Sarah had provided early morning tea for the hands, and when all were in the kitchen, Bony telephoned Constable Pierce and spoke for five minutes. Ten minutes after that, he started out for Lake Eyre.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Sink of Australia
THESUNrose above Lake Eyre, and it was like facing car lights ten yards distant. It was no hindrance to Bony, who had to concentrate his attention on the whitefeller Kurdaitcha shoes, fashioned so differently from the soft feathers worn by that fabulous creature. But the sun masked him completely from Wootton, who stood on the white beach, as well as from others standing high among the pines. He found that weight related to the area of the boards attached to his feet was not sufficient to clog the footwear if he proceeded by sliding one foot forward, then the other, and at the beginning of the journey the dingo pad was quite easy to see.
Progress, however, was slow. Muscles unaccustomed to particular stress began to tire, so that, on glancing back, he was dismayed on estimating that his voyage over The-Sea-That-Was was but a mile begun.
A hot wind was strengthening from the north, and it seemed to enshroud him in isolation completely foreign to that experienced on ‘dry land’. One cannot be completely isolated when trees are neighbours, and sand dunes are dwellings, but here was nothing of the comfort of familiar things. Here was menace to spur imagination, to emphasize the hopelessness of help in distress; pictures of himself slowly engulfed by dark and evil mud, or trapped by monstrous things, flashed across his mind.
Grimly he went on when he longed to go back.
The dingo pad was seldom more than twelve inches wide, and often was reduced to four inches. At some places it was quite distinct; at others only a good tracker could follow it. When he was three miles from shore, the pad wound about a great deal, which aroused his interest, because, under normal circumstances, a travelling dog proceeds straighter than does a man. Presently the pad became less twisted, and gave him his first surprise… a narrow strip of hard sun-baked mud.
He was glad to remove the boards from his feet and pause for a smoke, and it was something of a shock to realize that his interest in these surroundings had subjugated the purpose of the journey. Where the pad met the dry patch, the dogs had scratched their paws clean of mud.
Having rested, he returned to the pad, noting once again that his board tracks were exceedingly light, and when examining the depressions with his fingertips, he learned that the resilience of the mud would within hours entirely obliterate them. That the pad itself remained clear was due to the number of dogs that had used it since water covered the mud so long ago.
This dry patch of only a few yards wide and a hundred in length was a resting place, as he himself was using it. The marks of claws on the hard surface proved that. It was perhaps four miles from the shore, now distorted by the mirage creating wide rivers in the declivities, and vast lakes between the slopes of gibber-covered uplands. Vast sheets of ‘water’ lay about, the mud surface visible only within a radius of half a mile.
Not only dogs, but crows had rested on this ‘island’ in the mirage. And not only crows had stayed a little while, gone on. Two spent matches told of human visitation. The matches told him nothing but that… which was most satisfying.
To leave this patch of hard land was as easy as to arrive, there being only the one pad. Refreshed, Bony fastened the mud shoes and continued along this highway of the dingoes, the mirage receding before him, and ever flowing after him, the immediate surround always the same-flat, uniform of colouring, the top surface lifted to brittle pieces of crisp mud crust. A journey deadly monotonous, were it not for the little mysteries.
Why did the pad turn sharply to the right, continue in that direction for a quarter mile, again turn left, to continue the overall course to the east? Why did it proceed for three miles more straight than a man-made path, and then zigzag over a full mile? There was nothing which could be seen to account for this.
The day wore on, and he was beginning to wonder what kind of night he would spend if he had to camp on this narrow dog pad, when again the pad angled sharply. It had reached the border of a large area pitted by open holes the size of a florin. The dogs had not crossed it, had skirted it, and he saw why when a green finger emerged from one of the holes, beckoned to him, sank again into the mud. Then while he watched, other green fingers appeared, beckoned, and disappeared.
Curiosity was suddenly submerged by desire to get away from this place of the unknown; the beckoning fingers became the miasma of a nightmare, and the board shoes the leaden feet of it.
