After a silence Stephen reverted to their wandering life. ‘What a time it seems!’ he said.
‘Our faces-forgive me, Martin
– have already assumed something of that raw brick-red so
usual in New South Wales; and I think we have seen everything our predecessors have seen . . .’
‘The emu! The echidna!’ cried Martin.
except the platypus. Blaxiand assured me it was not to be found in his neighbourhood, but that it was not uncommon in the streams nearer the coast. He had never seen it, and indeed knew no more than I: it is strange that so remarkable an animal should be so little known in Europe. I have only seen Banks’s dried specimen – no dissection possible – and read Home’s superficial paper in the Transactions, together with Shaw’s description, neither based on a living animal. Conceivably our next river – our last, alas – will yield one.’
‘How kind Mr Blaxiand was, and what a splendid dinner he gave us,’ said Martin. ‘I know I speak like a man whose god is his belly, but this riding and walking and searching for specimens after so many months at sea gives one the appetite of an ogre.’
‘He was indeed,’ said Stephen, ‘and where we should have been without him I cannot tell: this is no country to lose one’s way in. After one day of wandering in the worst kind of bush, we should have ridden tamely home, if we had survived at all.’
Mr Blaxland, a fellow-member of the Royal Society with a large holding inland from Sydney, had made them heartily welcome, and had warned them of the danger of getting lost. Just to the south of his land there were great stretches of a kind of scrub where the leaves joined overhead, where sense of direction was easily lost, and where the parched ground was littered with the bones of absconders. He had lent them an ass to carry their already overflowing collections and Ben, a morose bearded middle-aged Aboriginal, who showed them a hundred edible plants, led them within shot of their dinner as though the desolate featureless plain were marked with signposts, pointed out a whole sparsely-inhabited and to their eyes almost invisible zoological garden, made fire, and sometimes, when they were to wait for some nocturnal serpent, lizard, opossum, koala, wombat, he built them huts from the great sheets of bark that hung from the gum-trees or lay at their feet.
For reasons that did not appear he was much attached to Mr Blaxland; but he was not attached to Stephen or Martin and he was often impatient at their stupidity. He had picked up some Newgate English from the convicts, and as they stared at what seemed to them an undisturbed patch of shale and dead grass he would say ‘Buggers Can’t see fucking track. Blind, no-see sods.’
‘And certainly,’ said Stephen, reverting to Blaxland, ‘it was a noble dinner. But of all the dinners we have eaten during this journey the one I enjoyed most took place before ever we set out. For a dinner to be more than usually successful it seems to me that the host must be more than usually cheerful, and Mr Paulton was in as fine a flow of spirits as could be imagined. And how well he played! He and Aubrey dashed away as if they were inventing the music by common accord; it was a delight to hear.’ He smiled at the recollection, and then added, ‘You did have the impression, did you not, that he was happy to know nothing about Padeen’s evasion?’
‘More than that: he told me privately that managed with discretion it would be thought he had gone to join his friends in the bush, living with the blacks.’
‘You rejoice my heart,’ said Stephen. ‘And speaking of
blacks, it occurs to me that some of our difficulty in communicating with this one,’ –
nodding towards Ben, who sat at some distance with his back turned – ‘quite apart from language, is the fact that he and his people have no notion of property. Each tribe has its frontiers, to be sure, but within that territory everything is common; and seeing that they have no herds, no fields, but walk about all the time for their living, any possessions other than their spears and throwing-sticks would be a useless burden. To us property, real or symbolical, is fundamental; its absence is known to be misery, its presence is thought to be happiness. The language of our minds is wholly different.’
Ben said ‘Shut up. Get on horse.’
They saddled their patient old mares – Ben had nothing to say to straps and buckles: he was a guide and protector of fools for Blaxland’s sake, in no way a servant. Indeed, his world did not include the man and-master relation at all, and nothing that they could give him did he want. Mounting, they rode slowly on towards their last river Their last river offered neither water nor platypus; they walked across dryshod. But the monotonous plain had been sloping gently down for some hours and now there were many more trees, and better grown, so that the landscape could without very much exaggeration be said to resemble a park, a dull, ill-tended park. Not altogether without cheer however, for in one of the taller trees Ben showed them a truly enormous lizard clinging motionless to the trunk, convinced it could not be seen: he would not let them shoot it, nor would he use one of the half dozen spears he carried. He appeared to say that the reptile was his aunt, though this may have been an error of interpretation; in any event the lizard, having been stared at for twenty minutes, suddenly lost its head, rushed up the tree, fell together with a long strip of loose bark, stood open-mouthed, defying them for a moment, and then raced away over the grass, high on its short legs.
‘He was a pleurodont,’ said Martin.
‘So he was. And he had a forked tongue too: one of the monitory kind, for sure.’
This kept them cheerful for the rest of the afternoon, and the next day, having looked at Banks’s Botany Bay, they rode into Sydney. The horses made straight for their stable, the ass with them; and in the more squalid outskirts Ben met a group of fellow tribesmen, some wearing clothes. They walked with him to the hotel, talking away at a great rate; and once there Stephen said ‘Mr Riley, Ben here, from Mr Blaxland’s, has been with us these ten days: pray give him whatever is right.’
‘Rum,’ said Ben in a loud harsh voice.
‘Do not let him do himself too much harm, Mr Riley,’ said Stephen, and taking the ass’s bridle he went on, ‘This is Mr Blaxland’s ass: I shall send him back by a sailor, to be collected when one of his waggons comes down.’
‘Good evening, Mr Davidge,’ he said as he stepped aboard and saluted the quarterdeck.
‘Would you be so good as to have these bundles carried below with the utmost care? Mr Martin, may I beg you to see that the skins, particularly the emus’ skins, are laid very gently in the Captain’s store-room? The smell will soon go off; he will not mind it. I must go and report our return. And then, Mr Davidge, may I trouble you for a sober, steady, reliable hand – Plaice, for example – to lead this ass back to Riley’s?’
‘Well, Doctor, I dare say I can find somebody in his right wits, but Plaice is lashed into his hammock for the moment, having been pumped over – you can hear him singing Green-sleeves if you bend your ear forward.’
Stephen could also hear the strong authoritative voice of Captain Aubrey addressing someone in the cabin in formal terms, someone who certainly did not belong to the ship.
At the same time he also became aware of the nervous tension aboard – anxious looks, furtive whispering, and the whole ship’s company or very nearly so gathered at the stations they would occupy if the frigate were to get under way.
‘Tell the gentleman who sent you that this note is improperly addressed, improperly phrased, and cannot be received. Good day to you, sir,’ said Captain Aubrey, clear in the still air. Doors opened and closed. An army officer, his face as red as his coat, came out, made an unsmiling return to Davidge’s salute and crossed the brow.
The moment he touched the land Stephen’s ass began a heartbroken shuddering bray and all the Shelmerstonians and some of the less respectful man-of-war’s men burst into a rare cackle of laughter, stumping about and clawing one another on the back.
Tom Pullings shot up on deck like a jack-in-the-box and roared out ‘Silence fore and aft.
Silence, there: d’ye hear me?’ with such extreme vehemence and indignation that the cackle stopped dead; and in the silence Stephen made his way to the cabin.