Survivor: The Autobiography

by Lewis, Jon E.

  When the ball of the sun again rested on the ridge of a dune in the west, we got up, shook off the sand, dressed, and dragged ourselves slowly with innumerable interruptions, towards the east, until one o’clock in the morning.

  The sand-bath, although cooling and pleasant during the heat of the day, was also weakening. Our strength was ebbing. We could not cover as much ground as the night before. Thirst did not torment us, as it had done during the first days, for the mouth-cavity had become as dry as the outside skin, and the craving was dulled. An increasing feebleness set in instead. The functioning of all the glands was reduced. Our blood got thicker and flowed through the capillaries with increasing sluggishness. Sooner or later this process of drying-up would reach its climax in death.

  From one o’clock until half past four in the morning, on 3 May, we lay inanimate; and not even the cold night air could rouse us to go on. But at dawn we dragged ourselves forwards again. We would take a couple of steps intermittently. We managed to get down the sandy slopes fairly well, but climbing the waves of sand was heavy work.

  At sunrise, Kasim caught me by the shoulder, stared, and pointed east, without saying a word.

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered.

  ‘A tamarisk,’ he gasped.

  A sign of vegetation at last! God be praised! Our hopes, which had been close to extinction, flamed up once more. We walked, dragged ourselves, and staggered for three hours, before we reached that first bush – an olive branch intimating that the sea of the desert had a shore. We thanked God for this blessed gift, as we chewed the bitter green needles of the tamarisk. Like a water lily the bush stood on its wave of sand, basking in the sun. But how far below was the water that nourished its roots?

  About ten o’clock, we found another tamarisk; and we saw several more in the east. But our strength was gone. We undressed, buried ourselves in the sand, and hung our clothes on the branches of the tamarisk to make shade.

  We lay in silence for nine hours. The hot desert air dried our faces into parchment. At seven o’clock, we dressed and continued onward. We went more slowly than ever. After three hours’ walk in the dark, Kasim stopped short, and whispered: ‘Poplars!’

  Between two dunes there appeared three poplars, standing close together. We sank down at their base, exhausted with fatigue. Their roots, too, must derive nourishment from below. We took hold of the spade, intending to dig a well, but the spade slipped from our hands. We had no strength left. We lay down and scratched the ground with our nails, but gave up the attempt as useless.

  Instead, we tore off the fresh leaves and rubbed them into our skins. Then we collected dry, fallen twigs, and made a fire on the nearest crest as a signal to Islam, should he prove to be still alive, which I very much doubted. The fire might also, perhaps, attract the attention of a shepherd in the woods along the Khotan-daria. But even if a shepherd should see this fire in an area of deathly silence, he was more likely to become frightened and believe it was the desert spirit who haunted the place and practised witchcraft. For fully two hours we kept the fire going, regarding it as a companion, a friend, and a chance of rescue. Nowadays, those who are shipwrecked at sea have other means of sending out their SOS in moments of extreme danger. We had only this fire, and our eyes were glued to its flames.

  The night was coming to an end, and the sun, our worst enemy, would soon rise again above the dunes on the eastern horizon, to torment us anew. At four on the morning of 4 May we started off, stumbling along for five hours. Then our strength gave out. Our hope was again on the decline. In the east there were no more poplars, no more tamarisks, to stimulate our dying vitality with their verdure. Only mounds of sand, as far as the eye could reach.

  We collapsed on the slope of a dune. Kasim’s ability to dig out cold sand for me was gone. I had to help myself as best I could. For fully ten hours we lay silent in the sand. It was strange that we were still alive. Would we have strength enough to drag ourselves through one more night – our last one?

  I rose at twilight and urged Kasim to come. Hardly audible was his gasp: ‘I can’t go on.’ And so I left the last remnant of the caravan behind and continued on alone. I dragged myself along, and fell. I crawled up slopes, and staggered down the other side. I lay quiet for long periods, listening. Not a sound! The stars shone like electric torches. I wondered whether I was still on earth, or whether this was the valley of the shadow of death. I lit my last cigarette. Kasim had always received the butts, but now I was alone, and so I smoked this one to the end. It afforded me a little relief and distraction.

