The next day he headed for the peak and descended into the third canyon, the one most distant from the cave. The baboons were there. The sentinels watched him from high vantage points and melted away when he came within range. He spent the day stalking them and fired his rifle once at one which he surprised by an arduous backtracking stratagem. The animal screamed, leaped into the air and then somehow managed to bound up an almost perpendicular cliff.
The day was not entirely wasted. He came home with more tsamma melons and two yellow lizards that he had killed with a gnarled club.
He found himself thinking of baboons constantly. A dead baboon was better than a live one. It was one less belly to fill. If all of them were dead there would be no competition for the meager food resources of the mountain. There was nothing he could do that was as important as killing baboons. The others could look for honey and lizards and melons. He would kill.
CHAPTER V
SMITH was dying of thirst.
There was no place to hide from the sun; the world was flat and hard and dry and there was no water, no shade. He walked across the terrible land looking for a place where he could lie and rest out of the sun. He would be dead soon and he did not care; he understood now the strange apathy that precedes death and makes it tolerable. He was about to sit down, he down, when he saw something ahead on the flat shimmering horizon. A tree …
His tongue was something strange, sausage-thick, hot. It was early morning; he had drained the last shell sometime in the night; he would die today, before the sun set. He staggered on, finding it difficult to keep the tree in front of him. Something was wrong with his heart. His forehead was suddenly cool and he retched.
He sat down. He’d rest awhile and wait until the dry heaves went away … his heart fluttering now like a frightened bird trapped in his chest. After a while he remembered the tree and got to his feet and walked toward it. It seemed far away.
He realized he was naked.
During the night an unbearable hotness had come over him and he had stood up to catch more of the cool air blowing from the east. He began walking into it, forgetting his empty ostrich shells, his shoes and hat. He took off his pants and shirt, carried them for a while until there no longer seemed a reason. He held his burning throat and went on through the night until he fell exhausted in the sand. And then the sun came again.
The tree was gone. He stopped, discovered he was walking away from it. As he watched, the tree became two, then four, then one again… .
He walked to it. The ground under him suddenly was very far away. He felt as if he were walking on stilts. He came toward a large stone, tried desperately not to step on it but somehow he couldn’t avoid it. He tripped and fell, swore.
He began to crawl. The dust entered his eyes and he closed them and crawled on over the baked earth and the stones. The pain did not matter; he had to get to the tree so that he could die in the shade.
He slumped down and rested for a long time as the sun rose higher. A naked man lying in a vast flat plain where nothing lived. A vulture came from far away and circled. Then another.
Smith opened his eyes and looked ahead and after a long time he saw that his tree was not a tree but a tiny bush less than a foot high, a strange growth with thick, rubbery leaves. He was ten feet from it.
He gathered his strength and crawled toward it, put his head under its tiny branches, its few dozen leaves. He brushed the pebbles away until the ground was soft for his cheek. He would not move from here; it was pointless; the country all around him was the same, parched and desolate.
The sun rose higher and higher, cruel, pitiless.
Hours later he opened his eyes.
Why didn’t he die?
He saw himself objectively for an instant, as if from above. He was lying on the sand under the tiny bush. Then the picture slowly changed as if one viewed it through a camera that was moving away. He lay in the middle of an acre of sand, then ten acres, then a hundred acres. A square mile now and he lay huddled in its center, cowering under the tiny bush for protection. Then it became ten square miles and there was no change in the topography of the country. No trees, no water —sand and stones and nothing more, as bare and desolate as anything he had ever flown over, as terrible as some stark and sterile moon. Now a hundred square miles.
He drifted off again. The whole world was pain.
When he opened his eyes he saw a foot, a dusty, withered, yellow-black foot, very small. He watched it for a while and then it moved, came at him, prodded his shoulder. He turned his head, looking upward, but the sun hit his eyes and he turned away, shielding his eyes with one hand. He sat up slowly with great effort.
