The mountain that went to the sea (10 page)

Jeckie said coldly. `I don't have to answer those questions, Barton. I'm not in school any more. Suppose I looked at the scenery instead?'

`Yes, you do that, sweetheart, but not for the next few minutes. I'm going up that long, low rise to the left and I'm going up full belt. The top is steeper than you'd think from the plain. Shut your eyes and hang on like a good girl. When you get to the top you'll see a mountain — on

its way to the sea.'

Jeckie did as she was told. The rise was boulder-strewn and the Land-Rover zigzagged about as Barton drove. They raised a dust pall in a brown cloud that puffed and lifted, then hovered over everything, including themselves and the Rover.

Barton pulled his hat low over his brow and looked ahead through slitted eyes.

`How you going?' he asked after five minutes.

`I'm going fine,' Jeckie said. 'But I can't see a thing for the dust.' It burned her eyeballs when she tried to open her eyes, so she screwed them shut tight.

Suddenly they stopped ricocheting from side to side and from boulder to dip. They ran along a short, straight, dust-shrouded strip, then stopped.

There was quite a silence. Barton leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.

`Don't look so up-tight, Jeckie,' he said. 'There's nothing but a most remarkable sight before you —'

Jeckie opened her eyes. They were not so much blinded with dust now as unexpectedly filled with tears.

She had cracked hardy all through that ghastly week after Edgerton had written to her, all the way up in the plane, then all the way out from the airport to Mallibee. She had cracked hardy through supper, through her sleep on her first night and through breakfast and her first visit to Cassie in the kitchen. She had met Jason Bassett all over again, and all over again something kind and easy in him had touched her. She had wanted to put out her hand ... maybe ask him for the loan of a shoulder!

Yet dust had all but broken her spirit. It was dust that was too much for her. It was the dust, too, that made her eyes water, not a sudden and belated reaction to the fretted feelings she had so lately suffered. It was the little

things of life that got one down, she acknowledged. The straw that breaks the camel's back. Or was it a kind smile from a dear man? Cousin Jason.

Tor crying out loud!' Barton said. 'What goes? Jeckie, you're not really crying? I thought you were enjoying yourself !'

`It's the dust. So gritty—'

`Well, here's my handkerchief. Get it out with the rolled corner. Or shall I try for you?'

'No, thank you. It's all out now . .. I think . . .' She looked at him, and blinked to pretend to prove her statement.

`You know what, Jeckie? You've got the most bee-oo-tiful eyes, specially when someone like me looks at 'em through a veil of . . . well, call it "mist" if that sounds better than dusty tears.'

`Thank you,' Jeckie said — just cold enough not to be encouraging.

'From now on I'm not teasing,' Barton said firmly. 'You're in my charge — for the time being. You'll have to settle for that. No questions allowed. Now turn your head to the left and look down into the valley. We're bang-on the right place in the right hour of the day. There goes Mallibee's mountain.'

Jeckie scrambled out of the Land-Rover as Barton eased from his own seat. She stood still, blinking her eyes, and looked down into the valley.

It was another world. High at the top of the opposite
hills the mesa rock surfaces were a brutal wounded red.
They were old, these hills, as if hewn in blocks and set

on one another millenniums ago. Along the slopes were
banded swathes of black lustreless rock. Lower still came
flat-faced coloured slabs, red here, green and aquamarine
there. The hills to the east rolled and folded away, striated
with yellow dried-out spinifex. Veils of water trickling
down from horizontal crack in some places made surfaces

glisten like mirror walls. Below, nearer the valley bottom, twisted whitetrunked trees — clinging by roots embedded in rock cracks — reached desperate leafy arms to the sky above. At the foot of all was a long narrow still pool in which were reflected the peacock colours of the bared rock face all over again. A double take — too true to be uru-eal. Nature at her cruellest, most magnificent, best.

From valleys beyond the rounded humps of low hills — then through the valley below — ran a silver streak. of a track.

It was a railway line.

Technology in the midst of the primitive! Jeckie thought. The railway line was a thread cutting through an ancient range of hills — impinging modern man and his works on relics of lost millenniums.

'Listen! It's coming!' Barton said. timed it well, all

right. Here comes the Iron King.'

Round the curve of the valley came the train.

The two coupled diesel engines were bigger than Jeckie's imagination. After them came a long long snake of open-topped waggons, each carrying its dark lifeless load of iron ore.

Truck after truck after truck. A train — three quarters to a mile long! It took an age to pass them.

Jeckie blinked her eyes, to make sure that what she was seeing was real. The diesels had disappeared round other curves of land, out of sight. But the trucks still came on. And on, and on — each filled to capacity.

The train went neither slower nor faster. It just went — clickety clack: truck after truck after truck after truck.

Mallibee mountain — in bits and pieces — going to the sea!

Jeckie's eyes ached from to-ing and fro-ing along the train. 'What is it?' she asked, almost dizzily.

The longest train in the world, they say. That's what it is,' Barton said between half-closed lips. He was not taken in by wonder. He was smouldering with a kind of anger. `It's two hundred and fifty miles from Westerly-Ann Mine to the coast, with not a single stopping place in all that stretch of land. From engine to tail-end — all but a mile of train. That's what it is!'

`I don't believe it!' said Jeckie. `I'm having a dream.'

`More like a nightmare — if you're one of the family,' Barton said. 'That stuff in those waggon-trucks is iron ore—Mallibee Mountain. It's been broken into pieces, shovelled aboard, now being taken away to the coast. They've built a new port so the world's biggest ore-carriers — sixty thousand tons — can get in to take the ore away. The next carrier off the line from the shipyards will be a hundred-thousand tonner.'

'Our mountain?' Jeckie asked, incredulous. 'You mean the iron-ore mountain belonged to Mallibee Station?'

