Lost Worlds

by David Yeadon

  “Maybe catch up a few yabbies for lunch,” said Bob as he untied the small motorboat and kick-started the engine.

  “Yabbies? What are they—fish?”

  “No—sorry mate—keep thinkin’ you know all this bush talk—they’re crayfish. Freshwater crayfish. Cook ’em up in boiling water. Eat ’em with melted butter. Bloody marvelous.” The crackle of the engine destroyed the early morning silence. Two herons flapped in an ungainly manner up out of the shallows on the other side of the creek and headed upstream in search of quieter hunting grounds.

  The water wound lazily through dense thickets of King Billy pine and stunted myrtle, their roots exposed mangrove-fashion in tortured coils and grasping tentacles. They looked alive in an animal sense, as if embroiled in some slow and macabre dance. Slivers of mist were still tangled in their upper branches and hung across the peat-bronzed waters like wraiths. Once in a while I’d spot a lonely pandanius, that strange variant on a tropical palm found in isolated clumps all over the southwest heathlands. Its slender trunk can reach fifteen feet and is topped by a crown of arched yard-long leaves. Decades of dead leaves cover the trunk like the hairy hide of some prehistoric monolith. Strange creatures indeed, which enhance this region’s lost-world flavor.

  Gradually the creek widened out into Bathurst Harbor and the thick vegetation drew back revealing vistas of mountains. To the far north, the hazy quartzite arêtes and pinnacles of the Arthurs; closer in the morose-looking mound of Mount Melaleuca around which winds yet another trail, the South-West Cape path, and, across the water, the rocky summits of Mount Rugby and Mount Stokes, bathed in a watery silver light. A majestic if melancholy scene, now even more reminiscent of western Scotland, particularly the remote Torridon region, one of my favorite wild places.

  Without warning, as we left the shelter of the creek, a blustery wind from the north set the boat bobbing like an empty bottle on the choppy broil of the fjord. It was a cold wind too, cutting right through my three layers of vest, shirt, and sweater.

  “Put your parka on, Dave. It can get real brass monkeyish.”

  Bob was right. I was already shivering and as I pulled on the waterproof jacket, my fingers turned into a messy mélange of red and purple splotches. He was sitting on the floor of the boat to reduce the bone-numbing blast. I joined him and peered over the side like a child on his first boat ride—open-eyed and just a little awed by the swell which made our small craft thump and bang its way across the waves.

  “There’s our beach.”

  Bob pointed to a long strand of white sand on the edge of a thick junglelike confusion of eucalyptus, pine, and myrtle.

  We shifted direction. Now we had the wind behind us and rode more easily with the waves toward the shore.

  The boat ground to a gravelly halt a few feet from the beach. Bob had his long rubber boots on and pulled us effortlessly higher up the sand. The water still had that gold-ocher color to it but was as clear as a Caribbean lagoon. Tiny fish darted in the shallows. The dark forest ahead of us was silent. A broody kind of place.

  “So—is this where you saw that creature—whatever it was?”

  It was very quiet and still now.

  “Yeah,” said Bob. “Right down there by those rocks.”

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s ever been here before. Feels like we just discovered this place.”

  “Well—that’s the way I like it. I don’t bring big parties here—half a dozen or so for a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. Real back-to-basics stuff. Catch our own fish and yabbies. Everybody chips in.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Well—most of ’em like it. You get a few who think they’re going to like it but then find it’s a bit too quiet. No TV. No radio. No telephones.”

  He led the way into the gloom following a barely defined path between the tangled branches, fallen trees, flurries of pandani and ferns, and heaping mounds of soggy moss.

  “This is weird,” I said. “It’s almost like a rain forest.”

  “Right y’are. That’s what it is. Scenery switches fast here. You can go from buttongrass marshes to myrtle to pines to rain forest in ten minutes. All depends on the microclimate and the soils. That’s what makes this place so special. Half a dozen different environments in a short walk. Nowhere else on earth like this.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It feels different. Bit spooky too.”

  “Spooky’s right. Takes a bit of getting used to.”

