Darkness Visible by William Golding Page B

native, the Aborigine—did you know they insist on being called Aboriginals as if they were adjectives?—but we did feel that perhaps we owed you something—”
    He leaned forward over his clasped hands.
    “—And before we part—tell me. Do you have some kind of, of perception, some extra-sensory perception, some second sight—in a word, do you— see ?”
    Matty looked at him, mouth shut like a trap. The secretary blinked.
    “I only mean, my dear fellow, this information you feel called on to press on an unheeding world—”
    For a moment or two Matty said nothing. Then slowly at first but at the last with a kind of jerk, he got himself upright on the other side of the desk and stared not at the secretary but over him out of the window. He convulsed but made no sound. He clenched his fists up by his chest and the words burst out of his twisted lips, two golfballs.
    “I feel!”
    Then he turned away, went out through one office after anotherand into the marbled hall then down the steps and away. He made some strange purchases and one, a map, that was not so strange and he put everything he had into his ancient car, and the city knew him no more. Indeed Australia knew him no more as far as eccentricity is concerned. For the short remainder of his stay he was noticed for nothing but his black clothes, and forbidding face. Yet if human beings had little more to do with him in Australia there were other creatures that had. He drove for many miles with his curious purchases and he seemed to be looking for something big rather than small. He wanted, it seems, to be low down and he wanted to find some water to be low down with and he wanted a hot and fetid place to go with it all. These things are specific and to be found together in known places but it is very difficult most of the time to get close to them by car. For this reason Matty took a winding course in strange places and often enough had to sleep in his car. He found hamlets of three decaying houses with the corrugated iron of their roofs grinding and clanking in a hot wind, and not a tree for miles. He passed by other places of Palladian architecture set among monstrous trees where the red galahs squawked and lilies loaded the tended pools. He passed men riding round and round in little trapsdrawn by horses with a delicate high step. At last he found what no one else would want, looked at it in the bright sunlight—though even at noon the sun could scarcely pierce through to the water—and he watched, perhaps with a tremor that never reached the outside of his face, the loglike creatures that slipped one after another out of sight. Then he went away again to find high ground and wait. He read in his Bible with the wooden covers and now, for the rest of the day he trembled slightly and looked closely at familiar things as if there was something in them that would bring comfort. Mostly of course he looked at his Bible, seeing it as if he had not looked at it before and noticing for what that was worth how the wood of the cover was boxwood and he wondered why and thought aimlessly it might be for protection which was strange because surely the Word did not need it. He sat there for many hours while the sun took its wonted way over the sky and then sank and the stars came.
    The place he had looked at now became additionally strange in the darkness which was thick as the darkness an old-time photographer thrust his head into under the velvet. Yet everyother sense would have been well enough supplied with evidence. Human feet would have felt the soft and glutinous texture, half water half mud, that would rise swiftly to the ankles and farther, pressed out on every side with never a stone or splinter. The nose would have taken all the evidence of vegetable and animal decay, while the mouth and skin—for in these circumstances it is as if the skin can taste—would have tasted an air so warm and heavy with water it would have seemed as if there was doubt as to whether