Paul was very pleased with himself about it. The men began to call him a mascot and to say he had brought Michael luck, as he had Jun Johnson. There was no saying how the fortunes of the new partnership might flourish, if he stuck to it. Paul, responding to the expressions of goodwill and the inspiration of being on opal, put all his childish and bullocky energy into working with Michael and Potch.
He still told everybody who would listen to him the story of the wonderful stones he had found when he was working with Jun, and how they had been stolen from him. They grew in number, value, and size every time he spoke of them. And he wailed over what he had been going to do, and what selling the stones would have meant to him and to Sophie. But the partnership was working better than anybody had expected, and people began to wonder whether, after all, Michael had done so badly for himself with his brace of deadbeat mates.
VIII
In a few weeks thought of the robbery had ceased greatly to disturb anybody. Michael settled down to working with his new mates, and the Ridge accepted the new partnership as the most natural thing in the world.
Life on the Ridge is usually as still as an inland lake. The settlement is just that, a lake of life, in the country of wide plains stretching westwards for hundreds on hundreds of miles, broken only by shingly ridges to the sea, and eastwards, through pastoral districts, to the coastal ranges, and the seaboard with its busy towns, ports, and cities.
In summer the plains are dead and dry; in a drought, deserts. The great coolebahs standing with their feet in the river ways are green, and scatter tattered shade. Their small, round leaves flash like mirrors in the sun, and when the river water vanishes from about their feet, they hold themselves in the sandy shallow bed of the rivers as if waiting with imperturbable faith for the return of the waters. The surface of the dry earth cracks. There are huge fissures where the water lay in clayey hollows during the winter and spring. Along the stock routes and beside the empty water-holes, sheep and cattle lie rotting. Their carcasses, disembowelled by the crows, put an odour of putrefaction in the air. The sky burns iron-grey with heat. The dust rises in heavy reddish mist about stockmen or cattle on the roads.
But after the rains, in the winter or spring of a good season, the seeds break sheath in a few hours; they sprout overnight, and a green mantle is flung over the old earth which a few days before was as dead and dry as a desert. In a little time the country is a flowering wilderness. Trefoil, crow’s-foot, clover, mallow, and wild mustard riot, tangling and interweaving. The cattle browse through them lazily; stringing out across the flowering fields, they look in the distance no more than droves of mice; their red and black backs alone are visible above the herbage. In places, wild candytuft in blossom spreads a quilt of palest lavender in every direction on a wide circling horizon. Darling pea, the colour of violets and smelling like them, threads through the candytuft and lies in wedges, magenta and dark purple against the skyline, a hundred miles farther on. The sky is a wash of pale, exquisite blue, which deepens as it rises to the zenith. The herbage glows beneath it, so clear and pure is the light.
Farther inland, for miles, bachelor’s buttons paint the earth raw gold. Not a hair’s breadth of colour shows on the plains except the dull red of the road winding through them and the blue of the sky overhead. Paper daisies fringe the gold, and then they lie, white as snow, for miles, under the bare blue sky. Sometimes the magenta, purple, lavender, gold and white of the herbage and wild flowers merge and mingle, and a tapestry of incomparable beauty—a masterpiece of the Immortals—is wrought on the bare earth.
During the spring and early summer of a good season, the air is filled with the wild, thymey odour of herbs, and the dry, musky fragrance of paper daisies. The crying of lambs, the baaing of ewes, and the piping of mud-larks—their thin, silvery notes—go through the clear air and are lost over the flowering land and against the blue sky.
Winter is rarely more than a season of rains on the Ridge. Cold winds blow from the inland plains for a week or two. There are nights of frost and sparkling stars. People shiver and crouch over their fires; but the days have rarely more than a fresh tang in the air.
The rains as often as not are followed by floods. After a few days’ steady downpour, the shallow rivers and creeks on the plains overflow, and their waters stretch out over the plains for thirteen, fourteen, and sometimes twenty miles. Fords become impassable; bridges are washed away. Fallen Star Ridge is cut off from the rest of the world until the flood waters have soaked into the earth, as they do after a few days, and the coach can take to the road again.
As spring passes into summer, the warmth of the sunshine loses its mildness, and settles to a heavy taciturnity. The light, losing its delicate brilliance, becomes a bared sword-blade striking the eyes. Everything shrinks from the full gaze and blaze of the sun. Eyes ache, the brain reels with the glare; mirages dance on the limitless horizons. The scorched herbage falls into dust; water is drawn off from rivers and water-holes. All day the air is heavy and still; the sky the colour of iron.
Nights are heavy and still as the days, and
