The Sands of Kalahari

by William Mulvihill

  PROHIBITED DIAMOND AREA

  TRESPASSING STRICTLY PROHIBITED

  Hours later they came to a group of dark buildings. Two elderly men came and stared at Sturdevant as they took him to a small cement annex with narrow slits for a window and a heavy oak door with rusty iron hinges.

  Patterson’s flashlight explored the tiny room. There was a narrow cot. And a pail. Nothing more.

  Sturdevant stiffened. Bauer pushed him inside and began to close the door, shutting out the night and the air.

  “No … please … no …” He was fighting the door, trying to hold it, feeling the clamminess close around him.

  And then the door closed; he heard the raw scraping metallic sounds as they locked it. He was in almost total darkness. He turned, felt his way carefully across the space to the cot.

  Suddenly all the fatigue and worry and despair broke within him. He began to cry uncontrollably.

  He woke up. Somewhere a dog was barking. It was close to dawn. He lay for a long time without moving. He was alive and it didn’t seem possible; he was alive and safe from the sun, he was cool and there was food and rest. He closed his eyes, turned slowly on the cot, yawned. He could spend a month here and it would not bother him, six months. He could sleep and drink and eat and make up for the impossible trip through the desert. They’d said he’d be here a month. A week back at the black mountain was an eternity. Maybe some of them were already sick, dying. He had to get out of here and get help. They were waiting for him back at the canyon: Mike Bain and Smith and old Grimmelmann and Grace and O’Brien. They could not endure an added month.

  He sat up and looked at the barred window. The shock of last night had worn off; the disbelief was gone. He was no longer numbed by the fact that they didn’t believe him. He had to start fighting again, make them believe him.

  He stood up and walked to the window. The dog had stopped barking. He shouted and the barking commenced, furious now. A door banged somewhere. He grasped the iron bars, took a deep breath and shouted as loud as he could.

  Let me out of here!

  The settlement came awake. Shouts, orders, the insane barking of dogs, doors banging, curses. Sturdevant smiled. It was going to get rough again, very rough, but it had to be.

  Let me out of here!

  Footsteps coming closer, angry voices swearing, flashlights cutting the gray-black dawn.

  “Bastard’s askin’ for trouble.”

  “Maybe he’s crazy.”

  And then the fumbling at the door, the screech of the bolt and the rusty hinges. Lights in his face, blinding him. Patterson and Bauer and others, angry faces puffy with sleep. They were silent for a moment watching him.

  “There has been a plane crash,” he told them as if for the first time. “You’ve got to take me out of here. We’ve got to search for the survivors.”

  He watched Bauer’s body turn, saw the fist coming and did not try to move away. The blow caught him full in the stomach and he went down gasping, hurt. Hands found him, pulled him up.

  “You gonna keep on with that?”

  “My name is Sturdevant. Check it out. I got a pilot’s license.”

  “You gonna stop it?”

  “From the air the place might look like a great black hand with sand all around… .”

  Bauer hit him again. His jaw exploded in pain; he reeled away and scraped the rough cement wall.

  “Maybe he’s telling the truth,” said a new voice.

  “Break his goddamn neck that’s what we should do.”

  “The law’s too easy on these birds.”

  Sturdevant found his balance. “I walked across the desert with two tins of water. Once I killed a big turtle. And lizards. I had a rifle too …”

  “Get him out of here, outside.”

  They pulled him through the narrow door, tearing his shirt. A glancing blow sent him reeling into one of the figures. Patterson.

  “Better cut it out, feller. Get smart.”

  He stood alone again, the sky milky blue, some of the stars still strong. A strange hour between dawn and day. There were more men standing around him now and others coming, their flashlights bobbing. Dogs, restrained by leashes, raged and snarled at him.

  “Son-of-a-bitch woke up the whole camp.”

  “They caught him waitin’ for a plane. Down Number 4 shack.”

