The Sands of Kalahari

by William Mulvihill

  “You liked the war?” She’d always believed that men did.

  “I liked building,” Mike said. “We did fantastic stuff with bulldozers and cranes and rock crushers. You have no idea … no idea …”

  “You liked it,” Grace said. He was talking; it was a good sign.

  “Yes, I liked it. We built roads through swamps and jungles and paved them with crushed coral. I wonder about those roads sometimes, and the bridges and buildings. I wonder if they are being used or if the jungle has taken over again, the rot, the time. I like to think that people are taking care of them, using them.”

  “What were you doing in Nigeria and all those other places?” Grace asked. “The same?”

  “The same,” Mike said. “Whatever needed building. I’m a knockabout, roughneck type of engineer. I’ve got a knack for improvising and getting by with half of what you need for a job. You learn that in out-of-the-way places and in wars. They send you the wrong material and half of that is stolen for the black market. They send you the wrong men and you end up doing most of the work yourself and training the guys under you. It’s a tough life if you’re honest and you like working.”

  She got up and brought water to him and he drank and felt better. She left him and he dozed off dreaming about her… .

  While he slept the others left: Sturdevant, O’Brien, Jefferson Smith and Grace Monckton.

  Grimmelmann walked slowly down the canyon. He looked everywhere for honeybees, for signs of game, for indications that people had been in the valley. They were in the Namib

  Desert. Sturdevant kept saying they were in the Kalahari but he was wrong; they were in South-West Africa. But it mattered little; it was all the same, sand and sun and desolation.

  But it smelled like South-West Africa… .

  It was getting so that he thought of nothing else but his first months in Africa, those bad times he wanted to forget. The Herero War and the chase over the desert and all the boys who had died that year. All his life he’d been trying to forget it, drive it down into the bottom of his mind, and now it was with him again. Fate had returned him to this place. The land had been waiting for him.

  January, 1904. Wilhelmshafen. It was right after Christmas, a clear, cold day, and they had stamped their feet on the cement pier waiting to go on the ship, a long line of them in their short blue jackets and high yellow boots, stiff with newness. They were going to Africa, South-West Africa, and they were going to avenge the poor colonists there, Schlesians and Bavarians for the most part. They were going to Africa and wipe out all the blacks who had committed the awful outrages they had read about. They were going to save a German colony; they were going to restore German honor.

  There was never a day like that. They marched through the streets to the docks and the band led the way and their boots smashed against the cobblestones and the people pressed around them, cheering and clapping and waving and singing with the music.

  They got on the boat and they sailed away. On the third day they had been issued new uniforms. Light brown khaki and light brown tropical helmets. They had fun with the strange helmets, strutting around admiring one another, clowning. Then an officer bawled them out and they tried on their uniforms and found them all too large.

  They reached Swakopmund, dropping anchor and rocking in the heavy swells. They crowded close to the rail, trying to see the shore, but there was heavy fog. And then the fog lifted and they fell silent, for there was nothing but a few other rusty ships and behind these an endless strip of reddish-white sand. Nothing more. They had expected palm trees and monkeys, straw huts and swamps and jungle. But there was only the sea and the sky and the endless sand. They saw some long, low buildings that looked like barracks and a lighthouse sitting on the sand. Swakopmund.

  The next day they disembarked. They hurried through the sand with noncoms hollering and their rifles sliding off their shoulders.

  There was no one to greet them. It was as if they had landed on the moon. They formed into their units and marched to the railroad station. The tiny open cars were used for hauling. At first they thought it was a joke and stood without moving. But the noncoms shouted and they crawled in and squatted in the metal cars and after an hour the train pulled out, into the interior, through endless sand dunes.

