by Bear Grylls
‘Oh no you don’t,’ he murmured, and swept them into the first-aid box. He held up the box and studied them carefully. The rule was not to eat any that were furry or had black bits showing through their skin. There were no furry ones but there were a couple that could possibly be the other kind. Maybe not black but certainly discoloured. Beck played safe and plucked them out again.
Pete’s going to love this, he thought to himself, smiling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Now that he had cleared a small patch of bark, he raised the axe in both hands and brought it down hard onto the trunk – again and again, until he had cut out a wedge of wood. He kept hacking away at the tree until he had enough of what he wanted.
‘Even the trunk meat is edible,’ he said as he went back to Peter, with a box full of insects and a pile of wood chips. ‘We’ll cook this too . . . ’
They still had wood from the crates on the truck to make a fire, and Beck gathered up kindling from the bushes in the form of small dry twigs and leaves. Once again he started to use his fire-making kit.
Just as Beck was sawing with the bow to get the first ember, he heard Peter gasp. Beck kept going but glanced up. His friend’s eyes were fixed on something a short distance behind him.
‘The sand just . . . moved.’
‘Yeah?’ Beck kept going – he didn’t want to lose the effort he had put in so far – but he was immediately on the alert.
‘And again. I thought I saw something.’
‘Where, exactly?’
‘About a metre away from you. Look – there!’
Beck glanced round to his right. He only had to turn his head a little way. Then he saw it. The sand heaved, for all the world as if it was water and a fish had just broken the surface.
In one swift movement Beck dropped the bow and the drill, and lunged. His fingers dug into the sand and for a moment he felt a smooth, lithe body between them. But he hadn’t quite got a grip and it wriggled away. Beck swore and followed quickly after it. It really was like a fish swimming through the sand. It zigged and zagged its way across, with Beck crawling after it. Unlike a real fish, though, it couldn’t dive deep. It had to stay near the surface where the sand was loose. Beck chased it halfway around the puddle, until finally he felt it between his fingers again. This time he held on firmly.
He carried it back to show Peter. It was a silver-grey lizard about twenty centimetres long. The pointed head had a wedge-shaped snout; the body was striped with bands of black and a dark yellow like caramel and streamlined with fish-like scales; the tail was short and blunt. Now that he had caught it, it stopped struggling, though Beck knew it would be off in a flash if he let go.
‘Meet the main course,’ he announced proudly. ‘It’s a sandfish. Not poisonous, not dangerous, and just what we need.’
He killed it quickly, holding it down with one hand and slicing its head off with the knife. He could just pull its guts straight out – a slimy, gunge-filled tube that he threw to one side, safely away from the water. He put the lizard’s gutted body into the container with the insects.
‘Not bad eyesight for you, Pete!’ Beck joked, and went back to making the fire.
* * *
It was quite a feast.
With so much wood to hand, the fire was the biggest Beck had made since they arrived in the desert. They boiled the palm leaves and pieces of trunk with water in the first-aid box. Beck tried to think of a way of holding the box over the fire with something that wouldn’t catch fire itself. Eventually he stuck three of the wooden slats from the truck into the sand, leaning against each other above the fire, and strung some of the wire he had cut from the parachute harness between the improvised tripod. The first-aid box dangled from this by its handle over the flame. He used the rest of the wire to skewer the sandfish so that it could roast properly in the fire’s heat.
While the main course was cooking, the boys popped the grubs and insects from the tree into their mouths. They went down so quickly that Beck wandered back to the fallen tree to get some more.
‘Fat, protein, carbohydrates and fluid, all in one handy bite-sized package,’ he commented. ‘Someone really should market them . . . ’
‘Limited market – trust me, Beck!’ Peter said through a mouthful of sand beetle.
Dessert was dates – bitter but full of fructose and energy. Beck rationed these, even though there so many. He didn’t want them to get the runs and undo all the good hydrating they had achieved so far.
The meal was washed down with all the water they could drink. For a long time after that they just lay on the sand, staring into the flames, deep in their own thoughts. Peter shivered. It was a genuine, proper shiver, caused because he really was cold, not feverish. His skin was goose-pimpling.
‘I’d better put my clothes back on . . . ’ he said as he wrapped himself up again. ‘I don’t suppose we can stay here long, can we?’
Beck looked around. ‘No . . . ’ he agreed. ‘Probably a few more days if we had to, but sooner or later we’d run out of food. And if the water dried up . . . ’
‘But, I mean,’ Peter said hopefully, ‘someone would find us eventually, wouldn’t they?’
‘If by “eventually” you mean while our skeletons can still be identified by our dental records . . . well, yes.’
Peter said nothing.
‘Remember that truck?’ Beck asked. ‘How long do you think that had been there? I’m guessing decades. But we were the first people to touch it since it got wrecked. The desert is so big. You don’t just stumble over people. You have to go out and look.’
‘So we have to keep moving,’ Peter said with dull resignation.
‘If you break down in your car, then the best advice is to stay put and wait for rescue. There are lots of stories of people wandering off to find help, only to be found dead nearby a day or so later,’ Beck told him. ‘But if no one’s looking for you and you have no car, then you have no choice. You’ve got to self-rescue – and that means get moving.’
