Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [1]
For a while she sat staring into the darkness; the darkness that was warm, thick and almost tangible; soon her mind became utterly blank. The day’s events had been too overwhelming; had drawn on her too heavily. The rhythmic beat of the small boy’s slumber came to her lullingly now. Gradually her breathing fell in step with his. The whisper of the creek came to her like the croon of a lullaby. Her eyelids drooped and closed, fluttered and closed again. Soon she too was fast asleep.
In the darkness beyond the gully, the bush came slowly to life.
A lumbering wombat came creeping out of his ground den. His short stumpy body forced a way through the underscrub; his long food-foraging snout ploughing through the sandy earth in search of his favourite roots. Suddenly he stopped: sniffed: his nostrils dilated. He followed the strange new scent. Soon he came to the gully. He looked the children over; thoughtfully, not hungrily, for he was a vegetarian, an eater of roots. His curiosity satisfied, he shambled slowly away.
Random fireflies zigzagged by; their nightlights flickering like sparklets from a roving toy-sized forge.
Soon, creeping along the edge of darkness, came another creature: a marsupial tiger-cat, her eyes widened by the night to glowing oriflammes of fire. She too had scented the children; she too clambered into the gully and looked them over. They smelt young and tender and tempting; but they were large; too bulky, she decided, to drag back to her mewling litter. On velvet paws she slunk away.
A night mist tried to gather: failed – for the air in the gully was too warm – and dissipated into pre-dawn dew. The dampness settled on the children, pressing down their clothes, tracing the outline of their bodies in tiny globules of pearl. They stirred but didn’t wake. They were lost in their dreams.
In her sleep the girl moved uneasily. She was in the aeroplane again, and she knew that something was wrong. She and Peter were the only passengers, sandwiched between the crates of vegetables and the frozen carcasses of beef, and she was watching the port engine, waiting for the flames she knew would come. Too soon they were there; the tiny tongues of red licking out of the cowling. In her sleep she twisted and moaned; then mercifully, her mind went blank – nature’s safety valve that protects, even in dreams, those who have been shocked beyond endurance – and the next thing she dreamt was that she and Peter were staggering away from the blazing plane, she pulling him frantically because one of his legs was numb and his feet kept sinking into the soft, yielding sand. ‘Quick, Peter,’ she gasped. ‘Quick, before it explodes.’ She heard a dull pulsating roar, and looking back saw the figure of the Navigating Officer carrying the pilot and clambering out of the wreckage. In the heat of the explosion he glowed white-hot, disintegrating. Again her mind went numb, but in her sleep she clutched her brother’s hand; clutched it and squeezed it so tight that he half-woke and slid awkwardly off her lap.
The nightlights of the fireflies became pale and anaemic. Out of the east crept a permeating greyness; a pearly opaqueness in the sky; the sun-up of another day.
CHAPTER TWO
THE advance guard of sunlight filtered into the gully, turning the night to powdery opaqueness. The warmth of the rays drew this opaqueness up: drew it together into little spirals of mist – random smoke rings from a giant’s pipe, that floated lazily above the course of the stream.
As the light gained in intensity, the bush beyond the gully took on new colours: vivid colours: jade and emerald, white and reseda, crimson, scarlet and gold. Here was something very different from the desert of popular imagination; a flowering wilderness