An hour later he was thankful to reach another patch of bone-dry mud, to rest and take stock of his progress. The sun said four o’clock. There was no landmark, and how far out in the lake he had come it was not possible to assess.
This hard patch was about an acre in extent, and having rested his aching muscles, he strolled over it and found evidence of a dingo rest, and again the spent matches. Of human tracks there were none, the ground being too hard to register any.
He decided to spend the night here, although he could not dismiss from his mind those sinister green fingers. He was less concerned by his food supply than by the three pints of water he now carried in the canvas bag.
Since daybreak he had consumed one pint, and, despite the aid of the pebble he had sucked all day, he felt this was the minimum for existence. The aborigines could live for a week and more on half a gallon of water, but not D. I. Bonaparte with his preference for countless cups of tea.
Until the sun went down, it was not possible to see land, and Bony occupied time by testing for water under the mud. He had found a short swathe of tree debris, among which was a four-foot stick, and although he didn’t find water even by seepage, he did uncover the mystery of the erratic course of the dingo pad. The true bottom of Lake Eyre was not flat, as the surface of the mud overlay indicated, but rather was similar to the sea bottom, with its valleys and hills and mountains. The dogs followed the summit of ridges, and the two areas of hardened mud merely covered the tops of subterranean hillocks; and that area of mud from which upthrust those extraordinary green fingers must mark a valley or chasm.
The mirage ebbed, to form long silver strips, and these shallows disappeared slowly, to vanish entirely when the huge red fireball tipped the distant uplands. There was the land ten miles away, and there was an object three miles away which certainly was a moving human being.
Seated on the hard mud, his arms clasping his knees, Bony watched and waited for the being to identify himself. Slowly colour faded from the sky, and the lake revealed all its true starkly drab and loathsome self, from which the sky blenched. As the minutes passed, the figure on the mud appeared to be no nearer, and yet was following the pad by which he had travelled. The dusk deepened, and there was no skyline, no background to gain a silhouette and so learn whether the person was white or black.
When half a mile from Bony, when he could dimly follow movement, the figure stopped, stood for a few seconds, finally sank to the pad. It was obvious that the man did not know of this second resting place, and had decided to park himself before darkness blinded him to the depths of mud either side of him.
For a space, Bony lay on his back looking at the unwinking stars, only those of the first dimension able to penetrate the high level haze. Restless, he sat again, smoked cigarette after cigarette, being careful to shield the flame of matches, and knowing it wasn’t his match flares that had determined the follower to walk that pad in the dark.
He heard the impact of mud with shoe one minute before the figure emerged from the darkness to reach the island in the mud and give vent to a sigh of satisfaction. The figure stooped tounstrap the boards, and then its identity was revealed.
Bony chuckled.
“Welcome, wife!” he called. “Welcome!”
He advanced, struck a match, saw the dark eyes meeting his own above the tiny flame. She stood silent, waiting for reprimand, making no movement when he slipped behind her
and eased from her back the rope slings holding the laden sugar sack.
“Your eyes are better than mine, Meena, but I am sure your legs ache more than mine do.”
“I thought you would be angry,” she said, and obeyed when he suggested she sit with him. “Are you?”
“Not at the moment. Why did you come?”
“Yorky has a rifle.”
“I have, too.”
“Yorky is a dead shot, Inspector.”
“You may call me Bony. I am a dead shot, too.”
“Yorky might kill Linda. I came to stop him.”
“Well, leave it. When did you eat last?”
“Before I left Mount Eden.”
“Then you must eat before you explain, and before I become angry, if I do. And, somehow, Meena, I cannot believe I shall ever be angry with you.”
The starlight emphasized the vastness of this place in which was no security against natural forces, no protection from unknown powers. The wind came softly, in fitful little gusts, bringing scents unknown to them, and strangely repellent. Presently, Meena said:
“What were those green things coming up out of the mud?”
