We crossed a boggy clay-pan and called good bye loudly, almost profanely to the lake behind us. Ayers Rock lay ahead, and we had actually seen it. For several miles the smaller, jumbled sand-dunes and broken troughs and courtyards, now crowded with stunted mallee, prevented further glimpse of our goal. Then we emerged onto a parkland of spinifex dotted with desert oaks only. There was no immediate sandhill high enough to obtain a view. Another arm of Lake Amadeus, completely unknown to Tiger, forced us a further delaying three miles to the east; but the way round it was comparatively easy. Away in the west the dull ceiling clouds of the morning receded, and then banked up again in the high, cumulus, atomic-bomb manner of sudden local storms. There was great contrast of vivid-white cloud and jet black beneath, dark curtain of rain and clear sky to right and left; sunlight and shadow side by side, falling rain and gleaming light. Towards midday the piling-up took on organized movement, and the storms passed before and behind us, one after the other, with a flurry and rumble of thunder, to continue on over the eastern horizon. The extraordinary procession went on for some hours, until one raced up and loomed high above us. It was impossible to avoid it. There was a blackening-out of light into the mystery of dusk, a heavy wind, a revolt of the camels, and then the heaviest rain I have ever known ripped leaves from the mulgas and pelted us like hail. The camels broke their lines and became frantic. Tiger muttered in annoyance; there was little he could do. Tamalji crouched beneath one of the large tucker-boxes, moving as the camel moved; and fat young Njunowa raced naked behind a mulga and laughed hysterically until the rain ceased as suddenly as it had started, and brilliant sunlight, gleaming on the wet surface of the desert, followed it.
The water soon vanished, and we continued our journey as though little had happened, with Tiger leading the camels cautiously round the sodden patches. There followed a strange game of hide-and-seek. The sandhills had once again taken up definite formation, and as we led the camels slowly over them the wide panorama of desert sands and bared crests and the intervening troughs of mulga clumps broadened and became higher, with Ayers Rock always ahead, forty miles away; and now a mile or so nearer, gleaming in dull pink.
Our approach was slow. Now we stood on a crest of windswept sand and saw its distant, breathtaking oneness and stillness; now we dropped between the sandhills, and our world closed about us in a desolation of sand and spinifex and scattered mulga. It was a goal coming slowly nearer, changing colour slowly in the afternoon sun; until I saw away to the right the pale, ethereal blue of many domes splitting the horizon like the temples of an ancient city.
‘Kuttatuta!’ Tiger spoke excitedly.
Mount Olga! The elusive goal of Ernest Giles, and still seen only by few men. It is the most awesome sight I have ever seen. It has light and colour far beyond the imagination of those who will never see it. Even without Ayers Rock and Mount Olga on the one skyline, the winter sunlight slanting across the sandhills has its own powerful beauty; but the picture, disappearing and reappearing tantalizingly before me at the summit of each sandhill, had the silence and grandeur of ages, and the power and simplicity of space and wilderness.
That night we camped right on the crest of a sandhill, and I sat and watched the colours slowly fade until Ayers Rock and the temples of Mount Olga darkened slowly into the night.
It was a gusty, cold night, with damp sand beneath us, and a longing for morning.
We travelled well all the following day in brilliant sunlight. The Rock loomed nearer only with an almost annoying slowness. Shortly after midday I defined a large area of eroded terraces and caves on the northern cliffs, some hundreds of feet high and as broad, resembling an exposed human brain. As we crossed crest after crest the brain grew into sculptured relief, scarcely credible as the work of time and wind, but seemingly the result of mechanical drills and chisels.
The boys sent up smoke-signals; but no answers came back from the Rock. Its solitude was real, and there were times when I felt I was approaching the immense coloured tomb of a dead age into which I had no right to look. The solitude might have been even more impressive had it not been for the continuous bell-call of a bird, which surely had beaten place and distance with its high run of notes and contralto base, ventriloquial, distant yet all about, and invisible. Tiger informed me: ‘That one Bunbunbililila!’ and at my attempts at repetition Tamalji threw back his head and laughed aloud.
The camel has been called the ship of the desert. As I walked, abstractedly, a hundred yards or a quarter of a mile to right or left of the four of them, I seemed to be viewing a moving story from a distance. The vast immobility of sandhills and intervening troughs was so much like an ocean stricken into stillness that the camels were like tiny boats moving ever so slowly over waves without life. Every now and then I would turn across the heavy sand, weaving in and out of the prickly spinifex, and move in closer to the camels, and for a time, once again become part of that slow-moving fleet, moving so slowly that Ayers Rock and Mount Olga seemed still years away as a reward only to be gained at the end of life’s span.
