Walkabout (originally The Children) by James Vance Marshall.
Title: Walkabout (originally The Children).
Author: James Vance Marshall (Donald G. Payne).
Genre: Literature, fiction, survival fiction.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1959.
Summary: A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother, Peter, set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an unnamed Aboriginal boy on walkabout. He looks after the two strange white children, breaking with tradition of his coming-of-age process, and shows them how to find food and water in the wilderness. But Mary's fears and prejudices bring out the darker aspects in the children's voyage, indicative of superstitions and prejudices of the vastly different worlds from which they come.
My rating: 7.5/10
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♥ The little boy nestled more closely against his sister. He was trembling.
She felt for his hand, and held it, very tightly.
"All right, Peter," she whispered. "I'm here."
She felt the tension ebb slowly out of him, the trembling die gradually away. When a boy is only eight a big sister of thirteen can be wonderfully comforting.
♥ The nightlights of the fireflies became pale and anaemic. Out of the east crept a permeating greyness; a pearly opaqueness in the sky; the sun-up of another day.
♥ Sturt Plain, where the aircraft had crashed, is in the center of the Northern Territory. It is roughly the size of England and Wales combined; but instead of some 45,000,000 inhabitants, it has roughly 4,500 and instead of some 200,000 roads, it has two, of which one is a fair-weather stock route. Most of the inhabitants are grouped round three or four small towns - Tennant Creek, Hooker Creek, and Daly Waters - which means that the rest of the area is virtually uninhabited. The Plain is fourteen hundred miles from Adelaide and is not a good place to be lost in.
Had they known enough to weigh up their chances, the children would have realized their only hope was to stay beside the wrecked plane; to rely on rescue from the air. But this never occurred to them. Adelaide was somewhere to the south. So southward they started to walk.
♥ "All right. Let's look for something to eat."
To start with - at least for the boy - it was an amusing game: part of their Big Adventure. They looked in the stream for fish; but the fish, such as they were, were asleep: invisible in the sediment-mud. They looked in the trees for birds; but the birds had vanished with the dawn. They looked in the bush for animals; but the animals were all asleep, avoiding the heat of the sun in carefully chosen burrow, log or cave. They looked among the riverside rocks for lizards; but the reptiles heard their clumsy approach, and slid soundlessly into crack or crevice. The bush slept: motions: silent: apparently deserted. Drugged to immobility by the heat of the midday sun.
The game wasn't amusing for very long.
♥ He wasn't the least bit like an African Negro. His skin was certainly black, but beneath it was a curious hint of undersurface bronze, and it was fine-grained: glossy, satiny, almost silk-like. His hair wasn't crinkly but nearly straight; and his eyes were blue-black: big, soft and inquiring. In his hand was a baby rock wallaby, its eyes, unclosed in death, staring vacantly above a tiny pointed snout.
All this Mary noted and accepted, The thing that she couldn't accept, the thing that seemed to her shockingly and indecently wrong, was the fact that the boy was naked.
The three children stood looking at each other in the middle of the Australian desert. Motionless as the outcrops of granite they stared, and stared, and stared. Between them the distance was less than the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than a hundred thousand years.
Brother and sister were products of the highest strata of humanity's evolution. In them the primitive had long ago been swept aside, been submerged by mechanization, been swamped by scientific development, been nullified by the standardized pattern of the white man's way of life. They had climbed a long way up the ladder of progress; they had climbed so far, in fact, that they had forgotten how their climb had started. Coddled in babyhood, psycho-analysed in childhood, nourished on predigested patent foods, provided with continuous push-button entertainment, the basic realities of life were something they'd never had to face.
It was very different with the Aboriginal. He knew what reality was. He led a way of life that was already old when Tut-ankh-amen started to build his tomb; a way of life that had been tried and proved before the white man's continents were even lifted out of the sea. Among the secret water-holes of the Australian desert his people had lived and died, unchanged and unchanging, for twenty thousand years. Their lives were unbelievably simple. They had no homes, no crops, no clothes, no possessions. The few things they had, they shared: food and wives; children and laughter; tears and hunger and thirst. They walked from one water-hole to the next; they exhausted one supply of food, then moved on to another. Their lives were utterly uncomplicated because they were devoted to one purpose, dedicated in their entirety to the waging of one battle: the battle with death. Death was their ever-present enemy. He sought them out from every dried-up salt pan, from the flames of every bush fire. He was never far away. Keeping him at bay was the Aboriginals' full-time job: the job they'd been doing for twenty thousand years: the job they were good at.
