Beyond the Black Stump

by Nevil Shute

“Then why have a cemetery?”

  “Aw, look,” said Mr. Bruce. “It’s this way. All this land is held on pastoral leases from the state—it’s not freehold. The Regans hold Laragh Station on a long pastoral lease. Well, it’s a law of West Australia that no one lessee may rent more than a million acres. Some time back before the war they made a survey checking up on some of these properties, because they reckoned that the station owners had been grabbing a bit here and a bit there till they’d got too much, ’n anyway they weren’t paying enough rent. It’s not much they pay, anyway—about three and six a thousand acres. Well, they found the Regans had been paying rent on about seven hundred thousand acres, but they were actually occupying a bit over the million, so they had to get rid of some. Tom Regan wasn’t going to give land to a neighbour, of course, on principle. So they picked on this Chinaman who happened to be buried by the track here, ’n said the Shire must have a cemetery or shift the body off their land. The Shire reckoned it was cheaper to accept a few hundred acres, especially as Tom Regan said he’d look after it and fence it. So we’ve got a cemetery.”

  The geologist said, “Well, who was the Chinaman?”

  “I don’t think anybody knows. He died of thirst along the track—oh, a long time ago. When Tom Regan made the cemetery he didn’t like to put a cross up on the grave because he might not have been Christian—probably he wasn’t. So he just put up that bit of straight timber.”

  “Uh-huh.” The other sat staring out over the grey-green landscape, shimmering in the heat. “What did you say the rent they pay is? Three and six?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Forty two cents? For a thousand acres, for a year?”

  “That’s right.”

  Stanton slipped in the gear. “Well, let’s get rolling. I guess I’ve seen everything now.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” said Mr. Bruce. “You’ve not seen half of it.”

  A mile past the cemetery they came to the boundary fence that ran between Laragh and Lucinda. It consisted of three strands of wire loosely supported on bush timber. A gate crossed the track, and this was adorned with a notice board, with ancient, half-obliterated lettering painted by some angry man in bygone years

  SHUT THIS

  BLOODY

  GATE

  “That’s the way on to Lucinda,” said Mr. Bruce. “It’s about ten miles to the homestead. Just follow the tracks and you can’t go wrong. We turn right here, along the fence.”

  Stanton swung the truck round and began to follow the line of the fence; faint wheel tracks ran beside it where a jeep from Laragh had run occasionally loaded with posts and wire for repairs. “He seems a nice sort of a young fellow, the one who lives at Lucinda,” he said. “I met him last night at Mannahill Station.”

  “That’s the one,” said Mr. Bruce. “He’s bought himself a packet of trouble with that property. There’s practically no water at all on it.”

  “There’s not much on this one.”

  “You’re wrong there. Laragh’s got good water—bores all over the place.” He pointed to the vanes of a windmill faintly seen in the distance, three or four miles away. “Look, there’s one there.”

  “Quite a ways from here.”

  “Not so far. You’re never out of sight of water on this station. It’s very different on Lucinda.”

  “Does he live alone, or is he married? What’s his name, again?”

  “David Cope. Yes, he lives quite alone, but for the blacks. He’s always over at Laragh nowadays. He’s got his eye on Mollie.”

  The American said nothing to that. He drove on for a minute in silence, studying the road. Then he said, “I guess I’ll go and see him one day. Or will he come over to our camp?”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” said Mr. Bruce. “He wouldn’t come on Laragh Station without asking the Regans—they’re a bit touchy sometimes. I know he’d be glad to see you over at his place. It must be pretty lonely there at night.”

  “It will be a long time before I go wandering about this country in the night,” said Stanton. “If I go, I’ll go in the daytime with a compass and a navigation outfit to take shots of the sun.”

  “It won’t do you any good,” said Mr. Bruce. “The sun at midday’s just about overhead.” He turned to the American. “That’s one thing you want to remember, Stan. It’s no good looking at the sun around midday to get the north. If you get bushed, the shot is to camp and wait for sunset, and go by that. It’s all right going by the stars at night, of course. Best time to travel, anyway. But middle of the day, the sun’s no good to you.”

