Hills End Page 4

  So they set off through the ever-rising succession of lesser hills and gullies that lay between them and the great bluff, wading through the many streams, or jumping them, or crossing them over fallen logs or rocks. No distant throb reached them from the trucks so long gone, no voices apart from their own, no sound except the cracking of twigs, the hissing and whispering and rushing of waters, the mysterious groaning of big trees, and the birds and the distant dogs. The dogs were back home in Hills End and were very annoyed about it. Almost every dog in the town was attached to a stake in the ground, a running wire, or a kennel. They wailed into the morning air until they realized that no one was coming to release them and one by one accepted that it was better to doze in the sun or gnaw a bone.

  All sound except the beating of the diesel eased away through the hills like the dying of a pain. The fires went out, the smoke vanished, the sun blazed down, the dust was still, and Frank Tobias in the office at the mill nodded over his book until his head dropped and his eyes closed.

  Everything went to sleep except the great River Magnus. It writhed and rippled and rumbled and cried out its warning, but no one heard.

  ‘I think,’ said Miss Elaine Godwin at precisely ten o’clock, ‘that we will take time off for recess.’

  It was a good idea, and Butch, in particular, agreed wholeheartedly.

  Miss Godwin added, ‘Ten minutes, children. One mustn’t rest for too long or one will lose the urge to keep going.’

  They flopped down on the last ridge short of the bluff and here the ground was too rocky even for stunted trees to grow. It was barren, except for tenacious little wild flowers, a few grasses and a few isolated bushes. It was frightfully hot and they sheltered in the shade of boulders.

  Miss Godwin took an apple from her haversack and began to eat it, thoughtfully and slowly, chewing each mouthful twenty-two times, sitting erect, shoulders squared, eyes puckered against the glare. She was very, very tired. She had forgotten that she was getting older, that the last time she had come here she had not been compelled to set an example to a group of children, that she had not been distressed for any reason at all, and that she had not been afraid until she had actually reached the bluff.

  Paul peeled an orange and he could feel his heart thudding against his ribs and he ached all through. Miss Godwin had set too fast a pace. She was tough. My word, she was tough! Boys liked to stop and start, to poke under logs, to drink from springs, to throw stones into pools. Boys liked to take their time and if they didn’t get to their destination no harm was done.

  Poor Butch was nearly finished. His feet were sore, he was soaked in sweat, he wanted to lie down and sleep. He was too weary even to eat.

  Gussie panted in the shade, longing for a tall glass of home-made ginger beer. She felt she wanted to cry. She couldn’t understand why Miss Godwin had to hurry, hurry, hurry. Usually her nature walks were fun. This was awful.

  Frances was hot and bothered and worn out. She knew now that something really was wrong with Miss Godwin. She wasn’t her usual self at all. She seemed to have retired into another room. Her face had never looked so thin and tight.

  But Adrian stared at the bluff, half a mile away across this rocky gap, rearing up and up, hazed over with heat, not frying in the sun, but toasting in the sun, browner and browner. A rugged face of rock so huge it looked like the wall at the end of the world, and this gap in front of him was the moat at the end of the world. There was water in the moat as there had been since time began, always running, trickling, rushing, welling up from the depths of the earth or oozing from the wall or cascading from some immense height above it. Here they had come to find the drawings that weren’t there.

  Paul, Adrian was sure, didn’t understand him. They were so close but so far apart. Paul was too precise, too accurate in everything he said or did. All Paul was interested in was the truth. Adrian liked to look for things beyond the truth; he liked to romance; he liked to create things, not out of logs of wood or lumps of stone, but out of his mind, with a pencil in his hand or a brush, or nothing at all in his hand. He only had to close his eyes and he could see things that weren’t there. The drawings weren’t really a lie. Adrian had created them for himself. They only became a lie when other people believed they were real. And they had believed him. And then he had lied to protect himself.

  ‘Very well, children. Time’s up.’

