‘Look, Laura,’ she called, holding back the curtains, her eyes moist. ‘A most unusual and wonderful thing.’
She stood, flattening herself ingratiatingly against the sash, in hopes that the patient might be able to see merely by turning her head.
‘Do you not want to look at it, Laura?’ she begged.
But Laura Trevelyan, who was again with her eyes closed, barely answered:
‘I have seen it.’
‘Silly girl,’ said Aunt Emmy, ‘I have but just drawn the curtains!’
‘It is the Comet,’ said Laura. ‘It cannot save us. Except for a breathing space. That is the terrible part: nothing can be halted once it is started.’
When Mr Bonner returned, his wife was still holding the helpless curtain.
‘Ah,’ he said, and his eyes showed that he too had hoped to escape along the path of celestial light, ‘you have seen the Comet, about which they are all talking. It is expected to be visible for several days.’
‘I was drawing Laura’s attention to it,’ Mrs Bonner said.
‘In the absence of an official astronomer, Mr Winslow is recording his observations,’ the merchant revealed, ‘and will send a report Home by the first packet to leave.’
Then the two old people stood rather humbly watching an historic event. In that blaze, they were dwindling to mere black points, and as the light poured, and increased, and invaded the room, even Laura Trevelyan, beneath the dry shells of her eyelids, was bathed at least temporarily in the cool flood of stars.
*
Towards the end of the afternoon, when the rim of the horizon had again grown distinct, and forms were emerging from the dust, they seemed to have arrived at the farther edge of the plain, from which rose an escarpment. Slowly approaching its folds of grey earth, the party was at length swallowed by a cleft, furnished with three or four grey, miserable, but living trees, and, most hospitable sight of all, what appeared to be an irregular cloth, of faded green patchy plush.
All the animals became at once observant. Moisture even showed in the dry nostrils of the dragging horses, whose dull eyes had recovered something of their natural lustre. Little velvet sounds began to issue out of their throats.
Here, miraculously, was water.
In the scrimmage, and lunging, and groaning that followed, the riders were almost knocked off, but did, by luck and instinct, keep their seats. The blackfellows, who were laughing generously out of their large mouths, ran whooshing amongst the animals to restrain them, but soon desisted, and just laughed, or scratched themselves. After the exertions of the journey and emotion of their meeting with the whites, they themselves did not much care what happened.
It was their ant-women who were engrossed by the continuance of life, who wove into the dust the threads of paths, who were dedicated to the rituals of fire and water, who shook snake and lizard out of their disgusting reticules, and who hung golloping children upon their long and dusty dugs. For the moment, at least, it appeared that men were created only for the hours of darkness.
As for the white men, dazed by so much activity, they accepted to be set apart, while hands, or swift, black birds made a roof of twigs over them. Soon they were completely encased in twigs, beyond which voices crackled. It seemed that an argument of procedure was taking place. Some of the blackfellows would, some would not. Some were tired. Others shone with a light of inspiration and yearning.
Presently, Jackie came and sat down amongst the white men, whose ways he knew, but it soon became apparent, from his sullen manner, that he was but obeying orders.
‘What will they do to us, Jackie?’ Le Mesurier asked. ‘What ever it is, let it be quick.’
Jackie, however, did not intend to understand.
And Le Mesurier continued to sit, staring indifferently at the fragile, yellow-looking bones of his own hands.
Various blacks came and went. A young girl, of pretty, barely nubile breasts, and an older, very ugly woman, seated themselves behind Jackie, suggesting a relationship recently formed. The boy, though obviously possessive, was insolent to the two women. They, in their turn, were rather shy.
Some men came, who had painted their bodies, and who filled the twig shelter with the smell of drying clay. There was, in addition, the wholly natural, drugging smell of their bodies, and of ants. As the singing began, somewhere in the rear, in that cleft of the escarpment where they were encamped, round the trampled mud of the waterhole, under the quenched blue of the sky, the two women in the twig cage were playing nervously with the long hairs of their armpits; their eyes were snapping in the shadows.
The singing, as monotonous as grey earth, as grey wood, rose in sudden spasms of passion, to die down, down, as the charcoal lying. The voices of dust would die right away. To rise and sing. One voice, alone, would put on the feathers of parakeets in gay tufts of song. The big, lumbering pelican voices would spread slower wings. There was laughter, too, of young voices, and the giggling of black women.
‘At least I intend to observe this ceremony,’ the German announced, remembering a vaguely scientific mission.
He began to unfold his difficult legs.
‘No,’ said Jackie, in an unusually high, recovered voice. ‘No, no. Not now.’
So they continued to sit. Through the chinks in the very black twigs, blue was poured into blue, until there was no measuring its depths. Sparks were flying, or stars. There was the smell of hot wood-ash, and cold stars.
Before the end came.
There was a definite end.
‘Do you hear, the heathen blacks have stopped?’ said Harry Robarts, the clumsy white boy.
Jackie had gone from there, followed by his two women, now as cold as dead lizards.
The silence seeming to allow their freedom to the trinity of whites, Voss went to the door, and was looking out.
‘Look, Frank, Harry,’ he called, ‘at this unearthly phenomenon. Whatever may happen, it is too beautiful to ignore.’
His voice trembled from the effort of breaking the bonds of language. His woodenness was falling from him, and he was launching out into the fathoms of light.
‘Lord, sir, what is it, then?’ asked Harry Robarts.
‘It is evidently a comet,’ said Le Mesurier.
Harry was ashamed to ask for further explanation, but bathed in his reverent ignorance. It was beautiful. He was hollow with it.
Now the darkness was full of doubt and almost extinguished voices. The branches of trees, or black arms, were twitching, as Voss continued to observe the quick wanderer, almost transfixed by distance in that immeasurable sky. His mouth, thirsty for so long, was drinking down the dark blue.
‘Yes. A comet, evidently,’ he was gulping.
Then Jackie was standing in the silence.
‘Why are you afraid?’ Voss asked.
The blackfellow was quite cold.
But, with his dark body and few words, he began to enact the story of the Great Snake, the grandfather of all men, that had come down from the north in anger.
‘And what are we to expect?’ asked Voss humorously. ‘This angry snake will do what?’
‘Snake eat, eat,’ cried the black boy, snapping at the darkness with his white teeth.
Voss was roaring with pleasure.
‘Then the blacks will not kill us?’ asked Harry Robarts. ‘We are saved?’
‘If we are not devoured by blacks,’ Voss replied, ‘or the Great Snake, then we shall be eaten by somebody eventually. By a friend, perhaps. Man is a tempting morsel.’
Harry, who could not understand, was comforted, rather, by his more immediate prospects.
Voss addressed the aboriginal.
‘You want for white man save blackfellow from this snake?’
The explorer, however, was still laughing. He was so light.
‘Snake too much magic, no good of Mr Voss,’ Jackie replied.