The Wind Cannot Read

by Richard Mason

  I went until midday without feeling a strong need for water, then it came upon me as though my body had suddenly realised it was being neglected. I had not seen any water all morning, not even in the valleys, and I began to worry over this, knowing that lack of a few cupfuls could drive me back to the Japanese.

  I pushed on for an hour, reckoning by the sun that it was one or two o’clock, and then I came cross a track and turned along it. I was more likely to find water that way, though I was more likely to find Japanese, too; so I proceeded circumspectly. I had only gone a few hundred yards when I saw some movement ahead, and I dived into the undergrowth. I lay on my belly where a section of the path was visible through the tangled vegetation. It was a whole company of Japanese, marching in single file. They were carrying full packs and water-bottles and rifles, and were moving forward to the road. They went in silence, and their faces looked expressionless and dead. If I had held a machine-gun I could have mowed them down without compunction, because at this distance they seemed less like humans than like some formidable species of jungle-born animal. And yet I knew that this was not so—that their appearance, like my own, spoke only of the moment, and that somewhere buried within all their equipment and khaki and set soldiers’ faces were stores of sentiments and memories, and that each one of them who trudged past me was in some way different from the rest.

  I let them go by, and then set off along the track in the opposite direction. In a few minutes there was more sound ahead, so I got down again. A string of mules came by, sturdy, big-eared animals carrying enormous loads. Some had machine-guns strapped to them and heavy boxes of ammunition. A dozen soldiers escorted the train, behind which another platoon followed in single file. They passed slowly, and I had to remain perfectly motionless, because I was only a few yards from their legs.

  When they had disappeared I cut off into the jungle again, thinking it too dangerous to continue along the track. The dryness of my throat and mouth was making it difficult to salivate. I had read so many tales of men who had suffered from thirst on a raft or in the desert, and of how the torture had turned them into gibbering idiots, that the fear of this happening to myself produced a nervous reaction that made the effect worse. I had also been perspiring freely, and I knew all the water had to be replaced.

  I thought that in some of the valleys there must be water, so I worked my way downwards again. I had been walking and floundering through the undergrowth all day, but I hadn’t covered more than two or three miles. Now I had to go on regardless of direction, only to find water. Food didn’t matter yet—and even if I found some it would be useless with nothing to drink.

  I reached the bottom of the hill, and it flattened out and rose again without any water course. There was nothing for it but to go on. I pulled my way up the next hillside thinking now of nothing but my thirst. It was not unbearable, but great enough to give me an unpleasant premonition of what was in store.

  I found a promontory from which I could look over the tree-tops and survey the country. I could still see nothing but lines of hills, with a few clearings in the jungle and no water at all. I chose the deepest valley between two hills, almost a ravine, with a mountain rising behind that looked like a watershed. It took an hour to reach it and the sun was dropping low on my left, over Cawnpore and Delhi and Peter and Sabby. I got down into the ravine where there was a deep gloom. The whole of the bottom was buried in under­growth. I stepped into all the tangled vegetation, and parted it with one hand and foot. There were the smooth stones of a stream bed, but I could neither see nor hear water, so I dropped on my knees and felt between the stones. It was all bone dry. I pulled at the stones and felt beneath them, but there was not even dampness. It had been dry since the last monsoon and was waiting for the next. The next was not for a month at least, and by that time I should have gone mad and died, or gone mad and gone back to the Japanese.

  I got up from the stream bed and climbed the side of the ravine again. I knew what I was going to do now—go on with all the determination I had, straight towards our lines, without wasting any more time searching for water that wasn’t there. With this decision I felt less thirsty, and able to move more strongly against the entangling growths. I shook my feet free angrily. I wasn’t going back to the Japanese to have my head cut off by the arrogant little ape Nakamura; and I wasn’t going to die either, because I had to see Sabby, and anyway our people weren’t more than a few miles away. Men had survived journeys a hundred times worse than this, and they didn’t have to see Sabby. I would go on all night and get through tomorrow. If I got through tomorrow water didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if it took until the following day: you could go most of a week without drinking. In any case, the sun wasn’t burning on my skin because of the trees, and that was different from the desert or an open raft. I was going to get through all right, and with this wound I would be sent to the rear at once, and I should be with Sabby in a week. The thirst was nothing when I knew I should be with her as soon as that.

