Other onlookers were not so lucky: two of the stretcher bound Elders fell to the ground screaming as their frail eardrums did burst, another suffered a colossal brain haemorrhage and died on the spot.

Finally, as Mamaragan hovered directly overhead, even Weari-Wyingga and young Jimba were unable to stop the young dancers from scattering — foolishly charging out of the corroboree zone, racing frantically across the brown dirt plains, as though they had any chance of escaping the Great Rainbow Snake if he decided to swoop down on them.

*      *      *

‘Stop you fools you can’t outrun it!   You’ll only doom us all to annihilation!’ thought Garbarla, rocking on his heels from his own bodily agonies, yet not really believing that the ceremony was going to work this time, despite the Dark Stone that Ernie still held on his lap (although like his friend Garbarla, he had his hands up clutching his ears, futilely trying to block out the deafening roar of the serpent).

But even if Garbarla had spoken aloud, he would not have been able to stop the young hunters, who in their terror forgot all about the ritual and fled, leaving only the bed-ridden Elders, Weari-Wyingga, Jimba, Ernie, and Garbarla himself to attempt to complete the ceremony before the monstrous reptile plunged down to gobble them all up.

Garbarla remembered, what now seemed like years ago, his half-brother Gunbuk telling him that Mamaragan swooped down to gobble up Aborigines who violated tribal law and wondered whether trying to send Mamaragan into an eternal sleep counted as a violation of tribal law punishable by death, in the mind of the rainbow serpent.   He giggled childishly at the thought, and then wondered whether he was going mad from terror.

Slowly the Great Rainbow Snake began to drift down toward them, like a leaf fluttering to the ground.   ‘A battleship more like it!’ thought Garbarla.   He recalled a NASA astronaut had recently described trying to bring a fuel-less space shuttle back down to Earth safely as being no more difficult than gliding a battleship down to Earth from a hundred miles up, and began to giggle again at the notion.

After a moment its slow descent began to quicken, then the rainbow serpent suddenly pivoted round, folded its double rows of wings tightly cross its mammoth back and dived headfirst toward them, sending a mountain of earth and rocks high up into the air, making Ernie and Garbarla duck for cover, as it plummeted straight into the ground on the other side of the corroboree zone.

*      *      *

Although it dived into the ground a couple of hundred metres from them, the impact was enough to send Weari-Wyingga, Garbarla, and Ernie all tumbling about the dirt.

‘Oh, my God I’ve dropped it, I’ve dropped the bloody stone!’ thought Ernie, realising that the Dark Stone had gone flying from his lap when he had been thrown into the air.

When at last he managed to climb back to his feet (no easy task since the ground beneath their feet rolled like waves on the high seas from the motion of the rainbow serpent tunnelling along beneath the corroboree ground), Ernie began furiously hunting around the dirt for the precious stone, without any luck.

Climbing back to their feet unsteadily, Weari-Wyingga and Garbarla saw that Mamaragan had burrowed into the ground directly opposite where they were, taking the three bedridden Elders to their deaths (along with the body of the fourth Elder who had died earlier) as well as almost accounting for Jimba.   The young hunter was holding on for dear life with both hands, hanging over the rim of an apparently bottomless pit, which went straight down into the earth.

Garbarla raced across to grab the teenager by the hands to pull him up out of the pit just in time…As they heard the express train rumble of Mamaragan and realised that the Great Rainbow Snake had reversed direction underground and was returning to finish them off.

“Quickly!   Quickly!” ordered Weari-Wyingga, racing across to pick up the Dark Stone, which he effortlessly hefted despite its weight, to hand to Ernie.

“Help him!   Help him!” ordered the old man and Garbarla raced across to help Ernie to hold the stone aloft, stretched out before them in the direction of the gaping pit entrance from which the serpent’s roaring issued.

While Weari-Wyingga began to recite aloud again, shouting the closing portions of the “laying” ritual, Jimba returned to the ceremonial dance all alone, doing his best to dance around the remnants of the ceremonial fire, which had been all but extinguished by the mountain of flying debris thrown up by the serpent’s headlong dive into the ground.   But soon, as the monstrous reptile’s diamond-shaped head came into sight from the inky darkness of the pit entrance, even the plucky young hunter lost his nerve and raced across toward Ernie and the others, to avoid the reach of the tree sized fangs and loathsome forked tongue that flicked from the mouth of Mamaragan.

Both Ernie and Garbarla feared the ritual had been a failure, and as the vast serpentine head emerged from the pit, they fully expected to be gobbled up by Mamaragan.

But after a moment they realised that the giant serpent had ceased its forward motion and was merely lying with its monstrous head pointing up from the pit entrance.   Then as they watched the evil, green eyes began to lose their lustre, fading like failing fluorescent lights, until they were dull and lifeless, staring sightlessly toward them like the eyes of a corpse.

“My God!   My God, it’s dead!” cried Ernie from excited relief.

“No, only sleeping,” corrected Weari-Wyingga.   “Thanks to you my friend, the ritual has worked for the first time in five hundred years!”

“Now we can relax and start rebuilding our lives,” said Garbarla.

“First rebuild dark stone,” said Weari-Wyingga.

“Rebuilt dark stone?” echoed Garbarla, puzzled.

“Yes,” insisted Weari-Wyingga.   “What happens the next time we need its help?   We can’t dig it up, without releasing Mamaragan.   So we must build a new dark stone.”

“Is that really necessary?” asked Garbarla.   “We might never need it again.”

“Better to have it and never need it, than to need it and never have it,” pointed out Weari-Wyingga.

*      *      *

The next day, when they were finally able to convince the other hunters that it was safe to return to the corroboree site, they found that the sleeping serpent had slowly sunk back down into the tunnel, until its staring, sightless eyes were nearly ten metres below ground level.   Weari-Wyingga gave orders for the hunters to fill in the tunnel — with the Dark Stone being buried about a metre below the ground, to act as a “belaying pin” to keep the giant reptile pinned firmly into a deep sleep below the surface of the village.

Over the next week, the Aborigines celebrated the “laying” of Mamaragan, although on the second day of the festivities Ernie and Garbarla set off in the Range Rover to return to Ernie’s sheep station.   To the obvious relief of Brian Horne, who had started to fear that he would have to spend the Christmas period working Ernie’s farm.

Both men were greeted effusively by Bear Ross, who gave Ernie and Garbarla both powerful “Bear hugs”, as they jokingly called them.   “My God am I ever glad to see you two,” said Bear.   “I’d started to think you must have been devoured by that monstrous snake, or something.”

“No, no the ritual was a success,” said Joseph Garbarla and he and Ernie jointly related to Bear what had happened.

“My people are celebrating the ‘laying’ of Mamaragan,” Garbarla finished, “but with mixed feelings.   On the one hand putting the Great Rainbow Snake into a deep sleep has saved the remaining inhabitants of the village from being slaughtered as so many of their friends and relatives have been, on the other hand Mamaragan has always been our God, our Creator.   What has happened to the Aborigines is like what would happen to the Christians if they suddenly discovered that Satan and Jesus were one and the same, and that they could only save themselves from the clutches of Satan by crucifying Christ all over again.”

*      *      *

Ernie also celebrated with mixed feelings.   Although glad to have helped seal the monster in the ground, he could not help thinking of all those he had been too late to save.   And as they prepared for their Christmas celebrations, Ernie set out again that night to roam through the forests around Merridale as the black wolf, once more thinking of his love for Rowena Frankland, and his fear that if he ever dared propose he might be dooming her to a horrible death at the jaws of his alter ego, the black wolf.

THE END