Patrick White - Voss

They were glad, said the boy.

It seemed obvious in the sunsets of plenty. At evening the German watched a hand daub flat masses of red and orange ochre above the already yellowing grass. Each evening was a celebration of the divine munificence. Accepting this homage, the divine presence himself was flaming, if also smiling rather thinly.

Although less appreciative of cosmic effects than was his master, the black boy would have prolonged the sunset. He kept close to the German at the best of times, but now, when the night fell, he had taken to huddling outside the fly of the small tent, where the terrier had been in the habit of lying.

This dog — in appearance terrier, in fact a stout-hearted mongrel — presented to Voss in the early stages by a New England settler, had disappeared, it was suddenly noticed.

‘She could have staked herself, or been ripped open by a kangaroo,’ said Voss.

He wandered off, calling the lost Tinker, but soon abandoned his efforts to find her. A matter of such insignificance could not occupy his mind for long.

‘Of course you know what has happened to the poor tyke,’ Turner whispered to Judd.

Deliberately he chose Judd, in whom he was always confiding.

Judd, however, on this occasion, did not listen to Turner’s conclusions. He was enclosed in his own thoughts.

Very soon after this, the fat country through which they were passing began to thin out, first into stretches of yellow tussock, then into plains of grey saltbush, which, it was apparent, the rains had not touched. Even the occasional outcrops of quartz failed as jewellery upon the sombre bosom of that earth.

One morning Turner began to cry:

‘I cannot! I cannot!’

The cores of his extinct boils were protesting at the prospect of re-entering the desert. His gums were bleeding under the pressure of emotion.

If the others barely listened, or were only mildly disgusted by his outburst, it was because each man was obsessed by the same prospect. Without an audience, Turner quietened down, and was jolted on.

‘At least we shall throw off our friends the blackfellows, if they are at all rational,’ observed Ralph Angus. ‘No one in his senses would leave abundance to enter this desert.’

‘That you would not understand, Ralph,’ grinned Voss, implying that he did.

‘I am entitled to my own opinions,’ muttered the young man. ‘But I will keep them to myself in future.’

Voss continued to grin. His flesh had been reduced to such an extent, he could no longer smile.

So the party entered the approaches to hell, with no sound but that of horses passing through a desert, and saltbush grating in a wind.

This devilish country, flat at first, soon broke up into winding gullies, not particularly deep, but steep enough to wrench the backs of the animals that had to cross them, and to wear the bodies and nerves of the men by the frantic motion that it involved. There was no avoiding chaos by detour. The gullies had to be crossed, and on the far side there was always another tortuous gully. It was as if the whole landscape had been thrown up into great earthworks defending the distance.

In the course of the assault, the faces of all those concerned began to wear an expression of abstraction. In the lyrical grass-lands through which they had lately ridden, they had sung away what was left of their youth. Now, in their silence, they had even left off counting their sores. They had almost renounced their old, wicker bodies. They were very tired at sunset. Only the spirit was flickering in the skull. Whether it would leap up in a blaze of revelation, remained to be seen.

Then, one evening as they scrambled up towards a red ridge, one of the horses, or skeleton of a gelding, of which the eyes had gone milky with blight, and the crimson sores were the only signs of life, stumbled, and fell back with a thin scream into the gully, where he lay, and lunged, and continued to scream.

At once every man, with the exception of the leader, raised his voice, in curses, commands, or words of advice. All together. What they intended to achieve by their outcry, the men themselves could not have explained, except that they had been compelled to join with the horse in expression of their common agony.

Then Voss said:

‘I suggest that you shoot the beast, Mr Judd.’

Judd dismounted, and, when he had unslung his gun and descended the slope, quickly dispatched the poor horse. This humane act was the only one that reason could have suggested, yet, when the convict had stripped the pack-saddle from the carcass, pulling at the leather with such force as he could still summon, almost falling back under the surviving weight of his once powerful frame, he took stones, and began to pelt the dead horse. He pelted slowly and viciously, his broad back turned to the group of his companions, and the stones made a slow, dead noise on the horse’s hide.

Until Voss insisted:

‘Come up, Mr Judd. It is foolish to expend your energy in this way.’

It did seem foolish. Or terrifying. Harry Robarts, who had respected, and even fallen in love with his mate, was terrified. But he, poor boy, was simple.

As soon as Judd had recovered his customary balance, and his legs had returned him to the horse he had been riding, the party struggled a little farther, climbing out upon what appeared to be a considerable plateau, arid certainly, but blessedly flat.

‘Here I think we will camp,’ decided Voss, when they had come to a few twisted trees.

He did not say more. There were occasions when, out of almost voluptuous perversity, he did respect the feelings of others.

All sat in the dusk, nursing in their mouths a little tepid water, that tasted of canvas, or a sad, departed civilization.

But Harry Robarts went wandering across the desert of the moon, stumbling quite drunkenly, and when the actual moon had risen, the tears were icy in the ravines of the boy’s agèd face. Rambling and snivelling, he fell to counting such mercies as he had received, and in so doing, recalled the many acts of kindness of his mate the convict. These appeared more poignant, perhaps, since all human ties must be cut.

When, suddenly, in the mingling of dusk and moonlight, the boy realized that he was looking into animals’ eyes. In the interval before fear, the situation remained objective for all concerned. Then it became better understood. The boy saw that the eyes were those of a blackfellow, squatting in a hollow beside two women, his equals in nakedness and surprise, who were engaged in coaxing a firestick into marriage with a handful of dry twigs. The attitudes of all were too innocent to be maintained. The boy stumbled back upon his heels, mumbling the curses he had learnt, the black man leaped, faster than light, blacker than darkness, into the nearest gully, followed by his two women and their almost independent breasts.

The boy was still cursing the shock he had received, and the absence of that courage which he always hoped would come to match his strength, when he heard a wailing from the natives, and from the distance, a blurred burst of answering cries. Upon telling his story afterwards, he remembered also to have caught sight of a second, more distant fire the moment before it was extinguished.

‘So we did not throw off the damn blacks,’ panted Harry Robarts in his own camp circle.

Voss, alone of all his party, remained persistently cheerful.

‘There is no reason to believe that these natives are not of our present locality,’ he said, ‘and it could suggest that we have come to better country.’

Such logic persuaded those who wished to be persuaded.

‘It is unreasonable,’ laughed Voss, ‘when we have practically ignored the presence of the natives in the past, to behave of a sudden like a number of nervous women.’