When he had gone a certain distance, the leader would perceive the folly of continuing, and stand a while, motionless upon his stilts of legs, reflected in the muddy water or watery mud. Then, I must return to those men, he would realize, and the thought of it was terrible. Nothing could have been more awful than the fact that they were men.
But a crust did form at last upon the slimy surface of the earth, and the party was able finally to ride forward.
Moreover, the land was celebrating their important presence with green grass that stroked the horses’ bellies, or lay down beneath them in green swathes. The horses snatched at the grass, until they were satisfied, or bloated, and the green scours had begun to run. Similarly, the eyes of the men became sated with the green of those parklands, although they continued to sing, like lovers or children, as they rode. They sang songs about animals that they remembered from childhood, or the vibrant songs they had hummed against their teeth as youths, waiting in the dusk against a stile. These latter songs were the more difficult to remember, in that they had never been sung for their words. The songs had poured forth in the beginning as the spasms and vibrations of the singers’ bodies.
So love and anticipation inspired the cavalcade as it passed through the green country, still practically a swamp. The passionate cries of birds exploded wonderfully overhead. The muscular forms of cool, smooth, flesh-coloured trees rose up before the advancing horsemen. Yet the men themselves, for all their freedom and their joyful songs, only remotely suggested flesh. By this time, it is true, their stock of provisions was inadequate, but an abundant supply of game had arrived to celebrate the good season. The men did take advantage of this, to catch and eat, only never more than was necessary to prolong life, for deprivation and distance had lessened their desire for food. It was foreign to their wizened stomachs. They preferred to eat dreams, but did not grow fat on these, quite the reverse.
Into this season of grass, game, and songs burst other signs of victorious life. In a patch of scrub stood a native, singing, stamping, and gesticulating with a spear, of which the barbed head suggested the snout of a crocodile. Three or four companions were grouped about the singer in the bower of scrub, but the others were more diffident, or else they lacked the gift to express their joy.
‘He is doubtless a poet,’ said Voss, who had grown quite excited. ‘What is the subject of his song, Jackie?’
But Jackie could not, or would not say. He averted his face, beneath which his throat was swelling, either with embarrassment or longing.
The enthusiasm of their leader had made several of the white men sullen.
‘There is no reason why the boy should understand their dialect,’ said Ralph Angus, and was surprised that he had thought it out for himself.
Voss, however, remained smiling and childlike.
‘Naturally,’ he replied, bearing no grudge against the individual who had censured him. ‘But I will ride over and speak with this poet.’
The stone figures of his men submitted.
Voss rode across, sustained by a belief that he must communicate intuitively with these black subjects, and finally rule them with a sympathy that was above words. In his limpid state of mind, he had no doubt that the meaning of the song would be revealed, and provide the key to all further negotiations.
But the blacks ran away, leaving the smell of their rancid bodies in the patch of scrub.
When the rejected sovereign returned, still smiling generously, and said: ‘It is curious that primitive man cannot sense the sympathy emanating from relaxed muscles and a loving heart,’ his followers did not laugh.
But their silence was worse. Each hair was distinct in their cavernous nostrils.
During the days that followed, mobs of blacks appeared to accompany the expedition. Although the natives never showed themselves in strength, several dark skins at a time would flicker through pale grass, or come to life amongst dead trees. At night there was frequent laughter, a breaking of sticks, more singing, and a thumping of the common earth.
Voss continued to question Jackie.
‘Is there no indication of their intentions?’ he asked, in some helplessness. ‘Blackfeller no tell why he come, why he sing?’
They were glad, said the boy.
It seemed obvious in the sunsets of plenty. At evening the German watched a hand daub flat masses of red and orange ochre above the already yellowing grass. Each evening was a celebration of the divine munificence. Accepting this homage, the divine presence himself was flaming, if also smiling rather thinly.
Although less appreciative of cosmic effects than was his master, the black boy would have prolonged the sunset. He kept close to the German at the best of times, but now, when the night fell, he had taken to huddling outside the fly of the small tent, where the terrier had been in the habit of lying.
This dog — in appearance terrier, in fact a stout-hearted mongrel — presented to Voss in the early stages by a New England settler, had disappeared, it was suddenly noticed.
‘She could have staked herself, or been ripped open by a kangaroo,’ said Voss.
He wandered off, calling the lost Tinker, but soon abandoned his efforts to find her. A matter of such insignificance could not occupy his mind for long.
‘Of course you know what has happened to the poor tyke,’ Turner whispered to Judd.
Deliberately he chose Judd, in whom he was always confiding.
Judd, however, on this occasion, did not listen to Turner’s conclusions. He was enclosed in his own thoughts.
Very soon after this, the fat country through which they were passing began to thin out, first into stretches of yellow tussock, then into plains of grey saltbush, which, it was apparent, the rains had not touched. Even the occasional outcrops of quartz failed as jewellery upon the sombre bosom of that earth.
One morning Turner began to cry:
‘I cannot! I cannot!’
The cores of his extinct boils were protesting at the prospect of re-entering the desert. His gums were bleeding under the pressure of emotion.
If the others barely listened, or were only mildly disgusted by his outburst, it was because each man was obsessed by the same prospect. Without an audience, Turner quietened down, and was jolted on.
‘At least we shall throw off our friends the blackfellows, if they are at all rational,’ observed Ralph Angus. ‘No one in his senses would leave abundance to enter this desert.’
‘That you would not understand, Ralph,’ grinned Voss, implying that he did.
‘I am entitled to my own opinions,’ muttered the young man. ‘But I will keep them to myself in future.’
Voss continued to grin. His flesh had been reduced to such an extent, he could no longer smile.
So the party entered the approaches to hell, with no sound but that of horses passing through a desert, and saltbush grating in a wind.
This devilish country, flat at first, soon broke up into winding gullies, not particularly deep, but steep enough to wrench the backs of the animals that had to cross them, and to wear the bodies and nerves of the men by the frantic motion that it involved. There was no avoiding chaos by detour. The gullies had to be crossed, and on the far side there was always another tortuous gully. It was as if the whole landscape had been thrown up into great earthworks defending the distance.
In the course of the assault, the faces of all those concerned began to wear an expression of abstraction. In the lyrical grass-lands through which they had lately ridden, they had sung away what was left of their youth. Now, in their silence, they had even left off counting their sores. They had almost renounced their old, wicker bodies. They were very tired at sunset. Only the spirit was flickering in the skull. Whether it would leap up in a blaze of revelation, remained to be seen.