It was becoming hard again to find the energy to do my jobs. Peter and Jess Young were looking pale. Alec and I compared the bruises we had that wouldn’t heal. They were like the ones I had before we found Queen Victoria Spring. So I had scurvy again.

Jess Young checked us and confirmed that we had scurvy. ‘I’ve seen bruises like that on sailors when they haven’t had enough vegetables.’ He knew all about it, so did Padar, but there was nothing we could do to help ourselves. There were no vegetables in the desert.

It seemed as though everything moved slower, even the string itself. We stopped shortly in a place where Tommy found lowans’ eggs. I wondered where he found his energy and how come birds lived in the desert. Then we travelled over granite ridges. Mr Giles liked granite; he poked around on foot while the rest of the string carried on. He called, ‘Tommy and Taj, you come and help.’

We searched the rocks – it was a pretty enough place. Tommy found tracks of crows and humans. There was smoke from fires above the scrub. Surely the people must be close by but they didn’t show themselves.

‘Look boss!’ Tommy discovered a little native well in a grassy water channel. It looked hopeful. He took off one of his boots to scrape up water, and Reechy and Mustara drank from his hat. Tommy laughed.

‘Perhaps we can get more water with a shovel,’ Mr Giles said, and he sent Tommy back to the string to get one. ‘Two hundred miles from Queen Victoria Spring and no water but this.’

Mr Giles and I watched Tommy gallop off on Reechy; Tommy always rode fast and Reechy could run at twenty miles an hour. Then suddenly, Reechy sank to her knees.

‘What the devil–’ Mr Giles started forward.

Tommy shouted from the saddle. ‘Gabi, gabi! Plenty watta! Plenty watta!’

We raced over to Tommy and found a large well. It looked as if permanent water was supplied by the drainage of the rocks all around. This was why Mr Giles was so interested in rocks. He was even more pleased with Tommy. After Reechy and Mustara had drunk their fill Tommy and Reechy galloped to find the string. Mr Giles and I searched around but couldn’t find any other water, so we sat and waited for the others.

‘That Tommy is a handy chap to have around. What do you think, Taj?’

I swallowed. ‘Yes, sir. He’s very clever.’

Mr Giles laughed. ‘So you think he’s clever, eh? He works from his instincts, not cleverness. Thousands of years of it bred into him.’

I had no comment to make for I felt Mr Giles had made Tommy less than he was. With a start I realised that not long ago I would have agreed.

‘Do you think jealousy is a curse, Taj?’ He seemed about to add something, musing, knowing I wouldn’t answer him. Then, ‘No, we all get along tolerably well. Don’t you think?’

‘Y-yes, sir.’ But I wondered what he was going to say before he thought better of it. Mr Giles was not a jealous man. Was it to do with Mr Tietkens or Jess Young? When he mentioned jealousy my heart leapt in guilt. Hadn’t I been jealous of Tommy for winning those races, for his talents, his closeness to Mr Giles?

Mr Giles stood up. ‘What’s that?’

I heard voices. Two naked women walked down to fetch water. They had a water carrier; it looked like a small bark trough. We kept silent but when the women came close enough to see us they ran away a short distance, then stopped to look back at us.

Mr Giles stood and bowed to them and made a sign that they should come back and get their water. He wasn’t frightened. But the women were; the bowing didn’t work. They dropped their bark troughs and walked off as if they’d like to run but thought running might make us chase them. It was a good thing Mustara was out of sight munching on plants he liked; what would the women have thought of him?

We picked up the troughs. ‘These are coolamins. They look like miniature canoes, don’t you think, Taj?’

I couldn’t comment for I had never seen a canoe. The coolamins were made from the yellow bark tree, tied at the ends with bark string.

‘When they are full of water the women carry them on their heads,’ Mr Giles said.

‘I’ve seen women do that near Beltana.’

These were the first desert people I had seen on the expedition. I wondered if the women would tell their men we were there. Mr Giles didn’t have his gun. What would we do if they came for us? We sat where we could see any movement over the rise, but no one appeared in the four hours we waited.

It felt as if the whole afternoon had passed when the string finally arrived. ‘Them march six miles before I catch ’em,’ Tommy told us.

It was wonderful to see all the camels watered. They had come 200 miles with only that one watering from the troughs seven days before.

While the camels were still drinking, seven men and a boy appeared. They were quietly spoken, and a few had some English words like ‘boy’, ‘whitefella’ and ‘what name?’.

They were astonished, not only by the camels, but that they could drink so much. The camels drained the well dry, and the look on the men’s faces worried me. It was obvious they had never seen the well dry before. What would they do? Fortunately, water seeped into the well again and in an hour it was as it was before, though purer.

Jess Young tore his red handkerchief into strips. Mr Giles tied these around the men’s foreheads and they seemed very happy with them. The bag of trinkets came out under Tommy’s watchful eye and a few mirrors and necklaces were given. Three or four more men came to camp once we had settled and Peter began cooking damper.

One man had a piece of oyster pearl on a string around his neck and another had a feathered ornament which he popped over his mouth and laughed through. He looked like a jinn, though Mr Giles was trying to talk to him, calling him Feather and making signs with his hands. Feather broke the string around his neck and couldn’t wear his ornament so Jess Young found some elastic to attach to it. The man thought the elastic too fearsome until Mr Giles put it over his own head. Only then did Feather accept the elastic.

Mr Giles gave the men some damper and sugar each. Of course they saw what Peter was cooking in the coals: lowans’ eggs that Tommy had found. They were as concerned as when they saw their water disappear and they pointed at them and spoke to one another. Perhaps they thought the eggs were their own food since Tommy collected them from near there, but Mr Giles didn’t give them any. ‘We have to eat too,’ he said when he caught Padar staring at him. Finally the men returned to their own camp.

We were camped between two acacia trees. There were plenty of the pea plants that Mustara liked and shady trees and bushes. It was much like Wynbring. That seemed so long ago, way back in June. I braced myself for sleeping; it was going to be cold in the night.