Earth Bound
A Novel by Clif Sanderson

'Earth Bound has the spiritual qualities of the best seller Celestine Prophecy ...but with Australian wit, irony and landscape...' 'This is not a novel but a guide book to the mind..' You can order on-line here

Introduction      Chapter -1-      Chapter -2-

All this time his hat had never left his head and now he partly lifted the back of it to scratch absently at his neck. The brim slid down over his eyes.

‘These lines on the Nullarbor desert, they didn’t arise without meaning. Someone, something or some event created them just as the Koori people suggest in their version of Original Creation. There was at some time a consciousness which brought about these huge lines which cannot exist in isolation, there is a connection between their existence and everything else and now we’ve reached the point in time and knowledge where we have been able to ‘discover’ them.’

‘I’ll grant you that,’ I allowed, ‘Obviously such things could not possibly be formed naturally. Reminds me of the pyramids they found on Mars. The geometric shapes are there, like it or not! No natural force could possibly create such mathematical shapes. But where is the intelligence which created them? And can we really believe they were left behind by the disappearing people as some sort of, what, warning?

‘Well I don’t know,’ said Digger, shuffling in his seat, ‘what I do know is that we’re seeing this sort of thing more and more often as our horizons grow. Some people are calling it contagiousness or perhaps convergence, because it seems to be growing like a virus.’

‘I sure don’t agree with everything you say, mate, there’s a lot of room for debate but I’ll give you this, even many people I work with are saying the same thing about all sorts of ‘revelations’ they are having. You call it ‘contagious’ I’d call it pandemic.’

‘Here’s the thing though, with typical arrogance we are stuck in the thinking that only human beings run the joint, we just keep forgetting that we are merely a minor part of the whole pattern of harmonic resonance holding the universe together.’

‘Well harmonic resonance I can buy, modern physics supports that notion, but this convergence thing doesn’t tally with scientifically supported reality,’ I was not about to get trapped in the double take of agreeing to one thing and having the other added as a non-optional extra, ‘leastwise not in any relationship to the way the Moronic Disturbance of the eighties proposed it.’

‘Yes, but what you are missing is that even the Harmonic Convergence, to give it it’s less acerbic name, had to happen within exactly the same laws of interconnectedness — contagiousness -— as those which we think we originate ourselves from our mind’s action and desires. Either the field exists all the time or it never does. We do or we don’t coexist in the woven pattern of the rug we are crawling slowly over.’

More students arrived to ogle the mess and Digger moved to close the door.

‘Whether these lines are natural or not they exist therefore, according to everyone from Einstein down, they have an incontrovertible relationship to every other ancient artifact like, for instance, the Easter Island statues. That’s the conundrum. Why the statues? Why the lines? What possible connection?’

By now the wayward spring in the chair was beginning to bug me but his reasoning was attractive in the exciting way I knew lead to dangerous adventures so I listened attentively enough to the possibilities arising.

‘Well most scientists now agree that nothing is solid, only energy in waves,’ I interjected without inflection, ‘but you’re going further and claiming that all events, even physical things like statues and pyramids are manifestations of one infinitely penetrating collusion, a sort of God-force.’

‘I wouldn’t use such high flying words but if you mean that everything works together — we all swim in the same soup — then, yes. How can it be otherwise? ‘What are we meant to do with life?’ gets answered if we check out what’s already happened. There are clues scattered around everywhere.’

‘Maybe. So what’s all this got to do with someone killing the school cat?’

‘What we’re talking about is not in some people’s best interest. The poor moggie was killed as a stupid warning that I am getting too close for the establishment’s comfort, that I should change my line of research. You see, I have been applying my ideas — and don’t laugh — to the question of the Ark of the Covenant.’

‘Oh, come on!’

‘I guess I expected that, but even though it’s become a bit of a joke it keeps on recurring in our literature and theatre because we have an intuitive awareness that it is one of the most important artifacts which can link things together into a clear picture.’

‘You think the Ark, simply by it’s existence, connects a lot of other things we can’t figure out?’

‘Well, yeah. But not some psychic trip, not some fantasy, I’m getting it that it’s for real. Maybe that is why it has been given this sort of terrifying image, because that keeps it alive in our culture.’

‘So, if it were really just another Biblical make believe we’d have forgotten it by now?’

‘Sure. The ancients weren’t so dumb! They knew they needed to give it some mystique to keep us alert to the usefulness of this thing so that by the time we learned what else we needed we’d still remember the Ark comes as part of the deal. Then, because it’s not huge like the others — its something you could easily trip over and not notice — they made sure we knew of its destructive power so we’d keep a weather eye on it.’

‘And the ‘establishment’ doesn’t like you thinking like this?’

He leaned high up on his wall of books and pulled out from among the piles of papers, books and electronic circuit boards Tolstoy’s 1895 book, ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ tapping his finger on the cover,

‘This is the book which changed Gandhi’s life because Tolstoy was the first to have the courage to point out that the strict purpose of the major institutions, of academia, politics, medicine and religion is to retard progress. He knew they have always protected their camping grounds no matter what it costs; your life, your sanity, your future. To the death. What struck Gandhi so clearly was Tolstoy’s realization that these groups strive to maintain their dominance not by the New Testament idea of non resistance to violence but the Old Testament way of an eye for an eye. Even though they might be preaching the New Testament loving-your-brother principle, they still to this day practice the lethal law of the Old.’

