The river is Down by Lucy Walker

thoughtfully into the air.
    'If the foreman said—then okay by me.' Nick sounded only partially interested. Yet Cindie, watching him, knew that there was far, far more to this question and answer than anyone showed.
    As Dicey had warned. There was more behind that mask of face and quiet manner than his words ever conveyed. She could see the men understood that too. It was something about his eyes. Expressionless, even a little tired, but the brain behind them registered everything: every smallest detail, including Cindie sitting on the ground, a mug of tea in her hand and only men, lots and lots of them, around her.
    He was thinking what?
    'I'm going farther up the track, Cindie. I'll take you along.' He didn't ask if she would like to come. This was, in effect, an order.
    She knew what was the mystery about him now. He seemed quiet, almost gentle; but he was implacable. Adamant. It didn't show, that was all.
    She emptied the dregs of her tea and put the mug in the large carton box where the men too had thrown theirs as they had finished. No litter on their wonderful road—for these men!
    'That's very kind of you,' she said, not sounding too formal. 'I'd love to see the finished part of the thousand-miler.'
    'The finished road is about a hundred miles north, I'm afraid,' Nick said with a wry twist to his mouth. 'Down on this section we're surveying and making the base foundation. There's another gang back-up fifty miles. They're sealing as the graders and levellers go through. I want a word with the foreman ten miles up. Then I'll take you back to the camp.'
    'But my car
    'Dicey will bring it back. He brought it out.' His eyes swung round to the girl and met hers. 'Didn't he?'
    Well really!
    Yet she had no good answer. She had let Dicey drive the car out. How could she insist on driving it back herself?
    She thought of those slammed doors the men had spoken of. She looked sorrowfully at her Holden as she passed it to climb into Nick's Land-Rover. She wondered if she ought to be as mutely obedient as this. Of course, she had been stranded. And he had rescued her. He was giving her food, roof and a modicum of kindness in the camp. She had to remember all that. It was good manners to be co-operative.
    Besides, she did want to see the road `back-up', as Nick had said.
    The ten-mile drive along the track to the next stretch, where a team of men were working with graders, was much the same as the one along which Dicey had driven here. It was all spinifex plain: in the near distance the red-capped, mesa-like ranges stretched on and on, their formations changing a little as the miles went by like some strange but fascinating exercise in geometry. Sometimes their flanks seemed totally covered with green grass. About this last, Nick disillusioned her.
    `It's spinifex, the same as around here. The water seeping down the sides of the ironstone gives it more surface moisture. That's why it's greener. The spiked leaves are a little more tender, that's all.'
    Sometimes the grass on the sides of the ranges seemed to grow in bands between wider bands of exposed red rock.
    `It's weird, yet in a strange way, fascinating,' Cindie said after a long silence. Her wonder at this country that had no margins to its world had made her temporarily forget her anger with Nick. She was mesmerised.
    `You like it?' he asked curiously.
    `Yes. Yet it's terrible! Which is a puzzle. All deserts, or semi-deserts, are terrible, aren't they? Yet they can be beautiful too. I remember when my parents brought me out from England—I was very small then. It was sunset as we came through the desert part of the Suez Canal. I've never forgotten how wonderful that was. The sunset over the desert—'
    There was a silence.
    'It would be frightening if one was lost in it,' Cindie went on thoughtfully. 'It goes on forever . There are no landmarks.'
    `This country gets into you,' Nick said, ignoring this last. `There are some who come, and go back out of it never to return.