by Bear Grylls
‘Pete! Get back in the shade!’ he shouted urgently.
Peter was standing halfway up the side of the wadi, bareheaded and bare-chested, unprotected from the sun apart from his trousers. The sun beat down on his fair hair as he craned his neck to peer short-sightedly into the distance.
Beck ran over to him and pulled him back towards the shade of the rock. To his surprise, Peter resisted.
‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘There’s trees . . . I saw trees . . . water . . . ’
‘No,’ Beck said firmly, ‘you didn’t.’
But with a surprisingly strong yank, Peter pulled himself free and hurried back to the side of the wadi. ‘It’s out there . . . I saw it . . . ’
Beck stared hard in the direction Peter was indicating, just in case by some miracle he was right. You never knew where an oasis might be. But he was pretty certain Peter was hallucinating. Anything that his short-sighted friend could see without his glasses on, Beck should have been able to see long ago.
‘I’m really sorry, Pete. It’s just not there . . . ’
Beck spoke gently but he was thinking furiously. Yes, he knew a lot of strategies for surviving in the desert. He also knew how a mirage could trick the eyes. But no one had ever told him what to do if a friend became actively delusional.
Peter stopped struggling. He kept his eyes fixed on the shimmering horizon, but his shoulders drooped. ‘It’s gone. I could swear I saw it – I . . . ’
He looked so forlorn that Beck felt a wrench inside.
‘Come on, buddy.’ He guided Peter back to the shade. ‘I’ve got something for you to drink.’
Peter sat listlessly while Beck retrieved the shirt from where he had left it – a bundle of cloth wrapped around the pile of damp sand.
‘Tilt your head back,’ he instructed. Peter did as he was told. ‘Open your mouth . . . ’
Beck held the bundle over Peter’s face and twisted it hard. He kept the pressure up, compressing the pile of sand into a hard lump. After a moment the cloth went dark and a steady trickle of water squeezed its way through the fabric, forced out of the sand by the pressure he was applying. The trickle fell onto Peter’s dry lips and into his open mouth. He smacked his lips.
‘Mm! Best water ever . . . ’ His voice was almost back to normal. Then he saw where the water came from. ‘So, just to be clear, I’m drinking water filtered through a shirt I’ve sweated in?’
‘You’re welcome to use mine instead.’
‘Thanks, I’ll pass. I suppose parachute silk’s not porous enough.’
‘Exactly. Here, take it.’ Beck passed him the bundle. ‘I’m going to get some of my own.’
He left Peter sucking more water through the cloth while he went back to the hole with his own shirt for more of the moist sand.
‘Let’s just say,’ Peter murmured between mouthfuls, ‘when we get back home I’m never going to look at a tap in the same way again!’
For a while after that they refilled their shirts with fresh wet sand and sucked on the bundles in silence. It was never going to be as satisfying as a good swig from a bottle of sparkling, clear water. There was also the danger of sucking a patch of the shirt dry, which just filled their mouths with the taste of dry, dirty cotton and made them thirsty again. But it got water into their bodies and it meant they didn’t have to touch the reserves in the water bottles.
With a good supply of damp sand, Beck reckoned they could keep themselves hydrated until they started moving again.
After that they slept a little. They had been walking all night so their bodies were tired. However, their bodies were also very thirsty, which got in the way of a good sleep. But there was nothing else to do. They lay in the shade while all around them the sun turned the desert into an inferno. Sleep was the best option.
Later on in the day, Beck agreed to open another can of tuna. The water was good and the protein gave them energy. This one also had diamonds at the bottom, which they packed away with the others. Beck reckoned they had to be the richest pair of teenagers in the world, for all the good it did them.
He glanced at Peter as he tucked into the mini feast. The hallucination had worried Beck more than he was admitting to himself. Peter seemed mostly back to normal now, but every time they set out into the desert it seemed to knock him back. When they rested, he recovered a little, but he didn’t regain all the strength he had lost. The cumulative effect was that he got slowly worse and worse.
Eating made them tired; sleeping after that was easier. At least, it was for Peter. He curled up on his side, using his pack as a pillow, and before long he was snoring.
At school, the official cure for anyone snoring in the dormitory was to whack them with a pillow. This time, Beck let his friend be. He sat up, hugging his knees, and gazed absently out of their rock shelter. For the first time he was seriously letting himself think that maybe – just maybe – Peter wouldn’t make it.
‘We need help,’ he murmured under his breath.
Talking to the desert, Beck? Now you’re losing it too . . .
No, he told himself. Not to the desert – to whoever’s out there.
Believing in a higher power was encouraged at school. And his experiences, first in Colombia and then a few months later in Alaska, had taught him that it takes a strong person to reach out for help every now and then. At key moments in his life, forces he couldn’t explain had come to his rescue. A wolf had shown him and his friend Tikaani where to find a pass through the mountains. And angels had surely guided him through the South American jungles.
He had tried to explain it to a boy at school. His friend had just laughed and put it down to ‘coincidence’. And Beck had to admit that, yes, it could be coincidence, even though he didn’t think it was.
