The Lonely Sea and the Sky (16 page)

The first 100 miles after leaving Timor the wind was coming in from the north-east, and I was drifting twenty degrees to starboard. This wind gradually died away to nothing for 100 miles, and then began coming in from the south-west, gradually increasing in strength, until I was drifting twenty-five degrees to port. I was lucky for the weather was perfect. In fact, the dreaded crossing that had brought disaster to planes and pilots was the easiest flight of the whole voyage. I did not touch the control-stick during the three and a half hours over water. By then I felt a part of the machine, and could fly the aeroplane in ordinary conditions with the rudder only; I could even negotiate rough air with the rudder only. For level flight, I adjusted the tension on the elevator control with a spring, and to climb or come down I pumped a little petrol from the front or back tank up to the main tank in the top wing.

  When I reached Bathurst Island the visibility was poor, and I flew along the coast for several miles to read off its bearing, and thus fixed my position. From Bathurst Island another 50-mile water hop brought me into Darwin at 1.20 p.m. I had flown 500 miles in six hours and ten minutes.

  I flew over the town before landing at the airfield, and could see some cars tearing along the road. When I taxied up to a few men standing on the airfield they looked at me as if I were a cobra. Then the Shell agent arrived, and introduced me to a tall elderly man in the group who refused to shake hands with me, 'No, Captain Chichester, my principles will not let me, until you have been passed by the medical authority.' Everyone called me 'Captain'. I was in a silly mood; I had reached my objective, Australia, and I said that if I was to be promoted to a rank, could I not be elevated to General straight away? I moved for an adjournment to the nearest hotel, to try the local beer. Carried unanimously. I thought Darwin was a corner of Hell but I certainly felt at home there, and got on well with the inhabitants.

  Next morning I took off at 6.45, circled, and picked up the railway that I followed for 300 miles through the bush. It was a good landmark, with the bush felled for a width of over twenty yards on each side. After the railway petered out at Daly Waters, I followed a telegraph line just as easily, because of the clearing through the bush, to Newcastle Waters, 425 miles from Darwin. At Newcastle Waters it was hot, bumpy, and the visibility was bad, because of a thick haze. Here I had to leave the telegraph line, and follow a track across the plain to the east. While I was circling to look for this track, I was tempted to land for a break after six hours' flying, but it was so hot in the air that each time I put my face out on the exhaust side of the aeroplane I felt scorched. I wondered if the upper wing, which gets blackened by the exhaust in ordinary weather; might catch fire. I decided that if it was so hot in the air, it must have been grilling on the ground, so I turned down the idea of landing. Refuelling was not an inducement, because the description of Newcastle Waters read 'Petrol and oil can be obtained at Anthony Lagoon 178 miles away. Nearest town Gamooweal 375 miles.' There were tracks leading in every direction. I chose the one that looked right, and followed it along the rim of a great expanse of flat country, which had nothing growing on it, and looked from the air like a vast dried-up lake.

  The track consisted of two wheel marks. During the first 50 miles I met one or two drovers. I was flying low, because of the haze, and we saluted as if I, too, had been on a horse. I passed the spot where the homestead of the Eva Downs Cattle Station should have been but could see no sign of it. (It had been burned down.) When I was due to arrive at Anthony Lagoon, the next cattle station by my reckoning, I came to a bore, a tall iron windmill for pumping water from an artesian well into a square water hole. There was a tin shed beside it. I thought that the shed was a store, shown on the map at Anthony Lagoon. There were tracks leading in every direction from it. I followed the most likely for a few miles, then decided that it was not the right one. I went back, and wasted twenty minutes circling at 100 feet above the ground in the thick haze, looking for the track. In the end, I was sure this could not be Anthony Lagoon, and I flew on in the same direction as before. A few miles farther on Anthony Lagoon showed up without doubt. There were several buildings on the edge of a permanent lagoon.

