We were both unable to face the walk back to our hotel. I left Ros in the shade and went to look for a phone. As soon as I found one I rang the various local car-hire companies. Most of them were either no longer in business or not answering their phones. Those I did get were uniformly discouraging. One woman had a Suzuki she could let me have but she didn’t really feel she could recommend it. ‘No air-conditioning in it,’ she said. ‘And no power. So it’s a bit hot, a bit slow and, for what it is, a bit dear.’ I said I’d take it. She told me it would be available first thing the following morning. I explained that my wife was at this very moment expiring under a boab tree, that the bakelite of the telephone receiver was at this very moment liquefying in the heat and running molten down my fingers, and that we needed something right now to get us back either to our hotel or to the infirmary, whichever happened to be the closer.

‘Why don’t you try a taxi?’ she said.

And that was how we came to fall in with Hector. And to stay in Derby somewhat longer than we’d bargained for.

Ex-Presbyterian-public-schoolboy from Perth (your school is always with you in W.A.), one-time administrator, adventurer and meat inspector, but today looking like a renegade senior auditor who’d run off with his best friend’s accounts, Hector Ross in wild and craggy middle age nursed a leg which only didn’t trouble him when he was dancing, ferried Aborigines from their alcohol-free townships to the grog shops and back again, and let it be seen that to be a taxi driver out here in the far north-west was to be a species of eccentric, a kind of buccaneer.

It is necessary to conceive, though, of pretty laconic buccaneering.

‘That’d be right,’ he said, when we told him that we’d had a strange experience in the Derby Disinformation Bureau, just yards from where he picked us up. ‘That’d be right,’ he repeated, when we told him that we’d been strongly urged to take the first lift out. ‘That’s what they all get told.’

I asked him if this meant that it wasn’t therefore necessarily the case that the roads to the gorges were impassable.