Wings Above the Diamantina Page 12

  The Sand Cloud

  ON THE MORNING of the day that Bony and his two assistants set out for Emu Lake, there landed at Golden Dawn a fast service plane which brought a Mr Cartwright, of the New Era Fire Insurance Company. The machine was piloted by Captain Loveacre.

  While the pilot was supervising the re-fuelling of his ship from forty-gallon petrol drums stocked by the storekeeper, Cartwright sauntered to the police-station, where he met Sergeant Cox emerging from his office. The sergeant shrewdly noted the details of Cartwright’s appearance: his age, which was about fifty; his large and flaccid face, with its bulbous nose; and the immaculate suit of grey flannel matched by a panama hat.

  The stranger announced his name before proceeding to inform the controller of the Golden Dawn police district that he had been requested by the Air Accidents Investigation Committee to examine the aeroplane wreckage at Emu Lake in order to test certain theories formulated by the Committee.

  Mr Cartwright did not add to this statement that he was a truly remarkable man. His disposition was too reserved to permit him to say that of one hundred fires he could accurately determine how ninety-nine had started, and that by examining the burned stock of, say, a drapery business, he could correctly estimate to within a pound or two the value of that stock before fire ruined it. It was rather foolish of a fire victim to swear that the value of his stock had been five thousand pounds when its actual value was only four thousand five hundred. It was foolish, too, to swear that he did not know how the fire had started, no matter how cunningly he might have short-circuited the electric lighting system, or rolled a piece of phosphorus within a bolt of curtain netting. On the other hand, if the fire victim was honest he received every pound of his insurance.

  “From what I have been told, Sergeant,” Mr Cartwright said, in his soft voice, “the aeroplane fire at this Emu Lake presents many interesting points. I understand that a young woman was found in the passenger seat, and that she is suffering from a kind of general paralysis. Is she any better?”

  “Not the slightest,” Cox replied. “What do the members of the A.A.I.C. think about that burning?”

  “They are a little mystified about it. That is why they asked my firm to lend them my services. I am advised to get in touch with the officer in charge of the matter, Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Do you know where I can find him?”

  “Yes. He went out to a place called Faraway Bore last night. I understand that to-day he intends examining Emu Lake for tracks, although two good trackers have already searched around the lake for tracks of any person who could have deliberately set fire to the machine. The inspector thinks that some person did destroy the aeroplane, and that in consequence he must have left tracks. He is anxious to clear up that point.”

  “Ah!” said Cartwright, stroking his chin. “A somewhat unusual name, Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  Cox nodded unsmilingly. Then he said impressively:

  “It belongs to an astonishing man. In his way, the inspector is just as great a genius in the investigation of bush crimes as the Emperor was in directing battles. Are you going to Emu Lake to-day?”

  “Yes—when the machine is re-fuelled and we have lunched at the hotel.”

  Having chatted for a few minutes with the sergeant, Cartwright left the police-station. Within the hotel bar he found Captain Loveacre drinking beer, and called for a second “pot.”

  “Beer makes good men better,” remarked the captain.

  “Good beer,” stipulated Cartwright.

  “I meant good beer. Bad beer makes criminals of saints.”

  “Saints do not drink beer,” Cartwright pointed out. Then to the landlord, he added: “As we are now better men, kindly refill the glasses.”

  Two men entered the bar, one of them to say with a faint trace of interest:

  “Thought it was you, Loveacre!”

  “Hullo, Dr Knowles! Cheerio, Mr Kane!” greeted the airman. “Our lunch is waiting, but we can just manage to sink another one. Meet Mr Cartwright, of the New Era Insurance, now on the business of that little red mono of mine.”

  The fire assessor shook hands. The doctor he summed up as a man who had been forced out to this cock-eyed place through over-indulgence in drink, but Kane puzzled and consequently interested him. Noting the details of his appearance, Cartwright saw a slight man of medium height, dressed in grey gabardine slacks, a coat that did not match, and an old felt hat. His teeth were large, and his brown eyes remained widely open in a stare of eternal surprise. The left corner of his mouth twitched, and the fire assessor observed that this twitch occurred regularly every ten seconds. In health he appeared to be robust, but, nevertheless, he was obviously a neurotic.

