My Love Must Wait by Ernestine Hill

My Love Must Wait by Ernestine Hill

Author:Ernestine Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Angus & Robertson
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00


11

Yellow Sands of Lilliput

On New Year’s Day, in a light breeze, they sailed from the glory of King George’s Sound, through a tangle of islands east-north-east to follow the hazy main. In d’Entrecasteaux’s Group alone, Flinders counted fifty-six isles. Tracing the profile of that sandy shore, he ran the ship so close that they could see beaches and breakers from the decks. Less than a mile out all day, at night he hauled to the wind and deepened the water to anchor, and was back to the land at daybreak, faultlessly following monotonous miles inch by inch in his charts. Many a fair wind he missed for the sake of his botanists, while he scoured the heights, theodolite on shoulder, up over the boulders to the crest.

Coasts of illusion, the watcher at the masthead was fooled again and again. Peninsulas and capes of trees proved to be only trees, island studded bays mirage, and mountains merely refraction. Wine-jellies, the red medusae, undulated about them in millions and an oily scum, that they tried to analyse, reddened the wave. Fins of monsters slit the blue. A shark they caught was twelve feet long with a seal bitten in half in its belly, one half skinned and in it the barb of a broken spear.

Sometimes they tacked in the nick of time from the sinister ripple of a deep reef, but Beautemps-Beaupré’s charts were good, Vancouver’s even better, and with Thistle in a boat ahead always their John the Baptist, they gave the breakers a wide berth and neatly skimmed the shoals.

On the fifteenth day the land rounded away to the north from a bold headland that Flinders named for his first friend in the Navy — Cape Pasley. In a hand as bold he marked it down in the virginal white of the chart. The old man would chuckle to see his name at the ends of the earth. Goose Island commemorated a ship’s dinner, a sand-drift chalk-white the cliffs of Dover.

“Strong breeze and cloudy.” By the end of January they were skirting the cliffs of Nuyts Land, unseen for two hundred years, a mighty arc of over a thousand miles. Vague ramparts of a vague country, those immutable walls kept siege against the southern ocean, league after baffling league with never a breach nor a landing-place.

The Investigator plunged in a head swell, her old bones creaking, her old leaks weeping. Her main t’gallant mast was sprung. Again she was making four inches in the hour. Where it was not madness to try it, he let the reefs out of her courses and bore in to the land, but the seared red walls towered above her six hundred feet sheer. Nuyts Land had nothing more to give him than it had given to the Dutchmen — trend of the coast, drift of the winds, and set of ocean currents. It was a vizor on the face of nature. That huge half moon of weltering seas he named the Great Australian Bight.

In



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