Corroboree (54 page)

Eyre said, ‘Who was your teacher, at New Norcia?'

‘Mrs Humphreys. She was teaching me ever since I was a baby.'

‘Well, she taught you remarkably well. But your intelligence is your own; and you've got plenty of that.'

She said, ‘Do you love me yet?'

‘Do I
love
you yet? What a peculiar question!'

‘I will stay with you for ever,' she said. ‘If you want me to.'

Eyre laid his hand on her shoulder, and then brushed away the flies and kissed her. While they kissed, the flies crawled all through their hair and over their faces, but they did not part their lips from each other until they had shared everything they had grown to feel for each other since they had first met, in Yonguldye's shelter.

‘No matter what happens to us, I will always love you,' said Eyre.

‘You don't have to make that promise. I don't expect it.'

‘Nonetheless, you have it.'

They rode on through a long and hazy afternoon. Now and then Eyre looked behind them, to see if there was any
sign of Yonguldye and his warriors; but there was none. He wished very much that he had Dogger's telescope with him, and Dogger's long gun; and he wished very much that he had Dogger, too. But their lives were now reduced to nothing more than riding westwards, and surviving. There was no time for sentiment, and very little time for mourning. They were a dark, emaciated white man and a naked Aborigine girl, riding through a world of scrub and dust and relentless beige, and that was the sum of their existence.

Days passed; more days of dust; and they found no more water-holes. Every morning the sky-spirits lit the sun-fire; and every afternoon the scrub wavered with heat so great that the goannas and the skinks remained motionless, as if stunned by the 120 degree temperature, and even the vultures looked as if they were flying through clear syrup.

Still there was no sign of anybody pursuing them, and they were now as far from Parachilna as Parachilna was from Adelaide, and Eyre was sure that they would soon reach the coast.

But every morning the sun came up behind them, and there were no more water-holes. Their bottles were almost empty, and they had no water for the horses. They threw away everything they could, to save weight. They left their saddles behind in the dust, like abandoned tree-stumps. They left the two extra rifles, and Eyre's spare boots and even, at last, Eyre's copy of Captain Sturt's
Expeditions
.

They lay at night under their blanket, shaking with cold, and scarcely speaking to each other.

‘When we reach the coast,' Eyre told Minil one morning, ‘if we don't see a ship straight away, we'll turn back eastwards towards Adelaide.'

Minil said nothing. But both of them had begun to accept that staying alive was their only priority, and that the route to Western Australia could wait for another explorer, at another time.

By noon that day, they had run out of water completely.
Eyre turned his water-bottle upside-down, and a drop fell on to the palm of his hand, as precious as a diamond, and gradually evaporated in the heat. Minil looked up towards the sun, her eyes squeezed almost shut, and said, ‘We have to go on.' The shine which fresh meat and fresh water had given her skin had now faded to a dull cocoabrown; and her ribs and pelvis were showing, as if death were making a premature announcement of his imminent appearance.

They went on. Their last pack-horse was close to collapse, but Eyre was reluctant to butcher it in case they needed it later. Fresh meat lasted only a day or two in this heat, with all these flies; and although blood might see them through one more waterless day, it quickly congealed and went bad.

The following day was Christmas Eve. Eyre sat silent on his horse, his eyes closed, feeling the sun drum and drum and drum against his skull. Even inside his eyelids, the day was vivid scarlet, and too bright to look at. He thought: I shall probably die on Christmas Day, and that will prove what an Anti-Messiah I turned out to be. Everybody expected so much of me: destiny, history, the opening-up of a continent; and here I am, stupid with sunstroke, lolloping through the scrub on a half-dead horse without a saddle.
Brayvo, Hicks!
Dogger had cried, as the deathspear slammed into his forehead and right through his brainful of memories and laughter and drunken nights. At least he had died quickly; at least he had gone without any chance to grumble or regret, a cantankerous invalid on Hindley Street, without beer or horses. But he never got to see Constance again, and when he had been sitting on his horse dying in those last few instants he must have realised that; and what a woman Constance was.

