The Second Queen of Hirta

Chapter 12: In tempore belli

Full list of chapters

By God’s blessing, California and Margaret survived the quarantine station, and settled in the nearby city of Melbourne, which we were told was the richest in the world, more so even than Glasgow or Liverpool, and, though not to be compared in this respect with the Equator, much warmer than either of them. While Margaret continued to grieve for her lost child, California found himself a job splitting wood for a local maker of bricks, which were used for building houses as there was not enough stone in the area to do so, but, in his own words, "quickly wearied of this and decided after six months to leave and seek my fortune elsewhere". He moved further inland to search for gold, a yellow substance not quite as hard as stone and considered, for reasons the Hirtans found impossible to understand, to have a worth almost beyond contemplation.

Gold was to be found in small rivers, but this, while not physically difficult, required both skill and patience. It was necessary to pick stones and other material from below the water and search through them in the hope of finding those little yellow pieces which were so much more valuable than the rest. Days might pass without such a thing happening, but those who looked for gold accepted this in the almost certain knowledge that their labours would in time be rewarded. That the rewards could be great, and that many sought to achieve them, was clear from the fact that Melbourne, which did not exist in the year that California was born, was home to one hundred thousand people, more than a thousand times the number living on Hirta, by the time he arrived there as a young man.