‘Makes sense,’ Peter commented.
‘We can keep moving, with food and water, and have a chance of getting somewhere. Or we can just stay here until the food and water runs out, in which case we’re stuck here in the middle of nowhere . . . ’
‘. . . with no food or water.’
‘We’ll rest a bit longer. We’ll stock up on cooked palm leaves and trunk. We’ll fill up the bottles too, of course—’
‘Will I make it?’ Peter asked bluntly. It was such a sudden change of subject that for a moment Beck didn’t know what to make of it.
Lots of replies ran though his head. Of course you will . . . was one. Don’t be silly . . . was another.
He knew he would insult Peter’s intelligence if he wasn’t honest.
The rest and the meal had done his friend a lot of good. The heatstroke had done him a lot of bad. The good didn’t quite make up for it. Add that to Peter’s previous condition . . .
‘I think we’ll both die if we don’t get our backsides out of the desert soon,’ he said simply.
‘OK.’ Peter met his gaze with a firm look of his own. ‘You’ve talked me into it. When do we go?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
They rested until after midnight. It was the best night they had had so far in the desert. A comfortably big fire, plenty of water, the drowsy feel of full stomachs. They felt as reluctant to get up as if someone was kicking them out of their nice warm beds on a cold winter’s morning back home.
But that was exactly why Beck reckoned they should get moving now. They had reserves in them to give them the strength to fight back against the cold of the desert night. They should be able to cover a good distance before the day warmed up again. They had cooked palm leaves in their bags and full bottles of fresh water.
Again they shook out their things for scorpions and Beck took one last look at the oasis. It was pale and ghostly in the moonlight. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He had said that little pr
ayer, and the oasis had appeared . . .
Well, the oasis had always been here, of course, he thought. How else could it be? But the fact remained: it was here, they had found it, and he owed his and Peter’s lives to the God who had provided it.
The land sloped gently upwards to the north. It took five minutes’ walking to reach the highest point. Beck couldn’t help glancing back before they started down the far slope, when the oasis would be hidden from view for ever. Already he couldn’t make it out against all the other shades of grey beneath the stars. It was like it had emerged from the desert to serve its purpose, and had now quietly sunk out of sight again.
He shook his head. There was no sense in harking back to the past. All they could do was make the most of the present and plan for the future.
They walked on through the night. It was still bitterly cold but they had enough food in them now to fight it. Every so often, as Peter’s watch reminded them, they stopped for their five-minute rest and another mouthful of water. They were still using the Tarahumara trick that Beck had taught Peter, holding the water in their mouths for as long as possible. It kept them from getting unbearably thirsty, but thirsty they still were.
Despite that, Beck was feeling quite optimistic. He had seen the ground grow firmer beneath his feet, more like rock than sand now. They could make good progress without having to clamber up loose, sliding dunes. Walking on flat ground, in comparison, was so straightforward. Put one foot in front of the other, get into a rhythm, switch the mind to neutral and walk. You could keep going for hours.
And was it his imagination, or was that dark patch of mountains, low on the horizon where you couldn’t see the stars, getting nearer? By day, Beck knew far better than to trust the evidence of his eyes. The heat haze could make the mountains appear near, but they never got any nearer. By night everything became harder still. So Beck had learned just to keep walking and ignore the whims of his imagination. He was concerned with two things: reality and finding people.
Dawn was approaching and the light was spreading across the flat landscape. Another couple of hours, Beck thought, and they would have to find another shelter for the day. This really was flat, he thought, gazing around. In fact—
‘Hey, Beck!’ Peter crouched down and ran his fingers over the ground. ‘Tyre tracks!’ He gazed up at his friend, his eyes shining. ‘We must be near somewhere!’
‘Don’t get your hopes too high,’ Beck muttered. He strolled on a short way, eyes fixed on the ground. ‘Yup. More here . . . more here . . . ’
In fact the dry, flat ground was criss-crossed with them, as if a herd of cars had recently stampeded over the desert. The noise in his imagination – the roar of engines, the grinding of tyres on the dry ground – contrasted strangely with the eerie quiet of the desert, where all he could hear was his own feet crunching on the dirt.
‘I reckon we’re on the route of the Paris–Dakar car rally,’ Beck told Peter. ‘Some French guy got lost in the desert in the seventies and decided it would be a good place for a car race. It happens every January – it’s one of the longest, toughest car rallies on earth. So if this was January, we’d have no problem being picked up.’
‘Oh.’ Peter looked crestfallen. ‘Funny. You’d have thought the tyre marks would have blown away by now. Got covered by the sand.’
‘Look carefully,’ Beck told him grimly. ‘There’s actually no sand here. We’re on a salt pan.’
He should have realized, he thought. He had felt the ground grow firmer. He had noticed how flat it was. He hadn’t put two and two together.
Peter looked around with casual interest. The dry ground stretched as far as they could see in the growing light.
