Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [11]
‘Arkooloola,’ the bush boy insisted. He said it again and again, pointing to the base of the cairn.
The girl looked more closely, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun. She noticed that there was something strange about the shadow at the foot of the cairn. As far as she could see, it went all the way round. It couldn’t, then, be ordinary shadow, caused by the sun. What else, she wondered, could create such a circle of shade? The answer came suddenly, in a flood of wonder and disbelief. It must be vegetation. Trees and bushes: thick, luxuriant, verdant, and lush. And such vegetation, she knew, could only spring from continually-watered roots. She struggled to her feet.
It seemed a long way to the hill-that-had-fallen-out-of-the-moon. By the time they got there the sun was setting.
They came to the humble-bushes first, the twitching, quivering leaves tumbling to the sand as they approached. Then came the straw-like mellowbane, and growing amongst them a grass of a very different kind: sturdy reed-thick grass, each blade tipped with a black, bean-shaped nodule: rustling death-rattle, astir in the sunset wind. The bush boy snapped off one of the reeds. He drove it into the sand. Its head, when he pulled it out, was damp. He smiled encouragement.
‘Arkooloola,’ he said, and hurried on.
The base of the cairn rose steeply, strata upon strata of terraced iron-rock rising sheer from the desert floor; and the bottom belt of strata was moss-coated and glistening damp, with lacy maidenhair and filigree spider-fern trailing from every crevice. The children stumbled on, brushing aside the umbrella ferns, spurred forward now by the plash of water and by a sudden freshness in the air.
Peter had been lagging behind – for the last mile Mary had been half-carrying, half-dragging him. But now, like an iron filing drawn to a magnet, he broke loose and went scurrying ahead. He disappeared into the shade of the umbrella ferns, and a second later Mary heard his hoarse, excited shout.
‘It’s water, Mary! Water.’
‘Arkooloola,’ the bush boy grinned.
Together black boy and white girl pushed through the tangle of fern until they came to a tiny pear-shaped basin carved out of solid rock by the ceaseless drip of water. Beside the basin Peter was flat on his face, his head, almost up to his ears, dunked in the clear translucent pool. In a second Mary was flat out beside him. Both children drank, and drank, and drank.
The water was luke-warm; for though the sun was no longer shining on it directly, the all-pervading heat had found it out: had warmed it almost to the temperature of blood. As the girl drank she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the bush boy settle down beside her. She noticed that he didn’t drink from the surface, but reached down, with his fingers outspread, to scoop water from the bottom of the pool. Quick to learn, she too reached down to the rocky bottom. At once the warm surface water was replaced by a current of surprising coolness: a delicious eddy from depths that the rays of the sun had never plumbed. Nectar, with a coolness doubly stimulating: doubly good.
The bush boy drank only a little. Soon he got to his feet, climbed a short way up the cairn, and settled himself on a ledge of rock. Warm in the rays of the setting sun, he watched the strangers with growing curiosity. Not only, he decided, were they freakish in appearance and clumsy in movement, they were also amazingly helpless: untaught; unskilled, utterly incapable of fending for themselves: perhaps the last survivors of some peculiarly backward tribe. Unless he looked after them, they would die. That was certain. He looked at the children critically; but there was in his appraisal no suggestion of scorn. It was his peoples’ way to accept individuals as they were: to help, not to criticize, the sick, the blind, and the maimed.
He