The Sands of Kalahari Read online

  Now night was gone. The sentinels scrambled to the high and distant posts and scanned the world that lay over the jagged slabs of rock, the sudden drops, the gravelly slopes and sudden ledges. The rest of the troop waited in the sun, happy for its warmth. The sentinels motioned to the leader. All was safe.

  The leader moved forward, down the escarpment. He was old and his hairy brown body was covered with spots of white hair; he was old but he was bigger than all but two of the warriors, and stronger than even these. He led the troop down, from the point of an upward jutting rock to a smooth slab below, then along a narrow ledge to a perpendicular drop of ten feet. On down the mountainside: leaping, dropping, all without great effort. The troop followed and they were noisy now, chattering, complaining, anticipating. At last they came to where food was to be found and the group broke up. Some of them began turning over stones to look for grubs and caterpillars and centipedes. Others went to clumps of acacia trees to look for sweet gum. Some wandered looking for berries or herbs or sweet roots. Soon the troop was spread out over a wide area but they were not separated. Sentinels watched on all sides: an enemy might be near.

  Gradually they moved along the valley floor, staying close to the cliffs, for the grass might shelter an enemy waiting to snatch one of the young. Once, a millennium ago, they had lived in trees but now the rocky cliffs were their home.

  The sun grew hot. They had eaten well. The old leader wandered under the cliffs and then went up twenty feet. The sentinels moved around him, ahead of him, above him. The troop followed slowly. They went to where there was breeze and shadow, where they could relax and sleep, where the young could play.

  But one of the young sentinels high above gave a cry and they froze with terror. It was a strange cry; they had never heard one like it. They scrambled up, saw what the sentinel saw. Far away in the hot sand where they had never gone something moved. A group of tiny figures came toward them.

  The troop sat tensely, uneasily, watching. One of the figures fell and they all jabbered in wonder and speculation. The warriors bristled and boasted of their strength. The females worried, held their young close, cuffed them when they made too much noise. The old leader sat silently, frowning. He was angry. The others backed away from him, for when he was angry he was short-tempered and dangerous.

  Far away in the desert below the tiny figures came closer.

  The mountain was before them; there was nothing else. They walked toward it and the fears of the dawn were gone. They would reach it now. It was no more than ten miles away.

  It’s like a gigantic ship, O’Brien thought. A sinking ship, bow high, stern going down first. Or it was a mastless battered hulk cast upon a shore, half sunk in the bubbling surf. Or a black iceberg, an iceberg in a sea of sand. But there must be game on it; there had to be. There was life on some icebergs. And if there was life there had to be water, enough for them to exist on.

  As they approached it, they began to draw closer together but there was no talking. They were all lost in their own thoughts and talking dried out the mouth and made the thirst greater. They came at last to a mile-long slope which led to a high escarpment of shale and rock and sand. Some of the rocks were great sharp chunks which had broken off ages ago from the cliffs above. O’Brien reached one of them and slumped down in the shade. Jefferson Smith came and then Grace Monckton. Then Sturdevant with the two tins of water. Then the old man and Mike Bain helping one another. They sat down in the shade and stretched out in the sand. Sturdevant measured out a little of the water in a plastic Thermos-bottle top. They drank and curled up in the sand and fell into exhausted sleep.

  Three hours passed before Sturdevant stood up, brushing the sand from his pants. He kicked O’Brien and the big man rolled over and sat up, alert and ready.

  “I’m going up,” Sturdevant said.

  “I’m ready any time,” O’Brien said.

  “I think it’s better if you stay here,” Sturdevant demurred. “I’m going up and have a look, see what’s on the other side. I’ll take one of your rifles. If I fire once, you bring the rest of them up. If there’s nothing, I’ll be back and when the sun goes down we can keep moving along the cliffs. I’ll see if Bain wants to go with me. I want you here in case some of them need help getting up.”

