The Sands of Kalahari

by William Mulvihill

“I’m with you,” Bain said. The idea of the trip was distasteful; he did not like the sand, the hours and hours of hard walking, for he was still weak. But he would go because O’Brien was going and there was no one to go with him. When they got to the cave they told Grace and Grimmelmann and then tried to sleep in the back of the cave. It was about noon now and they would rest until sunset. Then they would take the water can and some melons and climb the escarpment. When night came they should be miles out in the sand that surrounded them.

  Bain and O’Brien reached the plane an hour after dawn. They rested for a time and then ate one melon apiece and drank all the water they desired. They made beds and fell into a deep dreamless sleep; the night trip over the sand had exhausted them. The sun rose higher and burned down on the twisted metal but they slept through it. When the cooler air of evening came O’Brien stirred, opened his eyes and shook Bain.

  They got up sleepily and began a systematic search of the plane. Detjens’s sleeping bag was where they’d left it. O’Brien took it and began to fill it with odds and ends that would be useful: a coil of copper wire, a hammer and an ancient saw, a handful of nails, a heavy sweater that had been Detjens’s, a reading lens of Grimmelmann’s that would be valuable to make fire with.

  Bain found a coil of rope and a canvas water bucket. He put them together outside in the sand and soon found other things: a hand mirror of Grace’s, dirty socks and soiled shirts, extra belts, and three empty whiskey bottles flat and sturdy, which would make good canteens to carry on melon hunts and walks around the cliffs. He went through the tools and selected the metal shears and some files and the copper and zinc scrap. He found a camera in one of the bags and unscrewed the lens. In a battered suitcase he found six sugar cubes wrapped in paper.

  They made packs as large as they dared and carried the rest in their hands. Bain fixed a large suitcase so that he could carry it on his back and O’Brien rolled up the heavy sleeping bag and did the same. They left as the sun went down.

  They walked off and it seemed now that they had been a long time in the canyon; they felt as if they were going home.

  They reached the cave when it was still night, stumbled inside and fell asleep in a few moments.

  Later, they undid the pack and opened the bag and the suitcase and marveled at their new treasures.

  “It’s like Christmas,” Grace said.

  Grimmelmann nodded. There was nothing that would change their lives too much but it might help for a time; the lenses were important, the whiskey bottles, the clothes. Perhaps the trip had been worth it.

  Bain returned to the coffee can he had placed for the bees and found it almost empty. As he stood by the shaded nook a lone bee came, buzzed past his ear and landed on the flat stick protruding from the can. The insect had been here before. It did not hesitate but walked quickly down the inclined ramp and drank deeply. Then it flew away.

  Bain nodded to himself. A few bees drinking from one tiny pocket of water; it was not enough. He took the paper-covered sugar cubes he’d found in the suitcase in the plane from his pocket. He removed the paper from each one carefully and dropped them into the inch of water, watched them slowly dissolve. Then he walked back to a shady place, sat down and closed his eyes.

  He came back two hours later. There were three bees on the landing stick and as he watched, one flew away and two others came. He stood and watched five bees fly away and began following them. He found himself moving along the cliff, toward the peak. He started with his first bee and waited in the spot where he had lost it. Another came and he followed for twenty more feet. He did not hurry; there was enough sugared water to last all day. He followed each bee until it flew out of sight and then waited for another. A half hour passed and he became aware of the fact that a line of bees was flying past him from the opposite direction. He assumed that these were insects returning to the coffee can for the second or third time or that they were new hive members who had joined the rush to the new bonanza of sweetness.

  He moved along under the black cliffs which bulged out over him, jagged and threatening. The opposite cliff grew closer and higher and the valley floor started its upward tilt. It rose in some places in sudden, waist-high granite steps; again, hard graveled beds sloped upward in long swells, and there was one place where the black stone had split and a sheer ten-foot wall had to be negotiated by leaving the shadows and going out into the valley where the wall fragmented. He had never been here before.

