In the heat, after the men had left to muster, Mr Judd was proceeding methodically. He had a scrap of crumpled paper, on which he would make his own signs. There was a stub of lead pencil in his mouth. One of his thumbs had been badly crushed by a sledge-hammer long ago, and had grown, in place of a nail, a hard, yellow horn. Now as he worked, he experienced a sense of true pride, out of respect for what he was handling, for those objects, in iron, wood, or glass did greatly influence the course of earthly life. He could love a good axe or knife, and would oil and sharpen it with tender care. As for the instruments of navigation, the mysticism of figures from which they were inseparable made him yet more worshipful. Pointing to somewhere always just beyond his reach, the lovely quivering of rapt needles was more delicate than that of ferns. All that was essential, most secret, was contained for Judd, like his own spring-water, in a nest of ferns.
Sometimes he would breathe upon the glass of those instruments, and rub it with the cushiony part of his hand, of which the hard whorls of skin and fate were, by comparison, indelicate.
But now he complained:
‘Frank, I cannot find that big prismatic compass in the wooden frame.’
‘It cannot have got far, a big thing like that,’ answered Le Mesurier, who was not greatly interested.
‘These blacks would thieve any mortal thing, I would not be surprised,’ the convict said.
He was sweating, as big men will, in sheets, but his upper lip was marked by little stationary points of exasperation, anxiety, even cold despair.
He was looking everywhere for that compass.
‘Frank,’ he said, ‘it has got me bested. It will not be found.’
Then he went down to the gunyas, and cursed the black gins that were squatted there, looking in one another’s hair, laughing with, and tumbling the small, red-haired children. The black gins did not understand. Their breasts became sullen.
To Judd, the peculiar problem of the lost instrument was as intricate as the labyrinth of heat, through which he trudged back.
Mr Voss was furious, of course, because he had been expecting something, if not necessarily this.
Judd went away.
In the late afternoon when the other men rode in, and were watering their horses and coiling their whips, they were closely questioned, but there was not a single one could honestly feel the compass concerned him personally. At best amused, at worst they were irritated at having to turn out their packs.
Voss, who had come down to the tents, a prophetic figure in his dark clothes, said that the instrument must be found.
Boyle, too, had come across. He had questioned the blacks at the camp, and was pretty certain no native was withholding the prismatic compass.
‘Then there is no explanation,’ Judd cried, and flung his own saddle-bags from side to side, so that some of the onlookers were put in mind of the flapping, of a pair of great, desperate wings.
‘It is as if I was dreaming,’ the convict protested.
For almost all, the situation had begun to assume the terrible relevant irrelevance of some dreams. They stood rooted in the urgent need to find the compass.
Which Judd, it now appeared, was drawing out of his own saddle-bag.
‘But I never put it there,’ said his shocked voice. ‘There was no reason.’
His strong face was weak.
‘No reason,’ he added, ‘that I can think of.’
But he would continue to fossick in desperation through his memories of all evil dreams.
Voss had turned and walked away. The incident was closed, if not to his positive advantage, to the detriment of some human being. Yet, there were times when he did long to love that which he desired to humiliate. He recalled, for instance, the convict’s wife, whose simplicity was subtle enough to survive his proving of her lie. He remembered, with some feeling, the telescope that Judd himself had rigged up, and found unequal to its purpose of exploring the stars. Associated with such thoughts, of human failure and deceit, the German’s shoulders narrowed as he flumped across the dusty yard. Judd’s humiliation over the discovered compass forced him up the side-tracks of pity, until, suddenly, he jibbed. Delusion beckoned. His throne glittered achingly.
Down at the tents, Judd said:
‘Mr Palfreyman, I did not put that compass there.’
‘I believe you,’ answered Palfreyman.
‘There was no reason.’
There is always a reason, Palfreyman corrected silently, and would continue to search for this one.
Their stay at Jildra had become for the ornithologist a season of sleep-walking, dominated by his dream — it could have been — of tortured moonlight and rustling shadow, that retrospect had cast in lead. This brooding statue stumped horribly for him under the glass moon, but although Palfreyman watched — in fact, he continued to do so long after they had moved on — Voss the man did not walk again.
And now, at Jildra, something else was about to happen. Blacks scented it first upon the evening air, and dogs were half inclined to snarl, half to fool with one another. Then some of the white men, who had washed their necks and faces of dust, and who were smelling of dried water and soap, and an aggressive, crude cleanliness, came up formally from the tents to announce that a team was approaching. Distantly already the barking of strange dogs was going off like pop-guns, and the dogs of Jildra had begun to whine and to bite at one another’s shoulders, to express their joy and solidarity.
‘It is Thorndike, then,’ said Voss, running out without a hat, which left the white of his forehead exposed: he could have been emerging from a mask.
‘Damn me, if you were not right,’ contributed Boyle.
The latter was now permanently good-tempered, indifferent, acceptant, and, above all, amused.
In time the team was straining into Jildra, with that gallantry of animals reaching a goal. The bullocks groaned to a stop, and were turning up their eyes, dilating their nostrils, and, to the last, resisting the heavy yokes with their necks.
Thorndike, a scrawny, bloodshot individual, did not make any great show of pleasure, so insignificant and regular were his habits. Nor did he pay much attention to the German, about whom people had been talking; he merely handed over, as he had undertaken. For Thorndike brought, in addition to the expected provisions for Jildra, an axe that had been left behind at the station of a Mr McKenzie with whom the expedition had camped some miles farther back, as well as a bundle of mail, tied with a bow of string, for the German cove.
Voss took the mail, and was striking his leg with it as he asked Thorndike questions, flat ones about his journey and the weather, at which the other rasped back in some amusement. Thorndike had never seen a German, but was determined not to look at this one. So he spat, and worked his adam’s apple, and went about freeing his bullocks.
Presently, Voss went inside and untied his letters.
There were instructions and digressions, naturally, by Mr Bonner. There was a friendly line from Sanderson; newspapers; and a lady had contributed a fly-veil, made by her own hands, out of knotted, green silk.
There was also the letter, it would appear, from Miss Trevelyan.
When he had read or examined all else, throwing pieces of intelligence to his host, who had by this time pushed back his plate, and was picking his teeth and mastering his wind, Voss did break the seal of Miss Trevelyan’s letter, and was hunching himself, and spreading and smoothing the paper, as if it had been so crumpled, he must induce it physically to deliver up its text.