The Sands of Kalahari

by William Mulvihill

  “Crawl to the rope,” Bain said.

  “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

  “You’re damned right I am,” Bain said. “That’s why you’re going in the pit.”

  “I think I might stand up and take my rifle back,” O’Brien said.

  “Go ahead,” Bain said. “It might be better for you that way.”

  But O’Brien didn’t get up. He crawled to the rope and slid down it to the bottom of the pit. Bain pulled up the rope and threw down the canteen of water. “We’ll be back later with some melons and honeycomb and whatever we can find for you,” he told O’Brien.

  “Thanks,” the big man said. “I’ll remember when I get out of here. I’ll be nice to you for a while.” He walked back and forth in the bottom of the hole like a caged animal.

  “Can he get out?” Grace whispered. She was suddenly afraid, seeing him loose again.

  Bain shook his head. “A lizard couldn’t get up those walls.”

  “Bring some clothes too,” O’Brien said. “It’ll be cold here at night.”

  “You mean you plan to stay?” Bain asked.

  “I’ll be down some night to wake you up,” O’Brien said.

  “Make sure it’s me,” Bain told him.

  O’Brien laughed. “Get me out of here, Grace, before it’s too late. When you realize what he is, come back and get me out.”

  But Grace didn’t answer. She backed away from the hole and walked off in the direction they had come. Bain coiled the rope and followed her.

  O’Brien heard them leave, listened as they walked away. He was beaten; they had tricked him but his day would come.

  He walked around the walls. Impossible. Rock as hard as steel and slippery; overhang; a centipede couldn’t escape. There wasn’t any point now in thinking of escape. Bain wouldn’t leave him without food and water. He would wait. His weapon was time.

  Solitary confinement. The nights would be cold. He’d have to beg Bain for an old coat, a jacket. He could be here forever … for years. He shook the thought from his head. He was here for one day. One day at a time. And a day was coming when he would be up and out of the pit and then he would never again be imprisoned.

  Before night came Bain and Grace returned to the pit. They threw down two blankets, Sturdevant’s sleeping bag, a sweater. The nights were cold on top of the escarpment but it would be impossible to bring enough wood for a fire. And it would be dangerous. Bain wasn’t fully convinced that O’Brien was helpless in the big hole; he did not relish the idea of throwing wood down for the big man. O’Brien was too inventive, too clever.

  They tossed six melons down to him and some honeycombs and two pieces of the dried meat.

  “Get me out of here,” O’Brien said.

  “I’m afraid of you,” Bain said. “And so is Grace.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It is,” Grace said. “Something happened to you, something I feel, something I don’t even understand.”

  O’Brien put his head back and laughed; his white teeth flashed and the long black hair hung down, touching his muscled shoulders. He shook his head as if it were all some enormous joke. Grace glanced sideways at Bain and for a moment they both felt sorry for the big man in the hole. Maybe it was all a mistake.

  “You better let me come up, Bain,” O’Brien said. “I’ll go along with this for a while because you’re upset and you’re blaming me for everything. In a couple of days I’m going to get mad and get out of here and then I might put you down here. Both of you. Better let me out while I’m in a good mood.”

  “You can’t get out,” Bain said.

  “We’ll see,” O’Brien said. “Sometime you’ll come here and see that I’m gone and you’ll look in back of you and hurry back to the cave. And maybe I’ll be there waiting for you. Or I might be watching you from the cliffs, waiting for the night to come, waiting for you to fall asleep over my rifle.”

  “You can’t get out,” Bain said. “You look like a bug in a drinking glass. You need wings to get out.”

  “I’m warning you, Bain, for the last time. Let me out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace said. “We can’t do it. You turned Smith and Mike loose in the desert and you tried it with the old man. We’ll keep you here until help comes.” She turned to Bain. “Let’s go now, Mike.”

  They left and O’Brien was alone again. Night came and it grew cold and he lay in the sleeping bag, his brain turning slowly on the possibilities of escape.

