‘Another duffer!’
‘Rank as ever was bottomed!’
‘Seventy-five feet hard delving, and not a colour!’
The speakers were myself, the teller of this story, and my mate, Harry Treloar.
We were sitting on a heap of earth and stones representing a month’s fruitless, dreary labour. The last remark was Harry’s.
‘That makes, I think,’ continued he, ‘as nearly as I can guess, about a dozen of the same species. And people have the cheek to call this a poor man’s diggings!’
‘The prospectors are on good gold,’ I hazard.
‘So are the publicans,’ retorts he, ‘and the speculators, and the storekeepers, and, apparently, everybody but the poor men—ourselves, to wit. This place is evidently for capitalists. We’re nearly “dead-brokers,” as they say out here. Let’s harness up Eclipse and go over to old Yamnibar. We may make a rise there. It’s undignified, I allow, scratching amongst the leavings of other men and other years; dangerous, also, but that’s nothing. And many a good man has had to do the same before us.’
No life can equal that of a digger’s if he be ‘on gold,’ 72even moderately so; if not, none so weary and heart-breaking.
It’s all very well to talk, as some street-bred novelists do, of ‘hope following every stroke of the pick, making the heaviest toil as nought,’ and all that kind of thing; but when one has been pick-stroking for months without seeing a colour; when one’s boots are sticking together by suasion of string or greenhide; when every meal is eaten on grudged credit; when one works late and early, wet and dry, and all in vain, then hope becomes of that description which maketh the heart sick, very sick, indeed. Treloar was, in general, a regular Mark Tapley and Micawber rolled into one. But for once, fate, so adverse, had proved too much for even his serenely hopeful temper.
He was an Anglo-Indian. Now he is Assistant Commissioner at Bhurtpore, also a C.S.I.; and, when he reads this, will recollect and perhaps sigh for the days when he possessed a liver and an appetite, and was penniless.
Our turnout was rather a curious one. The season was dry, and, feed being scarce, Treloar had concluded that, at such a time, a bullock would be better able to eke out a living than a horse. Therefore, a working bullock drew our tilted cart about the country.
‘You see, my boy,’ said Treloar, when deciding on the purchase, ‘an ox is a beggar that always seems to have something to chew. Turn a horse out where there’s no grass, and he’ll probably go to the deuce before morning. But your ox, now, after a good look around, seeing he’s 73struck a barren patch, ’ll draw on his reserves, bring up something from somewhere, and start chewing away like one o’clock. That comforts his owner. I vote for the ox. He may be slow, but he generally appears to have enough in his stomach to keep his jaws going; and, in a dry time, that is a distinct advantage.’
So Eclipse was bought, I merely stipulating that Treloar should always drive.
I have an idea, that, after a while, as the old ‘worker’ sauntered along, regarding the perspiring Harry, and his exhortations and exclamations, often in Hindustani, with a mild stare of surprise, as he slowly stooped for a dry tussock, or reached aloft for an overhanging branch, the latter somewhat repented him of his experiment. But he never said so. And, to do him justice, Eclipse was not a bad ‘ox’; and, when he could get nothing better, justified Harry’s expectations by seeming able to chew stones. But his motto was decidedly festina lente.
Yamnibar, ‘Old Yamnibar,’ at last. Behind us, on the far inland river, we had left a busy scene of activity. Hurrying crowds of men, the whirr of a thousand windlasses, the swish of countless cradles, and the ceaseless pounding by night and by day of the battery stamps. And now what a contrast!
A wide, trackless valley, covered with grave-like mounds, on which grass grew rankly; with ruined buildings and rotting machinery, and, here and there, pools of stagnant water, whilst the only thing save the sweep of the wind that reached our ears was a distant rhythmical moaning, coming very sadly in that desolate place—the 74sounding of the sea on the rock-bound coast not far away.
The only signs of life, as Eclipse, pausing now and again, and taking a ruminative survey of the valley, drew us by degrees down the sloping hills, were the buglings of a squad of native companions flying heavily towards the setting sun.
‘What a dismal hole!’ I muttered, as the ‘ox,’ spying some green rushes, bolted at top speed—about a mile an hour—towards them.