  O’Brien nodded, ran his hand over the thick black stubble on his jaw. He was the strongest of them, stronger than Sturdevant and smarter too, but they listened to the pilot because he had been in charge of the plane and because he was an African. The rest of them worried him. Jefferson Smith was soft with easy living, a city man. Grimmelmann was in his seventies; it was a miracle that he was still alive, that he had made it across the desert. And Mike Bain was worse than any of them, slowly dying without his booze and tobacco; a big hulk of a washed-out man who had stayed too long in the tropics. And the woman was on the verge of hysteria. All of them would need help from now on. He might have to push them up the mountainside.

  Sturdevant bent down and shook Mike Bain, talked quietly to him until Bain got up and staggered out of the shade, trying to shield his sleep-stunned face from the sun. He followed Sturdevant and they started up, picking their way through the Gargantuan boulders, walking carefully on the loose shale. The heat burned through their shirts and through the soles of their shoes, but there could be no turning back. Both of them knew that and pushed the thought from their minds. They had to go on. It was like the crash and the walk across the desert; for them there was only one direction: forward. They had to climb in the sunlight because there would be no visibility in the cool night; they had to climb up the hot shale, reach the mountaintop. From the top they might see something, a town, a ranch.

  The boulders grew smaller, flatter, not as high as the ones below. The footing became surer as the loose shale gave way to rock. They leaned forward now, picking up each foot with a studied and conscious tempo, trying to maintain an even pace. And gradually Sturdevant realized that Mike Bain wasn’t going to make it. It had been foolish to take him along; there had been no need for it except his own desire not to be alone.

  They reached the end of the slope. The escarpment rose above them, a gigantic black wall shimmering in the sun. Sturdevant rested in the shade and finally Mike Bain joined him. They sat and looked at each other and said nothing. After a long time they were breathing normally. Sturdevant staggered to his feet.

  “You wait here. I’m going up now.” He waved to the break in the steep wall.

  Mike Bain nodded, and Sturdevant moved away and after a time vanished in the break. It grew cool in the shade of the overhanging ledge. Bain cleared away the larger stones and stretched out, rested. He should have gone on with Sturdevant; maybe the pilot needed him this very moment. But it was the same old story: he’d flopped again. The drink and all the years had broken him. He wasn’t really Mike Bain any more. The old punch was gone, the old snap. And he didn’t give a damn. He failed and people looked at him as if it didn’t matter, just as Sturdevant had looked at him when he didn’t get up. He didn’t deliver any more and people shrugged and walked away. It had been like that for years now but he still hurt. He was a guy stuffed full of pride but all out of will power.

  He fell asleep.

  Later, the sound of a shot came to him as it came to the others below: far away, casual in the loneliness, echoing over and over and over. He didn’t move. He was comfortable. Sturdevant had found something. They’d be saved now; they’d have food and water and cigarettes. It had been a bad dream; now it was over. The others would be coming up and he’d wait for them, help the old man, the woman.

  Two hours later they all joined Sturdevant. They stood on a wide ledge of ink-black stone and saw what the pilot had first seen. Opposite them, perhaps many miles away, was another steep, jagged ridge of equal elevation. It ran parallel with theirs until both ridges met miles away in a severe peak. Together the ridges formed a V-shaped cul-de-sac, a deep valley. There was grass, sun-browned, dry. Trees. And far away, close to the cliff, there
was a patch of green.

  They began the descent.

  CHAPTER II

  ALL at once Grimmelmann became the leader. Sturdevant had led them across the sand desert and up the escarpment and they had followed and admired his intelligence and stamina; now his authority diminished as the old man’s wisdom emerged.

  When they had crawled down the cliff and huddled in the shade, breathless and dizzy, he walked off several hundred yards and returned with five melonlike objects. The others sat wordless: O’Brien with the rifles across his knees, Jefferson Smith sipping from the tin cup. They sat and watched him take out an old penknife, cut into one of the melons and drink from it. He cut it open and began to eat the wet pulp inside. He smiled at them.