  And he would escape; there was no doubt in his mind. He would escape because he would direct his entire energy and will to it. Escape from the pit was survival and the secret of survival was adaptation. It was as simple as that. You adapted to a situation or a time or a place or you died. The survival of the fittest was the survival of the most adaptable; that was why man had come the long way from forager to master of all. The human body was a weak and pathetic thing. But it could adapt; it could do nothing well but many things half well; it had the miracle of change within it and through the great gulfs of time it did change and adjust and survive while thousands of other forms vanished.

  For modem man, survival meant mental change. The stubborn died as martyrs; the fanatic and the philosopher perished in the face of sudden change. To survive now one had to be pliable; one had to adjust to new codes and ideals and morals. The mind had to change.

  O’Brien grunted. He’d survive because he was the most pliable of all of them. He had no beliefs to discard, no codes, no rules; for him it was easy.

  CHAPTER VIII

  BAIN visited the pit twice each day and saw that O’Brien had water and food.

  “Bring me some more dried meat, will you?”

  “No.”

  “When I get out of here, you’ll be sorry.”

  “When you come out of there,” Bain said, “you’re going to prison, maybe worse.”

  “Don’t be silly, Bain. I’m going to escape from here very soon now. And when I do, be careful. I’m going to hunt you down. In the dark . .

  Bain left and went back to the cave. It had grown cooler and by the time they had carried the embers inside and built the night fire, the wind had picked up and there were distant rumbles far away. They heated some of the biltong and ate it with tsamma melon and honey and before they were finished a strange phenomenon occurred.

  It began to rain.

  The rain did not fall on soft land, heavy land, land that would absorb it, store it, hold it.

  It fell on parched, bricklike slopes; on land that had never known roots; on land long ago gullied and scoured and creased with a billion hard wrinkles. It fell in the desolate gorges, and on the high ridges of the black mountains.

  It gathered in pockets and broke through the tiny shale dams that held it back. It ran downhill, joined other rivulets, cascaded into older gullies.

  Powerful now, running on, joining other tiny tributaries. The land takes its toll, sucks some of it away; but there is too much, it has fallen too fast. It traps desert creatures in holes and nests and burrows: mice and lizards and spiders and snakes. It drowns them, carries their bodies along. Now a waterfall, a turbulent stream running downhill, finding new power, roaring on. A heavy rock is undermined and rolled along; it gathers speed, smashes at the soft sides of the watercourse. It rolls on, smashing other stones, grinding heavily on a granite bottom, becomes lighter. It is swept over another waterfall, splits in half. Soon it will become gravel.

  A million streams reach the canyon floor, spilling down the grooves cut by old rains, eon-old, time-worn.

  Mike Bain and Grace left the fire and walked slowly out of the cave and stood in the rain, lifted their faces upward, let the water pelt them. It was cold and wonderful; they began to laugh and cavort. Bain grabbed Grace and kissed her and shouted something to the sky. She ran away and splashed through a shallow pool that was growing in one of the saucerlike depressions a hundred yards from the mouth of the cave. Bain followed and she turned suddenly and kicked
water into his face. He caught her and they stumbled and fell into the water. He kissed her again and she grew quiet; they sat in the great pool of water which grew around them, almost unaware of it.

  “I loved O’Brien,” Grace said. “I’ve got to tell you that I might still love him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bain said. “I understand.”

  “I thought he killed Grimmelmann but somehow it didn’t seem important when we were both alone here. Nothing mattered. We were two people. And I wanted him, Mike. He was all I wanted and then you came back with your damned rules …”

  “I know,” Bain said. “I liked him too, in a way. I’m sorry.”

  “I knew he killed Grimmelmann,” Grace said.

  “Forget it,” Bain said. The water fell about them; they watched it striking the surface—a billion skipping drops that made a wild music.

  “I didn’t care,” Grace said. “That’s what bothers me. It was wrong, so terribly wrong.”

