Walkabout (11 page)

‘Say, Pete,' the girl had a sudden thought. ‘Remember that pool way back in the salt-pan. Remember how the darkie sucked up water with a reed. We can do that.'

They searched for and found a couple of hollow
reeds: reeds of the watermat grass. Mary remembered to plug one end with moss (as a filter); then they plunged the reeds deeply into the pool, and sucked. The water they drew up was clean and cool.

Their thirst was slaked. Their hunger remained.

It was Peter who, purely by luck, solved the food problem. He was idly stirring the pool with his water-mat reed – and dragging all sorts of leaf-mould and water plant to the surface – when he noticed a queer little prawn-like creature clambering out of the stirred-up water.

‘Hey, Mary! There's food in the pool.'

The girl came running. Eagerly. But when she saw the ‘food' she wasn't impressed.

‘He's awfu' small, Pete. And all arms and legs.'

‘Maybe there's other ones.'

Together they peered into the brackish water, but saw nothing.

‘Say, Mary!' – it was Peter's turn to think back now – ‘ 'Member how the darkie killed all them fish. Throwing stones. Couldn't we do that?'

‘No good here, Pete. Stones would go squelch in the mud.'

They stared disconsolately at the pool. Then the girl hit on the answer.

‘I know. Let's stir up the mud. Anything in the pool will get all choked. Will have to climb out.'

It worked like a charm; better than they had dared to hope. They collected a couple of branches, plunged them into the pool, and churned up the mud. In seconds the water took on the consistency of soup:
thick soup; brown and heavy: creamed with mud and scum. And almost at once the yabbies – diminutive crayfish of the bush – came bobbing up to the surface. Choked and blinded, they fled their mud-bed haunts; desperately, like drowning men, they struggled for the bank. Bedraggled, they hauled themselves up –out of the frying-pan into the fire. For on the banks the children were waiting for them. They snatched them up; smashed their heads against the earth; killing them instantly. On and on the slaughter went, till a full three dozen yabbies (each between four and eight inches long) lay dead beside the pool.

It was Mary who called a halt.

‘That's enough, Pete. Let's not kill any more.'

The yabbies, roasted on fire-heated stones, made a delicious meal. The children ate their fill, and still had enough left over for breakfast.

Soon, curled close together, they settled down for the night.

It was cooler in the hills, and they were glad of the warmth of the fire. The girl had dragged up an extra large supply of branches; and from these she picked out a couple of arm-thick trunks, and tossed them on to the fire. The sparks flew skyward; wreaths of wood-smoke drifted across the stars; down-valley a dingo howled at the crescent moon. Charleston was in another world.

They woke cold and coated with dew; but the resurrected fire warmed them quickly, and a breakfast of
yabbies put them in good heart. They collected another two dozen of the crayfish out of the pool – for the way ahead looked barren and devoid of food – then, Peter leading, they hit off across the hills, skirting the pyramid of wine-veined quartz.

The hills had a primeval grandeur. They had been old when the Himalayas were first folded out of the level plain. Their rocky slopes were hard; enduring; unchanging from aeon to aeon. The children traversed them slowly: ants on a gargantuan tableau.

In the clear, hazeless light distances and angles were hard to judge. Slopes that looked an easy ten minutes' stroll turned out to be an hour's exhausting climb. And always at the top of one rise was another: wave after wave of swelling hillocks, always steepening, always climbing; never dropping away, never falling into the longed-for valley.

In silence the children plodded on, watched by blue-wrens and moffets that tucked their pin-thin legs beneath them and scooted about the flattened rocks like mice on inset wheels.

Soon the rocks became increasingly rugged and broken, cut into lopsided rifts and faults, as though a giant with an axe had used the hill-top as a random chopping-block. Among the faults strange colours glinted: the dull crimson of garnets, the yellow flame of topaz, the white of moonstone, and, very occasionally, the fleck of blue-green beryl. Unmined wealth. A jeweller's shop of semi-precious gems; undiscovered; unexploited.

The girl's fingers ran round the base of a moonstone.

‘They're beautiful, Pete. Let's take some with us.'

‘Come on, Mary. We can't eat stones.'

Reluctantly she followed her brother among the desiccated rocks. But the jewels were something she didn't forget.

Then, quite suddenly, as the children rounded a shoulder of granite, they stopped: stopped dead in disbelief. For in front of them rose a whole hillside aglow with shimmering colour: every shade of the spectrum sparkling, flickering, and interchanging: a kaleidoscope of brilliance rioting in the midday sun.

Mary's eyes widened, her mouth fell open.

‘Jewels, Peter! Jewels! Millions and millions of them.'

But they weren't jewels. They were something even more beautiful.

As the children approached the hill they heard a low, high-pitched rustling; a soft vibrating hum that trembled the air. Then, to their amazement, the blaze of colour began to move: shimmering: palpitating: rising and falling, as the butterflies opened and shut their wings. Suddenly, like bees, they swarmed – disturbed by the children's approach – and in a great rainbow-tinted cloud went swirling south: south for the Victorian plains.

The hill lost its magic. The sun streamed down. The children plodded on.

At midday they rested for a couple of hours in the shade of a steep-sided ravine. Here they ate the last of the yabbies. To both of them, the prawn-like creatures tasted vaguely salt. And they had no water. The girl
dozed, drugged to immobility by the heat of the sun: but the boy was restless. Soon he got to his feet.

