Mirage and Bombs

ONE of Nature’s oddities was the grove of six cabbage-trees in the dense shade of which Detective-Inspector Bonaparte had made his noonday camp. They grew beside an unmade road winding like a snake’s track over a range of low, treeless and semi-barren hills; and, so close were they, and so virile their foliage, that to step in among them was not unlike stepping into an ivy-covered church porch on a brilliant summer morning.

A more inviting place for a noon camp in late spring, away out on the edge of Central Australia, is seldom offered, and thankfully Bonaparte made a little fire within the shade and boiled water in his quart-pot for tea. With contentment bordering on ecstasy, he began to eat a lunch of damper and hard-boiled duck eggs whilst reclining against his swag.

Thus he was able to see a picture made extraordinarily vivid by the clear sunlight beyond the shade, a picture roughly framed in the shape of a Gothic arch. In the foreground of the picture passed the unmade road he had been following for four days. The road went on to fall sharply downward and skirt a hillside two hundred feet above a boulder-strewn gully. Beyond the hill it disappeared only to reappear on the side of yet another hill, beyond which it again vanished and reappeared before becoming lost amidst the tiny foothills washed by a still white mirage sea covering a valley ten miles across.

Beyond the mirage-covered plain could be seen the scrub on the distant higher land, scrub appearing to Bonaparte like an inch wide dark-grey ribbon supporting the northern rim of the burnished copper sky.

Four days earlier Bonaparte had left Shaw’s Lagoon, situated beyond Queensland’s western border, a very small township offering no excuse for its existence other than that it marked the terminus of a motor mail route. Shaw’s Lagoon was roughly eighty miles to the south-east of the cabbage-trees where he was now camped, and since he had passed through the gate in the State Border Fence he had passed through no other, had met no traveller, seen no house or hut. And now, down there on the plain, yet another twelve miles to walk to the McPherson homestead, could be seen the first hint of human life, the dust cloudraised by a moving vehicle.