He remembered a joke he had heard in a Cairo café. A prophet in the middle of a desert tells a traveller who is dying of thirst that all he needs is water. There is no water, replies the traveller. Yes, the prophet agrees, but if there was you would not be thirsty and you would not die. So I will die, says the traveller. Not if you drink water, replies the prophet.
As the flames leapt higher and the air filled with smoke and gyrating cinders, Dorrigo Evans took a step back. The smell was sweet and sickening. To his disgust, he realised he was salivating.
Rabbit Hendricks sat up and raised both arms, as though embracing the flames that were now charring his face, then something inside him popped with such force that they all had to jump backwards to miss being hit by pieces of burning bamboo and embers. The bamboo pyre transformed into an ever more ferocious fire, and Rabbit Hendricks finally fell sideways and was lost in the flames. There was a loud bang as another of the corpses exploded, and everyone ducked.
The Big Fella stood up and, grabbing a bamboo pole, helped the pyre makers push the corpses back into the centre of the fire, where they would be incinerated most fully and quickly. Together they all laboured, poking and levering and flicking the bamboo back to feed the ever-rising flames, sweating, puffing, not stopping, not wanting to stop, just losing themselves in the soaring flames for a few moments more.
When they were done and went to leave, Dorrigo Evans noticed something lying in the mud. It was Rabbit Hendricks’ sketchbook, slightly charred but otherwise unscathed. He guessed it had been blown off the fire by the force of the small explosion. The card cover was gone, along with the early pages. Its front page was now a sketch of Darky Gardiner sitting in an opulent armchair covered in little fish, drinking coffee in a ruined street of a Syrian village, with some others standing around behind him, including Yabby Burrows with his hot boxes. Rabbit Hendricks must have sketched Yabby in after he was blown up, Dorrigo realised. The picture was all that was left of him.
Dorrigo Evans picked the sketchbook up and went to toss it back into the fire, but at the last moment changed his mind.
14
MEN AND MORE men began to overtake Darky Gardiner, shapeless empty sticks, their mouths grim set or gaping and their eyes like dry mud, moving no longer fluidly but fitfully jerking and jolting, and he fell further and further back in the column. All was gone from him. And what remained, he knew, what was strong and burning in his head and flesh, was sickness. His ulcerated legs only had to brush against leaves for a rush of agony to part his body in strange oscillations of pure pain.
Still, Darky Gardiner counted himself lucky: he had his boots, he told himself, and if one was temporarily soleless, tonight he would somehow fix it. No doubt about it, Darky Gardiner thought, even when they were buggered it was a good thing to have boots. And bolstered by this thought of good fortune at such a bleak moment, he dragged the coil of thick hemp rope back across his collarbone to stop it falling off, shrugged to better position it against his neck, and kept going.
And though he kept falling ever further behind, he still managed to make his way deeper into the jungle. His day he understood as a series of insurmountable battles that he would nevertheless surmount. To get to the Line, and at the Line to work till lunch, then after lunch—and so on. And each battle now reduced to the next impossible step that he would make happen.
He fell into a thicket of thorny bamboo, gashing his hand as he put it out to stop the fall. When he got back to his feet, he no longer had the agility and strength to poise on one rock and leap to the next, to take the long step up and over. Everything began to go wrong. He stumbled repeatedly. He swayed and lost what reserves of energy he had left trying to keep his balance. He fell again and again. And each time it was harder to get back to his feet.
When he next looked up as he lurched forward into the green bleakness he realised he was alone. The men out front had disappeared over a rise, and whoever was behind him was a very long way behind. The hemp hawser soaked up more rain and grew heavier on his shoulder. It kept losing its furl, spooling out into uneven bands of rope that snagged in roots, causing him to stumble. Each time he halted, refurled the rope and rebalanced the coil on his shoulder, the heavier and more awkward it became.
He stumbled on. He felt terribly weak and his head felt sloppy and unbalanced. The rope snagged again, he tripped, fell face-first into the mud, slowly turned onto his side and lay there. He told himself he needed to rest for a minute or two, then he would be fine. Almost immediately he passed out.
When he awoke he was in a dark jungle with a mess of rope beside him. He staggered to his feet, put a finger to a nostril, snorted snot and mud out of his nose, and shook his groggy head. Taking a stuttery step forward, he fell against a rock outcrop and dislodged some crumbling limestone from an overhang, which hit him on the shoulder.