I knew that book, had read it myself and understood exactly why Tolstoy had been excommunicated for writing it.

‘So this is the conflict then,’ he continued, ‘the ‘establishment’ desires us to continue our mesmerized sleep while Tolstoy and others try to wake the comatose.

‘But there’s more to it than that. Most people think any changes they have noticed are some sort of spiritual change, right?’

‘That’s true, I am getting a lot of people, even in my practice telling me they feel a sort of expectation that we are on the verge of some major change.’

‘But no-one’s quite sure when or what form it will take?’

‘I can tell you I am more than a little suspicious because there’s always been predictions and prophecies.’

He leaned forward to make the point.

‘But nothing concrete. Why? Because when we begin to feel these changes the mind resists and we avoid facing what might be the trauma of moving our butts from the comfortable seat we were fitted into as kids and so we say, waving our hands in the air, ‘oh, it must be a spiritual change’.’

‘And then everyone nods agreement!’

‘But that’s just it. As more of us have personal experience of this change and begin openly talking and comparing notes, the more threatening it becomes to the ‘establishment’ because it means we are reclaiming our personal power.’

‘That’s true,’ I conceded, ‘until recent years the population has been so docile that it has been possible to deny and suppress most individual experiences, treating them at best as psychotic breaks, speaking only ‘logic’, allowing only monks and religious to be ‘different.’ That way the status quo was not disturbed as things which fitted the profit/power driven picture were freely taught.’

These are the conversations of civilization. Enjoyable, involving, not dependent on linear outcome but skipping and evolving as the thoughts arise. This was the strength of our friendship and this was what animated our souls.

Digger stood and looked out the window as though the distant view would enhance his thoughts. Apparently it did for he sat and leaned forward.

‘You know, I don’t have any trouble with profit motives, just the stupid idea that it has to be built on the backs of others instead of the win-win model. I am sure that they are promoting the notion that this feeling of imminent change is a spiritual evolution due to happen some vague time in the future so that they can keep the same, or develop even more, control over us as the ‘slaves’ of the today. It is in their interest to divert these feelings of disenchantment away from any realization that most of the disillusion is with the present system. Clever buggers, eh?’

‘The only fly in the ointment is we’ve now got world wide communication and easy access to each other’s cultures so we can’t be blindfolded any more.’

‘Right! We’re not disagreeing here, except that for people to be a part of these changes, they’ve got to take an active physical part not a passive ‘spiritual’ sideline and right now we can do that because with such a big overview we can see the jigsaw puzzle like no people ever have before. Put the pieces in and Bingo!’

‘Sometimes, Digger you talk crap! Then you hit it on the button! You’re saying that by looking at and comparing all the past mistakes and triumphs left by previous cultures, by reading many of the signs they left, we can finally see it in perspective and know what to do now?’

‘Simple, eh? The map was always there right under our noses. It’s a bit like the idea that until you begin using fire you can’t melt the metal to make the wire to ‘discover’ electricity. Electricity was there all the time but you couldn’t see it, use it or organize it until you had fire, metal then wire. Just the same, we’ve got the exact plans for building an Ark but until now it’s always seemed out of our reach like some mystical weirdo thing from the Bible because we didn’t have enough information to understand how to make use of it. Now I reckon we’ve reached the point in the sequence where we can build a tuner! God’s waiting to talk to you mate!’

This new line was starting to make me uneasy.

Digger was always good for some original thinking but this sounded a bit too far off the wall for comfort. Maybe in the months since I’d seen him he’d developed a hidden agenda which would draw me in through our old friendship and then firebomb my insides.

Was he meaning we should all join the militants to take back our country? Not if he’s telling me he’s into non violence. Did he mean there is no such thing as spirituality? Well, that’s not so tough. The whole idea of spirituality depends on which culture you grew up in. ‘My God beats your God.’

Yet somehow what he was saying echoed true. It seemed to me that he was fossicking around for the main seam; a gold prospector with his mining sense honed to the mother lode. Confident that he was within inches of success.

Even so I sat there uncomfortably knowing if I wanted to retain anything of my life style I would need to leave immediately. You only needed to look at my previous experiences of his schemes to confirm that. I saw the praying mantis rising on its hind legs, the eyes under that crazy damn hat beginning to bulge and the razor sharp pincers swaying in the hypnotic death dance mesmerizing their prey, movement is impossible, eat or be eaten, survive or die; live the danger or sleep comfortably numb your whole brief life.

Suddenly smashing pain shattered into my head, consciousness wavered, the floor hit my cracking knee caps. The sound of the banshee chain-sawed my tooth nerves. I found myself sprawled on the carpet between the chair and the desk which was now covered with shards of glass two feet long from the exploded window. Digger’s head lay grotesquely plunged into the womb of the cat’s corpse, a massive boulder obscenely pinning his hat to the desk.

If I were a novelist I would say ‘minutes passed which seemed like hours’.

Slowly colors returned; the red of blood drop by drop on the white paper; yellow walls; green shirt; blue cup; white hand; the cup is cracked.