The fact was that when he believed, coincidences happened. When he didn’t believe, they stopped. When Beck’s parents had been killed, he had prayed for help, and his Uncle Al had comforted him and taken him in. And Beck could feel his parents beside him. They had always had a strong faith, and at a time like this Beck wasn’t too proud to ask for help.
And so he prayed. He was accepting that he couldn’t do this on his own. It was a sacrifice of his pride. He hoped that whoever heard his prayer would recognize it as such.
‘Please,’ he prayed simply again. ‘Please. Don’t let Peter die.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
They broke camp again as the sun was going down. First they shook out their shoes and clothes and rucksacks in case scorpions had crept in. The sky was clear and the stars shone like diamonds, reminding Beck exactly why they had got into this mess in the first place. The North Star guided them firmly onwards towards Morocco.
The desert heat disappeared as quickly as it had come and the familiar chill set in again. Walking kept their minds off it, a little. Tonight, Beck decided, they would make camp earlier. Find some sun-warmed rocks, get a fire going, warm themselves up again. Give Peter’s body every chance to recover.
The dunes still crumbled beneath their feet, and after several hours Peter’s pace was slowing. A lot. The next dune took the best part of an hour to climb; if it had been an ordinary hill they could have strolled up it in ten minutes. They paused at the top, looked at each other in the starlight, then started down the other side.
Peter took three steps, then fell forward. He rolled halfway down the slope before he stopped. Beck flung himself after him with long, lurching strides – just what he had tried to avoid doing after dark – forgetting the risk of breaking a leg on some unseen obstacle. He thought only of reaching his friend, a slightly darker patch on the dark sand.
‘Pete? Pete! You OK?’
Peter didn’t lift his head until Beck was next to him. ‘Oops,’ he said weakly, then sank back down again.
‘Don’t move . . . hang on . . . ’
Beck patted him down, arms and legs, feeling for any bumps; anything that might suggest a broken bone. But Peter stirred and pulled himself up into a sitting position –
something he couldn’t have done if anything was seriously wrong.
‘My legs just went,’ he whispered. ‘Sorry.’
His whole body was trembling and his voice shook. Beck couldn’t tell if it was from cold or exhaustion or, quite possibly, both. Yes, he had decided they wouldn’t press on as far as they had the previous night, but he had wanted to get further than this. They had covered a fraction of the ground they’d managed yesterday, but it looked like this was as far as they were going.
He helped Peter to stand up.
‘Let’s find some rocks,’ he said gently, ‘and we’ll get a fire going again.’
They had to walk a bit further to find a suitable place. There were no large rocks like those that had warmed them the previous night, though they did come to a place with plenty of smaller ones scattered around – lumps of stone that varied in size from a cricket ball to something bigger than a football. Beck wondered if they had been dropped here by some ancient river or flood – and it must have been thousands of years ago. Just in time, he thought with a wry smile, to save the lives of two boys all these years later.
He handed Peter the torch. ‘Keep this on me.’
By torchlight, Beck started to rearrange some of the rocks into a low wall. The rocks were warm to the touch, sending back the heat they had stored up during the day. Some he could pick up, some he had to push or roll along the ground. He took it slowly, using as little energy as possible. It would be foolish to build a shelter to keep them warm if it worked up a thirst that he couldn’t satisfy.
Each time he moved a rock, he got Peter to shine the torch underneath it. They weren’t the only ones in the middle of the desert who sought out the warmth offered by the rocks. They got another scorpion that way.
‘Midnight feast,’ said Peter. ‘Yum.’
His sense of humour was still working, Beck noted, but his body was trembling.
Beck built the wall into a U-shaped shelter just under a metre high so that they could huddle against it, soaking up the warmth as quickly as the rocks radiated it. Along with the wood he had collected the previous night, he had brought his fire-making tools. With warm rocks on one side and a fire on the other, the shelter soon grew comfortably cosy.
To celebrate they each had a mouthful of water from the second bottle – they had finished the first some time ago.
‘It’s getting low,’ Peter said simply. He held the bottle up to the firelight and sloshed the water around. The orange flames refracted through the water.
‘Yup,’ Beck agreed. There wasn’t much else that could be said. Then a thought struck him. Right. He needed something non-absorbent, something that water would run off . . .
Got it. He pulled the rucksack towards him, peered inside, then emptied the contents onto the sand next to him. With a little effort he turned the rucksack inside out. The interior was lined with a kind of plastic sheeting for reinforcement. With the tip of the knife blade he started to cut away the stitching that kept the plastic in place.
‘Anything I can do?’ Peter asked, watching curiously.
Beck paused. He didn’t want his friend to exert himself more than he absolutely had to, but he could certainly do with the help.
So he passed him the bag and the knife. ‘You could finish this off,’ he suggested. ‘Get the lining out of the rucksack, keeping it as intact as possible.’ Beck got to his feet and picked up one of the pieces of wood that they hadn’t yet burned. A few paces away from the shelter, in the dim light of the fire, he started to dig.
‘You’re not digging a well, are you?’
‘Unfortunately not. But it should get us some water.’
‘As long as it doesn’t involve peeing, it’s fine by me.’