‘It’s where the sea once was, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Yes. But the sea water has long since evaporated, leaving all the salt behind. Over thousands of years it has become this dry, barren, featureless wasteland.’ Beck tapped the ground with his foot. ‘Nothing but salt, with this solid crust on top. But it could be worse,’ he added. ‘It’s not necessarily the kind of salt you put on your chips; it could be caustic soda.’
‘Caustic soda? I think we use that to clean the floor back home.’
‘Well, think what it does to dirt on the floor, and then imagine it doing that to your skin instead. Don’t get it on you. Either way, there’s nothing here we can drink, no plants growing and most likely no animals either. They’ve got more sense.’
‘Ah.’ Now it seemed to dawn on Peter. No food, no water . . . ‘What do you suggest?’
Beck glanced quickly up at the sky to get his bearings, and turned northwards. ‘We get off it as quickly as we can,’ he said. ‘We just keep walking.’
But two hours later they were still on the pan and Beck knew they had to call a halt. The heat reflected back from the glistening, salty ground twice as strongly as it did from the sand. Any further and they would just roast.
He ground his teeth in frustration. He had so wanted to keep going. Another ten minutes and they might be off it, back on normal ground. Or they might still have miles to go. In the shimmering heat it was impossible to tell. Beck just couldn’t take the chance of them walking until they dropped. They had to stop and take shelter as best they could.
There was no chance of scraping away even a small trench in the hard ground. There were no rocks and certainly no vegetation to offer shade. They set up their makeshift shelter facing west, away from the sun and also away from the steady north-east wind.
‘The sun’ll move,’ Peter pointed out.
‘So we’ll move the shelter. But that won’t be until the afternoon. And after that we’ll set off again. We’ll walk all through the night if we have to. We’re getting off this salt, one way or another.’
The ground was too hard to drive the poles of the shelter into it. Beck didn’t want to use force in case one of them broke. They had to pile small pebbles around the base of each one to hold it in place. After that they settled down in the shade of the silk and prepared to wait out the day.
The shelter kept the direct sun off them, and the wind, but it couldn’t keep out the light. As the day grew brighter, the salt pan seemed to glow as the sun reflected off crystals in the ground. It shone straight into the shelter’s open front and it seemed to burn into their eyes much as the salt would have burned into their skin.
They still had the silk they had used for their dune surfer. They managed to prop up a couple of slats from the crate in front of the shelter, and tied one end of the silk to them; the other they fixed to the main poles. Now the shelter had an awning that stretched out and down in front of it. It cut out a lot of the glare and made a bit more shade.
‘Hey, we’ve got a patio,’ Peter remarked.
Beck smiled, though he felt the skin pull on his dry lips as he did so. The task had occupied them for ten minutes. Keeping the mind busy was almost as important as keeping the body cool and watered. Unfortunately there were a lot more ten minuteses between now and the evening, when they could move on.
‘I think we’ve earned our next drink,’ he said.
Back inside the shelter, Beck held up one of the bottles and swished it about. It was still over three quarters full. They had hardly touched it since leaving the oasis.
‘This will give us enough mouthfuls to get through the day if we space them out,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll still have a full bottle to take with us when we leave, to get us through the night and until we find another water source.’
‘It’s going to be a long day,’ Peter said mournfully.
Now Beck’s smile only touched one corner of his mouth. Peter was right.
‘There was once this old king,’ he said, ‘who asked his wise men for words of wisdom that would work in any situation. In the good times and the bad. The wise men went away, and they thought very wisely, and they came back and said, “This too shall pass.” And they were right.’
‘So when things are going well . . . ’ Peter said, frowning in t
hought.
‘. . . then make the most of it, ’cos this too shall pass. And when you’re having a really rubbish time . . . ’
‘. . . don’t worry, because this too shall pass. Yeah.’ Peter brightened a little. ‘I suppose that was quite wise.’
‘And today’ – Beck lay back on the hard ground and stretched, trying to be as optimistic as he could – ‘shall also pass. Eventually.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The day was a long time in passing. After a while they realized it was best not to talk. That just dried up the mouth. They couldn’t venture outside because the heat off the salt hit them like a physical punch and the sweat started as if someone had turned on a shower.
Peter passed some of the time by running through all the photos and videos on his camera. Beck felt almost surprised when he came to the photos of the men in the hotel lobby, and the plane, and the diamonds in the cans. It had been three days ago. It seemed such a long time, so far away in another world, that he had to remind himself how they had come to be where they were.
The one thing to be said about the shelter was that it was cooler than outside – which wasn’t saying much. The day passed into a blur. A little snoozing, a little just lying there and looking at the glowing silk a few centimetres above their heads. All that broke the day up was the regular beeping of Peter’s watch, announcing that it was time for another mouthful of lukewarm water, or a nibble of palm leaf and dates.
But finally the day was drawing to a close. The sun was low in the western sky and the boys were packing up the shelter. They loaded up their rucksacks and put on their silk wrappings. They stood there for a moment, two isolated figures in the middle of a sea of dry salt.
‘One more drink before we go!’ Beck said. They had gauged the first bottle exactly. Peter had taken the very last mouthful of water from it right on cue. Now it was time to start on the second.