‘Even unto death. Huh! They’ll need to do better than that!’

Slowly his head came up, shaking itself. Waiting for instructions, preoccupied with focusing wandering eyes.

‘About this time I should be grabbing for my mere,’ all thoughts of non violence shrunk rapidly. How useless this flat wooden club of the Maori would be for me in a fair dinkum fight, but it would have served well to give moral armament.

‘I guess it’s true after all. The Teacher’s Union keeps telling us how violence in the inner city schools makes this a dangerous profession!’

Both of us sat dazed and bloodied across the body of a dead cat and scattered piles of paper. From serious conversation to serious situation in one microsecond.

We couldn’t hold the drama.

Together we burst out laughing.

My knees ached, somewhere there was a slash of blood dripping off my face, Digger’s hat lay crushed and pitiful, he had splinters of glass all over his back, someone was threatening our lives and we sat there and laughed.

Psychotic break time.

We couldn’t just walk away from the scene. We couldn’t just stay either.

Knowing Mark would be here soon we shuffled a few pieces of glass towards the waste basket and prepared to leave. No doubt the room was in a sticky mess and no question that someone was trying to get a message to Digger, if not me. But neither of us had ever bothered too much about reading instruction manuals and by mutual agreement we weren’t about to change that policy.

Picking up my thought, Digger flicked his eyes towards the array of boomerangs on his wall, ‘Children’s toys,’ he muttered, as if to a student, ‘for teaching the kids how to catch the wind and throw accurately, probably developed so that the lazy elders wouldn’t have to keep chasing after bits of stick!’

Un-typically he had always kept the lower drawer of his desk locked. Now he produced the key, unlocked it and withdrew what looked like a heavy boomerang with only one wing. The other end flared out about the size and shape of an outstretched hand. It was slightly thicker in the middle then tapered off towards the edges where razor sharp blades had been inserted.

‘The woomera is what they used for real hunting. It flies but it doesn’t come back — at least not empty! You can see it has the same aerodynamics as the boomerang but it’s heavier and the working end in my personal adaptation is a little more dangerous!’

He hefted it’s weight and smiled a little.

Just then huge Mark appeared in the doorway. He’d come prepared to clean up the dead cat but as a true friend of Digger was not at all fazed by the showers of glass. I wondered again about this man who seemed to spend more time rubbing oil of wintergreen into over-flexed gym muscles than working. Digger had never invited him on any of our trips, as though keeping him in reserve like the twelfth man sitting handy on the bench.

With no more than a nod to Digger and me he set to work cleaning up the mess.

Digger acknowledged him then turned back to me, ‘We’re off to the desert this afternoon. Don’t pack anything, you wont need much.’

‘Now hang on a minute,’ I began to bluster, knowing it would take me about 30 seconds to agree, mentally rearrange my week’s schedule, calculate the amount of money I could instantly get my hands on, and have my Visa card in my hand. ‘I’m going to need to know more.’

QANTAS prides itself on being the world’s longest surviving commercial airline but there is nothing ancient about their service. Within an hour we had two seats booked, paid for and occupied on the two hour flight from Sydney to Adelaide, the capital city of the State of South Australia. We’d even had time for a cup of coffee and a doughnut in the bright new stainless steel and chrome departure lounge. I was going to ask Digger more about his ‘doughnut muttering’ but decided he’d let me know in good time.

I guess the tension was still with me because I definitely thought I saw Joan through the crowd at the ticket counter — yet when I pointed her out to Digger he swept it aside.

Still, I checked round the cabin of the neat little 767 and couldn’t see anyone suspicious amongst the farmer’s faces. I settled myself to enjoy the glorious view of Sydney Harbour as we took off and headed south west.

Digger seemed to drift off to sleep for a while, then, snapping awake, shook my arm.

‘Remember that game we played as kids? Scavenger hunt we called it. Where you had to work out a clue written on a piece of paper, that led you to another hiding place with the next clue and so on until you got to the bag of sweets your Mom had hidden? Well that describes what I think we’re doing.’

‘Picking up clues?’

‘Yeah. Not much more than that. You’ve got to decipher each clue before the next one becomes obvious. Thing is you can’t find the last one until you’ve understood all the others. Just let things arise in appropriate time and order. In this case there have to be a number of artifacts or keys which lead to one incredible result.’

‘So, Sherlock, how many clues do you anticipate?’

‘I only know it has to be an uneven number.’

‘Um-Huh. Why is that?’

‘Because all Chinese pagodas have an uneven number of levels.’

‘Oh yeah! How silly of me to miss that.’

His lopsided grin didn’t add much.

‘As we uncover each one the next one becomes clear. Seems to me the clues have been there all the time but everyone is impatient to ‘discover’ the wire before the fire and no-one has ever been able to find them all, or at least understand what they meant. First you have to let go of the old ways of thinking and seeing.’

‘Maybe you mean go back to the oldest ways of seeing and being.’

‘Fizzackerly!’

The sun shadow moved round the cabin as we turned directly south to join the landing pattern.

