The Golden Soak (31 page)

I was checking that the compass we had used on our geophysical was still in the dashboard locker when I remembered we would need the map from Ed Garrety's den. At least it would take us as far as the Highway. I went back to the little room littered with papers and ripped it off the wall. That was how I discovered the Gibson desert map. It was another aeronautical chart – Oakover River No. 3230 and the same size as the Hamersley Range chart so that it had been completely covered by it, the two of them Sellotaped to the wall together.

I stood there for a moment, staring at it, vaguely wondering why he hadn't taken it with him. Had he forgotten it was there? Kennie called to me he was ready and I took the charts out and spread them an the bonnet of the Land-Rover. The Oakover River chart showed the track eastward from Sylvania crossing the Highway and then splitting in two at the Murramunda homestead. Both tracks led to the Walgun homestead, the lefthand one direct, the other via the Jiggalong Mission and turning sharply north to make two sides of a triangle. There was nothing to the east of it, only desert. But from Walgun a track ran through the abandoned rabbit fence to the Talawana homestead and then due east between the Horsetrack and Poisonbush ranges and on through the Wells, Emu and McKay ranges to join the Canning Stock Route north-east of Lake Disappointment at Well 23. The Stock Route ran diagonally right across the chart as far as Well 45. But at Well 24, which was marked Karara Soaks, another track ran eastward into an area that was a topographical blank, and it was here, 40 miles or more beyond the Midway Well that I noticed a faint mark on the paper. It was in the form of a rough circle and looked as though it had been made by the point of a pencil and then rubbed out, the surface of the paper very slightly roughened.

‘You found a map then?'

I looked up to find Kennie at my elbow. And then I saw Janet coming out of the house. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘It'll take us to the Lake anyway.' And I folded the charts and tossed them into the Land-Rover.

She had a Thermos full of coffee and two skin waterbags, the sort you hang on the side of your truck so that the water sweats through the bag and keeps cool. ‘Don't forget,' I said as we climbed into the Land-Rover, ‘if you haven't heard from me after a week, then you'll know we're in trouble.'

She nodded dumbly, standing there, the Alsatian beside her and one hand absently stroking its head. And as Kennie started the engine, I leaned my head out of the window. ‘Better get started on those cattle. You've only got till the end of February.'

‘You know there's no water for them this side of Coondewanna.'

‘Have a look at Golden Soak then,' I said. ‘There was plenty of water at the four level and now the mine's collapsed that soak might start working again.' And I nodded to Kennie to get going. Not much of a chance, but anything was better than having her hang around the place with nothing to do but wait.

We took the backtrack to Mt Newman, colour flooding the landscape as the sun's light grew behind the Ophthalmia Range. And two hours later, in a garage in Newman township, we got news of Ed Garrety. He had brought his Land-Rover in for servicing just before lunch the previous day and had finally set out around five-thirty.

I had talked to enough Aussies, seen enough of their country now, to have no illusions about what lay ahead. The bush was the nearest thing to hell on earth, they said, and bush bashing like trying to drive through barbed wire entrenchments. But surely that depended on the locality. It couldn't all be as bad as that, and the desert wasn't the same as the bush. Surely to God it would be more open. I ordered a set of new tyres and instructed the foreman to give the Land-Rover a thorough overhaul, tipping him a ten-dollar note to get the job done in a hurry. After breakfasting at the Walkabout, we shopped for stores, then went in search of more jerricans, loading them full of fuel into the back of the Land-Rover until there wasn't an inch of space left. It was almost midday before we were finally ready, everything checked, and on our way.

We reached the Sylvania homestead shortly after one, but Ed Garrety had not called there and they had seen no sign of his Land-Rover. We were in flat country then, the hills behind us as we took the eastward track, and an hour later we had crossed the Highway and were at Murramunda. The heat was intense, the place abandoned. The track continuing eastward was fairly good and we were able to make Jiggalong in two-wheel drive. Ed Garrety had not called there, but we found an abo who had seen the dust streamer of a vehicle heading for the Walgun homestead shortly after sundown. We had a cooling drink of water and then drove on, the track running northward now.

