Golden Soak

By Hammond Innes

An unscrupulous miner lies, cheats, and steals to survive in this rollicking adventure set in Western Australia.

Alec Falls is a mining man, and on his honeymoon, he made the strike of his dreams: a long, beautiful seam of tin, just waiting to be ripped out of the ground. For two years, Falls and his wife lived high on the find, spending every penny they made, certain there would always be more. But one day the tin ran out, and so did Falls’s wife. Broke, alone, and ruined, he starts a fire and burns his house to the ground. As far as the world is concerned, Alec Falls is dead.
 
He travels to the forbidding desert of Western Australia in search of the legendary abandoned gold mine known as Golden Soak. But the mine is empty, the land is dry, and the people of the desert feed on men like Falls. To make a second fortune, he must pull water from the sand—and gold from thin air.
 
Inspired by Hammond Innes’s own extensive travels in Western Australia, Golden Soak is a classic story of adventure, daring, and greed at civilization’s edge.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504040952

Hammond Innes

Hammond Innes (1913–1998) was the British author of over thirty novels, as well as children’s and travel books. Born Ralph Hammond Innes in Horsham, Sussex, he was educated at the Cranbrook School in Kent. He left in 1931 to work as a journalist at the Financial News. The Doppelganger, his first novel, was published in 1937. Innes served in the Royal Artillery in World War II, eventually rising to the rank of major. A number of his books were published during the war, including Wreckers Must Breathe (1940), The Trojan Horse (1940), and Attack Alarm (1941), which was based on his experiences as an anti-aircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain. Following his demobilization in 1946, Innes worked full-time as a writer, achieving a number of early successes. His novels are notable for their fine attention to accurate detail in descriptions of place, such as Air Bridge (1951), which is set at RAF stations during the Berlin Airlift. Innes’s protagonists were often not heroes in the typical sense, but ordinary men suddenly thrust into extreme situations by circumstance. Often, this involved being placed in a hostile environment—for example, the Arctic, the open sea, deserts—or unwittingly becoming involved in a larger conflict or conspiracy. Innes’s protagonists are forced to rely on their own wits rather than the weapons and gadgetry commonly used by thriller writers. An experienced yachtsman, his great love and understanding of the sea was reflected in many of his novels. Innes went on to produce books on a regular schedule of six months for travel and research followed by six months of writing. He continued to write until just before his death, his final novel being Delta Connection (1996). At his death, he left the bulk of his estate to the Association of Sea Training Organisations to enable others to experience sailing in the element he loved.

Book preview

One

DRYM

The stone skeleton of the old Wheal Garth engine housing came at me out of the dark, its chimney pointing a gaunt finger at the night. It was there for an instant, glimpsed in the headlights, and then it was gone and there was nothing but the road and the moor and the slanting rain. That derelict mine building stayed etched on the sodden retina of my mind, a symbol – my world in ruins, and all because of that stupid, bloody meeting. I was driving too fast, feeling vicious after all the solitary drinking I had done since I’d walked out on them that morning. Trevenick shouldn’t have said it. He shouldn’t have called me a crooked thieving bastard. What had he ever contributed to the company, jumping on my bandwagon just because his father had left him a fortune? I sucked at my knuckles where the skin was broken. Too bad my temper had got the better of me again. A bunch of landowners, all of them, who wouldn’t recognize a mother lode if they saw one. And before that, facing me with the mine foreman, as if I didn’t know we’d run into granite over six months ago.

‘Australia! You won’t get me going to Australia.’

I could hear her voice, remote and hostile above the noise of the engine, the splash of the wheels as they ploughed through water. But what else – what was the alternative?

‘You should have thought of that before.’

I could see her face, white in the rods of driving rain, her beautiful, soft-lipped, childish face. My wife, my darling bitch of a wife, sitting there at the breakfast table in her dressing gown, accusing me of deceiving her. ‘All your big talk – I never realized …’ But she’d known. She’d known all along.

