“It cracks!” O’Brien said.
“It cracks,” Bain said. “And splinters and crumbles. Then I go up again and dig it out with the wrench and smash some more loose. The hole gets deeper and broader. We start the process over again. That’s how all the ancient people used to work rock. All you need is fire, fuel and time.”
“Very good,” Grimmelmann said. He nodded his head. “Very good, very good.”
Bain turned to the old German. “While they get busy on that I’d like you to help me on something else. Getting rid of of the bees.” He stood up and walked away from the other. Grimmelmann followed him.
“Let’s annoy them,” Bain said. “Isn’t it true that if you really upset them they’ll swarm?”
“Ja,” Grimmelmann said. “We might force them to swarm, to leave the hive. We have to make it unbearable for them. Smoke is no good. It only quiets them, makes them easy to handle.”
“I wasn’t thinking of smoke,” Bain said. “What do you think of this? I’m going to climb around the cliff until I find a spot where I can drive in a heavy piece of wood or maybe my wrench; a place maybe fifty or a hundred feet up, easy to get to. We find a big solid rock and wire it to the end of the rope. I take the other end up and make a turn around the protruding stick. We haul up the rock until it’s level with the hive opening. Then we use it as a battering ram, smash it against their home.”
The old man nodded. He saw Bain’s scheme in his mind: a pendulum made from a rope and a stone. The rock would be twenty feet in the air but they could control its movement with another piece of rope. The boulder would smash against the cliff. Inside the secret hive, heavy combs of honey would fall, eggs would break loose from their octagonal homes, workers would be killed, squirming pupae would die as their liquid food drained away. An earthquake in the insect world.
And it would not stop. The workers would start on the damaged comb, the escaping wealth of honey and pollen and grub and food. The queen would stop laying eggs. The hive order would be destroyed. The hammering would go on and on, hour after hour, until the hive was no longer an orderly totalitarian world of precision and ritual but an anarchistic state on the verge of insanity.
The hive would swarm. The queen would communicate to the workers and the general movement would begin, toward the strange outside world which the queen had seen but once. A great formless mass of bees would pour out of the opening and whirl away across the canyon. It would find a resting spot and cluster on some high pinnacle; scouts by the hundreds would search for empty crevices. One of them would find the next home and the queen would go there, half smothered by attendants and protectors. She would survive and when new white comb was ready she would begin to lay her eggs. The life of the swarm would continue.
“Ja, it is a good plan, I think,” Grimmelmann said nodding his head. “Let us get busy.”
Sturdevant walked on.
He was in the Namib Desert. There was no doubt about it now: the hot wind at his back heading for the cooler ocean; the dreadful sand desert, the land sloping downward, the river which ran for a time and then frittered itself away in the heavy sand. At times the wind was so strong that it picked up the sand, swirled it along, creating sandstorms.
He might make it to the sea, to the Skeleton Coast. His rifle was gone. He had used up the ammunition and left the weapon back in the gorge.
He drank again and then stumbled on, found a place to hide from the sun. The pools were running out; he could not risk any more daytime walking. The water tins were empty.
The Namib. A thousand miles of sand running along the sea and drifting back in some places a hundred miles. He was somewhere in it; every step forward was a step closer to the sea. But how far? Would it be wiser to stay in the river bed? There were permanent pools farther back up the watercourse in the narrow gorge. Ahead of him was sand and the sea… .
And the sea would be salt. Cold. The icy-cold Benguella Current swept up from the Antarctic. If he reached the sea he could somehow survive or he would die happily in the cold water.
Night came and he walked on. He was barefooted, for his shoes had fallen apart long ago. He was beyond fatigue. He walked and slept but it was more from habit than necessity. His body was now nothing more than bone and corded muscle, gaunt and almost weightless.
The moon came and the landscape turned bluish white; the cliffs were gone, replaced by sloping sandbanks. After a time he left the river course and walked along the banks, looked for lights, roads, listened.
