The Sands of Kalahari
Page 7
He’d given his hat to Sturdevant but his hair was long and thick; now he didn’t need the hat. It was an artificial thing which would not help him hunt; his black beard and long hair blended with the obsidian rock.
He stayed close to the cliff face until he reached the first break; then he began the difficult climb upward. He was sure of himself, sure of his strength; he was twenty pounds lighter than he’d been when the plane crashed and despite the diet he knew he was stronger, quicker, his senses sharper. The sun rose.
He rested for a few minutes on a ledge. He took off his binoculars and swept the jagged rock world around him. A lone baboon sat on a rock high above, a sentinel. It would be a useless shot; he had to get closer and get the sun out of his eyes. He put the glasses away and began climbing.
He reached the top and stood for a long time looking out over the sand sea; Sturdevant was there somewhere, reaching out desperately to contact the outside world. If he failed they might be here forever. He walked to the end of the cliff and looked down. It was a straight drop of hundreds of feet, perhaps a thousand. He backed away from it and found his glasses, looked for the sentinels. He found none.
He made his way down the ridge, away from the peak, eyes alert for anything: for bees that might lead him to honey, for fat lizards, for new plants to take back to Grimmelmann who knew the poisonous from the edible, the good from the bad. The steep cliff on his left ended; it was broken now, shattered.
He studied it for a while, found a way down and began the descent.
The smell of baboon came to him; he stopped and looked around but none of them were in sight; it was as if they sensed his purpose. He moved on and the way became easier and he sat down and rested, his back against the warm stone. He took off his boots and switched his socks; they were full of holes.
He stood up and started down the slope and ahead of him something moved and cried out. A sentinel, perched on a needle of rock, called out in alarm. Somehow they had lost him and he’d surprised them. He swung the rifle up and found the big doglike primate in the telescopic sights; he held his breath; he fired.
The baboon leaped backwards into the air.
He moved forward carefully, for the way was suddenly dangerous again—a fifty-foot drop on his left. Then ahead of him, level with him, the troop appeared, shooting up the escarpment to the dizzy heights above. Never in their memory had they known such a noise; never had a sentinel died before. They fled in terror.
O’Brien came to the high rock and worked down around it. He found the dead baboon. It was bigger and heavier than it had appeared; its arms and neck and shoulders made his own look puny. It was an ape with a dog’s head; its great jaw was filled with terrible teeth. He looked up and around him in sudden fear. Grimmelmann was right. A big baboon was dangerous; this one could have killed him, torn his limbs off, bitten great chunks from him. It was easy to understand now how two or three of them could kill a leopard.
It was too big to carry back to camp. He found his knife and began cutting into the warm body; the body was humanlike and he wondered if he could eat it. He would. It was meat and he was on the verge of starvation.
Then a sound in the rocks around him. He froze, knew what made the sound. He reached for his rifle and spun around.
A baboon was twenty feet from him, creeping, baring its big teeth in sudden surprise, reaching out with long hairy arms. He shot it through the head. A second bounded at him screaming and he pumped three bullets into it before it collapsed almost at his feet. Two others fled, bounding over the rock jumble like rubber balls.
He stood up. His legs shook and he wondered if he could make it up the cliff. It was like the war. On Okinawa a crazy drunken Jap had come running out of a cave waving a sword and had died the same way the baboon had. Hunting was war. Three dead baboons.
He retreated to the shade of a tall slab of rock. There was no fuel here, nothing to burn. He’d cut the best meat from the three bodies and carry it back up the escarpment and down again to where there was wood. And then he would cook it and eat it; he was slowly starving to death and he would eat anything to stay strong, stay alive. If people ate snakes and lizards and insects, then baboon meat was edible too.
He got up and went into the sun again and began cutting pieces of meat from the stiffening carcasses. He was hungry.
Jefferson Smith took his fountain pen and his diary and left the cave. He and Bain were alone. O’Brien’s rifle was gone and the girl and Grimmelmann were out after lizards and firewood. He couldn’t sleep any longer; he had to write.
Outside he sat down with his back against the smooth cliff wall, opened the book and propped it against his upraised legs. The urge to write was an old urge which he understood and welcomed; it was a link with the life before, a time of long ago when he lived among books, studying, reading.
He turned the pages, studied the words which he had written, read scraps of it. It was familiar. He was glad that he had taken the book; it was better than the new socks and the saw and the copper wire. He found the last pages on which he had written.
Last day here. Next stop: Windhoek. Angola has an old sadness about it, a heaviness. Most of the Brazilian slaves came from here and it was a short trip across for them. Try to get figures on this on return trip. See Orteza. Ask Brill about his sources for the Institute report.
He had written this in the hotel in Mossemedes the night before Sturdevant flew them out. Angola wasn’t too bad; there had been no trouble, no color problems. The Portuguese were old-timers in Africa. Brill was the Englishman in Windhoek, a wealthy eccentric who had made a fortune in the rare book business and had become a scholar in the process, an expert on ancient Africa. Brill had invited him to Windhoek and he had looked forward to the visit as the most important aspect of his journey. The Englishman owned some of the only known Arabic writings on the slave trade and had translations of them made at his own expense. It was a chance of a lifetime. His own book could not be written without them.
