On The Nullarbor
THISwall of straw was something like ten feet high and as many thick, and whether or no it was the same wall he had smashed through with the shovel some twenty miles to the west was not of interest to Bony. He tore and stamped his way through, the others following with little difficulty, and when beyond, he led them to the right for several hundredyards, and there lit a fire well away from it, the wall itself now blanketing the light from anyone north of it.
With the aid of firelight, he checked his companions’ gear and found nothing missing. Then, for a psychological reason, he made them help him scoop and tramp a chamber inside the wall in which to sleep, giving the illusion of safe shelter.
He rationed himself to four hours’sleep, Lucy tethered to an ankle, and on waking found the sun gilding the fragile roof of the sleeping chamber and silvering its walls. It was not unlike being within a case woven by silkworms, the strands of straw like satin opalescence. The straw shimmered and gave forth music, the music of gentle surf beyond the mouth of a silver and gold cave, and Bony knew that the wind was rising-a blessing from the north, because a south wind might carry their scent for a mile and more to be registered by keen aboriginal noses.
The sun said it was nine o’clock as he built a fire on the ashes of the previous one, and filled the billy-can for tea. Squatting on his heels, he tackled the problem of how long to permit his companions to sleep, in view of their present position relative to those wild aborigines.
They were now nine miles from the caverns and twelve from the desert lands where those wild men camped. Although improbable, it was still possible that the aborigines would visit the caverns about sun-rise, and might chance to cross the tracks evidencing the flight of the prisoners. It was a risk that had to be accepted.
Provided the aborigines left the desert lands at sun-rise, and determined to return by sun-set to avoid camping on the Plain at night, their range would be up to twenty miles. And the fugitives were but twelve miles from the desert.
There must be no needless delay.
The water boiled, and tossing a handful of tea into the billy, he waited twenty seconds before removing the brew from the fire. Then, on walking to the wall, he noted that the wind was causing it totremble, and that the sound of the ‘surf’ was now loud and near.
Rousing the sleepers, he told them to come to the fire for breakfast and bring everything with them.
As they emerged from the wall, each one stopped and stared, and Bony watched them to measure their first resistance to the Plain. Their eyes widened. Their faces registered the disbelief of what they saw, and he knew he could give them now no time to think. With the gear in their arms they walked stiffly to the fire.
“Thought you said we could camp all day in that straw stuff,” Riddell complained. “Five minute sleep and you rouse us out.”
“I could sleep for a year,” yawned the girl.“What about awash? I need it.”
“No wash until we find water,” Bony said. “I thought we might camp here for a day, but the wind is now making the wall tremble, and if it rises much more, the wall will begin to move, and also we haven’t come far enough to be safe. So eat anddrink, and we’ll move on.”
They were sullen until Brennan asked how the wall came to be there. The explanation provided opportunity to distract them.
“Certainly looks like something’sgoin ’ to happen to it,” Jenks surmised. He was standing, a pannikin of tea in one hand, and a meat-and-bread sandwich in the other.“Caw! So this is the Great Nullarbor Plain. Well, you can have it for mine. And if I was at sea I’d say it’sgoin ’ to blow like hell.”
“Yes, we’ll pack up and start before that wall rolls on and over us. We’ll find a safer place than this to camp.”
Bony rolled his own swag and that which the girl had to carry. He was obliged to assist the others, too, for they were not yet proficient.
“I’ll carry your swag, Joe, as you will have the water,” he told the big man. “Today I’ll not have to carry the dog.”
“Okay! Every little bit helps as the monkey said when he…”
“Hold my mirror for a second or two,” Myra asked, andD. I. Bonaparte, F.R.M. I. steadied her small mirror while she did her hair and ‘put on her face’ with the aid of a tongue-moistened rag. “What a sight I am. Couldn’t you find me some red ochre or something the blacks use?”
“You never know what we’ll find, Myra. At the moment I find you looking well and attractive. As we walk, make a mental list of all the things you will buy at the shops.”
“Yair,” growled Riddell. “And I’ll be thinking of all the beers I’ll be buying.”
“What do we use for money?” demanded Brennan, and Maddoch cheerfully said he had money enough in a bank to keep them all drunk for a year.
On this note they listened to Bony’s briefing.
“We start off in single file as we did last night. We’ll walk for an hour by the sun, and then spell for a quarter of an hour. You follow me, Myra, and you, Mark, bring up the rear. Now you may talk as much as you like, even sing. In fact, singing would be a help. And don’t look at the Plain too much. It will still be there this evening.”
They moved off, Bony now with no sense of danger of them falling into a hole or over a cliff-like bank into another Bumblefoot Hole. The dog at first strained on the leash, and presently Bony freed her and she trotted on ahead, happy at last.
They were like a small caterpillar crawling across an aerodrome, and soon the wind found them and tore at the girl’s hair, scampered through the men’s hair, and when now and then Bony looked back at them they were staring across the world to the not-so-distant edge, the verge of cliff that couldn’t possibly have any foundation.
Then Maddoch shouted:
“Look at the straw!”
The party stopped, to gaze in wonderment at what was happening. They could see neither the eastern nor the western limit of what appeared as a pale-yellow snake, alive and menacing, its body rippling in effort to digest a meal. Here and there it bulged towardsthem, at places it rolled over and over, and at no place was torn asunder. Bony knew it could roll over a man and do no hurt, but it appeared to be as weighty as molten metal. Brennan said, as though being the last man he would be the first to be trampled:
“Get on. Why wait around here?”