  Six hours had passed since the beginning of my solitary journey, when, totally overcome with feebleness, I sank down by a new tamarisk, and went off into the doze which I feared, for death might come while I was asleep. As a matter of fact, I hardly slept at all. All the time, in the grave-like silence, I heard the beating of my heart and the ticking of the chronometers. And after a couple of hours I heard the swish of steps in the sand, and saw a phantom stagger and struggle to my side.

  ‘Is that you, Kasim?’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Come! We have not far to go!’

  Heartened by our reunion, we struggled on. We slid down the dunes; we struggled upwards. We would lie motionless where we fell, in our battle against the insidious desire for sleep. We slackened our pace, and grew more and more indolent. We were like sleep walkers; but still we fought for our lives.

  Suddenly Kasim grabbed my arm and pointed downwards at the sand. There were distinct tracks of human beings!

  In a twinkling we were wide awake. It was plain that the river must be near! It was possible that some shepherds had noticed our fire and had come to investigate. Or maybe a sheep, astray in the desert, had been searched for by these men who had so recently passed over the sand.

  Kasim bent down, examined the prints, and gasped:

  ‘It is our own trail!’

  In our listless, somnolent state, we had described a circle without knowing it. That was enough for a while; we could not endure any more. We collapsed on the trail and fell asleep. It was half past two in the morning.

  When the new day dawned, on 5 May, we rose heavily, and with difficulty. Kasim looked terrible. His tongue was white and swollen, his lips blue, his cheeks were hollow, and his eyes had a dying glassy lustre. He was tortured by a kind of death-hiccup, which shook his whole frame. When the body is so completely dried up that the joints almost creak, every movement is an effort.

  It grew lighter. The sun rose. From the top of a dune, where nothing obstructed the view towards the east, we noticed that the horizon, which for two weeks had revealed a row of yellow sawteeth, now disclosed an absolutely even, dark-green line. We stopped short, as though petrified, and exclaimed simultaneously: ‘The forest!’ And I added: ‘The Khotan-daria! Water!’

  Again we collected what little strength we had left and struggled along eastward. The dunes grew lower, we passed a depression in the ground at the bottom of which we tried to dig; but we were still too weak. We went on. The dark-green line grew, the dunes diminished, stopped altogether, and were replaced by level soft ground. We were but a few hundred yards from the forest. At half past five we reached the first poplars, and wearied, sank down in their shade. We enjoyed the fragrance of the forest. We saw flowers growing between the trees, and heard the birds sing and the flies and gadflies hum. At seven o’clock we continued. The forest grew thinner. We came upon a path, showing traces of men, sheep, and horses, and we thought it might lead to the river. After following it for two hours, we collapsed in the shade of a poplar grove.

  We were too weak to move. Kasim lay on his back. He looked as if he were going to die. The river must be quite near. But we were as if nailed down. A tropical heat surrounded us. Would the day never come to an end? Every hour that passed brought us closer to certain death. We would have to drag ourselves on to the river before it got too late! But the sun did not go down. We breathed heavily and with effort. The will to live was
about to desert us.

  At seven p.m. I was able to get up . . . Again I urged Kasim to accompany me to the river to drink. He signalled with his hand that he could not rise, and he whispered that he would soon die under the poplars.

  Alone I pulled myself along through the forest. Thickets of thorny bushes, and dry fallen branches obstructed my way. I tore my thin clothes and scratched my hands, but gradually I worked my way through. I rested frequently, crawled part of the way on all-fours, and noticed with anxiety how the darkness grew denser in the woods. Finally the new night came – the last one. I could not have survived another day.

  The forest ended abruptly, as though burnt by a fire. I found myself on the edge of a six-foot-high terrace, which descended almost perpendicularly to an absolutely even plain, devoid of vegetation. The ground was packed hard. A withered leafless twig was sticking out of it. I saw that it was a piece of driftwood, and that I was in the riverbed of the Khotan-daria. And it was dry, as dry as the sandy desert behind me! Was I to die of thirst in the very bed of the river, after having fought my way so successfully to its bank? No! I was not going to lie down and die without first crossing the Khotan-daria and assuring myself that the whole bed was dry, and that all hope was irretrievably gone . . .