A tiny wizened man stood in front of him. An ugly gnome with a face that looked a thousand years old. A pygmy with yellowish skin. There were others, ten or twelve, women and children waiting in the background.
Smith tried to smile. Bushmen …
The wizened gnome watched him, pug-nosed, bulbous-browed. He was perhaps five feet tall and carried a bow smaller than a yardstick. Five or six arrows protruded from a quiver that hung from his hip, a quiver that seemed to be made from some kind of bark. And two garments: a triangular-shaped loincloth and a loose animal hide over one shoulder. A skin bag, half-filled, hung from his waist.
The Bushman began to talk. It was as Smith had read about and heard Grimmelmann describe: weird sounds, not quite human, clicks and smacks, tongue noises, croaking sounds, sudden kisslike sounds, all of it unlike anything he’d ever heard, primeval and frightening. What was the little animal-man saying? What would they do with him? Suddenly he wished he were alone; it was better to die alone than at the hands of paleolithic men. They would torture him, cut him up, eat him. He searched the ground around him, found a rock the size of a brick.
One of the others broke away and came toward them. A tiny wizened woman with a face more Mongoloid, ferretlike. She wore a loose, shapeless hide and carried a stick to which were tied three ostrich eggs. She undid one as she came toward him and handed it to the man. Smith reached for it. Water. They carried it that way. The man removed a plug from it and gave it to him and he drank. The liquid was hot and smelly and salty but it was water and he was going to live for a while longer. He forced himself to hand the shell to the man. If he took too much they might decide he was too much trouble and shoot him with a poisoned arrow.
The little man walked away from him with the ostrich egg and joined the others. And he began the noises again, the talk; some of the others spoke but most of them stood and listened. This one was obviously the leader and the group was his family or blood group, a tiny clan perhaps.
Smith got to his feet. They could save him, they could take him out of the desert. The dizziness hit him again and he staggered sideways, trying desperately to straighten up. He must not be a burden; they were going somewhere and he wanted to go with them. They wouldn’t hurt him but they might abandon him.
He stood still and the earth stopped moving; the dizziness left him. The Bushmen looked at him and began to laugh, pointing at him. They began to walk away. One of them pretended to be dizzy and the others joined in the fun. Smith watched them, half-smiling, then realized that they were leaving him.
“Hey, wait a second, will you?” It was his voice, but cracked and hysterical; his mouth hurt, his tongue sausagelike, unwieldy. The Bushmen stopped and looked back. He walked toward them trying to talk to them in sign language, pointing to himself and to them and making little walking movements with two fingers, the kind children make on table tops.
They understood. Some scowled. Some laughed. They all looked to the Boss. He rubbed his wrinkled jaw and rubbed his peppercorn hair and pulled an ear lobe. He made a motion to Smith, a motion that said he might join them. Then he turned his back and walked off and they all followed; a dozen tiny men and women and children and one tall black man making their way across the lunar landscape.
He realized he was naked. Stark naked. And slowly through the haze of time and
pain and shattered memory it came back. He remembered the cool night, taking off all his clothes and walking through the night with the wind on him; the cold rushing across the desert. The heat had driven him insane for a time.
He walked on trying not to step on the big stones; his feet hurt but his head was clear; his stomach made strange gurgling sounds from the water. He decided to stay a little behind the Bushmen but it was not easy; the little people walked at a brisk pace.
Then it came to him. He had spoken to them in English and they hadn’t responded; to them it was a foreign sound, meaningless. It could be that none of them had ever heard English or German or Afrikaans. They were true Bushmen living in the most remote parts of the desert and shunning white men. And that was the terrible wonderful crazy joke about the whole thing. He was a Negro.
If he’d been white he’d be dead now. They would have stayed away from him, let him die of thirst. Or they might have murdered him. Strange black men were bad enough, but white men alone and unarmed and helpless …
They thought he was a native African.
