This Golden Land (35 page)

     "Yes, I was unconscious."

     "Thulan your spirit-guide. Maybe you walkabout. You Thulan Dreaming? He protect you."

     "Neal Scott is my name," he said, tapping his chest. "I am Neal Scott."

     She struggled with the words, but her native language did not seem to possess the letter S, and when it came out Neel-ah-kaht and seemed a struggle for her, Neal said, "Never mind, Thulan it will be," wondering what a
thulan
was, secretly hoping it wasn't something embarrassing or comical.

     "We think you dead," she said. "Gum tree spirit save you."

     "Gum tree?" And then he remembered the pit and the elusive smell. He realized now it had been the scent of eucalyptus leaves. The Aborigines had not been cooking him but treating him with the same sort of healing steam with which Josiah Scott had treated Neal's boyhood colds, using camphor and pennyroyal.

     He rubbed his jaw and felt a young beard there. And then, remembering the rest of himself, quickly looked down and was relieved to see a gray kangaroo skin covering his loins. Perhaps it had been done because these people knew of white man's physical modesty—because the men in the camp, as far as Neal could see, did not cover their private parts—or maybe the kangaroo pelt was another stage of the cure.

     "Where are my clothes?" he asked, and when Jallara did not seem to understand, he pantomimed until she nodded in understanding. Pointing to a large campfire, she pinched her nose and made a distasteful face.

     Neal's eyebrows arched. "You burned them because they
smelled?

     She nodded with a smile.

     He looked down at his feet and saw in relief that he still wore shoes. Neal knew that his tender white man's feet were no match for this harsh terrain.

     He sank back. "Thank you for saving my life, Jallara . . . I don't know what happened to me . . ." He rubbed his eyes. What
had
happened to him? His memory was foggy. There had been a sandstorm. And then he had wandered for days. Terrible thirst and hunger. But what was I doing out in the middle of nowhere?

     He closed his eyes and tested his memory. "My name is Neal Scott," he murmured, "adopted son of Boston lawyer, Josiah Scott. My mother—or someone in her family, an angry patriarch most likely—left me on Josiah Scott's doorstep. I have a university degree in geology. I am a scientist and photographer. I am madly in love with a midwife named Hannah Conroy. I came to Australia to make discoveries and solve mysteries. I was part of an expedition . . ."

     Here, his memory grew hazy. He remembered faces of men around a campfire, one in particular, an older man, ruddy-faced and white-haired in a white pith helmet—

     Sir Reginald Oliphant, famed explorer!

     Neal breathed a sigh of relief. He had not lost his memory. He was just a bit foggy on the details. Dehydration affected the mind, he knew. Neal suspected that, in time, it would all return.

     And then he thought of Hannah. Saying good-bye at the Australia Hotel. The feel of her lips on his, her supple body in his arms . . .

     Exhaustion overcame him and he drifted off into deep sleep. The next time he awoke it was late afternoon. Jallara was not there, but three fierce looking men gazed down at him from beneath heavy brows. They were black with wiry limbs and sinewy torsos, and yet they were old men, with white hair and long white beards. Their bodies were painted in white stripes, they carried spears and looked as if they had just materialized from an era long past. Their physical fitness impressed him.

     Before Neal could speak, Jallara was there, kneeling next to him with the possum-skin water bag, and seedcakes formed into dark, round balls.

     The three men squatted while Neal ate, and despite their ferocious appearance, they were friendly and smiled as they questioned him with
Jallara translating. Neal had questions of his own. How long had he been with them, and where had they brought him? The answer, as nearly as he could figure, was days, and they were far from the place where they had found him.

     The seedcakes were surprisingly delicious but he could not eat much yet as his stomach had gone for too long without food. Neal was amazed at how weak he felt. Thanking Jallara for the meal, he sank back and looked up at her. "Where did you learn to speak English?"

     She smiled. "Yes. English."

     "Where? At a mission?"

     She seemed not to understand. He thought a moment, then said, "Jesus," as that was the first word missionaries generally taught the natives. But she did not seem to understand that either. Then where had she picked up her English, and her non-Aboriginal blood?