  “You must listen to me,” Sturdevant said. “A plane crashed back in the desert. They’re waiting to be rescued. They can’t wait …”

  Somebody hit him and he went down hard. He spat blood on his hands and knees.

  “You have a radio,” he told them. “Check with outfits that know me. I can give you names. I have responsibilities . .

  “Dressed up jus’ like a company man.”

  “Teach him some manners, Gert.”

  They pulled him up, held his arms, twisted his head around.

  “You gonna quit!”

  “I’m telling the truth, you stupid bastards.”

  He tried to escape the blow. The wind went out of him and he crumpled back on the hard ground fighting for air, finding it while they kicked him. He vomited and began to cry. Some of them would believe him eventually, one of them. He’d convince one of them by standing up, fighting, suffering.

  “You had enough now?” They shook him.

  “Plane crash … help them … radio…”

  “He’s fainted.”

  They dragged him across the hard ground and pushed him through the door of the tiny jail and locked the door. They walked back to low buildings talking and laughing and smoking cigarettes.

  The bees fled from the cliff, deserted the stone hive, swarmed to some lost rock hole in the black mountain. On the third morning Bain and the others found them gone except for a few dazed workers who crawled and buzzed aimlessly before the narrow opening. The pounding of the big rock had driven them away as Bain had predicted. Now they could concentrate on the job of cracking open the cliff and extracting the precious honey.

  They had built a fire in the tiny hole Bain had found on the top of the big slab that seemed to cover the hive. O’Brien had started it with grass and twigs and bark, then adding wood. The fire burned, building up a bed of coals, and the surrounding rock grew warm, then too hot to touch. Bain had left his work on the swinging rock and climbed the rickety ladder that O’Brien had started; he carried the canteen cup filled with water and he sloshed it over the fire and the hot rock nearby. The fire died, hissing and smoking; the water spilled off the ledge, dripped in on sand and shale below.

  Bain worked into position and pulled the wrench from his belt. He smashed it down around the hole filled with sodden ash and something gave; the weakened rock gave way under the steel. The cold water had caused an uneven cooling of the rock and it had cracked and splintered. Bain picked out a piece the size of the original hole and dropped it down for the others to see. He dug out the wet trash and then started smashing the rock again.

  They did not start another fire in the enlarged crevice Bain decided that they would drive the bees away first. Grace and Grimmelmann went back to the cave and O’Brien stayed to help with the hanging rock.

  It was ready within two hours; a fifty-pound boulder hanging in a cage of wire which was fastened to the rope. They fixed a lead rope to it and began smashing it against the hive opening.

  The rock and the cliff met with a heavy impact, chips of rock sprayed the area; a sudden flow of black angry bees emerged from the slit and they backed away. The big rock bumped and thumped and grew quiet. Bain found the lead rope and brought it back as far as he could, aimed the rock at the hive and let go. It crushed against the cliff and bounced away.

  “I don’t like it,” Bain said. “We’re bastards to do this.”

  O’Brien wiped sweat from his face. “Will it really work?” He didn’t care about the bees.

  “Yes,” Bain said. “It’ll work. They can only take so much. Then they’ll take off for a quiet place.”

  An hour later they
went back to the cave.

  And now the honeybees were gone.

  They filled the enlarged crack with the hot coals they had brought from the cave, added hard, dry sticks, waited for the stone to grow hot. When it was ready O’Brien threw the water on it and then hammered away the shattered crumbs of stone with the battered wrench. The crack had grown deeper. Bain sharpened some of the dry sticks and hammered them deep into the new fissures. The fire was started again.

  “Only one trouble,” O’Brien said.

  “What’s that?” Bain asked.

  “When the slab goes it will bury us under it.”

  “We’ll start doing it by remote control soon,” Bain told him. “We’ll find a crack somewhere above the ledge, drive a stick into it and fix a bottle or the canteen to it on a string.

