Going Camping

For many years, I have been camping in the bushland West of Sydney. Every chance I get, I take my backpack and tent and head out. The areas that I had always visited had been gaining in popularity over recent years, and many of my old favourite spots had become too well known. I would trek for a day, only to find that others had already pitched their tents in the best locations.

Most of these other campers weren't what I consider to be "serious" campers. Usually they drove their cars as close to the campsite as they could get and then walked for only half an hour or so. They would bring their portable toilets and various other paraphernalia and set themselves up, and say how glad they were to "get away from it all". And then they would pull out the battery powered TV and complain how lousy the reception was.

As a result, I found myself heading off into other parts of the park. Much of the country is wilderness, the only people to ever visit much of it, the occasional aboriginal tribe. I actually found myself to be enjoying these sojourns even more, and started coming more and more often.

Eventually, I began to tire of city life, my heart and mind belonging more and more to the eucalyptus trees, clean air and wild animals. Much to my own surprise, I found myself quitting my job, selling all my furniture and possessions, and setting out for a life off the land.

I walked for several days, getting well away from any towns or cities, and even the camping areas. Eventually I found what I decided would become my home. I had been crossing through a small forest when I nearly fell off a cliff, into a lake far below. One moment I had been pushing my way through the undergrowth, the next, my foot came down on empty air. Only by grabbing a low-hanging branch was I able to save myself from the several hundred feet drop.

The view was spectacular. The lake was several miles long and about a mile wide and shone with a vivid blue that one so rarely finds in man-made environments. Surrounded by bushland, there were several sandy beaches scattered about its shores. Five small islands were dotted about the middle.

Making my way along the cliff, looking for a way down, I found an old animal track winding down.

Following it, I found that it went all the way to a rock platform that jutted into the lake.

A small, freshwater waterfall splashed down at one end of the platform.

What decided me though, was the cave.

At the other end of the rocks, a doorway sized cavity could be seen. Curious, I entered. It was pitch black inside so I took a torch from my backpack, lit it, and stepped inside.

From the flickering flames of the torch, I could see a tunnel extending in front of me. Watching out for snakes and spiders, I started in.

After only a few feet, the tunnel turned and all light from the outside was cut off. After only another few feet, the tunnel suddenly widened into a large cavern.

Looking about me, my jaw dropped and I sank slowly to my knees in awe.

At one stage, this cavern must have been occupied by an Aboriginal tribe. All about me, the walls were painted in their unique styles. Earthy colours depicted scenes from the Dreamtime. Stylised animals were chased by depictions of men and women hunters. Scenes from everyday life were depicted.

I had studied Aboriginal history at University and was able to decipher many of the stories. I found a painting that I realised represented the local area. The lake was clearly defined, including the location of the cavern and the best hunting and fishing areas. There was a warning symbol at the other end of the lake.

I was familiar with the symbol and knew that there would be an explanation nearby.

After a few minutes search I found it. And became confused. Normally if there was a dangerous animal or natural formation there, it would be carefully explained, pictorially. This warning carried some of the most potent warning symbols that the aborigines ever used, but it made no sense.

I could find what look to be a depiction of several crystals, but could not understand what they meant. They were placed in the centre of the warning, so it was them that the tribe were warning against. But how could crystals be dangerous? Perplexed, I reasoned that the crystals must be symbolic of something else. To the tribe living here, it was probably very obvious, but to me, it meant nothing.

I knew that there had been no tribe living in this area for nearly a hundred years. I also knew that they would not object to me living in the cavern. This was a place of life, and all life was welcome there.

* * * * *

I settled into my new life quite easily. There was plenty of fish in the lake and game in the forest. Supplementing the meat with berries and other vegetation, I became content. My days were spent hunting, foraging and exploring. My nights were spent gazing at the stars and thinking deep thoughts.

The peace and tranquillity of the place slowly seeped into my bones.

I was on one of my many treks about the lake that I heard the noise. It sounded like the buzzing of bees, and it took me a while to work out what it was. Dirt-bikes.

I sighed. Despite my efforts, the outside world had intruded. Eventually the noise faded away, but still the feeling of violation persisted.

The bikes returned every couple of days, but the noise was distant and I never saw them. Strangely enough, it was their reappearance that motivated me to investigate what the pictures in the cavern were warning about. Up till then, I was quite happy to leave the matter alone, and just to stay away from the other end of the lake. For some reason, the bikers made me want to investigate it.

I suppose it was just so that I would be able to give a reason to the riders to stay away from the area, if I knew what it was I was warning them about.

Grabbing my newly carved walking stick and some water bottles, I set out early one morning. It took me a couple of hours to reach the end of the lake, being in no hurry. It's funny, when I lived in the city, whenever I walked, I walked fast. Even when I was not trying to get somewhere on time, I still walked as though I was late for something important. Now that I was away from all that, my pace was much more leisurely.

