The following morning Rooke stepped outside into the pearly dawn and saw two figures silhouetted against the sky: unmistakably natives, looking down towards his hut.
Since his encounter with the fishermen all those months ago, he had regretted his cheerful Good afternoon! and the silly social smile. He had planned another way to speak the language of welcome and now he tried it. He looked up at the men, a long gaze that said I have seen you. Then he sat against the wall of the hut, neither facing them nor turning his back. And waited.
He was impatient for them to approach. The urge to keep glancing towards them was hard to resist. Watching the clouds in the east lit up by the sun that was about to appear, he occupied his mind with speculating on what the top of the cloud might look like. Would it be rounded, as it appeared, or was that an effect of looking at it from below? After a time it was no longer a pretence: he truly forgot the men.
Then he became aware that they had come down the slope and were standing a short distance away. They still did not look at him, but nor did they stalk past. Moving his eyes but not his head, Rooke saw that one was Warungin.
Their eyes met, and the contact seemed to act as a signal. Warungin came forward and sat down near Rooke. With him, you might almost say.
Warungin put a hand out and said something. Said it again. Looked at Rooke as if waiting for him to say it. It seemed to start with a b, but there was a sort of thickening to the sound. Rooke made a stab at repeating the blur of syllables, but could not get his tongue around them.
Warungin said the word again. He was not making idle chat. He was doing a job of work, teaching a word to a man who could not hear it. Rooke tried again, copying the sounds like a snatch of melody.
‘Boourral,’ he heard himself say, a formless bubble of language such as an infant might make. Warungin said the word again, and Rooke tried once more.
‘Bere-wal.’
Warungin nodded curtly, as if thinking, as near as he is going to get.
Then he began in dumb show to put a pocket telescope up to his eye and peer through it. He must have used one, Rooke supposed. Perhaps during his captivity, along with the chairs and plates and glasses of wine the governor had offered him. One hand held the telescope, the other eased the tube in and out to focus, one eye looked steadily through the imaginary glass, the other was squeezed tight. He gestured—telescope, distant objects coming up close—and repeated the word.
Rooke put an invisible telescope up to his own eye, moved the tube in and out.
‘Berewal.’
Warungin gestured impatiently with curved fingers, bringing the distance closer.
Not the object, but what the object did! Berewal was not telescope, but something like a great distance off.
‘Berewal,’ Rooke said again, and copied Warungin’s gesture of scooping the distance towards him, eager to show that he was not so stupid, after all.
But Warungin was not interested in what an apt pupil Rooke was, did not smile or nod in praise. He pointed across the port to where the trees of the northern shore were catching the early golden light.
‘Cammera-gal,’ he said, slowly enough that Rooke could hear the separate parts. Then he laid a hand on his chest, over the lines of scars. ‘Cadi-gal,’ he said. ‘Cadi-gal.’
That suffix Rooke remembered from Silk’s list of words. Gal: tribe, or perhaps place. Warungin must be saying, I am of the tribe or place called Cadi.
Warungin leaned forward and put a hand on Rooke’s chest, on the front of the red jacket.
‘Berewal-gal,’ he said.
He left his hand there, as if understanding could flow out of it, pass through the red wool, and into the heart of the man beneath. Rooke could feel it, the slight pressure of his hand against him. The first touch between two such separate beings. He almost expected a flash, as when lightning leapt between air and earth.
And with Warungin’s hand on his red wool chest, Rooke understood. Berewal, a great distance off. Gal, tribe. Warungin was teaching him the name of his own people: Berewal-gal, the great-distance-off tribe.
He was pleased to have been named: it was a gift. But it was shocking, too. None of the mysterious belongings or impressive skills of the white men—the ships, the muskets that could split a shield, the telescopes, the gold braid—gave them any special standing. They were just one more tribe. Berewalgal, the great-distance-off people.
He hungered for more. How did you say, Good morning, good afternoon, please, thank you, goodbye? How did you say Will you teach me your language?
But once Warungin saw that he had been understood, he got up and turned his back, facing the ridge. He gave no sign, made no sound. But a group of natives filed into view and down the rocks: another two men, three women, three children.
They stopped in front of Rooke’s hut and ignored him. He felt as if he were as unremarkable to them as any other part of the place: hut, rock, trees, man standing with his hands clasped in front of his privates like the reverend at prayer. He supposed these people did not expect much of a man who had to be taught even the name of his own tribe.
They were watching Warungin, who was delivering himself of a short speech. He pointed with his chin towards the hut, at Rooke, down to the settlement. He paid out his flow of words like a rope with knots in it: a piece, then a pause and another piece. Rooke felt his ears bulge out of his head with listening. Not just the words were opaque, even the cadence was unlike any language he had heard. Every phrase began emphatically and faded away. Trying to hear its form was like trying to take hold of running water.