  It became dark quickly. The vast wildness of the jungle faded and there was only the blackness and the faint outlines that made my immediate world. Everywhere the crickets rasped and hissed and screamed, and all kinds of other new noises began. There may have been the same noises in the daytime, but at night they sounded new, as any noise sounds new in a cathedral when you have heard it only in the street. It was rather like a cathedral in the jungle at night because of the stillness that sounds only emphasised, and because the stillness was awe-inspiring, and there was some power in it the nature of which it was impossible to comprehend. I tried to struggle on, groping my way from tree to tree, one arm dead at my side. I went on purposely until I was too tired to care where I lay, and I dropped down suddenly and remained where I had dropped, biting a stick that fell across my face, for that kept my parched lips apart and the tongue from the roof of the mouth. The temperature fell quickly and the cold ate at my exposed limbs and went through me. It was a long night, the longest I have ever spent. It dragged itself out until I could no longer believe that this was one night only; but I thought I must somehow have slept through the day and woken up only to suffer another. I counted what I thought were minutes; and over each I seemed to labour as though it was a full stage on a steep hill, with the top far away out of sight. I thought it must be three or four in the morning, and in order to give myself the surprise of seeing the light before I expected it, I pretended that it was only midnight. But there was no pleasant surprise, for had it been only dusk I would have expected the light sooner. Finally, I gave up waiting for the dawn, believing this night was really endless; and then it came when I had almost ceased to care. I got up at once, thinking in the cool morning I could make good headway, particularly as my thirst seemed to have diminished. When the sun began to shine through the upper branches of the trees instead of between the trunks, I reckoned I had put a mile behind me. I began to feel light-hearted, believing that when the noise of battle began I should find myself level with it. Then all of a sudden I saw the ravine in which I had searched for water on the previous evening, and despair banished all the hope in me. I had somehow confused my directions despite the position of the sun to show me I was wrong—and now the day was advancing and the high sun was heating the air, and the air was burning in my rough throat.

  There was no firing to be heard. I wondered if it was Sunday and the armies were observing a day of rest. I tried to work out the day of the week, going over the days from the Thursday on which I was captured. I marked each in my mind by an incident, but each time I reached three or four I lost count, and the time became confused. Anyway, it didn’t matter what day it was, there was no battle to guide me, that was the point.

  I used the sun, and went south, still parallel to the Imphal Road. Later on I came upon an encampment of Japs. Luckily I heard them first and got down out of sight, but it took me a long time to skirt the area, cautiously crawling most of the way—and with one arm useless it wa
s a terrible business that exhausted me. When at last I tried to stand up I collapsed and had to lie resting for a time. I was weaker than ever, with a pain spreading through my body like a poison from the shoulder of my wounded arm. I had left the bandage on still, and dare not remove it, partly because I knew I could do nothing and partly because I was afraid the sight would revolt me. All over the arm a dirty blue-green colour was spreading, and in places the flesh had been scratched and torn by thorny growths. The dysentery was nothing now. I had dried up with no food or water in my stomach, and there were only pains that didn’t matter. But there was a burning pain round my head like a red-hot steel band. It was this that made me cry. I could have kept myself from crying, but this would have taken energy that I needed, and I let myself weep. It did not matter weeping in the jungle when there was nobody to see. Once I had started, enormous convulsions began in my breast, but there were only tiny tears on the end of them, squeezed out as though my body had not enough water to spare for this. I put my face on the ground and bit the earth until the waves that shook me had subsided. Then I got up and went on, but stumbling half blindly. I felt utterly broken and hopeless.

  Yet something kept holding me up, some strength that no longer seemed my own. It was as though I had passed from reality into a dream; and the dream brought with it the blessing of timelessness. I ceased to count or care about the hours. But I know that when I came at last upon the river course, the sun was low amongst the trees.

  I could not see any water in the river at first, only the white stones that were evidence of a torrent in the rainy season. I was too dazed to rush upon them in excitement. I went on stumbling up to them, and I fell down there before I knew whether or not there was water. Then I heard a faint trickle. It came into my ears slowly, growing louder, like a sound that wakes one from sleep. I listened to it for quite a long time before I turned over and pulled away a stone and saw the dancing reflection of the light. I tried to push my head down, but there was not enough room between the stones so I shifted one or two more for the length of my body, and as I touched the water with my lips I felt it like tender fingers caressing my limbs. I turned my head sideways and the water ran into my mouth. It was a moment or two before I could contract my throat muscle to swallow. When I succeeded I could feel the liquid pass down the channel to my stomach. My throat was still hard and the first gulp made no difference. I swallowed six or seven times more and each time it was a great effort, and I felt enormously wearied and could not bring myself to swallow again. It vaguely occurred to me I had found this water too late. It did not matter very much. All I wanted to do was sleep. I closed my eyes and the water splashed into my mouth and over my face, and I was too tired to think of anything but the dark sleep that was creeping over me and the very gradual extinction of pain.

