A World Apart (20 page)

Eliza knew her friend would be impressed if she could bring home a fish. But how to catch one? As she considered this, she cast about for a stone. She found one the size of a pumpkin. She would find a place where the fish congregated, and hurl it into their midst. She did not have to search far. Since she had first found the traps, the tide had receded. She saw a tangle of fish in the shallows, making futile efforts to squeeze through a narrow gap into the stream that ran down to the sea. She flung the rock into their midst. They scattered, but one was stunned. It swam in circles on the surface, mouth gulping air. She splashed into the knee-deep water and grabbed it by the tail. As it wriggled to escape, she flung it onto the sand, watched it die. It was big — longer than her forearm. Susannah would have fish for luncheon, perhaps even roasted if the flint and steel delivered their promise.

Eliza's discoveries set the pattern for a string of days which saw the trio gradually improve their circumstances. Susannah begged Eliza to gather herbs to make a poultice for the deep cut on her forearm.

‘But there'll not be English herbs in this land, Susannah,' Eliza said with a pessimism she wished she had not shown.

‘No matter. The natives must use the herbs from hereabouts. Find something with a strong smell to it, Eliza. Like lavender, maybe.'

‘But — '

‘No matter. If I don't get this cut to stop its festering, I'll die, and Ann with me. And the pain is fit to make me scream sometimes. Go, Eliza.'

Eliza soon found some aromatic herbs. She crushed them between two rocks and made a poultice which she tied onto Susannah's arm with strips of a flax-like plant she had seen growing near water. Soon the wound healed, and Susannah regained her good spirits.

The attempt to make flour from seeds was less successful. Hours of labour produced a handful of brown grit which baked into a bitter cake. Susannah ate it, and asked for more.

‘If I don't stop eating fish, Ann will turn into a mermaid,' she said. Then Eliza discovered a plant with large soft leaves spread close to the ground, not unlike a lettuce. She bit the smallest piece from a leaf and chewed it between her front teeth. It tasted bland. She swallowed it. Someone must undertake the experiment. A day later, she repeated the process with a larger bite of the leaf. Again she suffered no ill effects. Soon the lettuce plant became a regular addition to their diet, and Eliza cast about for other edible plants and berries.

The weather slowly grew cooler, though not unpleasantly so. But rain, which had been plentiful for the first weeks, had not fallen for some time. The waterfall had dried to a trickle, and Eliza wondered what they might do for water if the flow stopped. One afternoon the sun shone with particular brightness, promising a return to the earlier warm weather. Clouds gathered in the west. Soon a storm would break. The wind died and the sea sulked; grey, still. The black clouds grew heavier, and the light began to fail, bringing an early dusk — hot, quiet, heavy with portent.

Crash! A clap of thunder ran down from the clouds, followed by the crackle of lightning and rain spearing down in huge drops. Eliza ran to the cave. Earlier in the day she'd planned against the storm's coming. She had brought a load of oysters to the cave on a billet of driftwood with a cuplike depression formed from a knothole, and filled all the water containers. Susannah had ground a fair quantity of seeds, and stood ready to bake the flour into cakes. In recent days, her cooking had improved as she found which seeds tasted good and which did not.

After an hour, the downpour suddenly stopped. The sun shone brightly, and the pattering of the rain gave way to quiet. Then, as if the air had been prepared for it, an utterly foreign sound broke the silence. They looked at each other in alarm.

‘Crows,' Susannah whispered. Eliza shook her head. Once or twice in their earlier days, before her fear of savages had been dulled by the weeks of peaceful solitude, she had had fancied that birds' cries were human voices. The sound came again — jabbering human voices, shrill and guttural, excited.

The two women stared at each other, horror flashing in their eyes. Eliza felt her heart thud. The voices took up an animated conversation. Susannah motioned to Eliza to look out of the cave's small opening and down to the beach. She saw five naked black men standing on the sand. Each held a bundle of spears and sticks. Then one gave forth a guttural cry of surprise. He pointed a stick at the white linings of the oyster shells left on the rocks, hard evidence of Eliza's gatherings. The others answered, as they scanned the beach, doubtless searching for more signs of human presence.

