Patrick White - Voss

So that Voss was staring with inordinate affection at the black-gold body of the aboriginal.

‘He will be my footstool,’ he said, and fell asleep, exalted by the humility of the black’s perfect devotion and the contrast of heavenly perfection. Sleep did, in fact, crown man’s sweaty head with stars.

But in the morning Jackie could not be found.

‘He will have gone to look for a strayed horse,’ said Voss at first, with the bland simplicity that the situation demanded.

‘Horses!’ cried Harry Robarts. ‘No horse of ours has the strength to stray.’

‘Or to find water,’ Voss persisted.

‘The waterholes are dry in hell,’ remarked Le Mesurier.

‘Then, he will come,’ said Voss. ‘Eventually.’

There was still some brown muck left in their canvas water-bags, and this they held carefully in their mouths. They did delay a little, although it began to appear to all that it was immaterial whether the native returned or not.

One of the horses, it was seen, would not get up again. The hair of its mane was spread out upon the ground, its bones barely supported the shabby tent of its hide, and the gases were rising in the belly, in one last protest, as the party pushed on.

By the time the sun had mounted the sky, their own veins had begun to run with fire. Their heads were exact copies of that same golden mirror. They could not look into one another for fear of recognizing their own torments.

Until the head of Harry Robarts was rendered finally opaque by the intense heat of the sun. He had acquired the shape and substance of a great reverberating, bronze gong.

‘I do not want to complain,’ he mumbled and throbbed. ‘But it is going on and on.’

Then he was struck.

‘I am beaten!’ he shouted, and the bronze doom echoed out through many circles of silence.

‘Listen,’ said Voss. ‘Did you not hear some sounds at a distance?’

His lips would just permit words.

‘It is my own thoughts,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘I have been listening to them now for some way.’

Nor would he look up from the desolate ground to which his eyes had grown accustomed. He would not have asked for more than this.

‘It is the devils,’ shrieked Harry Robarts, who was rolling upon a steed of solid fire.

It was often the simple boy who first saw things, whether material or otherwise. Now the German himself noticed through that haze of heat, the deeper haze, then the solid evidence, it appeared, of black forms. But still at a considerable distance. And always moving. Like corporeal shadows.

Voss dared to smile.

As the expedition advanced, it was escorted by a column at either side.

‘When we run together,’ said Le Mesurier, whose attention had been drawn, ‘that will be the centre of the fire.’

For the present, however, there was no sign that any fusion of the three columns might occur.

While the white men, with their little trickle of surviving pack-animals and excoriated old horses, stumbled on through the full heat of day, the blacks padded very firmly. Sometimes the bodies of the latter were solid as wood, sometimes they would crumble into a haze of black dust, but, whether formless or intact, they expressed the inexorability of confidence. By this time, each party was taking the other for granted. Women had come up, too, and were trailing behind the men. There were several dogs, with long, glistening tongues, from which diamonds fell.

Feeling his horse quiver beneath him, Voss looked down at the thin withers, at the sore which had crept out from under the pommel of the saddle. Then he did begin to falter, and was at last openly wearing his own sores than he had kept hidden. Vermin were eating him. The shrivelled worms of his entrails were deriding him. So he rode on through hell, until he felt her touch him.

‘I shall not fail you,’ said Laura Trevelyan. ‘Even if there are times when you wish me to, I shall not fail you.’

Laying upon his sores ointment of words.

He would not look at her, however, for he was not yet ready.

In spite of his resistance, their stirrup-irons grappled together as they rode. Salt drops of burning sweat were falling upon the raw withers of the horse, making the animal writhe even in its weakness.

So they rode through hell, that was scented with the Tannenbaum , or hair blowing. His mouth was filled with the greenish-black tips of hair, and a most exquisite bitterness.

‘You are not in possession of your faculties,’ he said to her at last.

‘What are my faculties?’ she asked.

Then they were drifting together. They were sharing the same hell, in their common flesh, which he had attempted so often to repudiate. She was fitting him with a sheath of tender white.

‘Do you see now?’ she asked. ‘Man is God decapitated. That is why you are bleeding.’

It was falling on their hands in hot, opaque drops. But he would not look at her face yet.

They had come to a broad plain of small stones, round in shape, of which at least some were apparently quartz, for where the swords of the sun penetrated the skin of the stone a blinding light would burst forth. These flashes of pure light, although rare, brought cries to the mouths of the three white men. The light was of such physical intensity. Laura Trevelyan, who had experienced sharper daggers, was silent, though. She rode apart, and waited.

When the men had recovered from their surprise, it was seen that the two columns of natives had come upon their rear, and were standing ranged behind them in an arc of concentrated silence. Voss dismounted, and was waiting. For ages everybody stood, and it seemed that nothing would ever happen beyond this commingling of silences, when there was a commotion in the ranks of the blacks, and an individual was pushed forward. He came, looking to the bare ground for inspiration, and when he had approached, Voss addressed him.

‘Well, Jackie, I do not blame you,’ he said. ‘I knew that this would have to happen. What next?”

But Jackie would not lift his head. Subtle thoughts that he had learnt to think, thoughts that were other men’s, had made it too heavy. His body, though, shone with a refreshed innocence.

Then he said:

‘No me. Jackie do nothun. These blackfeller want Jackie. I go. Blackfeller no good along white men. This my people.’ The renegade waved his arm, angrily, it seemed, at the ranks behind him. ‘Jackie belong here.’

Voss listened, touching his beard. He was smiling, or that was the shape his face had taken.

‘Where do I belong, if not here?’ he asked. ‘Tell your people we are necessary to one another. Blackfellow white man friend together.’

‘Friend?’ asked Jackie.

The word was twanging in the air. He had forgotten its usage.

Now the tribe began to murmur. Whether asking, urging, or advising, it was not clear.

Jackie had grown sulkier. His throat was full of knots.

‘Blackfeller dead by white man,’ he was prompted to say at last.

‘Do they wish to kill me?’ asked Voss.

Jackie stood.

‘They cannot kill me,’ said Voss. ‘It is not possible.’

Although his cheek was twitching, like a man’s.

‘Tell them I will not die. But if it is to deprive them of a pleasure, I offer them friendship as a substitute. I am a friend of the blackfellow. Do you understand? This is the sign of friendship.’

The white man took the boy’s hot, black, right hand in both his, and was pressing. A wave of sad, warm magic, and yearning for things past, broke over the blackfellow, but because the withered hands of the white man were physically feeble, even if warm and spiritually potent, the boy wrenched his hand away.

He began gabbling. Two men, two elders, and a younger powerful native now came forward, and were talking with Jackie, in words, and where these failed, with signs. That of which they spoke was of great importance and, even if deferred by difficulties, would, it appeared, take place.