My foot was hard down on the accelerator, the moors and the rain streaming by and the swish-swish of the windscreen wipers, my mind recalling every word. Maybe I had talked big. But Rosa liked it that way. A big house, a big car, clothes, parties, jaunts to London, with the sense always of riding the crest of a wave; but when it came to the pinch, when the tin gave out and we’d nothing to live on but hope, that was different. She wouldn’t even write to that cousin of hers who owned a mine and 200,000 acres in Western Australia. Oh no, the Garretys weren’t her sort of people – not smart enough. And she didn’t care a damn about Golden Soak, or any other Australian mining prospect for that matter.

The Standing Stone rushed past, a druidical milestone on the way home, and I was thinking of our honeymoon, how I’d made love to her in the dry adit of Balavedra, where my grandfather had worked as a miner, and then gone on alone to discover that damned vein of mother tin staring at me in the torchlight beyond a recent fall of rock. Two years we’d had, the world at our feet, until that wild wet day, with the wind blowing in gale force gusts off the sea, when the mine foreman had broken the news to me in his broad Cornish. After that nothing had gone right. We were into solid granite, no vestige of tin or any other mineral. And then Trevenick smelling a rat and calling a board meeting.

I needed a new start, a new country, and Australia was the obvious choice for a man with my qualifications. And when I told her I’d written to Kadek almost a fortnight ago, she’d rounded on me – ‘If you can’t keep me without turning crook, there are other men who can.’ She was scared, of course, but that didn’t make it sound any nicer.

I told her to go to hell, stalking out to the car and driving straight to that meeting in the stuffy little office we rented in St Just. If I hadn’t left then I’d have belted her.

I was off the moors now, on the long dip down to Drym, the first bend coming up fast. I braked, remembering how I’d walked out of the meeting, promising to pay them back by the end of the month. I’d braked too hard, I knew that, still seeing their faces, the three older ones hostile and Trevenick sitting on the floor looking dazed. The skid started as I recalled Captain Bentall’s words, my hands correcting automatically, the shriek of tyres on wet tarmac – ‘We’ll give you till the end of the month, Falls. Now get out.’ – his voice sounding as though he were giving orders to a naval rating, and then the headlights spinning and the car crashing sideways through old fencing, rolling gently against a bank of heather.

I wasn’t far from home, but still far enough in the rain to get soaked and chilled, reaction setting in. I was shaken, nothing more, only now the crash had started a new train of thought.

They said afterwards that I looked like death, alone there at the bar – that they weren’t a bit surprised. It was all in the papers, the landlord’s comments, an interview with Rosa. But they didn’t understand. I hadn’t been drinking because it was the end of the road. I’d been drinking because I didn’t know what the hell to do about my wife. And though I’d got it all worked out, every step, so that it would look spontaneous and quite natural, I still didn’t know how I was going to cope with her.

But the house, when I reached it, was in darkness. Stumbling up the drive in the rain; it looked much as it had done that first time we’d seen it, in the dark, walking hand-in-hand between the laurels and laughing excitedly because she’d found a house to match the fortune I’d discovered underground. It nestled deep in a hollow, surrounded by the dark of cedars and the blue of Abies nobilis, its nice Georgian front ruined by a Victorian brick addition of extreme ugliness. But that was what had kept it on the market, and it had looked a lot better when we’d torn down the rusting iron verandah and the rotten conservatory at the end, painted the bricks a warm shade of pink and rooted out the laurel shrubberies. It still had a slightly dilapidated air, but it was home – the only home I’d known since my parents died in a plane crash when I was studying at the Royal School of Mines in London.

I fumbled the key into the lock, sober now, but my hands still trembling with shock. I called to her as I switched on the light. ‘Rosalind!’ No answer. The house silent and watchful, hostile even. ‘Rosa. Where are you?’ Did the old walls know what I planned to do? ‘Rosalind?’ Still no reply, the stillness all about me, communicating the emptiness. I switched on more lights and climbed the stairs to our room, wearily and with a feeling of loneliness. I knew she had gone.

