The Colour (28 page)

She replied that she was ‘going some of the way' and hoped they would leave the subject at that. But a few of the diggers, with their faces set on what lay before them, liked to keep up a prattle about the terrors of the route to the Taramakau River.

‘Men try to warn you off from going there,' they said. ‘They tell you tales of boulders falling on you and drownings in the river and how the gorge narrows and narrows until you're in darkness. And what can you reply except that men
have
crossed the Hurunui Saddle. Hundreds have done it. All we doubt is that a woman could do it. That we do doubt.'

‘Do you?' said Harriet.

‘You won't do it, miss. Not a digger's chance! Yet it's no more than fifty miles.
Fifty miles.
And why should strangers cross from Australia and Celestials sail from China and get to what is rightfully ours in Canterbury County and we be denied it by a mountain put in our way?'

‘Why indeed?' replied Harriet.

‘The government should build a road. That'd be the answer. A proper dray road all the way to the gold. Then you could be comfortable in the cart and admire the scenery along the way! You'd prefer that, as a woman, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?'

‘Perhaps,' said Harriet.

‘No “perhaps” about it. You'd prefer that. Keep your skirts dry, eh? But governments are too slow, see? Send surveyors, that's all. Send men to stare at the confounded passes. But still no confounded sign of a road from east to west beyond Waitohi.'

‘No,' said Harriet.

‘So we have to risk our worthless lives, like transports, to get there! Or die in one of those tubs they run out of Nelson. Either way, we could lose. There's a word for that, isn't there? A word to say that never can you win?'

‘I expect so,' said Harriet. ‘But, like you, I can't think what it is.'

These conversations grew tedious and Harriet wished she was once more alone until, after the stop at Amberley was passed, the road turned north-west and began to climb steeply and the air to grow colder and the high bush to close round them and the sun to glimmer and be gone. Then, she felt that to be part of this slow, shabby caravan was preferable to her earlier isolation. She could tell that Billy was nervous, trying not to slip or stumble on the steep path, and she could feel the dusk coming on and the way seemed visited by ghostly shadows.

She dismounted and pulled out a length of rope and tied this to Lady's collar and held it tight with the reins, for she saw that the dog could stray into the bush, chasing birds or small animals, and she felt on this road that all that was left to her in the world were Billy and Lady and that, whatever happened, she mustn't lose them.

But she got on the horse again quickly and rode on. She didn't want to be left too far behind the other travellers. Ahead of her, in the misty light, she could see the Puketeraki range of mountains, with their jagged tops, and behind these, the high peaks of the true Southern Alps, on which she'd gazed for so long.

II

On the plains of the Waitohi River, before the long ascent to the Hurunui, an enterprising man named Charlie Wilde had built two huts out of pine slab and tussock thatch. He charged sixpence a night for a mattress and a bowl of soup or a pigeon stew and was known among the diggers for the brightness of his fires, which he set in a pit of stones and which seemed to burn ‘with a brilliant bloody flame'.

It was here, as the dusk turned to darkness, that the convoy stopped. There was a bit of grazing for the horses and the travellers sat by Charlie's fire, eating off tin plates and contemplating what waited for them beyond the end of the dray road. An area of manuka and cabbage trees behind the huts served as a latrine and Charlie Wilde noticed that many of the men about to go over the Hurunui kept going back and forwards from this bit of scrub.

Charlie had been to the edge of the Saddle and looked down the gorge and seen how the walls of the mountains seemed almost to close over the ribbon of valley, as though to crush anything that dared breathe there, and he had turned round and come back. He had lived in New Zealand for thirty-nine years, but nothing had ever terrified him as the sight of this abyss terrified him and he knew that no amount of gold would make him go down there. The men whose cramping guts forced them to trudge out to squat among the manuka hadn't yet seen what he'd seen, but they
knew
that it was waiting for them; they'd imagined the dizzying descent of the path and then the darkness and cold of the gorge and the freezing water and the high boulders and the echoes all around and the feeling of going in a circle and being lost. They were each one waiting to see what he would do and how he would hold himself together when he came to this place.

