“You have an office with the usual map of Australia pinned to the wall?” he asked, well knowing that the Police Station is the cross carried by every policeman in the true outback.

Easter conducted him to his own particular cross, where he lit the oil-lamp suspended from the ceiling, permitting Bony to survey the usual littered desk, the usual wire files hanging from nails driven into the walls, and usual large-scale map. Mechanically constructing what could be assumed to be a cigarette, he stood with Easter before the map on which someone had etched with blue pencil the area marked Nullarbor, meaning no trees. The cartographer had drawn a rule-straight line from east to west, and named this the Transcontinental Railway, the line bisecting the area.

“Authorities differ over the extent of this Plain,” Bony said, without intention to teach but rather as a preface to what he had in mind to say. “It’s probably much more than the estimate of thirty thousand square miles. What do you know of it?”

Easter’s forefinger traversed the railway.

“Three hundred miles of dead straight line built on dead level ground, or what appears to the naked eye as dead level.” The finger flashed downward on the map to within an inch of the coastline, moved slowly upward to cross the railway, continued upward until seemingly stopped by a blue dot named Lake Wyola. “From here down to the coast is something like three hundred miles. No trees, no surface water except in rock-holes filled by rain. Just a vacuum spanned by a railway, the railway stops by nothing but a few houses and servicing depots. No out-lying homesteads excepting to the south and one to the north-west. No roads but that coastal one. No fences, only land and the sky. That woman didn’t fall from the train.”