The sun was setting as we reached Walgun, and though the place seemed deserted, an abo in a singlet and shorts eventually answered the blare of our horn. No whitefella had stopped there the previous night, but he showed us the fresh tyremarks of a vehicle heading up the track to Balfour Downs.

There were low hills to the north of us now as we drove through the gathering dark and it was night when we passed by the Balfour Downs homestead. We did not stop, driving east-north-eastward to the old abandoned rabbit fence and the source of the Oakover River, still in two-wheel drive. But though the going had been pretty fair, we were utterly exhausted by the time we reached the Talawana homestead. No lights, no sign of life. We camped by Talawana Pool, which was dry in the starlight. A meal and a couple of hours' sleep, then we were on the long drive eastward towards Lake Disappointment, and in about ten miles we were reduced to four-wheel drive, the track invaded by spinifex and saltbush, the going slow.

Dawn found us in the low hills of the Wells and Emu ranges, the sun coming up in a fire-ball blaze of brilliant light and the McKay Range standing black in silhouette like humped up islands in a desert sea. By then we could hardly keep our eyes open, and when we hit the sand I was driving so carelessly I stalled the engine. It took us a good two hours to dig ourselves out and get clear of the soft patch, using the sand mats, and a mile or two further on I drove the Land-Rover into the sparse shade of a small grove of snappy gums. We didn't eat, just drank some of our water that was warm and tasted of metal and then fell into the back and lay there dozing, too tired and listless to sleep properly. I remember looking at my watch, the time ten-thirty. Except for the breaks at Mt Newman and Talawana we had been driving steadily for twenty-four hours. According to the chart we were within 60 miles of the Stock Route with the Lake less than 40 miles to the south-east. Vaguely I wondered how far ahead of us Garrety was now. Even with Tom driving, and used to the country, could he stand it continuously, hour after hour?

I wondered whether I could, and I was fit, the heat exhausting and my mind wandering. And the desert still ahead of us. Did anybody still use the Stock Route? And that other track – would we be able to follow it? I was thinking then of the faint mark of that circle on the Oakover River chart and McIlroy dead these thirty years. Was that where he had died? Or was that the rough position of his copper monster? Was it all a dream, a mirage? Then why the mark? And the chart itself – it was an aeronautical chart. It couldn't have existed in Big Bill Garrety's day. So his son Ed had made that mark, and then thought better of it and rubbed it out. Why? And how had he known?

So many questions, my mind wandering and the heat enclosing me, weighing me down, my skin prickling and my eyes gritty as though clogged with sand. The desert. Soon we would be in the desert. And the wells all dry most likely at this time of the year. It was madness, this driving into the unknown, following a man whose sanity I began to doubt – in search of what? And for what? What the hell was I doing it for? For Janet? For a chit of a girl with a turned-up nose and a freckled face? Or was I, like McIlroy, risking my life for the vague chance of a fortune?

Over and over, around and around, the questions rattled in my throbbing head. Never an answer, only questions, and the heat burning up my sleep, destroying the rest I needed. And then Kennie started talking to himself – some row with his father. Talking in a sort of delirium from which he woke suddenly with a cry, sitting up wild-eyed and staring at me in the hooded glow of the interior. ‘Pa – I thought he was here.' He leaned forward, lifting the back flap and peering out at the sand-glare. ‘Dreaming, was I?'

‘Something like that,' I murmured, the glare red through my closed eyelids. ‘Close the flap for God's sake.'

‘It's hot in here.'

‘Close it.' I snapped irritably.

Silence and a moment's pause, then the red glow was gone from my eyeballs as he let it drop. ‘We must be out of our minds,' he mumbled. ‘The engine's only got to pack in …'

‘Why should it?'

‘Well, a spring then.'

‘I brought a spare.'

It silenced him, but only for a moment. ‘You should've hired a plane, searched for him that way. The shade temperature must be all of 120°. We get bogged in sand or lose our way – men die every year trying to walk out of the bush in summer. Twenty-four hours. That's all you got if you start walking. Twenty-four hours without water and you're done, finished. It's crazy.'