  “Wrong ended when the plane crashed,” Bain said. “I wanted to kill myself rather than starve to death. You wanted to live and you wanted him. Don’t brood about it. It’s past.”

  “But it was wrong.”

  “I wanted to die and you wanted to live,” Bain said. “We both did the wrong thing. We closed our eyes for a little time.”

  “We all followed our natures,” Grace said. “I wanted a certain man and you wanted to quit and O’Brien wanted to survive. We might be as bad as he is… . Maybe Grimmelmann’s death wasn’t murder, maybe Smith and Sturdevant are alive. How can we judge him?”

  “I’m not judging him as much as protecting myself from him,” Bain said. “I want to live too; and I want you to live. We’re all guilty, but you and I worry about it, we’re sorry. That’s what makes us different from O’Brien.”

  Grace nodded. The rain was building up to the point where it was difficult to talk, to see more than a few yards.

  They stood up and ran back to the cave, to the shelter, to their fire. They dried themselves on rags and bits of old clothing, threw extra wood on the fire.

  “Don’t kiss me again, Mike,” Grace said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If we weren’t here alone it would be different. I wouldn’t care. It’s too easy this way. I like you too much.”

  “Is that why you helped me take O’Brien?”

  She shook her head. “I helped you because I didn’t feel safe with him any more. I was afraid of him.”

  “And that outweighed everything else?” Bain asked. “Yes,” she said. “I wasn’t secure with him after he told me about Grimmelmann. I thought that maybe someday he’d send me off in the desert too. You wouldn’t do that. You’d starve to death along with me.”

  “Would I?” Bain asked. He’d never thought about it. “Yes,” she said. “Or you’d go yourself. You’re not like him.”

  “We don’t know what we’d do.”

  “O’Brien does,” she said.

  “Okay, so he’s evil, he’s no good,” Bain said. “That I know.”

  “He’s not evil, Mike. He just has a different set of laws than we have. If right and wrong ended when the plane crashed, then something else took over. Maybe it was O’Brien’s way, I don’t know. The situation here is bad, not O’Brien; he just tried to cope with it in his own way.”

  “Survival of the fittest,” Bain said.

  “Something like that.”

  There was a long silence.

  “When we get out of here I’m going to start courting you,” Mike said suddenly. “If you’re available, I mean.”

  “Try me,” she said.

  “You mean it? Me?”

  “We’ve got a lot in common, Mike,” she said. “I don’t know how I’d get along with anyone else; we’ve been here, Mike, other people haven’t. They’ll never really understand us after this.”

  They were warm now. The fire felt good. Outside the rain continued to fall.

  “You better be sure with me,” Mike said. “You have a knack for picking the wrong guys.”

  “The story of my life,” Grace said. “I hardly remember my ex-husband now. I suppose I married him because he was the first one who asked me and he was going to London. I was lonely and I loved him very much but I don’t think he was capable of returning it. It was a second-class relationship.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bain said.

  “And then O’Brien,” Grace said. “Maybe it was all physical or clinging to something strong but I was his all the way, Mike. I want you to know that. Whatever else he is, he is male. So much different from my Mr. Andrew Monckton. For a while it was enough for me.”

  “I know,” Bain said. “I’ve had women like that too. I know what it’s like.” He thought of a girl in Rangoon, of another in Casablanca.

  Night came. They ate again and went to bed.

  The rain fell on O’Brien.

  He opened his eyes and got up slowly like a tiger uncurling after a long day’s sleep. He lifted his face to it and smiled; it spattered on his face, his lips. He turned his palms upward in a gesture as old as man, assessed its power, welcomed it. He walked around the sheer walls, wet now and glistening. Tiny rivulets spilled down from above and he stood under one of them and let the water shower over him. The rain built up. He was standing in an inch of it now, two inches, three; the tiny waterfalls pouring into the great hole were thicker, more violent, arching farther outward from the edge of rock above.

  O’Brien stood in a foot of water. Fear struck him. He was going to drown.

  He began to yell, to scream; he cupped his hands and shouted upward through the heavy rain.

