TRUE LIFE STORIES. The Death Stone

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3938, 11 August 1937, Page 9

TRUE LIFE STORIES. The Death Stone

(By

YON L. IDRIESS.)

AUSTRALIA’S MOST POPULAR WRITER.

—Copyright.

A true life story of the Australian aboriginal which shows the remarkable power the witch doctors exercise over the superstitious minds of the natives.

Warrigal felt peculiarly drowsy and stupid that morning. Dimly, his animal-like brain wondered why he was not out by the pleasant cookingfires with the others of the tribe. How quiet they all were! No loud talk of the young men, no laughing chatter of the gins, no squeals from the piccaninnies.

His favourite hunting-dog, too, was not sleeping by his side! Angrily Warrigal sat up. His fierce eyes instantly saw on the side nearest his heart, where his dog should have been lying, a little round, flat stone. The Death Stone! For long breaths Warrigal sat staring in the gloom of his gunyah, a rugged black statue, midway between beast and man. His brain could grasp only one thing at a time. Some unknown enemy had “pointed the bone” at him. Then the spirits of the dead had brought the Death Stone to h>s side by night. And now he must go away and die!

As in a daze, he crawled through the gunyah-opening, and stood upright in the new morning air. The birds were trilling with the sweetness of freshly awakened life; mists arose from the long, wet grass; the big Sungod was peeping over the grey mountain range that hid the sea.

Mechanically, Warrigal grasped his spears and wommera, and walked slowly away towards the grey range

which held the burial-ground of his people. From the tribesmen clustered around cooking-fires came no sound of farewell, no sign, though all eyes watched him go. Only a young gin wept bitterly. But as Warrigal strode on with all the litheness gone from his sinewy kgs, his mind was bitter- only against his hunting-dog. It had not followed him! When the Sun-god shone fiercely in his domed home Warrigal came to the base of an old grey mountain towering far above all else of the big, grey range Around him lay in con-

fusion fallen granite boulders often as ■Jarge as the gunyahs the strange white men build. Far away towards the Sun-god’s world, where the whitetufted eagle was circling, the grey boulders were piled in numbers like the sands of the sea. Here, in the

days of old the gods of the earth and I sky and stars had thrown stones at each other until, tired of their play, they had piled the stones in one mountain heap. Wandering white men cad this gloomy landmark the Black Mountain. It lies in lonely majesty inland behind Cape Melville, in farnorthern Queensland. No trees, no vegetation grow on those boulders or in between. But on the flat summit, where lies a little loan, there cling stunted, gnarled trees, twisted and wrenched and tossed by the fierce winds of the sea, bent and bowed like the forlorn crosses on lone graves of white men.

Without hesitation, Warrigal began slowly to climb the- mountain, choosing a zigzag course which picked out the interlocking boulders in such a way that a man could step from one broad surface up to another. Black men had climbed the grey mountam that way before some among white men had learned to hew a club out ot stone. Warrigal never paused, but his steps grew slower, his heart sank tower as he climbed in the footsteps of the ghosts that had gone before.

At last he reached the wind-blown summit, and standing there as the first man may have .stood back m the mists of time, concentrated his gaze on the far-flung sea. He did not glance at the dwarfed trees. He knew wha. was there. Those hungry roots were deep in dust brown, human dusAround their twisted butts la Y ®ku- ’ of blackish-grey with little earth-col-oured holes where air and lain < - • sun had bored through. There were many brown, and some a dirty greywhite, and others that glistened from the kiss of the sun; these last th. eagles had picked clean, and the ramstorms had washed sticlis thev lay in their crude bed of stie> nd twisted branches. Two were thus through the branch. ’ to . the wind swayed * em th y •=> snake gether in curious *° und ’ was nisiling through dry grass. Ths the Xburial ground of billows

played along the Great Barrier Reef. The sea was life. And though he was soon to die Warrigal, like all things, wild or civilized, wanted to gaze on life to the last. He could see ths squat shape of Nobel- Island like a black toad close inshore, and far out, over Rugged Cape Melville, the tall, needle-like peak of the largest of the Howick Group. He climbed a little way down th? mountain-lip, not dairing to rest on the summit, for at night all the spirits of the dead -people would play there. Warrigal shivered. He chose a gloomy, narrow-mouthed cavern whose rough walls were furred by the scraping past of rock-.wallabies. The animal smell of this home of wild things pleased his nostrils. He squatted down with his back to the mountain summit, sta-ing stonily out to sea l —waiting.

