Turning Back the Sun(14)

But as he examined it, there arose a deep, reverberant Oyohoyoh! It was so muffled that at first he imagined it came from somewhere above him or even from the rock.

Oyohoyoh!

Then Rayner saw them, a pair of savages—an old man and a girl—watching him from the gum trees. He could not tell if the shout had been welcome or warning. They did not move. They seemed as uncertain as he was.

He raised his hand in greeting, and the old man lifted both his in reply. Rayner had not noticed the conical hut sheltered against one cliff. The pair watched him coming. He had not bargained for this. Mentally he had dissociated the holy place (if that is what it was) from the people who had worshipped here, as if he were visiting somewhere long dead, a property of the wilderness. But now the townsman”s fear surfaced in him: a tingle of revulsion and alarm. In the half-minute that he took to reach the natives, the axed-in heads came floating against his shins again.

As Rayner reached him, he saw an old man of barbarian majesty. He wore a shabby pair of trousers rolled up at the ankles, and was clasping a flimsy stick. He looked huge. His flaccid shoulders and torso, dusted in grey hair, sloped without interruption into passive arms and stomach, before slipping away toward the delicate feet and hands of all his people. And his face was extraordinary. It nested in a tumult of hair and beard, as if he were staring from grey flames. Under their overhung brows the eyes were nearly invisible—Rayner couldn”t even see their whites—but his skin glittered an igneous blue-black, as though its pigment had turned mineral.

The girl stood behind him in a torn white dress and a necklace of seeds. She looked about eighteen. The extremities of her hair had been twisted to ginger rats” tails.

Rayner said, “I hope it”s right my coming here.” He did not even know if they spoke his language. “I thought it was empty.”

“Is empty,” the man said gruffly. “You go where you like, but go careful. Is blackfeiler place, but okay you look.”

He turned and said something to the girl. She ran forward and held out a wooden mixing dish filled with yams. He took one, and she darted back. She might have been the old man”s wife or granddaughter, it was impossible to tell. Only her bird-like movements expressed her. Her face looked blank, except for the savage”s expression of distant puzzlement.

Rayner said, “Are you living here alone? Are you the guardian?”

“We just living with our living,” the man said. “But this like whitefeller say, retirement job. This old feller”s job.” He gazed at Rayner as if at a landscape, impassively, through his overcast eyes. “But sometimes we go into town too, buy trousers, buy shoes, buy the other things.”

Rayner”s unease had gradually merged into curiosity. Because these people were not of the town, he found an obscure release in them. Even the shabbiness of the savages was interesting, because it was not the town”s shabbiness. “You speak our language.”

“I got the stock farmers” language, you know, worked for three, four years, fencing and yarding. Big farm downriver. Bloke by the name Ellis. You know Ellis? But I like to keep one place now. I can”t throw the bullocks no more.” He swept out one arm in an arc. “Living is all right till a feller gets old. So I stay here now and look after the places.”

“What places?” Rayner asked. “Painted places?”

“Ancestors,” the man said. “I can show you ancestors. There not many to see, eh, but I show you. Some of them gone now, is gone by rain and wind, and some. But most is staying, not too much.”

He lumbered over to the scarp that Rayner had just left, moving with a leaden, broken gait which suddenly reduced him. Then he stood in front of the rock face. “You see them?”

But Rayner saw nothing. Over the surface spread a web of hairline fissures, and the confusion of colors between them looked like blemishes of the living rock. The old man struck his hip. “You come stand here. Look now. Is different shadow, eh?” Rayner went and stood by him. The man pointed with his stick. “See there … there?”

Rayner looked again. And before his eyes, the figures awakened out of the stone. The whole surface lit up into new patterns: hunters, warriors, women, herders…. He was astonished that he had not discerned them before.

“Now you see.”

The figures were elongated and graceful. They floated in random patterns across the rock. Where its face had flaked away, they left amputated legs or heads. Rayner could make out a hunting party pursuing the miniature gazelles of the wilderness; a line of men on the march; a circle of women who seemed to be talking or preparing food; and higher up, where the pigment had oxidized and half gone, a phantom battle raged.

He asked in amazement, “How did they get these colors?” Some of the tones looked unfaded: white, yellow and blood red.

The man said: “They opened stones.”

The artists, Rayner guessed, had used pigments of charcoal and pipe clay and the ochreous local ironstone. The images were all in silhouette: incarnate shape and movement. They appeared less like people than ideas of people. Even when fighting, they seemed to be engaged in an aerial ballet.

He asked, “What kind of men painted these?”

The old savage thought a while before answering. “Priests.”

Rayner had no idea what the paintings were trying to do. They portrayed everyday life—but as if it were paradise. He could not resist the idea that they contained some secret, something known also to the savages sitting motionless on the town steps, gazing into an inner distance. But knowing how compulsively he laid his own ideas on neutral things, he asked, “Are these life without the white man?”