But it couldn’t all have been Edna’s fault, though I saw why one needed someone to blame. God himself would have given this spot a miss, assuming it to be waste not hallowed ground, a rubble heap belonging not to the church but to the basketball club.

I took a final walk around the town. Was it my fancy, or did Coober Pedy really turn opalescent in the early evening? I watched the light soften the pink breeze blocks of Jackson Lou, Opal Buyers, anyway, as the sun set over the corrugated water tanks. And I thought I discerned a pearl lustre on the skin of the Aborigines hanging about outside the Billiard Hall. A wind still blew, covering my notebook with red dust, like the blood of a dry scholar. But it was quieter on the streets than I’d yet seen it – a sinister quiet that could have nothing to do with tranquillity in such a place, but suggested the calm between air raids.

Back at the caravan park a queer hush had descended also. Old men wearing bush hats sat immobilized in the front seats of their 4-wheel drives, thinking of the drive ahead. Others drew long lines on atlases, or knelt in the dirt in the shade of their lean-tos, zipping up equipment, not exchanging a word with their travelling companions. Even around the public areas an atmosphere of awful expectation, such as might grip a last outpost, could be sensed. I don’t know how it had fallen out like this but we were all heading in the same direction at the same time; by first light the following morning we would be on the road, pointing north, going for the big one, together. So we were unified in anxiety, but also ultimately isolated, because fear, just like confidence, is a private matter.

While I’d been out walking Ros had been in the campervan, bringing her journal up to date. When I got back I found her stretched out in the back, sleeping. With what looked like a suicide note between her fingers:

George said that some people got claustrophobic inside underground houses like his. Not me. I am claustrophobic in Coober Pedy. The town is in the heart of Australia. Desert everywhere. Everywhere equally far away. I feel I can’t catch my breath. Is it possible I’ll never see an edge again? I long to change my ratios and angles. I must find a sum which unequals my distance from here to anywhere else. I start doing subtractions. There’s no relief. I am in the middle of the desert in the middle of the dead heart of Australia. George horrified me with stories of people who arrive and never leave. He drove past their caves, pointing them out. He warned us, ‘You can stay too long. It can be a mistake. The locals get you and you never leave.’