Eliza watched the scene from the cave's tiny opening. The heavy rain had washed all traces of her steps from the sand. The foreshore gleamed flat in the grey light of dusk. The men began to move independently about the beach. One dug in the sand at the waterline, found some shellfish, opened and ate them. Another stood still, on a rock at the edge of the pool, spear poised, looking not unlike a skeleton tree. Then he flicked his spear into the water. It floated up with a wriggling, bloody fish impaled on its point. He recovered his spear and climbed back onto the rock as the dying fish flapped on the sand. Moments later he caught another fish, then stooped over something he had placed on the sand before him, his hands moving quickly. Then a cloud of smoke rose, and he stepped back. A fire flickered up from a handful of sticks. In spite of her fear, Eliza watched in wonderment. He had made fire effortlessly in seconds.

The baby whimpered. Instantly, Susannah buried its face in her breast. Eyes closed, Ann sucked silently. After her terror that the baby might betray them, Eliza began to breathe easier again. She climbed to the cave's door and looked out. In the half dark, she could see the men eating fish as they lounged round the fire. How long would they stay? She looked at the bowls of water arranged against the cave wall, the pile of oysters in their shells, and wondered what would happen if the men stayed until morning. Susannah rocked Ann ceaselessly, silently, while she watched Eliza with frightened eyes.

Every few minutes Eliza looked out at the men. A puff of wind carried the smell of cooking fish to her nostrils. Then she smelt men's sweat. Thank God the wind was not blowing the other way. She had heard from a sailor that some native peoples had an incredible sense of smell; able, like a dog, to smell food a long way off. As well, the sailor had heard tell that the people of Botany Bay possessed an ability to track men through the forest by some mysterious power. Indeed, they had been employed by the Governor to find convicts who had run off into the forest, it was said. No matter if the escapee walked along the middle of a stream, or across bare rock, he would be hunted down, and perhaps eaten if the savages had a mind to it. Eliza looked across at Susannah, wondering if she too had heard this story.

Darkness fell. The men did not move from their fire. Eliza sat tense with terror. Ann must cry soon. She had never stayed silent for so long in her life. Though the inside of the cave was by now pitch black, Eliza could tell from Ann's breathing that she was awake, and like to become bored and want to talk to her mother in her infant language of gurgles and crowings. She began to make fretting noises. Just as Eliza bit her lip in horror at a loud gurgle from Ann, a rhythmic clicking sound from near the men's fire startled her. A concerted wailing followed. The visitors were dancing round the fire to the clicking of sticks and singing. Eliza inched towards Susannah.

‘How goes it with Ann?' she whispered in the dark.

‘She's asleep, thank God,' Susannah whispered back. ‘I put my finger in her eye by mistake in the dark. She made to bellow, I know. I heard her draw breath. But I near throttled her till she stilled. Now she's dead to the world.'

The singing and dancing continued hour after hour. Eliza began to wonder in her fear whether the men might be performing some ritual to celebrate the capture of the two women, or a preliminary to eating them. She dare not share her thoughts with Susannah. All night she
lay awake. The water ran low — Eliza willed herself not to drink from the last container. Susannah should have it to keep her milk flowing.

As soon as dawn broke, Eliza looked out onto the beach, desperate for water. The men were slowly rousing themselves. With hardly a word, they gathered their spears and sticks. One man looked in the direction of the cave. Then he walked towards it, murmuring to the others. Eliza felt her heart skip. She turned to look at Susannah, who watched her wide-eyed. Eliza put her finger to her lips. Then she looked about the cave for a weapon. There was none. She drew slowly back from her peephole, thinking that the rising sun could catch some movement of her white face which the man's keen eyes might detect.

Then, without warning, the group moved purposefully towards the cave. They walked closer. Soon they were so close she could see only their bare black legs. Then one stepped right to the cave entrance. He stopped, his ankles but inches from her face. Her heart pounded fit to burst. Then he shouted to the others. His voice carried excitement. One of them called back in a voice obviously intended to calm the other's excitement. After perhaps a minute, the first man moved on up the cliff, followed by his companions. Eliza dared to hope they had left the beach. She held her breath, listened. The occasional clatter of wooden weapons on the rocks was all that she could hear. Eventually the sound died away. The beach fell silent. Eliza climbed out of the cave.