‘Now, for the first time ever we can scan the whole planet for information, we have the Internet, we have books, data banks, worldwide phone systems, mystics, channels, witchdoctors, we have anarchy on a grand scale! By their own hand the organized groups are approaching extinction and like all species their resistance to oblivion is making them lethally vicious.’

Despite myself I had to ask, ‘And you’re saying they knew this all along?’

‘Not consciously, that’s always been their problem. Their insatiable greed for power over others has fogged their intuition. They are sure there is a way of making use of this knowledge but their own fear of someone else finding it is exactly why they have tortured and killed any poor psychic they could get their hands on. Why do you think this Emperor Lucius Aurelian gawk burned down the Alexandria library in AD272? It was the largest collection of knowledge the world has ever known and he barbecued it. He wanted to believe they had captured all they needed to know, locked it up in Rome and guaranteed their power over the rest of us. Well, as usual they blew it!’

For a moment I checked out the window, we were flying over vast irrigated areas of Australia’s largest river, the Murray, more than 2300 miles long and source of water for the city of Adelaide and the green farm lands in the south. This country is bigger than the United States and it stretches nearly three thousand kilometers from here to Perth on the West coast. If one ranch here is bigger than the whole State of Texas, how much of it is unexplored? Except by the First Nations?

‘Scientists will never figure out these lines — how could they? — and they may be a very minor piece of the puzzle but they have major importance to us because we have reached a level of technology where they can be ‘discovered.’ That is what makes them an important clue.’

I found my own excitement was beginning to overcome my resistance. ‘It’s sort of like a strip of movie film, you can look at any frame and see a picture but they are all separate images.’

‘Good way to put it because without a special projector to interpret the film strip nothing’s clear. You can’t even see what you are looking at. Television beams are in the air all the time, radio waves go right through your body and may agitate the molecules enough to cause major illness yet without the know-how to build that tuner — silence!’

‘I see what you are getting at, we can’t see, hear or feel these radio waves, but they are there all the time, probably in some form always were. Look at the radio signals from the distant galaxies for instance. Didn’t the National Astronomer carry an article recently about scientists reading patterns of radio signals which may be thousands, millions of years old?’

‘Yes, but once again, why do we persist in assuming that only human beings could have produced signals with any intelligent meaning?’

‘And you think the Ark of the....,’ my voice trailed off at the simple boldness of his idea.

Nervous now, I involuntarily looked round the cabin, then laughed at my naiveté.

‘What makes you think you can create an Ark....?’ Why am I whispering?

‘Thirty years ago the University of California actually made an exact replica to the dimensions given in the Bible, and they had to dismantle it because they couldn’t contain the power it gave off — in other words, no tuner!’

‘And you want to do the same?’ One minute I’m keen to do it the next I’m not too sure I want to meddle in this.

He was basing his whole theory on an assumption that the Ark was for real, and I reckoned that if it was, then the horror stories of hell-fire and destruction were also for real and way beyond anyone’s ability to control! I am confined in a small space with the madness of the ultimate ego tripper!

‘I think I’ll leave this one to you....’

‘Look, no sweat mate, the only reason it goes into melt down is you don’t have the proper tuner! The ‘voice of God’ stuff was just like we tried to handle 20,000 volts of electricity before we’d invented transformers, of course we’d get blown to shreds. Ask Lot’s wife!’

‘And you’re telling me these lines are one of the paper chase clues which are like pieces of some cosmic jigsaw?’

‘Right! Two hundred years ago if you pushed a button on the wall and the lights came on you’re Merlin the Magician; today phfff! The establishment has your brain in a plumber’s vice, you can’t move without terrible pain, everything has to fit their model because once you break that grip and let free falling become a way of life the whole universe becomes your personal playing field.’

‘Free falling, Huh?’ I chewed that over for a while, ‘OK, I go along with most of your theory, but where’s the technical mind to put all this together?’

‘Look around — probably half the people on this plane, even today’s farmers, have their own computers, but you need state of the art electronics also — if we can get precise measurements we can build the tuner ourselves. And these three scraps of paper tell me that there is extreme urgency to our task — we don’t have much time to unravel the mystery.’

‘So run the film for me.’

‘For all their achievements, great and small, scientists have always known one thing. We are continually at risk from an asteroid collision. There’s millions of them out there rushing all over the heavens. We’ve had a few hits down the centuries. And they don’t have a clue how to prevent it. That’s why they aren’t telling anybody about this one. But according to my calculations the Jenkins comet is headed exactly on rendezvous with your favorite planet. Most of us, if not all, will be wiped out. We’ll either be drowned by the giant tsunami if Jenkins hits the ocean or die a slow suffocating death as the oxygen is replaced by dust clouds to rival a teenager’s bedroom.

‘It’s like an end of college exam on a grand scale. No-one gets to miss it. The only thing is, if we have understood enough about the universe and the way it works we’ll pass the test and the human race gets a chance to try for something better. If not we get sent back for recycling. But God, after all is benevolent. H/she has given us the clues planted all over the place. You and I are the kids looking at scraps of paper scrawled with Mom’s cryptic clues. Thing is this time we’re looking for more than bags of candy. If we miss it we’re dead as dinosaurs. If we pick up the clues in the right sequence we just might be able to save the shop and a few billion lives at the same time.’ he scratched around in his copious bag for something while I digested what he had said.

