In spite of Mrs Macquarie’s warning they got lost on their first afternoon. The fairly broad track – for they were not yet beyond the range of scattered settlements – having led over an almost bare sandstone rise which gave them a view of lagoons, a complexity of lagoons, sloped gently down through scrub and scattered trees; and on the right hand they heard a full-throated liquid note of what could only be a lyre-bird, a fairly distant lyre-bird.
‘Do you know,’ said Stephen, ‘that no competent anatomist has ever examined one?’
‘I know it well,’ said Martin, his eye gleaming.
They left the track and rode gently through the brush towards the often-repeated note until they came to an acacia, where they nodded, silently dismounted, tethered the horses and the ass – they had brought him too, their journey being advanced – and walked as quietly as they could into the bush, Stephen carrying the fowling-piece, for Martin, with only one eye and an unduly tender heart, was not a reliable shot. As quietly as they could: but the bush was close-set, dry, littered with dead horny leaves, twigs, branches; and it grew deeper. They were within fifty yards of the voice when it stopped in mid-phrase; they waited, poised, a good ten minutes, and they were turning disappointed resigned faces to one another when two other birds began. To approach the nearest they had to creep, for not only had the brush changed to yet another kind of eucalypt, but the ground had also grown rocky. Still, they were experienced bird-creepers, and now, with infinite pains and accompanied (they being in the shade) by innumerable mosquitoes, they did get close enough to the bird to hear him chuckling to himself between his calls, and scratching the ground. And when at last they came out into the little bald place with a mound in the middle where he had been doing so they found his marks and his droppings. This was their nearest approach to success; and after the seventh bird they decided that so late in the day it was folly to go farther from their horses. They would return to the acacia where they were tethered.
‘But surely this is not the way?’ cried Martin. ‘We had the
great lagoon directly before us when we left the road.’
‘I have the compass,’ said Stephen. ‘The compass cannot lie.’
After a while the compass, or their interpretation of it, led them through a prickly shrub they had never seen before and whose botanical nature they could not determine: they were following what seemed to be a path made by the repeated passage of some animal when Martin stopped abruptly: turning he said ‘Here is a dead man.’
He was an escaping convict, and he had been speared a week or ten days before. At least they laid a symbolic branch over him before they walked on, forced to make some detours because of stretches of impenetrable bush, but still rising and hoping for more open country.
It was when the sun was as low as their hearts and they stood there in doubt with lyre-birds calling on either hand that they heard the ass’s howl not a quarter of a mile behind them. In their agitation they had managed to cross the track without seeing it, and once they were on it again the whole landscape fell into place, direction was obvious, and the great lagoon lay where it ought to lie in relation to the rest.
They woke to the sweetest dawn – day in the east, still night in the west and a sky between them varying by imperceptible degrees from violet to the purest aquamarine.
Dew had fallen and the still air was full of scents unknown to the rest of the world. The horses moved companionably about, smelling gently of horse; the ass was still asleep.
Smoke rising straight: the smell of coffee. ‘Have you ever known a more blessed day?’
asked Martin.
‘I have not,’ said Stephen. ‘Even this uninviting landscape is transfigured.’
A lyre-bird called on the hillside within twenty yards and while their cups were still poIsed it flew right over their heads, a long-tailed pheasant-like creature, and pitched in the brush beyond. The horses brought their ears to bear. The ass woke up.
‘Should you like to pursue him?’ asked Stephen.
‘No,’ said Martin. ‘We have seen one now, and if we want
to dissect one, Paulton will I am sure oblige us with a specimen. They send dogs in to flush them and shoot them as they rise. I am of opinion that we should never deviate from the track and devote all our time to the waders. There must be hosts of them on the lagoons, together with what ducks the country can afford; and as Paulton said, the track skirts the whole series.’
There were indeed hosts of waders on the shore, long-legged birds stalking about in the water, short-legged ones racing about on the mud, formations a thousand strong wheeling all together with a flash of wings, and everywhere those fluting marsh- and shore-bird cries, often the same as those they had both heard in their boyhood and uttered by birds if not of quite the very species then wonderfully like – greenshanks, stilts, avocets, plovers of every kind. ‘And there is an oyster-catcher,’ said Martin. ‘I cannot tell you, Maturin, how happy I am to be lying here on the saitwort in the sun, watching that oystercatcher through my glass.’
‘He is so like ours that I am puzzled to say just where the difference lies,’ said Stephen.
‘But he is certainly not quite our bird.’
‘Why,’ said Martin, ‘he has no white on his primaries.’
‘Of course,’ said Stephen. ‘And his bill is surely longer by an inch.’
‘Yet I believe it is not the difference that makes me so happy; but rather the similarity!’
This happiness, which inhabited both of them, received something of a check when the path, which had run by three successive bodies of water without ambiguity, divided into two equally faint arms on the grassy slope of a hill that separated the third body from the fourth, a grassy slope with a spring. They dismounted to let the horses drink and graze, and to consider the interminable complexity of shining water that stretched away and away before them under the vast bowl of sky, with clouds sailing across it on the south-east trade. They could come to no satisfactory conclusion: giving the horses their heads in the hope that instinct would succeed where reason failed did not answer – the horses gazed at them with
patient, stupid faces and waited to be told where to go: the ass remained perfectly indifferent – so it was decided by the toss of a coin that they should take the right-hand arm. And after all, they said, even if it should die away, as paths so often did, so long as they kept down to the water’s edge they could not get lost in the dreadful bush, since there was no bush down there; and so long as they kept generally northward, along the coast, they must necessarily come to Woolboo-Woolloo. Eased in their minds, they gathered several of the more unusual plants (the habitat was in itself most exceptional), some
beetles and the almost perfect skeleton of a bandicoot, and rode on, startling a group of kangaroos when they came round the shoulder of the slope.
The theory on which they proceeded was sound, but it did not make quite enough allowance for the winding of the shores along which they travelled nor for the fact that many of the lagoons were not lagoons at all but deep and many-branched inlets of the sea. The path of course disappeared on an outcrop of bare sandstone, never to be found again – ‘Could it have been made by kangaroos?’ they wondered – but they carried on happily enough, plagued by mosquitoes early and late but enchanted by the birds, until both food and time began to run out.
An incautious kangaroo, up-wind in a misty dawn, an ancient tall grey kangaroo, perhaps senile, provided food of a sort; but nothing could provide them with time and when at last they found Woolloo-Woolloo, which they did from the seaward side of the lagoon, recognizing it with immense relief (their theory justified – ignominious death averted) by the cairn and flagpost that Paulton had described, and Bird Island just showing in the north, they could not stay more than that night with him in spite of his pleas, still less press on to the forests of the Hunter valley.
‘My dear sir,’ said Stephen, ‘you are very good, but we have almost outstayed our leave. I have promised Captain Aubrey to be back on the twenty-third, and with our horses in their present state and the ass so slow we must start very early tomorrow. If you would do me a kindness, you would see us