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without having something to eat; without first collecting a stock of food for their journey. The sea might be farther off than it looked.
    They searched mainly for fruit, but for a long time found nothing. They examined the tawny leopard-trees,the sapless mellowbane, the humble-bushes with their frightened collapsing leaves, and the blood-woods with their overflowing crimson sap. They skirted the kurrajungs and the bottlebrushes and the eucalyptus; then they came to a group of trees of another, rarer kind: graceful, symmetrical trees, covered with thick silver foliage and – miracle of miracles – with multicoloured globules of fruit.
    Peter gave a whoop of delight, and rushed headlong at the longed-for food. For a second Mary hung back, thinking of poison; then she too was leaping and snatching at the balls of fruit. It was a chance they’d have to take.
    The fruit – called quondong by the Aboriginals –was about the size of ping-pong balls, and ranged in colour from greengage-green to plum-red. The redder fruit, they quickly found, were the riper. To the starving children they were ambrosia; sweet and juicy, thirst-quenching and nourishing. They ate, and ate, and ate.
    For a long time they sat in the shade of the quon dong trees, the trees that had saved their lives. They were too happy to talk.
    After a while Mary got up and began to pick more of the fruit: their cache for the trek to the sea. She hummed contentedly as she collected the quondong, storing them first in Peter’s handkerchief then in the folds of her dress. Soon Peter also got up; he wandered across to one of the trees and started lazily to gather the fruit. Working their way from tree to tree, the children drifted slowly apart.
    Though the edge had gone from his hunger, Peter wasn’t altogether at ease. He kept looking nervously at the surrounding bush. He had a strange sort of feeling: a feeling of being watched. Several times he looked up quickly, certain there was someone there; but the bush slept on in the heat of the sun: silent, motionless, apparently deserted. Unconvinced, he sidled back to his sister.
    â€˜Mary!’ he whispered. ‘I think there’s someone here!’
    â€˜Someone here! Where?’
    Disbelieving she swung round. The quondong fell to the grass. Only by snapping her teeth together did she stifle a scream of fear. For there, less than four feet away, so close that she could have stretched out an arm and touched him, was a boy. And he was ebony black and quite naked.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE girl’s first impulse was to grab Peter and run; but as her eyes swept over the stranger, her fear died slowly away. The boy was young – certainly no older than she was; he was unarmed, and his attitude was more inquisitive than threatening: more puzzled than hostile.
    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 higheststrata 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