Читать книгу The Will of the Tribe - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 8

Objects of Gold

In contradistinction to the Interior Aborigines, the Kimberley natives are well-built, tall, graceful in walk and poise. It has been considered likely that these people were the last to migrate from the northern islands, then driving the original inhabitants into the inhospitable arid lands, as the original inhabitants of the continent had been driven down into Tasmania before that island was separated from the mainland.

Captain was a typical Kimberleys man. He was five feet ten in height, he was well formed and in excellent physical condition, partly due to the fare provided by Jim Scolloti. The cutting scars either side of his backbone went far to prove his complete initiation, and the absence of cuts on his chest proved that he hadn’t risen to a place among the élite of his tribe.

Bony watched him at work on a young gelding. Man and horse were within a circular yard, and round and round this yard the Aborigine followed the horse, carrying the bridle destined to be slipped up and over the animal’s ears, today, tomorrow or sometime. One of them would tire first and it would not be the Aborigine. One would be worn of patience and it would not be the man. Wearing only old dungaree trousers, Captain followed the horse with the tenacity of a dingo.

As he would not want to be interrupted, Bony saddled the roan mare put at his disposal and rode from the yard past the homestead and thus to the desert with Lucifer’s Couch ahead. He had asked for a quiet horse, and the roan was certainly docile, in fact too docile. She declined to canter. She made it obvious that leaving the homestead wasn’t done at two o’clock in the afternoon. Having no switch, Bony had to drum her ribs with his heels.

The sky was flawless. The air was motionless. The sun, well past the zenith, gave black shadow to every ground thing: shrub, grass tussock, sharp unevenness of sand made by animal tracks. The green of the creek gums was over-painted with opalescent tints. The line of creek gums retired slowly to the left, but the gold nugget lying on the horizon appeared never to draw nearer. Here again Bony found himself in the Deceitful Land where distance is either magnified or reduced, level land becomes low sand ridges, and great sand-dunes sink to become as level as a billiards table.

He followed the well-defined track of motor wheels first made by Scolloti’s utility and subsequently by the motors conveying the investigators. Maintained at a sharp walk against her will, the roan brought Bony to the outer of the three rings circling the Crater. This rock upthrust was barely a foot above the general level and sand filled the declivities, and here the motor vehicles passed over without obstruction. It ran away to the south and to the north as far as could be seen and appeared rule-straight. It was much like the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz badly in need of repair.

The next or middle ring was like the same road, well formed and needing only to be rolled and sealed. Rocks had been removed to permit the passage of vehicles, as the average height above ground level was three feet. It was here that Lucifer’s Couch jumped from being a golden nugget on the horizon to become a flat-topped wide hill of commanding front. Coming to it athwart, the rays of the radiant sun upon it appeared as though a mass of golden nuggets had been thrown with force against a mound of pitch, the shadows actually being responsible for this effect.

On arriving at the inner ring, Lucifer’s Couch seemed touchable, although still a quarter-mile away. More man-labour had been done to make passable the crossing of this ring, many yards in width and four to six feet high. That is at the outside edge, because, along the inner side, the wash of sand and earth debris lay almost level with the summit. The roan walked on and up the gentle ground slope to the foot of the massive front of golden rocks.

Bony there reined her to the south and thus proceeded to skirt the Crater wall estimated to be one mile in circumference and, until recently, thought to be almost straight.

When with Howard on the wall or rampart he had noted, without much credit, that, although the summit was almost level, there was at one point a cleft or sinkage reducing the height at this point by fifty-odd feet. He rode on round the wall until opposite this cleft and here dismounted and neck-roped the horse to a stout desert jamwood.

He climbed the wall from rock to rock, like walking up a steep stairway, and, on reaching the top of the lower section or cleft, he gazed again upon Lucifer’s Couch and marvelled at the perfection of cosmic bombardment. The only living creature to be seen was an eagle, which came over the wall, sailed down into the pit and, with merely a few slow wing-flaps, rose to sail over the wall on the far side.

The bird was obviously on its beat, hopeful of finding a goanna or lizard drowsing in the warm sunshine, and Bony wondered idly if the great bird remembered those days the dead man lay there unprotected. The scrub trees about the central soak-hole appeared like ragged buffalo grass, and the lesser bush-trees on the circular slope down to it like spindly grass stems. Lucifer’s Couch! It would have been unforgettable: the sight of Lucifer’s Fall; it was a well chosen place, too. The isolation he felt on the summit of the wall, plus the feeling of remoteness from this majestic and yet desolate monument to a meteor, momentarily gave the feeling of complete nakedness.

He shrugged it away and brought his mind to work on the problem set him, and he tried to project his mind back in time and into the skull of the man who had selected this vast pit to receive the dead. Why carry the body up and over this wall and leave it down by the dry soak? To every compass point save to the north, the desert lay bare beneath the sun to the unbroken rim of the inland plain, a horizon so sharp as to appear little more than a mile or two distant, as well as to provide certainty of the earth’s roundness of shape. There lay thousands upon thousands of square miles of arid wastes. Why had Cain not buried Abel where the crime had been done? Why bring the body to this Crater? And, having brought it, why place it in the clear outside the soak for a wandering aircraft to fly over? Why not accept the concealment provided by the meagre scrub about the soak? It didn’t square with the psychology of the white man, of the semi-civilized Aborigine, or of the wild black man who inhabited the southern wastes.

One week prior to this day a man had said, “Our interests in this dead man are of varying importance. Mainly, we want to know how he got into the locality without being observed and reported. We’d like to know what he was doing out there. We would like to know why he was murdered. Who murdered him doesn’t concern us, for that is the police job; yours, not ours.”

“Do you know who he was?”

