Corroboree (36 page)

Christopher rode up beside him, his face sugar-pink and sweaty. ‘I hope we're going to be able to stand up to this heat,' he said, in a hoarse, dry voice. ‘I'm beginning to feel as if I haven't got any more perspiration left to perspire.'

‘It's very good for you,' Eyre replied. ‘It cleanses out the body's impurities. Just like a Turkish bath, without any steam.'

‘I'm not sure I'd rather remain impure.'

Eyre gave a wry smile, and shrugged.

‘Did Joolonga say how far it was to Woocalla?' Christopher asked him.

‘Not too long now. We should be there by evening.'

Christopher nudged his horse a little closer. ‘He's not—he's all right, isn't he, Joolonga? You can trust him?'

‘What makes you say that?'

‘I don't know. He hardly speaks to me at all. I mean, I've tried to treat the chap decently, for all that he's a native. But he seems to have thoughts of his own.'

‘Well?' asked Eyre.

‘Well, I don't know. I've never thought it was too healthy for natives to have thoughts of their own.'

‘I don't see that there's any way in which you can stop them.'

Christopher turned around in his saddle, and looked back at Joolonga, who was riding with his midshipman's hat pulled far down over his eyes, his blue uniform so dusty that it was almost white. Joolonga gave no indication that he knew that Christopher was watching him; and his expression remained as abstracted and as arrogant as ever. Weeip, however, gave Christopher a wave of his fly-whisk; and Dogger raised his head in interest to see what Eyre and Christopher were doing.

‘Captain Sturt said he trusted Joolonga, didn't he?' said Christopher.

‘He didn't say anything about him: except that he'd met him on his first expedition.'

‘Well,' said Christopher, ‘the fellow seems strange to me. Not altogether friendly. I don't know. It's difficult to describe, exactly. But I rather get the feeling that he's
watching over us
, don't you see, instead of guiding us. He's not what you might call co-operative.'

‘He's self-opinionated, I'll give you that,' Eyre agreed. ‘But I must say that I find him quite interesting. He's the first Aborigine I've ever met who can describe ideas, as well as people, and events, and places. He seems to have a grasp of what this expedition means; not only to his own people, but to ours, too.'

‘Is that likely to have made him any more friendly?' asked Christopher. He took off his hat, and dabbed the sweat away from his forehead with a scarf that was already soaked in sweat.

‘I'm not sure,' said Eyre. ‘But he's no fool; and he knows a lot more about this country than we do. He also seems to know where we might find Yonguldye.'

‘I'd rather trust Dogger's opinion on that,' said Christopher.

Eyre narrowed his eyes, and looked up ahead of them,
towards the horizon. The north-west wind had stirred up so much dust there that it was impossible to distinguish where the plains ended and where the sky began. There could have been mountains ahead of them, for all they knew. And now that the sun was sinking, the horizon began to glower and boil, a dark scarlet colour, and the empty sky above them began to rage with red.

Dogger had once said to Eyre, out on the verandah in front of Mrs McConnell's house, ‘Don't ever ask me to tell you what the sunset's like, out in the bush. You wouldn't believe me if I told you, and if you saw it for yourself you wouldn't believe it. And besides, it happens every evening; and after a few weeks you begin to grow tired of reds and oranges and ochres; and you begin to dream about green.'

Eyre was beginning to understand what Dogger had been talking about. Ever since they had struck inland from Kurdnatta they had been living in a world of brick-reds and purples and dusty yellows. And the further north they travelled, the harsher and redder the landscape became; and the fiercer the sun. If there was an ocean in the centre of Australia, there was no question in Eyre's mind now that it could only be reached by days of hot and uncomfortable travel. Perhaps that would enhance the relief it gave them, when they eventually reached it. Eyre had already begun to have dreams about shining blue water, and nodding palm trees; and dhows sailing from the inland shores of South Australia to the tropical inland beaches of the north.

Perhaps the inland sea was further away than Captain Sturt had imagined it to be. After all, Joolonga had been as far north as Edieowie, and Dogger had actually visited the northern ramparts of the Flinders Range, and neither of them had seen the glitter of an inland sea, even from a distance. But the geological fact remained that scores of rivers drained inland, rather than out towards the ocean, and that if they drained inland then they must drain some
where. And then there were the seagulls, which Eyre had seen with his own eyes. Seagulls, flying north.