  The “camp” appeared suddenly in the half-light. It was barely distinguishable from the rest of the forest except for a broad tarpaulin stretched between four trees to shelter the camp kitchen and eating area. A riot of ragged eucalyptus, tree ferns, laurels, and dense rhododendron bushes surrounded us.

  “Rain can get real bad, so I decided we gotta have one place we can all sit and keep warm and dry. I’m going to start up the fire and then see if I can get us some lunch.”

  “Okay. I’m going to take a look at this rain forest.”

  “Fine. See you back soon. Don’t get lost!”

  I laughed. Lost? Me!

  I wasn’t laughing fifteen minutes later. I couldn’t have wandered more than a couple of hundred yards from the camp, but somehow I’d misgauged my orientation. The sun was no help. It was lurking behind clouds and remnants of morning mist, so there were no shadows. Just murky gloom. Damp and tangly. And dense thickets of myrtle and rotting trunks that I tried to circle around and in the convoluted process got all turned about. Totally topsy-turvyed, in fact. Usually my sense of direction is excellent. My wife, Anne, claims I’ve got some kind of built-in compass, possibly a leftover from my days as a city planner when working with maps was a daily necessity. But in this messy mangle of a forest I’d lost it. Clean gone. I had no idea where the hell I was and, like an idiot, had left no marked path and ignored all the basics of Scouting 101.

  Bloody stupid cocky complacent sod! The self-retribution was beginning (my alter ego has always had far higher expectations than I could ever live up to).

  I’d read somewhere (you see how much reading I do about my lost worlds; my alter ego is pleased about that) that the vegetation of South-West Tasmania is considered to be a remnant of Gondwanaland—that enormous supercontinent floating on a vast reservoir of magma which gradually split apart around a hundred million years ago to form the separate continents on today’s globe. Specific evidence of ancient plant forms are the eucalyptus, the wattles, the myrtles, the Huon pines, and the myriad complexities of the heathland shrubs and ground-hugging bushes. Unlike the geologically recent and dramatic shifts to aridity on mainland Australia, the environment and climate of western Tasmania have remained essentially the same for tens of millions of years, thus preserving rain forest species that once prevailed throughout the southern sector of Gondwanaland and, after the continent shift, in Antarctica itself.

  So here I was, discombobulated and disoriented in one of the earth’s most ancient prehistoric forests whose groping, snagging, scratching confusion of strange species with mossbound trunks and straggling, slippery roots made the whole thing into an increasingly nightmarish experience. Sticky too. I was covered in sticky spider-webby goo and guck. In places I was over my boots in slime and glop. Any moment I expected to find leeches.

  “Bob!”

  My voice sounded thick. There was no echo in the spongy morass.

  “Bob!”

  Louder but no more effective.

  My mind still possessed a little island of calm. It suggested the only solution—radial lines of exploration from a central and immediately recognizable landmark.

  I found a fine landmark. An enormous eucalyptus whose bark hung in ocher and sand-colored tatters from a white trunk. It overshadowed everything around. A truly beautiful rain forest specimen which, in any other mood, I’d have been happy to sketch and photograph. At the moment, however, sketching was the last thing on my mind.

  The plan worked well. I set off on my first tangent from this splendid center p
oint in what I thought was most likely the right direction back to the camp and then a retrace of the two hundred steps to the center point, and off again on a thirty-degree variant.

  After the first four tangents I had discovered nothing except even denser thickets and muddier swampy morasses. Maybe I’d wandered farther than I thought. Maybe two hundred steps weren’t enough. Maybe I’d missed the camp by a few meager yards…. My mind whirled with doubts, but there was nothing left to do except persevere until I’d completed a whole 360 degrees of tangents.

  On the eighth tangent I was losing confidence in the whole exercise. I was a muddy, weary mess. Lunch back at camp began to seem not only a most attractive proposition but also vital to my metabolic well-being. And then, as I continued thrashing through the thickets, I became aware of what seemed like an echo in the gloom. When I moved and stumbled through the forest, something else was moving. Something not so far away. When I stopped it seemed to stop. But not every time. Sometimes the muffled crack and rustle of leaves and branches would continue a few seconds longer and then pause. When I started up again it would start up too….