“Yes,” answered the man. “We have identified the body by the fingerprints, the dentures, the evidence of smallpox. Therefore, we are not interested in the question of identity. Do you grasp what we want of you?”

“Naturally, having been to school,” Bony had replied, and walked out of the office where the condescending type lorded it.

Now he argued that, were he confronted with the problem of carrying a dead man over this gigantic wall, he would select the place where the wall was lowest in the length of its circumference. That would be where he was sitting. He conceded that a white man or men either in haste or panic would not think of this, or would decide it was better to struggle up the wall at the point reached rather than carry the body a further half-mile to mount at its lowest point. He was, however, confident that the wild Aborigines would select this lowest point or pass, because they would have no lubras with them to undertake the labour. White men or black men, was the question he needed first to answer.

He stepped down from rock to rock to the floor of the Crater. It was clean of tracks until he had proceeded some twenty yards towards the centre. Keeping at that distance from the wall, he completed the full circle. He visited the pegs driven in the ground to mark the position of the body and finally came again to the base of the wall at its lowest point. He had crossed countless tracks made by boots and naked feet, and he had made one discovery.

The native trackers, including Howard’s, had known that the dead man was a white man. They had been instructed to look for the tracks of a white man or men and, believing that no white man could be expert enough to leave no tracks, they hadn’t bothered to examine the base of the crater wall. None had thought to look for proof where the wall had been crossed.

The man who could think like an Aborigine and reason like a white man proceeded to test the theory that the dead man had been brought over the wall at its lowest point.

He mounted the wall, this time using his hands as well as his feet, to bring his eyes closer to the individual rocks and the deeply shadowed crevices. Instead of climbing directly, he mounted in wide zigzags to cover the entire area below the pass. His hands found what his eyes failed to see. The fingertips felt the still sharp angles of splintered rock which rain and wind and sun had not completely eroded away, proving that the meteor must have fallen in recent times and not hundreds of years ago. The edges were not sharp enough to cut his fingers and thus would not cut the feet of a wild Aborigine.

He spent two hours climbing the wall and when again he sat and smoked in the cradle of the pass, his hands were sore and his legs ached. The sun was setting over the northern mountain summits, the arms of the ranges thrusting into the desert dressed in purple and dark blue. The westward face of the Crater wall was painted indigo, and that facing the setting sun purest gold.

Bony stood and faced the setting sun now dancing upon a distant tor. His right hand rose to touch the left pocket of his tunic where reposed an envelope containing several fibres which, he was sure, were of hessian, the material used for bags, the material used by the men who had brought the body to the Crater to wrap about their feet, and thus reduce the depths of their imprints and the more efficiently erase them.

The wild men would not use hessian bagging. They would not own hessian bagging were they so minded to use it.

The sun scorched the distant tor, and the neighbouring summits became a chain of pastel-tinted jewels. The light took the standing Bonaparte and transmuted him to gold, the gold of the rocks about him, and even his teeth, bared in a grin of triumph, for a second or two, were of gold.

He rode homewards in the twilight of this magic world, the thrill of detection carrying him onward, as an empty belly urged the horse to run at racing speed. He had been able to eliminate the wild Aborigines, for the fibres proved that men wearing boots had conveyed the body to the Crater. They would be white men, or Aborigines employed as stockmen. They could have come from Deep Creek or from Beaudesert, distance lengthening the odds in favour of Deep Creek.

This evening a conversational point with the Brentners and their two off-siders was a coming tour of the Kimberleys by a Federal Ministerial party, and Bony, not particularly interested in how public money is spent, retired fairly early. From a heavy suitcase he took a pair of woollen shoes, made with the wool on the outside and intended to permit the wearer to leave no tracks. Having then ordered his subconscious to wake him at four, he slept until that hour.

It was moonless and cold when, with the woollen shoes slung from his neck by the thongs, he left the house and followed the Creek bank, wearing his ordinary riding boots. Above, the meteors were busy and it was seldom that a full minute passed without at least one flashing into momentary brilliance. He was at the ford where Howard and he had crossed the Creek, when the first herald of the new day beflagged the eastern sky.

The ford, the homestead and Lucifer’s Couch, formed a rough triangle, each side three miles in length. Thus it was three miles to the Crater and, now wearing the sheep-skin shoes, he had gained shelter among a clump of desert jam-woods less than a mile from the great wall when the light was strong enough to observe its shape.

It appeared drab and featureless but, had he looked the other way, he would have seen the Ranges being drawn from grey obscurity to become rosy turrets and battlements of elfin green. His attention, however, was concentrated on Lucifer’s Couch and on the tiny horse tethered to that same scrub tree he had used the previous day. He saw the man appear round the southern curve of the wall and watched him free the horse and ride it at a hard gallop back to the homestead.

It was information needed and expected. Before daybreak the man had ridden to the Crater and then, as soon as light permitted, he had tracked Bony’s horse to the jamwood to which he had tethered his horse and then had tracked Bony to the wall and seen where he had climbed it and gone down the far side. Doubtless he, too, had descended to the floor and found what Bony had done there. He now knew of Bony’s movements the previous afternoon, but would be ignorant of the major discovery of the hessian fibres.

Returning to the Creek, Bony changed his wool shoes for his boots and proceeded to the homestead, the wool shoes compressed against his side under the coat. Were interest maintained in his movements, he would be tracked to the tree above the ford, where he had made the change, and no farther.

The horse-yards were empty, and the horse he had seen ridden must have been taken from the open paddock and returned there. When sauntering across the compound to the house he noted several lubras about the laundry. Captain was coming from his room. An Aborigine riding bareback was driving the working horses to the yard, and Bony thought it likely this was the man who visited the Crater. One of the lubras wore a blue ribbon in her hair, and later he watched this young woman walking up the Creek, obviously following his tracks.