The room was empty, but with a special emptiness, a sort of desecration as though a burglar had been there, the dressing table bare, the drawers still open where she had rootled for clothes and costume jewellery, the personal things that added up to our two years of marriage. And the suitcase gone that she used for London.

I went back down the stairs, slowly and in a daze, searching the drawing room first, the study, then the dining room. I ended up in the hall, staring at the oak chest which had been her latest success in a local sale. No note, nothing conventional like that. Not that I expected it – she wasn’t that sort of person. I went into the study, to the big court cupboard we used as a bar, and poured myself a Scotch, not bothering about water. I took it to the desk, drinking it slowly, slumped in the red leather chair she had given me on our first anniversary when everything was rosy, with tin high, the mine a bomb, our future assured. The keys were in the drawer where I had been hoarding cash against the day when we’d have to get out. It was a long time before I nerved myself to open it.

But it was all right. The money was still there – four hundred and thirty-six pounds. I counted it carefully, my hands trembling. No question of an assisted passage now. It would have to be Naples or the Piraeus, and though an emigrant ship, I’d have to pay my passage. The money was my lifeline and if she’d taken it.… But she hadn’t, though she’d taken her passport. And no note to say she was sorry. Yet she’d still put the afternoon’s post neatly on the desk and there was a vase of late roses that hadn’t been there the night before.

Automatically I reached for the paper knife, its moss agate handle smooth to the touch. A Christmas present from one of our richer friends. But I knew he wouldn’t be a friend any more. I hadn’t any friends. Not any real friends. Only acquaintances, men who liked my style, who provided me with an audience. I picked up the letters; two bills, an invitation to dinner, a list of foreign cars on offer, but no airmail – nothing from Australia. I sat back then, feeling chilled.

Was he away? Had he moved from Perth? My letter hadn’t only been about Golden Soak. I’d been fishing for a job as well. Why the hell hadn’t he answered? At least he could have told me what the prospects were. But then why should he? I’d only met him once and that was nearly four years ago. We had spent a long evening together drinking on the terrace of an hotel overlooking the Costa del Sol, the night air warm, the sound of dance music and the moon making a silver path across a calm sea. I’d been working for Trevis, Parkes & Pierce then, a firm of mining consultants in the City, and it was Kadek who had first put it into my head to form a company of my own. It was about the time Western Mining’s Kambalda prospect was providing the first whiff of the Australian nickel boom to come and he was busy flogging the shares of an unknown Australian company to rich English exiles with tax-free money to burn.

I glanced at my watch. It was past eight already. Soon I would have to make up my mind. I poured myself another Scotch, adding soda this time, and settled back in the chair again, thinking of the only other person I knew in Australia. I had come back from Balavedra on a Friday night to find her in the drawing room with Rosa, sitting silent and very tense. I’d given her a large dry Martini, and after that she’d relaxed and all through dinner she was telling me about the North West – the Pilbara, she called it – the sunshine and the red rock, its wild beauty. And about Jarra Jarra. Particularly about Jarra Jarra. How it was thirty-one miles from one end to the other and they ran three thousand head of cattle and owned an old abandoned gold mine.

Golden Soak. It was just a name, and yet somehow it had stayed in my mind – an idea, a prospect, something to go for if things didn’t improve.

I remembered the freckles and the snub nose and the odd way she’d talked, like somebody out of an old-fashioned magazine. And her eyes, her slightly prominent grey-blue eyes, the bubbling vitality of her. She was just twenty-one, the absolute antithesis of my darling wife, and driving her to the station in the morning she had invited me to visit them at Jarra Jarra, suggesting laughingly that I might have a shot at opening up their mine again the way I’d opened up Balavedra.

