This Golden Land (41 page)

     Thinking he couldn't take much more, praying that the ritual was over, Neal watched in horror as Thumimburee reached into a pouch and, bringing out a handful of red substance, smeared it over Neal's many puncture wounds. He watched by the light of the campfire as the red clay, mixed with
his own red blood, was applied to his torso, and rubbed in with such vigor that he thought Thumimburee meant to skin him entirely.

     Finally, when Neal thought his knees were going to give way, as he bit his tongue to keep from crying out, he felt helpful hands beneath his arms as the brothers Daku and Burnu eased him to the ground where he was given a skin of water and many congratulatory pats on the back. They spent the night in that spot, with men sitting watch, and the next morning they brought Neal back, to recuperate beneath the shade of the mulga tree.

     It took two weeks for the tattoos to heal. After the initial pain subsided, itching set in, but Neal had to keep his hands away from the scabs covering his chest. But then the itching went away and the scabs began to fall off, leaving Neal's white torso covered in an astonishing pattern of dots rendered from the rust-red heart of Australia.

W
HAT COMES AFTER WALKABOUT
?" N
EAL ASKED
. "W
HAT IS
the third phase of the initiation?"

     But Jallara held up her hand in a gesture that meant the topic was taboo, and so he could only pray that it wasn't something ghastly, like eating a live snake.

     It was morning, the camp was bustling with celebration as everyone loved the pomp and excitement of walkabout. The boys threw boomerangs or chased one another, and the men stood around Neal giving him advice, pointing this way and that, gesturing, even though he didn't understand a word. They were all remembering their own walkabouts, years ago, and were giving him pointers. But for once Jallara wasn't translating. She was involved in the sacred ceremony of preparing the initiate for departure. While the women were painting his body and tying feathers in his hair and beard, Jallara placed a necklace of animal teeth over Neal's head, to rest on his newly tattooed chest and lie alongside the small leather pouch that held the emerald tear catcher.

     "Do not eat
thulan.
He is your Dreaming spirit. Taboo to kill, taboo to eat." Neal had learned that
thulan
was their name for a lizard that the British colonists called Thorny Devil, and which Neal knew by the scientific name of
Moloch horridus.
Ten inches long with a flattened body and spiny skin,
thulan
had the ability to change its color and the pattern on its skin to match the ground it stood on. Neal had encountered many during his trek with the clan, and thought the little beast both ugly and beautiful. The clan feasted on
thulan
regularly, but no pieces were ever served to Neal.

     "Thulan has nothing to fear from me," he said with a smile. For once, Jallara did not smile back. Why was she being so solemn? Even her friend, giggly Kiah, was strangely somber. Neal wondered if it had something to do with the third ritual, the one after walkabout, and which was taboo to mention.

     "When do I rejoin the group?" he asked when he was ready to go. He looked at the faces gathered around him—black-skinned with heavy brows and deep-set eyes, faces that he recognized as belonging to Allunga, Burnu and Daku, Jiwarli and Yukulta, people he had come to think of as friends.

     "When it is proper time," Jallara said.

     Neal frowned. "What do you mean? What time will that be?"

     "Only Thulan know."

     "You mean it's up to me to decide when to return?"

     "Up to the spirits, Thulan. You receive vision, you come back."

     He stared at her. He couldn't rejoin the clan until he had experienced a vision? Neal had assumed there was a pre-arranged time limit, such as seven days or by the next full moon. Or possibly when the initiate felt he had survived long enough. Neal had not anticipated this. How could he come back if he received no vision?

     He was starting to wonder if he had taken on more than he could handle. When he had looked at the men's magnificent tattoos, and heard stories of walkabout, it had all seemed so manly and adventurous, the sort of tales white people in their parlors loved to read. He had not expected so much pain and sacrifice. Or risk to his life.

     But he couldn't back out now. It would be cowardly. And what would he write in his book—what would he tell Hannah? It crossed his mind that he
could invent a vision. But he knew he couldn't lie. This was a sacred ceremony. Even if it wasn't his own religion, he had to respect these people's beliefs.

     He looked out at the ochre plain and considered the ordeal before him. Neal had snared his share of goannas and geckos, he had even knocked a big red kangaroo off its feet (although Daku and Burnu had had to finish the animal off). Neal knew how to track echidnas and burrowing rodents, how to start a fire, and how to find water. Since he doubted there would be any messages from the spirit world for Neal Scott of Boston, Massachusetts, as much as he might welcome a chance to experience it, he would have to choose his own time to rejoin the clan. Perhaps five days would seem reasonable. And he wouldn't have to lie. Since it was taboo to talk about one's secret spirit-message, no one would ask him for details, they would just assume he had visited the other world.

     Finally, declaring him spiritually ready, they gave him a spear and a kangaroo fur blanket, and nothing else. Thumimburee said that if he did not come after the cycle of one moon, they would search for him, and bury him, for his long absence could only mean that he was dead.

     Neal watched them tear down their shelters and tie the stick-bundles to their backs. They kicked out the fires and erased all traces of human habitation, as they had done in every camp since leaving the billabong, and then, without a backward glance at Neal, the clan struck off toward the west.

     He watched them for a long time, observing the way the shimmering waves of desert heat distorted their figures and finally swallowed them. He knew they were only a few miles away, and yet he felt as if he were the last man on earth. The wind, without the flavoring of children's laughter and women's chatter, was empty and unsettling. It whistled through his long hair and beard as if to say:
We have you alone at last.