He grew very tired, sat down in the sand.
Keep moving!
He obeyed. He got up and walked on. There would be no more pools, for the river bed ran through pure sand. He thought of the people he had known and arranged them alphabetically: Allen, Bentley, Collins, Dobbs… . Then he would recall poems he liked and try to recite the first line of each. He tried to remember all the places he had ever slept, all the books he had ever read.
And then in the dead of night a strange sound that he heard but did not understand for a long time, a familiar noise that reached his drugged brain. The sound of ocean surf.
He started to run and saw the moonlight shimmering on the ocean, ran toward the dark waves that rolled in and curled violently as they died on the hard beach. He fought loose from his pack, threw the water tins to one side.
He stood and let the sea slosh over his bare feet. He had been allowed to live and complete the incredible walk. He’d save the others now.
He sat down and let the sea run around him. It was cold. He took a mouthful and then spit it out, the dryness gone from his throat. He walked along the beach and found tire tracks. He began to follow them.
He saw a building in the distance, a small white building on the dunes safe from the heavy Atlantic surf. He hurried toward it, walking between the tracks he’d followed, the wide tracks of a truck or Land-Rover.
The door was locked. There was a sign: the building was the property of an international diamond monopoly. He had made contact with the civilized world.
He broke a pane of glass and forced the single window up, crawled in. The small building was a combination storehouse and living quarters, separated by chicken wire. He stood barefooted on the cement floor and looked around: cot with blankets, a kerosene stove, shelves of canned goods, mirror and basin, small bookcase filled with paperbacks and old magazines. He walked to the storeroom. Drums of oil here, gasoline, cases of tinned food, a box of work clothes. Crates and boxes from England and America and the Union.
He was somewhere along the coast of South-West Africa.
He found a can opener and ate tinned beef and peach halves and whole corn. He made a pot of coffee, found the aroma strange and almost sickening and decided not to have any. He had to let his system get used to civilized food, rich food, sweet food.
He heated more water and began shaving.
He was going to stay here for a time. He was too tired to move on, walk down the beach. The razor worked along the edges of the tough beard and the long reddish hairs fell away. He lathered his face again; it felt good to shave again, to be clean, civilized. He would have to give himself a haircut too and put on some fresh clothes.
It was not always called the Gem Coast.
The Portuguese saw it first in their search for Prester John and the mythical golden cities of the medieval imagination. They found a few Bushmen along its desert shore, naked mollusk eaters, fishermen, small tribes who waited for the greatest of all gifts from the salt ocean: an occasional great whale dead on the cold sand.
There were few harbors but the sea rovers found them and sent armed conquistadors into the desert beyond; they struggled through the deep sand and fought the insects and the Bushmen of the interior and staggered back to their ships. It was the most terrible world they had ever seen, worse than the ice world of the far north, worse than the Congo jungles. They cursed it and sailed away. One of them, bolder than the rest, or perhaps more foolish, sailed on southward and came at last to a gentle cape.
Diaz.
The world shunned the coast until the eighteen eighties. A German named Luderitz wrangled twenty miles of barren coast from a Hottentot chief. He petitioned his government to protect his trading interests but was for a time ignored. Then the colonial fever gripped Germany and she took not only the twenty miles but the vast area around it, larger than herself. It was her first colony.
It was a glory that was soon to die. The Great War came and a South African army ended the German rule. The area became a League mandate but its real ruler was Capetown.
Then someone found diamonds in the sand near the Orange River. A great rush for easy wealth started. Now it was the Gem Coast.
Later, he made himself a cup of tea and opened a can of pears. Then he curled up on the cot and tried to sleep, listening to the surf pound on the desolate beach. The door was open now and the stuffiness was gone from the small building. It was midday.
This was the Gem Beach and the building was some sort of a way station, a supply depot, one of several probably along the tremendous stretches of the coast owned by the company. They did not mine diamonds here; they simply picked them out of the heavy sand. Alluvial stuff. A pocket was discovered and bulldozers and scores of men moved and shifted the sand, picking out the rare stones—each year millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds for New York and London and Paris, from the remote beach to the luxury shops of the outside world.