She walked to the waterfall on unsteady legs. Twelve hours of dehydration while she sat immobile with fear had taxed her body. Again she strained her ears for sounds of the departing men, but heard nothing. As she walked down the path to the beach, she felt light-headed. She staggered the last few steps to the waterfall and drank from the pool until she was satisfied. As she headed back to the cave with water and food for Susannah, she saw the beach through new eyes.

It was no longer a haven. She passed the pile of ashes left by the visitors' fire, not wanting to walk directly to it, nor leave her footprints superimposed on the churned sand surrounding it. Then her eye caught the glint of a polished object lying beside the ashes. Diffidently, she walked to the fire and saw a boat-shaped stone as long a man's hand. It was made from black granite, polished smooth, and incised with wavy lines and patterns of dots. What was it for? It bore no marks of usage such as a tool might. What did the markings mean? Was it a sacred object they would later return to collect? And when might that be? She took it with her to show Susannah.

By the greatest of blessings, the trio had been hidden in the cave when the savages arrived at the beach. Then, by unexpected good fortune, the storm had obliterated their footprints. What if the men had come upon the three of them sleeping naked on the sand in the afternoon sun, a habit they had acquired of late? Whatever the collection of miracles that had saved them from this visitation, the place no longer offered them the nurture they had sought after the shipwreck. Now it had turned on them, showing its true colours after bidding them welcome.

As she had trained herself to do when she read of the unresolved problems of science or philosophy, Eliza took, for a moment, a diametrically opposite perspective. In fact, the two women had trespassed on the native people's land, not the other way about. How would the good folk of Poole, in her native Dorset, react if they saw naked black men walking along the beach, their wrecked canoe in the distance?

‘You must climb the cliffs and look about. See what lies open to us,' Susannah said as they talked. ‘Who knows, Botany Bay may be but a stroll away.'

‘Indeed it might. And if it were, we'd be clapped in irons in a trice, and spend our next one-and-twenty years as prisoners. Or hanged.' Eliza must play Devil's advocate.

‘That might be better than being roasted by savages,' Susannah said. Although Eliza dreaded the native people, Susannah seemed petrified by the mere thought of them. ‘And there might be other things you find — a safe place to hide, easier foraging,' she added.

‘How could that be?' Eliza said. ‘Here, the sea feeds us. If we leave, we turn our backs on our larder.'

‘We can never know till we look,' Susannah urged.

‘Till
I
look. You must stay here with Ann.'

Next morning, Eliza ate and drank till she was more than comfortably full, then set off to scale the cliff, following the route taken by the men. Climbing the rockfall was laborious rather than difficult. Soon, she heaved herself round a big rock and saw that she was at the top of the cliff. She stood on high ground and looked about her. A tree-covered plain, cut by small steep-sided gorges, stretched as far as she could see. At a distance, the forest took on a distinctly purple colour, till it met the horizon in a line of low, flat-topped hills. All was primeval. There was no field, no house, no scar on the wrinkled purple carpet that stretched as far as she could see. A crow circled above her, curious at the interloper. The sun beat down on her head. The air was uncannily quiet.

She sat on a rock. She must think. She listened acutely, but no sound broke the silence. The aromatic smell from the leaves of the forest was stronger here than at their beach home. The nearby trees were like those growing among the rocks at the top of the beach — gnarled limbs with papery bark lifting here and there to show white skin beneath — hard, sparse leaves, but no hint of fruit. She stared to the western horizon for minutes at a time until her eyes watered. Perhaps there might be a steeple, the gable of a roof, which would show up under methodical scrutiny. But nothing emerged from the tableau before her. It was a benign desert.

‘We must leave, dearie,' Susannah said. Although it would cost her pain and anxiety to make the journey through the forest, she was prepared for this. With her wrist not yet properly healed, and an infant yet to be weaned, she was bound to suffer more than Eliza, who had become strong and resilient during their life as cave-dwellers. ‘If we stay, we must be eaten the next time the savages come. It was Providence they didn't discover us. We could be on the beach, talking, fishing, cooking on our fire, trailing our footprints everywhere. Sooner or later, it must happen.'