‘Come on, Mary,' he urged. ‘
Kurura
. Maybe that valley's over the next hill.'

But it wasn't. Nor over the next. Nor the next. Nor even the one after that, which they reached in the golden sunset.

They camped for the night beneath a low shelf of granite. They were hungry and thirsty; exhausted and disillusioned. There was no wood for a fire, no water for a drink. The sunset wind was cold; and so, when they came out, were the stars: cold and uncaring : cold and uncaring and very far away.

Before they slept the children talked awhile in whispers.

‘Pete!' The girl's voice was anxious. ‘You think we oughta head back tomorrow? Back for the waterhole?'

‘Course not!' The little boy was scornful. ‘The darkie said there's water over the hills. We'll go on.'

D
AWN
brought wreaths of mist, as the heat of the sun warmed the dew-wet rocks, making them steam like tarmac after summer rain. The children woke damp and cold, hungry and thirsty, their mouths dry and their voices hoarse.

‘Come on, Mary,' Peter's croak was harsh as a kookaburra's. ‘I don't like this place. Let's push on.'

He led off, round a shoulder of smooth-grained granite. Both children moved a deal more slowly than the day before. Every step required a conscious effort.

They found that the shoulder joined on to a solid massif, a great wedge-like block of hills flanked by a subsidiary ridge which ran directly across their line of advance. Atop this ridge little puffs of cloud, sun-tinted fawn and pink, were rising and falling to the breath of unseen air draughts. Mary looked at the clouds: thoughtfully: hopefully. She tried to remember her geography lessons – in hot climates weren't clouds supposed to form over water? Maybe beyond the ridge they'd come at last to the longed-for valley. She said nothing to Peter – disillusion, if it came, would be too cruel – but somehow her eagerness communicated itself to the little boy; he quickened his stride.

But the ridge proved unexpectedly steep, especially
its last hundred feet. Here the rock was smooth, devoid of vegetation, swept clean by wind, scorched bare by sun. Toe-holds and foot-holds were hard to find.

‘Careful, Pete.' Mary paused, wiped the sweat out of her eyes and pointed to the left. ‘Over there. It's not so steep.'

Slowly, painfully, they inched their way higher.

The clouds had changed colour now, changed from pink and fawn to a dazzling white. Like puffs of cotton wool in a sky of Reckitt's blue, they bobbed and curtsied along the farther slope of the ridge, almost within the children's hand grasp. And below them Mary could see more cloud: strato-cumulus: layer upon layer. Her hopes rose.

‘Careful near the top, Pete. T'other side may be a cliff.'

They reached the crest together – the longed-for crest, swept by a cool, moisture-laden wind – and stood, hand in hand, looking down on the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth.

They couldn't see much detail in the valley itself, for it was blanketed in cloud, but the general layout was clear. It was a rift valley, steep-sided, about three miles wide, splitting the hills like an axe-cut. Through occasional breaks in the cloud the children could see belts of woodland and the distant gleam of water.

Peter danced on the crest of the ridge.

‘Just like the darkie told us, Mary. Food and water.
Yeemara
and
arkooloola
.'

The girl nodded.

For a moment the clouds drifted away, revealing a broad, slow-moving ribbon of water, reed-lined, dotted with water-birds, and beautiful as the river that ran out of Eden. Then the layers of strato-cumulus closed up. But the children had seen their vision: knew they'd been led to the promised land. Hand in hand they scrambled and slithered into the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth.

T
HE
girl lay on her side, propped up on one elbow, cutting the fourteenth notch into a branch of yacca. The boy watched her.

‘How long you reckon we been here, Mary?'

She counted the notches, first those on one side, then those on the other.

‘Eight days in the desert. Six in the valley.'

It seemed to both of them far longer. The past, especially to the boy, was like another world.

They lay beside a shallow lagoon, both of them naked – for on their third day in the valley the girl's dress had been torn beyond repair by the claws of a koala. In front of them the reed-fringed water, motionless as glass, went looping away down-valley; behind them the hills towered up, their summits wreathed in cloud; on either side of them the virgin forests, dark as a cathedral vault, sprawled almost to the water's edge. It was midday, and the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth lay motionless, asleep in the heat of the sun.

For six days the children had wandered slowly up-valley, exploring the curving lagoons, the reedy marshlands and the belts of semi-tropical forest. They had found a number of animals, fish, and reptiles; and a great multitude of birds; but of human beings there was never a sign. They had had plenty to drink and
plenty to eat – not always what they'd have chosen (for the water duck eluded their every trap and snare) – but at least something: fruit or vegetable, reptile or fish. Now they had come to an especially beautiful reach of the valley, and the girl – much to her brother's disgust – was preparing to make a home –‘just a hut of reeds,' she had said, ‘in case we want to come back.' Peter had jibed at the idea of home-making. ‘Gee, Mary,' he'd said, ‘what we wanna house for? If it rains, we can shelter in the forest.' But the girl had seemed so disappointed, that he'd agreed to call a halt until the reed-home was made.

He wasn't, in one way, the least bit sorry to have an excuse to rest; to lie back in the lush, sun-hot grass and assimilate all that had happened in the last few days. They had seen such wonderful things; especially since they had come to the valley….