Only Harriet had no accurate picture of it. The Orchards had told her that trying to cross the Hurunui was ‘sheer and absolute madness', yet what she saw in her mind was a continuation of the path very like the one she had travelled that day. Certainly, she thought, there would be some steep turns and she hoped Billy wouldn't stumble or fall or an avalanche of stones sweep her away, but she had never imagined ‘the stairway of hell' as it truly was.

And so she was able to sit with the men and eat her plate of pigeon stew and warm herself by the fire and feel only the particularity of this night, which was the first night of her journey, and something like happiness began to creep over her. She found she didn't any longer mind the conversation of the gold-seekers, which turned now around the visions they had of themselves in a rich life ‘once the colour's found'. It amused her that each and every one of them began by making himself into a philanthropist and swore he would never be ‘tight-fisted and niggardly and mean as stone' but would share out his future wealth with brothers and sisters, cousins and nephews . . .

‘Do you not feel,' she ventured, ‘that always, in advance of good fortune, men imagine how it will be so nicely shared around, but then, when that fortune comes, somehow it seems to them as though there is
not enough of it
to share?'

There was a simmering of laughter at this. ‘That would depend,' said one of the diggers, ‘on what you call a fortune. For the true fortune has to last. It has to have staying power against whittling away. So with a middling fortune, you might say to yourself that you were the one who got it and risked your confounded neck, and so you were the one who must rightly keep it.'

‘I'd say a little poverty is a fine thing,' said another man. ‘But only first time round! I can live on bush rats. But if I should get free of it for a while and get a taste for sweet lamb's meat and clean linen, and then all that is taken away, what will I feel?'

‘Sick as a puff-adder!' said Charlie Wilde, and there was a chime of laughter around the fire.

Harriet slept in a corner of one of the huts, with Lady at her feet, and the men lay near her and snored and fretted through the night.

She woke when it got light and was cold, and made her way to the grove of manuka, which stank of death. And as she squatted down, she told herself to harden her heart, her mind, her sensibility and, from now on, to try to suffer everything that came her way or vanquish it and not fall under any spell of weakness. In the foul grove, it came to her that she was yearning – yearning beyond any telling – for something, but she couldn't identify what it was.

Charlie Wilde made a hot porridge on the remnants of the fire and Harriet and the diggers filled their bellies with this and then set off on the last stretch of the road that led to the Hurunui Gorge. Here, the plains ended; here, the drays would turn back.

‘You can count the minutes now,' Harriet heard one of the men say. ‘Then hell closes in.'

III

Pare lay in darkness and listened to the waterfall.

It seemed to her, from where she was, in a narrow cavity of rock, that the voices of the world, of a hundred languages, from the throats of thousands upon thousands of souls, babbled in the falling water; if only she could lie perfectly still, breathing very faintly, then some words that she recognised might be detected and these words might comfort her and enable her to go on with her journey.

But Pare couldn't master quietness.

She was lying on a grey stone, covered with her blanket and clutching her bundle to her. She had rubbed poroporo balm into her feet and bound them with leaves, but the pain from these bruised and bleeding feet was so startling that her whole body was perpetually disturbed by it. She muttered to the pain, without meaning to, all the while, in fact, striving to be silent and failing and knowing she was failing, and the night would on and the words in the waterfall kept tumbling and falling and vanishing away.

From time to time, she slept. She heard a cormorant shrieking in her dreams. She longed for the dawn to break, for with the coming of day she would resume her watch for travellers entering the gorge. Pare knew that the gorge, once glimpsed at the edge of the Hurunui Saddle – once truly seen by the measuring human eye – appeared as an Underworld, where the saddest spirits, left behind or shut out from some less melancholy place, snagged and rent their gossamer bodies on matador thorns and draped a veil across the sun.