He might still be in trouble, for there was little love between the Bushmen and their Negroid neighbors. They were hunters and the others were cattle grazers and villagers and the rift was as old as time. But there was nothing else he could do. He had to stay with them or die.
They went on and he followed, almost trotting to keep up with them.
The ground became firmer again, reddish with dry tufts of grass and dry trees standing alone in the barrenness. Smoke ahead. The Bushmen began talking and the pace picked up until it was a true trot. Smith fell behind, his legs trembling, half-running to keep up. But he knew that they would stop and rest, eat perhaps.
Some of the older children shrieked and ran ahead of the main group. There were three men at the fire, one standing and the others bending over the fire. Three gazelles, two of them cut open and half butchered, lay close to the fire. The children examined each animal and one of them began to act out the hunt. The hunters looked at Smith for a long minute and asked the old leader questions and then forgot him.
Now all of them fell upon the gazelles. They began to cut pieces of meat from the carcass with sharp flints. One of them had a steel blade, another a square piece of copper with a bright, honed edge. Some of them cut pieces of meat, dropped them into the fire and turned back to work on the entrails with the others. They clicked and clacked and the noises were happy now; they cut and tore at the raw meat with bloody hands; they pulled the roasted meat from the fire and tore at it like starved dogs, grunting and calling to one another. The hunters had obviously gone off ahead of the main group, before dawn perhaps, to stalk game with their tiny bows. And they had been successful and carried the game to this prearranged spot. It baffled Jefferson Smith. It had not appeared that the group followed a trail. Yet somehow they had gone straight to where the hunters waited.
And Smith found himself tearing at one of the carcasses with his bare hands trying to rip a piece of bloody flesh from it. He had not planned to touch the meat but the sight of it and the smell of the slices roasting in the fire made him lose all reason. They might kill him for touching their kill, there might be taboos and rituals, but he did not care. He was crazed with hunger and he could not stand and wait to be offered some of the kill.
Next to him one of the older children worked with a thin flint, a tiny boy cutting with skill and precision. The boy looked up, saw him, grinned and finished cutting. He handed the meat to Smith and began laughing. The others near him looked up and it became a joke.
But Smith was gone. He found a solid thorn branch and snapped it over his knee. He pushed the sharp end through the meat and crouched next to the fire. His stomach was convulsive with the anticipation of meat: rich, red, dripping and now cooking over the fire.
He ate it. A pound of roasted gazelle torn apart by his own teeth and fingers gritty with sand, part raw, part burned. He went back and got another piece now, cut it himself with a paleolithic flint he found near the carcass. He squatted next to the others and roasted it, watched the juices bubble and dry up, watched the meat char. He got too hungry to finish it so he stopped like the others and ate that which was cooked. He felt the strength return to his body, felt the glow of hot meat in his stomach. He was alive.
Bain told the others about the hive while they ate their breakfast outside in the early warmth of the morning sun— a breakfast of melon and gemsbok soup and roasted lizard. They stared at him for a while in open disbelief. He told them of the coffee can and the sugar and of tracking the bees to their hive.
“Why the big secret?” O’Brien asked. “Why didn’t you tell us about it before?”
“I wanted to think about it for a while,” Bain said. “I had to figure out a way to get rid of the bees and get to the honey. It won’t be easy.”
O’Brien was visibly angry. “It’s easy enough to get rid of the bees.”
Bain looked at him. “I will not permit them to be killed.” It was an ultimatum. The others looked at him. It was a new side of the man they hadn’t seen, tough and challenging.
“Aw, don’t be silly,” O’Brien said. He sensed that Grimmelmann and even Grace were with Bain.
“I’ll be in charge of this operation,” Bain told him. He looked around at the others. “I found the hive. I know how to get into the cliffside. The bees will not be killed.”
“I agree with you,” Grimmelmann said. “There is no sense in killing, killing, killing… .”
“What’s the difference?” O’Brien said.
