Instead she broke in with the announcement, ‘Can’t ’ee see she is gone? She’s dead!’ It sounded the more terrifying for being unintelligible to her audience, just as her emotion, her bursting into tears, must have seemed disproportionate to those who had not shared her sufferings.
While Ellen Roxburgh wept for her own experience of life, the pseudo-physician, to judge by his excited jabber, appeared to be holding her responsible for his failure. He did not succeed, however, in rousing an opposition. For the first time since the meeting on the beach, the captive and her masters, especially the women, were united in a common humanity.
They allowed her to accompany the funeral procession, trapesing into the forest until they found a hollow log in which to shove the body. At once their grief evaporated, except in the mother’s case, who was prepared to keep up her snivels, but only awhile, for they were returning to the fish feast.
On this occasion the captive was first allowed a head, even a half-raw liver, but as the company grew sated, nobody thought to prevent her reaching out of her own accord to snatch a whole fish from off the coals, burning her fingers and lips in her haste to devour.
Finally she too was satisfied, not to say gorged, bloated, stupefied. She scarce heard the blacks wailing at dusk to appease whatever spirits lurked in the surrounding air. She would surely have been free to join in their prayers if so moved, but her soul had grown too dull and brutish to concern itself with spiritual matters.
A couple of days after the fish orgy, the blacks struck camp. There was good reason for doing so: the stink of rotting fish-remains was becoming intolerable, and the fleas had grown so aggressive that human beings could be seen scratching themselves with the vigour of their similarly afflicted dogs.
As the huts were dismantled, the sheets of bark were loaded on the women when the slave looked incapable of carrying more. They started out, the men as vanguard, the female sumpter-beasts and children trailing behind. A clear morning, laughter and songs, made the migration less insufferable than it might have been. Glancing up from under her load Mrs Roxburgh was inspirited by glimpses of blue haze, the aromatic smoke from the firesticks they carried along with them, and the dark forest alternating with stretches of open country, this latter a dead green illumined in places by the light off reflective lake-water.
Later in the morning a halt had evidently been made, for those at the rear of the file were suddenly squeezed concertina-fashion against those in front. In consequence the slave dropped most of her load, but was rewarded by improved vision. What she saw was a group of men standing round a vast grey tree, at an elbow of which a flock of pied birds repeatedly swooped, squawking in anger.
One of the blacks procured a length of vine, and by looping this round the trunk and pressing on the latter with the soles of his feet, was soon hauling himself in an aerial squatting position towards the bough at which the birds were directing their displeasure. Upon arrival he thrust his arm inside a hollow, and pulled out a small furred animal, and dashed it from high to his companions on the ground; where the beast was clubbed to instantaneous quivering death.
From engravings in the library at ‘Dulcet’ Mrs Roxburgh believed the little creature to have been what is called an ‘opossum’. Exhausted as she was by the journey, and chafed raw by her load of bark, she felt no more than a slight tremor of sympathy, brushing it aside with her filthy hands as though it had been the folds of an actual, and as proved by experience, superfluous veil or fichu, before returning to the state of detached assent with which she received almost every occurrence in this present life. The opossum, moreover, was food, to be stored in one of the netted ‘dillis’, though whether she herself would benefit by it was doubtful.
The women again loaded themselves. Not long after the march had been resumed there was a repetition of the foregoing scene, with incensed birds revealing the whereabouts of an intruder in their elective tree. But the men were conferring longer than before, and with exaggerated laughter in which the women and capering children finally joined. Until the slave realized she had become the object of their attention and mirth. She was dragged forward, the vine was produced, and a grinning giant of a man indicated that they expected her to climb the tree in the manner already demonstrated.
Mrs Roxburgh immediately became faint with terror. If she could have but conjured up her hardy girlhood; instead it was as though her spirit had taken refuge in stays, petticoats, a straitening bodice, the great velvet bell of a skirt, in fact all the impedimenta of refinement bequeathed to her by her mother-in-law. Her actual blackened skin, her nakedness beyond the fringe of leaves, were of no help to her; she was again white and useless, a civilized lady standing surrounded by this tribe of scornful blacks.
When one fellow more scornful than the rest, and more vindictive, thrust a firestick into her buttocks, and again, and yet again, she cried out in pain and fright, ‘No, no! I expect I’ll do it. Only don’t hurt me.’
In imitation of the man she had watched climb the tree farther back, she looped the vine and felt for a hold with the soles of her feet, and began this fearful climb. If her strength or courage threatened to desert her, a firestick was held beneath her person, and the fear of burning drove her higher — or else it was the spirit of Ellen Gluyas coming to Mrs Roxburgh’s rescue.
Indeed, she found herself close enough to the bough to thrust her arm inside the hollow and feel around for animal fur, which was there, warm and springy, on the tightly curled, slightly shivering muscular body. Compunction made her falter, but only for an instant. She dug in her own desperate claws, and hauled, and brought the creature well outside its nest before the pink little snout opened and the teeth were sunk in the back of her hand. Then she did scream with pain, and the blacks below roared and cheered, and clubbed to death the animal she let fall.
Somehow slithering she began her worse descent. As she was tossed from branch to branch, her greatest fear was for her precious girdle. If she clutched, it was at air, by handfuls, fistfuls of perfumed leaves, everything either evasive, or stubborn like the tree itself, but after a last long agonizing embrace with the abrasive trunk, she landed on earth in a state of pins and needles, torn skin, broken nails, and a throbbing hand.
She was scarcely more alive than the dead opossum, but her girdle had held and she was comforted to see amongst the leaves, her ring.
When she had adjusted her dress the other women did her the kindness of helping her load, and the file moved on.
The site chosen by the elders of the tribe for their next camp was a stretch of flat sandy ground separated from a sound or river estuary by a mangrove thicket. The grey, deformed trees, the grey water and sandy soil depressed the captive, shaken and exhausted besides by her experience earlier that day. Her companions had immediately set to work re-erecting the bark huts. She too, was expected to work, digging with a flat pearl-shell and her hands the shallow trenches she had noticed surrounding the huts at their previous camps. She imagined them to be a practical device for draining off the water in the event of a tropical downpour, but in her present frame of mind would not have cared had she and all of them been inundated and drowned like ants.
Needing to relieve herself, she went a little way apart from the others, into the mangroves, and when she had finished squatting, took the opportunity to stray farther and investigate the lie of the land. By the view she had from the water’s edge she was persuaded that they were living on an island, separated from the mainland only by this narrow strip of water. In her dispiritment and acceptance of her fate, she was glad that her discovery absolved her from making an attempt to escape by following the coast to Moreton Bay. She was immured, not only in the blacks’ island stronghold, but in that female passivity wished upon her at birth and reinforced by marriage with her poor dear Mr Roxburgh.