Before turning in and lying up for the day’s heat, we drove to the base of the hill nearest us and clambered the broken rock to the small trees at the top, taking our personal clouds of flies with us. The sun was already blazingly hot and away to the south-west a salt-white glimmer marked the flat immensity of Lake Disappointment. All to the east now was nothing but desert, speckled with the golden yellow of spinifex, and the sandridges like a flat red swell coming in from the north-northeast. High overhead two wedge-tailed eagles worked the air currents, soaring on great wingspans, intent, searching for anything that still had life in that arid hell of drought-ridden sand.
We drove back to the wellhead, had a brew and a large breakfast and then turned in. The height above sea level was about 1200 feet, but it made no difference, tiredness and heat catching up with us as we lay in the back of the Land-Rover, the flap closed and the sweat drying salt on our bodies, unable to sleep.
Two miles to the north of us the Stock Route was joined by the lone track coming in from the east. The chart showed it coming in at right-angles, and in its whole length of well over 100 miles there was only one feature marked, the Winnecke Rock. And there was only one well, the Midway Well, and that about five miles south of the track. I doubted whether we could find it, and even if we did it would probably be dry. It was midway between our present camp and a track that ran north-south across an area of the chart that was completely blank, not even the lines of the sandridges marked. That track looked fine on the chart, but Kennie didn’t think it was any more of a track than the Stock Route, and in such featureless country it was most unlikely that we could ever find it.
I didn’t need to look at the chart as I lay there restless and hot and completely naked. It was all in my mind, every detail clearly imprinted. There were so few, and the faint pencil indent of that rubbed-out circle. Before sundown that evening, two miles to the north we would have to make our decision — continue on the line of the Stock Route where at least we had the chance of water or turn east into the empty featureless desert, banking on that faint circle mark being Ed Garrety’s objective. Dizzily I wondered where he was camped now. He couldn’t be far ahead of us surely. Perhaps camped at the track junction. Would we have caught up with him if we had driven these two extra miles?
All that blistering day the evening’s decision nagged at my mind, the hot wind drifting the sand and the flies crawling. And that was the measure of my tiredness, for we really had no alternative. The Stock Route was known. If there was, in fact, a big copper deposit, then it had to be in the unknown part of the desert, and so I came back again and again to that pencil mark. To find it we would have to locate Winnecke Rock and then work our way eastward. I didn’t know how high the sandridges were or what the going would be like. I just hoped to God we could follow his tracks. If we could follow his tracks we might catch up with him before he was dangerously deep into the desert. It was the Canning Desert really. The Gibson was more to the south. But the name didn’t matter. It was all the same — the Great Sandy, the Canning, the Gibson. All sand and sparse, dried-up vegetation, and once into it we only needed to have one breakdown …
I dozed and woke, dozed and woke, fear of the waterless oven of sand and the days ahead twisting at my mind like a drill. And all for what? For a man who wanted to die. Or was it the Monster? Was I, too, willing to risk my life for a pot of gold under a burning sky? I didn’t know. I just didn’t know what my motive was. My mind was too confused. Heat and exhaustion, my bare skin covered in salt from the sweat I couldn’t feel, the pores of my body prickling and Kennie naked beside me, turning restlessly and mumbling in his sleep. Why the hell didn’t we turn back now, while it was safe, while we still could?
But shortly after five I started a fire going, woke Kennie and we brewed tea and had a meal with large ants pestering us and a small goanna playing hide and seek in and out of a clump of spinifex. And then we drove north up the Stock Route until the speedometer showed we had covered a mile and a half, when we slowed, watching for the eastward track. Here and there tyremarks showed faint in the sand. We found the turn-off, the tyremarks clearer as he had swung away to the right. I looked at Kennie. ‘Well, we can’t be far behind and if he’s gone east …’ I waited, watching him, his face red and blistering with the sun, his greenish eyes wide as he tossed his bleached hair back and gazed into the flat empty land ahead. I saw him swallow jerkily, his adam’s apple rippling the silky beard where it ran down across his throat. ‘Then we’d better get cracking,’ he said quietly. ‘The sooner we catch up with him the less desert we’ll have to cover.’
So we drove east, following the faint intermittent wheel-tracks, driving slower and slower as the light faded and it became more difficult to pick them out, driving on the edge of a confusion of piled-up dunes, the salt pans of small lakes bordering our route — outriders of the great dead lake now behind us. Soon we were having to stop repeatedly and search for the wheeltracks on foot by torchlight. Sometimes they were concealed in the hard dry vegetation of long-forgotten rains, at others they were lost in a harder surface or on the everlasting damnable spear-pointed spinifex. Going slow like this, we were using a lot of fuel, and it was hard on the vehicle, hard on ourselves. In five hours we had covered no more than twenty I
miles by the speedometer, the engine overheating, the radiator boiling. And then we bogged down in soft sand. Kennie voiced my own feelings: ‘Hell!’ he said. ‘We can’t go on like this.’
We dug ourselves out and got moving again, the tracks still faint, the sandridges rolling shallow in the headlights, but getting higher, the flat sandplains between them wider. And then we came to a broader plain, dead flat but covered in spinifex, and the tracks vanished. We found them again half a mile ahead, over the top of a sandridge, but it was more by luck than judgement and it cost us the better part of an hour. I stopped then. Nothing but a jumble of sandridges now, very confused, the track running in a straight line through a flat plain between the ridges, but very faint. The engine was sizzling hot, steam showing from below the radiator. We had some food, sitting there in the sand waiting for the engine to cool, not saying much, only thinking about the miles of desert that lay ahead. The stars were very bright, the ghost of a moon just risen. It was airless and still and hot, so still and silent that the sad featureless landscape surrounding us seemed petrified. In that weird pale light it had the stillness of death. It scared me, and I knew Kennie was right — we couldn’t go on like this.
I lit a cigarette, noticing that my hand trembled slightly, and then I got the chart out and sat there with it spread out on my bare knees, staring at it in the light of my torch. ‘Only one thing to do,’ I said, my voice slow and uncertain. I held the chart for him to see, pointing to the Winnecke Rock. ‘It’s thirty-six miles. If we drive a compass course just short of it, say thirty-five miles, we should be able to locate it in the dawn.’
He nodded. ‘You think he’s making for the Rock?’
That was when I showed him the rubbed-out mark of that pencilled circle. ‘I think that’s where he’s heading. If it is, then he can only locate it by a compass bearing from a known position, and the only features shown here are the Rock and the Midway Well.’
‘And that track.’
The note of sarcasm in his voice, the little worried laugh — neither of us believing now in its existence.
‘When we’ve found the Rock, we’ll cast around for the treadmarks of his Land-Rover.’
‘Use a lot of petrol,’ he murmured.