  “Tsamma melon,” he said. He cut the one he had into four slices and handed them to Grace Monckton. “Pass them around,” he told her. “This is the sweet kind. The other’s bitter but you can eat it too. If there are enough of these we can last for a long time; men, and horses too, have survived weeks and weeks on them. It’s the mainstay of everything here; even Bushmen need them.” He stabbed another one from the pile in front of him and tossed it to Sturdevant. Bain came and picked up one and soon they were all busily drinking the juice and eating the sweet pulp.

  “They show you something about adaptation and survival,” said the old German. “When it matures, the rind gets tough as you can see, the older the tougher, protecting the water inside, the water and the seeds—eat them, too, they’re good— and then when the growing season’s about to start and the rain comes, it rots and lets the seeds go. Perfect timing.”

  “They’re good,” O’Brien said. “But how many are there around here?”

  “I saw a big patch out farther,” Grimmelmann said, waving his hand out into the valley. “We’ll just have to see. If we decide to stay here for a while, we should pick them all and store them out of the sun.” He had a heavy German accent that people found pleasant. His English was almost perfect.

  They all nodded.

  “Where’d you learn all this?” Sturdevant said. “You sound like an old Boer, like my grandfather, full of all the stories of the old days.”

  “I was in South-West Africa long ago,” said the old man. “The Herero War, all of it desert fighting. We learned much then about living. I think we’re in Süd-West now. You think the Kalahari. It does not matter. It is all the same. A line on the map.”

  “That was a terrible war,” Smith said. “I’ve read a little about it.”

  “Ja,” Grimmelmann said. “A terrible war as all wars are. I will tell you. I am ashamed to say I was in it. The Herero were good people, but the settlers wanted their land and cattle and their labor. They would not submit. Most of them were exterminated. Sixty thousand. It was much like your Indian wars in America.” He got to his feet slowly, helping himself with his heavy cane. All the melons were gone, their rinds scattered in the stony sand. Grimmelmann began walking up the valley. O’Brien got up and walked after him and one by one the others followed.

  O’Brien caught up with the old man.

  “You mentioned rain,” he said.

  Grimmelmann nodded, stopped for a moment and using his cane turned over a flat stone the size of a dinner plate. Two mottled lizards fled from the light.

  “Yes, the rain. It does rain of course in this part of Africa. More than you would think. More in some places than the official figures say. But there is a catch, my friend. It rains but the rain hits the sand and within a few minutes it vanishes. There is nothing to hold the water. It comes down in torrents and it runs through the sand. If you dig down far enough in the right spots you will hit water. Pits they call them here. But there is no surface water. If you had surface water in most of the Kalahari the land could support great herds of cattle, but there is none. Here and there a shallow pond after a good rain, pans they are called, but they dry up and grass grows in their place. And the country is getting drier all the time, do you know that? A lake that the famous Doctor Livingstone discovered, one that you will see on old maps, it is gone now. Gone. It dried up and now you can drive a truck across it and raise dust. The curse of Africa is aridity, my friend, not jungle.”

  “Is this the dry season here?” O’Brien asked.

  “Yes,” said the old man. “It is the dry season. Don’t wait for it to rain or you will wait for a long time. But there must be at least one spring or source of water around here. Coming down the cliff I saw traces of baboon.”

  “Let’s hope so,” the big man said.

  “The last great rain was in nineteen thirty-four,” the old man said. “I was in Germany then but I read about it in the papers. It caused the Swakop to run to the ocean and it brought so much rubble with it that the coastline moved out to sea. It was the greatest rain in recent times. It took the railroad bridge along with it. There has never been a rain like it since.”

  They came to a cave, passed by it and found a pool at the base of the towering cliff. It had a diameter of six feet and was five feet deep. There was no runoff but the water was not stagnant or brackish. There were small trees around it and tracks of animals and birds.

  “I think we will all live now,” Grimmelmann said. “With water we have a chance. For a while.”

  They knelt down and drank with their cupped hands. O’Brien dipped his deep cowboy’s hat into it, backed away and let it run over his head and down his face. He began laughing. Grace splashed it into her eyes and on her neck. Bain lay still and pressed his face into it. Grimmelmann borrowed the tin cup from Sturdevant and began pouring water on top of his head. Smith poured it all over himself with cupped hands and Sturdevant submerged his head completely under the surface. Sturdevant took off his shirt and filled up one of the water tins and then raised it over him letting the water shower over his dust-blackened body. He began singing “Waltzing Matilda.”