But the West Coast gold had drawn men into these shadows and now they would continue to venture here, to make their slow, terrified way, as she had done, back and forth across the river. Choosing where to cross and recross the water, when boulders or the overhanging cliff face blocked the path, required a knowledge of the river. But nobody knew this river. It was the unexplored heart of the South Island. And so, very often, they chose the wrong place and their feet were lacerated, as hers had been, or the icy water knocked them down and swept them away.

Pare knew that it was here that Death began to travel with the gold-seekers, as it travelled with her, and kept pace with them and refused to fall back. And they saw it everywhere: in every slippery stone, in every falling tree branch, and they felt it everywhere: in the air that was heavy and difficult to breathe and in their confused hearts. Yet they went on. They knew that the gorge had to have an end, that they were on the road to the level plains of the Taramakau River, that, if they could only survive, they would arrive at the swamps and the beaches and the sea.

Pare's hope was in these people. She'd seen one or two of them as she'd skirted the mountain lakes and come over the Saddle, before she'd slipped during one of the tormenting river crossings, and she prayed that others would pass this way and that she could barter her paua shell for a pair of woven sandals and fresh bandages, or food to sustain her while the cuts healed and the pain diminished. So she lay on her high ledge, from which she could see far up the gorge, almost to where the steep descent began, and waited.

She had waited for three days. Once, she climbed to where a silver fern was growing and dug it out with her shark-toothed knife and mashed its root and ate a few mouthfuls. She wanted to drink from the waterfall, but she didn't dare to go too near to it. She crawled back down to the river's edge, where the water seemed to protest all the while at its narrow confines, hurling up white spray in her face, and surging against her arm as she drank. Then she crept away, to a little patch of mud, and sat there and she could see the smears of blood from her feet colouring the ground.

IV

Harriet, leading Billy and holding fast to the rope tied to Lady's collar, now arrived at the edge of the Saddle, at the topmost point of the pass, and looked down.

She heard the men begin to swear. They stared at the abyss and the abyss revealed itself to them in all its unchanging darkness.

‘God be damned, I'm for licking her!' announced one of the diggers. ‘I'm for giving her her satisfactions. Then I'll be done with her and come to mine. This time tomorrow I'll be at the Taramakau.'

And this man, without any pause, but only clutching more tightly the handle of the little cart that he trundled with him, stepped off the ledge where they stood, as if into the void, but his feet holding somehow to firm ground, as the path fell away and spiralled downwards into the valley.

Harriet and the others watched him in silence. Nobody moved. Though the shadows were advancing on him, he was visible to them for a while yet and they could still hear his footsteps and the sound of his cart. Harriet remembered the drips of oil left on the mud floor of the Cob House after Bunny and Hopton had left and wondered what had happened to them here.

‘Well?' said an elderly digger, when the man was lost to their sight. ‘You're not going down there, eh, Miss Harriet? You don't want to die just yet, do you?'

The man coughed and spat and Harriet saw the gob of spittle land near her, flecked with red. She made no reply.

The wind, blowing in a curve up the funnel of the valley, was very cold here and Harriet realised that she was trembling. She held tightly to Billy's bridle and Lady's rope. In the sunless gorge, she now saw that a waterfall tumbled sheer for a thousand feet or more, and the roar of it came belatedly to her, as though sound travelled differently in this place. And she remembered Dorothy saying to her: ‘We are not strong enough for rivers and stars. We think we are at first, but we're not.'

At her side, Harriet could now see the men slowly begin to prepare themselves to face what awaited them, adjusting the straps of their swags, retying their boot-laces, taking swigs of grog, slamming their hats more firmly on their heads, as though the hats might protect them from falling branches and rocks. And Harriet knew that, however afraid they were, they would all go down, all try their luck, because they'd come this far with their dreams of gold and
there was no other dream
. They were like soldiers in retreat.