  Bain! Help … help …

  And he knew that it was useless and stopped. He would die now and there was nothing he could do unless Bain came and Bain would not come until the rain was over and it would be too late. The pit would be half full of water and he would be floating in it like a dead fly in a tumbler of drinking water.

  He found the center of the pit and stood and the rain became so intense that he closed his eyes. A yard of water covered the bottom of the hole; the little waterfalls joined now —sheets of water pouring down from the long inclines above, running off the smooth rock into a great cistern.

  To drown after all the escapes from the desert, to drown in a world where water was almost never seen, to drown after he had sent the others off to die of the sun and thirst.

  The water rose about him, inch by inch.

  Bain sat up slowly, unzipping the bag. The cold air poured in on him. The fire had burned low and the rain outside had not slackened. He got up, shook Grace.

  “O’Brien,” he said. “We forgot about him. He’s up there in the pit and it’s probably half filled with water.” He saw the big man struggling in the water, trying to hold onto the polished rock. It was something neither of them had thought of —the water, the sudden rain. Grimmelmann had told them about it but somehow it never seemed possible in such a pitiless desert world. Unless there was some unseen and unknown cleft in the bottom of the pit it would fill with water and drown whatever was in it. There was a good chance that O’Brien was already dead… .

  Grace stepped out of the sleeping bag and hovered near the fire; it glinted on her golden hair.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Go up,” Bain said. “He might be hanging on, waiting for us. Maybe.”

  “He’s not dead,” she said. “Not him.”

  “We’ve got to see,” Bain said. “We can’t let a man die like that.”

  “No, we can’t. That’s the trouble with people like us. We can’t do things like O’Brien.”

  “He may be up to his neck in water right now,” Bain said. “That rain’s been coming down all night.”

  “If you pull him out of the pit what do you plan to do with him?” Grace asked. “It’s pitch dark. He’ll kill us. I don’t see what we can do.”

  “We’ve got to see what the situation is,” Bain said. “If he can stand up until
dawn we’ll wait. If he’s swimming around hanging on, we’ll have to figure out something. Throw the rope down and let him tie himself to it until daybreak. I know he’s dangerous, but I can’t leave him there, Grace. I can’t kill a man that way.”

  “I know,” Grace said, “but we’ll have to be careful; the way up the cliff is going to be almost impossible.”

  “Let’s go,” Bain said. “Every minute counts.”

  Somehow they reached the pit, fighting the night and the rain and the slippery path. Bain carried the rifle and helped Grace with his free hand and they worked up the storm-lashed cliff and rested for a few moments when they were safe on the top of the ridge. The rain had diminished but the darkness was almost complete and they felt their way along the familiar path. An inch of water washed their bare feet and gusts of wind whipped at them. They slipped and fell and pulled each other along and after a long while they stood and looked at the pit.

  In the darkness they could see only a part of it but they saw that it was completely filled and overflowing with water. It had not seemed possible in the cave but now, standing in the swirl of water that ran down the incline into the pit, they realized that the crevice had been filled in the first few hours of the downpour.

  They circled the pit carefully, stooping low, peering into the water, calling out for O’Brien, but there was no sign of him and no answer.

  “He’s down there in the bottom,” Grace said. “It wasn’t our fault. We didn’t think about the rain.” She felt sick.

  “He might be alive,” Bain said.

  “I know,” Grace admitted. “I have the same feeling.”

  They were frightened now and shaken from the climb and the cold rain. Grace found herself praying that O’Brien was really dead. Bain no longer trusted the darkness.

  They hurried away, back down the cliff, to their cave. The black night was O’Brien’s province. They felt fear pressing on them from all sides.

  O’Brien staggered away from the pit fighting the terrible nausea that had seized him once he was freed from the water and the glassy rock. He began to vomit and fell down again; his legs and arms shook from the fatigue and strain. He got up and went on in a stupor, almost unaware of the darkness and the driving rain and the slippery dangerous path he followed.