Arthur Upfield - Sands of Windee

Dante’s Undreamed Inferno

TO RIDE ALONG the fence that marked the southern extremity of the Windee fire was as though they rode along the outskirts of a great city hidden by the darkness but pointed by its tens of thousands of lights and its flaming sky-signs. Just north of the fence and for some four miles’ distance the army of fire-fighters under the leadership of the indomitable Stanton had started little fires which were afterwards beaten out, so that a broad ribbon of grass was burned to ash and presented an impassable barrier to the main fire that a few hours later swept upon it.

Thousands of acres of knee-high grass had vanished, but the burning grass had fired twigs, sticks, and branches fallen from the parent trees during several years, and these, together with dead trees still standing, created a greater heat that fired the pine- andbelar trees and scorched and shrivelled the hardy non-resinous mulgas. A hundred million torches, from the great pillars of flame consuming the pine-trees, down to the tiny last flares of dead and fallen branches, turned the steadily rising smoke into lurid horror. From this inferno came an incessant fusillade of reports in all degrees of volume and many qualities of tone. Uprising through the crimson pall, universe after universe of stars rushed into oblivion, as though the gods, stooping to gather handfuls of worlds flung them up in the delirium of their power. Thousands upon thousands, two hundred thousand acres of scrub and wheat-like grass, were disintegrating, turning into those upward-rushing, vanishing universes and the vast low-hanging crimson cloud.

Bony and his companion rode parallel with the fence, but some five hundred yards south of it, so great still was the heat of the fire. When four miles due west of the dam and mill, they came to a right-angle in the fire-break, and, seeing there that the fence was cut, they too made the angle and rode north.

Here the air was comparatively cool, the wind coming from a little north of west, a zephyr breeze that yet smelled of the incense sent up by grass and green leaves. The angle they traversed represented the south-west point where the fire had been stopped. For two miles the break, marked clearly by the edge of the knee-high grass, ran due north, but then it began to curve westward, and Bony saw that at this place the fire had met the fire-fighters, and thenceforward the fire-fighters had been forced slowly back.

So dry was the grass, so dry theair, that the fire moved slowly against the little wind there was. To east and north, seven or eight miles through and beyond the inferno, the main body offirefighters were burning long ribbons of fire-breaks, two men here, three and four north, one or two south, precisely as a battalion of infantry strung out in a long line and ordered to dig in, the isolated parties eventually to link up in one long line of entrenchments.

Under thegeneralship of old Jeff Stanton, already that line stretched to magical lengths. Truck-loads of men were rushed up and down, widening and lengthening it, striving to the limit of human endurance to make of it a great Hindenburg line, impregnable to the fire advancing on it then as fast as an athlete can run.

Man was forced to become elemental in a battle with the fiercest element. At such moments the soul is glimpsed. Among this small body of men was no thought of wages, of strikes, of go-slowness. There was no thought of saving a vast area of land and many thousands of sheep for the master, even an admired master. Nor was there any thought of striving to preserve their jobs. The dominating motive was to win, to beat back the fire-devil; and they fought in exactly the same spirit that a university eight rows to win, succumbing to nothing short of sheer exhaustion at the end of the race.

We-in Britain and Australia-have been reproached for our love of sport. It was the elemental love of sport which urged on Jeff Stanton’s men until they dropped and were picked up by truck-drivers to be rushed to another place, there to work till they dropped once more. It may have been this spirit that made Father Ryanelect to remain in depopulated Mount Lion. Such a spirit may have actuated old Jeff Stanton to pay good wages and yet make a million. In their diverse ways both these men were deep, deep as the ocean, not raw students but experts in the study of human nature.

Knowing men, bushmen in particular, Bony was equally expert with the squatter and the priest. When he and Jack Withers came on the hundred-gallon galvanized tank and the miniature dump of chaff, and, leaving their horses to eat their fill at a bag trough slung between two trees to which they were tied, proceeded along the edge of the fire, he was by no means surprised to sec two devils direct from Dante’s Inferno running about purposefully with a flaming billet in one hand and an empty sack in the other.

To the uninitiated their actions would have been childish. It was as though they childishly lit little fires in make-believe imitation of the great fire. Then, seemingly afraid of their little fires, they proceeded to beat them out. Yet they worked with systematic thoroughness. Their little fires laid a swath of black ash twenty feet wide and a bare hundred yards from the main fire, there creeping against the wind as an old man may walk.

Now and then one straightened his back and wiped the running sweat from his eyes with fist or forearm. Their clothes were rent andgrimed, the legs of their trousers holed by sparks, their boots being slowly burned off their feet. Their bodies were filthy with perspiration and soot, but the living spirit of these two illiterate chunks of humanity was an inextinguishable, indestructible point of brilliant purity.

“Cripes! Where the ruddy hell ’aveyousbeen?” one of these “chunks”, barely recognizable as the Stormbird, demanded of Withers. “Didyous bring the tea and tucker?”

“My oath!”Jack Withers assured the tall, raw-boned and iron-hard man who invariably raised a fight wherever he went. “We left the tea and the billies and the grub on the tank. Better take a spell, an’ me an’ Bony ’ullcarry on.”

“ ’Bouttime too,” grunted Combo Joe, who was short and broad, and able to lift a ton-truck clear of bog. “Any one ’udthink this ’erewus a picnic.”

“‘Oo’syerlady friend, Jack?”

“This ’ere is Bony, friend of mine,” Withers grinned. “This ’ere is Mister Stormbird and Mister Combo Joe”; but never could Bony decide which was which, for upon each was directed one of poor Jack Withers’s eyes.

The relieved lurched away and the relief took over. Then followed three hours of such work as made it a period of agony. Bony’s arms ached excruciatingly. His eyes smarted and wept water. His throat became parched and sulphuric. He was dimly aware of Withers moving with the seeming tirelessness of a machine, and knew not that to his companion he presented a similar picture. Lit by the flames he created, bathed in the lurid light of the main fire, his brain heated to boiling-point, Bony at last came to regard himself as being the one opponent of the creeping monster always pushing him ahead of itself. It became a malignant personality with a million eyes and a thousand fiery arms, with whom he was engaged in a fight to the death. And such a fight, an endless and unequal battle, for his arms and legs were encased in lead.

“Well, ’ow’sshe going?”

Bony staggered upright and looked into the face of the Storm-bird with glassy eyes. “Tired!” he wheezed.

“Fat-ee-gu-ingkind-erlife,” the Stormbird remarked, only between each word wasan horrific oath.“ ’Ere, give usyer bag and fire-stick, and let’s seeyer run like a two-year-old to the tank where we leftyous a couple of billies of tea. Come on, Combo! These blank overgrown childrenain’t donenothink since we bingorn. Now watch two men ’avea go!”