  Later in the day the grade grew so steep they had to jump out of the tiny cars and push. The grade was uphill all the way and not until evening did they reach the summit of the giant rise. Then they looked back and saw Swakopmund behind them, twenty-five miles away, saw the sea and the vast stretch of sand between them. And they turned and looked ahead and saw a wild and terrible mountain range. For some it was the first mountain range they had ever seen and it frightened them. Even the few Bavarians among them were amazed by the coarseness, the wildness, of the jagged mass of stone that rose before them. It was dark now and cold and all of them unrolled their white woolen blankets and tried to get comfortable in the rolling, squeaking cars. And some of them down the line were singing:

  “Doch mein Schicksal will es nimmer

  Durch die Welt ich wandern muss.

  Trautes Heim, dein denk’ ich immer …”

  In the morning the sun came. They rolled on into a narrow valley of the mountain range and above them the cliffs threatened. They stopped at a string of sheds and boiled some rice and coffee. They scrubbed their utensils with the rough sand and moved on. They were short on water now and were supposed to drink only when ordered. In the afternoon they emerged from the mountains and found themselves on a wide plain.

  They felt relieved. The earth was reddish yellow and there was a sparse growth of rough grass which looked like rye. Here and there were thick bushes. They saw birds and then a gazelle. They began to relax and talk more.

  They came to a farm which had been burned and saw graves near the charred walls. Toward evening they stopped at a large station. They slept on the ground that night and it seemed like a luxury after the cramped cars swaying and creaking and men kicking in the cold night.

  The next day they saw their first riverbed: a band of clean dry sand running through the barrenness. The country was softer; in the distance were the green slopes of new mountains.

  They reached Windhoek at noon. They marched through the streets of the spread-out city and saw smiling faces and other soldiers and women. Up the hill they marched to the fort, broke ranks and wallowed in the water which ran from rusty faucets in the courtyard wall.

  The other soldiers were men and boys who had been simple settlers and now, since the native uprising, were in the home guard. They wore wide-brimmed hats and high boots. They had been in the country for years and were quiet and superior. They would act as guides. Some of them were wounded; the barracks were filled with the sick.

  And there were prisoners. Proud Negroes, men and women, and they did not look like defeated people. Some of the girls were strangely beautiful; many of the older women looked like witches and some of them smoked pipes… .

  Grimmelmann bent down and studied a mark in the sand. Baboon, probably. The cliffs were full of them. He straightened up and walked on, swinging his heavy cane. He had to clear his mind of the past and concentrate on the present. It was getting so that all he thought about were the old days, half a century ago when he was a very young man.

  The heat shimmers along the dead rock; nothing moves.

  Now a glint in the air: a female wasp. She hovers close to the ground, searching among the stones and pebbles, the parched grass. She finds an ant colony and flies away; she explores another hole. A lizard’s tongue licks at her from the blackness. After a long hour the delicate insect finds her enemy, a great tarantula.

  The big spider comes from his hole in a rush. He is hungry and the thing that flies over him is tasty; he will catch it and bring it deep into his burrow.

  The fight. The spider is a monster, hairy and powerful. The wasp is fast and desperate with an urgency that must be appeased. The great jaws of the spider come at her and she feints an
d weaves away. A heavy leg hits her, she is stunned; for a moment the spider has her but in a final instant she dodges away. The sparring goes on. The wasp’s stinger is ready, a black rapier glinting in the sun. Now, without warning, she allows the giant spider to run over her; she rolls and jabs upward at the great soft belly as his jaws seek her. When the spider shudders and shrinks from the pain she escapes.

  And she is back again, fighting. The tarantula lunges heavily, groggy from the poison. The rapier punctures again and again; paralysis hits the giant’s body. The wasp rests, watches her victim stumble and lie totally paralyzed, completely helpless.

  The wasp drags the great body across the stone and gravel to a sandy spot. She digs a hole, pushes big pebbles out of it until it is large enough for the tarantula. She pulls the living body into the tomb-nest and begins to bury it. Then she stops, rests again, lays an egg on the spider’s warm body. She finishes the burial and flies off.

  In time the egg will hatch, the larva will feed upon the tarantula’s body, will survive and come forth and fly away.