The desert sun streamed down. The children stared and stared.
..The Aboriginal was in no hurry. Time had little value to him. His next meal - the rock wallaby - was assured. Water was near. Tomorrow was also a day. For the moment he was content to examine these strange creatures at his leisure. Their clumsy, lumbering movements intrigued him; their lack of weapons indicated their harmlessness. His eyes moved slowly, methodically from one to another: examining them from head to foot. They were the first white people a member of his tribe had ever seen.
♥ A gust of laughter: melodious laughter; low at first, then becoming louder: unrestrained: disproportionate: uncontrolled.
She looked at the bush boy in amazement. He was doubled up with belly-shaking spasms of mirth.
Peter's incongruous, out-of-proportion sneeze had touched off one of his peoples' most highly developed traits: a sense of the ridiculous; a sense so keenly felt as to be almost beyond control. The bush boy laughed with complete abandon. He flung himself to the ground. He rolled head-over-heels in unrestrained delight.
His mirth was infectious. It woke in Peter an instant response: a like appreciation of the ludicrous. The guilt that the little boy had started to feel, melted away. At first apologetically, then whole-heartedly, he too started to laugh.
The barrier of twenty thousand years vanished in the twinkling of an eye.
♥ Then he turned to Mary.
It was the moment the girl had been dreading.
Yet she didn't draw back. She wanted to; God alone knew how she wanted to. Her nerved were strung taut. The idea of being manhandled by a naked black boy appalled her: struck at the root of one of the basic principles of her civilized code. It was terrifying; revolting; obscene. Back in Charleston it would have got the darkie lynched. Yet she didn't move; not even when the dark fingers ran like spiders up and down her body.
She stayed motionless because, deep-down, she knew she had nothing to fear. The things that she'd been told way back in Charleston were somehow not applicable any more. The values she'd been taught to cherish became suddenly meaningless. A little guilty, a little resentful, and more than a little bewildered, she waited passively for whatever might happen next.
♥ "Mary!" his voice was frightened. "He's gone!"
The girl said nothing. She was torn by conflicting emotions. Relief that the naked black boy had disappeared, and regret that she hadn't asked him for help; fear that nobody could help them anyhow, and a sneaking feeling that perhaps if anyone could it had been the black boy. A couple of days ago she'd have known what to do; known what was best; known how to act. But she didn't know now. Uncertain, she hid her face in her hands.
It was Peter who made the decision. In the bush boy's laughter he'd found something he liked: a lifeline he didn't intend to lose.
♥ Mary looked at the bush boy, and saw in his eyes a gleam of amusement. It angered her, for she knew the cause; Peter's high-pitched, corncrakey voice. All the tenets of progressive society and racial superiority combined inside her to form a deep-rooted core of resentment. It was wrong, cruelly wrong, that she and her brother should be forced to run for help to a Negro; and a naked Negro at that. She clutched Peter's hand, half dragging him away.
But Peter was obsessed by none of his sister's scruples. To him their problem was simple, uncomplicated: they wanted help, and here was someone who could, his instinct told him, provide it.
♥ Seeing him in trouble, Mary also dropped back; and Peter reached for her hand.
The girl was pleased: gratified that in his difficulties he'd turned to her. Subconscious twinges of jealousy had been tormenting her. She had been hurt, deeply hurt, at his so quickly transferring his sense of reliance from her to an uncivilized and naked black. But now things were returning to normal; now he was coming back to the sisterly fold.
♥ The bush boy drank only a little. Soon he got to his feet, climbed a short way up the cairn, and settled himself on a ledge of rock. Warm in the rays of the setting sun, he watched the strangers with growing curiosity. Not only, he decided, were they freakish in appearance and clumsy in movement, they were also amazingly helpless: untaught; unskilled, utterly incapable of fending for themselves: perhaps the last survivors of some peculiarly backward tribe. Unless he looked after them, they would die. That was certain. He looked at the children critically; but there was in his appraisal no suggestion of scorn. It was his people's way to accept individuals as they were: to help, not to criticize, the sick, the blind, and the maimed.