‘...and clue one is ....what?’

‘The big idea.’

‘Come again.’

‘What I’ve just been sharing is the big idea. Outside the usual fog.’

He pulled out a large crumpled yellow work pad and a stub of pencil.

‘Point one: For the first time in history we are able to travel at will all over the planet. Point two: We now have the instruments to check out all the precise measurements of the whopping big old artifacts sprinkled all over the place. This is why....’

The page he thrust under my nose was covered in dozens of lines, triangles, symbols and a few bread crumbs which he casually brushed off.

‘..we can now build that tuner.’

‘Like that?’

‘Yeah. Something like that. If I’m right the tuner is the Ark with added extras.’

‘No pre-planning, right?’

‘Just travel where we are led.’

‘And build an Ark to stop a raging comet in it’s tracks.’

‘You got anything else to do while waiting for the end?’

‘You’re sure about the Jenkins?’

‘Couldn’t be more.’

‘So why are we spending time visiting with the Aborigines...’

In my haste I had used the term we had all grown up with. He lectured me, as I knew he would, ‘ ‘Aborigine’ is a handy Latin name ignorant Europeans have given them, it simply means ‘original inhabitants’ and is exceptionally abusive. ‘Koori’ is acceptable even though not accurate. It’s about the same as lumping all Germans, French, Austrians etc. under the name of ‘Europeans’ just because they live on the same land mass.’

‘God, you’re right it’s so hard to lose habits, but you’re saying that even though the Ark is a western mind concept the Kooris know of it?’

‘You’re talking here of the world’s oldest continuous culture. You think they don’t know what’s going on?’

The cabin staff were collecting the headphones and performing the quaint ritual of handing out small sweets to comfort infrequent flyers during the descent.

We had no stowed luggage so after disembarking we strolled casually towards the car rental desk. The uniformed girl turned to us, ‘Yes, your name please?’

‘Digger Mawson.’

‘I’m sorry, Sir, we have no cars available right now.’

Digger shrugged a little gesture and his eyes beneath the rim of his Akubra slotted a fraction as we turned to cross the hard tiled floor and hail a yellow taxi to take us to Mussleton Street on the northern edge of the city.

‘They’re on the ball, I’ll give them that,’ Digger muttered to me.

Here, on the cusp of the grape growing area, was a tiny farm growing truck vegetables and lots of weeds among a few vines. I had been here once before about five years ago when we were heading for the Plateau but we’d only stayed long enough to enjoy a glass of green wine and a few pleasant moments under the wide Australian verandah collared with juicy grapes.

Jonathan met us as last time, still wearing his own version of the Akubra felt hat and the mandatory R.M.Williams boots. ‘Off to the Plateau are youse? Not a good time for that now the Government has clamped down on visitors. Might be a bit tricky ’n all, eh mate?’

I guess others had different names for it but we declared it to be ‘The Plateau’ since that is exactly what a Sydney surveyor had found when he was asked by the English Government to survey the location for their missile testing site in the fifties and had come upon a flat, carved stone plateau in an area where no known people who worked stone had ever lived. A prehistoric question mark decaying slowly in the arid lifeless desert.

‘Bunch o’ wackers. Wouldn’t know if their head was pointed home in a snow storm! No, Jon, we’re not heading for the dry interior. Matter of fact if you had a cold can I’d enjoy a beer right now.’

Jonathan began to relax. He seemed happy that it was not to be a short stay. He leaned against the post, lifted the front of his hat by the brim and scratched at the widening bald patch. His dark moustache moved to frame the first question then, realizing there would only be answers if Digger volunteered them, it flopped into customary lethargy. He looked more like the Australian’s idea of an Australian than a recent escapee from the mob who built the dykes around Holland.

Tall and slim, lanky legs and small feet, he could have taken a job as a jackaroo any day and beaten any cowboy at their game. Instead he brewed wine! And, heavens to Betsy!, to the ultimate embarrassment of his Aussie mates, drank wine instead of beer, even on days when the Nullarbor desert winds came into the kitchen and dried a man’s throat like salt pans drank water. He’d known Digger for a while. From time to time they owed each other favors, never meddled in each other’s business but always maintained a handy mateship.

Taking a wooden lounge chair I could relax and look out over the slightly raised land which gave a grand view of the blue hazy rolling country north towards the Barossa valley and the heart of the Down-Under wine growing district.

Digger sat on a ragged plastic deck chair, his legs splayed out in total abandon while Jonathan disappeared into the house then returned shortly holding an icy cold dripping can of Fosters for Digger, a misty glass of white for me and a huge tumbler of red for himself. No apologies, he just loved to drink his wine.

Without preamble Digger asked outright, ‘Jon, we want to borrow your microlight.’ I wished he hadn’t included me in that, I definitely did not want to fly off into one of the world’s most barren, challenging places in a tiny plane made of paper-thin plastic. Powered by a miniature ski-mobile engine.

Jonathan hardly flinched. ‘OK, I really need it back by the weekend though.’ He still didn’t ask why, which you might have imagined would be the first response.

He just sat there.

