3
The creek had hardly been crossed before the Hanging Rock had risen up directly ahead of the four girls, clearly visible beyond a short grassy slope. Miranda had been the first to see it. ‘No, no, Edith! Not down at your boots! Away up there – in the sky.’ Mike remembered afterwards how she had stopped and called back over her shoulder to the little fat one trudging behind.
The immediate impact of its soaring peaks induced a silence so impregnated with its powerful presence that even Edith was struck dumb. The splendid spectacle, as if by special arrangement between Heaven and the Head Mistress of Appleyard College, was brilliantly illuminated for their inspection. On the steep southern façade the play of golden light and deep violet shade revealed the intricate construction of long vertical slabs; some smooth as giant tombstones, others grooved and fluted by prehistoric architecture of wind and water, ice and fire. Huge boulders, originally spewed red hot from the boiling bowels of the earth, now come to rest, cooled and rounded in forest shade.
Confronted by such monumental configurations of nature the human eye is woefully inadequate. Who can say how many or how few of its unfolding marvels are actually seen, selected and recorded by the four pairs of eyes now fixed in staring wonder at the Hanging Rock? Does Marion Quade note the horizontal ledges crisscrossing the verticals of the main pattern whose geological formation must be memorized for next Monday’s essay? Is Edith aware of the hundreds of frail starlike flowers crushed under her tramping boots, while Irma catches the scarlet flash of a parrot’s wing and thinks it a flame amongst the leaves? And Miranda, whose feet appear to be choosing their own way through the ferns as she tilts her head towards the glittering peaks, does she already feel herself more than a spectator agape at a holiday pantomime? So they walk silently towards the lower slopes, in single file, each locked in the private world of her own perceptions, unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth: of the creakings and shudderings, the wandering airs and currents known only to the wise little bats, hanging upside down in its clammy caves. None of them see or hear the snake dragging its copper coils over the stones ahead. Nor the panic exodus of spiders, grubs and woodlice from rotting leaves and bark. There are no tracks on this part of the Rock. Or if there ever have been tracks, they are long since obliterated. It is a long long time since any living creature other than an occasional rabbit or wallaby trespassed upon its arid breast.
Marion was the first to break through the web of silence. ‘Those peaks . . . they must be a million years old.’
‘A million. Oh, how horrible!’ Edith exclaimed. ‘Miranda! Did you hear that?’ At fourteen, millions of years can be almost indecent. Miranda, illumined by a calm wordless joy, merely smiled back. Edith persisted. ‘Miranda! It’s not true, is it?’
‘My Papa made a million out of a mine once – in Brazil,’ Irma said. ‘He bought Mama a ruby ring.’
‘Money’s quite different,’ Edith rightly observed.
‘Whether Edith likes it or not,’ Marion pointed out, ‘that fat little body of hers is made up of millions and millions of cells.’ Edith put her hands over her ears, ‘Stop it, Marion! I don’t want to hear about such things.’
‘And what’s more, you little goose, you have already lived for millions and millions of seconds.’
Edith had gone quite white in the face. ‘Stop it! You’re making me feel giddy.’
‘Ah, don’t tease her, Marion,’ Miranda soothed, seeing the usually unsnubbable Edith for once deflated. ‘The poor child’s overtired.’ ‘Yes,’ said Edith, ‘and those nasty ferns are pricking my legs. Why can’t we all sit down on that log and look at the ugly old Rock from here?’
‘Because,’ said Marion Quade, ‘You insisted on coming with us, and we three seniors want a closer view of the Hanging Rock before we go home.’
Edith had begun to whimper. ‘It’s nasty here . . . I never thought it would be so nasty or I wouldn’t have come . . .’
‘I always thought she was a stupid child and now I know,’ Marion reflected out loud. Precisely as she would have stated a proven truth about an isosceles triangle. There was no real rancour in Marion – only a burning desire for truth in all departments.
‘Never mind, Edith,’ Irma comforted. ‘You can go home soon and have some more of Saint Valentine’s lovely cake and be happy.’ An uncomplicated solution not only to Edith’s present woe but to the sorrows of all mankind. Even as a little girl, Irma Leopold had wanted above all things to see everyone happy with the cake of their choice. Sometimes it became an almost unbearable longing, as when she had looked down at Mademoiselle asleep on the grass this afternoon. Later it would find expression in fantastic handouts from an overflowing heart and purse, no doubt acceptable to Heaven, if not to her legal advisers: handsome donations to a thousand lost causes – lepers, sinking theatrical companies, missionaries, priests, tubercular prostitutes, saints, lame dogs and deadbeats all over the world.
‘I have a feeling there used to be a track somewhere up there,’ said Miranda. ‘I remember my father showing me a picture of people in old-fashioned dresses having a picnic at the Rock. I wish I knew where it was painted.’*
‘They may have approached it from the opposite side,’ said Marion, producing her pencil. ‘In those days they probably drove from Mount Macedon. The thing I should like to see are those queer balancing boulders we noticed this morning, from the drag.’
‘We can’t go much further,’ said Miranda. ‘Remember, girls, I promised Mademoiselle we wouldn’t be long away.’
At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mountain laurel glossy above the dogwood’s dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace. ‘Well, at least let us see what it looks like over this first little rise,’ said Irma, gathering up her voluminous skirts. ‘Whoever invented female fashions for nineteen hundred should be made to walk through bracken fern in three layers of petticoats.’ The bracken soon gave way to a belt of dense scratchy scrub ending in a waist-high shelf of rock. Miranda was first out of the scrub and kneeling on the rock to pull up the others with the expert assurance that Ben Hussey had admired this morning when she opened the gate. (‘At the age of five,’ her father loved to remember, ‘our Miranda threw a leg over a horse like a boundary rider.’ ‘Yes,’ her mother would add, ‘and entered my drawing-room with her head thrown back, like a little queen.’)
They found themselves on an almost circular platform enclosed by rocks and boulders and a few straight saplings. Irma at once discovered a sort of porthole in one of the rocks and was gazing down fascinated at the Picnic Grounds below. As if magnified by a powerful telescope, the little bustling scene stood out with stereoscopic clarity between the groups of trees: the drag with Mr Hussey busy amongst his horses, smoke rising from a small fire, the girls moving about in their light dresses and Mademoiselle’s parasol open like a pale blue flower beside the pool.
It was agreed to rest a few minutes in the shade of some rocks before retracing their steps to the creek. ‘If only we could stay out all night and watch the moon rise,’ Irma said. ‘Now don’t look so serious, Miranda, darling – we don’t often have a chance to enjoy ourselves out of school.’