  “I’d say it’s not much good to you any time in this country.”

  They drove on another five miles by the fence. Then Mr. Bruce directed the American to bear in to the right. “I get it,” said Stan. “That’s the big limestone outcrop in the air photograph.”

  “That’s right. I’ve not been this way before. It looks all right for the trucks, though. Take it easy. When we were here before we came down from the north, and then went over the hills to Laragh homestead. We were travelling in jeeps, though.”

  Stanton drove the truck carefully across country, threading his way around the occasional boulders and around the thickest clumps of spinifex, too busy to take much note of the geological formations they were driving over. Presently the Australian directed him down from a spur towards a piece of flat country seamed by a dry river bed, beneath the big limestone spur. “I’d say a camp down there would be as good as anywhere.”

  Stanton stopped the truck, and killed the motor, and sat motionless at the wheel looking at the country ahead of him; the two trucks following him stopped also. Presently they all got out and stood looking over the barren landscape. There were a few sheep in the valley, but no other sign of life.

  “I guess this is it,” said Stanton presently. “This is what we’ve come for.”

  Hank said, “Run a line of shots across the valley, boss. See where that limestone goes.”

  “Maybe,” said Stanton. “We’ll make our camp down there by the dry river bed, for a start.”

  Four

  A WEEK later Mr. Bruce left the seismic crew, to return to Melbourne. Stanton drove him to Malvern Downs via Laragh and Mannahill; at Malvern he got a lift in a truck going into Onslow and from there he went to Perth by the regular airline. One of the first jobs if oil should be found on Laragh Station would be to construct an airstrip near the rig.

  At Malvern, Stanton Laird met reinforcements. An American from Texas, Spencer Rasmussen, had come up to take over the management of the camp, freeing Stanton for his proper technical work. Stanton had met this man in Arabia and had got on well with him; he had been a driller as a young man and had worked in the oil industry all his life. At the age of forty-five he had drilled many wells in many countries; he was tough with labour and supremely efficient at the job he knew so well. In his leisure moments, which were few, he liked pitching horseshoes and playing the accordion. He brought with him three more men, a jeep, and a big eight-wheeled truck furnished with a miniature drilling rig to drill the shot holes for the seismic observations.

  His arrival at the camp took a great load of organisation off the geologist. For the first time Stanton was able to get down to work upon the drafting board in the tent that they had set up as an office, poring over the ground observations of the previous party reinforced by his own observations. He was able to work relatively quietly there for hours on end, clad in a pair of shorts and sandals only, analysing the results of the previous day’s observations and laying down the programme for the next day. Gradually, on paper and in his mind, he began to build up a picture of the run of the strata deep down in the earth beneath their feet. Frequently he would take the jeep and drive two or three miles to some spur of the hills, and spend an hour or two with plane table and theodolite. Very soon these expeditions took him close to the Lucinda fence.

  He took time off one afternoon, and went out in the jeep to pay a call on David Cope. He had
arranged the visit beforehand over the radio telephone after the morning schedule of the Flying Doctor service, and David was waiting at the homestead when the jeep drove up.

  Lucinda homestead was a little place of five rooms only, built on the earth instead of up on posts; at some time in the past a layer of concrete had been laid on the bare earth floors of the rooms. The structure was of wood supporting a covering of white asbestos sheets; inside, the walls were lined with some synthetic board, dark yellow in colour and unpainted. There was no verandah, a considerable deprivation in that climate, for the house was small and very hot.

  David greeted the American warmly. “Come on in,” he said. “The house isn’t much—not like Mannahill or Laragh, I’m afraid.”

  Stanton said, “It’s a palace to me, Mr. Cope. We’re living in tents.”

  “David’s the name, Stan. It’s what they do in this country. They’re bloody touchy about names.”

  “I know it.”