     The oldest of the three men who continued to sit with Neal—a black man with snow-white hair and beard, wearing animal teeth necklaces and a sliver of wood piercing his nasal septum—said something to Jallara and she pointed to Neal's chest and said, "Thumimburee ask, what is?"

     He looked down in surprise. It was still there! The emerald-glass tear catcher that he had disguised in a leather pouch and hid beneath his shirt in case it caught the interest of someone in the expedition. The Aborigines hadn't removed it. And then he realized they must have thought it was personal magic, since they too wore necklaces bearing amulets with what he surmised were spiritual and mystical powers.

     He managed to convey that it was a receptacle containing his mother's tears and the man named Thumimburee, through Jallara, said solemnly, "Very strong magic, Thulan."

     That night the clan held a corroboree to celebrate the recovery of the white man they had found near death. The men and youths were adorned in feathers and bone, shells and animal teeth, their lithe bodies decorated with white paint, and they danced around a sturdy fire while the women and children clacked sticks together in rhythm.

     They roasted a kangaroo and produced honey on the comb with wild fruit, all shared out, Neal observed from his twig shelter, in a complex system
of priorities and taboos. There was no grabbing for food or fighting over it; portions were distributed according to a strict protocol that Neal had heard about during his time on the survey vessel out of Perth: the man who killed the kangaroo first gave servings to his own and his wife's parents, to his brothers, and to the men who had hunted with him. They in turn shared with their families, or with men to whom they owed a debt, sometimes leaving nothing for themselves. Neal knew that the boy who had caught a goanna could not eat it himself but had to give it to his parents, and a girl could only receive food from a man related to her by close kinship.

     Jallara herself brought food to Neal, offering shyly the succulent slices of meat, bits of comb dripping with honey, and fat witchetty grubs roasted in the embers. He was ravenous and ate with such gusto that people stared, until he realized he was being rude, and slowed himself down. The only fluid the clan drank was water, but after his days of thirst, to Neal it was like the finest wine.

     Every time he glanced Jallara's way, he found her watching him through the smoke and the sparks, her large, deep-set eyes fixed on him, and each time he felt a strange and shocking stirring deep within himself. He was intensely curious about her, drawn to her in an inexplicable way. Perhaps it was simply that she spoke English, making him feel at ease and less a stranger among these strange people. Or perhaps it was something deeper which he was not yet mentally fit to fathom.

     He slept uneasily that night, waking up from nightmares in which he was lost in the wilderness. He lay in a sweat, staring up at the stars that peeked between dried brush and twigs, wondering where he was, to what place Jallara's people had carried him while he was unconscious. What had happened to Sir Reginald and the other members of the expedition? Were they dead? Neal thought of young Fintan Rorke, who whittled flowers out of wood, and prayed that they had survived. If they had, then surely Sir Reginald and his men were searching for him. Or had they given up the search by now and resumed their westward trek?

     Or were they lost and wandering in this godforsaken wilderness as he had been, but hadn't the luck to be found by Aborigines?

     The next morning the clan woke up to industriousness, with the men
going off to hunt while the women foraged near the water hole. By afternoon they were back, the men with a kill, the women with grubs, roots and the occasional lizard. They slept through the hottest part of the day, and then took up their never ending tasks of whittling spears, carving boomerangs, making stringy baskets, all the time laughing, singing, talking.

     With the help of two boys, Neal was able to stand and shuffle to a place behind boulders to answer the call of nature. Now he had a better view of the terrain that surrounded this oasis, and all he saw was red sand, low lying orange hills, and spinifex—tall clumps of hummock-grass resembling giant startled porcupines.

     He got a better look, too, at his exotic hosts. Although Neal had observed Aborigines during his short time in Australia, he had never been in such close proximity to them. He had heard them referred to as "blacks," "savages," "natives," but Neal's scientist's mind looked at them in a different way. It occurred to him that the Australian Aborigines resembled no other people on earth. They were unlike black Africans, and certainly did not resemble the Polynesians, their closest geographical neighbors. The nearest that Neal had come to seeing someone with the same features was a guru from India, a turbaned mystic he had met in a Boston drawing room, a man whose heavy brow, wide nose, deep-set eyes, flowing hair and prodigious beard were similar to those he saw in this camp.

