Arthur Upfield - Murder Must Wait

Into the lullaby of the engine and the singing of rubber on sand drifted the voice of her companion, and during the fraction of time before she glanced at him she was conscious of mental effort to break the spell.

“Did you ascertain the date of the new moon?” Bony asked.

She moved her gaze from the slender dark hands about the wheel to rest upon his face in profile, and it seemed that time halted while she looked at the firm chin, the straight nose, the high forehead and the straight blackhair which even the wind failed to disturb.

“It’s due today,” she answered.

“Today! Someone once said of the moon: ‘The maiden moon in her mantle of blue.’ And I think it was Shakespeare who wrote: ‘The moon, like a silver bow new bent in heaven.’ Do the thoughts build anything for you?”

“Not clearly,” she replied, hesitantly. “I’m not educated like you.”

“A mythical problem, Alice. The quotations came to mind to support a theory. Like a silver bow new bent in heaven… a maiden moon in her mantle of blue… a maiden and a bow… Cupid’s bow.”

After a half minute of silence, Alice said:

“I don’t get it.”

“I did think the dates those babies were stolen might have been chosen to coincide with a phase of the moon.”

“Moon madness or moonshine,” Alice said, teasingly.

“I sought the possible significance,” Bony said reprovingly. “Just why the new moon is of importance, if at all, to the abductors I have yet to learn. The new moon comes today. We shall see it just after sunset.”

On a white splodge of mullock hiding the surface of a dam appeared four emus that stupidly must race the car and dart across the track, heads low, tail feathers sweeping up and down, clawed feet at the extremity of long shanks throwing up miniature dust clouds.

Shortly after the ground colours had painted out these birds which never flew but could run at forty miles an hour, Bony stopped the car to scan the world ahead with binoculars.

“Something like two miles outare what is commonly called Devil’s Marbles,” he said. “Far to the north-west a dust cloud denotes sheep travelling to a watering place. There are no smokes, nothing to indicate the presence of aborigines, so Padre Beamer was right when he said his blacks went east up-river on their walkabout.”

Soon the Devil’s Marbles appeared on the image of the landscape like a figure on developing film. Then it seemed that under pressure of vast volcanic forces they jumped over the edge of the world. Alice wondered why Bony drove past these great brown boulders, a Stonehenge here as strange as that on the downs of England.

Bony braked the car to a halt, again stood and examined the scenery.

“We must walk,” he said. “Half a mile, that’s all. You may remain in the car, if you wish. I could drive to those Marbles, but the wheel tracks would be noted when the new moon wears her mantle of blue.”

“I’m being left out far too much,” Alice protested, and almost hastily alighted. Then she wondered why he didn’t walk direct to the heaped boulders, why he angled this way and that to walk on a chain of cement-hardclaypans, and once when she looked back at the car it was easy to believe they were space travellers exploring another planet.

Of brown granite huge smooth rocks supported others upon their shoulders, some with seeming eternal security, others with knife-edge balance which, Alice thought, possibly she could upset. She was asked to stay put, and Bony walked round the little mountain, noting one place where a camp fire had burned.

The journey back to the car seemed to take longer, and still Alice failed to understand why Bony deviated from the direct line to follow the hardclaypans. She was glad to arrive, to welcome the cooling breeze from the moving car as Bony drove on for a further mile before turning back toward Mitford.

Half an hour later the car wasstopped, and Alice couldn’t remember having seen previously the windmill and iron tanks. She strove to recall the gate which Bony alighted toopen, drove through and closed. She was sure they hadn’t gone through a gateway before, or passed a windmill, and just where they were she hadn’t the remotest knowledge.

“I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me why we’re touring about out here?” she asked, when Bony stopped before another closed gate and she was feeling the apprehension of the lost.

“Your patience, Alice, hasn’t gone unnoticed,” he told her when they were once more on the move. “Our business here is to prospect a theoretical lode which could show paying results; prospecting which must be done before the effects of stirring up the Settlement are further made manifest. It is all a matter of distances, angles, and compass points and what not.”

“Now everything is made clear to me,” Alice jibed. “Do you know where we are?”

“Yes. Ahead of us is a well called Murphy’s Triumph. Far to your leftis the Murray and Mitford. If we continued in the present direction for a month we would arrive at Perth, in Western Australia.”

“What would we do if the car broke down?”

“Walk fifteen miles to Mitford…walk south.”

“I’m glad we brought Mrs Yoti’s flask of tea and something to eat,” Alice said, adding: “I hope the car doesn’t break down.”

She only just saved herself from giggling, and then was furious at the thought which had captured her mind.

“We’ll have our tea in the shade of a tree to which I want to present you,” Bony said, and Alice was thankful he hadn’t guessed what was in her mind. “We should be there in twenty minutes. As the tree was something more than a sapling when Dampier first saw the coast of Australia, it is now the Aged King of Trees. Therefore, you must be presented to it.”

The world continued to roll towards them, parading its endlessly different faces, and then there seemed to be an end of the world and nothing but sky beyond, and the end came swiftly, to mock them by revealing yet another face… a vast flat depression covered with a russet carpet.

The car dipped downward to tread the carpet, in the centre of which was one small shrub. The carpet was woven with dried herbage upon a base of broken clay chips, and the shrub was a blot, a flaw. The blot grew under fairy magic, became a tree, and the tree grew and grew like Jack’s beanstalk to tower over the carpet, over the world. When abreast of the tree and some four hundred yards from it, Bony stopped the car, and Alice wanted to say to the tree:

“How silly to grow there all by yourself. You must be lonely, and you don’t look at all friendly.”

They drank Mrs Yoti’s tea and ate her salad sandwiches before beginning the walk to the tree. Alice was thinking she should have rested in the car when this image of eternity tore from her mind all lassitude. The girth of the trunk awed her. The grey and brown mottled bark was smooth and yet wrinkled like the skin of a pumpkin, and from high the old bark hung in long streamers to rustle and sing softly in the wind. Four great boughs sprang from the bole to support lesser branches draped with bark shed by the eucalypt instead of its leaves.

At the base of the trunk was a cavern, black walls of charcoal telling of savage attacks by grass fires, and the cavern was floored with wind-blown sand, rose pink and faintly rippled. Alice was invited to enter the trunk-cavern with Bony, and found ample room for a dozen people to shelter from the rain.

“A proper monarch,” she said, and Bony nodded agreement and stepped out after her. With him she circled the tree, but she did not follow when he climbed it to disappear among the branches. The wind rustled the bark streamers, and abruptly she felt herself dwindling into the emptiness of space materialised.