Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (28 page)

The ground soon became steeper and the creek branched repeatedly, breaking up eventually into a maze of identical rocky gullies. Without Ida, Crofts knew he would be utterly lost now. He kept his eyes on her as she moved ahead confidently. He was sweating heavily. They continued clambering, penetrating deeper into this broken country until late into the morning. Except for the slight noises of their own advance there was no other sound, and the only other movement was the gliding flight of the accompanying kites. Robert had noticed the birds tailing them soon after they had entered the rough country. He looked up at them every now and again and they seemed to return his gaze.

It was almost midday when Ida and Crofts came round a corner and were confronted by a wall of rock rising forty metres or more directly in their path, barring their way. Ida continued towards it without pausing and Crofts followed her. Only when he caught up with her at the very base of this cliff did he see a cleft no more than a metre wide, worn down through the pure sandstone by the eroding action of water. The cleft was several metres higher than the spot on which they stood and between it and them, scored into the sandstone base by rocks and debris brought down the creek through the millennia by countless floods, was a circular hole which resembled the inside of a huge jar. The hole was at least five metres across at the neck, and below the neck it widened, forming a great hollow bowl fifteen to twenty metres deep in the pure rock. Crofts stood on the edge and looked down into the cool dark interior, fascinated by the perfect symmetry of its erosion, as if it were human design. When he looked up he saw that Ida was on her hands and knees, crawling out into the narrow groin of smooth stone overhanging the hole, the only access to the cleft beyond. He watched her. If she were to slip the rock would offer no hold. Before she reached the narrowest point of the groin she paused and looked back at him and smiled, resting there for a moment. Then she looked down. ‘There are lots of them like this,' she said, gazing into the hole below, her voice booming and echoing among the hollows of the rocks around her, as if she were in the sounding chamber of an instrument. ‘There's a dead wallaby or something in there,' she said.

Crofts looked into the hole again and realised that there was a still black mirror of stagnant water at the bottom of it, reflecting the trees and the sky perfectly. In the water, as if set in pitch, floated the carcass of an animal.

‘It's a pig,' he said. The sight of the drowned pig gave him the feeling that he had been through all this before. He looked up at Ida, who was preparing to edge her way past the narrowest spot. ‘Isn't there some way round?'

She kept going.

‘We ought to take a break,' he called. But she ignored him, all her attention on getting past the tight groin of rock. If she fell there would be nothing he could do. He had an image of himself standing on the edge of the hole looking down at her thrashing helplessly in the disgusting water. It made his stomach go weak. There was a greenish scum around the top of the water. Just then a breath of the cold air from the bowl touched him and he thought, with horror: the hole is digesting the pig. Ida was through. She stood up in the keyhole crack in the rock beyond and waved to him. She was safe. ‘It's not so bad,' she called, but she sounded out of breath all the same.

He was afraid as he got down on his hands and knees and crawled out onto the smooth, worn stone. He realised at once that it was much worse than it had looked when he had watched Ida. He was too frightened to glance sideways but could feel the black hole as if it were a weight pulling him off-balance. As he moved slowly forward, the hole below him seemed to have been waiting a million years for this moment, patient beyond human belief. If I went away, he thought, and didn't come back until the end of my life, when I'm
eighty
the hole will be here just as it is now. Open, black, empty, fixed in the earth.
Nothing
will have changed. He wobbled towards the emptiness and caught a whiff of the stink from it. It made him gag. He stopped crawling and realised his mistake at once as a cold wave of fear washed through him.

‘Don't stop there, Robert!' Ida called, a touch of alarm in her voice, trying to sound unconcerned. ‘Keep going!'

Instead of moving forward, however, he tried to cringe a little further away from the sloping edge, and above him the overarching rock brushed unexpectedly against the pack, pushing him down. He felt his knees slip a fraction, and sweat broke out on his forehead. He could move neither forward or backward and he knew that if he stayed where he was he would soon begin to slide further down towards the steepening incline that formed the mouth of the hole. An impulse to scream rose up in him and he closed his eyes. He heard himself call, ‘Help me, Ida!' as if it were the voice of a stranger some distance away. His limbs had frozen, his joints locked into position. His knees slipped another fraction. His weight was dragging him inevitably across the rock and the cold gravity of the hole pulled him sideways: the realisation that horrified him more than anything was that nothing would change. In his panic a futile eternity of waiting began to close over him.

Ida's voice called softly, urging him, ‘Look up!'

He opened his eyes. She was lying on her stomach in the keyhole above him holding out a long green sapling. A leaf on the end of it brushed his face and he smelt the eucalyptus oil.

‘Don't take your hand off the rock,' she said. ‘Grab the end of the stick in your teeth.' Her eyes looked into his, looking down at him from only two metres away. ‘It's got the pig. It doesn't need us,' she said, her voice intense, close to him, reaching intimately for him.

The leaves brushed across his face again. He reached forward and gripped them in his teeth. Through the sapling he felt the steadiness of Ida's hands. Slowly he began to crawl forward.

They didn't talk about it, and after another hour's climbing they emerged onto the surface of a gently undulating plateau, on which grew a sparse forest of stunted trees. Directly ahead of them, no more than a kilometre away, the pinnacle of Mt Mooloolong rose three hundred metres in the air. They stood next to each other and looked at it. Neither spoke, but she reached out and held his hand. He had seen the formation before, from the bank of the earth tank in the brigalow that day when he had rescued Ward. He had not known then that it was Mt Mooloolong. From this angle it looked out of place in the landscape, as if it were not a natural part of the local geology but had been put there by another force.

She said quietly, ‘It looks different.'

‘They're heading off,' he said, pointing up as the pair of kites wheeled above their heads and dived away, gliding down over the maze of broken gullies that fell away at their backs. They sailed effortlessly across the shattered surface of their domain, back and forth they went, crossing and recrossing the ravines, getting smaller and smaller until at last they were lost in the distance.

‘Okay,' he said, ‘show me the way.'

‘We don't have to.' She looked at him.

He laughed, and they went together, towards Mt Mooloolong, across the easy sloping ground, hand in hand.

•

Ward sat against the front wheel of the jeep. He was watching the two distant figures as they slowly made their way down from the summit of the white pinnacle. The jeep was parked just over the crest of the wall of the earth tank, at the very end of the cleared fence line through the brigalow. The tank was full of water now from the storms and there was no sign of the dead pig. Beside Ward, lying on an old shirt, was the .303 rifle, which he had taken from the stockman's quarters before leaving the station. Ward had been sitting here without moving, watching the climbers on the mountain, for more than two hours. He was waiting for the right moment. He was aware that it was nearly time.

Half a kilometre behind the station owner, back along the fence line, Alistair was struggling forward on foot. He had abandoned his exhausted pony some time ago. The boy was himself now close to exhaustion. He went forward in a shambling, interrupted jog through the low obstructing growth and dead sticks, talking to himself all the while and weaving from side to side in an erratic path.

Alistair had reached the base of the wall of the earth tank when the ripping explosion of the high-powered rifle shot pulled him up. He stood still listening, and into his mind there came a bright image of the stockman falling, his body turning over and over slowly through the air, falling down the vertical face of the forbidden mountain. He called and ran forward up the slope of the bank, shouting to his father and seeing the canvas top of the jeep coming into view. He reached the crest of the bank and looked down. Ward Rankin's body lay awkwardly to one side of the front wheel, the rifle beside him.

Beyond him was the still water in the tank. Beyond that the grey forest of brigalow, out of which the oddly misplaced sandstone monolith of Ida's mountain rose into the empty sky.