     A memory suddenly came to him, long forgotten: Eight-year-old Neal exploring the world globe in Josiah Scott's study, looking at the continents and thinking how they resembled puzzle pieces. The eastern shore of South America looked as if it could fit neatly against the western shore of Africa, and the southern shore of Australia could fit neatly against Antarctica. When Neal later attended university and studied geology, he heard an intriguing new theory about continental drift. The theory was that, millions of years ago, only two huge land masses covered the earth before breaking up and drifting apart to form the continents that existed today.

     Was this why Jallara's clan, with their hair that was wavy instead of tightly coiled or "frizzy," made him think of the Indian guru he had once met? Was it possible that somehow, long ago, a migration from the subcontinent of India led Jallara's distant ancestors to Australia?

     As Neal watched Jallara's clan at their evening activities, other issues crowded into his mind. He thought of Hannah. Had she perhaps heard about the sandstorm? Did she think him dead? And what
did
happen after the sandstorm hit? As Neal searched his foggy memory, trying to find answers, he began to realize that something was bothering him, but he could not put a name to it.

     Something vitally important. But what?

     As he wrestled with his uncooperative memory, Neal watched the men groom one another around the campfire, using sharp stones to trim their hair. While the women and girls allowed their hair to grow below the shoulders, the men kept their curly hair cropped in a cloud around their heads. They also spent hours painting themselves, taking great care with the dots and lines that they applied in white pigment to their own and others' bodies.

     Another night of fitful sleep as the importance of the elusive memory grew in Neal's mind. He was certain now that there was something very important he was supposed to remember. But what? Lying awake in the night, while his rescuers slept and snored, Neal kept going back to the days before the sandstorm, to see what it was he was supposed to remember. Had he promised to do something? Had he a specific task to carry out? Was he carrying a message to someone? If only he could remember!

     He finally drifted off only to awake suddenly and feel something warm and soft at his side. With a start, he sat up and saw Jallara lying there, fast asleep beneath his fur blanket. Neal was so shocked he couldn't speak. She lay on her side, facing away from him, her eyes closed, her shoulder rising and falling in gentle respiration. Neal scanned the camp. Everyone slept, including the dingoes. But what was going to happen come dawn? When daybreak shed light on him and this girl, was Thumimburee going to vent his fury, for surely some sort of taboo had been breached?

     He looked at her more closely. Jallara slept with her hands folded beneath her head. In the moonlight he saw that her face and torso paint was not smudged. Lifting the blanket, he saw with relief that her grass skirt was in place. In fact, nothing about her looked out of place, nothing untoward had happened while he slept, and it occurred to him that she had merely crawled in to keep him warm, for the night was bitterly cold, or perhaps she
had heard him cry out in nightmares and came to bring him solace.

     Strangely, she had that very effect on him because, as he lay back down, Neal felt comforted by her warm presence. It took him a while to cast off the disquieting after-effects of a bad dream, but he eventually drifted into dreamless slumber.

     When he awoke, Jallara was offering him a possum-skin of water and warm seedcakes. As he looked into her black eyes and recalled how she had felt next to him during the night, Neal was suddenly gripped with the desire to repay these people for saving his life. While he was still unclear on the details of the sandstorm and its aftermath, he did know that if it weren't for Jallara and her family, he would be dead.

     The solution came to him as he hobbled around the camp on weak legs, and paused at one point to support himself against a grass shelter. And the whole thing came tumbling down. An embarrassed Neal apologized profusely as two men helped him up, but they only laughed. The hut was reconstructed within minutes, and Neal realized he had found a way to repay Jallara and her people for saving his life.

     This primitive clan that wore no clothes, owned no possessions, had no concept of money or wealth, did not read or write, hunted with sticks and lived in shelters that easily collapsed, were like Adam and Eve before the temptation in the Garden. Neal looked at their flimsy shelters and wondered why they didn't construct sturdier ones. And then he thought: They don't know how. As they didn't have hammers and nails, chisels and saws, it was no wonder. And why had they never invented the bow and arrow? Neal decided that he would show them. It would vastly improve their hunting, and with their hunting improved, their lifestyle would therefore improve. Neal would show them how to build stronger shelters and also how to plant seeds so that they could control their own crops all year round, instead of relying on scavenging.