  Like the beds of all desert-rivers in Central Asia, that of the Khotan-daria is very wide, flat, and shallow. A light haze floated over the desolate landscape. I had gone about one mile when the outlines of the forest on the eastern shore appeared below the moon. Dense thickets of bushes and reeds grew on the terraced shore. A fallen poplar stretched its dark trunk down towards the riverbed. It looked like the body of a crocodile. The bed still remained as dry as before. It was not far to the shore where I must lie down and die. My life hung on a hair.

  Suddenly I started, and stopped short. A water-bird, a wild duck or goose, rose on whirring wings, and I heard a splash. The next moment, I stood on the edge of a pool, seventy feet long and fifteen feet wide! The water looked as black as ink in the moonlight. The overturned poplar-trunk was reflected in its depths.

  In the silent night I thanked God for my miraculous deliverance. Had I continued eastward I should have been lost. In fact, if I had touched shore only a hundred yards north or south of the pool, I would have believed the entire riverbed to be dry. I knew that the freshets from melting snowfields and glaciers in northern Tibet flowed down through the Khotan-daria bed only in the beginning of June, to dry up in the late summer and autumn, leaving the bed dry during the winter and spring. I had also heard that in certain places, separated sometimes by a day’s journey or more, the river forms eddies, which scoop the bed into greater depths, and that the water may remain the year round in these hollows near the terraced shore. And now I had come upon one of these extremely rare bodies of water!

  I sat down calmly on the bank and felt my pulse. It was so weak that it was hardly noticeable – only forty-nine beats. Then I drank, and drank again. I drank without restraint. The water was cold, clear as crystal, and as sweet as the best spring water. And then I drank again. My dried-up body absorbed the moisture like a sponge. All my joints softened, all my movements became easier. My skin, hard as parchment before, now became softened. My forehead grew moist. The pulse increased in strength; and after a few minutes it was fifty-six. The blood flowed more freely in my veins. I had a feeling of well-being and comfort. I drank again, and sat caressing the water in this blessed pool. Later on, I christened this pool Khoda-verdi-kol, or ‘the Pool of God’s Gift’ . . .

  My thoughts now flew to Kasim, who lay faint from thirst on the edge of the wood on the western shore. Of the stately caravan of three weeks ago, I, a European, was the only one that had held out till the moment of rescue. If I did not waste my minutes, perhaps Kasim, too, might be saved. But in what was I to carry the water? Why, in my waterproof boots! There was, in fact, no other receptacle. I filled them to the top, suspended them at either end of the spade handle, and carefully recrossed the riverbed. Though the moon was low, my old track was plainly visible. I reached the forest. The moon went down, and dense darkness descended among the trees. I lost my trail, and went astray among thorny bushes and thickets, which would not give under my stockinged feet. From time to time, I called ‘Kasim!’ at the top of my voice. But the sound died away among the tree trunks; and I got no answer but the ‘clevitt’ of a frightened night owl.

  If I lost my way, perhaps I would never again find the trail and then Kasim would be lost. I stopped at an impenetrable thicket of dry branches and brush, set fire to the whole thing, and enjoyed seeing the flames lick and scorch the nearest poplars. Kasim could not be far away; he was certain both to hear and to see the fire. But he did not come. I had no choice but to await the dawn. At the foot of a poplar, out of reach of the fire. I lay down and slept for some hours. The fire protected me against any prowling wild beasts.

  When dawn came the night fire was still glowing, and a black column of smoke was rising above the forest. It was easy now to find my trail and the place where Kasim lay. He was still in the same position as the night before. Upon seeing me, he whispered: ‘I am dying!’ ‘Will you have some water?’ I asked, letting him hear the splashing sound. He sat up, dazed and staring. I handed him one of the boots. He lifted it to his lips and emptied it to the last drop. After a short pause he emptied the other one, too.

  Thomas, an English explorer, made the first crossing of the Empty Quarter or Rub al Khali, 1930–1.

