Landscape of Farewell (23 page)

Dougald and his pale bitch were nowhere to be seen.

I stopped and stood looking around me in alarm, gripped by the certainty that without Dougald to guide me I was lost in this maze of tumbled stone and crisscross of fallen tree limbs. The wall of the escarpment stood in deep shadow close on my left hand. I called Dougald’s name and his voice came back to me at once, softly from the darkness. ‘Over here, old mate.’ I floundered across to him. He was standing within a gap in the
wall of rock. He put a steadying hand to my shoulder. ‘Are you okay there?’ I apologised for holding him up and explained the problem with my shoes. I was trembling, and was ashamed that I had very nearly panicked. I was tempted to tell him that this excursion was not for me and that he should go on alone and let me find my way back to the truck. I had not foreseen quite how daunting and alien to me the bush would be. He pressed my shoulder encouragingly and said my shoes would soon dry, and he turned and went on. I followed him. I reassured myself with the thought that perhaps, after all, we did not have far to go.

We entered a narrow defile, which sectioned the cliff. The incline within this passageway became steeper as we ascended it, and I was soon breathing hard with the unaccustomed exertion. His mother’s stick was a great support and I was very glad to have it, but even so I was forced to stop every few yards to catch my breath. Also the calf muscles in my legs were burning from the unnatural strain of trying to prevent the smooth soles of my shoes from slipping back on the loose ground at each upward step.

I emerged, at last, from between the walls of the narrow defile onto a flat shelf of land which resembled a terrace of the Inca. Dawn was breaking over the scene, the rocks and trees lit by a soft play of golden light. Dougald had not waited for me but had already crossed the terrace and was standing looking up at another sheer rock wall on the far side of it. I was surprised
by his energy and agility. I turned and looked down the way we had come. The tall cinnamon trees beside the river were far below us, the meadows of Gnapun spread out in the pale dawn light, dotted about with the elegant ironbarks. It was as if I looked down on the artfully designed park of a great country estate. There were no signs of human occupation in the valley, however, no houses or roads, no grazing cattle or sheep, but only the countryside itself, still and silent as it always seems to be; a silence in which the air trembles with a kind of absence, as if the landscape listens, or waits for something. But nothing happens. It is strange and uncanny, this sense of waiting, and it is unsettling. Certainty is withheld as one is led to a sense of expectation, and one is made to suspect that one’s perceptions are provisional and will soon require revising. Leichhardt noticed it and found the stars reassuring. He knew himself to be the first European to pass this way on his desperate journey. I began to wonder if I were to be the last. Surely no others but Gnapun and his people had ever made their way among these hidden roads?

I hurried after Dougald. It struck me that I was never going to be quite me again after this. It seemed a great insight at the time, though now that I look back on it I wonder what I thought I meant by it. How would I relate this journey to Reginald, and would he be impressed or would he scoff at my silliness? I didn’t care … I
did
care, actually. It is a great annoyance that we care for the opinions of people whom we despise. But there, we do.

We continued to gain height, reaching one terrace after another by means of these great cracks and hidden ways within the rock walls. We left the river and the valley far below us, and eventually lost sight of them altogether. We may even have crossed a ridge, or even two ridges, and it may be that the valleys I caught glimpses of far below us from time to time later in the day did not include the valley from which we had begun our ascent that morning. It was not many hours before I no longer knew where I was in relation to where we had started from. And as to our direction, I was bewildered, except that I knew it to be generally upward. Whatever the reality might turn out to be, our destination remained for me the version of Gnapun’s rock shelter I had briefly described at the beginning of ‘Massacre’, and I imagined it up there ahead of us somewhere among the cliffs of the escarpment. In a way, I could not believe it was really there or that we were actually going to reach it. Gnapun’s cave was not a real place for me, but was an image in my imagination, which I had acquired partly from Dougald’s original description of it in his story and had partly concocted from my own imagination. There had seemed to me, from the very beginning of this excursion, something a little unnecessary and obsessive in Dougald’s determination that he and I must actually go together to visit the real cave. But of course I did not feel the need of it that he did. I don’t think it is too much to claim that for Dougald this journey was a pilgrimage—a last
pilgrimage—to the spiritual centre of his life. And if it was not that exactly, then it was something just as important as that. No equivalent place existed for me. Where was the spiritual centre of my life? The question had no meaning for me.