Then all the men joined the one who had arrived with Warungin, sitting or squatting with their spears beside them. Rooke took a step in their direction. Should he join them? But one of the women, lean and wrinkled, her long dugs flaccid, her thighs fleshless, was walking towards the doorway of his hut. He made exaggerated ushering gestures. Come in, welcome, I am pleased to see you! He was glad there was no one there to watch him. The woman did not respond to the pantomime. Her dignity made his eagerness seem false.
She went into the hut and glanced around as if it were not so very interesting. When she called back over her shoulder to the other women, a few curt syllables, they crowded inside. They inspected his domestic arrangements, murmuring to each other. One of them picked up a corner of the grey blanket over the bed and held it to her cheek, exclaiming, he thought, at the scratchy texture. They ran their long-fingered hands over the gleaming wood of the table, touched at the brass hinges where the legs folded. One lifted the cover of Montaigne and turned the pages.
He wondered if they were saying: Look, he has bark here in a little square.
Would they have the idea of square? Would some wild Euclid among them have pondered the marvels of the triangle?
Even in that tight space they had a remarkable way of not meeting his eye. They moved around him and he guessed that they were not speaking loudly because he was there. And yet he was not there.
The children had been hiding themselves behind the legs of the women, peeping around at Rooke and retreating if he looked at them. Now he caught the eye of a little boy, a sturdy fellow of five or six, who ducked back behind his mother’s leg but then looked out again. Rooke smiled and even tried a wink, and by degrees the boy grew brave enough to dart out and touch one of the brass buttons on Rooke’s jacket, dabbing at it as if it might be hot. Discovering that the button did not bite, he lost his shyness entirely, dancing around Rooke, plucking at his sleeve, pulling at his buttons and by the look of it shouting something to the effect of, What are these? What are they for? Where did you get them? Can I have one?
The women became bolder, holding things up to show each other as if exclaiming over goods at a market. They spoke to him, finding it hilarious to say the few words they must have already learned from the people in the settlement: ‘Goodbye! Goodbye! How do you do! Mister! Missus!’
‘Good morning, good morning,’ Rooke replied, making them laugh even more. ‘I do very well, thank you, and you?’
His shaving things lay on the table and one of the women—tall, full-figured, so magnificent in her nakedness that Rooke was a little shy—picked up his razor and bent it open. He sprang across the hut to snatch it away from her and all the amusement stopped on the instant. He tried to show them how sharp it was, cut a twig from beside the fire with the blade and kept up a stream of words—sharp, you see, very sharp, it will cut anything, I use it to shave, see here?—out of some instinct that speech was less frightening than silence.
The hut, ill lit at the best of times with its single window, grew dark. Rooke saw that clouds had gathered low and black, and it began to rain, fat drops hitting the shingles hard enough to make them rattle. A smell of cold mud rose up from the ground.
He went to the doorway and looked out. The rain hurled itself down against the rocks so violently it created a sort of spume. Under its force the bushes lashed about and the water of the harbour was almost invisible, the rain as thick as fog. He caught a few drops on his palm, held it out to his visitors.
‘What is this, how do you say wet?’
The two young girls had hung back up till now, but one came forward and touched at his palm with the point of an index finger. Rooke looked into her face. She was perhaps ten or twelve years old, skinny and quick, with a long graceful neck and an expressive mobile face. He thought he saw in her the same impulses he was feeling himself: excitement tempered by wariness, the desire to explore held in check by the fear of making a wrong move.
She looked straight into his eyes and her mouth made a wry pout, equal parts frustration and amusement. He felt his own lips form an answering shape and saw her watching him—his eyes, his mouth, the look on his face—reading him in just the same way he was trying to read her.
She was like Anne had been at ten or twelve, was his instant thought. Dark skinned, naked, she was nothing like Anne, yet he recognised his sister in her: old enough to want to look into another’s eyes, one human to another, and still young enough to be fearless.
She touched his palm again, this time with all her fingertips, stroking his skin as if to test its texture. Over the roar of the rain she said something. Like a deaf man, he watched her lips moving around the stream of words. Then she stopped and waited, her teeth resting on her lower lip in a way that said, more clearly than words, Well? What do you make of that?
He strained to separate some of the sounds, snatching at two that had surfaced clearly enough to be repeated.
‘Mar-ray,’ he tried.
She smiled, her entire face involved in the act. He had thought her eyes black, but now he saw they were the deepest brown. To look so freely into the eyes of another felt as dangerous as leaping from a height. He was amazed at such recklessness in himself.