  I was about to call out to Bob again when a thought dropped itself like a little pernicious demon into what was left of my thinking mind.

  What if it wasn’t Bob?

  Well, who else could it be?

  Not anybody. Some thing.

  What thing?

  Like the thing that Bob saw on the beach…

  Oh, that thing.

  Not a pleasant thought at all. What did Bob call it? “A bloody monster…the worst-lookin’ thing I’ve ever seen…pure evil.” I stopped and tried not to make a sound. Of course, when you do that everything starts to get as noisy as hell—your breathing, your heartbeat, your pulse…. Normally I never notice how much noise I make puffing and panting when I walk in tough terrain. Now I realized that I must be the noisiest breather on earth and trying to suppress the panting only made my gasps sound more wheezy and phlegmatic.

  I crouched down and remained as still as I could.

  At first there was silence. Then the cracking of twigs and rattling of leaves started up again. Maybe it was a wallaby—they make quite a racket with those huge hind legs and prehensile tail. Maybe…and maybe not. I wasn’t going to take a chance.

  It seemed to be moving around me, first to my right and then at my back and then on my left.

  And it was definitely getting closer.

  And then I saw something, about thirty yards away, something shadowy in the gloom, hunched and black. What light there was filtering through the tightly packed trees produced nothing more than a dim outline of shape. But it was certainly big. I eased behind a tree, slimy with moss and forest dew, and lifted myself up a little higher. The sounds were louder now, coming closer. The thing had long groping arms. It was carrying something under one arm. A bundle? A baby? But a baby what?

  Then it growled. Only it wasn’t a growl. It was a well-defined, highly recognizable syllable of sound.

  “Shit!” it said.

  And there was my monster, now in plain view, struggling to break a fallen branch.

  “Oh, hi, Bob.” My voice sounded cracked. My mouth felt as dry as a desert.

  “Jeez!” Bob shot to an upright position, dropping his load of wood in surprise. “Jeez, David—don’t do that. I wondered what the hell you were.”

  “Well—I wasn’t too sure about you either.” Brain pictures of mythical monsters scurried back to their lair deep in my overactive subconscious and I felt better already. “What’re you doing?”

  “We’re low on wood. Fire’s going fine, but we need more. Got some yabbies for lunch. You hungry?”

  “Sure I’m hungry. Which way’s camp?”

  “Camp? It’s right there.”

  He pointed in the gloom and although there was nothing I could recognize, I decided to keep up the nonchalance.

  “Great. Thought I was on the right track. Easy to get lost in here, though.”

  “Easy for some,” mumbled Bob. “You almost made me piss my pants. You must be a hell of a silent walker.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  And the yabbies were wonderful. Quite the best lunch in weeks.

  Later in the afternoon we returned across the fjord and moved slowly up the creek to the jetty. The sky was blue now in patches. Birds were twittering away in the bushes and across the heath.

  “Think I’ll go and see the Willsons for a while.”

  “Sure. No worries. See you back at the hut. You better check your gear when you get back if you’re leaving early tomorrow. See if you need anything. I’ve got a few things lying around you can have.”

  “Thanks, mate. Good on yer.”

  “Don’t you get bloody Strine on me. I’m the character. You’re just passing through!” He laughed. “Well, passin’ through or passin’ on. Not sure which for certain!”

  “Thanks, Bob.”

  “No—she’s right,” he said reassuringly. “You’ll make it.”

  I hoped I would. Although after that overheated little terror among the trees I was beginning to wonder.