♥ The bush boy selected a large, smooth-surfaced chip, cut a groove along its centre, then placed it in the hollow in the sandstone. Next he took a slender stem of yacca, and settled the end of it into the groove of the chip. The chip was ten covered with wood splinters and sprinkled with powdered resin. Placing an open palm on either side of the yacca stem, the bush boy rubbed his hands together. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the stem revolved in the groove, creating first friction then heat.
As the sun sank under the rim of the desert, a lazy spiral of wood-smoke rose into the evening air.
The bush boy's hands twisted faster. This was the skill that raised him above the level of the beasts. Bird can call to bird, and animal to animal; mother dingoes can sacrifice themselves for their young; termites can live in highly-organized communal towns. But they can't make fire. Man alone can harness the elements.
♥ The girl woke early: in the whiteness and stillness of the false dawn: in the hour before sunrise when the light is very clear and the earth peculiarly still. She lay on her back, watching the stars die and the sky pale. Was heaven there, she wondered; somewhere beyond the stars and sky? If it hadn't been for the bush boy she'd probably know by now.
♥ A few weeks ago she'd have known what to do; known what was best. But here in the desert most of the old rules and the old values seemed strangely meaningless. Uncertain, unsure, she fell back on a woman's oldest line-of-action: passivity. She'd simply wait and see.
The decision brought immediate relief. Now she'd relinquished her leadership and all its implied responsibility, much of her keyed-up tension ebbed away. Rolling on to her back she closed her eyes and fell almost at once into a deep refreshing sleep.
♥ During the meal Mary watched the black boy. They owed him their lives. His behaviour was impeccable. He was healthy and scrupulously clean. All this she admitted. Yet his nakedness still appalled her. She felt guilty every time she looked at him. If only he, like Peter, would wear a pair of shorts! She told herself it wasn't his fault that he was naked: told herself that he must be one of those unfortunate people one prayed for in church - "the people who knew not Thy word": the people the missionaries still hadn't caught. Missionaries, she knew, were people who put black boys into trousers. Her father has said so - "trousers for the boys," he'd said, "and shimmy-shirts for the girls." But the missionaries, alas, evidently hadn't got round to Australia yet. Perhaps that's why it was called the lost continent. Suddenly an idea came to her. A flash of inspiration. She's be the first Australian missionary.
Missionaries, she knew, were people who made sacrifices for others. While the boys were scattering ash from the fire, she moved to the far side of the cairn, hitched up her dress, and slipped out of her panties.
Then she walked across to the bush boy, and touched him on the shoulder.
She felt compassionate: charitable: virtuous. Like a dignitary bestowing some supremely precious gift, she handed her panties to the naked Aboriginal.
He took them shyly: wonderingly: not knowing what they were for. He put the worwora down, and examined the gift more closely. His fingers explored the elastic top. Its flick-back was something he didn't understand. (Back thread and liana vine didn't behave like this.) He stretched the elastic taut; tested it; experimented with it, was trying to unravel it when Peter came to his aid.
"Hey, don't undo 'em, darkie! Put 'em on. One foot in here, one foot in there. Then pull 'em up."
The words were meaningless to the bush boy, but the small one's miming was clear enough. He was cautious at first: suspicious of letting himself be hobbled. Yet his instinct told him that the strangers meant him no harm; that their soft, bark-like offering was a gift, a token of gratitude. It would be impolite to refuse. Helped by Peter, he climbed carefully into the panties.
Mary sighed with relief. Decency had been restored. Her missionary zeal had been blessed with its just reward.
But Peter looked at the bush boy critically. There was something wrong: something incongruous. He couldn't spot the trouble at first. Then, quite suddenly, he saw it: the lace-edge to the panties. He tried his hardest not to laugh - his sister, he knew, wouldn't approve of his laughing. He clapped a hand to his mouth; but it was no good; it had to come. Like a baby kookaburra he suddenly exploded into a shrill and unmelodious cackle. Then, giving way to uninhibited delight, he started to caper round and round the bush boy. His finger shot out.
"Look! Look! He's got lacy panties on. Sissy girl! Sissy girl! Sissy girl!"
Faster and faster he whirled his mocking fandango.
Mary was horrified. But for the bush boy, Peter's antics supplied the half-expected cue. He knew for certain now why the strange gift had been made, knew what it signified: the prelude to a jamboree, the dressing-up that heralded the start of a ritual dance.