  (2)

  I woke up and it was night. A very soft, starry night with a feathery wind blowing. I could not think where I was. I had been dreaming of Bombay and the house on the hill and I woke believing myself to be on a soft mattress, with a white pillow under my head and Sabby snuggling up to me, stroking away with her long fingers the dull pain in my forehead. Very gradually the fingers became water and the pillow a round stone, and there was no Sabby at all, only the feeling of space around me and the slow realisation that this was jungle. I remembered that my body had been sick. I could not feel my body now. There was no pain in it, and below my throat there might have been nothing. I wondered if it was all dead and only my mind was living, and to test it I made up my mind to move my leg. I managed to shift it a few inches. Then I moved my arm, enclosing a stone in my fingers, but I could not grip it tight enough to lift it. It was only a small stone.

  I tried to get up. I began to count five, intending on the five to concentrate all my energy into the effort. I counted slowly, because there was a reluctance in me to do this. When I reached five there was a short spasm in my body that expended itself before I had raised myself at all. There seemed to be a force holding me to the ground, my own dead weight. I thought I would try getting up the other way, so I shifted my top leg over slowly until I was lying face downwards instead of on my side, and I pushed upwards on the one sound elbow. I raised myself an inch or two and then dropped back exhausted. I lay with my face pushed into the stones, thinking that I was dying.

  I did not really know why I was dying, whether it was weakness from the days I had lived on a few handfuls of rice and these last two days on nothing, or whether it was the poison from the wound. Whichever it was, I ought to have been stronger. If I had been a soldier, I should have come easily through this. But I had been sitting too long behind a school desk and cooped up in the fort at Cawnpore; and I had been eating well and growing soft, not lifting a box myself because there was always a bearer. I was not dying a tough fighting death, but falling effete by the wayside. I was deeply ashamed of my defeat, and I knew that in my weakness I had betrayed Sabby. And I had betrayed Lord Durweston, whom I had promised that I would look after Sabby; and I had betrayed myself.

  I did not care how long this night lasted. It was not like the last, one aching minute after another, but a timeless suffering in the heart. And after a time there began to come back to me certain scenes from my life, and with them a curious sense of detachment, as though they were from the life of a stranger. And I fell to wondering how it was that my own life had been built up of these scenes, and not of others; how it had come about that with all the world to be born in I had been given life in a place called Tewkesbury in the Midlands of England. And what power was there beyond my own will that had thereafter shaped my destiny? Had it been preordained that I should escape from Burma, to find waiting for me in India a year of intense happiness? And that I should be abandoned at last on the stones of a river-bed in Manipur? How strange a place in which to die! I had somehow never thought of myself coming finally to grief in so remote a spot . . . But it was always in the last reel that you got the biggest surprises.

  Yet now it seemed to be at hand, I saw nothing to fear in death. It was leaving life that I dreaded leaving Sabby, perhaps in pain and deeply unhappy. I wanted more than anything else to be with her, to hold her frail body tightly and kiss away her enormous tears; and I wanted to show her love in the warmth of which she must grow well. And I wanted to be alive to see Sabby grow old, for with age there would come to her a new beauty of gentleness and serenity. I loved her for what she would become no less than for that part of her that I knew; and if I regretted dying, it was more than anything because I should never see her like this and could not help her to live through the misery of the present.

  “Darling Sabby,” I said . . . “Sweet, darling Sabby” . . . and I could hear my own voice amongst the stones, and I thought somehow that she might hear it too, and remember as I was remembering the loveliest moments of our happiness—when she had held the towel between us in her first bedroom in Bombay, and we had kissed with lips only faintly touching; and the night I came back to her from Rosie, and those times when we had lain under a pine-tree overlooking Jali Tal; and the night we had first gone to the new house together and dined together on the balcony with the lights of Bombay like a jewelled carpet below; and at Agra in the moonlight, the exquisite confusion of happiness and sadness . . . all this, and underneath it the fusion of our love. I had been taught to love and to know the meaning of gentleness and generosity . . . but these were only seeds planted in me, and were only beginning to grow into a real knowledge that would bring a serenity into my life. I was dying with all my old selfishness and ignorance . . . and it was too soon. I hadn’t begun to live.