  This was the homestead of another cattle station. I circled; and picked up the track for the next homestead, Brunette Downs. Once or twice I lost the track, and wasted time circling for it. When I reached Brunette Downs I had been told to land on a gravel patch north of the homestead, instead of on the landing-strip which was in bad condition. This required a cross-wind landing, which I thought dangerous. I had not only been flying for eight and three-quarter hours, but the last 240 miles had been in rough bumpy air close to the ground, requiring snatchy use of the control-stick, and it was difficult to make a smooth landing after that: I picked the best place on the gravel for landing into wind, but at the first approach overshot, and the second time bumped badly. The patch was not wide enough to land across it. The intense heat made me annoyed and irritable. I flew across to the landing-strip, and had a good look at it flying low. It seemed in good condition, and I made an easy landing on it. I drank all the water I had left, and lay on the ground under the shade of one wing. After twenty minutes a man strolled towards the aeroplane. At first I thought that he had an enormous black beard, but in fact he was a youth with a black flyproof net round his face, with a cloud of flies which at once transferred to me. I wished that he had brought some netting for me as well as the flies. I asked him a lot of questions, and he answered 'I don't know' to nearly every one of them. He did not know who the next neighbour was, he thought there was some petrol here, but if so, it was locked up. There was no one else there except himself, the manager was expected back, but he did not know when. Everything on the ground seemed maddeningly slow after long hours of flying.

  The description I had of Brunette Downs read, 'Nearest railway station Dejarra, Queensland, 320 miles. Nearest town, Camooweal, 210 miles.' My top tank was nearly full of petrol, so that I had just over three hours of flying left. That ought to be plenty to reach Camooweal. Now I had all the makings of a drama; I decided to fly on. I drank the juice of a tin of pineapple, and gave the rest of the fruit to a couple of blacks who had turned up. I emptied three quarts of oil into the motor, and took off again, muttering curses. I continued to follow the track by which I had arrived. It was not going in the right direction, but I thought that it would swing round later. After a while, when it did not, I turned, and headed south. This was by far the most difficult country that I had come across for navigating – or ever have come across, for that matter. There were no distinctive landmarks at all. There were wheel tracks in places, but they could be most deceptive. For example, when an area became flooded, the tracks were obliterated, and the lorry or whatever had made the tracks, had to detour round the edge of the water. As the water receded, the lorry on its next visit would make tracks perhaps half a mile away from the last lot. The next lot might be half a mile away again. Tracks were apt to leave a water hole in all directions. I had two maps, one cut from a schoolroom map of Australia, and a large-scale strip map, a white print from a linen tracing covering the route from Darwin to Cunnamulla, which the Australian Civil Aviation Department had sent up to Darwin for me. These maps marked places in a grand manner, and where I expected to find a town of 5,000 people, there would be a house and one or two sheds. The strip map showed a great number of rivers, but in nine hours of flying I had not seen a single one. They were, in fact, dry watercourses, which held water only occasionally after heavy rain. From the air they looked like the rest of the country, which was all monotonously similar. The bush of evergreen gum-trees was sparse; the individual trees could have been counted from above. The general result of all this was that my target for each leg of the flight was a spot in a featureless landscape, and I would not be sure what the spot consisted of – whether it was a house, a house with sheds, or merely a bore. The haze shrouded everything, and cut down visibility to about a mile.

  After flying 5 or 6 miles south without seeing another track, I decided that I had overshot, and turned north-east again. I picked up the track a few minutes later. There was one landmark between Brunette Downs and Camooweal-Alexandra, the homestead of a 12,000 square mile cattle run. I duly located this, and passed over it at 5.05 p.m. They had just had rain here, the first for several years, and the mud colour of the ground I had been flying over was changing to a faint greenish tinge, where grass was beginning to sprout. I flew southeast, and picked up a bore with stockyards as shown on the map, 18 miles from Alexandra. Tracks led from this bore in various directions, and I circled time after time before feeling sure that I had chosen the right one. I was burning petrol in a way I had not allowed for.

  The terrain was changing; downs now alternated with stretches of red soil, with a few trees dotted about. I came on another bore, and an engine shed, but too soon, according to the map. The track ought to leave there in a south-easterly direction but, though I circled several times, the only sign of a track that I could see was one going due east. I flew along it for 7 miles, but it did not deviate from east, and I concluded that it must be the wrong track. I turned, and headed south. Every minute hunting for the track seemed an age. How foolish I had been to leave Brunette Downs without refuelling! I flew on south for 10 miles without crossing as much as a sheep track. I had lost the track, and I was in a nice fix. I had not enough petrol to return to the bore and start afresh. I turned east again, and decided that the track I had first followed from the bore must be the right one, and that it was going to turn south-east in due course, and that if I kept on heading east I must come across it. However, after flying east for 12 miles without any signs of the track and looking anxiously at the petrol gauge, I decided that I was too short of petrol to search any longer, and that I must head direct for where I reckoned Camooweal to be.

