Best is that we for deth dispone
After our deth that lif may we;
There was another and longer silence. ‘Ranald Guthrie,’ I said at last, ‘has a pretty art in turning medieval piety to irony.
Wedderburn seemed to struggle for words – was forestalled by a startled cry from Sybil Guthrie. There was a scuffle in the darkness; I lowered my lantern and saw that Mrs Hardcastle’s all too potent poison had accounted for yet another rat – a great grey creature that had grotesquely dragged itself to die at our feet. For a moment I thought it was one of Gylby’s learned rats, with its little message attached. Then I saw that it was a rat more learned than that. Clutched in its mouth, as if seized to staunch its final agony, was a small black notebook.
PART FIVE
THE DOCTOR’S TESTAMENT
1
As consciousness came to me I was aware that the landscape was unfamiliar. And this awareness was for a space like Adam’s in the Garden: I recognized novelty without the aid of any of those contrasting memories which would seem essential to the formulation of the idea. More strangely, I was unperplexed by this. I suppose my mind had vigour only for the business of survival.
Before me was a rolling immensity of dark green vegetation, its dull lustre fading into purple distance under a vibrant blue sky. Behind me, I thought, was the roar of breakers, and heat as if the breakers were lava beating up from a subterraneous sea of fire. I struggled round. The sea was an illusion; the reality was a sweeping curtain of veritable flame, a great sickle of flame that reaped the tinder-dry vegetation with a motion perceptible as I watched. For a moment it was a spectacle only; then it realized itself as imminent peril. I got to hands and knees and saw, bounding before the blaze, a scattering of miniature prehistoric creatures – one grotesque form reproduced on every scale from the human to the rodent, like a child’s nest of bricks. Kangaroos and wallabies: with an immense effort my blood-soaked brain gave them their names. And at that much of my local knowledge returned to me; I saw that I was in the path of a bush fire and that I must find a break or be overwhelmed.
I was crouching where I must have fallen, half-way down an out-crop of limestone rock from which a dry gully dropped to lose itself in the scrub. Here and there the scrub gave place to a sparser growth of ti-tree, prickly bushes and salsolae, which in turn exhausted themselves round arid islands of sand. But nowhere was a denuded area large enough to promise security; my only hope was in a single massive ridge of rock that showed not more than two miles away, in startling isolation amid the low and endless undulations of green. It swayed and quivered as I looked – partly from refraction in the heat, partly perhaps to my own impaired sense – and I could be certain neither of its size nor of the practicability of ascent. It rose in sheer lines accentuated by an occasional perpendicular funnel or cleft. Up one of these I might scramble to safety.
I got to my feet and found myself – with a sort of detached surprise – not without considerable physical strength. The fire was partly checked by a veering wind; had it been sweeping directly towards me I should have had no chance at all. As it was, it was a grim race and I wasted no time. But before striking down the gully it occurred to me to discover if I had any possessions. There was evidence of a little encampment: a dead fire, an overturned billy, horse-dung. These meant nothing to me. But I found a haversack which I knew to be mine and took up. I knew too that there ought to be a water-bottle. In a swift and desperate search I failed to find it. T
Then I set out. The scrub was low and, when entered, not actually dense; I got forward without difficulty and with my mark always before me. A mile on I found a water-bottle – mine or another’s – three parts empty. This strange chance gave me a sort of irrational or superstitious confidence without which I should not be alive today.
By the time I reached the foot of the ridge there were already little fires about me. The heat of the conflagration was attracting a light headwind that blew in my face but through this the main blast was carrying forward showers of sparks that in places kindled flaring outposts of fire hundreds of yards ahead. Once I was nearly trapped by a sudden line of flame that leapt to life in a clump of yaccas about me – stunted spearlike growths of which the resinous butts will kindle with the force and rapidity of an explosion.
For agonizing minutes I explored the rock-face in vain for cleft or foothold: it seemed that my back, in a most horrible sense, was to the wall. But presently I found a possible chimney and began to climb. It is interesting that in that crisis I commanded all the lore though nothing of the memories of a mountain youth. And perhaps it was because my memory was like a freshly sponged slate that I can recall now with an almost hallucinatory power every step and strain of that desperate ascent. I emerged at length some nine hundred feet above an inferno of fire, and sufficiently shaken to fear that I might only have attained to a species of monstrously elevated grid-iron where I should perish like a martyr in a mad painter’s dream. I was however perfectly safe.
For over an hour I watched the fire sweep past. Though powerless against the barrier of rock it yet added appreciably to the burning heat of the sun and the scorching breath of the dry north wind that fanned it behind. The climb and the heat and the terror of the scene had momentarily exhausted me; I drank charily from my water-bottle and concentrated all the resources of my will on the next and all-important battle – the battle against mere despair. Many men who have wandered in wild places have found themselves in just such a perilous pass but few, except perhaps in some ultimate stumbling agony, can have experienced my peculiar distress.
With my senses in fair order and almost unimpaired physical strength, I yet found myself void of all memory of my own identity or of my whereabouts. Below me, I was massively aware, was a landscape not native to me – the landscape of Australia in one of its most appalling manifestations. I had plenty of knowledge – I could have read Latin or recognized the Parthenon or selected a fly for trout – but of knowledge organized round the fact of personality this was my whole store: I was a stranger lost in Australia. Beyond this I found it impossible to struggle. My consciousness of myself had no wavering boundaries which effort could push back: I was imprisoned in ignorance by walls as sheer as the rock up which I had recently climbed.
The fire had rolled away – by watching the dropping sun I judged roughly to the south-west. It had left behind it a smoking vastness which would be dangerous to traverse before a night had passed; my only present course was to take what bearings I could, find shade, and rest.
I estimated my horizon at about fifty miles. And in all that vast circle, save for the eminence on which I stood, was nothing but the empty and featureless bush, scarred by one long and diminishing trail of fire – a rolling and planless dapple of scrub and sand, diversified only by a sporadic growth of timber or by the swell of some undulation slightly more pronounced than the rest. Of clearing or settlement or homestead, white man or black fellow, there was no slightest sign; the scene was void, sullen, and sinisterly waiting in a way that caught and haunted the nerve. Only on the very verge of the southerly horizon lay a single level pencilled line. Long and anxiously I studied it through the treacherous heat. And finally I decided to call it the sea and make it my goal.
I turned to reckon needs and resources. Tied to the haversack was a hat, the primary need of all. Inside were a shirt, oatmeal, some biscuits, matches and a few personal belongings at which I could only gaze in perplexity. I had no compass. But in my trousers pocket I discovered a watch. And I had a two quart billy-can without a lid.
In the bewildering country below me I believed that the watch and the sun alone would be useless. I needed the watch roughly set at noon, a clear star-lit sky, country sufficiently open and a surface sufficiently safe to traverse in the cool of the night. I needed water within twenty-four hours, and food within three or four days. These points determined, I found a patch of shade, lay down and was almost instantly asleep.
I awoke in the brief Australian dusk to see below me a hundred points of smouldering fire. But the main conflagration had disappeared, caught and smothered perhaps in some chance funnel of sand, and I decided to descend and at least test the possibility of beginning my journey that night. The route down the chimney was doubly hazardous in the failing light but I was in the mood for taking chances. The decision nearly cost me my life.
