by John Marsden
'What if we can't get back?'
'What goes down must come up,' Homer said, making it clear how much attention he'd been paying in Science over the years.
'Let's do it,' Corrie said, with surprising firmness. I was glad. I didn't want to push people too much but I felt that the whole success or failure of this expedition reflected on me, or at least on Corrie and me. We'd talked them into coming, we'd promised them a good time, and it was our idea to take the plunge into Hell. If we had a miserable failure I'd feel awful. It'd be like throwing a party, then playing Mum's 'Themes from Popular TV Shows' all evening.
At least they seemed willing to take a shot at the first of Satan's Steps. But even the first step was difficult. We had to drop into a tangle of old logs and blackberries, then scramble up the tilted scarred face of the rock. We got quite scarred ourselves. There was a fair bit of swearing and sweating and pulling other people up and hanging on to other people's packs before we were all standing on top, peering down at Homer's ledge.
'If they're all as difficult as this...' Fi panted, without needing to finish the sentence.
'Over here,' Homer said. He got on his hands and knees, turned to face us, then slid backwards over the edge.
'Oh yes?' Fi said.
'No worries,' we heard Homer say. There was a worry, and that was how we were going to get back up again, but no one else mentioned it so I didn't. I think we were too caught up in the thrill of the chase. Robyn followed Homer; then Kevin, with much scrabbling and grunting, lowered himself cautiously after them. I went next, scratching my hand a bit. It wasn't easy because the heavy packs kept wanting to overbalance us, to pull us backwards. By the time I got down, Homer and Robyn were already jumping off the end of the ledge and fighting their way through the scrub to inspect the second huge block of granite.
'The other side looks better,' Lee said. I followed him round there and we inspected the possibilities. It was very difficult. There was quite a sheer drop either side of the block, despite the bushes and grasses growing out of the cliff. And the rock itself was sheer and high. Our only hope was an old fallen log that disappeared into the shadows and undergrowth but at least seemed to be going in the right direction.
'That's our path,' I said.
'Hmmm,' Homer said, coming up beside us.
I straddled the log and started a slow slide down it.
'She loves it, doesn't she?' Kevin said. I grinned as I heard the slap of Corrie's hand hitting some part of Kevin's exposed flesh. The log was soft and damp but was holding together. It was surprisingly long, and I realised it was taking me under the front of the rock. Huge black beetles and slaters and earwigs started spilling out of the wood between my legs as I got towards the thin and more rotten end. I grinned again, hoping I'd scared them all away before Fi followed me down here.
When I stood up I found I was under an overhang, free of vegetation but facing a screen of trees that almost concealed the next giant block. We'd be able to force a way through the screen, no doubt getting torn and scratched a lot more, but there was no guarantee we could get around or over or under the granite. I sidestepped along, peering through the screen, looking for possibilities, as the others started joining me. Fi was the fourth, arriving a little breathless but without fuss; funnily enough it was Kevin who was unnerved by the insects. He slid the last few yards down the tree in a rush, yelling hysterically, 'God no, help, there's creepy-crawlies everywhere! Get them off me! Get them off me!' He spent the next three minutes brushing himself fiercely, spinning round and round in the narrow space we had, trying to catch glimpses of any more that might be on him, shaking his clothes frantically. I couldn't help wondering how he coped with fly-struck sheep.
Things calmed down with Kevin but we still couldn't see any way out of the overhang.
'Well,' said Robyn cheerfully, 'looks like we camp here for a week.'
There was a bit of a silence.
'Ellie,' Lee said kindly, 'I don't think we're going to find a way down. And the further we go, the harder it's going to be to get back.'
'Let's just try for one more step,' I asked, then added, a little wildly, 'Three's my lucky number.'
We poked around a bit more, but rather doubtfully. Finally Corrie said, 'There might be a chance if we wriggle through here. We might be able to get around the side somewhere.'
The gap she'd picked was so narrow we had to take our packs off to get through it, but I was game, so I took Corrie's pack while she wrestled her way into a prickly overgrown hole. Her head disappeared, then her back, then her legs. I heard Kevin say, 'This is crazy', then Corrie said, 'OK, now my pack', so I pushed that through after her. Then, leaving Robyn to look after my pack, I followed.