Eyre said to Christopher, ‘Don't worry too much about Joolonga. As long as he leads us to Yonguldye, we'll be all right. It can't be more than three or four days' riding now, to the inland sea. Then, if Joolonga proves to be troublesome we can dispense with his services altogether. Personally, I don't think that he's going to be particularly difficult. He's a man caught between two civilisations, that's all; and sometimes he has trouble convincing himself that he belongs to either. Hence, the arrogance.'

The sun had now plunged itself so deeply into the dust that it was no brighter than a sore red eye. They had reached a gully, where mulga and ghost gums grew, and Eyre raised his arm and called to Joolonga, ‘This is it. We'll camp here for tonight. Then we'll make an early start in the morning.'

Joolonga came riding up, and circled his horse around in front of Eyre. ‘We have travelled only thirty miles today, Mr Walker-sir. If we travel so slowly, our water will run out before we can reach a water-hole.'

‘We will make up for any lost time tomorrow,' said Eyre. ‘But for tonight, we will pitch our camp here. I think that Mr Mortlock has probably suffered enough for one day, don't you?'

Joolonga stared at Eyre defiantly, and then he said, ‘Mr Mortlock is dead, Mr Walker-sir.'

Eyre said nothing. Instead, he stared at Joolonga in shock. Then he climbed down from his horse; and walked back to the heavy-set chestnut on which Arthur had been strapped, under his parasol. One of Arthur's arms dangled lifelessly; and his head was slumped to one side of the chestnut's neck at such an awkward angle that he had to be dead, because no living man could have endured it. Beneath him, his grey blanket was caked with dried mucus, which buzzed with flies; and flies clustered all around Arthur's mouth and nose, giving him the appearance of a man with a dark grey beard. The crimson sunlight
illuminated the spectacle of Arthur's death with grisly theatricality; as if it had been staged as a carnival sideshow, the Horrible Demise of Arthur Mortlock.

Eyre stood for a long time looking at Arthur's body, and his restless horse, and the makeshift shelter which had protected him from the sun during the worst of his suffering. Then at last he turned back to Joolonga, and said, ‘We'll bury him here, tonight. Then we'll pitch our camp. Weeip—you make up the fire. Midgegooroo, you start digging a grave for Mr Mortlock. Joolonga—'

A moment's tight pause. Then, ‘Yes, Mr Walker-sir?'

‘Joolonga, you check through the stores. I want an inventory of what we've consumed to date, including how much water we've been drinking; and I also want an idea of how long you think our supplies are going to last.' He glanced towards Arthur's body. ‘Taking into account, of course, that Mr Mortlock is no longer with us.'

‘Yes, Mr Walker-sir.'

Midgegooro was unstrapping Arthur's body, and lowering him down the side of his horse to the ground.

Eyre said, ‘You don't know how this happened, do you, Joolonga?'

Joolonga's face remained impenetrable; and very black; and there was something in his eyes that was so haughty and self-possessed and yet so strangely prehistoric that Eyre, for the first time in days, felt a prickle of coldness. He felt that Joolonga knew far more about Arthur's death than he was prepared to volunteer, whether it had been magical or not. Perhaps Joolonga knew more about the entire expedition, and where it was going, and what it could expect to find. Or, on the other hand, perhaps he didn't. Perhaps Eyre was simply allowing himself to be frightened by his own lack of experience, and by the prospect of leading six men to their deaths in a fiery and unfamiliar landscape. When they had ridden out of Adelaide, it had seemed inconceivable that this expedition could be anything more than a stiff ride into the South Australian countryside, with a few picnics along the way.
But now that Eyre had seen for himself the devastating distances; and felt for himself the sun bearing down on him at 110 degrees; now that he had peered until his eyes watered at horizons that refused to materialise, and mountains that refused to come any closer; now at last he knew that they were confronting far more than tiredness, and saddle-sores, and disobedient Aborigines. They were confronting the entire meaning of Australia. These plains, these mountains, these endless miles of scrub, these were Australia's unforgiving heart, and her uncompromising character. She was like an old, old woman, who no longer considered that she was obliged to grant favours to anyone; an old, severe woman who castigated her children, and her children's children, and especially the new children who didn't understand her cruelty at all.