`To Mallibee property — originally.'

`But how could they take it? I mean, if it belonged to us?'

She was unconscious of using the word 'us', and unconscious of the fact that she had for the first time identified herself with Mallibee. As she stared at the incredible snake of glistening track, and the monster plying along it, Jeckie had seen the ore being carried away as 'our mountain'.

'Pillage,' Barton said explosively. 'Robbery. In broad daylight too!'

'But how can they?' Jeckie persisted. `Mallibee is a freehold property given to Great-Grandfather Ashenden because of his exploration services to the State. I mean they can take back a leasehold station but they can't take freehold property. Or can they, Barton?'

`They didn't take it. They bought it. At least one descendant of the Ashendens sold out a birthright. His birthright, granted. But still part of Mallibee.'

'Oh no!'

'You wouldn't do a thing like that, now would you Jeckie?' He was suddenly looking at her closely.

'Of course not. Wait a minute, Barton. You wouldn't be wishing my mother dead, and me in the position of deciding about her share in Mallibee? If so —'

Barton assumed the expression of one very shocked person. 'What a wicked mind you have, Jeckie! I'm ashamed of you.'

'You don't own me—so you don't have to feel anything about me,' she retorted.

Barton sighed — as he changed his role back to teasing

cousinship. 'Blood will out, you know. There's still something of the Ashenden mixed up with the Bennett in you, pet. Why aren't you watching the train, Jeckie? Look ... here comes the tail-end.'

`I am watching the train. I'm wishing I could jump from here on to it and go wherever it is going — two hundred and fifty miles away to the coast — so as to get away from what you, Barton Ashenden, have been thinking. You're thinking about what I would do with my share — if I one day inherit it — '

'So you want to run away with the ore, out on a carrier ship? Then away across the sea? Just to punish me? My, oh my, Jeckie! You do take things seriously, don't you?'

She did not answer him.

They watched in silence for a long time as the train raced on through the valley then away through the cutting in the lower hills. The last click-clack was heard, a sound fading in the distance. Then its echo faded too. A strange silence settled over the valley, over the deserted railway line, and over the plain beyond the last of the hills. Mallibee Range sat blue and brooding on the open cuts of its terrible man-gouged wounds.

Jeckie saw now that the mesa-topped range was thrust up from the plain like some primeval foreign body. From this vantage point it had a beginning and an end that could be seen with the naked eye. The far end had been scooped into a gigantic, open-mouthed hollowed gap. Behind this cut-away the range sloped off into the distance in a strange, sad, blue, unfinished way of low hills. Jeckie could see tiny movements down in that great gap now. They could have been ants at work except that the super-giant shovels that scooped away at the mountain were tools beyond ants. They had to be men.

Westerly-Ann, Jeckie thought. That was the mine to which the two men at the airport belonged. No wonder Barton had been barely civil to them. It didn't bother them to whom the mountain had belonged. It would have been no more than a money-making mountain of iron ore — to them. Yet Jason Bassett had been friendly with them. That, of course, was one of the reasons why Barton had been very perfunctory in greeting Jason! She was beginning to see through the glass daddy of

the family relationships now — she thought. Jason was on friendly terms with the enemy.

The silence that had fallen on the heat-razed land was troubled again. This time it was the sound of a motor vehicle labouring up the side of the valley to their right.

'Is someone coming up the track, Barton?'

`Yes. You can see the dust plume rising up from the cutting over to the east. He's through now. Holy smoke, it's old Clinton from Nimarri Plains!'

`Old Clinton?'

'A crusty old bachelor. Owns the neighbouring station to the north east of Mallibee. He's more hopping mad about the iron ore than Ashendens A and B, Jeckie. His land is leasehold and when the mining crowd moved in, he had no control over them whatsoever. They'd actually pegged claims all over his place. The Wardens' Court —that's Jason Bassett — okayed their claims. They moved in and scooped out costeans till part of the station looks like a massive game of snakes and ladders.'

Jeckie watched the utility, enveloped in its own dust cloud, zigzagging its way upward between the iron-coloured boulders.

Finally it reached the top, then eased over on to the track where the Land-Rover stood.

The man at the wheel was as brown as the boulders and as dust-covered as the utility. Somewhere under the old wide-brimmed pastoralist's hat was a wizened face.

'Hallo there, Bart,' a croaking voice called. 'See that rakin' train go through? That's a bit of Mallibee on its way, all right!'

'You don't have to tell me, Evan. We've been watching it.'

'Daylight robbery when they take that stuff. Make your old grandfather, and his father before him, turn in their graves.'

'Don't blame me for it, Evan. I'm not the one who hived-off that stretch of land.'

'Neither you did. It was that cousin of yours. Say, who've you got along with you, eh?'

'I'm sorry, Jeckie, I was waiting to get a word in — to introduce Evan Clinton to you. Evan, this is another cousin

frorn the south. Miss Jeckie Bennett.'

'Cripes! Do they all run to girls down there? You had one of them up a few weeks back, didn't you? Everyone round the district's been waiting for the wedding bells. Who's going to marry who, eh? Coupling up the old family together again, eh?' The old man threw back his head and laughed. Then, in the middle of a hearty guffaw, he stopped dead.

'Say, Barton, you're just the one I want. 'Scusin', Miss Jeckie-if that's your name - but could I take Barton off for an hour or two? I'm going across the dip to move some of the latest pegs the Westerly mob have been putting along the boundary line between me and Mallibee. It's in your interest too, Bart. There's none of that geologist mob on the watch jes' now ...'

'I'd like to come, Evan. But I can't leave my cousin here. She'd never make that track across country to the Turn-Off.'

'Try me, Barton,' Jeckie said quickly. 'I'd love to come with you and Mr Clinton - '