“Why kill them when it’s not necessary?” Grace said.
“We might have to,” Bain put in. “But I’m going to try to drive them out.”
“How?” O’Brien asked.
“I’ll show you when we get there,” Bain told them. He got up and went back into the cave to collect what he would need.
Bain led them toward the hive. He carried the long wrench; the big coil of rope hung from his right shoulder. O’Brien carried a suitcase, which he changed from hand to hand as they went along. There was a hatchet in it, some of the nails and some melons. Grace carried the battered canteen cup that they’d wired to a long stick. It was almost full of hot coals from the permanent fire. Grimmelmann carried a small airline bag containing the canteen, the whiskey bottles and a small tin, all filled with drinking water.
They did not hurry but stayed close to the cliff, in the shadows, walking along the way that was now becoming a recognizable path.
They reached the cairn that Bain had built and saw the black bees buzzing above them. They put down their burdens and rested, drank some of the water and ate some of the melons.
Bain studied the hive opening and the area around it and was happy with himself for remembering it in such detail. The cliff here was not smooth; great overhanging slabs, fissured and cracked, hung to the perpendicular sides. The hive opening was at the side of one of these slabs, close to the cliff, protected from above and on one side by outward-jutting rock. It appeared that the opening led to some cavity behind the big slab, a cavity filled with wax and honey and pollen and bees. The slab was eight feet long and five feet wide; it hung on the cliff wall like a giant shingle.
Grimmelmann joined him, shielded his eyes from the glare and studied the cliff.
“I do not think you will get this honey,” the old man said.
“I’m going to knock off the whole slab,” Bain told him. He walked to the cliff, stood under the slab and studied the rock wall. It was climbable. He could reach the top of the slab and examine it. O’Brien joined him. Bain took off his ragged shoes.
“Boost me up,” he said. The big man cupped his hands and Bain stepped into them, grabbed a lip of stone and began climbing. Three minutes later he was twenty feet above the others, studying the top of the slab. On the far end, over the hive opening, it was a foot wide and it maintained this width almost to the end he clutched. He pulled himself higher, ran his hand along the back. He had hoped for a wid
e, deep crack but there was none. The slab was part of the cliff it clung to; the narrow ledge had been made by the falling away of some chunk above, the remains of which had long ago been turned into shale and sand by time and the elements and was now part of the canyon floor.
But there was one spot close to the cliffside where the rock was crumbly. Bain picked at it with his finger, dislodged a fragment of black stone. He put his forefinger into the hole and strained at another piece. It moved but did not give. He reached back carefully, pulled the wrench from his belt, put it on the rock shelf and found a more secure foothold for his left boot. Below the others watched him, wordless, apprehensive.
He took the long wrench and hammered at the thimble-sized hole; the loose bit broke free. He cleaned out the hole again, inserted the end of the wrench and began smashing it up and down. The stone was resistant but it was stone and it gave way before the cold steel. He withdrew the end and smashed again at the edge of the hole. Sweat poured from every pore; his arms ached. After five long minutes he had a hole the size of a pack of cigarettes, a hole that had been filled with shattered and weakened stone, a hole that could be enlarged only with tremendous effort, for the stone surrounding it was solid and almost impervious to the smashing wrench. But Bain was satisfied. He rested for a time and then crawled down to rest in the shade.
“We can do it,” he panted to the others, “I know we can do it now.”
“Knock off that slab?” O’Brien said. Grimmelmann had talked to him, filled him with doubt.
“Yes,” Bain said. “Just a matter of time. Now listen to me, all of you. O’Brien, go find a dead tree and make a ladder up to the top of that ledge. It’ll be easier, going up and down. When you get up there make a fire in the little hole and keep it going. Grace can collect stuff to burn, good hardwood if you can find it. Here’s the idea: we get a good fire going in that hole, the rock all around it heats up, hotter and hotter. Then we dash cold water on it. What happens?”
The Sands of Kalahari Page 14