I finished my drink. Thinking about Janet Garrety, I was almost glad Kadek hadn’t answered my letter. Clever. That was the word that best described him. And interested only in money. I was sick of men like that – sick of mining, too. An outback cattle station was just what I needed. A chance to sort myself out. I’d write to her on the boat.

I got to my feet then, my mind suddenly made up. The Scotch had warmed me, relaxed my nerves. I went upstairs and changed into dry clothes, a sweater and an old pair of flannels, and then I had a look at the kitchen to see if Rosa had left me anything to eat. There was wind at the back of the house, rain lashing at the scullery window and seeping in under the back door as it always did with a storm off the sea. It would be a wet ride. But that didn’t matter. That was physical. It was the mental beating that had shattered me, the feeling that an unkind fate had stripped me of all I’d worked for these past two years, and in that mood the idea that had leapt into my mind as I stumbled home through the rain after the crash seemed less wild, a logical progression, an escape into anonymity.

Cold chicken, tomatoes, cheese, a bottle of beer. I put it all on the kitchen table. A man on his own, in a state of shock, would hardly bother to take it through into the dining room. Even charred embers contain evidence for those who know what to look for. Everything had to support what I wanted them to think. Sitting there, alone, I had time to go over it all again in my mind. I ate slowly, unconscious of time, working it out step by step, logically and carefully.

It was almost nine by the time I had finished and the only doubt then left in my mind was the motor bike. I had used it to get to and from the mine before the Company had been able to provide me with a car. Since then it had been under an old tarpaulin in the pump house next to the garage. I had checked it over quite recently, knowing that the Company car, and probably our own as well, would have to go. It worried me that somebody might remember its existence, but that was a chance I would have to take.

The garage was in the old stables, separate from the house. I wheeled the bike inside and topped up the tank from a jerrican of petrol kept there for the lawnmower. It started first kick and I left it to warm up while I folded the tarpaulin and tucked it away behind some deck chairs.

Back in the kitchen, I cut myself some sandwiches, wrapped them in greaseproof paper and put them in a suitcase. Into this went the clothes I’d need and everything of value that I thought would not be noticed – a small diamond brooch that had belonged to my mother, my father’s signet ring and an old gold hunter that had been left me by an uncle. I also took the cuff links from my evening dress shirt. And after that I started on the electrics.

I began on the flex of the bedside lamp, roughing it up with a nail file until the copper gleam of the wires stood bare. Then out to the fuse box on the landing to replace the 2-amp wire with a piece of ordinary wire. Finally back to the scullery, where the mains fuse was supplemented by one of those sensitive trip switches. A small piece of grit jammed it successfully. Candles I knew we had and I stuck one on to the plastic top of a jam jar, cut two grooves in it near the base and took it up to the bedroom. There I set it on the floor beside the bed, slipped the bare wires of the flex over it, slotting them into the grooves on either side, and jammed a heavy spring clip over the top.

Now it remained only to set the scene. From the study I brought up the half empty bottle of Scotch, with the soda syphon and a glass on a brass tray, and put it down beside the bed. I had also put a full bottle in my pocket and this I emptied on to the carpet and over the bedclothes. I pulled the whisky-sodden eiderdown on to the floor so that the corner of it overlaid the flex just clear of the candle. Then I took off my wristwatch and put it under my pillow. Finally, I switched on the bedside light and stood looking round the room, checking that everything was as it should be. My pyjamas, of course. It was always possible that a button might survive, and the glass on its side, on the floor, as though it had fallen from my nerveless hands.

I felt strung up then, my nerves taut – memories of the house and of our life together, and that big double bed mocking me. The room reeked of whisky, and the house, solid to the wind, silent, waiting for the end. I shivered, feeling chilled again, depressed by the thought of two centuries of occupation, all those others who had lived there. I bent down quickly, the box of matches in my hand, and lit the candle.

