Turning Back the Sun (5 page)

T
he road to the wilderness crossed the river and passed through the mines. Among their discolored slag heaps the wheels of the winder-houses turned in slow motion, and above them, from a stack fifty meters up in the sky, the smoke from the smelter plant unfurled a long, black banner over the town. Then the installations dwindled through a slovenly amphitheater of hills, where a narrow-gauge railway trailed over mineral pinks and greys.

The road held the plume of smoke in view for ten kilometers into the wilderness. The car wheels lisped over tarmac and a film of sand. Recently, whenever he could find time, Rayner had taken to driving alone into this emptiness: a savannah of stunted acacia and whitened grass whirring with cicadas. He felt eased here. It was a kind of shriving. All the vehemence and frustration of the town seemed to dissipate without hiatus into the empty circle of the horizon. The grey-red earth was soft, cracked, and the sky hung unchanging: a land without purpose or memory. It put him at peace.

Once he passed a shrunken water hole where some
natives were grazing their cattle. Their bullocks” haunches stuck out like knives. He lifted his hand in greeting, but they only stared. Beyond, the grasslands merged again into the plains, spiked with saltbush and desert oaks. There was no wind. The leaves hung limp, and the steppe ran to the sky like a faded carpet.

On his old War Ministry map a dotted line led to a faded asterisk, the site of native rock paintings. Two of the older townsmen had faintly remembered seeing them, sheltered in a hollow. But for years nobody had been there. Leszek, who had visited them as a youth almost fifty years ago, could not remember what they depicted. He”d only said, “You can”t go there now, surely? To one of the savages” places? Oh no, not after what”s been happening…. They”d kill you.”

“It”s deserted, isn”t it?”

“I don”t remember. With the savages you can”t always tell …”

In the end Rayner had resorted to a book written forty years earlier by a missionary who had tried to convert the elusive wilderness tribes. It pinpointed the site thirty-two kilometers southeast of the town: “a rocky hollow, still a shrine of the local tribespeople. Its paintings are crude and much faded …”

The tarmac road had dwindled to sand long before another track—no wider than a footpath—bifurcated to the east. Rayner followed it gingerly over the hardened ground. It seemed to go on for a long time. Once or twice, where the earth lightened, he thought he was approaching cornfields, but they resolved into faded grass on a faded earth.

Then the track stopped dead. The hollow opened so abruptly beneath him that only the sudden green of its treetops gave warning. It was small, circular—an eccentric dimple in the plain. It looked like what it could not be: the mouth of a buried volcano.

He peered over the edge. The place seemed empty. A
few gum trees lifted from the dust. A depleted water hole stared from its grass like a sunken eye. The heat had grown intense. Rayner scrambled down and began to circle the hollow. Sometimes the soft earth had dropped from its banks to show scraps of schist-like rock. He scrutinized their surfaces for paintings, but found none. Only at the base of one he was surprised to come upon a bowl of plaited cane filled with withered berries. Laid on twigs at the foot of the rock face, it must have been somebody”s tribute or thanksgiving. But to whom? The scarp showed nothing.

But as he examined it, there arose a deep, reverberant
Oyohoyoh!
It was so muffled that at first he imagined it came from somewhere above him or even from the rock.

Oyohoyoh!

Then Rayner saw them, a pair of savages—an old man and a girl—watching him from the gum trees. He could not tell if the shout had been welcome or warning. They did not move. They seemed as uncertain as he was.

He raised his hand in greeting, and the old man lifted both his in reply. Rayner had not noticed the conical hut sheltered against one cliff. The pair watched him coming. He had not bargained for this. Mentally he had dissociated the holy place (if that is what it was) from the people who had worshipped here, as if he were visiting somewhere long dead, a property of the wilderness. But now the townsman”s fear surfaced in him: a tingle of revulsion and alarm. In the half-minute that he took to reach the natives, the axed-in heads came floating against his shins again.

