Beyond the Black Stump (36 page)
Read Beyond the Black Stump Online
Authors: Nevil Shute
They got into the car and went home, rather silently. The diapers upon the line were dry; she went out into the garden in the evening light and took them down and folded them, and took them round to Ruth. She walked back in the gloaming through the decent, prosperous streets of the small town, sad that she could never be a part of it, glad to be getting out of it and going home to her own place. Hazel had been a dream world to look forward to; the reality had proved quite equal to the dream, though the reality was not for her. But nobody could take away the dream, the memory of this lovely little place. One day she would see it re-created in Australia.
That evening was a very special one, for Mr. Laird’s favourite programme,
I
Love Lucy
, came on the T.V. after supper, and they sat and watched it with him. And after that Ruth and Aimée Eberhart came in to visit with them for a while, and Shelley Rapke, and they got out the Scrabble set and all played Scrabble for counters, and Mollie ended up ahead so that she would have won sixty-five cents from Mr. Laird if they had been gambling with real money.
When they had drunk their glasses of cold milk and eaten a biscuit as a nightcap, and had all gone to their rooms, Stanton settled heavily to work. There was one more geological report to be written as a result of his oil explorations in the Hammersley Range of Northern West Australia, and it seemed to him that this was the right time to make a
start on it. He unpacked the contents of a bulging briefcase on the desk in his bedroom, sorting out the carbon copies and the folded plans. Then he pulled out a full-sized drawing-board and T-square from behind the bed, and set it up upon the table underneath the light. He took off his jacket and opened the register, adjusted a green eyeshade that clipped round his head with an elastic band, and set to work to draw upon the board with frequent references to the carbon typescripts that gradually became strewn around the bedroom.
Three quarters of an hour later he moved from the drawing board to the desk, got out his typewriter from its case and put a sheet of paper with a carbon into it, headed formally in bold black embossing, TOPEKA EXPLORATION COMPANY, INC., with the address more discreetly at the side, Topex Building, Cedar Street, New York City. Then he typed the title heading,
Report on geological strata around Bore No. 407
Hammersley Range of West Australia,
Latitude
23
°
05’
South. Longitude
118
°
51’
East.
He sat in thought for a moment, and commenced to type.
The above bore was sunk to a depth of
11,063
feet before the work was abandoned in June 1955. In the attached report the bore hole itself is taken for the datum, and all distances and bearings are referred to that. For the exact location of the bore, the camp site should be located immediately to the west and below a prominent limestone bluff, the site being shown by numerous concrete slabs and hut foundations. Amongst these the septic tank will be evident. The bore hole lies S.W. of the vent pipe at the southern end of the concrete septic tank, 167 feet, bearing
219
°
true.
It was little more than a year since they had pitched the first tent on that site, but how long ago it seemed! How Mollie and her mother had admired the camp equipment when they drove over in the jeep from Laragh, on that first afternoon! The afternoon that they had frozen up some maple ice cream for her specially …
Five lines of seismic survey were carried out on the reflection method, each line comprising six shots spaced approximately one thousand yards apart. These lines were distributed around the datum point as indicated on Plan B, four of the lines being in the Western sector, at distances from datum up to
14,000
yards.
The dry aridity of the country! The wide spaces, the huge distances! The unfettered freedom of the place! Hazel was beautiful and gracious, and a guy couldn’t spend his life in places like the Lunatic. Yet a regret would stay with him that would take years for him to get out of his system. Maybe he never would.
He moved to the drawing board and worked there for the best part of an hour. Then in the stillness of the night he moved back to the typewriter. By two in the morning he was writing,
On Plans D, E, F, G, and H are indicated the apparent sectional geological structures on the five lines of survey indicated on Plan B. With the exception of Plan E, these sections all display the same characteristic of a primary reflecting bed located at depths varying from
2,300
feet to
2,950
feet and a secondary reflecting bed located at depths varying from
3,550
feet to
4,100
feet. On Plan C the sub-surface contours of these two reflecting beds are indicated as deduced from the above sections, the top plan (green) indicating the upper reflecting bed and the lower plan (red) indicating the lower reflecting bed. Scale of Plan C: 1 inch to
2,000
yards.