I soon realised that Corrie had the right idea, but it sure was difficult. If I wasn't such a stubborn pigheaded idiot I would have surrendered by this point. We ended up crawling along like myxo'd rabbits, me pushing Corrie's pack ahead of me. But I caught glimpses of a wall of rock on my left, and we were definitely going downhill, so I figured we were probably getting around the third of Satan's Steps. Then Corrie paused, in front of me, forcing me to stop too.
'Hey!' she said. 'Can you hear what I hear?'
There are some questions that really annoy me, like 'What do you know?', 'Are you working to your full capacity?' (our Form teacher's favourite), 'Guess what I'm thinking?', and 'What on earth do you think you're doing young lady?' (Dad, when he's annoyed). I don't like any of them. And 'Can you hear what I hear?' is in the same category. Plus I was tired, hot, frustrated. So I gave a bad-tempered answer. After a minute's pause Corrie, showing more patience than me, said, 'There's water ahead. Running water.'
I listened, and then realised I could hear it too. So I passed the word back to the others. It was only a small thing, but it kept us going that little bit longer. I crawled on grimly, listening to the sound get louder and closer. It had to be quite a busy stream, which at this altitude meant a spring. We could all do with a fresh cold drink of the water that came from these mountain springs. We'd need it for the struggle back up to the top of Hell. And it was time we started that struggle. It was getting late; time to set up a campsite.
Suddenly I was at the stream and there was Corrie, standing on a rock grinning at me.
'Well, we found something,' I said, grinning back.
It was a pretty little thing. The sun didn't reach it, so it was dark and cool and secret. The water bubbled over rocks that were green and slippery with moss. I knelt and soaked my face, then lapped like a dog as the others started to arrive. There wasn't much room but Robyn started exploring in one direction, stepping gingerly from rock to rock, as Lee did the same in the other direction. I admired their energy.
'It's a nice creek,' said Fi, 'but Ellie, we'd better start heading back up the top.'
'I know. Let's just have a relax first, for five minutes. We've earned it.'
'This is worse than the Outward Bound course,' Homer complained.
'I wish I'd gone on that now,' Fi said. 'You all went, didn't you?'
I'd gone on the course, and enjoyed it. I'd done a lot of camping with my parents but Outward Bound had given me a taste for something tougher. I'd just started thinking about it, remembering, when suddenly Robyn reappeared. The look on her face was almost frightening. In the dense overgrowth I couldn't stand, but I straightened up as far as I could, and quickly.
'What's happened?'
Robyn said, with the air of someone who is hearing her own voice but not believing her own words, 'I just found a bridge'.
Chapter Three
The path was covered with leaves and sticks, and was a bit overgrown in places, but compared to what we'd been down, it was like a freeway. We stood spread out along it, marvelling. I felt almost dizzy with relief and astonishment and gratification.
'Ellie,' Homer said solemnly, 'I'll never call you a stupid dumb obstinate slagheap again.'
'Thanks Homer.'
It was a sweet moment.
I ignored him.
The bridge was old but had been beautifully built. It crossed the creek in a large clearing and was about a metre wide and five metres long. It even had a handrail. Its surface was made of round logs rather than planks but the logs were matched and cut with perfect uniformity. Joints cut in each end married the logs to crossbars and the first and last ones were then secured to the crossbars by wooden pegs.
'It's a lovely job,' said Kevin. 'Reminds me of my own early work.'
Suddenly we had so much energy it was as though we were on something. We nearly decided to camp in the clearing, which was cool and shadowy, but the urge to explore was too strong. We hoisted our packs on our backs again, and chattering like cockatoos we hustled down the path.
'It must be true about the hermit! No one else would have gone to all that trouble.'
'Wonder how long he was here for.'
'How do you know it was a he?'
'The locals always talked about him as a male.'
'Most hims are talked about as males.' That was Lee, being a smartarse.