Upon reaching the area, I found several more warning signs, engraved and painted on rocks and trees. My curiosity aroused even more, I moved past them anyway.

After another fifteen minutes walk, I stopped, agog.

A small cleft in a hill lay in front of me, only several feet wide and thirty or so feet deep. And yet it looked like a slice of the night sky. Millions of pinpricks of light shone in the darkness of the cleft. The crystals in the painting now made sense.

Stepping into the ravine, I looked at the walls, my suspicions confirmed. Thousands upon thousands of crystals were embedded in the walls of the cleft, shining brightly in the gloom.

The warnings were beginning to make a kind of sense. Perhaps the reason the people of the area had deemed this place dangerous, was because of the feelings it invoked. I wanted this place to be my own secret. I knew that the crystals would be virtually worthless as a commodity in a modern marketplace, but to an ancient people, they could have represented great wealth. Perhaps this place had caused animosity, greed and hatred in the people, and so they declared it a dangerous place.

I was starting to get a headache, probably from the refracted light shining in my eyes, and I sat down to take a drink of water. Instead of clearing, the ache began to get worse. My head started to spin and I felt both dizzy and nauseous.

Around me the cave began to swim and swirl. I doubled over suddenly as a wave of nausea washed over me. My head ablaze with pain now, I started to crawl out of the cleft, back into daylight.

I had never felt a pain like this before. It felt like someone was stabbing me between the eyes with a sharp rock and my body was racked with spasms.

As soon as I was entirely in daylight, the pain disappeared.

Just like that.

One moment I had been in complete agony, the next, everything was ok.

I rolled over and looked back at the cleft, confused. Was that what the warning was about? Was the cleft the reason I had been in pain?

All thoughts of reason fled my mind as I looked at the cleft. No longer was it a cleft. Instead, it was a wide ravine, hundreds of feet tall and wide. My jaw dropped as my mind tried to grapple with the impossible reality of the situation. Afraid of what I would find, I slowly turned around to the forest.

My legs disappeared from beneath me, but I didn’t even notice I was sitting down again. Instead, my mind went into shock as I looked at the mile tall trees.

I had shrunk!

* * * * *

I sat like that for about an hour, just looking around me, my mind reeling from what it knew to be impossible. Eventually my other senses rallied and overrode my brain. I had indeed shrunk to a height of about 4 inches. Finally I dragged myself to my feet and took stock of situation.

My clothes and backpack had shrunk with me, so whatever had happened, it wasn't biological. My only thought was that it had to be the chasm and the crystals. That was what the aborigine's had been warning about. The crystals shrunk whatever went into the chasm.

I could barely look at the chasm without my stomach turning over. One thing was for sure, I was not about to step back into it. If my first encounter had reduced me to 4 inches tall, next time I could be reduced to sub-atomic.

My only chance lay back in the cave where the warning had been. There was still one or two off-shoot tunnels that I had not fully explored. Maybe there would be another message there, one that told how to reverse the shrinking.

Shouldering my backpack, I set off towards my home. What had been a nice, easy walking path, had now become an obstacle course. Twigs and pebbles were like fallen trees and boulders to me now.

It soon became obvious that I was never going to reach the cave before night fell. It had taken me two hours to walk here when I had been normal sized. It was likely to take me at least two days to get there now.

I found a cavity in an old log that I was able to squeeze into. It was spacious inside with only the one opening. I had found it a tight fit getting through that opening, so hopefully any nocturnal predators wouldn't be able to get through at all.

I spent a restless night inside that log. My mind refused to slow down, continually spinning from one thought to another. What if there was no remedy? What if I was stuck this size forever? What if I came across a wild animal? Another person?

By the time dawn came, I was more tired than when I had gone to bed. Never-the-less, I forced myself to resume my trek.

Several times during that day, I heard the dirt bikes. I didn't know if it was because my hearing was more sensitive, or something else, but they sounded a lot closer than they ever had before. As dusk arrived that day, I found myself at the edge of the lake, looking across an expanse of water, towards my cave. I estimated I had maybe half a days walking in front of me.

What made me stare though, was the camp fire that was burning on the rock shelf. Someone was in my cave.

* * * * *

I woke the next morning, cramped and sore, to the roar of engines. The log I was in started to vibrate as the sound grew. Stumbling out of the entrance, I tried to find where the noise was coming from, my head turning wildly. The noise was deafening now.

Movement from the side caught my attention. I didn't have time to think, just throw myself out of the way as a dirt bike thundered through the clearing. The wheels missed me by bare inches. The spray of dirt that it kicked up showered down on me. Across the clearing, another three bikes roared past.

