The Touch (6 page)

“Dynamite?”

His eyes went from her animated face to several dozen big wooden cases stacked from floor to ceiling in one corner, each one marked with the skull-and-crossbones.

“Dynamite,” he said, “is the new way to blast rock apart. It never leaves my custody because it’s so scarce that it’s nigh as precious as gold. I had this lot shipped from Sweden through London—it was with you on Aurora. Blasting,” he went on, voice growing more excited, “used to be a risky and unpredictable sort of business. It was done with black powder—gunpowder to you. Very hard to know how black powder would fracture the rock, what direction the explosive force would take. I know, I’ve been a powder monkey in a dozen different places. But recently a Swede had a brilliant idea that tamed nitroglycerin, which of itself is so unstable that it’s likely to explode if it’s jarred. The Swede mixed nitroglycerin with a base of a clay called kieselguhr, then packed them in a paper cartridge shaped like a blunt candle. It can’t go off until it’s detonated by a cap of fulminate of mercury tightly crimped on the end of the stick. The powder monkey attaches a length of burnable fuse to the detonator and produces a safer, far better controlled blast. Though if you have a dynamo, you can trigger the blast by passing an electric current down a long wire. I shall be doing that soon.”

Her expression provoked a laugh; she was amusing him a lot this morning. “Did you understand a word of that, Elizabeth?”

“Several,” she said, and smiled at him.

His breath caught audibly. “That’s the first smile you’ve ever given me,” he said.

She found herself blushing, looked out the window.

“I’m going to stand on the plate with the engineers,” he said abruptly, opened the forward door and disappeared.

The train had crossed a wide river on a bridge before he came back; ahead of it now lay a barrier of tall hills.

“That was the Nepean River,” he said, “so it’s time to open a window. Our train has to climb a gradient so steep that it has to zigzag back and forth. Within the length of much less than a straight mile, we will ascend a thousand feet, rising one foot for every thirty feet traveled.”

Even at their much reduced speed, opening a window was ruinous to one’s clothes; big particles of soot flew in and landed everywhere. But it was fascinating, especially when the track curved and she could see the locomotive laboring, black smoke pouring out of its chimney in huge billows, the rods attached to its big wheels driving them around. Occasionally the wheels would slip on the rails, losing traction in a flurry of staccato puffs, and at the end of the first zigzag the train went up the next slope backward, the caboose leading and the locomotive bringing up the rear.

“The number of reversals has the locomotive leading again at the top,” he explained. “The zigzag is a very clever idea that finally enabled the Government to build a railroad over the Blue Mountains, which aren’t mountains at all. We’re ascending what is called a dissected plateau. On the far side we descend on another zigzag. If these were real mountains we could travel in the valleys and go through the watershed in a tunnel—a far easier exercise that would have opened up the fertile growing country in the west decades ago. New South Wales yields nothing easily, nor do the other colonies of Australia. So when the Blue Mountains were finally conquered, the men who worked out how to do it had to abandon all their European-based theories.”

So, she was thinking, I have found one of the keys to my husband’s mind—and to his spirit, if not to his soul. He is enthralled by mechanical things, by engines and inventions, and no matter how uninformed his audience, he will talk and teach.

The scenery was spectacularly outlandish. The heights fell away many hundreds of feet in dramatic precipices to mighty valleys stuffed with dense grey-green forests that became blue with distance. Of pine, beech, oak and all the familiar trees of home there were none, but these alien trees had their own beauty. It is grander than home, she thought, if only because it is so limitless. Of habitation she saw no sign apart from a few tiny villages along the train line, usually associated with an inn or a mansion.

“Only the natives can live down there,” said Alexander when a big clearing gave them a particularly wonderful view of a vast canyon ringed with perpendicular orange cliffs. “Soon we’ll pass a siding called The Crushers—it’s a series of rock quarries—and on the valley floor beyond there is a rich coal seam. They’re talking of mining it, but I think the cost of bringing it a thousand feet straight up will be prohibitive. Though it will be cheaper to ship to Sydney than the Lithgow coal—hauling that up the Clarence zigzag is very difficult.”

