The mountain that went to the sea (8 page)

'A mountain gone to the sea?' Jeckie asked. 'I don't understand.'

'You will, my love. You will!'

`Gone to the sea?' Jeckie repeated.

`All but. Not all of it — yet.'

`On all fours, I suppose?' she asked scornfully.

`No. On a mile-long train.'

'A train? Out here in the Never-Never? Barton, do please stop teasing: and make sense.'

`Okay. I'll stop teasing and you start believing. A bargain? Good. Now first I have to drop by that unique town in the outback known as the Turn-Off. It's printed in large black letters on the map but just wait till you see it! I wouldn't be seen there except that the raking oil gauge is dropping fair out of sight, so I'm losing oil. I had to watch it last night, remember? I hope we make the Turn-Off before I oil-out altogether.'

`Barton,' Jeckie said crossly, 'you are teasing me again. You're trying to frighten me into believing we're likely to be the next people lost out here in the desert. It's as bad as desert anyway — all that spinifex —'

`I'm not trying to frighten you. We'll make the Turn-Off, or nearabout. And I didn't pre-arrange a leak in the oil pipe.'

`I'm sorry.'

`That's good. You stay right that way, Jeckie. You look rather endearing when you're being sorry. Your eyes aren't flashing fire any more.'

Jeckie smiled. 'Thank you for those few kind words, Barton. It's just that I don't quite understand your particular brand of outback humour. Do I take it too seriously?'

`Take no one in the outback seriously, infant. That is, except Andrew. He always means what he says. And how! Now look ahead. You see where the track winds round that hump in the plain? Once round that, we begin to descend on to a slightly lower level — then all's straight on to the Turn-Off.'

He dropped his right hand from the steering wheel and

patted Jeckie's knee.

`Pretty girl,' he said quite softly. 'Don't let yourself be razzed by me. Once you come north of Twenty-six you have to learn about me, as well as learn about the territory. I'm the harder to understand.'

`Oh no, you're not,' Jeckie said eagerly. 'Actually you're rather a pet, Barton, now that I am beginning to understand you. It's understanding Andrew that will be hard—'

`Hard as a nut to crack. Marry me instead, petto! It'll be so much easier to begin with. Save a lot of trouble and end all matters of speculation on the part of others — and/ or indecision on your own part. Got the idea?'

Jeckie leaned forward so that she could look right into Barton's face.

`Some day some girl will take you seriously when you talk like that, Barton,' she said warningly. 'We haven't known one another twenty-four hours yet.'

Barton consulted the clock on the dashboard, then his own wrist watch.

'Another seven or eight hours to go,' he said with a grin.

'Is that how you really do things up here in the nor'west?'

`You mean, meet a girl one day and marry her the next? You bet. It's done all the time. Not by any Ashendens to date, of course. But there can always be a first time. There's twenty men to every girl up here so — as often as not — where the residents are concerned, it's first in who gets the prize.'

`Will you please stop joking, Barton.'

`I'm not joking.'

Jeckie glanced at his face. He was quite serious.

I don't think he is, she thought. He just wants to get married.

She also thought she had better not pursue this subject any further. She might be getting on to outback tracks that led to nowhere. Lost.

Nowhere?

Well, Barton was not exactly no one, nowhere. He was an Ashenden and a major shareholder with Andrew in Ashenden's Mallibee Station.

When they rounded the next hump of land everything altered. The spinifex, the dried-out claypens, and the flintstone track were all, as before, stretching away distance-wise. But one feature dominated the whole wide scene. Across a deep depression on the far side, was thrust up a series of giant rock-tipped mountains, almost like flattened pyramids. The sides of these serries and mesa mountains were clothed in a yellow-green grass. And the tops were great red blocks.

Beyond, further away towards the north east, blue rounded hills had become a low blue range beginning suddenly and ending suddenly. It seemed to ride up out of the eastern sky and then drop away again far off, sheer to the spinifex plain.

The scene was so extraordinary, so full of wild colour, and so unexpected that Jeckie said, `Oh-h . . .' with a cry of surprise.

'I thought that would knock you.' Barton had his old, knowing grin back in action again. 'It always knocks 'em the first time they see it. Ever seen colours like that before?'

`There's nothing but plain. It dips, then you sort-of turn a corner, and there it is! Something fantastic: I don't really believe it.'

`Exactly. Now we take this right fork and that'll bring us to the Turn-Off.'

Jeckie's spirits had risen.

'Enough oil left to get us there?'

'Yes. Just, and that's all.'

'Is the Turn-Off a real town? Houses and shops?'

'It has a windmill, a store with a house behind it, a petrol station and a light aeroplane airstrip. On the map it's called a town.'

'Is that all?'

`All except for the storekeeper who runs the petrol station and is also the Shire President, Warden of the Wardens' Mining Court, etcetera, etcetera. I suppose you could call him a landmark if you want. Some people do.'

`Oh!' Jeckie cried, suddenly pleased. 'You mean the man who was in the lounge at the airport? His name was..

'Never mind his so-and-so name, Jeckie. Just forget

him. Let's hope he's out of town and laack at the airport. Maybe even away over the range looking after his Shire, or something. We don't remember his name — if we can help it — back at Mallibee.'

This time Barton was not joking. His grin had disappeared as if it had never been there.

'You told me not to mention him to Andrew. Why, Barton? Is there something wrong with him?'

It's not what he is. Don't ask questions on that subject Jeckie. What you don't know won't bother you.'

'It all sounds very interesting. He seemed . . . Well, he has a very welcoming smile . . She put her head on one side while she cogitated. She remembered how nice and kindly his smile was. His eyes met one's own eyes head on, and they were friendly, rather beguiling sort-of eyes.

