It was too hot for me to rise. And I was hating Derby more with every minute. It seemed to be composed of all the elements that make remote country towns vile anywhere in the world. It possessed none of the natural beauty of Kununurra – no orange hills or hidden valleys – and none of its primitive civic bezazz either. No government buildings that I could see. No bustling shops. Just a tumble of sheds unable to hold their outline in the heat haze. And a long dusty highway with too wide a nature strip in the middle, so that merely crossing the road was a migration. I fell into a slumbering bank to cash a cheque. The bank tellers started at the appearance of another mortal. The name of the one who dealt with me was Stormy Collopy. As I remembered, a collop was an egg fried on bacon, or a thick fold of fatty flesh. Had I been forced to live in Derby I would have changed my name at once to Torrid Rind. Back on the main road I found Ros standing like one of the damned, staring down a side street at the end of which you could see miles of sandflats and in the distance the sea bubbling in the heat. The town centre of Hades must offer an identical prospect.

When we finally found the Tourist Bureau it was closed. A chirpy note informed us that it would be open again in half an hour, though it didn’t say in half an hour from when. Suffering from exhaustion, thirst, frustration, and third-degree sunburn, in no particular order, we collapsed into a chicken and chip eatery next door. It’s possible to underestimate the subtleties of Australian cuisine. It might be thought that dry stuffed chicken fried in boiling fat would have been the last thing to ease our discomfort, but in fact a scalded stomach can free the mind wonderfully from all other worries. Bleeding internally, we forgot our peeling flesh. And soon our cheerfulness was very nearly restored, although living symbols of determined defeat were all around us.

A big sad girl was being taught how to prepare garlic bread and how to work the till, but seemed unable to distinguish the two activities. Our change came back reeking of garlic. It’s possible there was small coinage in the bread. The sweat ran down her face and neck, back into the boiling oil.