Digger took out the newspaper article on the Nullarbor lines and thrust it towards Jonathan who paused to watch a car slowly navigate the twisting road beneath the house then briefly scanned the paper. ‘Yes, I half expected you when I saw that, it fits in with the ideas you’ve been talking about for years. Somewhere in here is the beginning of that elusive answer I reckon.’

His eyes squinted towards the West then at the overhead sun; in that look was reason enough for him to have given up his gentle homeland to live in this harsh place. ‘And you’re staking it that this is one of the artifacts?’

‘Yeah, mate. Looks as though I’m not the only one either.’ Digger quickly told Jonathan about the cat and his suspicions of other things. ‘If it is then I guess we are real close and we don’t have that much time left to solve the riddle.’

In agreement, Jonathan nodded in the direction of the car he knew meant a stranger in the area.

A long silence followed. I have no idea how other people get on when long silences happen, perhaps they just let their mind collapse inwards but I am inflicted with a brain which won’t give up, ever. If I try to sit quietly or meditate, the monkey chatter in my conscious brain gets thunderous! Why aren’t you at work? What if the weather turns bad on Saturday? How is it that you don’t finish reading that book? Lord, you didn’t pay the telephone bill!

Mundane stuff which interferes with what I choose to do. I once asked a monk who had spent thirty years of his life as a meditator how it was for him. He replied, ‘Sometimes it doesn’t work.’ At that moment I decided that that discipline was not for me.

‘So, you meeting Kundulla out there?’

‘I guess so. I haven’t called him!’ The joke was no joke at all. There are no telephones in the middle of the Nullarbor, not even for emergencies. In fact there is only one road and one railway line, both running directly east/west and both claiming world record straight stretches as though crossing the alien landscape like hasty arrows. We would have to follow the road in our flying flea and refuel at outpost filling stations because not even the sparsely scattered homesteads carried enough fuel for passer’s by to top up their tanks.

As I watched the two of them complete their conversation, I felt more and more like the limpet ‘third party’ yet knowing my own skills could be essential to the foray. I was happy I’d made the decision to come and content now to wait for more enlightenment when it might be given out.

After exchanging a few more pleasantries Jon invited us to climb into his huge military-style truck. I could see it doubled for a tractor by the clumps of soil clinging to the fat tire treads.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ he said, moving piles of yellowing magazines, vine clippers and muddy boots. His rifle was leaning against the dashboard and he reached up and clipped it to the roof over the windscreen.

‘Bad year for ‘roos. Drought up north.’

At the far end of the farm, next to the only open field, two barns had been cobbled together to form a rudimentary hangar for housing the microlight which was about the only thing dust free and shining on the whole property.

Obviously well cared for and loved not simply, I suspected, for it’s technical capabilities but for the opportunity it gave for free flight to places no other vehicle, by land or air could possible take the adventurous explorer.

Digger and Jon easily wheeled it out on its three balloon tires sitting squat against the red dust and we turned it towards the west for take off into the perpetually prevailing wind. Jonathan stood, hands on wide hips, hat slid back on his head, and paused as he must have done a hundred times to admire his baby.

In the background we could see the myriad steeples of Adelaide, a city abundantly blessed with churches, rising above the mid-afternoon haze, in front the dark green vines in wired rows suspended by white sloping posts at regular intervals. A cockatoo screeched welcome to another aviator and the multi-hued Rosellas flipped from branch to branch of the ghost gum leaning hard on the left downpipe of the hangar. A priest might have taken this in and said, ‘God is Good,’ and nobody here at that reverent moment would have contradicted the thought.

More practical things presented themselves as we refueled the little craft. We found huge blue and red helmets and white overalls hanging on nails in the shed, put them on and slid gingerly into the open cockpit. Well, not really cockpit, more a sort of flat piece of cherry red fiberglass curved up at the front to protect the legs from the wind with the rest open to the world.

‘Watch out for eagles!’ Jonathan yelled into the swirling dust of the prop wash.

The Great Australian Bight is a massive chunk cut out of the southern coastline as though one of the Dreamtime characters had lifted the whole continent from the ocean and taken a giant bite — if that were the case, then the city of Adelaide is built on the indent made by the right hand eye tooth. And the Nullarbor, off to the left, is where the Bugs Bunny teeth would have chomped the Clifs meeting the Antarctic ocean.

We would need to fly north west for many hours to follow the land past the world’s largest deposit of iron ore at Broken Hill then directly west towards the setting sun. Our only protection for a night spent under the wing would be our lightweight aluminum survival blankets.

The nights out there are bitterly cold and next morning we welcomed the morning sun on our backs as we flew for two hours before landing right at the door of a roadhouse to have a cooked breakfast and fill the tanks.

Still heading west we flew parallel to the road until we reached Nundroo then made a right turn to head directly north towards Emu Junction.

Most people mistake the name Nullarbor for a Koori word but in fact the Latins have got to us again and it literally means ‘null arbor’ or ‘no trees’. At 500 feet that is exactly how it looks so we were easily able to spot the tiny camp where Kundulla had been waiting for us for two days.

It was so expected he would be there no-one even commented. He is a full blood Koori with the dark deep-set eyes of the nomad and a few wisps of gray beard now on the broad chin. He seems to be forever smiling.

