Arthur Upfield - Sands of Windee

Bony rode now with but two regrets in his heart. His hope of salvation was vanishing quickly. He regretted that he would fail to take Dash back to Marion Stanton, and he regretted that he had not brought a revolver, for when the end drew very near a revolver bullet would be far more merciful than fire. He thought of his wife, so understanding of his dual nature, and of his sons, especially of Charles, who would so easily slip into his shoes and honourably carry on his father’s successes.

He and the horse suddenly swept on a mob of kangaroos halted in frightened perplexity. The grey and the red and the chocolate coloured forms, some with white chests, hardly moved when Grey Cloud dashed through them. They were stupid with fear and dazed by the smoke. A fox on a rabbit-burrow was digging furiously, and not two yards from it a rabbit sat at an entrance-hole calmly cleaning its face as does a cat. The fear of natural enemies was swamped by the greater fear of the advancing universal destroyer.

The minutespassed, three all told, when Bony saw the barrier that had turned back the kangaroos. The smoke ahead rapidly thickened. Then within it he saw first a faint pink glow that deepened with his progress. As from a photographic plate in a developing bath the opaqueness began to break up. There appeared blots of crimson that magically brightened into glittering flames, magically increased in number, isolated flames and chains of flame, flames that remained stationary, and lines of running darting flame which clung low to the earth.

There burned a section of the Windee fire, creeping slowly as a man may walk against the wind. Bony knew it was the beginning of the end, for he was now in a fiery corridor less than a mile in width, a corridor whose walls of fire were rushing on him together.

He was forced northward. For the first time he dug his heels into Grey Cloud’s flanks, determined to ride until the horse dropped or became mad and ungovernable with the swelling terror. That would be the exact end for both horse and man.

The reality of life becamean horrific phantasmagoria. To them gathered a racing escort. Before, beside, and behind them fully a thousand creatures of the wild fled in their company, seeing in Grey Cloud a leader, a living thing that still moved with purpose. Excepting on their right, where lay the Windee fire, the racing horse and its rider became hedged in by bounding kangaroos, galloping foxes and dogs, bellies to ground, tongues lolling, tails horizontally stiff. Rabbits scurried or crouched, dazed by the flying forms and pounding feet of the larger animals. Snakes writhed and struck in impotent fury: goannas glared down malevolently from the topmost branches of the trees, hate and anger incarnate in reptilian beauty.

Rapidly the temperature rose. The corridor now had shrunk to a quarter of a mile in width. The multitude of terror-impelled animals so increased that many were swept against the trees and left struggling with broken legs. A flock of half a hundred emus-the ostriches of Australia-rushed into the escort, joined it. and pounded along with it.

No longer did Bony attempt to guide his horse. Panic governed Grey Cloud as it governed the wild host about them. The man’s eyes burned, great circles of pain bathed in gushing tears. He was aware now of individual incidents that excluded the grand total effect of this inferno undreamed of by Dante. He saw flames, blue and yellow, lick upward about a giant sandalwood tree. He saw another such tree more firmly gripped by fire, and with a flash of his old interest in natural phenomena saw how the fire was forcing the oil of the tree to the leaves and causing it to drop from their points, splashing into little founts of fire on the ground.

He saw a thirty-foot pine-tree split open in a gush of fire with the report of a gun. He saw rabbits running aimlessly, lost from the scattered burrows, not pausing even when they raced into the line of scarlet creeping with a hiss through the grass. He heard their screams between the sharp reports of bursting trees, the thudding of falling branches, the roar of flame, and the upward rush of heated air.

The smoke shut out the sun. The daylight waned, and was replaced by a crimson glare that lit the scene of a vast stampeding mob of animals, in whose centre sped a grey horse bearing a hunched rider. A grand drive by the hunter, Death!

Quite suddenly the passing trees vanished. The ground rose gently. To Bony came the sound of pebbles being struck by hoofs, and then he knew and would have screamed his triumph, and the triumph of all those animals and birds who had followed his leading, had not the smoke so choked him. As through the narrow end of a funnel, horse and man, kangaroos, emus, foxes, and dingoes poured out on the blessed gibber-stone plain where the fire could not pursue.

Bony-and a Prisoner

THE SUN at its zenith laid the shadow of Bony’s head about the toes of his boots. It beat down on him and the horse he was leading with a more pitiless heat than that of the roaring, crackling fire from which they had escaped, almost by seconds, early that morning. It heated the smooth gibber-stones to a temperature that would have fired a match held against any one of them.

Slowly horse and man were moving over a vast treeless expanse, a plain so gently undulating that it appeared deceptively flat, yet which gave effect to the mirage that offered delusive glimmering sheets of water in every direction. Here and there low, stunted bushes, greenish blue in colour, defied the scorching sun long after the tussock-grass had died. Tiny lizards, brown, grey, and green fled into the shelter given them by the bushes. An goanna, four feet long, with yellow-marked green body, snakish head and long tapering tail, slid with astonishing rapidity into its hole. Of other ground life there was none. Two thousand feet above the earth three eagles circled as so many manoeuvring aeroplanes. Little larger than pinheads, they swerved and circled with never a beat of a wing, waiting and watching, watching and waiting.

The man’s head was covered with a blue silk handkerchief, knotted at the corners. He walked at his normal pace, head bent downward, eyes following the tracks made by two horses. The gelding, which he led, followed with sagging head and lack lustre eyes. It was Grey Cloud, but he appeared to possess the chameleon power of changing colour, for now he was the colour of oldbrickwork, and his hair was matted and caked hard with the dust a thousand animals had raised in their race for life.

Grey Cloud then could neither gallop, nor canter, nor trot. His big heart was almost broken, and if he could not drink before night fell he would lie down never more to rise. Bony’s supply of water would not have filled a pint pannikin, and if he did not reach water by nightfall, then shortly after the dawn of the next day he would lose his reason, gradually discard his boots and his clothes, stagger a little way naked, and fall down on his face never again to rise and walk.

Yet still he possessed hope. He had circled in a great arc, and so had cut the partners’ tracks. Then he had followed them across the gibber-littered plain, where for long distances the tracks were invisible to a white man’s eyes, where the only indication of the passing of the men he sought was a freshly disturbed stone moved by a horse’s hoof. Those tracks must lead him to water eventually, for the horses ridden by Dot and Dash could not exist without a drink at least once in the twenty-four hours.

Bony’s head ached. His eyes felt like twin balls of simmering fire. It was far too agonizing to raise his head and look out over the plain that jazzed in the heated air. The silence of the world was that of the King’s Chamber in the Pyramid of Cheops, and when Grey Cloud plaintively whinnied the low musical cry startled the half-caste and caused him to stumble. Even then he dared not subject his tortured eyes to the glare of the plain. A whistling breath fanned his neck, and he became aware that Grey Cloud was very close behind him and was suddenly excited.