  ‘Please, miss.’ Butch turned his eyes on her, great big pleading eyes. ‘Please, miss,’ he said, ‘but d’you think I could stay here? Honest, miss, me feet are killin’ me.’

  Miss Godwin clucked, ‘“My feet”, Christopher, “are killing me”.’

  ‘Are they, miss? Oh, I’m sorry, miss.’

  ‘Not my feet, Christopher. Your feet.’

  Butch blinked. ‘That’s right, miss. They’re killin’ me. Honest.’

  Miss Godwin clucked again. ‘I cannot leave you here, Christopher. That would never do. Oh dear, no. The sun is far, far too hot.’

  ‘Gee, miss!’

  ‘If your feet are hurting you so much it would be wiser if you hobbled another hundred yards or so until we found a nice pool in the shade where you could soak them. Does that sound better?’

  ‘Yes, miss. Thank you, miss.’

  ‘Come along, children.’

  They trailed after her, down through the boulders and the gravel, past the dead wood and the debris dumped there by the violence of forgotten storms, and Butch hobbled and grunted and winced and sweated. His heels were blistered because his shoes were tight. They had been shining new shoes, size ten, specially for the picnic. What a picnic! There would have been ice-creams and lemon drinks and big, juicy pies.

  ‘Here you are, Christopher, a nice pool and a nice rock for shade. Now you soak your feet and get them right again and then come along after us. Do you know where the caves are?’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Very well. When you get to the path at the bottom call loudly for us and we’ll let you know exactly where we are.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Don’t drop your new shoes in the water, will you?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘Come along, children.’

  Again they trailed after her, looking back at Butch, pulling faces at him, and little Harvey mocked him by limping like a man with a wooden leg.

  They disappeared amongst the rocks and Butch eased off his new shoes that weren’t shiny any more, and were scuffed on the toes, and so terribly tight at the heels. The blisters had burst and it hurt him to peel his socks off, but then he shivered in delight when he lowered his feet into the cool, kind water. In a minute or two he felt much better, much cooler all over, and he unbuckled his schoolbag and ate a large piece of apple pie.

  When he tried to put his shoes on again he couldn’t. His feet started hurting almost as much as before, so there was only one thing he could do. He curled up in the shade of the overhanging rock and went to sleep.

  At the foot of the bluff Miss Godwin gathered her children round her. She was guilty of deceiving them. They thought she only wanted to talk but really she wanted to rest. She felt like a jelly inside, quivery and without any strength. She knew now that this climb up the bluff was every bit as bad as she had feared. This was why she hadn’t climbed it when she had come before; it had been simply common sense, not cowardice.

  She drew her book from her haversack and it fell open at a photograph of the rock paintings at Lightning Totem Centre in North Australia.

  ‘…Now take a good look at these, Adrian, and tell me if you find any similarities to what you saw.’

  Adrian had been through this before. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Certain, miss.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you once more, Adrian, to go through the book from cover to cover and make your selection. There must be similarities somewhere.’

  ‘I told you about the red hands, miss.’

  ‘That doesn’t help much, Adrian
. There are thousands of red hands throughout the continent. It is their association with these other things that is mystifying.’

  Paul sighed inwardly. Of course the association was mystifying. It wasn’t even true. But Miss Godwin had spoken about this, over and over again. She was excited by it. She had kept harping on it, perhaps trying to break Adrian’s story down, but Adrian’s story had never broken. He hadn’t changed a detail. He had described things which, Miss Godwin said, had never been found before. They must have been made a very long time ago, perhaps thousands of years ago, by artists out of touch with all other men.

  So she waited while Adrian thumbed over the book again, from photograph to photograph, endeavouring to steady her nerves and marshal her strength. How she wished these children hadn’t come! Their very presence forced her to make the climb. She couldn’t get out of it with dignity. If she failed to make the climb what would these children think of a teacher who taught them to explore but was afraid to explore herself? What would they think of a teacher who enthused about the art of the stone-age men but was too frightened to make a personal effort to see it?