After an hour or two of following him and his tireless bitch I gained a kind of second wind and became more or less inured to the pain in my ankle.

The sun climbed high into a cloudless sky and the day grew warm. The air was fragrant with those mysterious perfumes whose source I had no knowledge of. I sweated and no doubt I groaned aloud every so often when the going was particularly tough. A little after noon by my watch, Dougald called a halt in the shade of a wild cherry tree beside a spring on one of the numerous terraces, and he lit a fire and boiled a billy of water. I sank down onto the soft grass in the shade of the tree beside our little fire and lay on my back. He called me when the tea was ready, and in silence we drank it and ate the entire packet of arrowroot biscuits he had purchased at the Greek’s café. I was too tired to talk and had run out of questions. I think by that stage I was feeling rather fatalistic about the outcome of our search for Gnapun.

After resting for little more than half an hour, Dougald packed our few things into his rucksack and stood up. ‘You all set there, old mate?’ he asked, looking down at me and anxious to be on his way. My joints were stiff after the rest and I struggled to my
feet with difficulty and hobbled after him, following him through the confusing world of giant walls and terraces that seemed to go on without end. We came upon well-grassed flats, where we quenched our thirst at springs of clear water that seeped from the ground, and where delicate grass trees and ferns grew in the sweet stillness among the rocks. On one magical occasion it seemed as if we had stepped into a formal Chinese garden, and I forgot my fatigue and imagined a Sung poet seeking this sequestered place to spend his last days meditating upon the foolishness of humankind. But mostly the country was dry and rocky, the trees small, twisted and without character. We walked beside stone ramparts that insisted they had been constructed by iron men. And once I was startled when a group of animals rose suddenly from their siesta and fled at our approach. For an instant I thought they were people. When the sun at last began to decline towards the horizon, we had still not reached Gnapun’s cave.

Nature was not everything that day, however. There was something else besides nature, some confusion of the mind, either of mine or of Dougald’s, that came by degrees to lie at the centre of this expedition into the heart of the country of his Old People. I am still not sure what happened, but I will do my best to describe it here nevertheless.

It was late in the day and I was resting on a log in the middle
of one of these by now familiar terraces, my leg thrust out in front of me, my hip and ankle aching fiercely. I was massaging my thigh with both my hands, for the pain was considerable and was greater once we stopped than it had been while we were walking. My ankle had more or less given way and the pain had inched its way up the side of my leg into my groin. Every time I set my foot on the ground it felt as if someone was digging about in my flesh with a steel needle. The sun was nearing the horizon and I was clammy and chill with my cooling sweat. Bits of twigs and leaves had got down my shirt and were irritating my skin, but I could not be bothered getting them out. It is true, I was an old man and I was tired and it is quite possible I was also a little confused by then. I do not wish to deny it. The day had been a difficult one for me and I was deeply preoccupied by my anxieties about my ankle and whether I would be able to make it back to our camp by the river before nightfall. I had often found myself daydreaming during the day and frequently had lost sight of Dougald and his bitch. This worried me and I knew I was finding it difficult to remain alert to the realities of our situation. Panic flickered at the edges of my reason and I waited with anxiety for its sudden overwhelming onset, as if my panic was to be the beginning of the last act of a tragedy—or was it a comedy? I am prepared to accept some share of responsibility for all this, but I do not believe that I was alone in being the entire cause of it. Delusion is, by its nature, a strange and estranging condition
of mind. A part of us knows when we are deluded, but we are nevertheless unable to convince ourselves to act contrary to the dictates of the delusion. It is surely this inability to line ourselves up with what we know to be the realities of our situation that is the trigger for our eventual panic and our downfall.

So there we were at the end of that long and exhausting day, two tired old men high in the escarpments of the wild Expedition Range, searching fruitlessly for a place that one of us had visited in his youth and had not seen since. It was an unlikely affair and there is no doubt that the odds had always been against us in this foolish enterprise. We were too old to be on a quest. Quests are for the young.

