“Hell! What a job!”

“Easier, perhaps, than we think at the moment. So, I am William Black, the old man’s nephew. You will recall that I visited you at your station this morning, as the Norseman policeman advised me, and it just so happened that you had to make the journey to Mount Singular for an official reason you have time to invent, and that you consented to have me accompany you.”

Easter said: “I see,” but Bony doubted it. They were silent during the next hour, at the end of which the scenery was exactly the sameexcepting that all that was left of Chifley was the water-tower looking like a black pebble lying on the horizon.

When Easter suggested lunch, Bony gathered dead brushwood and made a fire, and the policeman filled a billy-can and swung it from the apex of an iron triangle. The tucker-box was unloaded, and while the water was coming to the boil they stood and surveyed the Nullarbor Plain simply because there was nothing else to look at.

“Must be unpleasant when a wind storm is working,” Bony surmised, and Easter told of experiences when he had been glad to lie flat on his chest with a rock slab to anchor him to the ground.

“I understand there are no caves, caverns, blow-holes, north of the railway. Is that correct, d’you think?”

“None have been located,” replied Easter. “But that means nothing to me because the country north of the railway hasn’t been fully explored. It’s all the same country, north or south of where they built the railway. There are other points, too.”

“Such as?”

“It is said that the blow-holes are worked by ocean currents, that the sea tides force the air back into the galleries deep below and so create the underground wind. You know all that, of course.”

“And that the noises underground have been attributed by the aborigines to the stomach rumblings and movements of Ganba the Man-eating Snake,” Bony added.