He shifted his body on the narrow cot, rubbed his head. The long hair was gone; he had found scissors and a comb and sitting outside in the sand, the mirror propped before him, he had cut away the snarled mass of reddish hair, let the wind take it and blow it away. And he had clean clothes on now, plain white underwear and a one-piece, zippered work suit, heavy wool socks and high work shoes, all from boxes in the storeroom. Work clothes for the company’s native labor force.
He was filled with good food and he was clean and shaven and comfortable. He would stay here and grow fat until someone came.
Three hours passed and he awoke and got up.
It was difficult to sleep. He saw them in his dreams: Mike Bain and Grace Monckton and O’Brien and Grimmelmann and Smith. They were waiting for him, starving, sick, desperate, waiting for him to come back in a plane and save them. It was his duty to save them, his duty… .
He walked out of the door and smelled the strange salt air. There was no boat to take him down the coast, no vehicle. The beach south of him stretched away and away. How far to some place where there were people, telephones, a radio transmitter?
He turned back and went into the storeroom, took one of the rubber tires and rolled it out of the door, down the dunes to a level spot on the wide beach. He went back for matches and a can of motor oil. The beach was strewn with bleached driftwood, and for a half an hour he worked, carrying wood, piling it on the rubber tire. He poured the oil over the pyre and set it on fire.
Black smoke snaked its way into the clear sky. If anyone saw it they would certainly come and investigate. He sat in the sand and rested, watched the flames attack the dry wood.
He went to bed soon after darkness came, after a meal of canned ham, whole com and pineapple slices. And he drank coffee this time, good rich coffee with cream and sugar. The fire had died down. In the morning he would make another farther down the beach where there was a new supply of driftwood.
Then he came awake, suddenly. A strong light blinded and something was prodding into his leg, hurting him. Voices.
He sat up and the blinding light moved to one side and he saw that it was a flashlight. A big man was standing in the doorway, a white man with a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. He wore a white-brimmed hat, a light wind-breaker and heavy work pants. Behind him another man, younger with a shock of blond hair and a thin mustache.
“Don’t try anything, now,” said the big man. “Just hold steady.”
“Jesus,” Sturdevant said. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.”
The two men came into the building. The blond-haired man carried a shotgun. A Negro appeared and stood in the doorway. The big man carried a kerosene lamp to the table, touched a match to the wick and adjusted the flame. Sturdevant rubbed his eyes and yawned slowly.
“You were silly to try it this way,” the big man said. “Better give us the stones now,” the other man said. He waved the shotgun.
“Stones?” Sturdevant asked.
“We mean it,” the big man said. “Give us the diamonds now and it’ll go easier with you later.”
“Diamonds?” Sturdevant said. He began to laugh. They had come with guns, not to rescue him but to arrest him. They thought he was a thief, a diamond poacher.
He cleared his throat.
“My name is Sturdevant. I’m a pilot. My plane went down inland from here, hundreds of miles I guess, a hell of a walk anyway. Somewhere deep in the Namib. My plane went down. Crashed. There are five people trapped back in there, on a black mountain sitting all alone in a desert of pure sand. They’re starving to death. I made it here, all the way across the sand, down a dry river bed.”
“You walked here,” said the one with the blond hair. “You say you walked here from the interior?”
“Yes.”
“Impossible. You should have made up a better story.” Sturdevant scowled at him. “Who the hell are you?”
“Give us the stones,” the big man said. “We need the stones first of all.”
Sturdevant shook his head back and forth. “If I came here to steal diamonds why the hell would I make a fire?”
“What fire?”
“Go look outside on the beach. I burned up one of your company’s tires too. You can bill me for it.”
The big man nodded to the Negro and he vanished into the night.