  Sturdevant led the way. O’Brien and Grace Monckton walked together and Jefferson Smith was last. The peak dominated their thoughts but they did not talk about it; it was too important. Their lives depended upon what they would see from the highest point.

  “What do you do in Rhodesia, Mrs. Monckton?” O’Brien asked the girl.

  “Cattle,” she said. “Cattle and sheep.”

  “And you came down from Nigeria?”

  “Yes,” the girl said. “We flew up last month to visit an uncle. My father hadn’t seen him since the war. He had to get back but I stayed on for another two weeks and then started out on my own.”

  “And your father didn’t know you had started home?”

  “No, we just left. Flew to Leopoldsville. Missed the plane to Livingstone. Took the Impala plane with the rest of you.

  If we’d all waited for the scheduled plane we’d have been all right.”

  O’Brien was silent. He’d missed the flight too and gone on the Impala plane. It was a small South African airline with good pilots and good planes but they’d been forced down in Angola with engine trouble. They’d spent the night in an ancient Portuguese hotel and in the morning Sturdevant was there, eating breakfast with them and offering to fly them to Windhoek. He was an ex-fighter pilot with a shiny new plane and he was obviously getting rich flying chartered runs and hauling equipment and mine boys. So they got in his plane and flew away, south and eastward. Night came and then a sudden storm. By dawn they were lost, flying low over endless sand and rock, running out of gas.

  He turned to the girl again.

  “Did your husband stay back in Nigeria, Mrs. Monckton?” She hesitated for an instant. “I’m divorced.”

  O’Brien nodded.

  “I came back to Africa last year,” she said. “From England. After my divorce. I’ve been staying with my father.”

  “I see,” O’Brien said. He wondered what sort of a man her husband had been, what she had been like as a wife.

  “Do you think that Impala pilot will put two and two together?” she said. “He knew we left on Sturdevant’s plane.”

  “Yes,” O’Brien said, “but he doesn’t know that we got lost and crashed. A guy like Sturdevant is always on the move. He leaves one place, flies off into the blue, and that’s it. Nobody waits for him. His flights aren’t logged. The Impala pilot figures we got to Windhoek and went our separate ways and he figures that Sturdevant is now chartered out to some mine in the Katanga maybe or working for the South African government if he’s got the right connections. Nobody knows we’re down.”

  “Have you decided where we are?” Grace asked. “Sturdevant says we’re in the Kalahari.”

  Jefferson Smith caught up with them. “It reminds me of Nevada,” he said. “Or California, the desert part. The stark bare mountains and the shale and sand and scraggly bush. It’s like the Southwest.” His voice was pleasant, deep and unhurried.

  “I’m from California,” O’Brien said. “You hit it right. It is like the Southwest. You get the idea back in the States that Africa is all jungle and maybe some veldt. You’re amazed when you find out that a hell of a lot of it is just like Arizona or West Texas.”

  Grace Monckton turned to Smith. “You’re a professor, aren’t you? I thought somebody said that back in Angola.” Smith nodded. “I’m an assistant professor, really, working on a doctorate. I got a grant from the Ford Foundation to come here, for a year. I’m trying to unify what we know about Africa before the European penetrations, especially Negro Africa.”

  “Where do you teach?” O’Brien asked.

  “Harvard.”

  O’Brien whistled. “You make me feel like a barbarian. I managed to get through college by playing football and having an uncle on the board. And I came over to hunt. Sounds simple as hell now, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Grace said. “You could have stayed in America and hunted.”

  “And you, Mrs. Monckton, could have stayed in England and raised cattle,” O’Brien said. She smiled. Why didn’t he call her Grace?

  “And as for me,” Smith said. “I should have had sense enough to stay put after all my ancestors went through to survive the slave ships and all the rest of it.”

  They all began laughing for the first time. Far ahead Sturdevant stopped, turned around, and waited for them to catch up.

