gone, while his mind still groped for the tag of association.

  …Sunday dinner at the homestead… The meal all but over…Two people with nothing fresh to say to each other, idling over the coffee and the last of the wine. Mary tapping absently at the rim of her wine-glass with a coffee-spoon, so that the heavy air was filled with the thin, repetitive note. His own voice, sharp and surprisingly loud:

  ‘For God’s sake, Mary! Must you do that?’

  And then Mary’s wintry, sidelong smile:

  ‘Wears you down, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Why do it then?’

  ‘Cattle for breakfast, cattle for lunch, cattle for dinner, cattle in bed.’

  With each repetition, the spoon tinkled on the glass.

  ‘That wears me down, Lance. I’m a woman, not a breeding cow. Don’t you see what’s happening to us? I want a husband, not a studmaster.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mary! Be a little patient! I’ve told you a dozen times, we’re battling now; but it won’t be for long. A couple more years and…’

  ‘And we’re building bigger herds and better ones – while love gets smaller and smaller; while our marriage goes from bad to worse.’

  ‘I’ve always thought it was a pretty good marriage.’

  ‘You’ve hardly thought about it at all. And I’m beginning to lose interest!’

  ‘You don’t damn well know what you want…’

  And so on and on, through the dreary dialogue of disillusion, with its meaningless accusation and its hidden rancours that each was too proud to put into words…

  Now, when there was no pride left, it was already too late. When he was ready to speak the truth, his swollen lips could not frame the words – and there was no one to hear them if he did.