‘You fellas long time late. We done cook goanna yesterday, him no longer here, gone walkabout in tummy,’ he burst out laughing at his ‘black fella’ talk and reverted to the English accent of a city college. Then, serious for a moment, he hunkered down, scratched at the fire and quietly commenting, ‘When your white government policy separated me from my mother you took away my family, my culture and my language. Same for all Kooris. No language now, no family. But some of us, we took back our culture. Only good thing is, speaking your language, soon you might be able to understand us, what we’re saying.’

I’d known Kundulla since my intern days in Perth. He was then a teenager living in the rubbish dump just north of the city. No-one took much notice of the Koori camp within sight of Central railway station in this bustling little city and the chance of getting an education for those kids was nil. That Kundulla qualified first for correspondence lessons and then grabbed a scholarship to an eastern coast boarding school showed the measure of his abilities. It was especially remarkable because in the early fifties the government still had a policy of snatching Koori babies and sending them far from their families across the country to Christian Mission schools ‘for their own good.’

That it meant their culture and families were destroyed was presumably the covert reason of the authorities whose undeclared mission appeared to be genocide for the First Nations of this primal land.

Kundulla had been with us on many of our expeditions into the red centre of the country but we never imagined we understood his ways more than just a very little.

Now he nodded his head towards his didgeridoo. It was a generous gesture and Digger picked up the heavy instrument, caressing the wood before putting the narrower end to his mouth, sucking in a deep breath and playing one long note, a mixture of melancholy, primitive urge and joyful connection.

Such a sound could make the hair on the back of your neck stand right up.

Kundulla with his eyes closed, began to sway as Digger formed the rhythm and in the peculiar circular breathing of this powerful instrument began declaring ourselves part of this desert, part of this Dreamtime. Part of the present moment. I had my own eyes closed, for this was as near to a truly religious experience as you can get and as he played on and on we were quietly joined by Mirrimbundalla, Kundulla’s friend who had been shyly sitting behind the bark humpy until welcomed by the didge to be part of our Selves.

Just as I slipped into the altered state created by this unity I thought, ‘To Hell with the Ark of the Covenant, if God wants to speak to us he can use the sound from this hunk of wood and this power wave we can feel and we don’t need to disturb the Pope’s sleep one wink.’

Mirrimbundalla (you don’t shorten Koori’s names or they would cease to exist) chuckled at my thoughts and lay back in the sun while hundreds of flies fought for the salt around his eyes.

The didgeridoo faded into silence.

Silence.

More silence.

A nearby Emu scratched at a lazy worm.

Midday.

The sun moved a millimeter or two, unaided.

Digger moved slowly to loosen the fuel cap so the tank wouldn’t explode in the tremendous heat.

Still again.

Kundulla, I swear it, began to mosey! Moving slowly, knees bent, foot following foot through the low scrubby bushes. Suddenly his hand shot out and in one continuous movement he snatched up and whip-snapped a six foot long black snake. Dinner.

Silence.

‘This is definitely a key.’

Kundulla began to speak slowly and quietly.

I watched him speaking and could not understand a word he was saying until I realized he was not making eye contact with us but looking out beyond the horizon. It wasn’t until I sat beside him and looked out to the farthest distance were he was looking that I began to see what he was saying.

He talked of things he had learned as a schoolboy and later as an initiate who had been called to the desert when the elders had come into town and beckoned him to his rightful walkabout amongst the dreaming. I knew he was taking a risk telling us these things because anyone who has spent any time in Australia knows that Europeans can never know their knowledge.

Many anthropologists have come and made fools of themselves by writing books and papers pretending to have gathered the Koori knowledge. The Australians laugh and sell them another bag of wind.

If you were not born Koori no matter how hard you try you will never assimilate the knowing bred into 120,000 years or more of desire to relate to the Dreamtime spirits. They are too far ahead of us.

‘This, what I am going to tell you, is not secret knowing but women’s talk at a corroboree when we party. It is partly what I learned from your school and mostly what I know from no school. It might be Koori ways it might not be. It might be the Great Spirit talking through me. It might be bullshit.

‘Mirrimbundalla here has the churinga for the lines. That doesn’t mean he owns the land, it doesn’t mean he has inherited the land, it means he is the land. I could not be here talking to you without him here too. We are forbidden to speak to you of our own churinga but if he agreed I would be allowed to interpret his to you this once. I will not do that.

‘The physical churinga is a piece of wood usually about two feet long with special markings on it which are like a map of this person’s land. Only one person holds that churinga and it is his reason to be alive. The lines are shown on his carving and as you know from your satellite photos we are camped at the southern end of the most easterly of the major lines. They’re nearly impossible to see from the ground because we’re too close.

‘How we came to know they were here you can guess, how they were made is the sort of crazy question only your so-called scientists would bother asking. Here they are, that is enough.

‘Now you know of them you are becoming awake. There’s always been changes. Nothing new there. It’s time for you whiteys to get off your high horse and realize that you’re here in the physical world, not on loan from some super spiritual place with a ticket back if only you pray the right way. All ‘thee’s and thou’s’.

