It also saved it.
Before I was half-way down the light had failed badly. Near the bottom the chimney forked; I misjudged a foothold in attempting to take the route by which I had come and fell perhaps fifteen feet down the other branch of the cleft. I lay at once dazed and in a curious agony of calculation: a broken limb or a bad sprain and I was done for. I felt no pain – but pain often comes later. I moved my limbs; they answered my will and a wave of relief passed over me. It was followed by a wave of fear. My legs were soaked in what I thought was blood. It was water. The discovery changed all my plans. I must carry with me every ounce of water that I could, half of it in an open billy. Until the billy was exhausted I must never once stumble. Such a strange variant of the egg and spoon race could be accomplished only in daylight. I judged that the gain in water would outweigh an extra twelve hours’ strain on my food, as also the risk of my not being able to hold a fairly straight southerly course by the sun. This decided, I lay down once more to sleep or rest. The night was cool but without extreme cold or frost. This encouraged me in the belief that I had seen the sea: it was unlikely that I was either at a considerable altitude or islanded in a great land-mass.
I was up at dawn and, accepting the dubious analogy of the camel, drank a good deal more water than was comfortable. There was a difficult climb from the spring by which I had fallen to the open ground and I found that my mind, though tolerably clear, had alarming blind spots in addition to that of memory. I wearied myself with trying to climb free with a brimming billy before I saw that I could fill the billy in the open from the water-bottle and then return to the spring and replenish that.
Apprehending this aberration, I spent some bad moments in sheer fear of fear – in panic lest I had discovered in myself a first symptom of that paralysing panic that can come on men who feel themselves bushed. Concentration on the first miles of my egg and spoon race conquered this feeling. The scrub was fairly open and the undergrowth too sparse to be treacherous. I allowed myself a pint of water that day and brought the rest safely to my evening halt. During the march I had eaten a few biscuits; I now kindled a fire and cooked myself a species of oatmeal bannock on a flat stone. I felt far from hopeless.
Throughout the day I had been troubled by intermittent but piercing headaches; otherwise my physical condition was good. And that night I slept dreamlessly. But in the morning I was so stiff that I guessed my muscles had been more accustomed to riding than tramping.
On the second and third days I must have made some twenty miles a day. Thereafter, the billy being empty, I travelled by night. That I was moving almost due south I had no doubt and at the end of my third night-march I knew that I could not have seen the sea: my goal had been mirage or some lake now behind me. Everywhere about me still was the same unchanging emptiness, the same endless iteration of sand and scrub. Occasionally I sighted kangaroo in the dusk; once by daylight I hurried to meet two natives who proved – so deceptive was the light – no more than two lonely magpies perched on stumps. And then at dawn on the seventh day, when my water and provisions were both exhausted, I came upon the unmistakable tracks of a white man – the imprints, too often repeated to be a trick of nature, of a booted foot just distinguishable in the loose surface of the sand. I realized that they must be fresh – a breath of wind would have obliterated them – and I hurried forward with a dreadful fear that in my weakness I could never overtake the stronger man in front. My heart leapt when I saw, not a quarter of a mile ahead, the thin smoke going up from a camp fire. I ran forward, sobbing and trying to call out from a parched throat.
The man was dead. He lay with an empty water-bottle – his sole unabandoned possession – beside him. His body, still warm, was sprawled on its face, one arm stretched out towards the smouldering fire and the hand closed round a few dry leaves. Death had taken him in the act of feeding his last desperate signal.
Something broke in me – a barrier I had built up not against the thought of imminent death or my present extremity of weakness and thirst, but against the silence of the bush. The barrier broke and I heard the silence, the hot heavy silence untouched for hours either by the dry cicada or the rustle of a breeze in the parched grass. I called out and my voice was horrible; I threw down my haversack and ran, horribly calling out, into the encompassing emptiness away from that silent and vastly-vaulted tomb. The frenzy brought me some final access of strength and I must have stumbled forward for hours. My head was swimming and shot with piercing pains; there was a great roaring in my ears, a roaring as uninterrupted as the silence of days had been. The roaring grew to thunder. There was a moment with the quality of blinding revelation when I knew that the thunder was not within but without. Then I found myself standing on the very verge of a high cliff against which, far below, thundered the breakers of an open sea.