‘Let’s try and find a golden one,’ laughed my mercurial friend. ‘Here we have a whole gold-field to ourselves. Just think of it! “Lords of the fowl and the brute”—Eclipse and Kálee and the bralgas. Take the old chap out of the gharri, and we’ll pitch our camp.’
I ought to have spoken of Kálee long ago. Indeed, when one comes to think of it, I ought to have called this story after her. But man is an ungrateful animal—worse than most dogs. Not that the great deerhound with the faithful eyes, who might have stepped out of one of Landseer’s pictures, was forgotten—far from it. But for her we should possibly now, both of us, be bundles of dry bones, with all sorts of underground small deer making merry amongst them.
She ought, according to her merits, to hold pride of place here. But she was quiet and unobtrusive as she was faithful and affectionate, whereas Eclipse was nothing of the kind, only a noisy blusterer, thinking of no one but himself. Therefore, as happens so often with us, has he stolen a march on a failing memory for prior 75recognition. But the ‘ox’ is grass, and Kálee still lives in the great Eastern Empire, and has two servants to wait upon her. O Dea certe!
‘Behold!’ said Treloar, as we lay and smoked in the moonlight, after supper, in front of our tent, which we had pitched between the door-posts of what had evidently been a building of some size, but of which they were the sole remains. ‘Behold, my friend, the end of it all! But a few years are passed, and where, now, are the busy thousands that toiled and strove and jostled each other, below there, in earth’s bowels, in the fierce race for gold? Look at it now! Think of the great waves of human hopes and disappointments and joys that have rolled to and fro across this miserable patch of earth! Think of the brave hearts that came hot with the excitement of the quest, and departed broken with the emptiness of it. Also, of those others, who never departed, but lie at rest beneath that yellow clay. Just a little while, in the new-born one, is centred alike the glow of success and the cold chill of failure; all the might of swift fierce endeavour, every passion, good and bad, that convulses our wretched souls. And then, after a brief season, its pristine form defaced and scarred, comes the rotting solitude of the tomb! Why ’tis, in some sort, the story of our corporal life and death!
‘“Over the Mountains of the Moon,
Down the Vale of Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,” the shade replied,
“For there lies El Dorado.”
76Behold, my friend, the Valley of the Shadow that has passed, wherein many a bold soul has gone down to Hades, “unhouselled, disappointed, unaneled.” Do their ghosts wander yet, I ask?’
‘O, bother!’ I mutter sleepily. ‘I’m tired. Let’s turn in.’
Fortunately such outbursts were rare. But when the fit came on, I knew too well the uselessness of attempting to stop it.
Awakened towards the small hours by the roarings of Eclipse, triumphantly apprising the world at large that his belly was full, I found the lantern still burning, and could see Treloar’s eye ‘in a fine phrenzy rolling,’ as he scribbled rapidly. Years afterwards I read in the Bombay Pioneer ‘How the Night Falls on Yamnibar,’ and thought it passable.
It was anything but pleasant work, this groping about old workings. It was also very dangerous. Many were the close shaves we had of being buried, sometimes alive, at others flattened out.
The soil, for the first twenty or thirty feet, was of a loose, friable description. Thence to the bottom, averaging eighty feet, was ‘standing ground,’ i.e., needed no timbering. But, in many cases, the slabbing from the upper parts had rotted away and fallen down, followed by big masses of earth, which blocked up the entrance to the drives where our work lay.
Then after, with great trouble, clearing the bottom, generally yellow pipeclay, and exploring the dark, cramped passages for pillars, we had, before beginning 77to displace these, to support the roof by artificial ones. Timber had at the time of the rush been plentiful; as a consequence pillars were scarce. Also, the field, having in its prime been a wonderfully rich one, it had been repeatedly fossicked over. This made them scarcer still.
Often after a heavy job of clearing out and heaving-up mullock, water, and slabs, all the time in imminent peril of a ‘fall’ from some part of the shaft, would we discover, on exploring the drives, that they were simply groves of props—not a natural support left standing.
Such a network of holes and burrows as the place was! I can compare it to nothing but a Brobdingnagian rabbit-warren.
The flat had been undermined, claim breaking into claim, until the wonder was that the whole top crust didn’t cave in. In some places this had happened, and one looked down into a dismal chaos of soil, rotten timber, and surface water.