  Another half hour. The buzz of flying bees was always in his ears and he realized that he no longer stood and waited. There was a continuous line of bees, some going, some coming, a visible line which anyone could follow. He smiled to himself; he’d show O’Brien and the old German; he’d add to the larder by using a little common sense and some sugar cubes.

  A few minutes later he located the hive. It was twenty feet above the canyon floor, a yard-long, half-a-foot-wide slit in the black cliff. He found a place to sit down and watched the stream of bees issuing from and returning to the lair. The shadows grew long. He built a cairn with flat stones directly under the hive opening and walked back to the cave.

  Sturdevant slept, dreamless and satisfied. It was late afternoon. A fly crawled on his face and he brushed it away without waking. Next to him a small fire burned weakly. The crudely butchered carcass of a zebra lay between him and the fire. Flies and tiny gnats crawled over it.

  A few vultures wheeled overhead, high above the cliffs in the narrow band of sky. The boldest one had flopped down minutes ago and sat now on a slab of rock viewing the carrion, the fire and the sleeping man.

  The carrion birds and the scavengers had come almost as soon as he had shot the big zebra. It had happened very simply. He had come to a turn in the gorge and suddenly in front of him six motionless zebra were staring at him. He unslung the rifle and aimed at one of them but the weapon was too heavy for him now and the front sight wavered over a wide area. He sat down. The zebra stood facing him, strangely unafraid. He braced his elbows against his knees and aimed at one of them and fired.

  They vanished but he hurried after them. The water swirled in the tins and threw him off balance but he followed their spoor. The bullet had hit something, and the sand and shale showed blood spots. Twenty minutes later he found one dying. He was tempted to shoot it again in the head but he did not. He waited for it to bleed to death.

  He took off the packboard and, setting the water tins in the shade with the rifle, began to collect sticks and bits of wood that lay half buried in the white sand. After a while he took a precious match and started a small fire. He was trembling with a terrible hunger and the first few morsels of meat he ate raw, for he could not bear to wait for them to cook.

  Another fly landed on his matted hair and crawled down his face to the blood-smeared lips. He grunted and rolled away, exhausted from the meal he had eaten, filled now and sluggish from the zebra meat. He looked up and saw the cliffs and the sky and the circling birds. He closed his eyes again… .

  The dream came and he shuddered in his sleep; he knew at the very start what was going to happen, for the dream never varied. He’d had it almost every night since he’d left the mountain.

  He saw buildings before him on the horizon, a town of some sort, and he stumbled toward it, falling and calling out. And from the town came people, little boys and girls at first, ragged and skinny with the bright eyes of the malnourished. He sat in the sand and they stood before him. He smiled and waved to them; they looked at him without emotion. From the town now, others: men and women, hurrying to see. Someone helped him up, a big black man in a dirty coat. He hung onto the man and the crowd moved toward the buildings. There were no white people in the crowd. It must be some outlying slum town. The Negroes were quiet but there was an undercurrent of excitement in them and they began to talk in quick sentences in a language that he had never heard before.

  They stopped and gave him water from a dirty tin can. He was able to walk alone now; the crowd grew as more Negroe
s came from the bleached and misshapen huts, from the narrow trash-littered alleys. He tried to talk to them but they seemed unable to understand English—a queer, impossible situation. They could not hear him and they did not seem to care. He smiled and nodded at them, grinned, waved. They had rescued him and he was thankful.

  The excitement grew. More people came and he was surrounded by a wall of black faces, wide-eyed, calling out to each other, laughing now. Somewhere the beat of a stick against a tin; the crowd picked up the rhythm and they bore him through the narrow cluttered streets that stank with refuse. The crowd pressed in on him now, hurting him, carrying him along. Somewhere a woman screamed, a high-pitched wild scream that made him cringe, made him afraid.

  Then he was alone, dizzy and weak. He slumped to the ground and when he looked again he was in the center of a great circle of black men, festive now and happy. He looked around and saw the pole that protruded from the hard-packed dirt. Chains hung from it, and handcuffs. They were going to torture him, kill him; he understood the silence of the children now, the dumb faces of the others, the woman’s scream. They were going to lynch him.