Coming from the bowels of the mountain was the splash of running water among the piled-up boulders. y r arrigal knew that the lilting gurgle among the deeper tones of this subterranean organ was really the laughter of spirits at play, awaiting the cloak of night before they came out to dance on the mountain-top. When the long day sped, the Sungod, sinking to sleep far behind the mountains, drew his blanket over the world. So came the hush hour when the live things of day retire and those of night get ready to prey over the earth. The wind died down until only the spume of its breath came with the softening boom of the rollers on the rocky shore below. Across

the black sky a spreading net of stars twinkled brighter and brighter. With a sudden, stiff cat’s-paw came the jangle of bones swaying from the branches of a tree. The black man, motionless in the cavern, hunched his shoulders and hips so close that his body shrank by half. His mat of coarse hair shivered noticeably; he thrust a wrist in his open mouth to silence the snapping of his teeth. His livid, unseeing eyes glared out over the vast, slow-moving boso.-n of the sea. The spirits of the dead had come out to play.

A shriek rose from the summit, its fearful echoes rang through and through the honeycombed caverns. Again and yet again that laugh rang out. Then silence spread over the world until through the waiting moments there came the muffled beat of wings. The night-hawk, sitting hunched up in the burial trees, had called his mate for the evening meal. Late on the third day Warrigal sensed his Death Spirit drawing very near. His instinct, razor-edged, felt it coming closer to touch him. Noislessly in the playing sunlight at the cavern’s mouth stepped lissom Wy-wee, the young gin; like a spirit girl she came, her parted lips seemed breathless as the terror in her violetblack eyes. She gripped a freshly-kill-ed squirrel.

Long she gazed at the crouching man whose wild, fixed eyes stared past her ever the sulnit sea. Then she knelt on the cold rock and edged up to him beseeching his unseeing eyes, fondling her forehead against him, softly whispering his name. With tender hands she brushed his stiff, grizzled hair that was only a few days ago so healthy and black, but now a tangle of greying bristles. Beseechingly Wy-wee held the squirrel to her man. He moved not; he might almost be dead. She glided from the cavern and ran upward towards the summit, jumping the rocks like a wallaby. In unspeakable terror she snatched dry sticks from beneath the grizzly trees, her fingers tingling from the dead things among the dead wood, then fled down the rocks back into the cavern. Shivering violently she bent over the sticks, rubbing two together with a twirling motion of marvellous rapidity. Soon they produced the faintest breath of smoke, then a stranger breath that grew' a puff with warmth in it, then a quickly increasing spiral of hot smoke that burst into bright flame.

Deftly she arranged the fire and laid on it the squirrel. The smell of singeing fur filled the cavern and drifted away through the open spaces between the rocks. As Wy-wee turned the tiny animal on the blazing coa s an appetising odour of roast meat mingled with the incoming sea breeze. The Sun-gcd was sinking to rest. Thu cooking completed, Wy-wee invited

But he sat like a ‘hing of stone. Tearing off a hind-leg she pressed the warm flesh between her man’s lips. It met only a line of set teeth. Throwing the meat aside she sobbed on the chest of the doomed man. The following noon three black shadows fell across the mouth of the cavern. Two of them, charm-painted, seized Wy-wee and dragged her screaming from the motionless Warrigal. Eurahah, the dreaded wizarddoctor of the tribe, stood a silent moment, gazing with snake-like eyes into the wild eyes of Warrigal, now fired with the stare that comes just Wore the death-film. Satisfied, Euijahah