‘Not as much as stopping and starting and driving slow the way we have been.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go then.’ His voice was pitched a little high, nervous and uneasy.
We got to our feet, and while he topped up the radiator, I took a bearing on the tracks running out ahead of us. Converted from magnetic to true they were headed 103°, slanting across the sandplain towards the next ridge. According to the chart, 103° was the correct bearing for the Winnecke Rock. The track bearing, on the other hand, was nearer 110°, so we were almost certainly north of it, heading direct for the Rock. I took the speedometer reading and then we got going.
Steering a compass course required concentration and it was difficult driving because of the spinifex. The clumps were small and widely spaced, but each clump the size of a mole-hill, hard as concrete, so that, riding them, the jolting was incessant, and Kennie at the wheel twisting and turning to find the easiest route, the strange opaque light making it difficult for him to pick his way. Three miles of this, and then the spinifex thickened, forcing us into four-wheel drive, the going slow and the tracks lost, the needle of the speedometer flickering between nought and five. We found the tracks again on the slope of the next sandhill, deep-scored where he had taken it fast. We made it to the top, but only just, the engine labouring in four-wheel drive, the wheels spinning in the soft sand of the crest. Another sandplain, much wider, full of spinifex and here and there the skeletal remains of wind-uprooted mulga lying prone, their spiked roots like tank traps, like the battle maces of medieval giants.
We had lost his tracks completely now and our course, slanting across the lie of the sandridges, meant that every few miles we had to turn into the face of a petrified sandwave, take it at a rush in four-wheel drive, both of us clinging on for dear life, our heads bumping the roof. Twice we had to stop on the far side of a ridge to let the engine cool. It was a nightmare drive, but at least our course was generally parallel to the line of the self dunes, and in the sandplains between the ridges the going was less difficult, fairly flat and the spinifex patchy, so that there were moments when we almost touched 15 mph. I am told we were lucky, that the area we were in must have been better than most of the Gibson, but, even so, dawn was paling the eastern sky before we had completed those thirty-five back-breaking, exhausting miles.
We stopped on top of a sandhill that was about 40 feet high, the desert rolling all around us, a long undulating sand-swell, the ridges showing like pale red waves above the green-gold sea of spinifex. Lizards scuttled dryly through a patch of scrub, ants moved busily in the sand and we saw our first scorpion. But it was the fantastic surrealistic beauty of the scene that held me spellbound, the breathless cruelty of it, the hardness of the colours in that clear dry air, above all the terrible infinity of it, the sense that it went on for ever. There was no sign of anything that could be described as a rock, only limitless sand and scrub, the waves of the ridge rolling endlessly to the horizon.
We gathered enough material to make a fire, had tea and a short rest, and then as the sun rose and the contrast of colour and shadow heightened the sense of having become part of some mad artist’s canvas, we began our search, driving north across three ridges, east 6 miles along an easy sandplain, then south across the dunes, their backs less steep going in this direction. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the Rock we found, but the tracks again. We were 2.4 miles on the southward leg, in a particularly bare sandplain between two ridges and they were quite clear, still bearing 103°.
The sun was well up by then, all the colour gone out of that terrible landscape and the heat already so violent that every movement was an effort. Even so I wanted to drive straight on, catch up with him and get it over, or at least reach the area of that pencilled circle.
But Kennie, his head bent over the chart, the skin of his nose peeling and his hands trembling, insisted it was madness. ‘It’s all of fifty miles, nearer sixty.’ He looked up at me, his eyes slitted against the glare. ‘Driving in daytime, it’ll just about finish us. The rad’ll boil. The engine’ll probably overheat again, and if we hit soft sand or have a puncture. … It could take us all day.’ He didn’t want to drive on through the heat.
We drank some water and had a meal, talking it over in the shade of the Land-Rover. But I couldn’t persuade him. ‘What the hell’s it matter whether we catch up with him now in daylight or later when it’s a little cooler?’ Mirages were already forming, the scant, desiccated vegetation swimming on the flat horizon, the dunes bobbing crazily on the skyline. In the end I agreed. What the hell did it matter? We stripped and lay in the back, our bodies burning with the growing heat of the sun, the back of the vehicle glowing like a furnace. And then, when I’d just got off to sleep, a hornet’s drone woke me, growing gradually to a roar, ripping like a buzz-saw into the muzzy drowsiness that still engulfed me.
I sat up, pulling back the flap and peering out. The blinding white of the sky hit my eyes and I could see nothing, the sound fading. Kennie slithered naked to the ground, yelled as his bare feet touched the burning sand, and then the noise was back, growing again from the south. And suddenly I saw it — a small twin-engined plane coming in low across the sandridges, and as it roared over us, barely 100 feet from the ground, the pilot waggled its wings.
So Janet had got scared and notified the authorities. That was my first thought. I had thrown Kennie his shoes and now we were both of us standing naked in the sun watching the plane. ‘One of the new Cessnas,’ he murmured. We watched it as it banked to the north of us, circling and then banking again as it picked up the tracks of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover to the east of us and followed them, still flying low. The sound of it dwindled, fading into the immensity of desert space till the plane itself was no bigger than a fly on the horizon. ‘Well, that’s one thing,’ I said. ‘They know where we are now.’
‘Who?’
‘The authorities.’
Kennie smiled at me sourly. ‘You’re joking. The Administration up here runs on a shoe-string. They don’t hire planes to search for fools who go driving around in the desert.’
‘Who then? Somebody has.’
He shrugged. ‘Prospectors. Maybe it’s a survey party.’ But he sounded doubtful and his face had a troubled look.
It seemed too much of a coincidence that a survey party doing an aerial magnetic or a mapping job should have happened on our tracks by chance. The same thought seemed to have occurred to him, for he said, ‘You’re a mining consultant. Not many mining consultants operating on their own like you. And going off into the desert in summer. They’d think you were on to something.’ He hesitated. ‘It’d be all round Mount Newman, and the Conglomerate in Nullagine…. That bar’d be full of talk.’
‘What are you getting at?’
He hesitated again, as though unwilling to put his thoughts into words. ‘Pa,’ he said at length. ‘Pa might hire a plane. You’re lucky, see. First Blackridge, then Golden Soak. And he knows about the Monster.’ He started to climb back into the Land-Rover, but then he stopped, his eyes on the horizon to the east. The plane was still there, a speck circling.
‘Do you think he’s found something?’ My voice sounded strange, a dry croak, my eyes riveted.
He nodded. ‘I reck’n.’
I reached for my shin and shorts and put them on, the plane still circling. He did the same, and we stood in the sun watching it, our eyes screwed up and the minutes passing. Then it was going back, still a speck and climbing. It was flying high and fast as it passed over us, the sound of it barely audible. ‘Must be near 10,000 feet,’ Kennie said. It was slightly to the south and took no notice of us. We watched it until it had disappeared, a speck high in the sky to the west.
I got into the driving seat and started the engine. The position over which it had been circling was not more than 10 miles away and the tracks led straight towards it. Half an hour, an hour at the most. The engine couldn’t overheat in that time, not with the breeze beginning to blow, a hot little wind from the southeast. We got going, following the tracks in four-wheel drive, the breeze increasing until sand was glowing like a tide towards us along the desert floor. This wasn’t the normal heat wind. This was more like a gale and in an instant the tracks were gone. One minute they were there, the next they had vanished, overlaid by the wind-blown drift of the sand. Kennie leaned towards me. ‘Bedourie,’ he yelled. ‘Sandstorm. No wonder that pilot was in a hurry.’