..Yet still the dance went on: ever faster, ever wilder. He was swaying now to a drumbeat that couldn't be heard, caught up in a ritual that couldn't be broken. On and on and on; though his muscles were aching, his lungs bursting, his heart pounding, and his mind empty as the cloudless sky. Then suddenly the climax: somersault after somersault, victory-roll after victory-roll, till he was standing, stock still and in sudden silence, face to face with the children.
And once again he was naked; for at the moment of climax the elastic of the panties had snapped, and the gift - symbol of civilization - lay under his feet, trampled into the desert sand.
♥ The girls' eyes grew wider and wider.
The bush boy's eyes widened too. He realized, quite suddenly, that the larger of the strangers wasn't a male: she was a lubra, a budding gin.
He took a half-pace forward. Then he drew back. Appalled. For into the girl's eyes there came a terror such as he'd seen only a couple of times before: a terror that could for him have only one meaning, one tragic an inevitable cause. He began to tremble then, in great, uncontrolled, nerve-jerking spasms. For, to him, the girl's terror could only mean one thing: that she had seen in his eyes an image: the image of the Spirit of Death.
To the bush boy everything had its appointed time. There was a time to be weaned, a time to be carried in arms: a time to walk with the tribe, a time to walk alone: a time for the proving-of-manhood, a time for the taking of gins. A time for hunting, and a time to die. These times were preordained. They never overlapped. A boy couldn't walk before he'd been weaned; couldn't take a gin before his manhood had been proved. These things were done in order.
This was why the question of the girl's sex had never interested the bush boy. Didn't interest him now. For in his tribal timetable he had only arrived at the stage of walking alone: the stage immediately preceding the proving-of-manhood: the stage of the walkabout.
In the bush boy's tribe every male who reached the age of thirteen or fourteen had to perform a walkabout - a selective test which weeded out and exterminated the weaker members of the tribe, and ensured that only the fittest survived to father children. This custom is not common to all Aboriginal tribes, but is confined to the Bindaboo, the most primitive and least-known of the Aboriginal groups who live among the water-holes of the Central and North Australian desert. The test consisted of journeying from one group of water-holes to another; a journey which invariably took some six to eight months and was made entirely unnaided and alone. It was a test of mental and physical toughness far fairer - but no less stringent - than the Spartan exposure of new-born babies.
It was this test that the bush boy was now engaged on. He had been doing well: had covered the most difficult part of the journey. Yet he wasn't, it seemed, to be allowed to finish it. For the lubra had looked into his eyes and seen the Spirit of Death.
Death was the Aboriginal's only enemy, his only fear. There was for him no future life: no Avalon, no Valhalla, no Islands of the Blest. That perhaps was why he watched death with such unrelaxing vigilance; that certainly was why he feared it with a terror beyond all "civilized" comprehension. That was why he now stood in the middle of the Sturt Plain, trembling and ice-cold, his body beaded in little globules of sweat.
Peter looked in amazement, first at the bush boy then at his sister. He couldn't grasp what was happening; couldn't understand how things had gone so suddenly and terribly wrong. Afraid, his recently-acquired confidence quite drained away, he reached for his sister's hand. Then, unexpectedly, he started to cry.
To the boy boy the little one's tears were confirmation: confirmation of what the lubra had seen. He turned away. He left the worwora at the edge of the billabong: he left the lace-edged panties by the ashes of last night's hearth. Slowly he walked away into the desert.
♥ Physically the Australian Aboriginal is tough. He can stand any amount of heat, exposure, or cold; and his incidence to pain is remarkably low. But he has his Achilles Heel. Mental euthanasia. A propensity for dying purely of autosuggestion.
Experiments have proved this: experiments carried out by Australia's leading doctors. On the one hand a group of Aboriginals - voluntarily of course - have spent a day in the desert at a temperature of roughly 95°-100° Fahrenheit, and have spent the night in a sealed-off chamber, thermostatically controlled to a temperature of minus 15° (47° of frost). They slept well without any sort of protection; and, though they were naked, felt no cold. On the other hand, Aboriginals who are a hundred per cent physically fit have been known to die purely because a tribal medicine man has put the death curse on them. One such man was admitted to a state-capital hospital. Thorough tests proved that there was nothing the matter with him; psycho-analysts tried to instil in him the will to live, the will to fight. But in vain. The medicine man had said he was going to die. And die he did: of self-induced apathy.