There were times when I reflected upon the unusual journey in search of respite and clarity of thought. The world and its problems were distant and unreal. The great monoliths in the desert were so symbolic of defiance amid desolation that I could not fail to gain at least some strength of purpose at sight of them. I do not think any of the few white men who have travelled slowly towards them in a desert pilgrimage, have not been affected in the same way.
Each sandhill challenged effort; it was tough, slow going, heavy walking while loaded with cameras and water-bottles; but practice and strategy helped so much that I realized there is a definite art in crossing a sandhill, an art in crossing the troughs between, and healthy practice for the senses in plotting direction without fail. Down in the troughs all signs of Ayers Rock and Mount Olga disappeared, and I had to note angles at which the sandhills ran, and then pick a lone bush or bump on the next sandhill as a landmark, approach steadily until the sandhill loomed high up, then a steady, leaning ascent up the soft, bright-pink sand with feet evenly spaced to avoid slipping; up and up, a pause for breath with the corrugated crest still against a brilliant sky of cirrus cloud; up again, and – once again Ayers Rock still dead ahead; no mistake, no lost ground. Direction checked and found correct!
A quick check to sight the camels; for that was important. Now they were up on the crest also, perhaps to the east, moving slowly over, now they were out of sight down in the next trough. Sometimes I would draw ahead of them, perhaps a mile, looking back every few hundred yards to check again; until, reaching the crest of a chosen sandhill higher than all those for some miles round, I would squat in the cool sand and enjoy the warming sun of Central Australia’s winter; and study every detail of the grand monoliths still many miles away, but approaching slowly through time and space so that with each sandhill ascent I could note some minor difference of feature, or colour, or shape.
The strange hide-and-seek went on, until when the Rock appeared no more than six or seven miles away, its mass loomed above the sandhills and was never out of sight. The camels ceased their yawing to right and left and increased their pace to an obvious goal. Once again, at sunset, I stood apart from the camp, and watched the setting sun colour Ayers Rock in a fiery red. The crevices and hollows, caverns and overhangs, and blackened line of watercourses stood out in dark shadow and mystery against the blaze of light over everything else; then I raced across the near sandhill, and saw the sun go down in a fan of crimson behind the dark silhouette of Mount Olga.
That night was clear and cold. A heavy dew came down and penetrated my sleeping-bag, and soaked into everything lying about. Before sunrise, Tiger pointed out to several small birds deliberately catching the dew on the leaves of a low mallee-bush. Here then was perhaps one answer to the riddle of where creatures of the waterless desert obtain fluid. The eastern sun painted the Rock once again, this time a light revealing pink. We got away within the hour; our slow approach now accompanied by budgerigars, crows, finches, mulga and ringneck parrots; and a rapid increase of wildflowers on the areas where wandering natives had burnt the spinifex a year or so before, and enriched the sand with ash. One particular bush, about five to six feet high, had golden and green flowers waving up and down in the light wind, remarkably like green parrots in flight. I thought the bush was a type of banksia. Later investigation revealed that it was a type of desert grevillia. Tamalji and Njunowa left the camels and ran from flower to flower, bending low at each bush, sucking nectar from the flowers, and passing on. This was one of the desert delicacies; and I became conscious of much twittering and chattering overhead, and discovered hundreds of grey martins circling above, diving down in our wake to peck at the honey-laden flowers; and always in the distance, the elusive, tinkling Bunbunbililila.
My guess of six or seven miles from the night’s camp to Ayers Rock proved incorrect. It took four hours of steady travel to penetrate the encircling belt of mulga sloping down from the surrounding sandhills towards the base of the Rock, which stands in a vast saucer depression, so gradual in its slope from the sandhills that it is scarcely noticeable. The last half-hour of travel was the most misleading, for a guess of a quarter of a mile to the base was made when we still had more than a mile to go. We continued straight towards the towering light-red walls, until boggy ground from the great gallonage of water that heavy rain had cascaded off the Rock, terrified the camels, and I walked ankle-deep in mud, slipping, stumbling, bogging, dodging pot-holes and larger clay-pans, to approach the Rock, conscious of a growing clamour of birds high up on its tremendous walls.