Chapter 2

Tom sloshed out of the knee-deep water.

He sat on a flattish rock and sipped the tepid liquid as he thought about his situation. He was sure that there was a camping ground somewhere near the Rock, in this era, but he had no knowledge of exactly where it was.

Tom pulled his phone from the back pocket of his pants. It said he had no connection and that the date was the same as his watch said. If he were in nineteen-eighty that did make perfect sense to him. as they didn’t even have a mobile network.

It was either that or the high iron content in the Rock could be blocking his signal. He also knew that even in twenty-twenty, this area probably didn’t have good reception.

Now that he had water, he decided it might be prudent to look for the camping grounds before he totally ran out of daylight. With little effort, he brought up a map of the area into his mind’s eye.

Memorising anything that he heard, learnt, or saw, had always been easy for Tom to do. It was how he got through High School and even College so quickly and with high scores. However, recalling it when he needed to, was the real trick as far as he was concerned.

He’d been good at geography and remembered doing an essay on the region, and its culture back in High School some ten years before. He had always believed it might be fun to come here. He had admired that the local indigenous population did well to hold onto their culture despite the do-gooders thinking that they knew better.

Tom then remembered that the main highway ran down the guts of the Northern Territory from Darwin to Adelaide in South Australia, so it was north to south. Then the road to Uluru ran west and passed it on the northern side before it curved around the western side of Uluru.

A feeder road came off the secondary road. It went back towards the south-east and to the actual Rock. Tom vaguely remembered there was a small town to its north-west. He clicked his fingers and grinned. The airport was also to the north-west of where he was.

He’d bet that the camping grounds were over that side, as it was also the old access point to climb up to the top of the Rock. He did wonder if someone would sell him some food to get him through the weekend when he got there.

Destination decided upon, Tom took out his gym clothes and pulled them on. Since he had only recently started to work out, he was glad that he was still self-conscious about his love handles and small paunch, so he hadn’t switched over to lycra yet. Hopefully, his clothes wouldn’t seem too outrageous in this timeline if he had truly gone back in time.

He stuck his dress shoes in the bottom of his pack and then the rolled-up pants and shirt after he removed all of the items from the pockets. Opening up the lunch box, he reclaimed his apple and then jammed the box and his water bottle back in on the top.

Tom slid his phone down into a side pouch and picking up his wallet, he crammed it in too. In the deep shadows, he failed to see his Go-Card that had been under his wallet, slip to fall under the rock beside where he sat.

Recently he had become meticulous in making sure it was in his wallet, but this situation was far from normal.

Once Tom was dressed, he put his backpack back on and headed back out to the path that led around the monolith.

He happily munched on his apple as he took in the sights. The sun was now nearer the horizon, and the angle of the sunlight caused the rays to fracture in the atmosphere. This prismatic effect triggered the colour of Uluru to change from a sandy-red to a deeper shade of blood-red.

Tom was entranced to view the amazing transformation. He looked at the interesting formations caused by erosion and water, as the softer rocks that had once surrounded this compressed eluvial fan had been eaten away, hundreds of thousands of years before.

He knew that the scientists believed that the Rock extended up to 6km below the current land surface. He had to smile as he knew the locals had different interpretations of how the rock got here.

He was surprised some fifteen minutes later when he heard voices and found three young women standing near a cave entrance. Rails had been erected, and a sign informed people that the cave was out of bounds to non-indigenous people.

“Well, that sucks,” one of the women said.

Tom noticed that all three women were reasonably fit and guessed they were all in their early twenties. They were all dressed in long-legged, high-waisted denim shorts, and a thin, cotton, long-sleeved button-up shirt over a colourful singlet.