  ‘Really, miss,’ said Adrian, closing the book and passing it back to her, ‘it might be that I’ve forgotten, but I’m sure they were different.’

  ‘Very well, Adrian.’ Miss Godwin glanced at her watch. ‘We’ll find out how good an explorer you are. I think you’d better lead the way with Paul, don’t you, and the rest of us can follow very carefully?’

  ‘Yes, miss. There’s no danger, really. It looks much worse than it is. There’s only one thing. Don’t look down unless you’ve got something to hang on to.’

  ‘Do you hear that, children? Adrian says there’s no danger and Adrian knows. But if any of you would rather stay down here just say the word.’

  Gussie would have liked to have stayed, very, very much, but she was frightened that everyone would tease her. She didn’t like the look of the water trickling from the rocks, or the moss and the slime. And her legs were aching, with the awful ache that she got sometimes and that her mother called ‘growing pains’. It didn’t seem right that it hurt to grow, Gussie thought, but perhaps that was why the trees groaned sometimes. Perhaps it hurt them, too.

  Maisie, too, was rather anxious, but she was frightened to speak up, frightened that everyone would make fun of her.

  ‘If it is an important discovery,’ she said, ‘will we all be famous?’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Miss Godwin. ‘Adrian will be the famous one. We’ll have to name the discovery after him.’

  ‘Golly!’ said Paul, shaken for the moment. ‘Can we do that?’

  ‘Of course we can. It’s our right, and if the Government agrees the caves will be known by his name for ever and ever.’

  ‘No kiddin’?’ queried Adrian.

  Miss Godwin coughed discreetly. ‘That isn’t quite the word, Adrian, but it is a fact. They’ll be named in your honour.’ Perhaps she was rueful then. She wasn’t selfish, but it would have been nice if they had suggested the discovery be named after her. She couldn’t expect children to think of that.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she said, ‘because we’ve all come here today, I’ll write a special chapter in my book and put down all your names, and then all of us can bask in Adrian’s glory. Do you like that for an idea?’

  They certainly liked that and all talked at once and Gussie even forgot her growing pains.

  ‘Come along then. Let’s start.’

  4

  Danger

  Frank Tobias, the foreman, woke up with a headache and a stiff neck. He blinked in the direction of the big clock on the office wall and was vaguely surprised. It was five minutes past eleven.

  He had a stale taste in his mouth and his nostrils seemed to be blocked and that dull ache in his head throbbed and throbbed. He shouldn’t have allowed himself to fall asleep. Nothing sapped more life from a man than sleeping in broad daylight with the sun blazing against the window panes and down upon a creaking iron roof.

  He had brought a vacuum flask from his home and he poured a mug of tea and panted while he sipped it, because it was difficult to breathe. He felt as though he had had his head in a bag, felt half suffocated, and even a little squeamish. Then he realized that something was wrong, something was missing. The silence, apart from the occasional creaking in the roof, was complete.

  Suddenly, he lurched from his chair. The engine had stopped. Great Scott! What had happened to the diesel? And then he knew. He hadn’t refuelled it. It was always refuelled at eight. That upset over the kids had put it out of his mind. What a fine thing! The foreman of all people! If Ben Fiddler couldn’t trust his foreman whom could he trust? That meant every refrigerator in town would be defrosting, even the big freezing chamber in the shop for the meat, and the butter would be melting, and the milk turning sour. Glory, what a mess there’d be, with an outside temperature already in the nineties!

  And there was another thing. If the diesel really was out of fuel, there’d be a job to do, and what a beastly job! The pipe lines all full of air, sludge from the empty tank sucked into the cylinders of the engine. It’d take hours to get the brute started again. Only one thing to do. Get number two engine turning over and roll up his sleeves and strip down number one. Glory, old Ben would skin him alive!

  He hurried from the office, across the heat of the sizzling yard, that yard that was inches deep in wood shavings, towards the engine house. What a place it would be on a day like this—galvanized iron walls, galvanized iron roof—a man would cook in his own juice!

