Dawn found us in the low hills of the Wells and Emu ranges, the sun coming up in a fire-ball blaze of brilliant light and the McKay Range standing black in silhouette like humped up islands in a desert sea. By then we could hardly keep our eyes open, and when we hit the sand I was driving so carelessly I stalled the engine. It took us a good two hours to dig ourselves out and get clear of the soft patch, using the sand mats, and a mile or two further on I drove the Land-Rover into the sparse shade of a small grove of snappy gums. We didn’t eat, just drank some of our water that was warm and tasted of metal and then fell into the back and lay there dozing, too tired and listless to sleep properly. I remember looking at my watch, the time ten-thirty. Except for the breaks at Mt Newman and Talawana we had been driving steadily for twenty-four hours. According to the chart we were within 60 miles of the Stock Route with the Lake less than 40 miles to the south-east. Vaguely I wondered how far ahead of us Garrety was now. Even with Tom driving, and used to the country, could he stand it continuously, hour after hour?
I wondered whether I could, and I was fit, the heat exhausting and my mind wandering. And the desert still ahead of us. Did anybody still use the Stock Route? And that other track — would we be able to follow it? I was thinking then of the faint mark of that circle on the Oakover River chart and McIlroy dead these thirty years. Was that where he had died? Or was that the rough position of his copper monster? Was it all a dream, a mirage? Then why the mark? And the chart itself — it was an aeronautical chart. It couldn’t have existed in Big Bill Garrety’s day. So his son Ed had made that mark, and then thought better of it and rubbed it out. Why? And how had he known?
So many questions, my mind wandering and the heat enclosing me, weighing me down, my skin prickling and my eyes gritty as though clogged with sand. The desert. Soon we would be in the desert. And the wells all dry most likely at this time of the year. It was madness, this driving into the unknown, following a man whose sanity I began to doubt — in search of what? And for what? What the hell was I doing it for? For Janet? For a chit of a girl with a turned-up nose and a freckled face? Or was I, like McIlroy, risking my life for the vague chance of a fortune?
Over and over, around and around, the questions rattled in my throbbing head. Never an answer, only questions, and the heat burning up my sleep, destroying the rest I needed. And then Kennie started talking to himself — some row with his father. Talking in a sort of delirium from which he woke suddenly with a cry, sitting up wild-eyed and staring at me in the hooded glow of the interior. ‘Pa — I thought he was here.’ He leaned forward, lifting the back flap and peering out at the sand-glare. ‘Dreaming, was I?’
‘Something like that,’ I murmured, the glare red through my closed eyelids. ‘Close the gap for God’s sake.’
‘It’s hot in here.’
‘Close it.’ I snapped irritably.
Silence and a moment’s pause, then the red glow was gone from my eyeballs as he let it drop. ‘We must be out of our minds,’ he mumbled. ‘The engine’s only got to pack in …’
‘Why should it?’
‘Well, a spring then.’
‘I brought a spare.’
It silenced him, but only for a moment. ‘You should’ve hired a plane, searched for him that way. The shade temperature must be all of 120°. We get bogged in sand or lose our way — men die every year trying to walk out of the bush in summer. Twenty-four hours. That’s all you got if you start walking. Twenty-four hours without water and you’re done, finished. It’s crazy.’
I stretched out my hand and gripped his arm. ‘You didn’t have to come. Now shut up. Try and get some sleep.’ I looked at my watch. Only eleven-fifteen and the worst of the heat still to come. ‘We’ll brew up at the nice conventional hour of five o’clock and start again at sunset. Okay?’ I could feel his body trembling, the skin of his arm hot to my touch and damp with sweat.
He nodded his head. ‘I suppose so. At least it isn’t September. September is the worst — blows like hell Pa always said.’ And he added, ‘I wish Pa was here. He knows this country.’
‘And I don’t. Is that what you mean?’ God! How irritability got one by the throat in this heat. But he was right. I’d never been in a desert in my life. And I lay back, wondering whether Ed Garrety had ever been in the Gibson before, remembering that letter of his, the note of hopelessness, thinking that whether he had or not it didn’t matter a damn, for there wouldn’t be much help from him. We were on our own, and dozing the slow, burning minutes away I couldn’t get the thought of the Gibson out of my head — the knowledge that it was out there waiting for me, stretching endlessly away into the Red Centre of Australia. The hot midday wind began to get up, drifting sand, a rustling hard-grained reminder of endless desert miles to disturb my restless sleep.
That evening, as the sun set and the sky ahead darkened to purple, a velvet mantle with the diamond-hard glitter of stars, we passed through the McKay Range, heading about 100° east with the Harbut hills fading as we neared them in the increasing darkness. The track was difficult to follow in the headlights, at times almost non-existent, only a faint lessening of the vegetation indicating where it had been, and spinifex everywhere, hard and spiky. Little but brumbies, donkeys and camels appeared to have used it in living memory. Indeed but for the animals I imagine it would have disappeared entirely. We saw their tracks and their droppings everywhere, camels chiefly, and when we paused in sand halfway between the McKays and the Harbuts I found in torchlight the faint marks of a vehicle. But though they looked recent, there was no way of knowing whether it was the Jarra Jarra Land-Rover or some survey party.
The going was slow as we probed for indications of the track, not daring to drive across country on a compass course. And when the moon came up it was little better. It was an old moon, and though it revealed the dead dry desiccated country through which we were driving in a pale translucence that washed all colour from the scene, it only confused us, dimming the headlights and straining our eyes.
We never saw the junction with the Canning Stock Route. I didn’t know it then, but the track marked on the chart as the Stock Route doesn’t exist. There never was a track, just a series of wells, the stockmen driving their cattle cross-country from one well to the next. Whoever marked that track on the chart had certainly never been within a thousand miles of Canning’s route. I cursed him as we strained our eyes for a sight of the well marked No. 23, finding it more by luck than judgement, a draw wheel on an upended post leaning drunkenly over a pit boarded with desert oak. The water when we got it up in our billycan was brackish.
From this well to Karara Soaks was only seven miles and the survey track we were now on led straight towards it. The country was hilly — mesa and butte formation sprawled like miniature Table Mountains along the skyline. It was on this section that we found the wheelmarks again. They were clear and sharp in the dawn and the same width as our own.
The sun was coming up ahead of us as we reached the Soaks, which was not a soak at all, but another derelict-looking wellhead between low hills of red broken rock with a dry creek bed skirting them. The hills had small trees on them and there were trees in the distance beyond the creek bed, and around the wellhead there was saltbush and the sered wispy remains of grass killed by drought and the salt in the wind. The water, when we got it up, proved surprisingly good. It was also refreshingly cool. We topped up our containers, then stripped and washed ourselves down.