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Aaron had been awake for hours before Lee stirred and reached for him. He moved some hair from her face and gently kissed her eyes. Abruptly she turned her head and sat up.
'What?' Aaron asked.
She eased herself back onto the pillow.
'What is it?'
'Nothing.'
Aaron turned an ear toward the window. The surf crashed and ran up the sand and he heard the fizz from the million foaming bubbles as they burst.
'It was nothing... thought I heard someone calling, that's all. If it was, they've gone now.'
Outside on the beach, about a hundred metres from their house, a man stood with his legs apart and arms upraised. He shouted at the gusting wind pushing at his face.
'There it is again,' Lee said bounding out of bed.
She began dressing; Aaron followed close behind.
'It's just someone on the beach,' he suggested.
'I know,' Lee said, looking directly at Aaron. '... but he sounds as if he's calling me.'
'Don't be ridiculous Lee.'
'I'm not...'
She was out the door ahead of Aaron and as he pulled his shirt over his head he noticed a bible on the small table near the window. Funny he didn't see it yesterday. It was a New King James version and was open. An Aboriginal decorated stone had been placed on it marking a particular page. Stumbling, looking back at the book, he followed after his wife who was already on the sand.
Once outside he could see there was someone there after all: an old Aboriginal man. Lee had almost reached the wretched looking fellow who by then was knee deep in water, bellowing at the wind, standing at the centre of a cluster of massive vertical stones that dwarfed him in the surf.
As she got closer she moved more slowly, with more caution; looking into his face, into his eyes. His eyes were wide, as if witnessing a horror. Instinctively, Lee wanted to shield him from the vision to alleviate his distress. The man was shouting again - louder it seemed to Lee - she had to say something, do something.
'There's nothing there... no one there!' she eventually cried out.
But the man appeared not to hear.
Aaron walked up to the old man and took him by the shoulder.
'Come on old man, it's okay... there's nothing to worry about,' he said, thinking him delirious, or worse, experiencing a delusional episode.
'Leave him alone,' Lee whispered and pushed Aaron away.
Aaron was so surprised by this that he back-pedalled a few paces and watched Lee take the man back to where he had been standing and stood beside him. Once again he raised his head and began shouting at the wind. Lee recognised the man's shouting as a rhythmic chant, that it followed a pattern. Finally, Aaron too realised the old man was performing a ceremony of some sort but still doubted the man's sanity as he watched his body twitching from tremors.
All the while the old man accorded the white people respect, while giving them only a cursory glance - his Wandjina duties were more important. His legs moved now in rhythm but his feet were firmly buried in the sand beneath the surf.
The Americans watched and listened for several minutes, captivated.
'Come on Lee we should leave the poor fellow alone.'
'There's nothing wrong with him.'
'How do you know that.'
'He's talking to the spirits.'
Aaron looked at his wife and slowly backed away as a flock of grey and white seagulls came down near the man to land on the water.
Lee stood two paces from the old man with her gaze fixed on him; the birds swam up to and around her as well. Did they think she would feed them? Was she just something new in the normal morning cycle? Or did she inherit some of the old man's lunacy or magic? Aaron could not decide. Since last month two things were certain, Lee had changed, and he was worried.
The old man's voice softened and his chant turned to song. His tune soon faded: single words on single notes trailed away to mix with surf sounds and the birdsong. Only then did he leave the water casting a curious glance at Lee, his face showing the concerns of his fifty years - to Aaron he looked seventy.
Lee smiled and bent to look into the man's eyes, his head was downcast.
'Do they still come here?' she asked.
The man nodded, yes, and kept walking.
'Can I walk with you?'
The man gestured his agreement with a wide sweep of an arm.
Aaron brushed the sand from his feet, watching from the steps of their house as Lee engaged the man. They walked slowly toward him.
'They came down here and there was a big fight... a big fight. Still fighting sometimes... but somewhere else now. I sing for them to stop,' the man spoke softly.
They walked side by side and breathed heavily; the steep grade to the house was made difficult by the loose, soft sand.
'I can't talk about it, it's too hard for me,' the old man said.
'Yes, of course. But you are permitted to tell me, aren't you? I'm really interested.'
'I know... I know. I knew you were coming,' the man said and stopped to look into her eyes.
Lee knew he was looking deeply inside her and felt vulnerable, as if she were standing naked before him. She turned away embarrassed.
