Down Under by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page B

eighty. They exist in a listless world of heat and dust. If you were looking for people with the tolerance and fortitude to colonize Mars this would be the place to come.
    Because of the heat, most houses in town are burrowed into the faces of the two bleached hills from which the town takes its name. The most ambitious of these dwellings, and the principal magnet for the relatively few tourists who venture this far, is the Dug-Out Underground Motel, a twenty-six-room complex cut deep into the rocks on the side of Smith’s Hill. Wandering through its network of rocky tunnels was like stepping into an early James Bond movie, into one of those subterranean complexes where the loyal minions of SMERSH are preparing to takeover the world by melting Antarctica or hijacking the White House with the aid of a giant magnet. The attraction of burrowing into the hillside is immediately evident when you step inside – a constant year-round temperature of 67 degrees. The rooms were very nice and quite normal except that the walls and ceilings were cavelike and windowless. When the lights were off, the darkness and silence were total.
    I don’t know how much money you would have to give me to persuade me to settle in White Cliffs – something in the low zillions, I suppose – but that evening as we sat on the motel’s lofty garden terrace with Leon Hornby, the proprietor, drinking beer and watching the evening slink in, I realized that my fee might be marginally negotiable. I was about to ask Leon – a city man by birth and, I would have guessed, inclination – what possessed him and his pleasant wife Marge to stay in this godforsaken outpost where even a run to the supermarket means a six-hour round trip over a rutted dirt road, but before I could speak a remarkable thing happened. Kangaroos hopped into the expansive foreground and began grazing picturesquely, and the sun plonked onto the horizon, like a stage prop lowered on a wire, and the towering western skies before us spread with colour in a hundred layered shades – glowing pinks, deep purples, careless banners of pure crimson – all on a scale that you cannot imagine, for there was not a scrap of intrusion in the forty miles of visible desert that lay between us and the far horizon. It was the most extraordinarily vivid sunset I believe I have ever seen.
    ‘I came up here thirty years ago to build reservoirs on the sheep stations,’ Leon said, as if anticipating my question, ‘and never expected to stay, but somehow the place gets to you. I’d find these sunsets hard to give up, for one thing.’
    I nodded as he got up to answer a ringing phone.
    ‘Used to be even nicer once, a long time ago,’ said Lisa, Steve’s partner. ‘There’s been a lot of overgrazing.’
    ‘Here or all over?’
    ‘All over – well, nearly. In the 1890s there was a really bad drought. They say the land’s never really recovered, and probably never will.’

    Later, Steve, Trevor and I went down the hill to the White Cliffs Hotel, the local hostelry, and the appeal of the little town became more evident still. The White Cliffs was as nice a pub as I have ever been in. Not to look at, for Australian country pubs are nearly always austere and utilitarian places, with linoleum floors, laminated surfaces and glass-doored coolers, but rather for the congenial and welcoming atmosphere. Much of this is a tribute to the owner, Graham Wellings, a chipper man with a firm handshake, a matinee-idol hairstyle and a knack for making you feel as if he settled here in the hope that one day some folks like you would drop by.
    I asked him what had brought him to White Cliffs. ‘I was an itinerant sheep shearer,’ he said. ‘Came here in ’59 to shear sheep and just never left. It was a lot more remote back then. Took us eight hours from Broken Hill, the roads were that bad. You can do it in three now, but back then the roads were rough as guts every inch of the way. We tumbled in here gasping for a