  Never before had the great South Arabian desert of Rub ’al Khali been crossed by white man, and the ambition to be its pioneer seized me as it had seized every adventurous Englishman whose lot has been cast in Arabia. But before I tell of the manner of my camel crossing and of the things that befell, I must briefly introduce the reader who is uninitiated in matters Arabian to the lie of the land.

  ‘The World,’ said the medieval Moslem geographer, ‘is in shape like a ball, and it floats in the circumambient ocean like an egg in water, half in and half out. Of the exposed portion one half constitutes the Inhabited Quarter, while the remaining half is the Empty Quarter, the Rub ’al Khali placed in the barren wastes of Arabia.’

  An extravagant estimate, this, of the place of our wanderings; yet it is no mean desert that approaches an area as big as England and France together. That it should have remained terra incognita till after the icy Polar regions, the tropic sources of the Amazon, and the vast interior spaces of Asia and Africa had been made to yield up their secrets to Western curiosity, is strange. An Arabian explanation was given to the traveller Charles Doughty, by his genial companion Zayed as Shaykhan, that worthy, with his finger upon a page of Arab script, declaring the matter in this wise: ‘God has given two of the four parts of the earth to the children of Adam, the third part He has given to Gog and Magog, the fourth is the Rub ’al Khali void of the breath of life.’

  Lack of rain and merciless heat indeed make of this a place where the Persian poet would have us believe ‘the panting sinner receives a foretaste of his future destiny’. Certainly human life can be but spasmodically supported, and then mostly round the desert’s fringes, where, among semi-barbarous nomadic tribes, hunger and the raid are Nature’s pruning-hooks.

  Native suspicion and an insular outlook combine with insecurity of life to keep the infidel intruder at arm’s length, and he who would travel hopefully and usefully requires some apprenticeship and acclimatisation: needs must he speak the tongue, know the mind, grow a beard, dress and act like his desert companions, betraying, for instance, no squeamishness over drinking water, pestiferous though it might be, drawn from unsampled waterholes come upon in the burning sands, and not improved by churning in strong-smelling animal-skins carried on the march. But to our story!

  On the 5 October 1931, the SS British Grenadier, homeward bound from Persia, arrived off Muscat harbour at dawn, and there picked me up, by arrangement, from a small boat. Two nights later I was dropped, clothed in native dress, into an Arab dhow we sighted riding at anchor off
the central-south Arabian shore. Landing, I made my way to the rendezvous where I had expected a trusted Arab chieftain who had served me on an earlier desert expedition, but I found neither him nor his promised string of riding camels.

  Experience had taught me the need of not disclosing my plans to anyone in a land where secrecy of movement at the outset is imperative. My hopes of even making a start were thus dashed, and, sick at my bad luck, I turned up into the Qara Mountains to think and to scheme, while I explored and hunted their forested slopes. More than two impatient months passed before despair gave way to reviving hope.

  It was the 10 December when at last I set out from Dhufar with a party of desert Arabs that included the famous Sheikh Salih, of the Rashid (Kathir) tribe, twenty-six warriors – nearly all of whom could show the scars of wounds, none of whom had I set eyes on before – and forty camels. The first day’s march was as usual cut short, some of the men returning to the booths to buy a trifling gimcrack with which to gladden the eyes of their beauties far away in the black tents, some for a final watering at the sweet well of the mosque, while skins in which we carried our water were oiled and made watertight, and crude, improvised sacks, which did for pack-saddles, were given a final look over.

  Our northerly course, on the morrow, led upward through the dense jungles of the Qara escarpment, where I had reaped a bountiful harvest for the Museum – hyenas, wolves and coneys, snakes and lizards, chameleons, birds and butterflies; and at Qatan I looked back for a last glimpse of the blue Indian Ocean 3,000 feet below. Waving yellow meadows that crowned the uplands gave place to libaniferous shrubs as we wended our way down the far side, amid red and rugged rocks wherein were groves of the frankincense and myrrh trees that gave rise to the fame of the Arabia of antiquity, of which we gain echoes in the Bible. Never could campfires have been more luxuriantly fragrant.