As Rayner reached him, he saw an old man of barbarian majesty. He wore a shabby pair of trousers rolled up at the ankles, and was clasping a flimsy stick. He looked huge. His flaccid shoulders and torso, dusted in grey hair, sloped without interruption into passive arms and stomach, before slipping away toward the delicate feet and hands of all his people. And his face was extraordinary. It
nested in a tumult of hair and beard, as if he were staring from grey flames. Under their overhung brows the eyes were nearly invisible—Rayner couldn”t even see their whites—but his skin glittered an igneous blue-black, as though its pigment had turned mineral.

The girl stood behind him in a torn white dress and a necklace of seeds. She looked about eighteen. The extremities of her hair had been twisted to ginger rats” tails.

Rayner said, “I hope it”s right my coming here.” He did not even know if they spoke his language. “I thought it was empty.”

“Is empty,” the man said gruffly. “You go where you like, but go careful. Is blackfeiler place, but okay you look.”

He turned and said something to the girl. She ran forward and held out a wooden mixing dish filled with yams. He took one, and she darted back. She might have been the old man”s wife or granddaughter, it was impossible to tell. Only her bird-like movements expressed her. Her face looked blank, except for the savage”s expression of distant puzzlement.

Rayner said, “Are you living here alone? Are you the guardian?”

“We just living with our living,” the man said. “But this like whitefeller say, retirement job. This old feller”s job.” He gazed at Rayner as if at a landscape, impassively, through his overcast eyes. “But sometimes we go into town too, buy trousers, buy shoes, buy the other things.”

Rayner”s unease had gradually merged into curiosity. Because these people were not of the town, he found an obscure release in them. Even the shabbiness of the savages was interesting, because it was not the town”s shabbiness. “You speak our language.”

“I got the stock farmers” language, you know, worked for three, four years, fencing and yarding. Big farm downriver. Bloke by the name Ellis. You know Ellis? But I like
to keep one place now. I can”t throw the bullocks no more.” He swept out one arm in an arc. “Living is all right till a feller gets old. So I stay here now and look after the places.”

“What places?” Rayner asked. “Painted places?”

“Ancestors,” the man said. “I can show you ancestors. There not many to see, eh, but I show you. Some of them gone now, is gone by rain and wind, and some. But most is staying, not too much.”

He lumbered over to the scarp that Rayner had just left, moving with a leaden, broken gait which suddenly reduced him. Then he stood in front of the rock face. “You see them?”

But Rayner saw nothing. Over the surface spread a web of hairline fissures, and the confusion of colors between them looked like blemishes of the living rock. The old man struck his hip. “You come stand here. Look now. Is different shadow, eh?” Rayner went and stood by him. The man pointed with his stick. “See there … there?”

Rayner looked again. And before his eyes, the figures awakened out of the stone. The whole surface lit up into new patterns: hunters, warriors, women, herders…. He was astonished that he had not discerned them before.

“Now you see.”

The figures were elongated and graceful. They floated in random patterns across the rock. Where its face had flaked away, they left amputated legs or heads. Rayner could make out a hunting party pursuing the miniature gazelles of the wilderness; a line of men on the march; a circle of women who seemed to be talking or preparing food; and higher up, where the pigment had oxidized and half gone, a phantom battle raged.

He asked in amazement, “How did they get these colors?” Some of the tones looked unfaded: white, yellow and blood red.

The man said: “They opened stones.”

The artists, Rayner guessed, had used pigments of charcoal and pipe clay and the ochreous local ironstone. The images were all in silhouette: incarnate shape and movement. They appeared less like people than ideas of people. Even when fighting, they seemed to be engaged in an aerial ballet.

He asked, “What kind of men painted these?”

The old savage thought a while before answering. “Priests.”

Rayner had no idea what the paintings were trying to do. They portrayed everyday life—but as if it were paradise. He could not resist the idea that they contained some secret, something known also to the savages sitting motionless on the town steps, gazing into an inner distance. But knowing how compulsively he laid his own ideas on neutral things, he asked, “Are these life without the white man?”

The old man encircled the paintings with a wide flourish of his stick. “This life our people always. This is life after the tree come down.”

“Tree?”