  “The destruction of the captain’s bus presents something of a mystery, does it not?” Kane put to Cartwright in a modulated and rather pleasant voice.

  “It won’t be a mystery after I have messed about the wreckage for an hour,” the assessor boasted quietly.

  “Seems probable that some bird deliberately set fire to it,” remarked the doctor. “Anyway, Bony thinks so.”

  “Bony? Who’s Bony?—Oh, you refer to that detective. Why does he think that?” inquired the squatter from Tintanoo.

  “Couldn’t say, I’m sure,” said Knowles, with a surprising flash of impatience.

  “What I am hoping is that he discovers the chap who did it,” Loveacre contributed. “I’ll bet a quid it didn’t catch fire by itself. When I know who did it I am going to barge right into him. I always feel deep sympathy for the bloke who successfully robs a bank—or an insurance company, for that matter, Mr Cartwright—but I have none for the petty gent who snatches handbags and sets fire to a poor airman’s skyjerker. Come on, Mr Cartwright! We must get lunch if we are to go out to the wreck to-day...”

  He led the way to the hotel dining-room, followed by the insurance assessor. John Kane and the doctor remained in the bar. Cartwright noticed that the airman walked with something of the strut of a bird, while his face, too, was birdlike in its sharpness. Perhaps it was Loveacre’s dark eyes, so brilliant and steady, that suggested the resemblance.

  Kane and the doctor saw them off after lunch, the latter obligingly removing the chocks from the wheels when the two engines were ready to break into full-throated song. Knowles was all birdman while he watched the grey biplane slide skywards.

  Captain Loveacre pushed his machine up to five thousand feet, at which height the assessor could observe that Golden Dawn lay almost in the centre of a roughly-circular gibber plain looking much like a worn patch on a dark green carpet. The St Albans road was an almost indistinguishable thread crossing the plain, but when it entered the scrub country it lay like a reddish-brown snake asleep on the same dark-green carpet. The fork presented by the junction of the Coolibah track was clearly discernible, and, through the telephone, the captain drew Cartwright’s attention to it.

  From then on Loveacre followed neither track, and presently, to the south, they could see the red roofs of Coolibah homestead. The empty river appeared like a skein of multicoloured wool, the channels winding in and out of the strands of green-topped coolibah trees. Here the river was twelve miles in width, presenting a twelve-mile deathtrap for airmen forced to land among its dry channels and whalebacked channel banks.

  “We’d be on the rocks down there, all right,” asserted Loveacre.

  Westward of the river he put the ship down to two thousand feet, where he found, as expected, the west wind much less strong. On the green carpet to the south, Cartwright saw the sun-reflecting fans of a windmill. Then the long strip of reddish sand-dunes Elizabeth Nettlefold had named the Rockies attracted his attention. Far to the north, on the bordering grey plain from a dark blob of colour a grey column of dense dust rose upward, and began to slant to the northeast when apparently at their altitude. The captain, on seeing the dust column raised by a mob of mustered cattle on Tintanoo, put down his bus lower still and, at fifteen hundred feet, found the air comparatively quiet.
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br />   Here and there, like solitary red hairs sprouting from a blackfellow’s bald head, the willy-willies conducted their drunken march. Several times the pilot had to deviate from his course to pass one. He had no mind to have his ship spun round like a top, and probably seriously damaged by an upwhirling vortex of hot air and sand.

  It was a strange world to the fire insurance assessor, but even to him after a little while the landscape became boring. Westward of the grey plain were splashes of brown on a dun-coloured background—sand-dunes among scrub, and broken country on which no aeroplane could land without being destroyed.

  Far ahead, right on the western edge of the world, appeared a diamond-shaped object dully reflecting the sunlight. This, the fire assessor was informed, was Faraway Hut, which was temporarily Bony’s headquarters. When over it they would be able to pick out Emu Lake.

