The Golden Soak (32 page)

Two miles to the north of us the Stock Route was joined by the lone track coming in from the east. The chart showed it coming in at right-angles, and in its whole length of well over 100 miles there was only one feature marked, the Winnecke Rock. And there was only one well, the Midway Well, and that about five miles south of the track. I doubted whether we' could find it, and even if we did it would probably be dry. It was midway between our present camp and a track that ran north-south across an area of the chart that was completely blank, not even the lines of the sandridges marked. That track looked fine on the chart, but Kennie didn't think it was any more of a track than the Stock Route, and in such featureless country it was most unlikely that we could ever find it.

I didn't need to look at the chart as I lay there restless and hot and completely naked. It was all in my mind, every detail clearly imprinted. There were so few, and the faint pencil indent of that rubbed out circle. Before sundown that evening, two miles to the north, we would have to make our decision – continue on the line of the Stock Route where at least we had the chance of water or turn east into the empty featureless desert, banking on that faint circle mark being Ed Garrety's objective. Dizzily I wondered where he was camped now. He couldn't be far ahead of us surely. Perhaps camped at the track junction. Would we have caught up with him if we had driven those two extra miles?

All that blistering day the evening's decision nagged at my mind, the hot wind drifting the sand and the flies crawling. And that was the measure of my tiredness, for we really had no alternative. The Stock Route was known. If there was, in fact, a big copper deposit, then it had to be in the unknown part of the desert, and so I came back again and again to that pencil mark. To find it we would have to locate Winnecke Rock and then work our way eastward slanting across the sandridges, driving on a compass bearing. I didn't know how high the sandridges were or what the going would be like. I just hoped to God we could follow his tracks. If we could follow his tracks we might catch up with him before he was dangerously deep into the desert. It was the Canning Desert really. The Gibson was more to the south. But the name didn't matter. It was all the same – the Great Sandy, the Canning, the Gibson. All sand and sparse, dried-up vegetation, and once into it we only needed to have one breakdown …

I dozed and woke, dozed and woke, fear of the waterless oven of sand and the days ahead twisting at my mind like a drill. And all for what? For a man who wanted to die. Or was it the Monster? Was I, too, willing to risk my life for a pot of gold under a burning sky? I didn't know. I just didn't know what my motive was. My mind was too confused. Heat and exhaustion, my bare skin covered in salt from the sweat I couldn't feel, the pores of my body prickling and Kennie naked beside me, turning restlessly and mumbling in his sleep. Why the hell didn't we turn back now, while it was safe, while we still could?

But shortly after five I started a fire going, woke Kennie and we brewed tea and had a meal with large ants pestering us and a small goanna playing hide and seek in and out of a clump of spinifex. And then we drove north up the Stock Route until the speedometer showed we had covered a mile and a half, when we slowed, watching for the eastward track. Here and there tyremarks showed faint in the sand. We found the turn-off, the tyremarks clearer as he had swung away to the right. I looked at Kennie. ‘Well, we can't be far behind and if he's gone east …' I waited, watching him, his face red and blistering with the sun, his greenish eyes wide as he tossed his bleached hair back and gazed into the flat empty land ahead. I saw him swallow jerkily, his adam's apple rippling the silky beard where it ran down across his throat. ‘Then we'd better get cracking,' he said quietly. ‘The sooner we catch up with him the less desert we'll have to cover.'

So we drove east, following the faint intermittent wheel-tracks, driving slower and slower as the light faded and it became more difficult to pick them out, driving on the edge of a confusion of piled-up dunes, the salt pans of small lakes bordering our route – outriders of the great dead lake now behind us. Soon we were having to stop repeatedly and search for the wheeltracks on foot by torchlight. Sometimes they were concealed in the hard dry vegetation of long-forgotten rains, at others they were lost in a harder surface or on the everlasting damnable spear-pointed spinifex. Going slow like this, we were using a lot of fuel, and it was hard on the vehicle, hard on ourselves. In five hours we had covered no more than twenty miles by the speedometer, the engine overheating, the radiator boiling. And then we bogged down in soft sand. Kennie voiced my own feelings: ‘Hell!' he said. ‘We can't go on like this.'

