I was stopping every half hour, moistening my mouth with a few drops of water. The temperature was around 100°, and though I knew I was sweating, my skin was dry, only the scum of salt to tell me I was losing body moisture. I walked on, right through the hours of darkness, and as the sky began to lighten with the dawn I collapsed on to the ground at the top of a sandhill, lying there exhausted, watching the desert take shape around me. There were wallaby moving in the flat sand trough below me, grey shapes that shifted their position with slow movements, crouching as they browsed on the dry, desiccated vegetation. And a little kangaroo rat that seemed oblivious of my presence. But no sign of the Land-Rover, nothing to indicate the presence of another human being in all the miles that stretched away to the surrounding rim of the horizon. The night receded, the washed-out grey of early dawn quickly taking on colour as the light strengthened. The dunes were ‘braided’ here, the stark beauty frightening. I didn’t see the wallaby go. They just suddenly weren’t there any more. I was alone then, seemingly the only living thing in that great red frying pan of a desert — except the flies in a cloud around my head and the ants in the sand at my feet, and that little marsupial rat.
I had some food and a slow, careful drink of water, and then, as the moment of sunrise neared, I began my search keeping to the top of the dunes and walking on a bearing of roughly 120°. I couldn’t be sure how far I had come during the night; I thought just under the twelve miles, allowing for rests and detours. But while the idea that I could locate that Land-Rover on the basis of course and distance walked had seemed sensible enough at the outset, now that I was in the presumed locality I realized how near-impossible it was in practice. Parked in a trough below a sandhill, I could walk within a few hundred yards of it and never see it.
The sun rose and I turned south, angling across the ridges, pausing on each top to search the valley between. It was my only hope. Even then I wouldn’t have seen it but for the fire. The sun had risen an hour ago and I was nearing the point of exhaustion, the heat intense and mirages beginning to haze my vision. My legs were trembling as I stumbled up the next ridge, nerves stretched and panic only just within my power to control. And those words of Kennie’s at the back of my mind. Coming out in the ship, I had read about the Warburton, Gosse and Giles expeditions, and how Gibson, going back for fresh horses, had lost his way and disappeared. As Kennie had said, it wasn’t all that far to the south, somewhere near the Alfred and Marie Range. But here there were no ranges, not the ghost of a distant blue range-top lipping the horizon to give me hope of shade and water. And then I had staggered to the top of that ridge and was standing there, the sun blazing, sand and vegetation dancing before my eyes, my body sagging and the flies crawling around my eyes.
I knew I must lie up now, find some shade, try to sleep. And then, when night fell, the trek back. I turned towards the sun, thinking of Kennie and the Land-Rover. Company at least. To die alone. … I suddenly had a feeling that I was in a void, hopelessly lost, with no hope of finding my way back. I was remembering how I had told Kennie to burn spinifex. But if I was lost, how could I see it? How could I possibly be certain I’d be near enough to him in the dawn — the next dawn?
Panic was very close then. I wanted to run. I wanted to run all the way back, just to be certain. And then I saw it, beyond the next ridge — a wisp of black smoke. And for a moment I was crazy enough to think I had run those twelve miles back. Today — tomorrow … time had no meaning. I was too damned tired.
The wisp of smoke was dying, and I was running, running down the slope of the ridge, across the floor of the trough, the smoke receding and the next ridge far away, hardly getting any nearer as my blood pounded and my feet staggered. Birds rose, flights of bright colours — budgerigars I think — and the wisp gone now. Christ! A mirage! That’s what kept me staggering at a shambling run, the fear that it was a mirage — a dream, my mind wandering, crazed in panic, dried seed pods rasping at my trousers and everything vivid in the blinding light. It seemed an age before I reached the top of the sand slope and then suddenly the scene had changed, the sandhills gone and in their place rough rock, red-knolled and eroded into little escarpments. And below one of these, far away and shimmering in the distance, my tired eyes glimpsed the blunt box-shape of the Land-Rover.
Sanity came back, all panic gone, and the going easier as I reached the bare rock surface. It was a conglomerate of some sort, rough and hard under my feet with only here and there a sparse covering of dwarf spinifex and grasses. I heard my voice, unrecognizable as I shouted, my mouth furred and my larynx sounding as though I had newly discovered the power of speech. A movement then, a figure coming out from behind the Land-Rover, standing staring and finally moving towards me. A black face and a wide hat, black hands gripping me as I reached for him, stumbling. The blessed certainty that he was real and not some mirage of my imagination. Tom.’ The black face split, his teeth showing in a grin of recognition. And then I passed out — not exhaustion, not shock, just pure bloody relief.
I was only out for a second. I didn’t even fall. Tom had hold of me and in a moment the grogginess was gone, the knowledge that I had found them giving me strength again. They were camped close under one of the little escarpments, a cavity hollowed out by the scouring action of wind and sand, Ed Garrety sitting there propped against the rough conglomerate wall and in the hollow at his feet the sand unbelievably darkened by moisture.
He nodded to me, smiling vaguely. ‘You made it, eh? I wondered whether you would.’ He didn’t seem at all surprised.
‘Two days you said.’
‘That’s right. But when we tried to get going again, we found the jets clogged with sand, and after we’d dismantled the carburettor and cleaned it that threaded union leaked so badly — we could only just start the engines. It wouldn’t give us any power.’ His voice trailed off, very weak, his breathing shallow and his skin paper-white.
‘I’ll try and fix it,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘No good. I’ve tried. Nothing to fix it with,’ He reached into his pocket and tossed me the rotor arm he’d taken from our Land-Rover. ‘That’s what you came for, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so.’ I was stretched out now in the shade of the overhang, reaction setting in and a great lassitude creeping through my limbs. Outside, the blinding white of the sunlight fell on a straight, dark-trunked tree with bark like cork and feathery needles, an anthill mounded beneath it and the pests scuttling over the conglomerate, large, long-legged and wiry, busy at some unidentifiable task.
‘Bulldog ants,’ he said. ‘Find a kurkapi — that’s a desert oak — and there’s always one of their damned nests under it.’ His voice was so faint I could hardly hear him. ‘Glad you came. I had Tom keep a fire going from first light. To signal you in. But not much spinifex here to make a proper smoke.’
I closed my eyes against the glare, the lassitude deepening, my head nodding.
‘Who sent the plane?’
I think he asked me that several times before I dragged myself back to consciousness enough to give him an answer. ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Could be a prospector — that man Culpin perhaps, or Janet may have changed her mind and notified the authorities.’