Hammond Innes: Golden Soak

These are the afterthoughts, of course — an endeavour to explain the inevitability of what happened. But I still cannot excuse myself for not being prepared for it. I should have talked to him, there over the dying ashes of that fire. I knew that this second journey out into the desert was a self-imposed ordeal, that he was tensed up and scared. But I thought it was something physical, a weakness to be overcome, a challenge. I never appreciated his real fear. I never understood, till it was too late, that this search for a copper deposit in the Gibson Desert had become for him a sort of purification of the greed he had grown up with.

He was awake at the first light, his eyes dark-rimmed with lack of sleep. ‘We’ll find it today, won’t we?’ his voice was high and trembling. ‘We must find it today.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘If it’s there.’ Instinctively I felt the need to damp down his intense eagerness.

We had completed the first box by nine o’clock. The going had been bad, but it was worse on the second leg north, the sandhills steep-faced, requiring a running start flat out in four-wheel drive. I.was driving at the time, the sun in my eyes; Kennie was acting as observer. I saw him suddenly lean forward as the wheels churned at the top of a sandhill. I thought he had seen what we were looking for and I slammed on the brakes, the bonnet of the Land-Rover dipping to the sand trough below. ‘What is it?’ I was looking at him as we sat there motionless, the radiator steaming. He was still leaning forward, staring straight ahead, his eyes wide and his face drained of all colour, almost white.

He didn’t answer and I cut the engine to let it cool, shading my eyes and staring into the sun. But the view hadn’t changed, the desert a series of giant sand swells rolling away to the horizon, an ocean of red sand patched with vegetation. And then, very faint above the boiling of the rad, I heard the sound of an engine. ‘A plane?’

He nodded, pointing, his hands clenched and his body strained forward. The drone of it was moving across our front from left to right and a moment later I caught a glimpse of silver beyond a distant sandhill. It was flying low, literally skimming the surface. We caught another glimpse of it, a flash of sun on metal, to the right of us now and flying south. The sound of it faded. ‘Your father?’ I asked. It had looked like the same plane.

He held up his hand, sitting listening, his body rigid. The radiator had stopped boiling and in the silence we heard it again, flying north this time. We didn’t see it. But both of us knew what the pilot was doing. He was flying a low level search, doing exactly what we were doing, but doing it faster and with much less effort.

The sound came and went for perhaps ten minutes, and then we lost it. We didn’t hear it again until at 09.42 it passed to the north of us, a speck high in the sky flying back towards the west. We were both of us out of the Land-Rover then, standing in the hot sun at the very top of the sandhill, and when the sound had gone and we lost sight of it, Kennie turned to me. ‘D-dogging us like that — why didn’t we do it by plane?’ He was suddenly very tense.

‘You think he’s found it?’

He shrugged, his eyes still staring at the empty sky to the west.

‘If I’d hired a plane and we’d failed to find it, then you’d be telling me we should have done a ground search.’

He looked at me then. ‘You can’t win, can you?’ He said it with a smile, but the tension was still there and his face looked pale.

We didn’t say anything after that, but pressed on fast, taking a chance and moving the area of our search forward a few miles. We were then into a patch of old mulga scrub, all dead and their roots half buried in the sand, and we had two punctures in quick succession. Altogether it was a bad day with only two boxes completed from our new starting point. Clouds came up in the late afternoon and the night was very dark. Our position was now 26 miles east of the lira, and I remember thinking that the abo who had given McIlroy the directions must have been a hell of a tireless walker. Either that or the Monster didn’t exist.

We filled up and checked our petrol before turning in. The situation was becoming critical. Each box was 13 miles of ground covered and at our present rate of consumption we had just enough fuel for five or six more box runs, unless we decided to rely on finding the rira again. We had already taken two cans from the abandoned Land-Rover, but there was still a sufficient reserve there to see us back to the Stock Route. We argued it out for some time, lying wrapped in our swags, but when we started out the next morning we had reached no definite decision.

We need not have bothered. Our search ended that morning just as we had completed the first run north. I was driving, keeping an eye on the clock and the compass as we began the eastward mile. We were then cutting diagonally across the sandhills and for just over a third of a mile we were on the flat floor of a trough, travelling quite fast for once. Then we came to the slope beyond. I didn’t change into four-wheel drive, just kept my foot hard down. It was a mistake. I hit a soft spot near the crest and we slowed, the rear wheels digging in, the chassis slewing and tilting.

It took us half an hour to dig ourselves out and get the Land-Rover to the top. We stopped there for a breather, both of us hot and tired, our tempers frayed. And it was while we were standing there, grateful for the breeze and the clouds that had obscured the sun, that it gradually dawned on us that we were looking across, not another sandhill, but at an area of gibber eroded from the younger Permian overlay to form a shallow rounded hill, and the green that showed in patches in the light brown of the gravel was not the green of vegetation.

I don’t know which one of us realized it first. I think it hit us in a flash almost simultaneously, for both of us suddenly dived for the Land-Rover and the next minute we were roaring down the slope. We hit the bottom on a hard rock, our heads bumping the roof. We were lucky not to break a spring, and when we got out, staring upwards now at the rounded, gentle slope of that hill, it looked like the giant carcase of a giant whale, its petrified flesh blotched with gangrenous streaks of malachite.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Kennie breathed. ‘It really does look like a monster.’ And he started work there and then collecting and examining samples, moving with feverish haste, literally dancing on his toes with excitement. It was copper. No question of that. The whole red-brown hill was patched with a lighter brown, the surface smooth and rounded and littered with stones and small rocks, and the copper, exposed by the weathering of the calcareous sediments and sandstones that had overlaid it, showed in streaks and blotches that were a greenish brown in colour and merged with the sparse covering of spinifex.

Kennie was immediately convinced that it was a discovery of major importance. I was more cautious, fearing he was letting his excitement run away with him. But, growing up with the geology of Australia constantly in his mind, he had developed a sort of sixth sense that I respected, and after we had climbed to the top, so that we had a clear view of the whole hill, he argued very convincingly that this was an old leach area, the Permian sediments worn down by the winds and the extremes of temperature over millions of years to expose the trapped ore in the Archaean rock beneath.

The first thing was to surface map the entire area, and it was while we were discussing this, back at the Land-Rover, planning how we would do it, that the stillness of that strange place was invaded by a low droning sound. It was high up to die southwest, but growing all the time, and then we saw it like an insect descending toward us. It was lost for a while behind the whale back hill, the sound of it beating against the sandhills behind us, and then suddenly it was there to our right hovering over the tail end of the Monster.