  They went back a quarter of a mile to the cave they’d passed on the way up the valley. It was ideal: high and broad with a white sandy floor. They stood in the entrance, which Sturdevant thought large enough to back a truck into.

  O’Brien took a flashlight out of his pack, and they followed him into the semidarkness.

  “Over here,” Grimmelmann said. He pointed with his cane to strange designs on the flat wall near him. “Bushman painting.”

  “They’re beautiful,” said Grace Monckton. The others nodded as their eyes followed the beam of light. The rock paintings had movement and life. Bands of tiny men with bows and arrows chasing nimble gazelles; an imprint of a small hand; a scene of people dancing and another that looked like a battle scene: large men with spears fighting tiny bowmen.

  O’Brien turned away and walked on. The others followed, their minds still filled with the primitive drawings. Other people had lived here long ago; perhaps they could survive too. The cave narrowed and the sandy floor tilted upward, became rock and then ended abruptly. O’Brien turned the light upward and they followed it. The ceiling veered upward, spirelike, jagged, boring up into the mountain.

  “A kloof,” Sturdevant said. “A chimney. Way back in geologic time water came down this hole and ate through the softer rock and made the cave.”

  “For the Bushmen,” Grace said.

  “Or maybe people before the Bushmen,” Smith said. “Maybe people lived here tens of thousands of years ago before any of them. I bet if we dug deep enough in the sand here we’d come across old campfires and bones and neolithic tools and flints.”

  “Maybe Bushmen still come here,” Grace said.

  They turned in the darkness as if an intruder had spoken. For an instant they were uncomfortable, vulnerable.

  “Is it possible?” O’Brien asked.

  “Where’s Bain?” somebody asked. The flashlight moved from face to face. No Bain. All the faces were suddenly taut.

  “Bain?” The shout echoed in the kloof above them.

  “Let’s go back,” Grimmelmann said. “Perhaps he is back near the mouth.”

  They walke
d quickly through the fine white sand and passed the wall paintings.

  Bain was lying in the sand, resting, trying to sleep. They stood around him. “I thought I’d wait here,” he told them. “Anything wrong?”

  “We figured you were with us,” O’Brien said.

  “I turned back after the pictures on the wall,” Bain said. “I’ve got a fever, I think. From the cut on my hand. I’m beginning to feel lousy.”

  “I’ll get a blanket,” Smith said. “If we’re going to stay here we can untie the stuff we’re lugging.” He looked around. “Are we going to stay here?”

  “Yes,” Grimmelmann said. “This is perfect. We are very lucky. If this were higher it would be a place for baboons, or leopards if there are any around here. We should stay here.” And without waiting to hear from the others he went outside. The others broke up. Smith brought his belongings in and got out the blanket for Bain. Grace and O’Brien left to look for melons. Grimmelmann began collecting sticks and piling them inside the cave, close to the mouth. Sturdevant walked back toward the pool with the rifle O’Brien had given him. There were bird tracks around the water.

  It grew cold with the coming of dark and some of them put on extra clothes. Grimmelmann made a fire against the wall close to the rock painting where the wall curved inward and the heat was reflected. One by one they came close to it, watched the flames dance and blacken the wall, listened to the pops and cracks of the wood.

  They had eaten melons that O’Brien and Grace Monckton had found. Sturdevant had fired at a large bird but it had flown away uninjured. He described the bird and Grimmelmann thought it was a bustard; he did not tell them it tasted like turkey when roasted.

  But they were not hungry, for their stomachs were filled with tsamma melon and good water. They were alive and they had a cave and fire. Grace looked up from the fire to the Bushman paintings. Smith followed her gaze, knew that Grimmelmann had built the fire so as not to destroy the primitive art but to be close to it, see it. The flames danced and the tiny figures seemed to come to life, to run and jump and dance and fight.