It was hot out, but nothing Mack hadn’t experienced before. Uluru was rushing toward a setting sun, and the rock surface glowed redder than before. Up close it wasn’t as smooth as Mack had expected. In places it looked as if the rock had been sandblasted, like some giant had set out to etch the surface and stopped before revealing any sort of pattern.
“Is this where we’re going?” Mack asked.
“No, this is just our base camp. We’re going up there.” Jarrah pointed toward the top of the rock. “The Indigenous people dislike folks climbing on it. It hurts them. Like watching someone tread on the flag, I suppose. Tourists do it anyway, but this is a sacred place.”
“Like skateboarding in a church,” Stefan said, tilting his head back.
Mack noticed Jarrah’s eyebrows go up, admiring Stefan’s metaphor. Mack suspected it wasn’t a metaphor at all, but something Stefan had actually done.
“But we have permission,” Jarrah’s mother said, “because we’re not skateboarding in church, we’re learning about the church, discovering it.”
“We have to climb up there?” Mack said dubiously.
“It’s not so bad,” Jarrah said.
It was so bad, despite a rope handrail that had been set up in places. They climbed inside a deep crease in the rock face, and in places the cleft was so narrow that Mack had to beware of scraping his shoulders.
By the time they reached the top, Mack was exhausted and his thighs ached and his knees were wobbly. He liked to think he was in decent shape, but he was in decent shape for gym class. Not in decent shape for running from Skirrit, flying clear across the planet, falling from several miles up into the ocean, and then climbing a thousand-foot wall.
Still, the view from the top was stunning. The sun was split by the horizon and sent out crazy streamers of brilliant red and yellow across a boundless sky.
“Nice, eh?” Jarrah asked. “Come on, then, better to reach the shaft while we still have light.”
Uluru was about three miles long, a sloping table-top, pitted and sliced, but overall it looked fairly flat. The shaft was not far away, easily spotted because it was topped by a frame with a winch and a motor.
Mack stepped cautiously to the edge of the shaft. It went straight down, a nearly round hole with no light coming from inside.
Mack could feel his inner fear sensor begin to ring urgently. Already his breathing was constricted, his throat closing up, his heart pounding in some not-quite-rhythmic way.
“When we get down, we’ll turn on the lights,” Karri said.
“Get down?” Mack asked in a shrill voice. “Wait a minute. You think we’re going down there? Down there? Down a black hole in a massive rock where I’ll be totally surrounded by billions of pounds of rock and it will be all around me like I’m buried alive?”
“We have a sort of basket on a winch. You climb in, hold on to the grip, and down you go.
Nothing to it, really,” Jarrah said.
“Ah-ha-ha no. No, no, no, no,” Mack said. “No. No, nonononono.”
Karri and Jarrah both stared at him, puzzled.
“You’re not claustrophobic, are you?” Karri asked.
“I’m not?” Mack shrilled. “Yes. Yes, of course I am. I have, like, a really strong dislike for the idea of being buried alive under some giant mystical rock in Australia!”
Jarrah shrugged. “I thought you’d want to see what Mum found.”
“Me? No. Pictures will be fine. Or even just a description,” Mack said. “Because there is no way, no, no, no, no way. No. Way.
“No.
“No way.
“My point is: no.”
“Well then, this whole trip is a bit of a waste then,” Jarrah said, clearly disappointed. “I mean, I could have shown you pictures back in Sydney.”
“Yes. Well. No one mentioned we were going to drop down a shaft into the bowels of the earth,” Mack pointed out.