Death, to the Aboriginal, is something that can't be fought. Those whom the Spirit wants, he takes; and it's no good kicking against the pricks.
Thar was why the bush boy accepted the fact of his impending death without question, without struggle. There was in his mind no flicker of hope. The lubra's terror, to him, could have only the one meaning. He had seen terror like hers before: in a woman's eyes after prolonged and unsuccessful childbirth; in an old man's face when he had become too weak to walk and the tribe had passed him by, leaving him alone, alone in the waterless desert. And so he now stood; without hope; passively waiting; wondering, as he stared across the moonlit valley, how and when the Spirit of Death would come to claim him.
♥ Quite suddenly the bird raised his head; he drew himself erect and, with a stiff-legged goose-step, strutted into the centre of the clearing. Then he started to sing. And in an instant all his drabness was sloughed away. For his song was beautiful beyond compare: stream after stream of limpid melodious notes, flowing and mingling, trilling and soaring: bush music, magic as the pipes of Pan. On and on it went; wave after wave of perfect harmony that held the children spellbound. At last the notes sank into a croon, died into silence. The song was over. But not the performance. For now came a metamorphosis too amazing to be believed. The drab brown bird with its tatty, straggling tail disappeared, and in its place rose a creature of pure beauty. The drooping tail fanned wide; its two outmost feathers swung erect to form the frame of a perfect lyre; and in between spread a mist of elfin plumage, a phantasmagoria of blue and silver, shot with gold, that trembled and quivered with all the beauty of a rainbow seen through running water. Then, hidden behind his plumage, the lyre bird again burst into song. And as he sang, he danced; prancing joyfully from side to side, hopping and skipping to the beat of a high-speed polka. And every now and then his song broke off, was interspersed with croaking chuckles of happiness.
Then, as suddenly as his performance had begun, it ended. The feathers drooped, the polka came to a halt, the singing died. And he as just another bird, scratching the earth for food.
The children walked on. The sun dropped lower. The western sky flowed rose and gold.
♥ The desert, and the children, slept.
♥ The bush boy had never seen such hair, sand-coloured and trailing like the comet that rides the midnight sky. He thought it very beautiful. He lay down on the sun-warmed rock, and stared. Admiringly.
Quite suddenly the girl looked up: looked up straight into his eyes: into his staring, admiring eyes.
She back away. In terror. Her hands, sliding along the bank of the pool, clutched at a loosened fragment of rock. She pulled the rock free; grasped it firmly.
The bush boy came walking down to the billabong. But at the water's edge he stopped: stopped in amazement. For the lubra was snarling at him; was snarling like a cornered dingo, her nose wrinkled, her lips curled back, her eyes filled with terror. He took a hesitant step forward, saw the stone in the lubra's hand and stopped again. Hatred was something alien to the bush boy; but he couldn't fail to recognize the look in the lubra's eyes. He knew, in that moment, that his body would never get its burial platform.
He felt suddenly weaker: much weaker. Things were happening that he didn't understand: didn't want to understand. He looked at the lubra's frightened eyes and snarling mouth, and was appalled. The will to live drained irrecoverably away.
♥ "Say, Mary! You reckon he'll go to heaven?"
"I don't believe you." The girl's voice was muffled. "He's only got a cold."
"I reckon he won't go to heaven. 'Cause he's a little heathen. He's not baptized."
The girl got up: quickly. She started to pace up and down.
"You sure he's real ill, Pete?"
"Course I'm sure. You come an' see."
For a long time the girl was silent. Then she said slowly:
"Yes. I'll come."
They walked across to the mugga-wood: to where the bush boy lay in a pool of shadow. Beside him, the girl dropped hesitantly to her knees. She looked into his face: closely: and saw that what her brother had told her was true.
She sat down. Stunned. Then very gently she eased the bush boy's head on to her lap; very softly she began to run her fingers over and across his forehead.
The bush boy's eyes flickered open; for a moment they were puzzled; then they smiled.
It was the smile that broke Mary's heart: that fast forgiving smile. Before, she had seen as through a glass darkly, but now she saw face to face. And in that moment of truth all her inbred fears and inhibitions were sponged away, and she saw that the world which she had thought was split in two was one.
*
He died in the false dawn: peacefully and without struggle: in the hour when the desert is specially still and the light is specially clear.
