*
As a result of climbing steadily and without respite, we had by now reached a respectable height up the mountain. There was no need for any scientific equipment to prove this. The state of our hearts and lungs was sufficient. The Koreans seemed to be more or less used to this type of exercise. The Russians on the other hand were less at ease. We were all panting. Tobacco smoke became increasingly oppressive. On top of that it felt as if a headband was tightly gripping our heads. And all around us there was a deep, deathly silence.
We continued on our way, with the greatest possible caution. Welowski and Saunders worked out our position with a sextant, as if we were at sea. Needless to say we were armed, from head to foot, against any band of brigands, although such an encounter was less and less likely in this emptiness. Above all we had with us Nain-Sain, who gave us more reassurance than anyone else did. You could say about our Mongolian that he lacked amiability and was of a withdrawn disposition. His natural silence had about it a certain secretiveness. But there was one thing which nobody could possibly reproach him for: that was of not knowing what he was doing. Each time we failed to follow his advice, we regretted it almost immediately. We had a new proof of this when we had to abandon the junks. Nain-Sain had recommended that we should acquire a dozen horses and camels. Sanders, who occasionally had peculiar crises of stubbornness, was strongly opposed to this, not out of miserliness, but simply because in Korea we had managed to get along very well without them. Nain-Sain hadn’t insisted. But it was not long before events proved him right. We were only too glad, in the week that followed, to come across a caravan which agreed to sell us six of their wonderful long-haired little Turcoman horses, whose sureness of foot exceeds that of the mules when it comes to moving along at the edge of a precipice. Thereafter our progress, as Nain-Sain predicted, improved, both in terms of speed and safety. Those among us who had been given the role of scouts could, from that moment on, do our job more effectively and with less strain and tiredness; in addition we could be sure that the heavy lorries in our convoy could avoid the risk of getting stuck in a cul-de-sac, or on a track which ended in an abyss.
*
‘Just look at that!’ cried Neratov, who usually didn’t say a word.
The fog again, of course! The fog, which seemed to complete the sensation of silent emptiness into which we were falling, deeper and deeper. The summit of some wild mountain peak emerged briefly from the mist, only to disappear again immediately.
‘Nain-Sain? Where has he got to?’ asked Ilichine.
‘Nain-Sain? Where is he?’ The question which there was always someone who dared to ask, whenever we had cause for concern! One of our ponies neighed mournfully. We shuddered. We had almost finished lunch. Nain-Sain was not with us.
‘He left a good hour ago,’ said Youen, who was busy cutting up slices of pineapple on our aluminium plates. Ilichine and Neratov smoked their pipes in silence. Kailor and Ou-Tsing were eating, while at the same time greasing their rifles, which they then cautiously wrapped up in strips of cotton wool.
‘A good hour ago! He might at least have told me!’ said Sanders, pretending to be annoyed, but more concerned not to let fall a silence which he was afraid would be to my benefit, a silence which would have allowed me to take him aside, perhaps, and which would require him once again to explain himself to me.
‘So we just have to wait,’ said Welowski. ‘Don’t you agree, chief?’
Sanders, who I was sure was becoming increasingly concerned, hurriedly replied:
‘Yes, of course we’ll have to wait! Youen, open a bottle of vodka . . . for anyone who wants some . . . ‘
He poured a large glassful for himself. I watched him with curiosity. Since we had left Fouzan he hadn’t drunk at all.
‘Now then, would this be a good moment to . . . . . . ‘ I said.
He didn’t answer, but gave me a look in which there was both anger and pleading. At that moment he realised there was nothing more he could do, that I had caught him.
What a strange afternoon! We waited nearly two hours in a fog which was getting thicker and thicker, without moving from the spot where we had our lunch. Nain-Sain was still not back. The convoy could not set off without him. Not one of us – not even Sanders – cared to go and look for him in the grey and frozen darkness, on the terrifying cliff road which we had been climbing all morning. We waited without saying a word, in a silence which was broken only by the distant sound of a rock falling and crashing down to bottom of an abyss, or the raucous cry of some creature – a bird or a wild animal, you couldn’t tell which.