We dug ourselves out and got moving again, the tracks still faint, the sandridges rolling shallow in the headlights, but getting higher, the flat sandplains between them wider. And then we came to a broader plain, dead flat but covered in spinifex, and the tracks vanished. We found them again half a mile ahead, over the top of a sandridge, but it was more by luck than judgment and it cost us the better part of an hour. I stopped then. Nothing but a jumble of sandridges now, very confused, the tracks running in a straight line through a flat plain between the ridges, but very faint. The engine was sizzling hot, steam showing from below the radiator. We had some food, sitting there in the sand waiting for the engine to cool, not saying much, only thinking about the miles of desert that lay ahead. The stars were very bright, the ghost of a moon just risen. It was airless and still and hot, so still and silent that the sad featureless landscape surrounding us seemed petrified. In that weird pale light it had the stillness of death. It scared me, and I knew Kennie was right – we couldn't go on like this.

I lit a cigarette, noticing that my hand trembled slightly, and then I got the chart out and sat there with it spread out on my bare knees, staring at it in the light of my torch. ‘Only one thing to do,' I said, my voice slow and uncertain. I held the chart for him to see, pointing to the Winnecke Rock. ‘It's thirty-six miles. If we drive a compass course just short of it, say thirty-five miles, we should be able to locate it in the dawn.'

He nodded. ‘You think he's making for the Rock?'

That was when I showed him the rubbed-out mark of that pencilled circle. ‘I think that's where he's heading. If it is, then he can only locate it by a compass bearing from a known position, and the only features shown here are the Rock and the Midway Well.'

‘And that track.'

The note of sarcasm in his voice, the little worried laugh – neither of us believing now in its existence.

‘When we've found the Rock, we'll cast around for the treadmarks of his Land-Rover.'

‘Use a lot of petrol,' he murmured.

‘Not as much as stopping and starting and driving slow the way we have been.'

‘Okay,' he said. ‘Let's go then.' His voice was pitched a little high, nervous and uneasy.

We got to our feet, and while he topped up the radiator, I took a bearing on the tracks running out ahead of us. Converted from magnetic to true they were headed 103°, slanting across the sandplain towards the next ridge. According to the chart, 103° was the correct bearing for the Winnecke Rock. The track bearing, on the other hand, was nearer 110°, so we were almost certainly north of it, heading direct for the Rock. I took the speedometer reading and then we got going.

Steering a compass course required concentration and it was difficult driving because of the spinifex. The clumps were small and widely spaced, but each clump the size of a molehill, hard as concrete, so that, riding them, the jolting was incessant, and Kennie at the wheel twisting and turning to find the easiest route, the strange opaque light making it difficult for him to pick his way. Three miles of this, and then the spinifex thickened, forcing us into four-wheel drive, the going slow and the tracks lost, the needle of the speedometer flickering between nought and five. We found the tracks again on the slope of the next sandhill, deep-scored where he had taken it fast. We made it to the top, but only just, the engine labouring in four-wheel drive, the wheels spinning in the soft sand of the crest. Another sandplain, much wider, full of spinifex and here and there the skeletal remains of wind-uprooted mulga lying prone, their spiked roots like tank traps, like the battle maces of medieval giants.

We had lost his tracks completely now and our course, slanting across the lie of the sandridges, meant that every few miles we had to turn into the face of a petrified sandwave, take it at a rush in four-wheel drive, both of us clinging on for dear life, our heads bumping the roof. Twice we had to stop on the far side of a ridge to let the engine cool. It was a nightmare drive, but at least our course was generally parallel to the line of the seif dunes, and in the sandplains between the ridges the going was less difficult, fairly flat and the spinifex patchy, so that there were moments when we almost touched 15 mph. I am told we were lucky, that the area we were in must have been better than most of the Gibson, but, even so, dawn was paling the eastern sky before we had completed those thirty-five back-breaking, exhausting miles.