He stopped typing, and sat for a long time staring at the wall in front of him. Perhaps Mollie had been right about the Frontier. Perhaps in his grandfather’s day this place really had been like the Lunatic. He knew that in the later years of the old man’s life, the only memory of him that Stanton had, his father and his mother had experienced a good deal of trouble with Grandpa and his weakness for strong drink. If it were possible for the old man to get out of the house unperceived he would go wandering off to Skid Row to get drunk in a saloon with other reprobates of his own age, to the shame of Stanton’s parents and the scandal of all Hazel. Perhaps this valley had been like the Lunatic today, once, long ago.
Perhaps, as in the Book of Genesis, there were giants in the earth in those days, when Hazel was created. But were the giants nice people to know?
He roused himself after a while, and went on typing.
On Plan C the bore hole, the datum point, is indicated by the letter O. Attached to this report, Appendix 1, is a copy of the core record and analysis sheets of spoil brought up from this bore at the appropriate depths. It will be noticed that at a depth of
2,560
feet a layer of hard granite rock approximately fifteen feet thick was penetrated, clearly impervious to fluids. Reference to Plan C shows that this anhydrite layer corresponds very closely in depth to the primary reflecting bed revealed by the seismic survey, and is clearly identical with it.
He would never be able to forget Mollie, nor forget the Lunatic that was her home. Too many of his standards had been changed by his time there. Before he went there he could never have seen virtue in the hard-drinking old reprobate who was her father; by the time he left, he could see nothing else. The man who would drop everything to help a neighbour in a difficulty, who would help an inexperienced English boy by taking three thousand starving sheep on to his property for no more payment than a case of rum. The man who loved animals, who could tame even a kangaroo mouse. The kindest hopper in the world. The kindest hopper this side of the black stump.
A tear trickled slowly down his cheek. He brushed it aside, and went on with his work. He turned to the drawing board again and made another sketch, and then back to the typewriter.
Plan I is an overall plan of the district to a scale of 2 miles to one inch, distances approximate as measured by jeep speedometer. Lines of geological section are shown upon the chain dotted lines A-A’ and B-B’. The dotted line X-Y indicates the approximate location of the fence between the properties. Surface outcrops of granitic rock corresponding in analysis to the primary anhydrite layer pierced by the bore O at
2,650
feet were observed at the points C, D, E, F, and G shown on Plan I. In all cases these were associated with extensive areas of limestone
country beyond the outcrop, corresponding with the waterlogged limestone strata found at the bore between the two anhydrite layers. Barometric altitudes of these anhydrite outcrops are indicated on the plan, referred to the surface level of Bore O as datum zero.
He was growing very tired now, tired enough to sleep in spite of everything, but it was nearly finished.
The water level at Bore O was established on February 22nd 1955 as –126 feet. On Plan I surface spot levels below –150 feet are indicated by the area hatched in brown, PQRST. Within this area bores sunk through the anhydrite rock might be expected to yield an artesian flow.
There was nothing more to say now, and his work was over. He signed his name at the bottom,
Stanton C. Laird,
Staff Geologist,
Topeka Exploration Inc.
Then he collected the sheets of his typescript and pinned them together, folded the many plans of foolscap size, and put the lot into a large manilla envelope. It was nearly four in the morning, and he was exhausted, too exhausted even to grieve.
He slept for about three hours, and then got up. In the next room as he dressed he could hear Mollie moving about. He waited till the sound of steps told him she had got her shoes on, and then he took the envelope and went and tapped on her door.
She came to the door, dressed, but with her hair in disarray. “Morning, Stan,” she said. “I’m afraid you didn’t sleep very well. I heard you typing in the small hours.”
He smiled wearily. “You can’t have slept so well yourself, either.” He paused, and then he said, “You changed your mind, honey?”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Stan. I don’t think we could ever make it work.”
He stood in silence for a moment at her door. “Mind if I asked you something, honey? Something real personal?”
“No,” she said. “I’ll answer it if I can.”
“You going back to marry that English boy, David Cope?”
She stood in thought. “I can’t answer that one. I just don’t know. I shouldn’t think he’d ever ask me again.”
“He asked you once, did he?” She nodded without speaking.
There was a pause, and then he said awkwardly, “You know somethin’? I got a wedding present for you, or a kinda dowry.” He put the envelope into her hands.
“That’s very sweet of you,” she said, wondering. “What is it, Stan?”
He stood for a moment thinking of the low, undulating hills nine thousand miles away, the rocky outcrops on the rose-red earth, the waterless river beds, the thin, parched bush in the valleys, the blazing, cloudless sky. “It’s water,” he said. “Skads and skads of it, under Lucinda Station. Clear, cool water.”