  He stopped then, suddenly disturbed. It was the feel of the yard, the feel of the heat, the stillness, the deathly calm, the suffocating atmosphere. He’d never felt anything quite like it. Sweat began pouring from him. Perhaps it was more than sleep that had made him squeamish.

  Instinctively he looked up to the sky. Unclouded, but not clear. Great Scott! In the north-east it looked ghastly, glazed over with a bronze sheen.

  He stared at it, couldn’t understand it, had never seen anything like it; but he knew it was wrong.

  He felt helpless, alone, isolated.

  A man was equal to things made by men, but Nature was different. There were times when Nature could be tamed, but there were times when Nature couldn’t be stopped.

  He realized he was listening again, and the stillness that he had taken to be total silence was neither stillness nor silence. He could hear dogs crying and the River Magnus rumbling, and he could see a cat across the yard in the hot shade, standing erect, bristling. A flight of ducks winged across the valley at an hour that was unusual for them, heading south. He could hear the lowing of cattle—the bull and the five cows and the calves at Rickard’s place. The milking of the cows for the coming evening was his responsibility. He could feel and hear and sense many things and all became one emotion—alarm.

  It demanded a conscious effort to continue to the engine house. No matter what was heralded by the state of the sky, one engine or the other had to be started immediately before all the perishable food in the township was ruined. He was right about the fuel. Number one was sucked dry. Frank Tobias was disgusted with himself, because when he felt the engine he knew it had been idle for an hour at least. The exhaust pipe was comparatively cool. He started the emergency unit and got back into the yard.

  He was restless and wondered how far the picnic convoy had gone. Probably most of the way. By now they’d be no more than thirty minutes’ journey from Stanley, all going well, with no punctures or breakdowns.

  He wondered about Miss Godwin and the children. They certainly would have reached their destination. Provided there had been no loitering they could have walked to the bluff in a little over two hours. There’d be no loitering with Miss Godwin. She bustled everywhere she went, as though her next hour were her last.

  He mopped his brow and wondered about himself. He was a strong man and a good man, but even the strong and the good might feel uneasy at being alone, as h
e was now, in an empty township, with a mighty barrier of mountains standing between him and the next man. The women and the kids didn’t count. If anything went wrong they’d be dependent on him. They’d be looking to him for help. He couldn’t turn to them.

  And something was wrong. He knew that more certainly than he had ever known anything. If he had been trapped at the rim of an erupting volcano he couldn’t have been more alarmed. The feel of the sky, the feel of the heat, the feel of the air, were downright evil.

  He stirred himself and paced down to the river. Old man Magnus was the weather prophet. Old man Magnus was the crystal ball that told the future.

  He stood at the bank and shivered. The water was dark, running high, rumbling. Glory, the river was almost yelling at him!

  He stumbled back to the mill across the flats.

  * * *

  The heat indeed was very trying and Miss Elaine Godwin shuffled up the face of the bluff, perspiring freely, shaking so much at the knees that she was sure they were knocking together. Dear, dear, dear! Why couldn’t she act her age and admit it was too much for her? She was groaning for breath and her pulse was beating so hard in her temples that all she could hear was its thud-thud-thud.

  She was such a fool. Here she was, condoning this danger, encouraging these children to risk their lives, when she should have forbidden this exercise. Exercise? Indeed no. It was a criminally foolish escapade which might leave her responsible for injury or death. Those dreadful parents sending their children after her! It was too much responsibility altogether. And, bless her soul, she’d have to get down again afterwards. That would be worse by far. It was this continual patter of little stones, and the times she slipped on wet rocks or slime, the times she looked down because the depths drew her eyes with a dreadful fascination, the times she groped for a foothold and sent a shower of fragments on the children beneath her. The times she was giddy and her head swam, the times she wanted to scream at the top of her voice, yet had to say so calmly, ‘Come along, children.’