Then suddenly, the sound of footsteps: at last Nain-Sain appeared, leading his horse by the bridle. Normally so indifferent, now he had a gleam in his eyes which nobody could mistake.
‘That’s the Gobi out there, isn’t it?’ murmured Welowski.
Neratov echoed him: ‘Is that the Gobi out there?’
Nain-Sain ignored them. He just gave a nod to Sanders, who got up to follow him. I also jumped up.
‘I’m coming with you!’ I said.
I said it with such authority that Sanders immediately realised that it would have been pointless to order me to stay where I was.
How long did we walk behind Nain-Sain? Three-quarters of an hour roughly, not more, and we didn’t go very far. We walked slowly, feeling our way with our hands along the rocky cliff face on one side. On the other side there was the precipice.
Then suddenly we stopped. The track was no longer climbing. After a week of almost uninterrupted ascent, we must have reached the edge of a vast plateau. But still we couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of us . . . .
‘Wait here’ ordered Nain-Sain. In a voice which the mist seemed to muffle even more, he added: ‘In half an hour we’ll see it. In the desert the fog always clears before nightfall.’
Then despite Sanders’ attempt to keep him he disappeared once again into the half-light.
*
‘So this is the moment!’ I repeated.
The Gobi was there, of course, behind that opaque wall of mist. It was there. And then what? Perhaps Sanders thought he could use it as a way out!
What was this place where Nain-Sain had left us, so he could set off again, to continue his tireless exploring? A sort of granite belvedere, a natural balcony where I sat down, and invited my companion to join me.
‘Where could be better than this?’ I asked, somewhat impertinently. ‘You must come clean. You know you can’t get out of this. You remember what you promised me last night? To give me proof that your idle gossip was not just a heap of abject slander.’
He usually didn’t like it when people spoke to him in that tone of voice. He remained silent, not breathing a word.
‘Slander, or lies perhaps,’ I continued, ‘Lies of which you could well be the source, why not?’
This time I touched a nerve. He jumped.
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you, you poor fool, that it’s out of pity for you that I’m not saying anything?’ he roared.
‘Pity?’ I said laughing. ‘That’s good, that’s something else, that is!’
I seized him by the arm and shook him vigorously. ‘It’s me who should have pity for you. Don’t you see what you’re doing? Do you know who you remind me of? A friend of mine, called Nevelsky, also a philanthropist. Like you, this Nevelsky spent a whole night telling me rubbish about someone who is dearer to me than anyone else in the world, than life itself, you understand, simply because he also had pity for me. I’ve had enough of this hypocrisy! Do you imagine that you can at your leisure pour mud over some poor unfortunate child without it causing you some sort of trouble?’
Still he refused to say a word. Anger and fury began to overwhelm me.
‘Proof, I said yesterday! Habrekorm, Lucas, all your old friends, do you think I believe everything they say? And you, how could you believe it? To have spoken like that, with such certainty – as I said to this Nevesky – like him, you would have had to yourself .
. . . But what’s the matter, good God? What are you doing?’
The dreadful suspicion! How had it come to me? I couldn’t believe it! But how could I prevent that suspicion from giving way to an even more dreadful certainty?
‘What’s the matter?’ I repeated.
I stood up unsteadily. White with rage, I let go of Sanders’ arm. ‘You miserable creature!’ I said. ‘You as well, then, eh?’
*
I covered my eyes with my hands. How long did we stay like that? I don’t know. I only heard, right next to me, Sanders breathing. At last he spoke.
‘I didn’t say anything, Michel’, he said hesitantly. ‘As God is my witness it was you who said it.’
‘Miserable creature!’ was all I could say.
I felt he was trying timidly to take my hand. I pushed him away.