The girl didn't know when he died. For she had fallen asleep. Her had had drooped, until her cheek rested on his, and her long golden hair lay tumbled about his face.
..but now, with the flames a-flicker and the stars aglow, they missed him more; missed him with an added poignancy. Peter looked at the Southern Cross, aflame like the jewelled hilt of a sword.
"Mary," he whispered. "Is heaven way up there? Way up beyond the stars?"
"That's right, Peter."
"You reckon the darkie's there?"
"Yes, Pete. I reckon he is."
She said it automatically: to comfort her brother. But in the same moment that she said it, suddenly and unexpectedly, she believed it. More than believed it. Knew it. Knew that heaven, like earth, was one.
♥ And the ghost of the bush boy was with them in every passing plant and stone. For both children had fallen into his ways. They walked now with the bush boy's easy, distance-eating lope; their eyes - like his - were ever questing ahead, studying the terrain, picking out the most promising leads; and every now and then - as he had done - they plucked and ate the pea-sized water-containing pods that dangled from the straggling belts of bush violet: nature's thirst quenchers. It was the same that evening, when, an hour before sundown, they made camp. His ghost was in the yacca wood they picked for their fire; in the sun-warmed desert stones they chose for their hearth; in the roots of the wondilla grass and stalks of sugar cane they ate for supper. They lived as he had lived. Like his shadows. Adaptable as adults could never be, they made the desert their home.
♥ Soon the two children were watching the platypus at play.
There were three of them: mother, father, and half-grown child. The adults were about twenty inches long; four-footed, fur-covered, and with enormous duck-like beaks. They were aquatic mammals - a link with the prehistoric past - web-footed egglayers; teatless milk producers - the lactic fluid being exuded through the female's skin pores; poison-fanged amphibians, with fangs in the hollow of the male's hind feet. No wonder the children stared in amazement!
♥ By midday they were traversing a rocky barren terrain, its only trees the drooping mugga-woods, its only flowers the everlasting daisies: the flowers that never die; that live on, even after their petals, leaves, stalks, and roots have crumbled and withered away.
♥ It was cooler in the hills, and they were glad of the warmth of the fire. The girl had dragged up an extra large supply of branches; and from these she picked out a couple of arm-thick trunks, and tossed them on to the fire. The sparks flew skyward; wreaths of wood-smoke drifted across the stars; down-valley a dingo howled at the crescent moon. Charleston was in another world.
♥ "Kurura. Maybe that valley's over the next hill."
But it wasn't. Nor over the next. Nor the next. Nor even the one after that, which they reached in the golden sunset.
They camped for the night beneath a low shelf of granite. They were hungry and thirsty; exhausted and disillusioned. There was no wood for a fire, no water for a drink. The sunset wind was cold; and so, when they came out, were the stars: cold and uncaring: cold and uncaring and very far away.
♥ He called Mary, and together brother and sister experimented with pieces of moistened clay. They found that it drew like chalk on a blackboard; and soon the lakeside rocks were covered with drawings: crude but evocative drawings: drawings that would have been a psychologist's delight.
After a few experimental dabs and smudges, the children settled down to their respective works of art. Peter drew koalas, lizards, and Jesus-birds: symbols of the new life. But Mary drew girls' faces framed with glamorous hair styles, dress designs that might have come out of Vogue, and strings of jewels like the Fifth Avenue advertisements: symbols of the life that was past. And after a while she drew something else: something even more revealing: a house. A simple outline: one door; one window; one chimney; one pathway lined with flowers. Symbol of subconscious hopes and nightly dreams.
The sun dipped under the rim of the hills. The children left their drawings; they stretched out, side by side, in front of the fire. Darkness on velvet wings came flooding into the valley.
♥ "You reckon they're white men, Pete? Or black, like the darkie?"
The children strained their eyes as the swimmers came steadily nearer. They swam in single file; and it seemed to Peter that their heads were black and abnormally large.
"I reckon they're darkies, Mary. Darkies with big heads!"
The gild nodded; she'd come to the same conclusion herself. She had expected to be terrified at the thought of herself being naked and the strangers being black; yet now that the fact of their blackness had to be faced up to, she realized - unexpectedly - that she wasn't nearly as frightened as if they'd been white! Holding Peter's hand, she stood at the edge of the water, waiting.