'He must have been here years, to go to all that trouble with the bridge.'
'And the track's so well worn.'
'If he did live here years he'd have time to do the bridge and a lot more. Imagine how you'd fill your time!'
'Yeah, food'd be the big thing. Once you'd organised your meals, the rest of the day'd be yours.'
'I wonder what you'd live on.'
'Possums, rabbits maybe.'
'Wouldn't be many rabbits in this kind of country. There's wallabies. Plenty of possums. Feral cats.'
'Yuk.'
'You could grow vegetables.'
'Bush tucker.'
'Yeah, he probably watched that show on TV.'
'Wombats.'
'Yeah, what would wombats taste like?'
'They say most people eat too much anyway. If he just ate when he was really hungry he wouldn't need much.'
'You can train yourself to eat a lot less.'
'You know Andy Farrar? He found a walking stick in the bush near Wombegonoo. It's beautifully made, handmade, all carved and everything. Everyone said it must be the Hermit's but I thought they were joking.'
The track was taking us downhill all the time. It wound around a bit, looking for the best route, but the trend was always downhill. It was going to be quite a sweat getting back up. We'd lost a lot of altitude. It was beautiful though, quiet, shady, cool and damp. There were no flowers, just more shades of green and brown than the English language knows about. The ground was deep in leaf litter: there were times when we lost the track beneath heaps of bark and leaves and twigs, but a search around under the trees always found it again. Every so often it brought us back to Satan's Steps, so that for a few metres we'd be brushing alongside the great granite walls. Once it cut between two of the steps and continued down the other side: the gap was only a couple of metres wide, so it was almost a tunnel through the massive hunks of rock.
'This is pretty nice for Hell,' Fi said to me as we paused in the cool stone gap.
'Mmm. Wonder how long since anyone's been down here.'
'More than that,' Robyn, who was in front of Fi, said. 'I wonder how many human beings have ever been down here, in the history of the Universe. I mean, why would the koories have bothered? Why would the early explorers, or settlers, have bothered? And no one we know has. Maybe the Hermit and us are the only people ever to have seen it. Ever.'
By that stage it was getting obvious that we were close to the bottom. The ground was levelling out and the last of the sunlight was filtering through to warm our faces. The overgrowth and the undergrowth were both sparser, though still quite dense. The track rejoined the creek and ran alongside it for a few hundred metres. Then it opened out into our campsite for the night.
We found ourselves in a clearing about the size of a hockey field, or a bit bigger. It would have been hard to play hockey on though, because it wasn't much of a clearing. It was studded with trees, three beautiful old eucalypts and quite a few suckers and saplings. The creek was at the western edge; you could hear it but not see it. The creek was flatter and wider here and cold, freezing cold, even on a summer day. In the early mornings it hurt and stung. But when you were hot it was a wonderful refreshing shock to splash your face into it.
That's where I am now of course.
For any little wild things living in the clearing we must have seemed like visitors from Hell, not visitors to it. We made a lot of noise. And Kevin—you can never cure Kevin of his bad habit of breaking branches off trees instead of walking a few extra metres to pick up dead wood. That's one reason I was never too convinced when Corrie talked about how caring and sensitive he was. But he was good with fires: he had the white smoke rising about five minutes after we arrived, and flames burning like fury about two minutes after that.
We decided not to bother with tents—we'd only brought two and a half anyway—but it was warm and no chance of rain, so we just strung up a couple of flies for protection against the dew. Then Lee and I got stuck into the cooking. Fi wandered over.
'What are we having?' she asked.
'Two-minute noodles for now. We'll cook some meat later, but I'm too hungry to wait.'
'What are two-minute noodles?' Fi asked.
Lee and I looked at each other and grinned.
'It's an awesome feeling,' Lee said, 'to realise you're about to change someone's life forever.'
'Haven't you ever had two-minute noodles?' I asked Fi.
'No. My parents are really into health foods.'
I'd never met anyone who hadn't had two-minute noodles before. Sometimes Fi seemed like an exotic butterfly.