  “I expect your tents are a damn sight more comfortable than this house. But do come in. I’ve got a kettle on the stove for tea, and I got the gin to make some cakes. I don’t know what they’ll be like.” They went into the house. “The folk at Laragh haven’t broken you in to rum yet?”

  The geologist laughed. “Not yet. Say, do they always drink it that way in this country?”

  “They seem to in the outback. Not down in Perth—it’s just like England there.”

  “I wonder they’re not all nuts, the way they drink that stuff.”

  “It’s the climate or something,” David said. “Or else it’s the way they shoot it down with a chaser of water. It doesn’t seem to hurt them, like it would you or me. The Regans are good graziers, you know.”

  “I know it,” Stanton laughed. “That’s the part that I can’t figure out.”

  The sitting-room, so called, that the front door opened into was very sparsely furnished. A deck chair, a steamer chair, and a table, all rather soiled and old, made up the only furniture. “I’m afraid it’s not much to look at,” David said apologetically. “I got this place walk-in, walk-out, and this is the only furniture that was in it when I came. I did up the bedroom that I use, but I haven’t been able to get around to the rest of the house yet.”

  The bedroom door was open, and Stanton glanced in. There was a good bed with a bright, clean bedspread over it, good bedroom furniture, new colour wash on the walls, and a couple of strips of carpet on the floor. It was a clean, decent room to look at, unlike the rest of the house.

  David saw the glance and led the way into the bedroom. “This is the only room I’ve got fixed up yet,” he said, a little proudly. “I’m going to get the rest of the house like this within twelve months. Do it room by room, in the evenings. The mugger of it is I haven’t got a lighting plant yet, so it’s all got to be done with kerosene lamps, and that makes it hot working.”

  The American said, “You’ve got this fixed up mighty nice.” A bookcase caught his eye, half filled with about fifty books in a uniform binding. He started at it in wonder; there were far more books there than in his home in Hazel. “I see you’re quite a reader,” he said.

  David took up one and leafed it through. “Reprint Society,” he said. “They post you one a month. It’s the best way to get books in a place like this, where one’s a bit out of touch. Don’t you find that?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Stanton. “I get the Saturday Evening Post and Life mailed out from home each week.” He glanced once more around the room. Three framed photographs stood upon the chest of drawers. Two were of elderly people, almost certainly the father and mother. The third one, very simple and rather appealing, was a portrait of Mollie Regan.

  David led the way back through the sitting-room into the kitchen. He had laid the kitchen table in anticipation of his guest; the chipped cups, the discoloured pewter spoons, were neatly arranged upon a clean tablecloth laid on the battered, soiled old table. A kettle was boiling on a Primus stove that stood on the blackened, wood-burning range. An ancient, rather rusty kerosene refrigerator added to the heat of the room, and there were many flies.

  David made the tea in a chipped enamel teapot, blackened with soot on the bottom, poured it out, and offered his guest one of the unpleasant rock-cakes of the gin’s making. “I’m afraid it’s all a bit rough,” he said. “It’s coming good, though. You come along in six months’ time and you won’t know the place.”

  “Sure,” said Stanton. “There must be a lot to do when you take on a place like this.”

  David sipped the hot tea. “Well, of course—there is. I’m at it all the time, from dawn to dusk. It’s a bad property, of course,” he said candidly. “If it was a good one I wouldn’t be here running it, at my age. Three hundred and twenty thousand acres, but very little water. There’s over a hundred thousand acres up your end that we can’t use at all.”

  The geologist blinked at the figure. “Can’t use it?”

  David nodded. “There’s not a puddle on it. Everything that falls soaks straight into the ground.” He paused. “I’ve never seen most of it.”

  “Never seen it? A hundred thousand acres?”

  “That’s right. I’m always meaning to take the jeep and drive across, but I’ve been too bloody busy on the parts that are some good.”

  The geologist asked, “Would that be the part towards our camp?”

  “That’s right. I can’t run any stock between this homestead and your camp. All the good part of the property is west from here.”