“If you did make a fire it was to signal the plane you’re waiting for, or the boat. What was it anyway?” It was the blond-haired one again.
“What’s your name?” Sturdevant asked.
“Bauer,” said the young man.
“Why don’t you believe me? Why this ridiculous idea that I’m a gem thief? It’s fantastic.”
“We know you’re here for the diamonds,” Bauer said. “This is all company property. There’s no way in or out except through us. You found out somehow about the pocket nearby, probably from some worker you bribed. It happens more often than you think. A small plane dropped you here and the plans were to come back and get you. If you made a fire it was to signal the plane in the night, not to attract attention. And something went wrong. Your friends pulled out and left you here. Bad piece of luck all around.”
“And you couldn’t have walked here from the interior,” said the big man. “We know the desert. Absolutely no water. You couldn’t possibly have come that way.”
“I had two tins of water,” Sturdevant said. “I carried them on my back for days and days until they were almost empty. Then I found a low spot and dug and found water. I had the pools in the gorge.”
“Where are the tins?” Bauer asked.
“Back in the sand somewhere,” Sturdevant said. “I had a rifle too but I ran out of ammo and left it behind. I lived on lizards and a big turtle and carp in the pools.”
“You can sure tell a story,” Bauer said.
“There have been no plane crashes either,” the big man said. “It’s been almost three years since a plane went down within a thousand miles of here. We know that for a fact because we keep a sharp eye on airplane information.”
“What airline?” Bauer asked. “What outfit?”
“My own,” Sturdevant said. “My own plane. Why don’t we go somewhere and check on all this? I’ll give you people to contact to verify all this. I’m known all over hell.”
The Negro came back and nodded to the big man.
“We got a little settlement up the coast fifty miles. With a jail. Next month sometime a truck will take you down to Oranjemund to the regular police. We’re C.D.M. people. I’m Patterson. We better go now.”
“Take me there now,” Sturdevant said.
“Next month,” Patterson said. “It’s a hell of a drive. A special truck comes around with the mail and all. You’ll have to wait. You’re going to jail for a few years anyway so what’s the hurry?”
“I’m not going,” Sturdevant said. “I’ve got to reach somebody and tell them about my passengers. They’re dying back there on the black mountain, a place that from the air would look like a black hand. I’ve got to go on. I’m responsible.”
“Don’t be foolish,” Bauer said. “We told you before. The story’s no good. No plane’s been reported down and you couldn’t have walked out anyway.”
“And you don’t look like a guy that has been through anything rough. You’ve been here four or five days maybe, down at the diggings, raking up stones. And your friends got cold feet and didn’t come back for you.”
“I shaved and cut my hair and the clothes are from the back room,” Sturdevant said. “I came here yesterday morning wearing a ragged pair of pants. Nothing else.”
“Let’s see the pants,” Bauer said.
“I threw them into the fire,” Sturdevant said.
Bauer laughed. “You burned your own clothes all right and put on company clothes in case somebody found you at the diggings. You better give us the stones now or we’ll get mad.”
“Do that,” Patterson said.
“What a pair of idiots,” Sturdevant said. “Jesus …”
“Don’t get sassy,” Bauer said, “or we’ll put handcuffs on you.”
The big man turned to Bauer. “Let’s go. We’ll take him back now.” He motioned to Sturdevant to get off the cot and go outside. Sturdevant did and felt Bauer in back of him with the shotgun. A pair of idiots.
The big man snapped on the flashlight, blew out the lamp and closed the window. He took out a ring of keys, selected one and locked the door.
They walked down to the beach. It was cold and Sturdevant wished he’d thought to bring a jacket. They came to a Land-Rover and Patterson put him in the front seat next to Bauer who got behind the wheel. Patterson and the Negro got in back. The lights came on and the motor roared and the truck rolled forward down the hard-packed sand with the surf roaring on one side and the gloomy dunes on the other. Sometime later the headlights hit a sun-bleached sign:
The Sands of Kalahari Page 15