  We pull the string, tip the bottle and spill the water. All from a good distance.”

  The big man nodded. He walked to where the big rock hung motionless from the long rope. He took the lead rope and backed off with it until it was as high as he could get it. When he let go the heavy rock swung through the air and smashed against the lip of the ledge.

  “It’s a little early for that,” Bain said.

  “Just practicing,” O’Brien said. “And it might have jarred the damn thing a little.”

  They worked all day on the ledge. Grace came with more hot coals. They sweated on the hot ledge, smashing weakened rock, driving heavier pegs deep into the growing cavity, drying it out with rags and grass and starting a new fire.

  Bain fixed a device to pour the water into the crack by remote control. O’Brien began to batter the ledge with the hanging boulder.

  “Very soon now,” Bain said as they watched the smoke rise from a new fire. “Maybe this is it.”

  They sat in the shade. After a while O’Brien got up and carefully climbed the ladder with a handful of dry sticks and fed them to the fire.

  “Let’s try it,” Bain said. They all got up. Bain walked to the cliff and found the string that would trip the bottle of water. He backed away with it carefully under the string which was taut. They looked to the bottle and saw it was tilted almost sideways. Then Bain pulled and it turned upside down and the water flooded from it, hissing on the hot fire, running into the deep crack filled with heated ash.

  O’Brien grabbed the lead rope and pulled the big boulder back, aimed it and then ran halfway to the cliff with it, flinging it away at the final moment.

  There was a violent snap almost like a rifle firing and the great slab of rock fell outward as the big rock smashed against it, hitting the ground with such force that all of them were shaken.

  They did not move. They did not believe that they had done it. The slab was gone from the cliff face and in its place a great hole was filled with layers of discolored comb. Some of it fell away and plunged to the ground. They walked to it, picked it up, licked the amber honey that oozed from the breaks.

  “Fantastic,” O’Brien said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He bit into a clean piece of comb. They were all eating the honey now, feeling its strength, its natural sweetness.

  Bain walked over and studied the great slab, saw the successive discolorations which marked the reach of each fire and each split. They had broken off a great piece of rock with patience and a simple process as the ancient Egyptians had. They had honey now, hundreds of pounds of it perhaps.

  “Now to get this stuff safe in the cave,” O’Brien said. He picked up the ladder which had fallen sideways, away from the slab, placed it against the cliff and made his way up to the hive. “It’ll be a hell of a job, I can tell you that,” he told them. He broke off a big chunk of comb and dropped it down to Bain. They had no containers, no place to keep the liquid food except in its own wax. They would have to carry it back to the cave in bags, in suitcases, and pile it in the cool cave.

  Bain and Grace carried the first load back the long miles to the cave. Then Bain took a torch and with Grace and the old man walked as far back into the cave as he could, and piled the dripping combs on the cool floor under the kloof. They hurried back to O’Brien.

  It took them the rest of the day to clean out the deep hive; they staggered along in the canyon under the great loads of honey. O’Brien made the most trips, carrying hundred-pound loads in the sleeping bag, magnificent in his strength, his corded body covered with sweat and honey and sand. Grimmelmann carried small amounts and he did not hurry; Bain and Grace worked feverishly.

  It was imperative to hurry. To leave the honey unprotected would have been disastrous. Even as they worked the swarm of looting bees and other insects came to feed upon the treasure. And small birds grew bold and hovered annoyingly close. Ants learned of the sacking and they came, militant and determined to share. A baboon came close and watched them cautiously.

  And then it was over. There was no more comb worth bothering with. They were bone-tired as they had never been, covered with honey, gritty and filthy from cutting and carrying the comb. They went to the water hole and washed, walked wearily to the cave and collapsed in the sand. They were heavy with the rich honey; they had the strange sensation of being overfed.

  Night came. Grimmelmann brought in the fire and built it up. The others did not stir.