Eyre thought: Christmas Day, whoever would have believed it? All these years, all through childhood, all through catechism, all through college, I've been destined to die on Christmas Day. By God, if I had known, I would have dreaded each succeeding Christmas, instead of merrymaking,
and eating too much, and dancing like a damned doomed marionette.

He saw Minil pitch off her horse like a falling shadow out of the corner of his eye. She dropped face-down on to the scrubby ground, and lay there still, while her horse came to an exhausted and obedient stop.

Eyre slid down from his mount, and walked quickly across to her in sweat-filled boots. He knelt down beside her, and gently turned her over, and she looked up at him with flickering eyelids, muttering and chattering with blistered lips.

‘Minil,' he croaked. ‘Minil, what's the matter?'

She lapsed into unconsciousness again, twitching nervously now and then as if she were dreaming.

‘That's it,' he said to himself, out loud. ‘That's it, that's damn-well it. She's going to die.'

He stood up, and took off his hat, and he was so dehydrated that he couldn't even bring tears to his eyes. But then he knelt down again, and slapped her face, one way and then the other way, and shouted at her in a high, broken voice, ‘Minil!'

She wasn't dead; but he knew that she must be close to it. Her breath fluttered as delicately as a zebra-finch caught in a thorn-bush. He rolled back her eyelid and her eyes were white. She muttered, and jerked, but she didn't wake up.

He bent over her for a long time, fatigued and trembling and stricken with the pain of losing her. But then he sat up straight, and thought: I must find water. Where am I going to find water? If I try to take her any further, she'll be dead by the time the sun goes down. She'll probably be dead within the hour, in this heat. But supposing I leave her here, and go looking for water on my own?

He knew how desperate a chance it was. His only experience of bush-craft was the experience he had acquired on this one expedition. There was a high risk that he would go looking for water and never be able to find her again. And there was also a risk that when he was away, Yonguldye
and his warriors would catch up with them, and kill her. But all he could do was trust in God, and his own judgement, and try to survive.

Carefully, he rolled her over on to a spread-out blanket. Then he propped up their second blanket on a dry branch, so that it formed a canopy over her head. She lay still, her mouth open, breathing faintly and roughly. God, he thought, how can I leave her? This may be the very last time I see her alive. But I must.

He remounted his horse, and rode westwards again; turning around from time to time to fix his bearings on the improvised shelter he had made. But after an hour, it was out of sight; and there was nothing but the rippling heat and the mallee scrub and the sky like a punishment above his head.

He thought of nothing sensible: the heat was too powerful. He rode with his thighs chafing against his saltcaked britches, his hat pulled low over his eyes. He didn't even have the strength to curse any more. He was sure that the sun was actually driving him mad, and that if he survived this journey it would only be as a lunatic, kicking and gibbering and nagging forever about roasted emu and weeks without water.

In a wandering, discursive way, he began to wonder what he was actually doing, riding westwards under this pitiless sun looking for water. Surely the most sensible thing to do would be to keep on going. Even if he did manage to find a water-hole, it would take him at least another two hours to ride back, and by then Minil would be dead. She was probably dead already.

It disturbed him that he could think about Minil so callously. But then it occurred to him that he must be very close to death himself, to be thinking so selfishly about his own survival.

He peered ahead through the sloping, glistening heat. There were imaginary lakes all around, lakes which could never be reached. He began to think that even when he eventually reached the sea, he would find out that it was
nothing but a mirage, and that he would still be riding across dry sand.

What he didn't yet know was that he was riding thirty miles too far north to reach the sea, and that he and Minil had entered the eastern extremities of the land which the Aborigines called Bunda Bunda, and which the Europeans would one day christen the Nullarbor Plain; Nullarbor being dog-Latin for ‘no trees'. The plain stretched all the way from Southern Australia, eight hundred miles to Western Australia, treeless, relentlessly flat, and with no running water from one side to the other. In the heat of Christmas Eve, it was more than the human imagination could bear.

