Beyond the Black Stump by Nevil Shute

all. I haven’t been out on the location yet, of course. I’ve got some air photographs of the district the last party picked as interesting enough for us to investigate more closely. Would you like to see them?”
    “I would so. Would it be pictures that the aeroplane was after taking a while back, and him so high up in the Heaven he might have been the Archangel himself?”
    “He was up here in June,” said Mr. Bruce. “Most of the photographs were taken at fifteen thousand feet.”
    “Well, Glory be to God, isn’t that a great height for a man to be flying? How far would that be in miles?”
    “About three miles.”
    The old man shook his head. “They’ll be no use to you, no use at all. Ye’ll see nothing any good to you at that distance. Ye should have told him to fly lower.”
    “They tell us all we need to know,” said Stanton. “I have the prints right here in the truck.”
    He walked over to the truck, opened one of his dustproof tin boxes, and brought a sheaf of half a dozen large prints back to the verandah. He handed one to the grazier. “This is the best general view,” he said. “The centre of this picture would be about fourteen miles from here, and practically due west. The scale would be about four miles from edge to edge of the print.”
    Mrs. Regan said, “Mollie, go and get your father his glasses. They’re in the right-hand small drawer of the bureau.”
    She did so, and the old man adjusted the unfamiliar things on to his nose and ears. He peered at the print, and the mouse peered with him from his shoulder. “Well, isn’t that the queer thing to be a picture of the property. Ye’d say to look at it that there’d be no feed on the ground, no feed at all, and the countryside in June as green with spinifex as all the fields of County Wicklow put together.”
    “They always look like that,” said Donald Bruce. The photographs were passed from hand to hand. He took one, and said to the grazier. “Look, this is where we are. You see this river bed?” He traced upon the print with his finger. “Well, that’s what you call Brown Ewe Creek.”
    “Do ye tell me that!”
    “And this line, this very faint, straight one. Can you see it? There.” The grazier blinked behind the unaccustomed spectacles. “Well, that’s the fence between your property and Lucinda Station.”
    “Well, Glory be to God! Isn’t it a great wonder to be taking pictures like that from the air?” He turned to his daughter. “Go tell your Uncle Tom to come and see these pictures, and then tell the Judge himself.”
    Presently Tom and the Judge appeared, somewhat the worse for wear, but a neat rum revived them and they beganto take an intelligent interest in the photographs. Stanton took the opportunity to give them a short lecture on the discovery of oil. “This, right here,” he said, tracing it with his finger, “this is a limestone outcrop such as might hold oil. Or it might not. This, here, is another one. Along this southern edge of both there’s a layer of clay. You can’t see it in the picture, but the geological survey says it’s there.”
    “That’s right,” said Mr. Bruce. “There’s nothing much to see upon the surface, but the limestone—just about
there—
that limestone shows an oil trace when you crack the rock.”
    “I’d say that it’s a typical folded structure with oil traces,” said the geologist. “I’d say
this
might be a small dead fold, and
this
. But
this
one, I’d say he might run right under, with a fold beneath the gypsum outcrops
here
, and
here
. I wouldn’t know yet, but it looks like that to me.”
    “Is that where there’d be oil?” asked Tom.
    “I wouldn’t know, Mr. Regan,” said the geologist. “If there’s a fold in the limestone there it’s my job to find it. If we find one or more folds with an impervious layer on top, then that’s the sort of a formation that is capable of holding oil. We do know this much, that there has been oil here