‘Marray,’ she said again, pointing with her chin towards the rain. He noticed that Warungin and the men had gone, sheltering somewhere he supposed, and felt a host’s pang that he had not called them in when the rain began.
Marray. What did it mean? Wet, something like that?
So close to her, with the water cascading over the shingles above the door and pouring onto the ground, it seemed awkward to say nothing.
‘What a downpour,’ he said, raising his voice against the din. ‘Have you ever seen such weather?’
He listened ruefully to the drawing room sound of that. It was the sort of small talk he could seldom manage when it was appropriate, yet here he was, doing it as deftly as Silk might have, for an audience of six naked women and children with whom he shared, so far, one word.
Forthright, fearless, sure of herself, she looked to him like a girl who had already mastered whatever social skills her world might demand.
‘Paye-wallan-ill-la-be.’
He could hear the way she was speaking slowly, making it easy for him. He tried to turn the sounds into syllables but could only get as far as the first few. She repeated each one and he said them after her. It was like being taken by the hand and helped step by step in the dark.
‘Paye-wallan-ill-la-be.’
Even when he had it, it was not a perfect copy. There was something smothered or woolly, a slurring or legato quality to the word that he could not imitate. He could hear it, but his mouth did not know how to make it.
Still, everyone smiled and nodded at him and cried words that he assumed were along the lines of, Well done! Congratulations!
So that was the word, or perhaps words. But what did it, or they, mean? Something to do with the rain, but what, exactly? What a downpour! Have you ever seen such weather?
The rain eased and stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The little boy pushed past Rooke’s legs and ran out. Two of the women followed more slowly. Rooke and the girl watched them splashing up the track, now a streaming torrent that gleamed in the rays of sun already emerging from the clouds.
‘Yen-narr-a-be,’ the girl said. ‘Yennarrabe.’
‘Yennarrabe,’ he repeated.
Her mouth twisted, perhaps in amusement at the way it sounded. They said it to each other a few times. For the moment it was enough to pass the echo backwards and forwards. Even without knowing their meaning, the fact of exchanging words was a kind of message: I wish to speak with you.
The girl’s face was so expressive, the sense of her personality so vivid, that Rooke’s instinct was to take a step back and look away. But he did not. The old woman had made herself at home, puffing at the coals to bring the fire back to life, taking the twigs that the other young girl was handing her from Rooke’s wood basket. With a reckless sense of taking a leap, Rooke laid the palm of his hand on his chest, where Warungin had laid his.
‘Rooke,’ he said. ‘Daniel Rooke.’
She caught on straight away and made a good approximation of his name. Then she put her hand flat on her own bony chest. Uttered a few syllables he could not properly catch.
‘Ta-ra,’ he tried.
Over at the fire the other girl laughed behind her hand and he heard her mimic his effort.
He rolled his eyes, grimaced. Yes, what an idiot I am, but harmless.
He tried again and the girl went slowly until the shapeless sound resolved itself into syllables: Ta-ga-ran.
The word he was making was still not quite the same as the one she had said. But he saw her face open with the pleasure of hearing her name in his foreign mouth, and at having been the one to teach him.
Her name and those two other utterances were in his mind now, but, as sounds not connected to anything, they would soon lose their shape in his memory. They were not Wind or Weather or Barometer, but like those, these words were part of the climate of the place, data that ought to be recorded.
He got down an unused notebook from the shelf, felt the girl watching as he sat at the table, dipped the pen in the ink and opened the book. On the first page, in his neatest astronomer’s hand, he wrote: Tagaran, the name of a girl. Marray, wet. Paye wallan ill la be—he hesitated—concerning heavy rain.
He read the words back to her, his finger under each syllable, stumbling through. She smiled, her face transformed, every part of it involved in the great beam of delight.
The old woman was calling out something. It might have been, Come, children, time to go, time to go, because she and the two girls left soon after. At the foot of the rocks, Tagaran turned.
‘Yenioo! Yenioo!’ she called, and he called back.
‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ What else could she have meant?
‘Come again,’ he called. ‘Come again soon, you are always welcome!’
But they were gone. He was farewelling the bushes tossing in the breeze.
Small though it was, the hut seemed larger and emptier when they had gone. There was Montaigne on the bed where the women had turned its pages. There was the blanket, crumpled from where the majestic one had held it up to her cheek.
In the silence, the dripping of water from the roof was very loud.
‘Marray, wet,’ he said aloud. ‘Paye wallan ill la be, concerning heavy rain.’
He drew a neat line across the page underneath the words. It said, This is all I know. Below, the space of white paper waited. He thought of Silk’s similar notebook, his similar, though more extensive, list of words. Budyeri, good. Bogul, a mouse.