I stopped a moment to see it burning, a golden flame. So small and innocent a thing, hardly bigger than a child’s night-light. I shook myself, knowing the moments precious. An hour at the most it gave me, no more. An hour to be gone from Cornwall into a new life. I turned and hurried down the stairs, leaving the bedroom door open behind me. I had helmet and oilskins ready, the suitcase strapped to the back of the bike. It took only a moment to get myself dressed for the road, and I was just going out by the back door when something, some instinct, made me pause.

I stood there for a moment, holding the door open with my hand, desperately searching my memory. And then suddenly it came to me. Christ! My passport. I had nearly forgotten my passport. It was in the slim black expensive briefcase my fellow directors had given me to mark the Company’s first year of operation. With it was my birth certificate, all the papers I’d thought I might need.

I hurried through to the study, shocked to find my keys still in the right-hand drawer. They should have been in the pocket of the suit I had left discarded on a chair in the bedroom. But perhaps it was natural that they should be in the desk. I found the one I wanted, my fingers trembling as I unlocked the centre drawer. The briefcase was still there. I checked the contents, and then went out into the rain, round the house to the garage.

The last I saw of Drym was a dark ivy-clad shadow crouched behind the shaft of light pouring out from the uncurtained study window. Then I was round the sweep of the drive, my back towards it, riding out through the gates, up by side roads on to the moors, two years of my life expunged, an episode. Now I had nothing but what was with me and I sang as I rode, yelling an old marching song into the wind and the rain, feeling free – gloriously, magnificently free.

It was not a mood that lasted long. Beyond Camborne, headed for Truro, I was wet and cold. The hour would be just about up and I was wondering about the candle and those frayed wires and whether it would work. The mood of elation had drained away; ahead lay the cold hard slog through the night.

I refuelled at Exeter and again near Wimborne. The rain had ceased about an hour ago and I ate my sandwiches there, cold and wet and tired, waiting for the garage to open. Later I stopped in the New Forest to consider what I should do about the bike. I had no road licence for it and I didn’t dare take it into Southampton. Still thinking about it, I lay down on a bank of heather and went to sleep, too tired to care. The sun was up and it was almost warm.

In the end I rode the bike into a dense thicket and dumped it there. I had removed the number plates and these I buried about half a mile away. Then I went back to the road and hitched a ride on a lorry I found parked in a lay-by.

It was almost dusk by the time I finally reached Southampton. I found my way to the docks, and after booking a cabin on the night ferry to Le Havre, I went into the Skyways Hotel, where I had a shave and then drank three whiskies straight off in the bar. I was very near the point of exhaustion, my mind going over and over the events of the last twenty-four hours. In that state you don’t think logically. All I knew was that I was scared. Scared at the finality of what I had done. Scared of what it might lead to, of the future – of just about everything. I’d no relatives. No friends now. I was alone and bloody lonely, feeling sorry for myself, utterly depressed. And then a boy came in with the evening papers, and there it was – in the Standard. MINE DIRECTOR DIES IN BLAZE. And an interview with Rosa: I had no idea Alec was in difficulties. He was always gay, always full of life. How was I to know the Company was bankrupt? If I’d known, if he’d confided in me, of course I wouldn’t have gone off to visit my family like that. After all, he was my husband. As if she didn’t know! She knew damn well we were living on borrowed time. Mrs Rosalind Falls – there was a picture of her inset against the burned out remains of the house, another of the mine. But no picture of me, which was all I cared about at the moment.

I lit a cigarette, my hand trembling, my eyes searching the bar over the flame. But only one other person had bought a paper and he was reading the sports page. It was just another item of news, so why should he, or anybody else, care a damn? I finished my drink and went into the dining room, going over the story again quietly with my meal. There was a statement from Trevenick denying there had been any disagreement among the directors. ‘The high grade ore was mined out – that’s all.’ Another from the landlord of the pub at Sennen Cove: ‘I wouldn’t say he was drunk, but he had been drinking heavily. He seemed upset about something.’