  Jefferson Smith had been with the Bushmen for three days. They were heading somewhere, moving across the arid plains and through the sparse grasslands. The country improved; the sand desert fell behind as they moved north and there were more signs of animal life, more tracks and birds and cover. Smith remembered what Grimmelmann and Sturdevant had talked about: the Kalahari wasn’t a true desert, it was just lacking in surface water. It was the Great Thirst-land.

  The day after they found him, the day after the feast of gazelle meat, he had gone with them and observed a strange practice. He saw them make sip wells in the dry sand of an old watercourse and suck water from it. An old woman dug a hole in the sand deep as her arm would allow. She collected grass and rolled it into a tight ball the size of a grapefruit and put it in the bottom of the hole. Now a long reed was inserted into the ball of grass and all the sand pushed back into the hole.

  The old woman took an empty ostrich shell and sat it upright in the sand near the protruding reed. From her bag of belongings she took a small stick. She sat down and made herself comfortable. Then she put the short stick in the side of her mouth and placed the other end in the opening of the eggshell. She grasped the hollow reed, put it in her mouth and began to suck. For several minutes nothing happened. The old woman strained and Smith could see that her body was directed to the one effort; her shoulders bent and her old back strained. Sweat ran from her wrinkled face.

  And all at once a trickle of water began to run down the short stick, from her mouth to the ostrich shell. There had been no water in the hole but the sucking had created a vacuum and from the moist sand around had come the water, seeking the ball of grass and penetrating it, leaving the sand behind, following the vacuum up the hollow reed. Fantastic —the reason why the Bushman could live where others perished.

  Now they walked along and came to the beginnings of a vast grassland; sparse clumps of brown grass dotted the red sandy soil and scraggly trees became more common. Two hunters broke away from the group and trotted away to the west.

  The afternoon died and they walked on until they saw ahead a trailing line of smoke in the sky and hurried to the hunters and their kill. They fell upon a big springbok and dropped the dripping meat into the big fire. Smith ate two chunks of it before he stopped to rest. He was like the Bushmen now, gorging himself with meat when it was available, eating all he could hold. Life was the process of living, of eating and drinking, of surviving. He was naked but he was not alone. The wild Bushmen were his friends now, they tried to talk to him, smiling when he did not understand. And he had names for some of them. The woman who first gave him water was Maggie. The leader was Plato because he looked amazingly like the textbook bust of the Greek. Then there were Fu Manchu and Wrinklebelly,
the two hunters. He had even named some of the children: Beetle and Number One Son and Nasty.

  He felt sure that they would not kill him now. They were wild but they were not brutal. They might hand him over to some white man, some district commissioner or police patrol. They would bring him somewhere, for they must know that he could not survive alone, without their meat and water.

  He found a place to sleep and lay looking up at the great sky. How far was this from a city with electric lights and automobiles? How many miles, how many years, how many centuries?

  When dawn came they moved on.

  The desert was left behind. They moved through grassland now, flat and dry except for an occasional vley, green and noisy with birds and ringed with the spoor of kudu and gemsbok. Smith sensed a new element in the clicking talk, an excitement. They no longer spared their water. The children ran and leaped and played with more abandon. Fu Manchu went off alone and they caught up with him a few hours later.

  He carried a young gazelle across his shoulders. They did not stop to eat it, but hurried on across the featureless grassland.

  They came to other Bushmen, to a tiny village of perhaps twenty little people. The villagers rushed to them and there was the age-old exchange of greeting and gossip and acclaim. They gathered around Jefferson Smith, eyed him with wonder and disbelief, the women embarrassed, a few of the men truculent. The leader of the village talked with Plato, clicking and gesticulating and pointing. Smith grew afraid. He was completely helpless in the hands of Stone Age people. It was quite possible that most of them had never seen a stranger at such close range, a Negro, an enemy; it was possible that none of them had ever seen a white man. They were the last few wild humans left in the world and he was among them, in their power.