‘It’s a good idea,’ Arch added, ‘always to check the toilet bowls in these parts.’

‘Just in case,’ Louise said.

‘To be on the safe side,’ Humpy confirmed.

‘I could feel the cold beer heating up in my can. When I put it to my lips it was hot and flat. But it wasn’t only my beer that they spoiled. I instantly made a decision – and never veered from it – that I would eschew all ablutions for whatever time remained to me in Camballin.

A bad night in the house. The air-conditioner was impossibly noisy, but we couldn’t consider trying to sleep without it. It seemed unreasonable of Ros, to me, to consider trying to sleep at all. I believed that she owed it to me, since outback travel was her idea, to sit up all night and guard me, on python-watch.

I woke up in the middle of the night and saw something vile suspended from the ceiling. I closed my eyes but whenever I opened them again it was still there. A long brown thing, swaying, with some kind of diaphanous sac – a breeding place for more of the same – appended to its tail or underbelly. The fact that I was unable to recognize it, or know whether there was another such creature like it in the whole of Nature, only made it the more disgusting. I thought of George Grey, sitting on a rock in this frightful, alien land, contemplating the ‘indifferently executed’ examples of Aboriginal art around him, the ruin of his once proud expedition at his feet – the dead ponies, the parched dogs, the appalled, convulsive men – when suddenly ‘a curious mis-shapen mass came advancing from some bushes with a novel and uncouth motion’. And I remembered how this turned out to be a boa crushing a kangaroo. Well, something equally novel and uncouth, something equally horrifically Australian, swung slowly from the ceiling, a mere three feet above my defenceless head. Out of pure terror I willed myself to sleep.

When I woke in the morning I was wrapped around in the single sheet that had covered us as in a cocoon, and I was glued, by the exudations of bodily fear, to the person who had got me into this. Above me, still swaying lightly in the air flow from the conditioning unit, was a wire flex and the brown plastic fitting of the electric light attachment. The vile diaphanous sac was the light bulb.

Still eschewing all ablutions, but attending briskly to everything else, I braced myself for a day with Neil. We were to be off early, to try the roads to the gorges, and to be back at Derby before dark. But first Neil insisted on preparing us a massive breakfast. With every rasher of bacon I swallowed I heard another item entering itself, with that dead springless click of electronic technology, into the computer.