Suddenly his hand swept in a grand gesture, encompassing the world. “Elizabeth, look! What you see is the geology of the earth in all its glory. The cliffs are early Triassic sandstone laid atop Permian coal measures, under which lie the granites, shales and limestones of Devonian and Silurian times. The very tops of some of the mountains to the north are a thin layer of basalt poured out of some massive volcano—the Tertiary icing on the Triassic cake, now all but eroded away. Marvelous!”

Oh, to be that enthusiastic about anything! How could I lead a life that would enable me to know the tiniest fraction of what he knows? I was born to be an ignoramus, she told herself.

AT FOUR IN the afternoon the train arrived at Bowenfels; this was as far west as the train went, though the chief town was Bathurst, forty-five miles farther on. After an urgently needed visit to the lavatory on the platform, Elizabeth was bundled into a carriage by an impatient Alexander.

“I want to be in Bathurst tonight,” he explained.

At eight they reached the hotel in Bathurst, Elizabeth reeling with fatigue; but at dawn the next morning Alexander was bundling her back into the carriage, insisting that the convoy start moving. Oh, another day of perpetual travel! Her carriage led the way, Alexander rode a mare, and six wagons drawn by draft horses carried her trunks, cargo from the Rydal rail depot, and those precious cases of dynamite. The convoy, said Alexander, was to deter the attentions of bushrangers.

“Bushrangers?” she had to ask.

“Highwaymen. There aren’t many left because they’ve been hunted down remorselessly. This used to be Ben Hall country—he was a very famous bushranger. Dead now, like most of them.”

The cliffs had been replaced by more traditionally shaped mountains not unlike those in Scotland, for many were cleared of trees; here, however, no heather grew to lend the autumn some color, and what grass grew was lank, tufted, brownish-silver. The deeply rutted, potholed track wound aimlessly to avoid big boulders, creek beds, sudden plunges into gullies. Perpetually jerked and tossed, Elizabeth prayed that Kinross, wherever it was, would soon appear.

But it did not until nearly sundown, when the track emerged from a forest into open space and became a macadamized road lined with shacks and tents. If all that had gone before was utterly strange, it paled compared to Kinross, which her imagination had visualized as Kinross, Scotland. Oh, it was not! The shacks and tents turned into more substantial wooden or wattle-and-daub houses roofed with a rippled iron or sheets of what looked like tree bark strapped and sewn down. Habitation straggled down either side of the street, but a few side lanes revealed wooden towers, struts, sheds, a bizarre landscape whose purpose she could not guess at. It was ugly, ugly, ugly!

The houses became commercial buildings and shops, all sporting awnings held up by wooden posts; no one awning looked like its neighbors, nor was joined to them, nor had been erected with any attention to symmetry, order or beauty. The signs were roughly hand-painted and announced that here was a laundry, a boarding house, a restaurant, a bar, a tobacconist, cobbler, barber, general store, doctor’s rooms, an ironmongery.

There were two red-brick buildings, one a church complete to spire, the other a two-storied block with its upper verandah lavishly adorned by the same cast-iron lace Elizabeth had noticed all over Sydney; its awning was of curved rippled iron, had iron posts holding it up, and yet more lavish application of cast-iron lace. An elegantly lettered sign said KINROSS HOTEL.

Not a single tree stood anywhere, so even the foundering sun beat down like a hammer and turned the hair of a woman standing outside the hotel to pure fire. Her attention riveted by the martial posture, the sturdy air of invincibility the woman exuded, Elizabeth craned her neck to watch her for as long as she could. A striking figure. Like Britannia on the coins or Boadicea in illustrations. She gave what seemed a mocking salute to Alexander, riding beside the carriage, then swung to stare in the opposite direction from the convoy. Only then did Elizabeth notice that she held a cheroot, her nostrils trickling smoke like a dragon’s.

There were plenty of people around, the men shabbily clad in dungarees and flannel shirts, with soft, wide-brimmed hats on their heads, the women in much laundered cotton dresses thirty years behind the times, shady straw hats on their heads. And many were unmistakably Chinese: long pigtails down their backs, quaint little black-and-white shoes, hats like conical cartwheels, women and men in identical black or dark blue trousers and jackets.

The convoy passed into a wilderness of machinery, smoking chimneys, corrugated iron sheds and high wooden derricks, then came to a halt at the bottom of a sloping cliff that ascended at least a thousand feet. Here railway tracks actually ran upward until they disappeared from sight among welcome trees.