But my eyes kept going back to that picture, the gutted shell with the slates all gone and the room beams blackened by fire. The finality of it took a long time to sink in, the fact that I was dead, burnt to a cinder in the ruins of our house. Alive and eating roast duckling it was difficult to realize that officially I no longer existed. I felt slightly sickened at the enormity of what I had done.

At the ferry terminal the immigration official barely glanced at my passport. The relief at being on board, no questions asked.… I didn’t wait to see the boat sail, but went straight to my cabin feeling utterly drained. I heard the engines start, the thump of the screws as we began to move. The dock lights swung across the deck beams above my head, then darkness and I knew England had slipped away, my own country, all my life gone – and Australia a 14,000 mile journey. But it wasn’t of the future I was thinking as I lay sleepless in my bunk. I was thinking of Rosa, the lusty, passionate vitality of her, the small firm breasts and the golden skin. All gone now, the world we’d shared in embers.

Two

JARRA JARRA

I woke to a long-drawn howl, quite close. It was dark and very still, and I thought the truck had come to a stop. I moved stiffly, conscious of the hard surface under me, the yielding coarseness on which my head was pillowed. Then I remembered that the truck had gone. I pulled the gold hunter out of my pocket and flicked my lighter. The time was three-forty, no moon, but the stars brilliant in the night sky. The sound that had woken me was gone now, but far away I heard the echo of it, an answering call.

I was tired, exhausted by the long rattling journey north in the appalling heat. Vaguely I remembered where I was, how I had seen the bulk of Mt Whaleback black against the moon as I stood watching the tail lights of the truck disappear in a cloud of dust down the dirt road. The howl came again, long drawn out, throbbing in the darkness. Something crawled across my hand, a feather touch of small legs moving. I shook it off. An ant probably. And faint in the distance came the answering howl. The weirdness of the sound, the loneliness of it, and myself alone, lying on a stony gravel bed.

I remembered Emilio arguing with me, trying to persuade me to go on with him to Nullagine. ‘The Conglomerate – issa not very good, but you getta meal there, some beer. Is better than living bush, yes?’ But the telegram I had sent her had said I’d be waiting at the turn-off by the old airfield, and in the end he had agreed to make the detour. He knew where it was, for he sometimes made deliveries to the motel at Mt Newman.

I stared up at the stars, wondering what the day would bring and whether she’d come, what I was going to tell her if she did. The dingoes were silent now, the night hot and still, not a breath of wind. I could see the Southern Cross, and lying there alone I was overwhelmed by the Strangeness of it all, even the night sky entirely different, no sign of the Bear.

I closed my eyes again, but sleep eluded me now, my fears taking over and chasing each-other through my heat-stunned brain. I hadn’t worried on the voyage out; it had been like a dream, a sort of hiatus, myself in limbo and all sense of reality suspended. But now it was different. Now reality stared me in the face and there was no escape. What the hell did I tell the girl? That I didn’t exist? That I was almost penniless? She’d want to know about Rosa, about Drym – she’d want to know what the hell I was doing in Australia. Come in the spring, she had said – not in summer. And here I was in summer and the luck she had envied clean run out.

I was thinking back now, tired and trying to convince myself it would be all right. It had seemed all right at the time, a way out. There’d even been a sort of inevitability about it. And at 14,000 miles’ remove Jarra Jarra had appeared a sort of oasis, a place where I could find myself again, a springboard from the security of which I could make the plunge into a new life. But now that it was only 60 miles away the prospect of it was quite different. It wasn’t only Janet who would be full of questions. There was her father, too. What would Ed Garrety think of a stranger arrived out of the blue, almost penniless and wanting a job? She had talked of drought and an iron ore company moving in on them, but with all that acreage and 3,000 head of cattle they were still rich enough to scare me.

