They had brought eggs and flour and salt. Louis, looking pleased with himself, produced a tin of Eno's Fruit Salt.
"Always take this stuff into the Bush," he explained. "If you can only get muddy water, this makes it more possible. And it's dashed good stuff for making damper less damping."
He put in too much and the damper was so light that it crumbled and got mixed up in the wood ashes. But they were both too hungry to notice whether they were eating damper or wood ash, and much too blissful to care.
They spread the blankets against the roots of a great tree, over a bed of heathery scrub, very soft and springy; they had no axe or any means of chopping wood, but there was a thick carpet of dead stuff under the trees. Noticing dead branches hanging by thin strips of bark Marcella made a lasso with the swag straps and pulled them down. As far as warmth went, there was no need for fire at all as soon as the meal was cooked: but out there in the vast purple-blackness of the night with pin-points of starlight in the illimitable loneliness the rose and gold of the spurting flames was comforting and comradely. They piled the dead wood upon it before they lay down; as one resinous branch after another caught fire the trees danced round in giant shadows, as though they were doing a death-dance for their limbs on the funeral pyre. The silence was a complete blank except when a flapping of wings beat the air where some bird changed its night perch, or a parrot squawked hoarsely for a moment, causing a fluttering of smaller wings that soon settled to silence again.
Louis rolled over; like Marcella he had been lying on his back, staring through the trees at the stars. His hand sought hers and held it, quivering a little.
"You know, it's going to be a hell of a fight, Marcella," he said.
"Oh my dear, do you think so?" she asked, surprised that he was confirming her opinion.
"Yes. In the city, you see, I only have to fight myself. I know, there, that I can always get the stuff—even if I've no money I can beg or pinch it—All I've to fight there is the accessibility of it. Here I've to fight the inaccessibility...."
"I don't quite understand that, Louis."
"I don't suppose you do. You see, dearie, out here it's quite on the cards that I shall go completely off my rocker." He spoke quietly, rather wistfully and sadly.