I can't remember any hike or campout I'd been on where people sat around the fire telling stories or singing. It just never seemed to happen that way. But that night we did sit up late, and talk and talk. I think we were excited to be there, in that strange and beautiful place, where so few humans had ever been. There aren't many wild places left on Earth, yet we'd fluked it into the middle of this little wild kingdom. It was good. I knew I was really tired but I was too revved up to go to bed until the others started yawning and standing up and looking towards their sleeping bags. Five minutes later we were all in bed; five minutes after that I think I was asleep.
Chapter Four
We didn't do a lot the next day. No one got up till ten or eleven o'clock. First thing we found was a biscuit bag we'd overlooked when packing the food the night before. It was empty. Thanks to us some grateful animal was now a lot fatter.
Our breakfast merged into lunch and continued into the afternoon. Basically we just lay around and ate, in one long pigout. Kevin and Corrie got into a passionate little session on Kevin's sleeping bag; Fi and I sat with our feet in the cold stream, planning our lives after we left school and left Wirrawee. Lee was reading a book, All Quiet on the Western Front. Robyn had her Walkman on. Homer had a go at everything: climbed a tree, had a look in the creek for gold, got a pile of firewood, tried to flush out some snakes. When I got some energy going I went with him, to see if the path went any further. But we could find no trace of it. Thick bush met us in every direction. And strangely, we could see no sign of any hut or cave or shelter which the old guy must have had if he'd really lived down here. Finally, sick of trying to tear our way through unsympathetic scrub, we gave up and went back to the clearing. And when we got there Homer did find a snake. It was six o'clock and the ground was starting to cool off. Homer went to his sleeping bag and took off his boots, then stretched out comfortably with a packet of corn chips. 'This is a great place,' he said. 'This is perfect.' At that moment the snake, which had crawled into his sleeping bag, must have stirred under him, cos Homer leapt to his feet and ran about ten metres away. 'Jesus Christ!' he yelled. 'There's something in there! There's a snake in my sleeping bag!'
/> Even Kevin and Corrie stopped what they were doing and came racing over. There was a wild debate, first about whether Homer was imagining things, then, when we all saw the snake move, about how to get it out with as little loss of life as possible. Kevin wanted to weigh the sleeping bag down in the creek with rocks until the snake drowned; Homer wasn't keen on that. He liked his sleeping bag. We weren't too sure that the snake wouldn't be able to bite through the bag; as a kid I was told a terrifying story by a shearer about how his son had been bitten through a blanket as he lay asleep in his bed. I don't know if the story was true but I never forgot it.
We decided to trust all those experts who'd been telling us since we were kids that snakes are more scared of people than people are of snakes. We figured if we were at one end of the sleeping bag and the snake came out of the other end he'd probably do a big slither in the opposite direction, straight into the bush. So we got two strong sticks; Robyn held one while Kevin held the other; they pushed them under the bag and started slowly lifting. It was a captivating scene; better than watching TV even. For a minute nothing happened, though we could see the snake clearly outlined as the material was stretched. He sure was a big one. Robyn and Kevin were trying to tip the bag so that the snake would virtually be poured out of the mouth onto the ground. They were doing it well too; perfect teamwork. The bag was at shin height, then knee height, and still rising. Then somehow the sticks got too far apart. Corrie called out; they realised and started to correct, but Robyn lost her grip for a moment. And a moment was all it took. The sleeping bag slithered down to the ground as though it had come to life itself, and one very mad snake came bursting out. The only rational thought I had at that moment was curiosity, that Kevin was obviously as nervous of snakes as he was of insects. He just stood there white in the face and trembling, looking like he was going to cry. I think he was so paralysed that he would have waited and let the snake crawl up his leg and bite him. It was funny, considering how tough he'd been when he had the stick and was lifting the bag, thinking he was safe. But there wasn't really much time or space for rational thoughts at that stage of my life; my irrational mind was running the show. It told me to panic; I panicked. It told me to run; I ran. It told me not to give a stuff about anyone else; I didn't give a stuff. It was quite a few moments before I looked around to see if they were OK ... and to see where the snake was.