I reached into my hip pocket, to the slender wad of notes, counting them by starlight. But I knew the score – one hundred and twenty-seven dollars. That’s all I had, all that was left after I had got myself to Naples, paid my passage out and all the incidentals. And naturally they had been expecting me to arrive by car. The letter I had found waiting for me when I got off the boat at Fremantle made that clear, and she’d given me detailed instructions – where to turn off the Great Northern Highway, how to find the start of the backtrack leading to the station. But instead of a car I’d wired her to meet me. How was I going to explain that? And no job, nothing to go back to?

The dingoes sounded again, but very far away. I dozed, my head fallen forward, and when I woke again it was to a different sound, a soft-toned bellow and the rumble of an ore train going north. The stars were paling now, the leaves of the eucalyptus tree under which I lay visible against the growing light of the sky. Something moved behind the patch of scrub to my right, a tall grey shadow. I watched, suddenly wide awake, my nerves tense. It was bending down, screened from my view, and then, with three quick leaps, it was within yards of me, standing erect and balanced by its tail, its short front legs hanging limp, its head lifted, alert and listening, the’ muzzle twitching like a rabbit’s.

In the half light the kangaroo looked big as a man. Instinctively I scrambled to my feet. Its head turned in a flash. I had a glimpse of soft eyes, and then it was bounding away at a gallop. And all around me grey shadows were moving at speed, heads thrust forward to balance the powerful strokes of the back legs as they covered the ground in great leaps. One moment they were there, the whole bush around me erupting in lolloping forms, then they were gone. No sound. It was like a dream.

I sat down again and lit a cigarette, my back against the gum, watching the sky pale to eggshell green, the dawn coming fast. And as the light increased, the shapes of trees and scrub emerged from shadow to become hard outlines. All gums. Nothing I knew or recognized, the earth red like dried blood, everything cruel and harsh, baked in the oven of yesterday’s heat. I tried to recall the sound of her voice, familiarly English, yet oddly different – not harsh, not metallic like the men on the boat, but different all the same: ‘Come in the spring,’ she had said, driving to the station that morning. ‘It’s lovely then with the wild flowers out.’ And she’d gone on to talk about the country, speaking of it as something beautiful, something to be loved as well as feared.

There’d been Australians on the boat. But like the man from Batemans Bay I’d shared a cabin with, most of them were bound for Sydney. They didn’t know the West. Only Wade, who’d boarded the ship at Capetown, had ever been in the Pilbara. He’d worked with a construction gang on the iron ore railway, and the way he’d described it up here, he and the girl might have been talking about two different countries. I could hear the sound of his voice grating, see the fringe of gingery hair above the long face, the pile of beer cans in the cabin base. He’d hated it.

That had been the night before we’d docked, the Italian immigrants lining the rails, staring out across the heat-still sea, the moon’s path like spilled milk. I had stood there with them for a time, all of us staring towards the future that lay veiled in the hot moon-haze. And when finally I had gone below, I had found the cabin packed with drunks, half awash with beer, and Wade perched on my bunk, his long legs dangling, sweat gleaming on his face, his hands trembling as he sucked at a cigarette. ‘You’re there, brother. Back in good old Aussie land. The Big Country.’ His cackling laugh, that grating voice – ‘So you’re headed for the Never Never, up into the Pilbara – the Iron Cauldron. Christ! You’ll fry. You’ll wish you’d never seen the blasted country.’ His drunken words merging with her clear, vibrant voice. ‘Come in the spring. It’s lovely with the wild flowers out’. And Kadek, long ago on that terrace in Spain, talking of the Golden Mile, envying me my degree: ‘If I’d had your education, I’d have been a millionaire by now.’ Dozing, I chased a wisp of molten gold through miles of desert blooms in a flat red waste, the only sound the rattle of the truck and Wade’s cackling laugh, his hatred of the Never Never.

I woke with a jerk, the fallen cigarette burning a hole in my old khaki trousers. I stubbed it out and got to my feet, moving down towards the