“Whatever they were, I feared them,” admitted Bony.
“Could be Carlinka,” the girl said, and when Bony pressed for information, she went on: “Story told by Canute. In the Alchuringa Days three blackfellers out hunting met a giant centipede. The centipede said: ‘Don’t kill me. I’m Carlinka.’ So they didn’t kill him. They turned him over on his back and scooped sand over him. They found they couldn’t cover him properly because his legs waved about so much, and then a dingo came along and said he’d help, and he did by scratching up the sand till all they could see of Carlinka was the tips of his feet wiggling about.”
The reddish light gleamed on her shoulders and naked breasts, her slim arms, and was reflected by her eyes. He knew himself to be old only in pride bidding him to remember not what he was, but who he was. When he spoke his voice was unnecessarily harsh.
“Now tell me why you came.”
“It’s like I told you, true. Yorky has a rifle. So have you. You’re a policeman, like Constable Pierce. You go after Yorky. When Yorky sees you and fires, telling you to go away, you won’t because you’re a policeman. You will fire back if Yorky doesn’t give up. And he won’t. And there’s Linda. Sarah kidded Canute to tell about Yorky and Linda camped in the middle of the lake, and Canute told Sarah Yorky could stop all the policemen in the world from getting him. So I came to talk to Yorky. Better to talk than shoot.”
“Much better, Meena,” agreed Bony. “Who made your Kurdaitcha shoes?”
“That Charlie.” Meena looked down and smiled. “Me and Sarah told him. He wouldn’t at first, but we made him. Sarah was in a tantrum. We found Charlie hiding in the motor shed, and after a little time he made the mud shoes for me, all right.”
“The men, what were they doing when you left?”
“They were all gone. Constable Pierce came and went away with Mr Wootton. Like you said on the radio, they went to catch Yorky coming off the lake. The men rode away before Mr Wootton. The men took their guns, too. I heard Harry tell the others to shoot Yorky on sight.”
The quivering voice was an entity fleeing away into the silence, and presently it came again.
“You don’t know Yorky, Ins… Bony. Yorky wasn’t cruel to anyone. He never treated us aborigines like dirt. He was kind to everyone. He’s the kindest whitefeller who ever was, not a dingo to be hunted and shot.”
“Are you sure it was Harry Lawton who urged the others to shoot him on sight?” pressed Bony. And when she answered affirmatively, he said: “Take it easy. We have to be on that dog pad at first sight of dawn.”
Chapter Twenty-two
The Corpse of The Past
THEYWEREfour miles on to the east when the sun blotted from that quarter the endless rusty mud and began hastily to lay the mirage over the putrescence of its own creation. It had been comparatively straight going, proving the dogs followed submerged ridges, when sharply the pad turned left towards the north and away from the glaring sun. Minutes later they saw movement at about half a mile, and stopped.
“What is it?” cried Meena, who was close behind Bony. “I don’t like it.”
A something rose and subsided erratically, never in the same place, and, without replying, Bony proceeded with his rifle more easily accessible to hand. They could see the lake floor was moving, and ultimately the pad skirted this area of disturbance. Great mud blisters rose and sank without bursting, the light glinting on them as though the skin was stretched taut with pus. There was no evidence indicative of thermal forces agitating this area of several square miles of turbulence.
“Go on, Bony. Don’t wait here. I don’t like this place,” Meena urged.
Far away something rose above the general level which was no blister. It was like a wave running end-forward, then abruptly it turned towards them and drew close in zigzag fashion. It suggested the movement of a great reptile swiftly passing under the mud which rose to curve away from its back. There was certainly no solidity anywhere except that under their feet. The wave thing skirted their end of the area and slowly sank among the recurring blisters.
“What’s doing it, Bony?” Meena whispered, but Bony merely shrugged and pressed on. What could he, the big-feller policeman, say in answer to so simple a question? How to explain something apparently behaving in opposition to natural laws? How to explain those green fingers? Or to bring logic to bear on the rotting corpse of This-Sea-That-Was?