‘Leave me alone! Aren’t you ashamed?’
‘Michel, Michel, listen to me! Would you believe me if I gave you my word? There is one thing which I swear to you: I did not know her, that’s to say, I still did not know you, when it happened. Before then, yes, of course! When I saw the two of you together, you and her, I felt more than a little regret. It was real sadness, do you understand, a genuine sadness!’
I shrugged my shoulders. All this was just words, only words. What was the point of any of this, I wondered.
Once again we sat in silence. The icy wind which had sprung up seemed to redouble in ferocity. No longer able to put up with this, and as if suffocating from the silence, I finally removed my hands from my eyes. I saw Sanders. He looked at me and smiled, with a sort of smile that I had never seen before, a poor smile admittedly, full of distress, but also full of a sort of radiance.
‘I don’t regret what has just happened,’ he said simply.
I continued to look at him. It was my turn to keep quiet, for the moment. How should he interpret my silence? If he imagined that I could have any interest in his protestations! He could have multiplied what he said a million times and still he wouldn’t dispel the only feeling that I could have from now on: hate, hate, hate! Hatred for anything, I admit, but for him – no. We are only betrayed by those in whom we have placed a certain amount of trust, isn’t that so? Now, as for me, I already felt almost friendship towards Sanders, can you believe that? How was it that I didn’t kill him there and then? I don’t know. Sticking out from his belt I saw the revolver which I had fired at Otto Streep. I had done that so quickly, so easily! But something told me that now was not the time or place, and that Sanders had not yet exhausted the list of obligations he had towards me.
But he was talking to me again. Gently, he persuaded me to sit down next to him. What was he saying to me? He was making lots of consoling noises, but they were not even getting through to me.
‘You must understand,’ he kept saying, ‘it’s better like this. There’s nothing you have to blame yourself for.’
The wind was picking up, and growing ever stronger. How was it that it hadn’t managed to disperse all that scaffolding of cloud which seemed to sway back and forth in front of us like a gigantic curtain in a theatre? Sanders was still talking. Then suddenly, I heard him stop. I felt his grip tighten on my hand.
I uttered a dull exclamation. ‘My God!’ I murmured. ‘Look at that!’
*
The Gobi Desert! Suddenly, in front of us, there it was. There were no longer any more of the fleecy clouds of a short while ago, only some dull grey wisps which were now being blown to the four corners of the universe by a wind that had become wild in its fury. We held on to our fur hats with both hands so that they too were not blown away. It was a pale and frightening scene. This was it, the sombre desert, graveyard of men and animals, a doleful, dull brown sea suddenly solidified by the most savage cataclysm, an appalling jumble of waves frozen into escarpments and ravines, a false plain riddled with chasms and caverns, a fawn-coloured labyrinth in which, once you had the misfortune of entering, you had to turn around, and again, always turning, without ever being able to get out! If the prey which we were going to try and capture was anything like this horrifying landscape, if it was anything on the same scale, then what a monster from hell, one day soon, we were destined to encounter. It was enough to make you shudder!
Again I heard Sanders’ voice, a peculiar voice in which there was persuasion, seriousness, tenderness, altogether something very moving.
‘Michel,’ he began, ‘if until now I have had any doubts, those doubts have now been dispelled forever. What I told you, I was right to say it, and right also to have done what I did.’
The wind, howling more and more like a tempest, chopped up his words, pounded them, and in so doing conferred on them a sort of inexorable authority. This was no longer just a different world but a new existence, it seemed, to which I had been invited, and which was now being offered to me. Sanders was constantly watching me and he smiled, persuaded that the game had been won.
‘Be brave,’ he said forcefully. ‘I have nothing more to say to you, for the time being at least. With each day that passes it will be the sand, the ice, and the wind which will see to it that you forget those kisses - which I have promised never to mention again from now on. So in view of the danger which you have left behind, you won’t be afraid of the terrible, awful, darkness which we are about to enter. Whatever happens to you now, you can tell yourself that there is something even more empty, more deserted, more desolate, than the Gobi Desert, and that is the heart of certain women . . . . . and especially her heart!
