Jim Shepard - Like You'd Understand, Anyway

During heavy winds the dogs shelter in hollows, whining and barking to very little purpose.

April 24th

Finally, some natives. A small group: two men, four women, and a few children. They were camped on a sand hill and sat watching as we approached. The children were in a terrible fright, clinging to their mothers like opossum. The adults are very wiry and strong looking though they tend to be deficient in the front tooth. While we watched they cooked some mice in the hot sand itself and then devoured them entire, fur, entrails, and all, nipping off the tail with their teeth. I had with me a vocabulary of the language of the Murray natives but was unable to make them understand a word of it. We asked, by signs, where they derived their water, and they intimated that they depended on rain. They did so by lifting their hands and then pulling them quickly down while fluttering their fingers. Then they pointed where we were headed and shook their heads vigorously.

They were much taken with our appearance, and some of us do present a sight: Mabberly with his great buccaneer's hat; Beale with his peculiar facial scar. Mander-Jones with his filthy beard. And Hill's spectacles, which are so very small that I constantly wonder how he sees adequately through them. Purdie, the only one of our party to have met aborigines on their home ground before, informed us after we had moved on that they believe Europeans to be black fellows returned from the grave, gone white because of their new status as ghosts.

Tested the water in their water-hole and found it to be 107.8 degrees. Tonight the dogs are barking toward the point from which the wind is coming. One of the horses kicked Moorhouse's gun on the stock and shivered it to pieces. Hill has broken my watch.

April 27th

Dreadful passage. For three days now our road has lain over these abominable and rotten lands on which water has evidently subsided and whose surface the sun has cracked into deep fissures. Whenever the dray wheels drop into the holes it shocks the animals greatly. We are flanked as we proceed by great ridges of basalt and ironstone. Nothing seems tempered by weathering; all edges seem razor-sharp. There is much eurite underfoot. Mysterious columnar formations off to the west. Nearly all we survey seems unsuitable for cultivation. The temperature yesterday rose to 111 Fahrenheit; this morning, it fell to 38. Nights we huddle in flannel pantaloons and greatcoats. Days we suffer in the heat. How it is possible that the natives can withstand such extremes, unprovided as they are against the heat and cold?

Cuppage is now able to lift or carry very little. Hill fears his wound may be infected.

May 1st

Full of accidents today. Moorhouse's dray broke its axle-pole, and Gould's its rear wheel. The country is more open and worse in character. Rents and fissures so tremendous the cart-drivers are thrown from their seats. Mabberly has been admirably careful with the whaleboat, about which, considering the likelihood of her being so soon wanted, I am naturally nervous. Nothing cheering in the prospect to the N and NW.

One of the dogs has been lost — swallowed — in a strange dry salt lagoon comprised of gypsum and black mud. Its compatriots were hysterical with grief and upset. The approaches to the place were most unpleasantly spongy. The wind blows salt from it over the flats behind us like smoke. Old Fitz, our best draft horse, has a swelling on his near hind leg.

May 2nd

Stopped to give the animals a day of rest and to repair the drays. At a dry creek bed, some white mallow, which Gould gave to the horses. Nearer the creek a plant with a striped and bitter fruit. Perhaps some kind of cucumber.

The flies an affliction. Scaled a box tree to consider the path ahead with the telescope. Flies blocked and clogged the eyepiece. Attacked by ants, their bites like a bad sunburn throughout the night.

May 5th

I've directed that the bullocks be fastened by the noses to the carts, so that we might start earlier. The thermometer this morning at half past six stood at 102. Increasingly the only plants we encounter are differing kinds of atriplex with their terrible spines. The only water our advance parties were able to discover today was a shallow puddle so thick with animalcula as to be unfit to drink.

Numerous insects about at night. During the day, the flies. Whether we are out taking bearings or in gullies searching water or in our tents, it is all the same. They watch our movements, and the moment our hands are full, settle in swarms on our faces.

May 12th

A new mortification: we have left behind all scrub and rock to confront gigantic sandy ridges which succeed each other like wave trains, and we climb and descend one just to confront another. Only the smallest, umbrella-shaped shrubs in evidence here and there, the intense surface heat having seared away the lower branches. The ridges are sixty to seventy feet high and as steep as swells in a heavy gale. They appear to extend many miles to the NW. Should we find a body of water in that direction, I am at a loss as to how we would negotiate the dray with the whaleboat that distance.

Even so, the ridges exhibit a regularity that waves alone must have created. What we are struggling with, it follows, was not long ago a submarine position. “Oh, for the love of God,” Browne responded when I told him, his hat soaked through with sweat before our day had even begun.

May 19th

A week of stupefying labor. The heavily loaded drays sink deep into the sand, and the overheated bullocks just cease their struggles completely for minutes at a time. The days are scorching hot, and the animals are suffering greatly. Today the sheep came to a dead halt and would not move, while the dogs and horses huddled under and against the drays for such shade as they might provide, remaining there until evening.

Winds and whirlwinds, all oven-hot. The horses are suffering even more than we might have expected. Their legs are pierced in a hundred places by spinifex, which has in the last two days begun to cover the ridges. Both Captain and the chestnut have had a running at the nose which I feared to be glanders, but Gould reports they are better. I have an ugly rash over my back and chest. The men complain of insomnia and sore eyes. This evening at sunset we remarked upon an extended haze of a supernatural blue on the horizon opposite the sun. The effect, we presume, of refraction.

I have had some surprisingly bitter contentions with some of the other officers. More than ever I am convinced that the interior is to be achieved only by careful calculation and that additional headlong rushing about will lead us into further difficulty. As it is now, advance parties, usually captained by Browne, scout twenty to thirty miles ahead of us by horse. Both Browne and Mander-Jones believe we cannot maintain this unhurried pace with summer only four or five months away.

I hope I will not shrink from the trials ahead. The day may come when I must face greater extremes, and I trust I will do so not the less firmly for having only the smallest notion of what I'm likely to encounter.

May 22nd

Cuppage feverish and laid up. A comfortable pallet has been arranged for him in the whaleboat. A few days' inactivity while the advance parties search for water. I have directed that the whale-boat be outfitted and painted.

Hill, who has been working wonders with poor Cuppage's suffering, is really like a young hero from literature: fair-minded, virile, and eager to get on. He articled as a surgeon, which he found not very agreeable. His real passion is for astronomy, and his sense of direction so intuitive he negotiated alone some of the jungles on the northern coast. And few men have less of envy in their disposition.