Eyre began to think of Minil. At this moment, if she were still alive, she was the closest companion he had; or had ever had. They had now shared all the physical intimacies which any man and woman could share. But Minil remained strangely aloof; rather in the same way that Joolonga had done; and he still found it hard to understand her or what she was expecting out of her life. She had evidently been very grammatically schooled at New Norcia, and she had told him that she had always worn European dresses there, bonnets and parons and petticoats. And yet, for all of her education, she had gone with Yonguldye into the outback, leaving her dresses and her Christian upbringing behind her.

It showed Eyre just how strong the mysterious magic of Australia must be, that when Aborigines were classroom educated and taught how to question the world around them, the first question which they seemed to be drawn to; magnetically and inevitably; was the question of their own origin, their own being, and the reality of the dreaming. Cynical and sarcastic as he often was, Joolonga had plainly come to consider that the myths of the dream-time had a greater strength and relevance to life in Australia than any of the beliefs which the white settlers had brought with them from the old country. The myths of the dreamtime were everlasting and immutable; they
could not be adapted to suit the greed or the convenience of the believer. Joolonga's only tragedy, like Minil's, was that in rediscovering his own religion through European education, he had lost his natural and intuitive link with native magic; his ability to commune with the spirits of the sky, and the spirits of the rocks, and most importantly of all, the spirits of his ancestors.

Perhaps this link was what Minil had been hoping to regain when she had followed Yonguldye; and perhaps she had come into Eyre's shelter that night because she had realised at last that she could never regain it. Take me back, she had asked him; back to the white man's mission. There could have been no greater pain than living in a world of strange and limitless magic, but never being able to share in it.

Eyre could see now why Yanluga had pleaded with him to be buried according to Aborigine custom. It had been a last attempt to join in his people's spiritual heritage; even if it was after death.

‘What are we
doing
to these people?' Eyre said, and surprised himself by saying it out loud.

He opened his eyes, which had gradually been closing as he was riding. About seventy-five paces ahead of him was a low limestone outcropping, on which four or five princess parrots were perched, pink-throated and yellow-chested. There were thick tufts of grass around the rock, and even a stunted gum. My God, thought Eyre, a waterhole. I can't believe it. I've actually found a water-hole.

He climbed stiff and awkward down from his horse, and hobbled like a very old man through the grass and scrub, until he reached the edge of the hole. It was dried up now, filled with sand, but when he knelt down and pressed his hand against the ground, he could feel that it was still slightly damp. He went back to his horse and took out of his saddle-bag the only implement he had which would serve as a spade: his curved brandy-flask, long ago emptied of brandy, but which he had kept with him as a water-bottle.

Watched by the inquisitive parrots, he began to dig into the sand. He was weaker than he had realised and he had to pause every few minutes to rest. But gradually the sand he was digging grew cooler and damper, and after an hour the bottom of his narrow excavation began to fill with clouded water. He lay flat on his stomach with his head down the hole and drank the water mouthful by mouthful, even though it was gritty and salt-tasting and even though he had to wait for minutes on end after each mouthful while the hole slowly refilled itself.

After he had drunk as much as he could manage, he dug the hole wider and deeper, and led his horse to it. The horse lapped at it for almost half an hour, while Eyre managed to dig another hole a little further away, and slowly fill up his water-bottle. He glanced up at the sinking sun: he would just be able to get back to Minil before it grew dark, and the water in his bottle would be enough to last them until they could ride back here tomorrow morning. Then: well, they couldn't be too far from the sea now. Another day's riding, perhaps. And if they were able to hail a ship, or find themselves a few fish, or washed-up mutton-birds, or cockles perhaps they might even think of going on, of doing what Minil had suggested, and finding a stock-route to the west. Destiny had brought him this far. Who knew where it might take him now? And it was extraordinary how much more alluring and accessible fame and glory both seemed to be, now that he had quenched his thirst. Minil had been right: it wasn't in his nature to surrender, and discovering a stock-route to Western Australia would make his name for ever.