The wall proved to be an opportune spur, the wind coming from the rear being another, and Bony estimated their speed at almost three miles in that first hour. Then the wall appeared to be moving after them as fast as they walked, so that it was no farther back although it was smaller as the twisting action shredded it gradually, leaving a carpet of mush on the ground after it. As there was no suggestion of a spell, Bony kept moving for another hour, when two and a half miles had been added to the day’s total.
A nasty day. Theabos would be reluctant to move out of their camp. Good!
Continuing the next stage, they found it necessary to lean a fraction backward to counter the pressure of the wind, and walking seemed comparatively effortless. The wall followed them, not quite at their speed, until it broke, and the ends raced forward to curve inward until other portions broke and soon short sections were racing across the Plain like squadrons of golden cavalry, some moving faster than others, and often the slowest energised to run the fastest. One mass sped past the travellers, scattering its mush after it, growing swiftly smaller until it was in turn broken into bunches which formed into great balls. And the balls of straw became rapidly smaller until, with final collapse, they flattened amid the eternal saltbush.
Thus was the disintegration of one of these mighty walls of straw, and after that there was nothing to distract the travellers’ attention from muscles beginning to complain now that the imagined danger was no more.
Bony espied a belt of bluebush some hundred yards long, a small forest of trees three feet high on the sea of saltbush, and here was found shelter from the wind, but also increased heat from the sun, and small flies to torment them. Gratefully they sat on the ground, and only Maddoch assisted Bony to find dead bush with which to boil water for tea.
Jenks cursed the flies, and Riddell declared he would go no farther this day, no matter what the flies did. Bony smiled at Maddoch, and Maddoch tried to return the smile but failed.
“Make a cigarette for Myra,” Bony asked him, and squatted beside the fire and rolled one for himself.
They must have come eight miles. Eight added to nine totalled seventeen. Those swathes of straw mush would obliterate what tracks they could not avoid making, also the broken bush his companions had left without thought that eagle eyes might see and read the tale. They were still not far enough from jail to be safe from the warders.
The discomforts of this noon camp would, he hoped, be allies, and when the meal had been eaten, he relaxed and waited for the allies to do the prodding, permitting the fire to die when the smoke of it would have kept the flies at bay. He lay with his eyes closed, and pictured the Plain dwarfed to map reading size, and placed imaginary pins to mark Patsy Lonergan’s camps, and that far eastward position of the caverns. He had set out with the intention of following the third leg of a triangle, and he was confident that he was doing just this, the objective being Bumblefoot Hole, where there was water and a little food, and certain shelter.
To locate Bumblefoot Hole would be to find the needle in the stack, but there was that ‘rock’, that point of high land beyond the horizon which would presently give him a bearing, provided he could bring its shape to coincide with the mental picture he had retained.
The Plain was presenting a new face to this first of the summer windstorms. Coming down from the vast desert lands, it bore a light-brown dust which foreshortened still farther the encircling horizon, which painted the sun light red, which tinted with soft purple thesaltbush, and the bluebush it shadowed royal blue. The sky was white, like the belly of a shark. And the wind was silent, save where it hissed past the ears, and this sound seemed to be within the mind, and the pressure of it against the body was as a thrust by the unseeable and the unknowable.
Riddell began to shout, and Bony opened his eyes to see the big man flailing his arms and fighting the flies, the filth of a nation streaming from his mouth in the frenzy of his desperation. Brennan said something, and in an instant they were exchanging blows. Myra looked at Bony and shrugged. Maddoch came to crouch before Bony. Tears were sliding down his dusty face and forming rivulets of light red paint. Flies were glued to the corners of his mouth, and were crawling into his nose and the corners of his eyes.
“We’ll have to go back,” he cried. “The caverns are better than this.”
“You go forward, not backward, Clifford,” Bony said sternly. “There can be no going back.”
“But this… I had no idea, Inspector.”
Inspector! It belonged surely to a previous incarnation, and he wanted to correct it, to insist that he was ‘Bony’ to his friends, and he remembered then that respect, even fear, must go with command.
“What are those lunatics fighting about?” he asked coldly. Maddoch turned to watch when the combatants were separated by the stocky Jenks ambling between them and turning about as though no tax had been levied on his physical strength, to walk between them again.
“We may as well go on,” Bony called. “We’ll take it easy, and hope for a hole or a cave to camp in for the night. What about it?”
He risked the friendly question, yet was confident of their answer. Almost eagerly they agreed, and he handed his blanket roll to Riddell, andhimself carried the half-full water drum.
The morale-slaying Plain took them instantly to itself, for they were like mariners leaving safe anchorage when leaving the belt of bluebush. No ship under them, no steel walls about them. Soon there was no place to leave astern and no place to steam ahead.
There was only the nightmarish uniformity of flat plain kept steady by a cloudless sky. You can ride a camel, a horse, a jeep, and close your mind to this Nullarbor, find exquisite relief in the cinema programme the mind will screen. But on your feet, you have to walk with eyes open and the mind naked to reality.
And when the sun said: “I’ve had enough of looking at you,” and turned to more interesting insects below, they had no cave, no hole in the ground, no bluebush amid which to crouch. The sky caught fire from the sun’s hot trail and the high-flung dust wove mighty draperies of scarlet before Space, shutting it out, as though blown upon by Evil itself. The colour in the folds deepened to magenta, then to black, and finally blessed night came.
One tiny spark glowed in the darkness, tended by a man who pushed together the ends of burning sticks. About him lay the blanket-cocooned figures of restless sleepers. He was contented, not by food but by the miles he had brought those restless sleepers, this day which was thankfully ended.