Jeckie wondered why he stayed in her memory more than the two men from the Westerly-Ann Mine who had some kind of special survey report about new-found grasslands for the 'Jason' man. They'd been pleasant enough too. She herself was the one who had been tired and out of sorts.

The Land-Rover ran on, sometimes rattling as it went over a dried-out creek or thumped out of one ironstone rut into another.

Great termite mounds dotted the plain, some as high as six or eight feet. They looked like small brown huts.

The mesa range came closer and closer and as it did, it lost its shrouded blue colour and took on horizontal stripes of pale green and red-brown.

'What are they, Barton? The stripes on the sides of the range?'

`Spinifex growing along the fissures. The mountains have been subject to alternate pressures of heat and cold for millions of years. That's how they denude. They crack up into huge blocks. The red is the colour of the rocks.'

'Yes, I can see that. But some of the spinifex is green. Real true bright green. The other is a dried-out yellow like it is on the plain.'

'There's water trickling through the rock fissures where the spinifex is green. We call it seepage. The rest is thirsty. Here's the Turn-Off coming up. Spot the windmill? They're sitting on a lake of underground water here. You want to

get out and stretch your legs, Jeckie?'

`Yes, please.'

`Right. But pick the shade. I'll park alongside the pump.'

Jeckie realized, as she climbed out of the Rover, that the early morning land breeze had dropped. Everything was blistering hot and still. She thought if a leaf dropped, it would crackle as it touched the ground.

Not that there were so very many leaves about the Turn-Off. A group of tall, whitetrunked trees stood just at the curve of the track by the side of the petrol station. To the west there was nothing but another long, lonely, red-brown snake of a track. Ahead was the continuation of the track Jeckie and Barton had come along. To the east another track wound off between spinifex, claypens and occasional clumps of mulga.

Someone had come out of the store on to the trellis veranda. Lovely creepers roofed this shaded area.

Except for the noise of opening the Land-Rover's bonnet and then the crackling sound of a man's voice as he talked to Barton, there was not a single sound in the world. It was silent as if everything around watched and waited, but made no movement. Like the spinifex plain, it was a strange, quiet, indifferent world around the store at the Turn-Off.

Jeckie crossed the track to peer curiously into the store. Inside, a long narrow fan swung back then forward. She could hear the thrum of a generator. The inside of the store was dark and cool. Jeckie stepped up on to the veranda, then went into the shade of the store proper.

It was a very remarkable store, she thought. It made her think of the country stores way down south she had known as a child. Affluence in the south west had put vinyl flooring from door to walls. Counters had become gleaming white glassed-in refrigerator units. Walls boasted steel shelves upon which stood plastic-packaged stores.

But this store here at the Turn-Off was the old magical kind. From beams under the roof hung everything imaginable from saddles to lanterns, buckets, pots and kettles, ropes, harnesses, aluminium billy-cans.

Piled up in one corner were saddle-cloths, bush blankets, folded canvas tents. In another bush safes, one upon the

other, stood supporting a pile of flat aluminium bowls. In a third corner stood stockwhips, fencing posts, long-handled shovels and spades.

Jeckie lifted her head, almost like a filly scenting home. Here, too, hundreds and hundreds of miles out in the outback, were those unforgettable scents and smells of childhood — long ago. Candle wax and paraffin, soap, new leather, and old leather too. Dried fruits, sweets, apples in a barrel, cooking from somewhere out back. They were all there — the scents of home that had been there long ago.

Jeckie's eyes gradually became accustomed to the darkness inside. Now she could see towards the back a long counter stretching from one side of the store almost to the other side. Jeckie walked towards it. She wanted to see if under certain glass boxes she could find again those tiny treasures of the past — coloured pencils, miniature notebooks, india rubbers, inkwells, imitation wrist watches, paper bon-bons, doll-size cutlery, aniseed balls, pink and white 'lolly' bars, liquorice straps .. .

They were all there — right down to the miniature baby dolls, toy soldiers, bouncing balls, packets of hundreds and thousands, bags of sherbet.

Jeckie pushed her sun hat to the back of her head and leaned on the counter. She gazed into the showcases, recognizing with sheer joy the tiny things she herself had treasured when all the country stores were old-fashioned, and before the days of universal refrigeration hundreds of miles from any town centre.

She hopped a little on one foot. She bent the knee of the other leg and kicked her foot out a little behind her — a habit never lost. Her one wavering foot in the air lost its shoe. It made a half circle in the air, then dropped with a plonk, just two feet behind her.

Jeckie was not worrying. Her shoe on or off did not bother her. Sometimes without thinking she actually kicked it off. It was a way of life with her left foot.

`Why, there,' she said aloud, 'is a tiny doll-size pack of cards. I remember — '

Someone had crossed the floor very quietly. Half of

Jeckie heard but the other half went on joyously picking

out old, remembered toylets of other country stores nearly a thousand miles from here.

The newcomer bent, then gently slipped her shoe back on her foot.

Jeckie whirled round.

`It's you!' she cried. Delight shone in her face. 'It's — No, don't tell me! I remember. It's Jason, isn't it?'

`That right. Jason. J. J. for short.'

His smile was gorgeous, Jeckie thought. Open and friendly and kind.

`As long as it's not the other mystery man,' she said happily as she leaned back with her elbows on the counter. She smiled up at him, her eyes bright as stars. 'The other one they call "Joe Blow". He's the "J" to be avoided — I'm told.'

The smile was still there but his eyes were steady, watching her, asking her eyes to stay sparkling and blue, wide to his gaze.

`Joe Blow?' he pondered. Then he pulled one ear gently. 'He's a noisy fella, that one. Generally speaking, he's well meaning though. Can have a nuisance value, too, at times.
It’s
news to me he has to be avoided by charming young visitors like you, young miss.'