The Confessions of a BeachcomberBanfield, E. J. (Edmund James)
History
The Confessions of a Beachcomber
Banfield, E. J. (Edmund James)
Dunk Island (Qld.); Natural history -- Australia -- Queensland
I scaled and scrambled over and crawled upon huge rocks, peered into
gloomy crevices with daylight edges fringed with ferns and orchids,
squeezed through narrow tunnels, and groped in dark recesses without
finding any evidence of prehistoric art. Blacks do not care to venture
into places where twilight always reigns, though they are curious to
learn the experiences and sensations of other explorers of the gloom. At
last, however, patience was rewarded, and beneath a great granite rock,
which on three previous excursions had been overlooked, the paintings
were discovered. In their execution the artist must have lain on his
back, for the "cave" does not permit one to sit upright in it, except
towards the wide and expansive front, and the subjects are on the
ceiling, which is fairly flat. The floor, thick with a fine brown dust
mingled with shining specks of decomposed granite, and dimpled with
hundreds of pitfalls of the ant-lion, slopes upward. It is cool, and a
dry, secure spot. Not even the torrential rains of many decades of wet
seasons have damped the floor. One feels as though he were disturbing
the dust of ages; when sitting back to admire the decorated ceiling, he
necessarily imprints patterns which are the replicas of those made by
flesh and bone long since numbered among the anonymous dead.
The sea laves the hot rocks 600 feet below, and booms and gobbles in the
cool crevices; but up here the outlook is obscured by rocks and giant
trees, and an artistic soul, longing for some method of expression,
might serenely gratify itself in accordance with its lights--crude though
they were. Here, at the entrance, lie a couple of charred sticks,
significant of the last fire of the artist, which smouldered out perhaps
half a century ago. On the very doorstep is a disc of pearl-shell, the
discarded beginning of a fish-hook. These relics give to the scene a
pathetic interest. As I looked at them ponderingly, a frog far in the
back of the cave gave a discordant, echoing croak, which started the
sulky and suspicious black boy who attended me into an abrupt
exclamation of semi-fright; while a scrub fowl, scratching for its living
overhead, dislodged a chip of granite which went clicking down the
rocks. "Tom," at the instant, felt that the spirit of the departed was
manifesting, in the hollow tones of a frog and the activity of a bird,
resentment at the intrusion of his haunts, and was warning us to begone.
But we had come far on a toilsome errand, and were not to be scared away
by trifles, though a transient feeling of reluctance to disturb the
solemnity of the studio could not be withheld.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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