The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Darky gives Tiny half the egg and a small ball of rice. They eat together. Darky wakes a couple of hours later with a pain in his gut. He tries to hobble quickly to the latrine but loses control of his bowels on the main path to the latrine. He is ashamed that he has left a mess where the men will have to walk the next day: “Next time, he vowed, he would get there, no matter how hard it was” (171). 

Rooster MacNeice wakes and begins the ritual of crushing any lice that he can find on his body. He recites several passages of Mein Kampf to himself and thinks about how much he hates Darky: “Hate was a powerful force for Rooster MacNeice. It was like a good to him. He hated wogs, wops, gyppos, and dagos. He hates chinks, nips, and slopes, and, being a fair-minded man, he hated poms and yanks” (173). As an exercise in mental discipline, he had made himself memorize a page of Hitler’s book every day because it was the only book he could find. 

The men begin to laugh, and the sound distracts Rooster. They are pointing at Tiny, who, while still asleep, has an erection: “It was, they agreed, a heartening thing, no less so given how low Tiny Middleton had sunk in recent weeks” (175). Rooster tells them that they have no decency. Darky puts a piece of eggshell over the erection and tells Rooster that now it’s hidden. When Rooster goes to take the eggshell away, Tiny opens his eyes and calls him a pervert. As the men laugh, Rooster goes back to the tent and opens his bag. His egg is missing. He thinks of the duck egg that Darky put on Tiny’s erection and knows that he must have stolen it from him. He realizes that he hates Darky more than he hates the Japanese. 

Guards, including the Goanna, make a surprise inspection while Darky is in the tent. When he sees that Darky has folded his blanket with the fold in the wrong direction, he hits him in the head with his rifle and moves on. Darky shares a smoke with some of the men. They see the guards carrying a body away on a stretcher. He thinks it’s the body of a man named Gyppo.

In the camp, Dorrigo shaves every day as an example to the men. He knows they are not perfect: “They lie and cheat and rob, and they lie and cheat and rob with gusto” (181). He knows that he will do the same at times. He rarely thinks of Ella, concerning himself only with the care and morale of the men. Of the thousand men that arrived at the Line, Dorrigo considers them all one group, even the dead: “For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever” (183). 

A sack of letters from Australia arrive, including one from Ella. While reading the first page, a memory of driving towards Amy strikes him. He can barely recall her face, but he remembers the desire, because he still feels it: “How to name this ache he felt in his stomach for her, this tightness in his chest, this overwhelming vertigo?” (185). One day he had bought her a pearl necklace with his savings, and the memory of the day is vivid. He puts down the letter and thinks: “The world is. It just is” (186).

Rooster is in line waiting for his breakfast. He always eats it quickly, despite telling himself to go slowly. Darky always eats carefully, with relish, savoring the pitiful food. Rooster always vows to do the same, and always fails: “All the time he knew it was his hunger eating him” (188). He sees Darky fall, spilling his own breakfast into the mud, where it washes away in the storm. Tiny approaches and gives Darky half of his breakfast. Rooster watches the two men and thinks that neither of them have any self-respect. He reports to the area where each day the men are divided into their work groups. Through the rain, he sees Tiny Middleton crawling to the group, refusing the help of Darky, who is walking beside him. The sight “made no sense to him and momentarily filled him with the most terrible hate” (191). He looks at the trees and tries to appreciate their beauty.

Dorrigo reports to Nakamura that four men died the previous day. There are 363 men left to work. Nakamura says he must have 500. He says to bring the remainder from the hospital. Fukuhara makes a speech to the men, saying that they are sick because they do not believe in the Japanese spirit: “Health follows will!” (194). A prisoner collapses in the front row.

Nakamura begins kicking him. Dorrigo gets between them and examines the man. He picks him up in his arms. Nakamura slaps Dorrigo many times. Dorrigo focuses on not dropping the prisoner. When he stops, they begin haggling over the number of men fit to work. They reach a compromise of 429.

Darky looks for a light hammer. He can no longer lift the heavier ones. Then he walks to the Line with the other men. They struggle to climb a ladder at the edge of a cliff, then pass the tools up the rungs to each other. Darky does not feel like himself and tries to think of something positive in his situation: “He tried to tell himself how this was a good day and how lucky he was in his strength” (200). He tells himself that life is only about getting the next footstep right. His boot gets stuck in a limestone cleft. When he pulls it out the sole tears in two. Men who lose their shoes tend to die more quickly of infection.