Beck paused and smiled.
Peter caught his look and his shoulders sagged. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Strangely enough, yes.’
When Beck had finished digging, the pit was about half a metre deep. He then took the empty water bottle and placed it upright at the bottom of the pit. Smiling, he then peed all around the bottle, making the sand damp with urine. ‘Now it’s your turn,’ he said to Peter, who got up and made his own contribution.
‘Right, that’s the first part done,’ Beck announced. ‘Now for the clever bit!’
He then pulled the plastic liner across the pit, pinned it out taut with rocks and sealed the edges with sand so that no moisture could escape. Finally he placed a small stone in the middle of the plastic to act as a weight, so the liner looked like an upside-down cone across the pit.
‘It’s a dew trap,’ he said as he returned to the shelter. He sat down next to Peter and they huddled together for warmth. ‘As the air warms up, the moisture will evaporate and then condense onto the plastic liner above because it’ll be cooler. And then it trickles down the inside of the sheet to the centre, weighted down by the stone, and drips into the bottle – clean and as if plucked out of the air – literally!’ He smiled. ‘Bedouin use the same condensation principle. They turn rocks over immediately before sunrise so the cooler surface gets condensation on it. But we’ll be moving by then, so we do it this way. Simple.’
‘So by the time the moisture reaches the sheet, it’s just normal water again?’ Peter said, getting it absolutely clear in his head.
‘Yup. All the water from the pee evaporates and ends up in the bottle – by magic!’ They both laughed.
‘You know,’ Peter said thoughtfully, ‘there are probably people who would pay for this kind of holiday!’
* * *
They passed a slightly less cold night than before. The shelter was more enclosed and the rocks and fire kept them warm. They slept back to back. Once again Peter was asleep almost at once, but Beck could still feel the occasional shiver running through him. He knew, with a sinking heart, that Peter would wake up a little worse than he had the previous morning, and be close to collapse almost immediately. That was how it had been so far and he was showing no sign of improving.
And they still had many miles to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The boys staggered their way to the top of the dune and stopped, not quite believing what they saw in the pre-dawn light.
‘Is that a—?’ Peter began, and stopped.
Beck turned to him and grinned beneath his face covering. ‘Fancy a lift?’
‘I think its driving days are over . . . ’
They scrambled down the other side of the dune towards the truck.
It was now the beginning of their third day in the desert. They had started out well before dawn, as before. The dew trap had yielded a little moisture. It was only about an inch, but their tongues and parched lips savoured every drop.
‘Every little bit helps,’ Beck had reminded Peter, who just nodded. No, they didn’t feel any better – but they would have felt worse without it.
Then they had walked on through the desert, ever northwards, as the sky lightened and the dunes emerged from the gloom all around them. Beck realized that Peter was pushing himself, always staying at least one pace ahead. He was determined not to hold Beck back. Beck had no idea what reserves of strength Peter was drawing on, but he admired his willpower more and more.
Then they had climbed the dune and seen the truck.
It lay half buried in the sand. Beck kept an eye on Peter as they approached it but he stayed upright. He had only fallen that one time. Beck noted the set look in his eyes and his careful, measured tread. He felt his own legs aching as well – more than ever before. But maybe their luck was turning. Beck’s father had always said that dawn comes after the darkest part of the night. And certainly their situation was as dark as Beck could ever imagine.
A faint idea began to glimmer at the back of his mind.
The truck was ancient. Beck guessed it dated from the 1960s or even earlier. There were no tyre marks in the sand, no hint of how it had got here. The desert had long removed all such traces.
He had heard about the old desert
battlefields of the Second World War – El Alamein and Ghazala. British and German vehicles left in the sand, still looking as new as the day they had been abandoned. Nothing rusted in the dry desert air and there was no mould to eat away at the seat leather. There was just the sand, blasting away at the paintwork and reducing it to a dull metallic sheen.
‘Wonder what happened to the driver,’ Peter said. ‘Hmm.’ Beck didn’t want to wonder what had happened to the driver. Maybe he was lying a few metres away from them, buried by the sand. Maybe he had tried to head off on foot and been swallowed by the desert. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind.
The front half of the truck was almost buried in the sand, as if the vehicle was sinking Titanic-like into the desert. Beck thought briefly of exploring the wreckage for anything useful but guessed there was no point. There might have been water in the engine once, but that would have dried up long ago. The engine would be choked with sand; the cabin was half full of it.
But the truck’s back half had potential. It was an old flatbed and had been carrying long rectangular crates made of wooden slats. Whatever had been in them was gone too but the slats remained. Beck got out the axe and used it to cut a good supply of straight, bone-dry wood. It would burn nicely at their next camp. Then he lifted out one of the crates and hefted it thoughtfully. It was about a metre wide, one and a half metres long, and had probably transported livestock. The bottom was made of solid planks of wood, dry and light. The sides were slats and there wasn’t much to the structure, so it was very light.
‘Do you think we could both fit into this?’ he asked thoughtfully.
Peter just stared at him as if he was mad.
Beck made the decision. ‘Time for a brief rest. Pass me your pack – I’m going to need more silk.’