  I was now flying close to the ground, forced down by the haze that had thickened, and the plane was being badly bumped about. The wind had freshened from south-south-east, and I was drifting between twenty and twenty-five degrees to port. The plane required careful flying, being tossed about close to the ground, and I was keeping an intent look-out, except for too frequent glances at the petrol gauge, now showing practically empty. I had not time or opportunity for working out what had gone wrong with the navigation. By then I no longer cared a damn about reaching Camooweal. If only I could see a building!

  I had flown 100 miles since the water bore, and must land within another 30 miles, whether I saw anything or not. Approaching nightfall was cooling the air, but I felt so prickly with heat that I ripped off the scarf protecting my neck to let air blow down my back. Suddenly I streaked across a scar on the ground. I banked steeply, and turned back to it. It appeared to be a formed road, running north. It was puzzling; why had I not known about it? I flew right down to have a good look. The odd thing was that it appeared to be unused. However, I stuck to it. I followed it south for a short distance, and came to a bore with an engine shed, and a sort of hut. I circled, looking for somewhere to land. There was a green patch beside the water hole; was it swampy? Everywhere else the ground was covered with stones and boulders. What about concealed tree stumps? There was a 25 to 30mph wind blowing, and I had been in the air for eleven hours; I must expect a rough landing. There was only a fifty-yard run of the green patch free of boulders, so I just had to make a good landing. I went round again, and put the plane down in the best landing I ever made. It rolled to a standstill among the first stones. I at once turned off the petrol cock, struggled out of the cockpit, and shuffled with dragging feet into the shed. It was an open shed, built over a pumping engine, and the wind sighed mournfully through it. Another shed, six feet square, stood over a fireplace. This one was made from the sides of petrol tins, which creaked and clanked dismally in the wind. It was a bleak, solitary spot in the twilight. I felt the ashes, and fancied they had heat in them, perhaps from a fire of two or three days before and my heart bounded, until I realised that it might be due to the heat of the day. The flies were terrible; I had never seen so many flies before. They crawled ceaselessly over my eyeballs, filled up my ears, and each time I forgot and opened my mouth (which I did frequently, for my tongue felt swollen and stuck unpleasantly to the roof of my mouth) they flew in. They tickled my tongue horribly, and I had to blow them out. Next, I looked at the mud-like water in the square water hole. I stirred the soft bottom with a stick, but it made no difference to the colour. I was parched with thirst, but decided not to drink till I had boiled the water. At first I could not find the wonderful road, where I hoped that lorries or cars would be passing. At last I found where it sprang out of the plain from nothing. This was queer, and after walking along it for 100 yards without finding any signs of traffic whatever, I felt that it was too much to take in, dismissed the whole thing from my mind, and turned back. I collected some chips and twigs and a piece of paper from the cockpit to start a fire going, the effort making my knees tremble. I rested before fetching more chips, and two logs. Then I scooped a half gallon tin of water out of the pool, and hung it over the fire.

  I lifted the tail of the
Gipsy Moth
to move it to a more sheltered position, because the wind was strong, but I had lost the strength to move it that way, so I fished out some rope and, fastening it to the tail skid, I pulled the plane towards the shed with a series of jerks. It took me half an hour to shift the plane a distance that should have taken half a minute. At first, when I panted I swallowed flies. Mercifully, after dark they vanished. By the time that I had got the plane in the lee of the shed, I felt done. As I moved towards the fire the roaring in my ears ceased, and a black film seemed to cover my eyes until the fire faded away to a pin-point in the distance. I dropped on the ground and rested. I was exhausted and in a panic – at being lost – panic-struck so abjectly that I was disgusted with myself. I was lost, true; in bad country, true; I had no petrol, true; but compared with what might have been, I was well off. So I reasoned with myself, but it was no use.