But language was more than a list of words, more than a collection of fragments all jumbled together like a box of nuts and bolts. Language was a machine. To make it work, each part had to be understood in relation to all the other parts.
That required someone who could do more than collect words and learn them by rote. It required someone who could dismantle the machine, see how it worked, and put it to use: a man of system, a man of science.
Looking at the words he had written, he knew—in the way he knew a prime when he saw it—that he was that man.
And everything in his life had been leading here. He saw it as clearly as a map, the map of his life and his character. He had been born with the urge to understand how things worked. He could read in five languages. The unknown was his daily bread: astronomy was a profession of mysteries. Difference held no fear for him. He knew that strangeness was commonplace when you inhabited it.
Above all, his temperament suited him to the task. Those qualities that made him such a diffident social being were the very ones that equipped him perfectly for listening.
He knew, with as much certainty as he knew his own name, that this would be his proper work in New South Wales: to acquire the native language.
Having gone so far in his mind, he went further, and allowed himself to picture the day when he would brush his jacket and set off down to the governor’s house with the notebooks in his hand. Sir, he would say. Perhaps it should be Your Excellency. Silk said that the governor liked to be addressed with his title. Perhaps he should ask Silk to go with him as a sort of ambassador.
Sir, Lieutenant Rooke seems to have found the basis on which the native language is founded!
In fact there would be no seems about it, but a certain modesty was becoming to a mere second lieutenant. Once the governor was paying attention, Rooke would find his voice.
I am pleased to be able to tell you, sir, that I am now able to speak with the natives such that a fruitful intercourse may be commenced.
The governor would be astonished. It was hard to picture that face expressing excitement, admiration, awe, but how could he not be excited, admiring and full of awe? Rooke would be presenting him not only with the means for the governor to fulfil his own ambitions in New South Wales, but with something bigger. The governor would be the first to learn of an addition to the world’s sum of knowledge almost as dramatic as Galileo’s or Kepler’s. The earth moves around the sun. Gravity is a force that operates at a distance. The journey of discovery he had just embarked on was of that order of significance, a journey not simply into the language of a race of people hitherto unknown, but into the cosmos they inhabited: the ways they organised their society and the gods they worshipped, their thoughts and hopes, their fears and passions.
After such a leap of learning, the world would no longer be the same.
The first problem was not one of meaning but of music: how to convey in the familiar twenty-six letters those alien sounds. Thinking out the way to start was like stretching a muscle that had been unused too long.
He turned over the first page of the notebook. Those first entries had given him the beginning, but they were not the way he meant to continue. On the inviting field of the following page drew up four columns: Letter. Name. Sound. As in the English word.
He felt a thrill, a physical thing, anticipation like an appetite.
He was reminded of what he had not thought of for years, his old copy of Lily’s Grammar of the Latin Tongue: the worn maroon cover, watermarked as with dark clouds, the spine that was coming away from the binding—his father had got it cheap from a stall at Southsea—and the woodcut in the frontispiece of men picking fruit with grand studied gestures.
Recklessly he turned over page after page of the notebook, heading each with a letter of the alphabet as Lily had done: Native Tongue to English, then again for English to Native Tongue.
Now he took a second notebook and on its flyleaf he wrote: Grammatical Forms of the Language of N. S. Wales. Words were all very well, but with nothing more than words one was forever a child, piping out the names of things. Grammar was the gearing that made them useful.
To begin with, he would have to limit himself to actions that could be acted out: to eat, to go or walk, to drink, to yawn, to creep. Foreign they might be, but these people must walk and drink, eat and yawn and creep.
He had better start modestly, with the indicative mood. I eat. You eat. He, she or it eats. Nothing much could be communicated without a sense of past and future, so he had better try for that too: I will eat, you will eat. I have eaten, you have eaten. And of course he must gather the useful imperative: Eat!
On the left-hand side of the page he wrote the English. Beside each entry were the spaces that would be filled, word by systematic word, with the unknown tongue. He headed the page opposite the empty verb templates with a title he hoped might gather up some of what was missing: other inflexions of the same verb.
He laid the notebooks out side by side on the table. The Vocabulary, the Grammatical Forms. The books were like the jaws of some ingenious machine. Between them they would crack open the nut of this language.
It would be an extraordinary task. Even Kepler, even Newton, had not been presented with a tabula rasa but had built on other men’s work. Unlike them, he would be setting off to meet the unknown with only his ears, his pen and these little notebooks.
Rooke was aware of a tightness in his chest that was new to him. It took him some time to recognise that this was how it felt to be in the grip of a vision. Destiny was a grand word, but perhaps not too grand for what lay ahead.