I stretched out my hand and gripped his arm. ‘You didn't have to come. Now shut up. Try and get some sleep.' I looked at my watch. Only eleven-fifteen and the worst of the heat still to come. ‘We'll brew up at the nice conventional hour of five o'clock and start again at sunset. Okay?' I could feel his body trembling, the skin of his arm hot to my touch and damp with sweat.

He nodded his head. ‘I suppose so. At least it isn't September. September is the worst – blows like hell Pa always said.' And he added, ‘I wish Pa was here. He knows this country.'

‘And I don't. Is that what you mean?' God! How irritability got one by the throat in this heat. But he was right. I'd never been in a desert in my life. And I lay back, wondering whether Ed Garrety had ever been in the Gibson before, remembering that letter of his, the note of hopelessness, thinking that whether he had or not, it didn't matter a damn, for there wouldn't be much help from him. We were on our own, and dozing the slow, burning minutes away I couldn't get the thought of the Gibson out of my head – the knowledge that it was out there waiting for me, stretching endlessly away into the Red Centre of Australia. The hot midday wind began to get up, drifting sand, a rustling hard-grained reminder of endless desert miles to disturb my restless sleep.

That evening, as the sun set and the sky ahead darkened to purple, a velvet mantle with the diamond-hard glitter of stars, we passed through the McKay Range, heading about 100° east with the Harbut hills fading as we neared them in the increasing darkness. The track was difficult to follow in the headlights, at times almost non-existent, only a faint lessening of the vegetation indicating where it had been, and spinifex everywhere, hard and spiky. Little but brumbies, donkeys and camels appeared to have used it in living memory. Indeed, but for the animals I imagine it would have disappeared entirely. We saw their tracks and their droppings everywhere, camels chiefly, and when we paused in sand halfway between the McKays and the Harbuts I found in torchlight the faint marks of a vehicle. But though they looked recent, there was no way of knowing whether it was the Jarra Jarra Land-Rover or some survey party.

The going was slow as we probed for indications of the track, not daring to drive across country on a compass course. And when the moon came up it was little better. It was an old moon, and though it revealed the dead dry desiccated country through which we were driving in a pale translucence that washed all colour from the scene, it only confused us, dimming the headlights and straining our eyes.

We never saw the junction with the Canning Stock Route. I didn't know it then, but the track marked on the chart as the Stock Route doesn't exist. There never was a track, just a series of wells, the stockmen driving their cattle cross-country from one well to the next. Whoever marked that track on the chart had certainly never been within a thousand miles of Canning's route. I cursed him as we strained our eyes for a sight of the well marked No. 23, finding it more by luck than judgment, a draw wheel on an upended post leaning drunkenly over a pit boarded with desert oak. The water when we got it up in our billycan was brackish.

From this well to Karara Soaks was only seven miles and the survey track we were now on led straight towards it. The country was hilly – mesa and butte formation sprawled like miniature Table mountains along the skyline. It was on this section that we found the wheelmarks again. They were clear and sharp in the dawn and the same width as our own.

The sun was coming up ahead of us as we reached the Soaks, which was not a soak at all, but another derelict-looking wellhead between low hills of red broken rock with a dry creek bed skirting them. The hills had small trees on them and there were trees in the distance beyond the creek bed, and around the wellhead there was saltbush and the sered wispy remains of grass killed by drought and the salt in the wind. The water, when we got it up, proved surprisingly good. It was also refreshingly cool. We topped up our containers, then stripped and washed ourselves down.

Before turning in and lying up for the day's heat, we drove to the base of the hill nearest us and clambered the broken rock to the small trees at the top, taking our personal clouds of flies with us. The sun was already blazingly hot and away to the south-west a salt-white glimmer marked the flat immensity of Lake Disappointment. All to the east now was nothing but desert, speckled with the golden yellow of spinifex, and the sandridges like a flat red swell coming in from the north-north-east. High overhead two wedge-tailed eagles worked the air currents, soaring on great wing spans, intent, searching for anything that still had life in that arid hell of drought-ridden sand.

We drove back to the wellhead, had a brew and a large breakfast and then turned in. The height above sea level was about 1200 feet, but it made no difference, tiredness and heat catching up with us as we lay in the back of the Land-Rover, the flap closed and the sweat drying salt on our bodies, unable to sleep.