  He got up and ran and they threw him back into the lonely circle. He fought them and they laughed and flung him away. He prayed. On his knees with uplifted hands he cried out to them for mercy and forgiveness. He made promises to them, he begged them to spare him. He was a good man, a friend. He began to sob. They were going to burn him.

  Four men carried him to the pole. They stood him upright and bound him with the chains and went back to the circle and he was alone again. Then an old man broke away from the others and came toward him. He carried a dry gray stick, crooked and canelike. The old face came close and looked at him, studied him with sadness and contempt. He threw the stick down and it fell between his legs. The old man turned and went away. And now a younger man, bent and crippled from some accident. He dropped his stick near the pole and stood for a moment, sullen and dangerous. He went away and a child of ten came, a girl, her body covered with malignant sores, her thin face bright with fever. She too carried a stick and dropped it on the others.

  He called to them. It was not his fault. He was white but that was no reason to burn him; evil was evil but a man’s skin should not condemn him. They would let him go. They would not burn him. He was a good white man who had always been a friend of the black man.

  But they kept coming with their accusing eyes and their dry sticks which they threw near him. Old men who had once lived where their fathers had lived, bitter now and alone in an alien compound without pride, without hope. Young girls, slum-poisoned, degenerate. And thin boys in castoff clothes, torn from one life and barred from another. They all came and looked at him and dropped their sticks.

  He began calling for help. There were white men nearby, police. They would come and save him. The crowd would dissolve and they would free him from the chains and the growing pyre of dry sticks. He would be saved.

  Day became night. A thousand torches burned; the people began cooking and eating, drums began to beat. A thousand faces came before him and he looked into them and saw the terrible tragedy written on them. He saw now what he had never wanted to see; he looked into the eyes that he had always avoided. And he knew that he was wrong.

  He straggled against the chains. If they freed him he could help them; he saw it all now. But he was in chains and his language was not theirs and they did not want to listen. The pyre was waist high now, pressing against him.

  A hush fell over the people. Then, directly in front of him, a figure broke from the crowd, the old man who had been the first to stand before him. He carried a torch. A great animal roar arose from the mob.

  He threw himself against the chains and the packed sticks, screaming and kicking, sobbing … don’t burn me, don’t burn me … please. O Jesus Christ don’t burn me.

  But the old man came toward him and he struggled and screamed. Then the impossible: he was standing in the center of a pyre that was already on fire and the smoke was in his eyes. He could not breathe. The flame found the bare flesh of his legs and began to cook it.

  He sat up, soaking from sweat, terrified, sick.

  The big birds sat around him. Four of them already; soon there would be a dozen, then a score, sitting in a ring, growing bolder, closing in on him. It would be best to cut what he could carry from the zebra and move on. If he remained with the meat he’d have to defend it. Stay awake. The birds would grow bolder as their numbers increased, they’d be all around him, disgusting, dangerous.

  He got up, groaning, heavy from too much eating. He looked at the rotting fly-covered meat and turned away quickly. The carrion birds could have it. He walked to the water tins and got them on his back, picked up his rifle and moved on. He had all the water he wanted and enough meat in his belly to last him a week. He was going to make it, going to make it… .

  He walked down the gorge through which the dry river bed squirmed and crawled like a white snake, a gorge that sliced through two hundred feet of black rock but never grew wider than forty feet. It was cool, for the sun came only half an hour each day, a strange place that sheltered him from the sun, where he walked in the soft sand and on the loose shale, looking up constantly toward the band of blue sky above, half afraid that the black walls would crumble down upon him.

  When the sun came he slumped down as usual in a shaded spot and slept until the sour fatigue faded into the numb exhaustion that was normal now. He rose and walked along in the white sand that the river of long ago had robbed from the soft uplands. When darkness came a few hours later he found that he was unable to go on; the moon’s light made almost no impression in the deep slit of rock.

