Voss proposes to Laura by letter, and receives her acceptance in the same way. After this, although they attempt to write to one another, Voss is beyond the reach of physical communication. Their minds, however, are in constant contact. Voss continually visualizes Laura riding with him into the desert, enduring the same hardships, “sharing the same hell, in their common flesh.” White makes it clear that this is something more than ordinary sympathy or imagination. Laura’s sickness, for which the doctors can find no cause, is directly linked to the suffering and death of Voss. He see a vision of her without her hair just as her hair is cut off. Laura is “locked inside him permanently,” even though they have only spent a few hours in one another’s company.

Although the mental connection between Voss and Laura is at the center of the novel, there are various other examples of the same phenomenon. Laura feels a strong connection to Rose, feeling her baby kick and experiencing the pain of her labor. After Rose is buried, she writes that she “seemed to enter into wind, earth, the ocean beyond, even the soul of our poor dead maid.” Voss often appears to be devoid of ordinary humanity and sympathy, but his understanding of others can be nothing short of visionary. When Palfreyman describes his sister’s suicide attempt, Voss takes over the narration, describing not only the feelings of Palfreyman and his sister but the physical details of the scene. Just before his own death, he screams as he feels the suffering of the horses and mules that are being slaughtered.

Even the least sensitive characters are occasionally affected by psychic connections, which often occur in dreams or periods of drowsiness. Colonel Hebden sees an accurate representation of the deaths of Turner and Angus in a dream. Earlier in the book, Angus has just told Turner that he thinks they have all “become a bit mad” when he suddenly feels a mystical connection to Judd, a man whom he has always regarded with suspicion and distaste. This vision of them sitting together companionably mending hobble-chains later allows him to accept the leadership of the former convict and follow him back to Jildra.

When Voss and Laura first meet, she is at home on a Sunday morning because she chooses not to accompany the rest of the family to church. She later tells Voss that she does not pray, and he immediately assumes that she must be an atheist. Voss does not respect atheists because he thinks they ascribe their own meanness and lack of magnificence to the God in whom they do not believe. However, he is equally contemptuous of conventional Christians, particularly Mr. Palfreyman, the clergyman, whom he regards as weak and credulous.

Voss is interspersed with conversations about religion. Voss himself is intrigued by the topic and continually returns to it amid the hardships of the Australian desert. However, the other men also engage in theological discussions. Angus is shocked when Turner says that he does not believe in God and asks if he is not unhappy in his atheism. Angus’s own Christianity is initially a matter of form, part of his upper-class education, but his surroundings in the desert force him to think more deeply about the nature of religious faith and religious doubt. This is true, to varying degrees, of all the explorers, especially Palfreyman, who tells Voss that “there is a great deal I take on trust, until it is proved at the end.”

Palfreyman has a sister who is a hunchback, and “does...