‘Most of you miss the point of being here at all. Our crowd have known all along that we come here to see ourselves being physical. Spiritual is what comes next, after we die. It is our birthright — or deathright — to be naturally and completely spiritual but only after you have learned how to live fully in this physical world.

‘Spending your life trying to be spiritual is missing the bus in a big way. What you need is being practical, useful to the planet, effective in a skilful way.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Digger shift a little to keep under the shade of the wing. The four of us now squatting in a straight line peering out towards the distant scrub as though the answer was written in the dust of the swirling willy-willys.

‘All of us, we got anger, greed, selfishness and suffering yet you guys deny and suppress this stuff, not getting the chance to learn from them. Oh God! I’m sounding like my stupid Priest preaching crap!

‘So out there you’ve got people who don’t have to worry about their day to day survival, what they call the developed nations!’ It was too much for him, he fell about laughing, ‘all the developed nations, having raped the rest of us have time to spend telling each other of the great spiritual quantum leap they feel is coming. Now that is bullshit man.

‘The real awakening is in making the practical, the everyday.’

‘And is that how the Kooris would see it?’ I asked.

‘No, I’m not a spokesperson for the whole Nation, you know, but if what I say makes sense then it may be how they would say it.’

‘So these lines, and our ‘discovery’ of them by highly advanced technology....?’

‘....means you get to carry the can! Fit them into the whole movie like you said.’

This dusty creature of the desert with the cracked face and bloodshot eyes hadn’t been there when I talked of the movie... oh well, let it pass.

‘This artifact,’ for the first time he looked deep into my eyes, ‘is the first one because here you are at the start of your adventure. It is the mother board of the computer.’

For the rest of the afternoon Digger and I flew many sorties up and down the lines. Mostly taking very accurate compass readings and measuring the precise widths, distances between and so on. It was a cool relief to be moving fast through the still air, at least there weren’t the perpetual flies bothering us.

By early evening we had completed the task and flew gratefully towards the rising column of smoke where Kundulla was preparing some delightful desert delicacy. Fried grubs most likely!

We landed in a cloud of red dust just as he slopped strong black tea out of the billy into two mugs he had with him, the steam visible now as the sun sank beneath the horizon exchanging the blistering heat for the night’s cold blanket.

It was time to celebrate the day and Kundulla picked up his didgeridoo and began the mournful loss with that one slow note coloring the fading light. Into the dusk came a feeling of connectedness, one with the surroundings, human life in the living void. Dark shadows moved not sure whether they were to be people or myths, bushes or children, gold rimmed clouds or the ghosts of elders. Sand and dust swirled in co-creation of being.

Kundulla brought the tip of the long wooden instrument up off the ground and blew the wild eerie call of the desert dog. The dingo would hear and respond, the soul of the land would be supportive, we would be acknowledged for our living.

Gathering into our circle came children now. Fat little bellies waddling over long thin undernourished legs. Round chubby faces already deep set with survival knowledge. A few teenagers, some with raw ropy scars of initiation on their hollow chests the same as Kundulla’s. They appeared from nowhere as if stepping through a rippling time-gate into the present insecure moment for a brief gathering. You somehow knew they could dematerialize on a whim to continue their walkabout.

A few wore scant clothes, the ragged castoffs of another society. Most of them just had a lap-lap of dingy gray cloth tied by straggling threads round their waist. This was not ceremonial time. No-one was here for any ritual; more an inquisitive, eye peering chuckle at the funny white men.

The kids gathered round the microlight, the smallest of them knee high against the oil streaked plastic. I saw Digger move fast as one of the tiny naked boys, leaning against the wheels, let fly a long and accurate stream of urine which nearly filled the hollow seat.

The noise was growing. Didge playing, dancing feet, clicking sticks.

Suddenly without a word they all became absolutely silent, listening. I could not hear a sound and Digger shrugged to me the same. The sun finally collapsed beneath the horizon and in the eerie half light we stood or sat as we had been, a fixed group of frozen images.

‘Flying doctor,’ offered Kundulla, but he was edgy. He knew the outback medical service seldom came this way, it hardly needed to with so few people here and neither was this the route a light plane would take on path from Perth to Adelaide or Alice Springs.

Without a sound we were left alone. No child, no teenager swayed near us, no word had passed but the time gate swallowed them all.

Only now did I hear the sound of the twin engines of a low flying plane on a search pattern, coming louder then fading, louder then fading, then louder again. Either they were in trouble looking for a place to land or they were scanning the desert for lost travelers.

Kundulla leapt to the fire and began heaping dusty soil onto the smoking embers but he was too late, they had spotted us and now flew directly over the camp so low you could see every rivet and feel the pounding of every piston. I saw the hungry leer of the pilot as he swept past and the golden flash of a woman’s hair in the rear seat.

Digger made a leap for the microlight and grabbed the instruments, his bag, and the large sheet of black plastic which accompanies every traveler in this waterless desert, then we raced off to a distance of 100 yards as the intruding plane, standing on it’s wing, looped over to thunder at zero feet across the darkening shrubs.

If we had scoffed at their banal methods before, we lost that idea in a crying moment as the missile they threw from the plane ball-fired into the last rites for our tiny, vulnerable chariot.

‘I guess Jon wont be traveling too far this weekend.’

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