  The path to the Willsons’ mining operations and home took me across the landing strip and through thickets of heathland scrub. It was pleasant to be alone in such familiar surroundings. I felt as if I were tramping across the high Pennine moorlands of the Brontë country near my one-time home in Yorkshire, England. The colors, the textures, the vastness of the scene reminded me of Ted Hughes’s landscape poems in which he makes all his images so tangible, so powerful, and—so similar to the underlying mood of the Brontë novels—somehow brooding and sinister. Hughes, husband of the late Sylvia Plath and Britain’s poet laureate, always seemed to be as much part of those wind-scoured upland places as the weather, the bracken, and the tattered fragments of pure lark song. He absorbed the landscape in his works and gave it back—rugged, strong, and cruel. One pungent fragment of his lines returned to me:

  Where the millstone of sky

  Grinds light and shadow so purple-fine

  And has ground it so long

  Grinding the skin off the earth

  Earth bleeds her raw true darkness

  A land naked now as a wound

  That the sun swabs and dabs.

  That’s the Brontë country all right, up around Hughes’s favorite millstone-grit village of Heptonstall perched on the edge of black crags, with enormous vistas of mountains and moors in all directions.

  And that was here too, except all the grinding of the “skin off the earth” had been undertaken by man and not the elements. Small domes of overgrown detritus rose out of the heathland, remnants of earlier tin-mining activities back in the thirties and forties.

  The boundary of the World Heritage area carefully skirts this mini-moonscape of mounds and ponds. Purists would doubtless prefer that this blot on the otherwise untouched landscape be returned to its natural state, but I found it strangely comforting—a meager sign of man’s presence in a vast, hardly explored wilderness.

  A small clapboard and tar-paper shack appeared around a bend. It nestled in a secluded spot among the mounds, protected by a huddle of wind-bent trees. Old mining machinery lay scattered about the yard; a rusting bulldozer sat lopsided in the scrub, broken and gutted for parts. A wind chime tinkled in the chilly breeze.

  I knocked on the door. There was no reply. I pulled a string latch and let myself in.

  It was warm and cozy inside. A wood stove had a few glowing embers in it. There were shelves of books, some old LPs, a couple of well-used armchairs, a stereo, a shortwave radio, and a kitchen table cluttered with empty pickling jars. Beyond the stove were scores of liter-sized beer bottles with the labels washed off. One stood open by the sink, half full of an amber liquid. It had that rich, malty aroma of homemade beer. I sensed a proud self-sufficiency here. Supplies would be expensive and cumbersome to bring into this remote spot, so back to the old basics—salting, pickling, home brews, and a contentment in the simple things of
life.

  No one was around and I felt like an intruder. As at Deny’s nestlike home, this place seemed to invite me to stay, but I was uncomfortable and left after a brief warming by the wood stove.

  Farther along the track, deeper into the mounds, I heard the sound of machinery. Engines were running and something was grinding and grating. The alien sounds increased. It was odd to hear such a racket in this place of sweeping silences.

  The noise maker was an amazing erector-set extravaganza of ramps, rotating drums, and chutes supported by a flimsy skeleton of bleached pine beams that wobbled and shook and looked ready to fall apart at any moment. I’d seen similar abandoned contraptions during my days, many years ago, exploring the gold-rush country of northern California. But I’d never seen one actually working before. The noise was mind-numbing.

  Someone was shouting and waving—a small figure in a green sweater, baggy jogging pants and a wrinkled canvas hat. I walked faster. It was Barbara Willson, pushing with a battered shovel at a pile of rocks, pebbles, and earth that slowly descended down a chute into an enormous churning cylinder punched with thousands of small holes.

  “Hold on a minute—let me finish this load.”

  She was sweating despite the chill breeze and worked furiously with her shovel, easing the boggy mass down the chute. Chunks of bedrock, a few the size of small boulders, slipped down into the maw of the churning drum. This looked like tough work.

  “Okay.” She finally pushed the last part of the load down the chute, put her shovel down, and wiped her brow. Even under the shadow of her floppy canvas hat I saw a pair of dark, determined eyes. “So—you made it.”

  “Yes—thanks for asking me. I stopped by the house, but there was no one around.”

  “No—not till sundown. We’re up here all day. Peter—my husband—he’s out in the bog.”

  She pointed across the gray-brown bleakness of the plain. I saw a tiny yellow dump trunk way in the distance digging into the earth.