'I saw you, I was with you on the road back there.' He gestured to the roadway. '... as well as in there last night.'
Lee saw Aaron disappearing through the door of their borrowed house and thought about their lovemaking in the greyness of the early day. She didn't doubt what the man said, she had read about the remote viewing phenomena in numerous European cultures - including the military experiments with it in her own country. But here among Aboriginal people it seemed to be a normal activity.
'I am tired now,' the man said.
Quickly he lengthened his stride and easily made it over the sandy rise to solid ground. Lee watched him disappearing into the dense undergrowth.
She disturbed Aaron as she burst into their small beachside house.
'Listen to this,' he said as she fell heavily into an old, beat-up sofa. He quoted from the bible he was holding in his hands:
"Seeing the Invisible
2 Corinthians 4: verse 18.
" while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal."
He lowered the book, looked at Lee but she said nothing. She wore a blank look, she had been transformed. Aaron was worried about her mental state. He had brought her here to absorb the culture of these people never thinking she would become so swept up in it, or that it might envelop her. For God's sake - she was American educated and she was white!
He looked once more at the passage he had just read: it had been marked by a red pen, left by someone who knew this morning's ritual would need an explanation to Christian visitors.
Eric Saunders pushed his head around the open frame surrounding the doorway of the borrowed house.
'Hello... anyone there?'
'Yes, we're here. Come in,' Lee answered, startled by the sudden intrusion.
'Good... glad I could catch you. Come up for breakfast with us... didn't know if you brought stuff with you or not, couldn't leave you here to starve could we?'
Saunders dressed according to church requirements above the waist; but below he wore khaki army surplus shorts clumsily rolled up to his thighs, he had Indian-style sandals on his feet and an ankle bracelet of thin leather and beads.
'We did bring some provisions with us,' Aaron said. 'But we'd love to join you.'
'Yes... we'd love to,' Lee reinforced Aaron's acceptance.
'Good-o then, we'll be ready for you in about fifteen minutes. Just up the road there and to the right, second house. The one with the blue roof, right on the beach we are. We'll get swept away first when the big wave does eventually come in from California. But the wife loves it here, you know.'
Lee thought this particularly ironic: when their home in California fell into the Pacific - being on the western side of the San Andrea's fault line - this whole Australian coastline would be swamped by the resulting tidal wave.
Aaron smiled politely and walked to the door as the minister turned to leave.
'Got to run,' Saunders said.
'See you soon then,' Aaron called after him.
Lee came to the door with her camera and brushed past Aaron, snapping the bizarre looking man as he walked away, bible in hand, while in the background the dense green bushes contrasted with black-skinned children who were at play nearby.
Breakfast with Eric and Myra Saunders was boring for the young Americans. Myra attended to the meal, deferred to her husband, smiled and said little. Steam trains of British rail were discussed by Eric at length and after breakfast he pointed out how the British sold their rail network systems to other countries, including Australia. He gave numerous examples of how steam powered trains were superior to either diesel or electric. All of it was of little interest to the visitors. Saunders became offended when Aaron wanted to discuss the comparative costs of the various systems but Lee intervened before Saunders had to confess that the real reasons for the obsolescence of steam trains was due to basic economics - the declining profit margins of using that system. He might also have had to acknowledge a corresponding fifty year decline in the export of British coal because of this.
––––––––
For the next two days neither Lee nor Aaron saw the old man on the beach. Lee rose early every day and watched alone as waves broke about the base of the gigantic vertical stones. She felt convinced an epic battle had taken place on this beach, that hundreds of Wandjinas perished and the strange looking rocks were the metamorphosed bodies of those killed in battle.
Tholly had told her other Wandjina stories from the area; he also told her it was only by coincidence that Henry Badjawaan, the revered custodian of the mystical Wandjina of this region, was at the beach the weekend Lee and Aaron had arrived.
Lee would never forget the old man: his skin folded and weathered from long seasons of torrid sunlight, the corners of both eyes coated by the glistening grey of advancing cataracts. He told her he heard horrible screams coming from the beach: death howls from warriors battling to the death.
––––––––
A few days later, Darwin appeared to the Shoemakers as a major metropolis on the horizon; San Francisco below them the following day was an overwhelming megalopolis with man-made monoliths reaching for the sky.