We stopped on top of a sandhill that was about 40 feet high, the desert rolling all around us, a long undulating sand-swell, the ridges showing like pale red waves above the green-gold sea of spinifex. Lizards scuttled dryly through a patch of scrub, ants moved busily in the sand and we saw our first scorpion. But it was the fantastic surrealistic beauty of the scene that held me spellbound, the breathless cruelty of it, the hardness of the colours in that clear dry air, above all the terrible infinity of it, the sense that it went on for ever. There was no sign of anything that could be described as a rock, only limitless sand and scrub, the waves of the ridges rolling endlessly to the horizon.

We gathered enough material to make a fire, had tea and a short rest, and then, as the sun rose and the contrast of colour and shadow heightened the sense of having become part of some mad artist's canvas, we began our search, driving north across three ridges, east 6 miles along an easy sandplain, then south across the dunes, their backs less steep going in this direction. Oddly enough, it wasn't the Rock we found, but the tracks again. We were 2.4 miles on the southward leg, in a particularly bare sandplain between two ridges, and they were quite clear, still bearing 103°.

The sun was well up by then, all the colour gone put of that terrible landscape and the heat already so violent that every movement was an effort. Even so I wanted to drive straight on, catch up with him and get it over, or at least reach the area of that pencilled circle.

But Kennie, his head bent over the chart, the skin of his nose peeling and his hands trembling, insisted it was madness. ‘It's all of fifty miles, nearer sixty.' He looked up at me, his eyes slitted against the glare. ‘Driving in daytime, it'll just about finish us. The rad'll boil. The engine'll probably overheat again, and if we hit soft sand or have a puncture.… It could take us all day.' He didn't want to drive on through the heat.

We drank some water and had a meal, talking it over in the shade of the Land-Rover. But I couldn't persuade him. ‘What the hell's it matter whether we catch up with him now in daylight or later when it's a little cooler?' Mirages were already forming, the scant, desiccated vegetation swimming on the flat horizon, the dunes bobbing crazily on the skyline. In the end I agreed. What the hell did it matter? We stripped and lay in the back, our bodies burning with the growing heat of the sun, the back of the vehicle glowing like a furnace. And then, when I'd just got off to sleep, a hornet's drone woke me, growing gradually to a roar, ripping like a buzz-saw into the muzzy drowsiness that still engulfed me.

I sat up, pulling back the flap and peering out. The blinding white of the sky hit my eyes and I could see nothing, the sound fading. Kennie slithered naked to the ground, yelled as his bare feet touched the burning sand, and then the noise was back, growing again from the south. And suddenly I saw it – a small twin-engined plane coming in low across the sandridges, and as it roared over us, barely 100 feet from the ground, the pilot waggled its wings.

So Janet had got scared and notified the authorities. That was my first thought. I had thrown Kennie his shoes and now we were both of us standing naked in the sun watching the plane. ‘One of the new Cessnas,' he murmured. We watched it as it banked to the north of us, circling and then banking again as it picked up the tracks of Ed Garrety's Land-Rover to the east of us and followed them, still flying low. The sound of it dwindled, fading into the immensity of desert space till the plane itself was no bigger than a fly on the horizon. ‘Well, that's one thing,' I said. ‘They know where we are now.'

‘Who?'

‘The authorities.'

Kennie smiled at me sourly. ‘You're joking. The Administration up here runs on a shoe-string. They don't hire planes to search for fools who go driving around in the desert.'

‘Who then? Somebody has.'

He shrugged. ‘Prospectors. Maybe it's a survey party.' But he sounded doubtful and his face had a troubled look.

It seemed too much of a coincidence that a survey party doing an aerial magnetic or a mapping job should have happened on our tracks by chance. The same thought seemed to have occurred to him, for he said, ‘You're a mining consultant. Not many mining consultants operating on their own like you. And going off into the desert in summer. They'd think you were on to something.' He hesitated. ‘It'd be all round Mount Newman, and the Conglomerate in Nullagine.… That bar'd be full of talk.'

‘What are you getting at?'

He hesitated again, as though unwilling to put his thoughts into words. ‘Pa,' he said at length. ‘Pa might hire a plane. You're lucky, see. First Blackridge, then Golden Soak. And he knows about the Monster.' He started to climb back into the Land-Rover, but then he stopped, his eyes on the horizon to the east. The plane was still there, a speck circling.