“What of Captain and Tessa?” Bony pressed.
“You may count them out. They don’t know the first thing about it.”
“Well, whatever the cause, the delay occasioned by Scolloti having to go to Beaudesert to contact Howard measures almost one day. That one day might have been important. I don’t know.”
“But why should anyone have interfered with the transceiver?”
Bony shrugged faintly, saying, “Life would be easy if we had the answers to all the questions. When you and Scolloti went outside again everyone had vanished, save the children. Even Tessa had disappeared, and it wasn’t till after sundown that Tessa returned with Captain, or rather Captain came home bringing Tessa with him. Tessa had been crying and her dress was torn as though she had been forcibly brought home. The explanation given Howard was that the tribe had suddenly decided on a walkabout, which is quite normal, and that Tessa and Captain went off with the tribe. Again quite normal, both being members of it. Tell me, what was Tessa’s explanation to you?”
“That she ran away with the others and thought better of it after Captain made her come back.”
“Please!” The blue eyes had caught her and she couldn’t evade them. “Nine years ago a child sought your protection. She was never initiated; she was adopted by you. Today she is almost fully assimilated. Her dress sense is excellent, her poise very good. Her conversation is intelligent and lucid. And she would just run off with the tribe when told? Her explanation, please.”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly like that. When I taxed her about it, she wouldn’t say anything. Then she said she didn’t know why. Eventually she confessed that the lubras beckoned and she had felt something inside compelling her to run after them. I wonder! Kurt thinks it was the collective will of the tribe. Can you agree with that?”
“Certainly. But what prompted the will of the tribe to command your Tessa? You and the children were left utterly alone after the cook went off to report. You and the children went to the camp and found it completely deserted. On your return you cleaned your husband’s guns and decided to sleep in the store-room, as it seemed the strongest place. And then in the early evening Captain returned with Tessa, the girl crying and her dress torn. The picture is clear enough, but there’s something wrong with it.”
Chapter Four
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