     Neal turned in a slow circle, looking at a landscape he had once thought bleak. He saw it now through different eyes. It was a land of colors. Ochre plains dotted with clumps of green spinifex were framed by dramatic red rocks, lavender mountains and brilliant blue skies. "We call this the Nullarbor," he had told Jallara one day.

     "Why?"

     "Because there is nothing here."

     She had not understood, and at the time Neal had not known why. Couldn't she see the wasteland, the lack of striking topography, just blowing wind and dust? But now he understood. As they had trekked, Jallara had pointed out areas that held sacred meaning to her people: Anthill Dreaming, Dingo Songline, the place where Lizard-Spirit Ancestor created the first
thulan.
Neal was still not adept at distinguishing the features that identified such places, but he grasped the significance of what she was telling him: that this vast plain of twisted rock formations and buried water and stunted trees was criss-crossed with ancient ancestral tracks, and dotted with spots of religious and historical significance to the people who had lived here for thousands of years.

     It was not an empty wasteland.

     "Follow songlines," Jallara had said. "Look for places of Dreaming." But as hard as he looked now, Neal could not find these things, he had no idea of where to start even. Still, he decided as he hefted his spear and struck off in a direction opposite from the way the clan had gone, there was plenty for him to see here, and he might as well get started and not waste time. While serving on the HMV
Borealis
Neal had read books written by naturalists who had been among the early explorers to the continent, and so in the course of his first morning of walkabout he was proud of himself for being able identify much of the fauna he encountered. This desert was a naturalist's dream, and he wondered—dared hope, even—if he might stumble upon a species never before seen by white man and which he would have the honor of naming.

     At noon, his stomach growled and he looked toward the cluster of boulders that had been the clan's home for the past few days. No one had said he could not remain there, as there was water and small game. But then it wouldn't be "walkabout." Neal presumed that the purpose of the ritual was to cover ground and wait for the spiritual revelations to come.

     Nonetheless, hunger and rationalizing drove him to the old camp, where he drank from the artesian well and roasted a fat gecko. He slept through the hot afternoon, deciding he would take up wandering after sundown.

     But when he awoke after sunset, he decided it would be best to stay here for the night and strike off in the morning. And so he sat with his back
against the trunk of the lone acacia and looked up at the sky.

     He was used to the stars by now, an astonishing brilliant canopy that one never saw above cities. As he listened for sounds of predatory creatures, Neal thought of his life up to this moment. He recalled his twelfth birthday when Josiah Scott had sat him down and said he was old enough to be told the truth, saying, "I am your adoptive father," showing Neal the cradle, the blanket, the emerald glass bottle he had thought once held perfume. Neal would never forget the tears that swam in Josiah's eyes that day, as if in telling the boy the truth, he was losing the son he had had for twelve years.

     Neal thought about Hannah, as she had held onto him during the storm off the island of St. Helena, and again as she had clung to him on the dusty road in front of the Australia Hotel.

     He turned his gaze to the monolithic mountain that burned red by day but turned a saturnine purple at night, and he drew the fur more tightly about himself. He knew it was October, but had no idea of the date. Strangely, he didn't care. There was a time when Neal had kept date and day and hour in his mind, the scientist conditioned to live by facts and external data. But his sojourn with the Aborigines had shown him a different way to mark the passage of time, through the stars, the length of shadows, even his own internal rhythms.

     And he had learned so much more. As Jallara's recollection of English had come back, and as Neal had become adept at understanding her gestures and inflections, and even a smattering of Aboriginal words, he had discovered an intricate religious belief system. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurred at a particular place left behind a vibrational residue in the earth. The land, its mountains, rocks, riverbeds, and waterholes, all echoed with vibrations from the events that had brought each place into creation.

     It made Neal think of the rust-red mountain, now looming dark and sinister against the stars, and he wondered if the vibrations he had imagined emanating from it had begun long ago by the very cataclysmic geologic event that had created it.

     Jallara also spoke of the Dreamtime which she said was the "time before time," when Ancestor Spirits came to Earth in human and other forms, to
give the land, animals, people their form and life as it was known today. Which was why, Jallara explained, the Ancestor Spirits and their powers were not gone but were present in the Dreamings seen all around.

     It didn't make much sense to Neal who had had little religious training. Josiah Scott had taken him to church on Sundays, but Neal had barely listened to the sermon from the pulpit. But one thing did make sense. With each day spent among Jallara's people, Neal came more and more to understand their close ties with the earth and with nature. He learned that the clan didn't feel separate from the scheme of things, that they didn't regard themselves as superior to animals or to water or rocks, but believed that they were all part of the complex web that had been spun at the beginning of creation, in the Dreamtime.

     As he listened to rustling in the overhead branches of the mulga tree, wondering what kinds of birds or rodents were up there, Neal thought again of his gratitude to Jallara and her people for saving his life, and his desire to repay them somehow. He had abandoned the idea of showing them how to build sturdier shelters when he realized they needed light collapsible dwellings for their nomadic way of life. That was when he had hit upon the idea of reading and writing. Jallara's people possessed phenomenal memories. To listen to Thumimburee recite the clan's history was spellbinding. "We walk, we walk, we camp at Emu Songline. Hunt kangaroo. Three sleeps. We walk, we walk . . ." Some stories took hours in the telling, or days. Impressive, Neal thought, but it would still be better if they had a permanent record.

     As he rolled himself up in the kangaroo pelt, wishing he had a few more as the cold was severe, he decided that once he reached Perth he would find a way to bring the alphabet back to Jallara's clan, and the tools of reading and writing.