East and west the cliffs stretched in unbroken line, great battlements and bastions of rock glittering in the morning sun. The prospect was of a magnificence that seized me and calmed me; and with the coming of a new clarity I realized the tremendous fact of a well-defined native track running eastward along the verge. I followed it painfully for some two miles to a point where the cliffs receded a little from the sea, leaving a valley of barren and sandy ground to which the path conducted by way of a narrow and precipitous gorge. I descended – with the greatest difficulty in my weakened state – and in little over an hour had found in the sand hills a couple of recent native wells. There was moreover a low scrub with a plentiful growth of red berries, and a flight of white paroquets – the first animal life I had descried for days – rose from feeding on them as I watched. I ate and had the wit to eat sparingly. After an interval I found a warm pool and bathed. My strength returned. Later and in another pool I succeeded in landing a couple of fish with my hat. Though my haversack was gone I had still the water-bottle and billy and in my pocket matches. My evening meal was a revelation of the sheer joy of taste. And that night I was lulled to sleep by a melody of waves.
For two days I travelled east along a firm beach, with sand hills and beyond them the cliffs on my left – a highway obstructed only occasionally by massive drifts of sea-weed. I had some days’ supply of water and for the rest I lived on berries. My confidence had returned and I was in the constant hope of coming presently within some fringe of settlement. Land birds were becoming more plentiful, a sign of some changing character in the upland country ahead.
On the third day the cliffs narrowed to the sea and I had eventually to spend hours finding a practicable route to the top. I was again in great danger. The berry-bearing scrub was giving out; I had no means of carrying a considerable supply of the berries; moreover they could not be a satisfactory diet for many days. And – what was yet more serious – I had found no further water. Twice I awoke early and experimented with collecting the light dew on the scrub; I found that with an improvised grass sponge and severe labour I could gain between a quarter and half a pint in a morning. The effort shortened my marches and I knew that it was toil for less than a subsistence supply. My one hope was in the rapidly changing character of the country through which I struggled.
The scrub was becoming denser and ran to the very edge of the now unscalable cliffs, so that I was at times afraid lest I should be unable to make any headway at all. But in places it was diversified by considerable growths of timber and I took this as a further sign that I was approaching a more productive soil. The gum trees moreover yielded me an unexpected source of food in a species of large white grub revealed by tearing off the ragged bark. I ate these cautiously and found they brought on considerable gastric disturbances; nevertheless I believed I gained strength from them. It was in following the lure of this food that I somehow lost the sea. A hot and leaden afternoon found me wandering in the heart of a maze of eucalyptus, my water for the second time wholly exhausted. And in the evening, abruptly, my nerve broke. Some subtle poisoning from the grubs may have been an immediate exciting cause, but it must chiefly have been a matter of accumulated strain. With some physical strength to stumble on, I had not the strength of will to rest with the closing in of night. I wandered among the great trees, possessed by the panic I had long dreaded, until I finally dropped to the ground.
For hours I must have lain semi-conscious, aware that the night was airless and oppressive beyond the ordinary. The agony of my thirst was shot through by the distinct pains of hunger and I must have groped up the tree by which I lay in the darkness in some hope of securing the familiar grubs. Suddenly my body quivered as if it had received an electric charge. The tree was ring-barked. I had come on my first trace of man.
I was unable to cry out and the night was utterly starless and obscure. I could only await the dawn, time and again reassuring myself of the reality of the bite of the axe. Dawn came, and to this day I cannot recall without bitterness and terror the irony it brought. The tree had been ringed and killed, as had half a hundred others. But the effort at clearing had been ill-judged; whoever had attempted it had long since been beaten back; the only sign of man was an empty and ruined humpy. I had resigned myself to dying on the very fringe of settlement when the storm broke above me.
Within five minutes I was sheltering in the humpy, soaked to the skin and with my billy brimming with water.
