Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

East and west the cliffs stretched in unbroken line, great battlements and bastions of rock glittering in the morning sun. The prospect was of a magnificence that seized me and calmed me; and with the coming of a new clarity I realized the tremendous fact of a well-defined native track running eastward along the verge. I followed it painfully for some two miles to a point where the cliffs receded a little from the sea, leaving a valley of barren and sandy ground to which the path conducted by way of a narrow and precipitous gorge. I descended – with the greatest difficulty in my weakened state – and in little over an hour had found in the sand hills a couple of recent native wells. There was moreover a low scrub with a plentiful growth of red berries, and a flight of white paroquets – the first animal life I had descried for days – rose from feeding on them as I watched. I ate and had the wit to eat sparingly. After an interval I found a warm pool and bathed. My strength returned. Later and in another pool I succeeded in landing a couple of fish with my hat. Though my haversack was gone I had still the water-bottle and billy and in my pocket matches. My evening meal was a revelation of the sheer joy of taste. And that night I was lulled to sleep by a melody of waves.

For two days I travelled east along a firm beach, with sand hills and beyond them the cliffs on my left – a highway obstructed only occasionally by massive drifts of sea-weed. I had some days’ supply of water and for the rest I lived on berries. My confidence had returned and I was in the constant hope of coming presently within some fringe of settlement. Land birds were becoming more plentiful, a sign of some changing character in the upland country ahead.

On the third day the cliffs narrowed to the sea and I had eventually to spend hours finding a practicable route to the top. I was again in great danger. The berry-bearing scrub was giving out; I had no means of carrying a considerable supply of the berries; moreover they could not be a satisfactory diet for many days. And – what was yet more serious – I had found no further water. Twice I awoke early and experimented with collecting the light dew on the scrub; I found that with an improvised grass sponge and severe labour I could gain between a quarter and half a pint in a morning. The effort shortened my marches and I knew that it was toil for less than a subsistence supply. My one hope was in the rapidly changing character of the country through which I struggled.

The scrub was becoming denser and ran to the very edge of the now unscalable cliffs, so that I was at times afraid lest I should be unable to make any headway at all. But in places it was diversified by considerable growths of timber and I took this as a further sign that I was approaching a more productive soil. The gum trees moreover yielded me an unexpected source of food in a species of large white grub revealed by tearing off the ragged bark. I ate these cautiously and found they brought on considerable gastric disturbances; nevertheless I believed I gained strength from them. It was in following the lure of this food that I somehow lost the sea. A hot and leaden afternoon found me wandering in the heart of a maze of eucalyptus, my water for the second time wholly exhausted. And in the evening, abruptly, my nerve broke. Some subtle poisoning from the grubs may have been an immediate exciting cause, but it must chiefly have been a matter of accumulated strain. With some physical strength to stumble on, I had not the strength of will to rest with the closing in of night. I wandered among the great trees, possessed by the panic I had long dreaded, until I finally dropped to the ground.

For hours I must have lain semi-conscious, aware that the night was airless and oppressive beyond the ordinary. The agony of my thirst was shot through by the distinct pains of hunger and I must have groped up the tree by which I lay in the darkness in some hope of securing the familiar grubs. Suddenly my body quivered as if it had received an electric charge. The tree was ring-barked. I had come on my first trace of man.

I was unable to cry out and the night was utterly starless and obscure. I could only await the dawn, time and again reassuring myself of the reality of the bite of the axe. Dawn came, and to this day I cannot recall without bitterness and terror the irony it brought. The tree had been ringed and killed, as had half a hundred others. But the effort at clearing had been ill-judged; whoever had attempted it had long since been beaten back; the only sign of man was an empty and ruined humpy. I had resigned myself to dying on the very fringe of settlement when the storm broke above me.

Within five minutes I was sheltering in the humpy, soaked to the skin and with my billy brimming with water. Only a few minutes later the corner of the little shack remote from me was smashed by the terrifying impact of a falling tree. And I found that once more danger had brought salvation in its train. In the fallen tree – in this tree, it must have been, among thousands – the wild bees had been building. I was master of many pounds of honey.

I had come from some great solitude to the fringes of settlement; I had only to find the sea once more and continue east to reach safety. And that night when the storm had passed I heard the murmur of the waves. I found the cliffs again no more than a mile away.

Where the great gum trees grew the soil retained no virtue for the nourishment of an undergrowth and the ground was tolerably clear. But when I left the trees behind me I found the scrub growing denser every mile; soon it presented an almost impenetrable barrier that ran to the very edge of the still stretching and unbroken cliff. Below me, between cliffs and sea, ran a narrow valley of sand hills that seemed to promise the possibility of water, and beyond this – save at high tide – there lay once more a highway of firm sand. I resolved to descend by the first practicable route, risking the chance of the cliffs again converging on the sea and forcing a tedious return journey.

I was confident and impatient; at the same time my nerve was wavering and my judgement, I suppose, beginning to fail. I took the first route that offered. It proved exceedingly hazardous; all the way down I had to fight both for foothold and against the premonition of approaching dizziness. And at length – it must have been near the bottom – I fell.

Of what happened after that I have only fragmentary memories. I remember walking without any sense of direction or of a goal along the endless beach. I remember a flock of sandpipers, rising and settling in their oblique and beautiful flight before me – perhaps leading me on when I should otherwise have fallen. I believe I had lost both billy and water-bottle: I remember finding water, retained from the storm, in a natural cistern of limestone rock. Vividly I remember a long nagging debate with myself as to whether I had heard the barking of a dog. And finally I remember lying in the dark and knowing I was in a delirium – knowing this because all round me warm night air was heavy with the scent of carnations.

The boy was bending over me. His face, golden-browned by the sun, had the massive quality, the more than natural concreteness and weight, of a great painting. He laid down the pannikin among the carnations in the little garden won from rock and sand and called out joyfully to someone in the shack beyond: ‘Dad – he’s come round!’

Then again he lifted the pannikin to my lips. ‘

You nearly did a perish that time, mister. But you haven’t run your final yet.’

I must have murmured something about being lost for weeks. His eyes grew round. Then he smiled, and his smile was like a sudden sunlight on a brown highland pool.

‘Yeah? Things do get a bit quiet west of Desperation Bay.’ I think he was ten or eleven; and his voice had all the pride of the pioneer.