XI
Like most people who have had to learn to read only late in life, he was a voracious reader, was Sanders. Every hour which was not taken up with his duties as leader of the caravan found him with a book in his hand. Not poetry, of course. Travelogues, most of all. As for those works which dealt with hunting for tigers, he already knew them all by heart.
One of the old books which he was particularly fond of was something written by an Italian by the name of Marco Polo, who a good number of centuries earlier had come to look around in these regions. At that time China was ruled by a khan called Kublai. I don’t know why this name was so pleasing to Sanders, but he delighted in repeating it over and over again.
‘Kublai Khan! Kublai Khan!’ he said. ‘With the permission of the Good Lord, Michel, that’s what we shall call our little friend. Just wait till you see him. You will realise straightaway why he can’t be called anything else. Kublai Khan was the greatest emperor in the history of the world, did you know that?’
I don’t know what use the book by this Italian could have. But as for what it said about the terrible region to which we had committed ourselves, you had to agree that it wasn’t far wrong. ‘When you ride in this desert by night,’ it said, ‘and if a traveller remains behind or leaves his companions to sleep or for some other reason, when he wants to resume his journey or tries to re-join the group, he sometimes hears spirits or voices which seem to be his companions; sometimes the spirits call out his name, and often they divert him from his path, and in this way many have become lost and have perished. I assure you that even during the day you can hear these spirits. You can sometimes hear them playing different instruments, especially a drum . . . . . ‘ Rocks shattered by ice, the howling of sand storms, the muffled roar of rock falls in the night - those who think they know about these things, sitting by their fireplace, they can smile and put forward all sorts of theories. But as for me, I’m certain that these noises exist, and that in the abominable solitude of that desert I have heard my name called out like that; and I can swear that on many occasions I have been on the point of collapsing in a faint, and Sanders and Neratov also, and even Nain-Sain, in other words people who are not exactly babies.
*
The days now followed one after another without us meeting a single human being. We could manage without them. ‘Yes, but what about animals?’ you might ask. Well, the animals didn’t show themselves either. Apart from a strange type of crow, of an unusual size, we only found
bobaks, those curious marmots that you shoot with a small-calibre rifle while it is stroking its moustache, sitting on a hillock above its poor little earth, a type of hunting which despite the relatively high price for its pelt – roughly two roubles – in the end becomes tiresome. And then neither Nain-Sain, nor Sanders, was much in favour of rifle shots which only served to announce our presence. Sometimes, two or three times a day, never more, you seemed to get a glimpse of something elusive, disappearing on the horizon, a unicorn, or a yak, or a wild horse. It was strange, this feeling of making your way through a world haunted by mysterious beasts that were impossible to approach. At other times, breaking the monotony of this immeasurable land, where snow alternated with sand, the capacious mouth of a cavern gaped wide open in a chalky ridge. We ventured into these caves, on tip-toe, with hearts beating.
There was never anything inside, not even a common owl, nor bats, but this did not prevent Sanders, when we came out, from playing a little game. He meticulously measured the dimensions of the entrance to each cave with a piece of string which he pulled out from one of the enormous pockets of his jacket.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked him on one occasion.
‘It’s interesting for me, in case I want to have a villa built somewhere here,’ he replied ironically. ‘But for the moment there is something else going on. Michel, dear friend, what in your opinion is the most unpleasant thing that you can thing of?’
I was a bit annoyed. ‘I imagine that must be untimeliness in making witty remarks.’
He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s not right, you bad fellow. As for me, well, I’ll tell you what it is: the most unpleasant thing, without doubt, is the feeling that you are being followed.’
I looked at him blankly. ‘What do you mean by that?’
The Gobi Desert Page 9