  With renewed interest, Cartwright studied the distant hut, and wondered what caused the short splash of light in its vicinity. Later he discovered that it was the water gushing from Faraway Bore.

  Beyond the hut evidently stretched another and far more extensive area of sand, for the horizon lay red beneath the sun.

  It was, of course, an optical illusion which made that sand country move up and down as though the earth pulsated. It seemed to reach higher at the apex of every pulsation. The ship, too, was rising now at a steep angle, and with increasing rapidity the distant sand country increased in area and in depth.

  “Sandstorm coming!” Loveacre shouted into his telephone. “I can’t put the ship down here without wrecking her.” And then a minute or so later, when the air was stinging their faces and the altimeter registered nine thousand feet, he said: “Blow me if I understand it! It looks like a low-lying red fog, doesn’t it? The air above it is clear enough. Ah, I’ve got it! It’s a sand cloud. I’ve heard about ’em, but I’ve never seen one before.”

  A sandstorm without wind! Far westward, possibly near the eastern border of Western Australia, a storm of wind had raised sun-heated sand particles for many miles above the earth. And then in its freakishness, nature suddenly allowed the wind to drop from fifty to five miles per hour, and the heated sand particles had slowly fallen earthward to be cushioned by the earth-stored heat of the sun in so dense a mass as to appear, as Captain Loveacre said, like a fog.

  Since the airman could not land on the broken country around Faraway Bore, the eternal gush of which had attracted the assessor’s attention, the only obvious alternative was to turn back and land on the temporary ’drome north of Coolibah homestead. From other pilots he had heard of these rare sand clouds. He knew that in width they did not extend for more than a few miles. This was moving so slowly that if at great height he could not see its rearward edge, he could out-distance it and land at Coolibah with plenty of time in hand. He recalled the observation made by a pilot who had encountered a sand cloud: “Ride over it if you can. You can’t fly through it, it’s too thick. If you park under it you will have serious trouble with the carburettor and feed system for days afterwards, because no wrapping up of your engine will keep out the sand.”

  Down again at two thousand feet, the sand cloud now presented an inspiring sight. It had the face of a moving cliff four thousand feet high. The sunlight slanting sharply upon it brought into sharp relief bulging escarpments and inward sucking caverns. It was as though this enormous thing was living, that, as it advanced across the world, it was actually breathing. Cartwright saw that it was moving with dreadful inevitability towards the toy hut and the sparkling water gush at the head of a thin crystal channel. He could see a man the size of a pin’s head walking near the hut, which he entered two seconds before it and the bore were blotted from sight. The place vanished, tramped on by this sand monster.

  The full-throated roar of the aeroplane’s engines deepened when the ship climbed to escape the living cliff of sand, while the cliff itself sank down as though pressed to earth by giant hands. Then it moved eastward beneath them, and there burst on their astonished gaze a great field of level sand limned by the sun in soft brown colours, in places stretched taut, in others rumpled like a badly laid carpet.

  Loveacre went up to sixteen thousand feet before he flattened out. The cold air struck their faces with one continuous blow, and Cartwright’s breath came in short gasps. During their up-rush the eastern edge of the world apparently defied the sand cloud, but now once again it was dwindling. Both to the north and to the south the red paving flowed beyond the horizon, but to the west lay the dark line of the real horizon beyond the rear edge of the cloud.

  Knowing now that the sand cloud was but some sixty miles wide, Captain Loveacre decided to go down to warmer conditions. His engines were behaving well, and there was no danger of them both failing and thus forcing a disastrous landing in the bowels of that mass of floating sand.

  “What do you think of it?” he asked the assessor.

  “Terrific!” gasped Cartwright, when his breathing became less difficult. “What a sight! Why, it looks like solid ground!”

  “Quicker than a quicksand, though. I pity all poor folk whom it will temporarily bury. That feller down there in the hut will be having a rough time of it, and so will that detective near Emu Lake. He will find no tracks, not even the tracks of an army tank—after this little lot has passed by.”