As I have remarked, it was risky work this hunting for the few solitary grains amongst the rotten treasure-husks left by others, especially without a local knowledge of the past, which would have been so invaluable to us. But there came to be, nevertheless, a sort of dreary fascination in it.
We had heard that, on this same field, years after its total abandonment, a two hundred ounce nugget had been found by a solitary fossicker in a pillar left in an old claim.
Very often, I believe, did the picture of that big lump 78rise before us as we crawled and twisted and wriggled about like a pair of great subterranean yellow eels, not knowing the moment a few odd tons of earth might fall and bury us.
One day an incident rather out of the common befell. Lowering Treloar cautiously down an old shaft to, as usual, make a preliminary survey, I presently heard a splash and a cry of ‘Heave-up!’ Up he came, a regular Laocoon, in the close embraces of a thumping, lively carpet snake, whose frogging ground he had intruded upon.
He had, by luck, got a firm grip of the reptile round the neck, and was not bitten. He was, however, badly scared.
Doubtfully he listened as, while releasing him from the coils, I assured him that the thing was perfectly harmless.
Was I quite certain on this point? he wished to know. Of course I was; and I quoted all the authorities I could think of.
Then, before despatching it, would I let it bite me? As an ardent ophiologist, he took the utmost interest in such a fact, and would like to become as confident as myself of it.
But I pointed out earnestly that this was simply trifling, and that we had no time to spare. Practical demonstration is a very capital thing in many cases. But ver non semper viret, and our friend of the curiously-patterned skin might not be always innocuous.
We took three ounces out of a pillar in Snake Shaft. That night, on returning to our camp, we found an old man there. He was the first person we had seen for a 79month; and so were inclined to be cordial. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the new-comer, except that he had a habit of tightly shutting one eye as he looked at you.
I have called him old because his hair was grey; but he was still a very powerful man, and likely to prove a tough one at close quarters.
‘Come and have some supper, mate,’ said Treloar.
‘Call me Brummy, an’ keep yer dorg orf,’ replied the other, as he poured out a pannikin of tea. ‘I don’t fancy a big beast like yon a-breathin’ inter the back o’ a feller’s neck.’
And, indeed, Kálee’s attentions were marked. She sniffed around and around the new-comer, bristled all her hair up, and carried on a monologue which sounded unpleasant.
‘No,’ he resumed in answer to a question, as Treloar sent Kálee to her kennel. ‘I was never on this here field before. Down about the Lachlan’s my towri. Everybody theer knows Brummy. I’m goin’ to do a bit of fossickin’ now I got this far. Ain’t a-thinkin’ o’ interferin’ wi’ you. Surfiss is my dart—roun’ about the old tailin’s and puddlers. Down below’s too risky in a rotten shop like this. I leaves that game to the young ’uns. An’’ (with a sly grin) ‘old Brum does as well as the best on ’em in the long run.’
Soon after this he went away and pitched a ragged fly further along the flat.
Next day, as we were having a smoke and a spell after rigging two new windlass standards, he came up to us, 80and in a furtive sort of manner, began to try and discover the position of those claims which we had already prospected. Having no motive for concealment, we told him as well as we could, also pointing out most of them from where we sat.
He appeared quite pleased as we finished, and marched off with his old tin dish banging and rattling against the pick on his shoulder.
‘That old man,’ remarked Harry presently, ‘is a dangerous old man. Moreover, he is a liar.’
‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
‘The first,’ he replied, ‘I feel—as Kálee did. Now for the second count in the indictment. Did you not hear him tell us that this was his first visit to Yamnibar? Well, when he asked so carelessly if we had tried the big shaft over yonder—the one where you can see the remains of a horse-whim—and you said that we had not, a momentary gleam of satisfaction passed across his face. We’ll try that hole to-morrow morning. Luckily, our new standards are finished.’
‘Pooh!’ I said. ‘My dear fellow, your legal training has made you too suspicious. The poor old beggar may have an idea of prospecting that very shaft himself.’
‘He probably has,’ replied Treloar quietly. ‘Only don’t forget that he doesn’t like underground work.’
However, my companion had his own way, which, except in such matters as that of the snake-test, he generally did; and next morning saw us fixing our windlass at t............