“Journey’s end, Elizabeth,” said Alexander, lifting her out of the carriage. “Summers will let the car down in a moment.”

And down the tracks it steadily came, a wooden conveyance not unlike an open omnibus on train wheels, for it had four rows of plain plank seats-for-six as well as a long, highly fenced tray for freight. But these seats were built at an impossible angle, so that sitting in one tilted the passenger far backward. Having closed the end of their seat with a bar, Alexander slid down beside Elizabeth and put both her hands firmly on a railing.

“Hang on and don’t be afraid,” he said. “You won’t fall out, I promise.”

The air resonated with sounds: the chug of engines, a quite maddening constant, thumping roar, metallic screeches, the slap-slap of rotating belts, crunches and grinds and howls. From high above came a separate noise, one lone steam engine. The wooden car began to move over the level ground to where the rails curved up, gave a lurch, and started to ascend the incredibly steep slope. Magically Elizabeth went from almost lying down to sitting upright; her heart in her mouth, she gazed down as the town of Kinross spread before her, widening in scope until the fading light turned its unlovely outskirts to impenetrable shadow.

“I didn’t want my wife down there,” he said, “which is why I built my house on top of the mountain. Apart from a snake path, this car is the only way up or down. Turn your head and look up—see? It’s being pulled by a heavy wire cable that’s wound or unwound by an engine.”

“Why,” she managed, “is the car so big?”

“The miners use it too. Apocalypse’s poppet heads—those derricks holding winches—are on that wide shelf we just passed. Easier for the men than going in through the tunnel at the bottom because of giant ore skips and the close proximity of locomotives outside. Cages let them down into the main gallery and bring them up again at the end of the shift.”

A coolness descended as they passed into the trees, as much, she divined, from altitude as from the sheltering boughs.

“Kinross House is over three thousand feet above sea level,” he said with that eerie habit he had of reading her mind. “In summer, comfortably cool. In winter, much warmer.”

THE CAR RAN on to flat ground at last, tilting them, and came to a halt. Elizabeth scrambled out before Alexander could help her, marveling at how quickly night fell in New South Wales. No long Scottish gloaming, no witching hour of soft radiance.

Hedge screened the car siding; as she came around it she stopped dead. Her husband had built a veritable mansion in this remoteness, of what looked like limestone blocks. Of three full stories, it had big Georgian-paned windows, a pillared porch at the top of a sweeping flight of steps, and an air of having stood there for five hundred years. At the foot of the steps was a lawned terrace; a great effort had been made to create an English garden, from trimmed box hedges to rose beds and even a Grecian temple folly.

The door was open, light streamed from every window.

“Welcome home, Elizabeth.” Alexander Kinross took her hand and led her up the steps and inside.

Everything of the best, brought here at what her Scottish canniness said was astronomical cost. The carpets, furniture, chandeliers, ornaments, paintings, drapes. Everything, including, for all she knew, the house itself. Only the faint reek of kerosene gave the lie to its being situated in a gas-lit city.

It turned out that the ubiquitous Summers was Alexander’s chief factotum, while his wife was housekeeper; an arrangement that seemed to give Alexander a peculiar pleasure.

“Begging your pardon, Marm, would you like to refresh yourself after your trip?” asked Mrs. Summers, and led Elizabeth to a properly functioning water closet.

Never had she been more grateful for anything than for that invitation; like all carefully brought-up women of her era, she sometimes had to go for hours upon hours without any opportunity to empty her bladder, thus dared not drink so much as one sip of water before leaving on an expedition, no matter of what kind. Thirst led to dehydration, concentrated urine to bladder and kidney stones; dropsy was a great killer of women.

After several cups of tea, some sandwiches and a piece of delicious seed cake, Elizabeth went to bed so tired that she remembered nothing beyond the foot of the staircase.

“IF YOU DON’T like your quarters, Elizabeth, please tell me what you’d prefer,” said Alexander over breakfast, taken in the loveliest room Elizabeth had ever seen; its walls and roof were of glass panes joined together by a delicate tracery of white-painted iron, and it contained a jungle of palms and ferns.