When they were gone, I dusted myself off and pulled my pack out of the log, then set off back to the cave again. Hopefully I could get there before the bike riders returned.

Part 2

It took me till nearly midday to reach the entrance to my cave. Occasionally I had heard the sound of the dirt bikes, but they were always distant. I passed the ruins of the fire that they had built, still smouldering. I shook my head at their stupidity. It was summer, and bushfires had started from less than that. There was nothing I could do at my size to douse the ashes, so I headed into the cave instead.

I despaired when I got into the cavern proper. My torches were still burning and in their orange flow, I could see the results of the bikers stay.

Not a single drawing had escaped their vandalism. Bright, garish colours had been sprayed across every ancient drawing. Most of the graffiti was obscene, and that which wasn't, was purely destructive. My few belongings had also been discovered and scattered about. Apparently they had not been worried that I would return.

Shaking from the anger I felt at their senseless destruction of eons old artefacts, it took me several minutes to remember why I was here. I had to explore the other tunnels to see if I could find a way of reversing the shrinking process.

I headed off down one tunnel which soon branched into three others. I had already explored two, but one I had not had time to check. It was this one that I went down.

The ground was worn smooth, so at least the walking was fairly easy. At first my hopes started to rise as I discovered other paintings. Then they sank as I saw the graffiti on them. Apparently the bikers had been more thorough in their investigations that I had been.

I reached the end of the tunnel, disappointed and headed back to the main cavern. There were only two other tunnels that I had not explored and they both branched off the same main tunnel. The first of these had no paintings at all, but the last tunnel started promising.

Only a few yards in, I found a picture of a crystal, similar to the one in the warnings. I hurried on, sure I had found what I was after. Five minutes later, I came to the end of the tunnel. The back wall was covered in one huge mural. In the centre of it was a pattern of crystals in a chasm. My heart lifted. The entire tunnel, including this wall was free of graffiti.

I started to study the drawings, trying to decipher their cryptic message. I was only a quarter of the way through when I heard voices echoing through the tunnels. The bikers had returned.

As I frantically tried to break the ancient language, the voices became louder. A strange hissing noise accompanied them, which I finally identified as an aerosol can.

An orange glow started to approach from down the tunnel, and the sounds of very large people became truly ominous. I waited until the last moment, then sprinted to the relative cover of a large rock near the wall.

Two enormous men walked into the chamber. My heart nearly stopped at the size of them. They towered far above me, impossibly huge. The analytical part of my mind decided that they must be at least eighty or ninety feet tall in comparison with me. Both men were clad in dirty jeans and leathers, with the jeans tucked into knee high boots.

They were laughing and jostling each other as they entered the cavern, spraying the walls indiscriminately with the cans of paint they held in both hands.

One of the giants stumbled as he entered the chamber and my heart nearly stopped as an enormous boot hurtled towards me. It thudded down just behind me, raising a small cloud of dust. The boot disappeared as the giant regained his balance, the dust settling around and on me.

I crouched down lower behind the rock, letting only my eyes appear over the top of it. The two giants had their backs to me, looking at the mural. When one of them reached forward with a can of paint and started defacing it, my heart leapt into my throat. If they obscured it too much, I wouldn't find the cure!

Without pausing to think, I jumped over the rock and raced across the floor, screaming.

"Did you hear that?" boomed one giant, turning slightly to look back down the tunnel.

A wall of black smashed into me as the giant shifted his weight, his boot hurtling across the space between us. His heel hit me dead on, sending me flying backwards. I hit a rock and bounced over it, falling into its shadow. As a wave of blackness washed over me, dragging me down into oblivion, I was barely aware of one of the giants questioning the other if he had seen the mouse that had tried to run up his leg. Then all I knew was darkness.

* * * * *

I woke some time later, my head pounding and my ribs sore. I gingerly explored my body with my hands, relieved to find nothing broken. Emerging from the concealment of the rock, I realised that the two giants had gone.

Fumbling with a torch, I finally managed to get it lit, and held it up to illuminate the mural.

Ten minutes later, I got up off my knees again and wiped away the tears. Where the mural had been was now nothing but a wall of blue, green, red and black paint. The name "Bandits" was scrawled across it in black.

There was barely an inch of the wall untouched by the spray paint. I fought against the pit of despair that sought to suck me in as I realised that my only chance of regaining my height had been obliterated. I had not been able to decipher even the small part of the mural that I had seen, let alone the entire thing.
And as was the case with many aboriginal pictographs, without the entire picture as context, any small part of the message was useless. With one random act of defacement, the bikers had doomed me to a life of tinyness.