  The real world gradually emerged from the west, but it was not so dark in colour as it had been. It lay, a quicklywidening strip from the curved horizon, like a dead world painted one uniform colour by the brush of time. While the machine flew but a few hundred feet above the sand cloud in the seemingly still and utterly clear air, the two men could presently see the long, pointed writhing streamers of sand which formed the rear edge.

  Then these streamers of light-red mist passed beneath them, and the earth below appeared without detail. The treetops were brown, all the small flats were brown—a brown tinged with red. The fliers saw at the same moment three tiny figures grouped below them, and Loveacre, having seen Emu Lake, brought his machine still lower.

  Cartwright was glad of the increased warmth. He was about to say so when they began to skim the surface of the lake, shortly to stop beside the wreckage of the red monoplane.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Bony’s Cramp

  FOR BONY and his companions, sound continued, but sight did not. The storm had approached with a low humming, reminding the detective of a child’s top at a distance. For a few moments the vast wall of sand towered above menacingly, threatening to bury them by toppling forward. Then its dark base swept upon them with a gentle hiss, and at once daylight vanished.

  To cry out was impossible, for to open the mouth meant to draw into the lungs the choking sand particles. Even to talk was out of the question. After a period of staggering about in search of escape, Bony lay full length on the ground, and by pressing his mouth against his outstretched arms filtered the air a little.

  Day was turned into blackest night. All about him, Bony heard a faint, persistent hissing sound, as though of escaping steam. It was caused by the incessant rain of sand particles falling like hard snowflakes.

  Softly at first and then gradually submerging the faint hissing, there came to Bony’s ears the low hum of motor engines, a humming which rose and fell rhythmically. Surely no one possibly could drive a car through this sand cloud! Ah—it was no car! It was an aeroplane. There could be no doubt about it. An aeroplane aloft in this sand cloud! It seemed almost impossible. Poor devils—lost, without doubt! It was only a matter of time when the sand would choke the engines, and then there must be a fatal crash.

  For long minutes he lay still, breathing carefully through his nostrils. When he did move his head he felt the electric trickle of sand slide off his neck. It was his first expedience of such a storm, but he had heard of this extremely rare phenomenon, and, provided he was not suffocated to death, the unpleasantness would be a small price to pay for the extraordinary nature of the experience.

  Bony was still triumphant
over the discovery of the fibres of wool. He now had definite proof that some person, wishing to prevent his passage through the bush being discovered, had used sheep’s wool on his feet in place of feathers. Probably the person had worn slip-over boots of sheepskin with the wool on the outside. Bony himself had adopted this method more than once. The trouble taken to baffle possible trackers most certainly pointed to a deliberate act of incendiarism. Yes, this case was certainly yielding to his assault on it. Then there was that boss stockman. He certainly was a puzzle. A likeable enough fellow and evidently half in love with his employer’s daughter. And yet there was his apparent failing for alcohol. There was something behind that trip to Gurner’s Hotel for a bottle of whisky and Bony’s old friend, intuition, warned him that all was not right in that quarter. Why had Ted Sharp deliberately told him a lie about having gone to Mitchell’s Well? Why, when he could have admitted having gone to the hotel for whisky and then asked the detective not to divulge the fact to his employer? He must have known that his confidence would have been respected.

  There was no necessity to tell a lie about so unimportant a point, and further to cover the lie by telephoning to Ned Hamlin to endorse it. It was a thread that would have to be followed to the end....

  The aeroplane up aloft seemed to be constantly circling as though desperately searching for a landing ground. Time went on, and yet after all it was not long before the darkness lightened, despite his tightly-closed eyes. When he did open them and raised his head, Bony saw the world bathed in blood: it was like looking on it through crimson-coloured glasses. The sun was blood-red and of gigantic size. Its light was crimson. Above, the long streamers of sand were deep red against the lighter red of the clear sky westward of them. When the two blacks stood up they looked as though they had waded through a river of blood. The trees were drenched with blood.

  The hum of the aeroplane engines became a thunderous roar, and, looking upward, Bony saw the machine, a large twin-engined biplane. It came sliding from above the sand streamers into the clear sky, a thing of superb grace and power.