Hammond Innes - Golden Soak

I rounded on him then. ‘I’m not disappearing,’ I said. ‘I’m going twelve miles, that’s all. And if I don’t find him, I’ll lay up during the day and walk those dozen miles back tomorrow night.’ And I told him to fire a patch of spinifex just before sunrise to guide me in.

‘Well, I hope to Christ you find him,’ he said.

‘So do I.’

I left him then and started walking, the satchel with my gear bumping my hip, the compass in one hand and the waterbag in the other.

The first hour wasn’t so bad. I had changed into a pair of khaki longs and the spinifex wasn’t very thick, plenty of sand between the clumps, and I was in a flat plain, walking diagonally across it with the next sandridge a good two miles away. At first I found it difficult to hold a course, the light of my torch blinding me every time I checked the compass. I solved that by lining the bearing up with a star, then I didn’t have to use the torch and could concentrate on where I was putting my feet.

If it had all been like that I would have made it in four hours, but over the next sandridge the going was bad. I was in a narrow trough between two ridges, the spinifex thick, my feet stumbling and spines like darning needles stabbing through my trousers. Ridge succeeded ridge, almost no gap between, the slopes steeper and the sand soft. I was sweating, conscious of the weight of the waterbag and beginning to tire. A gap opened out and I was into a patch of dead mulga scrub, the roots like giant spikes. I had to make a long detour round it and in spinifex again I began to stumble.

I paused then for a breather and checked my watch. One hour twenty-two minutes. I could have sworn it was longer than that. I went on again until I had done two hours, and then I sat down and smoked a cigarette. My knees were trembling and I was very tired. Two hours. Did that mean I had covered four miles? How fast had I been walking? I finished my cigarette and went on for another hour, the going variable with two long detours to the north across the ridges. It was easier after that, patches of open sand and gravel, but the stillness, the loneliness, getting on my nerves. I began to understand why the aborigines believe in their mamu. Time and again I could have sworn I saw a movement, shadows flickering in the desert. Kangaroo perhaps, or euros. I think they were really wallaby. But no sound, only the soft scuff of my feet in the sand, the scrape of the spinifex against my trousers.

I was stopping every half hour, moistening my mouth with a few drops of water. The temperature was around 100°, and though I knew I was sweating, my skin was dry, only the scum of salt to tell me I was losing body moisture. I walked on, right through the hours of darkness, and as the sky began to lighten with the dawn I collapsed on to the ground at the top of a sandhill, lying there exhausted, watching the desert take shape around me. There were wallaby moving in the flat sand trough below me, grey shapes that shifted their position with slow movements, crouching as they browsed on the dry, desiccated vegetation. And a little kangaroo rat that seemed oblivious of my presence. But no sign of the Land-Rover, nothing to indicate the presence of another human being in all the miles that stretched away to the surrounding rim of the horizon. The night receded, the washed-out grey of early dawn quickly taking on colour as the light strengthened. The dunes were ‘braided’ here, the stark beauty frightening. I didn’t see the wallaby go. They just suddenly weren’t there any more. I was alone then, seemingly the only living thing in that great red frying pan of a desert — except the flies in a cloud around my head and the ants in the sand at my feet, and that little marsupial rat.

I had some food and a slow, careful drink of water, and then, as the moment of sunrise neared, I began my search keeping to the top of the dunes and walking on a bearing of roughly 120°. I couldn’t be sure how far I had come during the night; I thought just under the twelve miles, allowing for rests and detours. But while the idea that I could locate that Land-Rover on the basis of course and distance walked had seemed sensible enough at the outset, now that I was in the presumed locality I realized how near-impossible it was in practice. Parked in a trough below a sandhill, I could walk within a few hundred yards of it and never see it.

The sun rose and I turned south, angling across the ridges, pausing on each top to search the valley between. It was my only hope. Even then I wouldn’t have seen it but for the fire. The sun had risen an hour ago and I was nearing the point of exhaustion, the heat intense and mirages beginning to haze my vision. My legs were trembling as I stumbled up the next ridge, nerves stretched and panic only just within my power to control. And those words of Kennie’s at the back of my mind. Coming out in the ship, I had read about the Warburton, Gosse and Giles expeditions, and how Gibson, going back for fresh horses, had lost his way and disappeared. As Kennie had said, it wasn’t all that far to the south, somewhere near the Alfred and Marie Range. But here there were no ranges, not the ghost of a distant blue range-top lipping the horizon to give me hope of shade and water. And then I had staggered to the top of that ridge and was standing there, the sun blazing, sand and vegetation dancing before my eyes, my body sagging and the flies crawling around my eyes.

I knew I must lie up now, find some shade, try to sleep. And then, when night fell, the trek back. I turned towards the sun, thinking of Kennie and the Land-Rover. Company at least. To die alone. … I suddenly had a feeling that I was in a void, hopelessly lost, with no hope of finding my way back. I was remembering how I had told Kennie to burn spinifex. But if I was lost, how could I see it? How could I possibly be certain I’d be near enough to him in the dawn — the next dawn?

Panic was very close then. I wanted to run. I wanted to run all the way back, just to be certain. And then I saw it, beyond the next ridge — a wisp of black smoke. And for a moment I was crazy enough to think I had run those twelve miles back. Today — tomorrow … time had no meaning. I was too damned tired.

The wisp of smoke was dying, and I was running, running down the slope of the ridge, across the floor of the trough, the smoke receding and the next ridge far away, hardly getting any nearer as my blood pounded and my feet staggered. Birds rose, flights of bright colours — budgerigars I think — and the wisp gone now. Christ! A mirage! That’s what kept me staggering at a shambling run, the fear that it was a mirage — a dream, my mind wandering, crazed in panic, dried seed pods rasping at my trousers and everything vivid in the blinding light. It seemed an age before I reached the top of the sand slope and then suddenly the scene had changed, the sandhills gone and in their place rough rock, red-knolled and eroded into little escarpments. And below one of these, far away and shimmering in the distance, my tired eyes glimpsed the blunt box-shape of the Land-Rover.

Sanity came back, all panic gone, and the going easier as I reached the bare rock surface. It was a conglomerate of some sort, rough and hard under my feet with only here and there a sparse covering of dwarf spinifex and grasses. I heard my voice, unrecognizable as I shouted, my mouth furred and my larynx sounding as though I had newly discovered the power of speech. A movement then, a figure coming out from behind the Land-Rover, standing staring and finally moving towards me. A black face and a wide hat, black hands gripping me as I reached for him, stumbling. The blessed certainty that he was real and not some mirage of my imagination. Tom.’ The black face split, his teeth showing in a grin of recognition. And then I passed out — not exhaustion, not shock, just pure bloody relief.