On that evening when they buried Arthur, Eyre felt closer to turning back than he ever had before; or ever would again. Midgegooroo dug a shallow pit in the dry ground, and then wrapped Arthur in his blanket, and laid him down like a grey mysterious totem. They gathered around him as the sun boiled through the clouds, and hundreds of emus rushed away to the east, so that it looked as if the whole earth was moving.

Eyre recited the Lord's Prayer, and then he quoted from Job. ‘“Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? Why did the knee receive me, and why the breasts, that I should suck? For now I would have lain down and been quiet. There the wicked cease from raging, and the weary are at rest. The prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master.”'

‘Food poisoning,' said Christopher, as they slid down the sides of the gully, back to the camp fire. Weeip was cooking beans again, and what he called ‘fat flaps', or flapjacks.

‘Perhaps,' said Eyre. ‘But none of the rest of us have
caught it; and we've all been eating the same food and drinking the same water.'

‘It could have been some disease that he picked up in prison,' Christopher suggested. He held out his hand to Weeip for a hot mug of tea. ‘You know how malaria comes and goes; perhaps this sickness was the same kind of thing.'

Eyre looked around the warm twilit gully. The stars were out; the cicadas were singing; and the ghost gums were playing statues. There was a dry smell of scrub on the wind; and the spinifex grass whistled softly and eerily to itself. He thought: we could turn back now, saddle up the horses in the morning and head straight back to Adelaide. After all, three men had died already, Chatto and Rose and the long-suffering Arthur. Do the rest of us have to risk our lives, simply to find an Aborigine medicine-man for a boy already dead, and wealth for Captain Sturt? We could always say that we ran out of water; that we rode for hundreds of miles and saw no sign of anywhere to fill our bottles, let alone an ocean, and how could anybody think of mining or farming or driving stock through territory as harsh as that?

But the seagulls had been flying north; and what was more, he had given Yanluga his word. There would be no chance of his claiming Charlotte, either, unless he came back triumphant. His moral and political destiny were all invested in this one expedition. It was his one opportunity to fulfil himself, his one chance of greatness. The seagulls had been flying north and he would have to follow them.

He looked up and saw Joolonga sitting by himself on the opposite rim of the gully, hungrily spooning up heaps of beans. He stood up, and climbed across to him under a white moon the size of a dinner-plate. Joolonga glanced towards him as Eyre came across; but said nothing, and continued to wolf down his beans.

‘Touching, wasn't it?' Eyre asked him, standing over him, one elbow resting on his knee.

‘Touching, Mr Walker-sir?'

‘The funeral. The Christian interment of Mr Arthur Mortlock, lately departed.'

‘It was sad, Mr Walker-sir.' Joolonga washed down the beans he was chewing with a mouthful of tea. ‘It is always sad when a spirit leaves the real world.'

Eyre watched him for a moment, and then said, ‘Midgegooroo told me that it was you who pointed the bone at him.'

‘Midgegooroo cannot speak, Mr Walker-sir,' replied Joolonga, placidly.

‘Midgegooroo
can
speak, and you know it. He uses hand-language.'

‘Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, Mr Walker-sir.'

Eyre shook his head. ‘I don't think so. Midgegooroo has a way of making himself quite explicit.'

There was a very long silence between them. Joolonga continued to eat his beans, occasionally taking a sip of tea or a bite of hard biscuit; his eyes darting around in the gathering darkness like two elusive white animals.

After a while, Eyre said, ‘I want to know the truth, Joolonga.'

‘There are many different truths, Mr Walker-sir. One truth for the white man, one truth for the Aborigine.'

‘And for you? Mr Betwixt-and-Between? What is
your
truth?'

Joolonga swallowed quickly, and sniffed, and then said, ‘Mr Mortlock
had
to die, Mr Walker-sir. The decision was not mine. It was Ngurunderi, the spirit of death, who lives in the sky. He accepted the souls of those two white men, Mr Chatto and Mr Rose; and when Ngurunderi accepts the soul of a murdered man, he demands revenge for those who killed him. Otherwise, he sends Wulgaru the devil to exact the punishment himself.'