  Grace Monckton had been on her way home. She had been born and raised on a farm as had her mother and grandmother before her. Her people had been in the eastern Cape Province for a long time, descendants of the 1820 Settlers who had been organized and sent to South Africa by the British government after the Napoleonic Wars.

  She was wealthy. The family owned several sheep farms; they bred horses and blooded rams and bulls. The first ancestor had stayed on the land and fought it. The hundred acres that had seemed fabulous in Britain was actually pitiful here because the land was dry and hostile and not suited to the plow. Most of the settlers quit, moved to the frontier towns and found other means of making a living. But some others stayed. They took over great tracts of land, grazed it with sheep and cattle, a handful at first, and then as the years passed they prospered and in time they were established on great manorial holdings of several thousand acres.

  She had grown up in the open, on horseback. And she was not quite a lady despite the schooling and the special tutors and the protocol of the local society. There was an urgency in her, a seeking, which worried her father. He was a busy man and he wondered sometimes if he had done wrong by keeping her at home and letting her grow up on the farms among the workmen and animals. Her mother had died when she was two and there had been thoughts about sending her to a convent school or boarding school but he could not bear to part with her and so she had grown up at his side. A colored woman servant had looked after her, grown to love her and become almost a mother.

  They climbed the peak carefully, stage by stage, resting each time, for the sun was on them. It was not a difficult climb nor dangerous but it was long and only O’Brien had ever climbed a mountain peak before.

  They reached the top and stood on a flat wind-swept ridge that veered up another fifty feet to a final pinnacle. Below them was the canyon; far away, almost at the end of it, was the pool. Next to it was another canyon and then a third; and to their left, on the other side of the ridge, another spur of rock running off enclosed still another narrow gorge. Sturdevant guessed that the two farthest ridges were ten miles apart.

  And there was nothing else. They stood on the top of a great black stone island in a sea of sand.

  “I thought this would be the end of a mountain range,” Smith said, voicing all their thoughts.

  “We still have all the water we want,” Grace said. “That’s all I was hoping for, the water.”

  O’Brien took his binoculars from Sturdevant and studied the gorges below them. “It’s like a big hand,” he said. “Five ridges running and enclosing four canyons.
Let’s hope a plane comes soon.” He handed the glasses to Smith and sitting down, took off his boots.

  They sat down with O’Brien. His feet were bare and he was wiggling his toes. They looked around them again and wondered how the top of a peak that looked so sharp could be so flat. It was a platform, acre-sized, of black rock. And it was hot from the sun.

  “What’ll we do?” Grace asked. She was not frightened as she had been when the plane crashed. They had survived. They had found things to eat. They were intelligent. Sturdevant had been born and raised in the bush; he was smart and tough. And so were O’Brien and Smith and the old man

  “If there was anything to burn we could start a fire up here and keep it going full time, plenty of smoke and all. Maybe somebody would see it.” Smith was thinking out loud. But they had all thought of it. There was nothing to burn.

  “We’ll just have to stick it out,” O’Brien said. He began putting his socks back on carefully; now they were free from sand. He tapped one of the scuffed boots on the rock. “We can stay here. We’ve got water. Somebody is sure to spot the plane and investigate. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “You’re wrong,” Sturdevant said. “You have no idea of the Kalahari. It’s endless. That plane might rust away before anybody flew over it; and it wouldn’t be a search flight so they might not even see it. I’m a pilot. I know. If we sit here and wait we’ll never make it. There are too many of us for the food supply, for one thing. There is an end to sand hens and lizards and melons.”

  “What about the baboons?” O’Brien asked.

  Sturdevant made a face. “I never heard of anybody eating baboon.” The thought disgusted him, more than the thought of eating rock python and yellow lizards.

  “There’s always a first time,” O’Brien said.

  “But there’s a limit to them too,” Smith said.

  “I’m going to get help,” Sturdevant said. “I’m going to take the two water tins, make a good pack out of them and walk out of here.”

  “No,” Grace said. “Don’t go. Let’s all stay together.”