* * * * *

Staying hidden in the concealing shadows of rocks, I looked out onto a scene that sent shivers down my back. All four of the dirt-bike riders had returned to the cavern, and it looked like they were setting themselves up for a long stay.

Food stuffs were piled against one wall. They hadn’t been there when I passed through earlier. I could see sleeping bags and other camping paraphanalia scattered about.

The four bikers were sitting about a small camp fire in the middle of the cavern. They had dragged a couple of logs inside to use as seats. Many empty beer cans were scattered about them. They had been drinking for some time.

I was starving by now and it was only my hunger that had forced me to drag myself out of the back tunnels. If not for my need for food, I think I would have allowed myself to wallow in self pity for hours more yet.

It had been the smell of cooked meat, wafting through the tunnels that had stirred me and it was for that that I was now looking. The men had cooked sausages and I could see where one of them had put his plate. Half a sausage sat on that plate, teasing me. It was resting on a piece of bread, also half eaten. The meat was a foot wide and three feet long and at that moment, I felt I could eat it all.

The plate had been put down behind the giant, in the shadow of the log that he was sitting on. Sprinting from rock to rock, I managed to get myself within ten feet of the end of the log. I waited until I was sure no-one was looking in my direction and bolted from cover. I dove into the shadow of the log, panting from fear.

When no outcry was raised, I pushed myself to my feet and started to creep along the log. At the edge of the plate, I hesitated, building up the nerve to grab the meat. I crawled onto the plate and over to the edge of the bread. The smell was intoxicating. I got onto the bread and tore a handful of meat loose and then some bread. I bit into it, savouring the taste.

Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. A hand! A massive hand! I froze, terrified, even as it seemed to search for me. The giant grabbed the edge of the plate and lifted. Another hand came into view as I was brought into the light.

Without looking the giant grabbed his sandwich, curling the bread back up around the sausage - and me! I was squashed against the bread and sausage as the giant lifted the sandwich towards his mouth.

I looked out of the end to see a cavernous mouth open and rush toward me. I screamed around my own mouthful of food.

Just as it seemed I was about to be decapitated by teeth as big as my head, I found myself flying through the air as one of the other giants knocked this ones hand. I hit the ground a second before the sausage, both of us raising small clouds of dust.

I rolled to a stop underneath a bike helmet that was as big as a house, panting for breath.

I looked out to see a scuffle between the two giants, which settled down almost immediately.

The giant who had been about to eat me was muttering under his breath, even as he picked up the dirty sausage and threw it into the fire. I sighed at the waste. I would have eaten that, dirt or no dirt.

Deciding that I would wait until after the giants were asleep to try and get more food, I realised that my more immediate concern was water. I could go another day or two without food, if I had to, but water was critical.

Again, keeping a watch on the giants, I crept out from under the helmet and then around behind it. Dashing from rock to rock was much worse this time. Now whenever I ran, I had my back to the giants. One of them could be preparing to smash me under a boot at any second, and I wouldn't know it until after I was a smear under some guys foot.

I reached the tunnel leading out without a problem and allowed myself a rest, bringing my breathing back under control. Then I headed along the tunnel.

It was a clear night and I was able to make my way easily across the rock platform and over to the water. Drinking my fill, I decided that I could really do with a wash as well.

Stripping off, I washed out my clothes then laid them out on a rock to dry. I lowered myself in the water. Damn that was cold!

I froze when I heard a blood-curdling scream. A massive shape hurtled over my head, followed quickly by three more. The four giants hit the water within seconds of each other, yelling and screaming as they did.

In horror, I watched the massive tidal wave race towards me. If it hit me while I was on the rock shelf, I'd be smashed to bits. I did the only thing I could do. Taking a deep breath, I dove straight down.

The wave hit the shore and despite the dive, it took me with it. At least the impact was lessened. I slammed into the rock shelf, was washed part way up onto it and then was sucked back into the water.

Within seconds, I was pulled a dozen feet from the shelf. Another wave came in at an angle, and the wash as it receded pushed me further back.

As I struggled against the current, I felt the waves of something massive below me. I screamed as a giant came up right in front of me. I actually brushed against the back of his head as he surfaced. Then I joined a cascade of water rushing down his back as he pulled himself up and onto the shelf.

Half drowned, I barely noticed as one of his hands came down on my clothing. In the dark, he couldn't see what it was and he tossed it away into the bushes. I was just about to think how thankful I was he hadn’t seen my backpack, sitting higher up on the rocks, when he stood up. I watched as a massive bare heel came down on my pack, flattening it completely. The giant didn’t even notice. He pivoted on his heel, destroying any chance of my equipment surviving, then dove back into the water.

This time there was no stopping the tsunami sized wave that picked me up and threw me onto the rock shore.

To be continued...