  Stanton smiled. “Maybe you won’t be so mad at what I’m going to ask, then. The strata on the Laragh side are falling to the west, so far as I can see, and now I’m working close up to your fence. The Department haven’t asked for us to prospect on your property, have they?”

  David shook his head. “I haven’t seen anything. You’re quite welcome, though.”

  “You wouldn’t mind if we go wandering around with plane tables and levels, with a jeep?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What about some lines of shot holes for a few seismic readings? That would mean a couple of trucks on the land, and a few little explosions.”

  “I can’t stop you,” said David, “and I wouldn’t want to. I mean, we’ve only got a pastoral lease, and if the Department write and say they want you to come here, we can’t say no. But, letter or no letter, Stan, you’re very welcome. We’ve got no sheep there because there’s not a drop of water for them, and most of it I’ve never seen myself. If you go on it I’ll be glad to know what’s there.”

  “That’s mighty nice of you,” said the geologist. “I’ll certainly tell you everything we find.” He paused in thought. “It could be that we might know something about the water prospect in this district by the time we’re through.”

  “I wanted to ask you about that,” David said. “You do prospect for water, as well as oil?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Stanton. “It’s one and the same thing. There are porous kinds of rock strata and impervious kinds of rock strata, just those two. Water or oil or coca cola—they’ll soak down into the porous strata and get trapped by the impervious strata. Once I get the undersurface picture of this whole locality set down on paper, then maybe I’ll know where water might lie or where oil might lie. Till then I’d just be guessing.”

  “I’d be very grateful for anything that you can tell me about the chance of water on Lucinda.”

  “It doesn’t look so promising right now,” said the geologist. “But there—that’s only guessing. How deep would you drill?”

  “Some of the bores on Mannahill go down two thousand feet. I don’t think they go as deep as that on Laragh.”

  The geologist opened his eyes. “You’d go as deep as that, though?”

  “If we knew that there was water there I think we would. It’ld pay to do so. It’s just a matter of finding the capital then.”

  Stanton nodded slowly. “I guess that might not be so easy in these parts.”

  “It’s
not impossible,” said David. They chatted for a quarter of an hour and then the geologist got to his feet. “Time I was getting back to work,” he said. “The boys ’ll be wondering what happened to me.”

  They went out to his jeep. “Come over to our camp some time, David, ’n take a look around. We got nothing much to offer you except ice cream. Miss Regan said that she’d be over to have some of that, but she hasn’t shown up yet.”

  “I’d like to do that, Stan,” the boy said. “I’d like to have a look at how you make these seismic observations, too.”

  “Certainly.” The geologist stood by the jeep, looking around. The low hills of red earth, covered in the greenish, dusty-look spinifex, swelled up towards the south in the golden light of the descending sun; did that show an anticline? He paused in thought, looking around, and then turned to the Englishman.

  “You got a mighty lot of country to pick from,” he said. “There should be water here some place.”

  David grinned. “We could use it.”

  “Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” said the geologist. He got into the jeep and started the motor. “’Bye now.”

  He drove back following the track that led to Laragh, passed through the Bloody Gate and shut it carefully after him, and turned north between the cemetery and the boundary fence. A few sheep grazed on the spinifex within the cemetery area, and as he drove a kangaroo got up and bounded away between them. He stopped the jeep and watched it as it ran away over a low rise; it checked in its bounding run and swerved to the right, and then went bounding on till it was lost to sight. He wondered what it was that had made it swerve like that. It looked as if the spinifex there was a different colour, sort of dead-looking.

  He was in no hurry. He stopped the motor and got out of the jeep, and walked in the direction taken by the kangaroo. He walked about a quarter of a mile, and a faint odour in the air assailed him, a very familiar smell. On the crest of a small rise he found what he was looking for. There was an area of ground, only about ten yards square, an outcrop of sandstone with a little granitic conglomerate. There was a fissure in the rock, and a smell of natural gas.