It’s a word she particularly despises. But I had to leave. Speleophobia was gaining upon me. I began the crunch back myself, while she approached the water, trying its depths and temperature with her foot. What stopped her diving into the invisible pool she still doesn’t know. Under normal circumstances my ‘No’ would have put the issue beyond doubt. She would have been in there. But this time something made her hesitate. A bad feeling. She was on her way to join me, in fact, when a loud swish! – a sound as of a crocodile’s tail turning, a crocodile in a fury of frustration – made us both start. The cave echoed with the disturbance – the walls of slime wanting none of it and throwing it back, a ripple of bat restlessness high above us. Ros was quickly by my side. Even in the darkness I could feel that she was white.

We hurried out into the daylight, where once again the black butterflies materialized from the rocks, and where the smell of fried onions and sausages and lamb chops and steak and tinned tomatoes told us that our personalized bush-lunch was ready for us.

Bent over the frying pan, Neil recalled his first camping holidays with Robin, when they were happy and not near the premature fruition of a ten-year plan. He’d originally met Robin, he told us, at the bar of the Boab, where she was pausing briefly for refreshment before continuing her journey around Australia. ‘Will you marry me?’ he’d asked her after an acquaintance of about fifteen minutes. ‘She looked at me as if I’d crawled out from under a stone, so I thought, “Hello here’s a challenge,” and I pursued her around the country until she agreed.’

‘You’ll find,’ Ros told me at a later date, ‘that many Australian women marry the men they do only to put an end to the curse of their petitionings.’

Not wishing to argue with an authority, I accepted her word for it. As I accepted her observation that on the night we all four ate sunshine potatoes together Robin had transferred her rings of betrothment from her left hand to her right.

After the steak, lamb chops and sausages, Neil prepared us egg-jaffles, followed by tinned fruit salad and Carnation milk, followed by biscuits and billy-tea. We sat under the shade of a huge white ghost gum and rested, the conversation turning at last, as it always will between small business people, to turnover. Turnover talk, in fact, is merely a primitive form of hierarchy jostling. Unless you are a fool you tell your turnover only to someone whose turnover you calculate to be lower than your own. In the brief preliminary tussle that took place in the shadow of the King Leopold Ranges, Neil effortlessly wrenched power, dazzling us with figures of such enormity that there wasn’t the faintest likelihood thereafter of our daring to mention figures ourselves.