The man pointed at what appeared to be a white river wavering between the paintings. “The tree come down. Who brings it down? Maybe some devil bring it down, maybe the people from the other place, the salt marsh people, I don”t know. But it got cut and there”s no more climbing up and down, only the sky like you see. This is the story now.”

Rayner wondered if the savage was confusing him on purpose. Perhaps he had enquired too closely. And now the man was pointing to the far side of the imaginary tree, tracing a surface whose paintings looked fainter and older. “Is the time before Time.”

In this bleached space, animals were the same size as men. They seemed to inhabit a region without gravity, and a few were upside down. Hare, lizard, human, antelope
—they floated together in stressless equality. Some of their heads were turned, as though they held conversation. But compared with the other figures they looked full-blown, static, as if they had reached completion or perhaps not begun. Hunters froze by their spears. Animals just sat.

The savage said, “This is happiness.”

Even the dancers described only hieroglyphs of dance, with their hands raised hieratically above their heads—although the loosened pose of one woman reminded Rayner bizarrely of Zoë, who had slept last night in his arms.

The man said, “The animals painted in their own blood. Gazelle is in gazelle blood, hare is in hare blood. That”s how they painted, eh.” The native was now breathing audibly, and Rayner noticed that he was starting to sweat. “Maybe these things painted by God.”

Rayner stepped back in frustration, to view the whole rock face from a distance. He felt he was gazing, illiterate, at a crucial text. It seemed to portray a felicity from which the white man had been excluded at some primordial time: a kind of lost knowledge. And the savage could only explain it in riddles. But if this was the inner world which these people inhabited, Rayner thought, why did they axe people”s heads in?

He asked, “What is this tree?”

“This tree, I not seen it since I was young.” The man flung out one arm toward the south. “Those people not my clan.”

Rayner looked foolishly to where he pointed. “What people? Where?”

“Out there, I don”t remember how far. Maybe five days away, maybe ten. I don”t know. They”re not my people, like I say. But most blackfellers been there one time or other. Tree place is like the world”s middle, eh.” He touched his stomach-button. “The navel of the world.”

Strange how many people imagined they lived at the center of the world, Rayner thought, while for him it was always somewhere else.

The savage turned and started back heavily towards the hut. Rayner said quickly, “May I use a camera?”

“Camera?”

“Yes.” He took it from its case.

The old man frowned at it. “What does this do?”

“It makes pictures of things.” Cameras were commonplace in the town now.

The savage took the black box delicately in his hands, and peered into the lens. His forehead had depressed into inky corrugations. He handed it back. “You show me.”

Rayner pointed the box along the cliff face. He had left its hood and tripod in the car. The old man listened to its clicking and waited for something to happen. After Rayner had finished he asked, “Where is the painting?”

“The painting is in the camera. They take it out in the town.”

He was not sure if the man believed him. They walked back slowly to the hut. It looked makeshift: just myrtle boughs and straw. Behind it, sprinkled with chips of painted bark, was a fresh grave. The girl was cooking outside, but jumped up as they approached, and pulled some grass-seed cakes from the ashes. The man said, “My daughter has made you welcome-cakes.” They sat down opposite one another, and he broke one. The girl disappeared into the hut, and after a while Rayner heard the clacking of a loom.

The old man started cramming the bread into his mouth. He said, “I heard some blokes been making trouble round town area.”

“There”ve been murders in the outlying farms. You heard that?”

“Yes, I heard that. These bad fellers make like they get rid of white man. One bad bloke makes it wrong for all of
us. They grow angry because no rain. They go a little out of their heads. That”s how it takes them, the drought. Is hard if rains don”t come and cattle all dying, one there, one here, dying.”

“The people in town are getting angry too,” Rayner said. “They think
they
live at the earth”s center!”

The man did not understand. “That”s another place, the earth”s center, long way south.” He extended his arm again. Rayner saw that he was shaking slightly, his whole body shaking. He kept ramming his stick in and out of the embers, as if to raise heat. His breathing had become a sad, nasal sighing. He said, “But that tree cut now. Nobody climbs up and down no more. It”s just sky now.” He pulled his stick from the cinders and inscribed something in the dust. “That”s the tree now.”