I watched Dougald with an increasing feeling of helplessness about our situation. He had lost his earlier confidence some time before this and was now making his way uncertainly across the perfectly flat and almost lawn-like surface of the terrace, which looked as if a gardener had lovingly trimmed it that morning. He was walking unsteadily towards a rocky prominence that jutted out over the valley, like the prow of an old galleon, as if he intended surveying the lower reaches of the escarpment for some familiar sign by which to determine our position before it grew too dark to see. It was the third occasion on which we had returned to this same terrace. Yes, the
third
. I had rested briefly on this same log for the first time hours earlier and had asked him then, ‘Where is Gnapun’s cave from here? Surely it
cannot be far now?’ But he did not answer me. As I watched him now I was remembering his words to me of the previous evening.
It’s just up here a bit of a way
, he had said, waving his hand carelessly in the general direction of the escarpment. And no doubt when he was a youth, and in the company of his confident grandfather, the journey from the river to Gnapun’s cave probably had seemed to be no more than just up here a bit. I watched him weaving around on his way to the edge of the terrace, pausing to look about, then going on a few steps. To me he had the appearance of a man who was lost. But was he lost? How are we to know the truth that is in another’s heart? At that moment I accepted what seemed to me to be the unthinkable fact, but a fact nevertheless, that Dougald was lost in the heart of his own country. And it was on this belief that I based my subsequent behaviour. But had I really seen what I thought I had seen? A lost man? Or had I seen a man in a kind of trance? A man in a condition that I had never before witnessed, and which I could not therefore understand or recognise?

I was no longer in the receptive state of mind that I had been in when we arrived at the river the previous evening, when I readily acknowledged the cry of the funereal black cockatoo as a welcome-home call to Dougald from his great-grandfather, Old Wylah, the merciless Gnapun. Now I was tired and irritated, and I was afraid. I had lost confidence in Dougald’s plan and was in a sceptical frame of mind. I was no longer a believer.
I saw a lost man, and no one, at that moment, could have convinced me otherwise. I did not see a man who believed himself to be in communion with the spirits of his Old People. It was not possible for me to have seen such a thing as that, or to have believed it a likely explanation for Dougald’s wandering behaviour. I was not in a mood to consider such things. I just wanted to be reassured that he was going to be able to get us both back to the truck safely, and that we were not going to perish in this wilderness. I did recall—and it was a warning to me that I ignored—that Leichhardt had suffered from a loss of confidence in his leadership by his followers similar to this loss of confidence which Dougald was now suffering from me. And of course Leichhardt also, and on his own admission, had felt at times compelled to go wandering off aimlessly and alone for hours on end, quite as if he had abandoned his senses and his companions and was lost, when in fact he was meditating on the mysterious workings of Providence, in which he had remained a steadfast believer. But, as I said, I ignored this warning. I ignored it because I heard it in the bland, superior voice of my detested other, the one who always behaves sensibly and never gets himself into such awkward scrapes as these. We dismiss each other, he and I. That is the essence of our relationship, to be dismissive, contemptuous and even loathing of the other. And yet, at some essential level, in the very depths and subsoil of our being, as it were, where we are one and the same person,
we share the same beliefs. That is the truth. What more can I say? I would not be without him. And without me, well, he would have no existence at all.

It was on the first occasion of our arrival on this terrace with its log, where I was sitting massaging my aching thigh, that I first observed, with a feeling of alarm, that Dougald had begun to lose the energy of his confidence, and to cast about him uncertainly for the way forward. I almost exclaimed to him then,
My God, Dougald, are you lost?
But the thought was too incredible and I did not dare voice it. His appearance was a dramatic reversal of the previous evening’s youthful transformation. The vivid energy that drove him and buoyed his spirits then and in the morning was gone. It happened suddenly. As I looked at him I saw his energy drain out of him and watched with a feeling of horror as he was overtaken by a dazed bewilderment that shone in his eyes, as if he saw ghosts. And who is to say he did not see ghosts? Those who do not see ghosts themselves will no doubt say that Dougald did not see them either. But I do not say that, although I observed the change in him myself with disbelief. Very soon he took on the appearance of a disoriented old man, casting about him first this way then that, standing and gazing vacantly up at the heights, a shocked expression on his face, his mouth agape, his eyes watery and pallid—the very image, indeed, of the old dodderer who had crossed the road in the rain in front of Vita and I—then lowering his eyes and going back over ground that
he had gone over twice before, searching for a sign that I was soon convinced was not there to be found. I did not doubt that we were in the wrong place. He did not reply when I suggested this, however, but looked as bewildered and deaf as one who no longer knows what is real and what is delusion. When I spoke to him his gaze passed over me as if he did not see me but saw a shadow, something of a memory that pestered him.