What should he write now? A record of the crash and what had happened since? No. He was not in the mood. He unscrewed the top from the fountain pen, touched it to the edge of the page to see if the ink was flowing. He would try to piece it all together later, find out the correct dates; the others could help him. He leafed through several blank pages and then selected one. A Monday. He wrote, finding it strange, almost difficult. His hands felt large and he had to concentrate to keep the letters small and neat.
I am hungry. All of us are always hungry. We eat but we do not think of it as food. This is my first entry since the crash. We are in the canyon now, in the cave, waiting every day for a rescue plane to come. Sturdevant left with cans of water to find help. Grimmelmann thinks it was suicidal to attempt it. The sand is terrible. Sturdevant is no fool. He must have known what he was attempting.
Why don’t they have camels here? Somebody said they have some in Bechuanaland. Used for police patrols in Kalahari. We might be near them now. Always hope. Camels came from Arabia. Did slavers use them at all? Check this. Did British bring them into Kalahari? Work on importance of camel to the Saharan slave trade. Impossible to cross Sahara without them; from Black Africa to Morocco, etc… . Blame camel for slavery.
Where did it come from? Central Asia. Turks? I wish I had all the hamburgers I could eat and French fries with plenty of salt. If we get out of this I’m going back to U.S.A. and eat. The hell with history. Buy a huge strawberry shortcake and eat it with my bare hands. Steaks. Baked potatoes. Bread. Stop.
We are not sick. Bain was; recovering. A nice fellow. Detjens died after crash. Buried near it.
He sat for a while and then closed the book, put the pen away. He should have brought a book from the plane. It would be good to read again.
Sturdevant got to his feet, fixed the pack until it rested comfortably on his shoulders and walked off. The sun was touching the flat horizon far away. It was time to move.
He walked on, westward. The water sloshed in the tins and h
e liked the sound of it. Since he had left the others four nights had passed, long quiet nights of the sky and the stars and the flat desert devoid of any living thing, like a great sea. He walked all night and when the sun came again he sought refuge from it. He dug a trench in the sand the first day and covered it with the pack and the jacket and he had spent the day there, almost suffocating but out of the direct and brutal rays. Never had a day been so long and the cold night so welcome. The next day had been better; the land became a little more irregular and he came to a long rock whose base had been scoured and worn away by wind-blown sand so that it afforded some shade. He found an arrowhead in the sand and a broken jar with a pointed bottom. Bushman.
He walked on… .
It was all one big gamble and it was best not to think about it. Walk, move, keep going. Cover the space, the distance. He began to think about all the great blank spaces still left on the map, places where men could walk for weeks and finally die. Australia, Brazil, Arabia, Libya, Canada—so many places in Asia and Africa and even in the United States. The Great American Desert. Nevada and Arizona and New Mexico and all the rest.
He had to keep going and reach some place or they would all die. Nobody would ever trace them. They were all on their own, six people.
Two hours later he stopped and rested, ate another melon and sipped some of the precious water. So far, so good.
When dawn came he found himself on the top of a long sloping rise; as the light improved he saw a blur of thornbushes below. He walked toward them, rifle ready. Bush provided shade and cover: perhaps a bustard here, a fat zebra. Deserted anthills, some of them ten feet high, rose out of the bush, insect castles, almost indestructible.
He found no game. An hour passed and he grew tired and hot, for the sun was rising. He found a suitable anthill, one that would provide some shade, and put his pack and rifle down. He searched the base carefully for scorpions and snakes and then drank from one of the tins.
He wedged himself close to the concave anthill and closed his eyes. It was better to be here than back in the canyon; better to escape, to get out, to try. He could not endure waiting, hoping for time to pass, sweating out a rescue.
The sun rose but he was safe from its direct rays. He felt the relief in his legs; he was tired, so tired… .
The prison ship.
The intense blackness of the stinking hold, the jammed bodies, the voices whispering. We’re ready now, another hour and we’ll start. The voice of Allister trying to find him in the darkness.
He got two in the air and one on the ground before they brought him down in Libya. He bailed out and ended up in an Italian PW camp in Bangazi. Everybody had an escape plan but the camp was well guarded and nobody made it.
The word came down: they were being shipped to Italy. That night two Australians were shot dead on the free side of the wire.
A week later they were on the boat, packed in like animals, pushing and fighting each other for space to sit. In the night Allister found him. They had bribed someone, a door would be open, a guard would be missing. Did he want to go?
Yes. Anything to get out of the darkness. It might be a trap and there might be a sudden light and a machine gun but he would risk it. A night’s freedom from the hellship was worth anything.
You’re a fool, someone muttered. A cockney voice.
There’s somebody waiting for you out there, said another. Somebody said the two Aussies bribed somebody back at the cage.
But he went. He and Allister and several others he never knew. He found the door and then another, went down a line and into the secret water and paddled away in the darkness.