The pad skirted the area for more than a mile, and twice the whale-like bank of mud rose and moved with astonishing speed as though the mass were a living thing. Merely a quarter mile from them, a hill of mud rose many feet, to disintegrate as though from internal combustion.
The sky was white, the sun itself tawny, and the wind came to hurry them onward to safety from this blistered menace. A possible explanation, in Bony’s opinion, was that this area of deep mud was agitated by water pouring into the northeast section of the lake, thus creating pressure and stress, and were this so, then danger to themselves was to be reckoned with.
He gained another opinion later when skirting a small area of liquid mud bearing distinct traces of oil. The wind then was so strong that the surface was ridged with sluggish ripples.
When the sun wassearingly hot on their backs, they came to the next dingo rest. Both were physically exhausted and disturbed by the implications of the mud’s behaviour, for should the water rise to cover the surface, the dog pad would disappear, and they would be engulfed.
“Two hours ago I urged you to go back. I do so now,” Bony said, and all the reaction he produced in the girl was a slow smile and a negative shake of the head.
“Yorky and Linda are somewhere out here,” she reminded him. “And I wouldn’t go back past those things for anything. You don’t seem to mind, though.”
“I mind all right, Meena. I’m not liking this at all.”
“I know. If there was a wall of fire half a mile on, you’d go straight through it instead of going back. The Missioner told us that pridegoeth before a fall. I hope you don’t fall.”
“We haven’t that kind of pride, you no more than I. You and I are merely animated shells crammed with fears and inhibitions, humility and pride. What white people might name courage is in us instinctive revolt against the abyss for ever opening at our feet. We must not fail. We dare not think of failure. So we must go on, even if we have to travel right across this abominable lake.”
They ate slowly. Sips of water immediately issued from them in the form of perspiration, the natural bodily function having ceased since leaving Mount Eden. For a little while they lay with their faces pressed into folded arms to give relief from the glare to eyes sore and heavy.
“You don’t really think Yorky shot Mrs Bell?” Meena asked without raising her head.
“No. But don’t ask me why he bolted with Linda. I couldn’t answer that.”<
br />
“D’youknow who did shoot her?”
“One of two men, possibly. It could be one of five men, but I think it’s one of two.”
“Which two, Bony?”
“It is now three hours to sundown, Siren. We should press on and hope to reach another dog rest before darkness stops us.”
“All set. I’m ready.”
She was lacing her mud shoes when he raised himself and blinked against the fierce light. He offered to carry her store of food, but she refused. She stood straight and strong, and the beauty of her body defeated the grime and dust and mud flakes adhering to it. Over her deep-gold face was the smile again, a smile of daring, with a dash of inscrutable woman.
Now and then she watched him pushing on ahead, seemingly making light of the gear he carried and finding no difficulty with the boards, and, as with their maternal forebears, both possessed that rare ability of closing their minds to physical discomfort and concentrating only on the important matter of arriving.
They came to a break in the pad of several yards, and after tentatively testing the surface, managed to cross by hurrying. Another area was pocked by mounds two feet high, and from the mounds came sucking and gurgling sounds. Bony, having heard and seen the giant earthworms of Gippsland, wondered how enormous must these worms be, if worms did produce the sounds and the surface casts.
Often he expected the water to flow around them, and as often was fooled by the mirage, so complete was this trickery played by Lake Eyre. Four crows came from the east, mocking them as they passed. That morning he had noticed three flying to the east, and as he laboured onward, he speculated about the additional bird.
When the sun went down, the wind was furnace-hot, the sky a flaming fire, and the surface of the lake was a red-gold sea. Far ahead tall masts towered to the sky, and from tip to tip of these masts sped something resembling nothing. Abruptly there appeared an object looking like a crab walking on the edge of its shell.
The bushman who came back b-22 Page 15