  He had to keep walking. The gorge ran to the sea and along the coast there were towns, ranches. The river bed was his road; he could not leave it.

  Two hours later the canyon walls spread apart somewhat and the ground became rockier, firmer, with a narrow band of sand in the center. And then a strange thing that he could not believe: he came upon a small quiet pool of water hidden from the sun, close against the cliff wall that leaned out and protected it. He drank and filled his water cans. He took off his clothes and sat in it, a tiny pocket of water trapped in a stone pit; water that had been part of the river when it was last running. After a long while he got up and moved on, down the widening gorge. The water cans hadn’t been so full and heavy since he’d filled them so long ago from the well he’d dug with his hands. The idea of dying from thirst fled from his mind. He had been very lucky finding the vley and he’d been lucky stumbling on the watercourse; before the cans were empty he would reach the outside. It was a matter of stamina.

  The sky grew dark and the sun went away; a cooling wind came and the sluggish feeling left him. For two days he had eaten and slept like a native, bloated himself upon the fresh meat, and now it felt good to walk again, to move. His water tins were full.

  Evening came and he walked on until it was too dark to walk safely. He found a sandy spot close to the cliff wall and fell asleep almost instantly.

  Before dawn, O’Brien was quietly scaling the cliffs, heading toward the baboons’ den. It was cold and dark and the rocks were clammy on his bare feet.

  He climbed steadily and at last reached the top of the ridge. He sat on a tilted rock slab and rested. The world brooded in primeval blackness but far away the horizon was shattered with the diffuse light of approaching dawn. He got up, still breathing heavily, and moved along the canyon edge toward the peak. Twenty minutes later he crossed the cliff top, moving from slab to depression, sometimes crawling. He found the broken cliff face and started down, step by step now, afraid of dislodging a stone, fearful of slipping and going off into the black void below.

  It grew lighter but he could not hurry. He cursed himself for not starting sooner but then suddenly he found the niche and lowered himself into it. He thought of a foxhole he’d had in Okinawa… .

  Some time later a baboon roared and he came out of his sleep-stupo
r. It was fully light now and the bend in the cliff wall seemed even closer than the day he’d been here and decided on the ambush. He raised his rifle, smiled to himself in the knowledge that even the sharpest-eyed animal couldn’t pick him out of the darkness.

  The baboons loitered around the den, sullen and sleepy. Only the young were frisky but they were careful to stay out of reach of their elders, wary of cuffs, trying not to be noisy. O’Brien studied them, realizing that his time was limited. Any moment they might break away and go off foraging.

  It was easy to spot the leader. He sat alone on a round pillar of stone to the left of the den entrance. Other big males were close but apart from him; in time he would decide which way to go, the scouts would go out and the troop would move off.

  O’Brien’s rifle cracked. The baboon leaned sideways and fell off into space, smashing on the house-sized boulders hundreds of feet down. In the moment of shock and paralysis the rifle cracked again and one of the males bounded sideways and rolled off into space with a torrent of loose shale. Then the cliff was alive with animals trying to escape.

  O’Brien concentrated on the big males. One of them simply stood and looked toward him, teeth bared, challenging. Then he pitched into space. O’Brien was elated. He swung his rifle toward the mouth of the den, knowing that some of them would head back into it from instinct. A female with a baby was in the opening and he shot it through the body.

  And one last shot—a long one. Another big male was climbing as fast as he could up the sheer rock wall. The rifle cracked and he fell backwards, plummeting down.

  Silence came. Nothing moved on the cliff. He got up, crawled down to the ledge and began the careful climb upward. He was more than satisfied. The leader alone would have been enough; as it was he’d killed three more males plus the female and the baby. They’d never come back to the den now, they’d find another place, but he’d find it and plan something else. In time they’d all be dead. First of all the males, the big ones who were dangerous, who might kill him if they cornered him somewhere—the fighters and the scouts. The rest would be wiped out once these were gone; the young would grow up without the benefit of their teaching, timid and afraid of him, thinking him invincible.