He made it. Ten days later he was flying again.
The prison ship was torpedoed. There were no survivors.
At dark he stood up, his legs stiff from fatigue. He drank some water, fixed the cans on his back and walked on across the great level land, white and unreal when the moon came.
In the deepest part of the night he began to laugh. At first the sound of it terrified him, for it made the dead world seem more spectral and the aloneness more acute. Then the noise seemed familiar and comforting. Walking became difficult, then impossible. He sat down still laughing, a part of his mind telling him that he was overtired, perhaps on the verge of complete exhaustion.
It was so funny… .
Looking for water. Seeking and questing for water. It was the core of the trekboer life and now he was part of it after all the long years of struggle. His great-grandfather, his grandfather, all those before whose whole life was a search for water with the bellow of thirsty cattle in their ears and the hot dust blowing in their faces. Water, water, water …
The burden was his now, the wheel had turned full cycle. But he was alone, all alone, and if he did not find water he would die. And yet it was funny.
After a while he stopped laughing. His stomach hurt. He worked the water tins loose and drank a mouthful. Somebody had played a great joke on him. He fixed the cans on his back and got up and walked on.
He came to low dunes which rose into somber hills, desolate and strange. Rock replaced the sand he had struggled through and his feet felt strangely light. When dawn came he was an hour from the highest point and he headed toward it, excited for the first time.
But there was nothing to be seen from it except the faint outline of a dry stream bed which wound snakelike to the south and west. He would follow it. It was dry and insignificant and probably vanished into some great sand bed miles or days away but he would stay with it because it was something. It might lead to the sea.
He worked down the slope and felt the sun on his face. There was a cleavage in the stone with a slight overhang and he decided to make it his sleeping place. He put the water cans in the shade and counted his matches. Seven left. He’d make a fire.
He walked off with the rifle and came back an hour later with a long brown lizard that had studied him too long from the flat rock where it sought the sun after a night in the clammy rocks. He skinned it carefully, removed the entrails and buried it all immediately to keep the flies away. He gathered dead thornbush branches, picking many of them individually from the bushes, raking up the remains of others with his hands. It took a long time and he was sweating and thirsty when he was finished.
He roasted the lizard meat over a small hot fire, cooking small chunks of it a piece at a time. He had two melons left and he ate one of them along with the meat and allowed himself some water. It was a good meal and when it was over he buried the remains of his kill, crawled under the outward-jutting rock and fell asleep.
When the sun went down he would follow the river bed.
He went on, walking by night and sleeping where he could during the long day. He followed the dry stream bed and on the second day it grew wider and stonier. But there was no water. He dug in several places but found nothing. He hurried on as his water cans grew lighter.
He talked to himself at times during the night walks; he would tell himself not to quit, to keep going. There was salvation for him and the others he’d left back at the mountain; he’d make it, he’d make it… .
And he would sing. The noise was welcome and it proved he was alive and there was always the chance that somebody might hear him. Sometimes his voice grew hoarse, his throat dry, and he would have to drink more water but he was willing to pay for the singing with a few extra sips of water, for the loneliness of the desert night was oppressive. If he did not despair, if he kept control of himself, he might well make it to the coast.
The country began to change, to slope downward. Then on the far horizon one dawn he saw a great blur of mountains. He walked on until the heat drove him to dig a burrow under a protruding slab of gray stone. He spent the rest of the day there, faint from hunger. Night came and he staggered on, talking to himself of the deep pools of water and the game he would find in the mountain ahead. And people. There would be people. A ranch run by an eccentric old German … natives herding sheep … a hunting party …
He came upon a strange phenomenon—a big, dusty turtle lumbering across his path. He stopped and watched it, knowing that he would kill it and eat it and live for another day or two.
The eating of it did not worry him. He had eaten turtle before in civilized places with white tablecloths and silver; his hunger was such that he could eat anything. But the killing bothered him. He could not shoot it and waste another shell and he could not smash its shell with a heavy stone as one could kill a lizard or a snake; he did not know why, but he knew that killing it this way was beyond him.
He caught up with the turtle and it hissed and pulled in its head and feet. He rolled it over and sat down. He tapped the shell with a stick and the head shrank farther into the reptilian folds. Turtles were creatures that no one should kill. They were too old and slow and helpless and dignified; if he lived and made it to the coast and safety he would never again eat turtle soup.
He stood up and began to gather wood. He could eat it raw but it might be better to cook it. He would make a great fire and someone might see it and come to investigate. There was a lot of wood here, more than he had seen.
The turtle was gone when he came back with his first armload of thorn branches. He threw the wood down and ran around until he found it lumbering off with uncanny speed. He caught up with it and picked it up. The shell was over a foot long and it was much heavier than he had supposed. The head and the legs had been sucked inward but as he walked back to the pile of wood the head came out and two orange eyes studied him. Like all turtles it became tamer as it was handled.
“I’m sorry,” Sturdevant told it. “I am sorry I have to kill you and eat you, but it is your fault. You walked the wrong way this morning. It is your fault …”