Without much hope we watched Kolemenos climb laboriously to the top of a high mound. One or other of us did this every morning as soon as the light was sufficient to give clear visibility southwards to the horizon. He stood there for quite a minute with his hand over his eyes, and we kept walking, expecting the usual hopeless shrug of the shoulders. But Kolemenos made no move to come down, and because he was staring intently in one direction, a few degrees to the east of our course, I dragged to a stop. I felt Kristina’s hand lightly on my arm. She, too, was gazing up at Kolemenos. Everybody halted. We saw him rub his eyes, shake his head slowly and resume his intent peering in the same direction, eyes screwed up. I wanted to shout to him but stayed quiet Instead I started to climb up to him. Zaro and the girl came with me. Behind came the American and Marchinkovas. The two Poles, Paluchowicz and Makowski, leaned on their clubs and watched us go.
As I reached Kolemenos I was telling myself, ‘It will be nothing. I must not get excited. It surely can’t be anything.’ My heart was pounding with the exertion of the slight climb.
Kolemenos made no sound. He flung out his right arm and pointed. My sight blurred over. For some seconds I could not focus. I did what I had seen Kolemenos do. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. There was something, a dark patch against the light sand. It might have been five miles distant from us. Through the dancing early morning haze it was shapeless and defied recognition. Excitement grew as we looked. We began to talk, to speculate. Panting and blowing, the two Poles came up to us. They, too, located the thing.
‘Could it be an animal?’ asked the Sergeant.
‘Whatever it is, it is not sand,’ Mister Smith replied. ‘Let’s go and investigate.’
It took us a good two hours to make the intervening distance. Many times we lost sight of the thing we sought as we plunged along in the sandy depressions. We climbed more often than we would otherwise have done because we could not bear the idea that somehow the smudge on the landscape might disappear while we were cut off from view of it. It began to take shape and definition and hope began to well up in us. And hope became certainty. There were trees – real, live, growing, healthy trees, in a clump, outlined against the sand like a blob of ink on a fresh-laundered tablecloth.
‘Where there are trees there is water,’ said the American.
‘An oasis,’ somebody shouted, and the word fluttered from mouth to mouth.
Kristina whispered, ‘It is a miracle. God has saved us.’
If we could have run we would have done so. We toiled that last half-mile as fast as we could flog our legs along. I went sprawling a few times. My tongue was dry and swollen in my mouth. The trees loomed larger and I saw they were palms. In their shade was a sunken hollow, roughly oval-shaped, and I knew this must be water. A few hundred yards from the oasis we crossed an east-west caravan track. On the fringe of the trees we passed an incongruous pile of what looked like rusting biscuit tins like some fantastic mid-desert junk yard. In the last twenty yards we quickened our pace and I think we managed a lope that was very near a run.
The trees, a dozen or more of them, were arranged in a crescent on the south side of the pool, and threw their shadow over it for most of the day. The wonderful cool water lay still and inviting in an elliptical depression hemmed round with big, rough-worked stones. At this time, probably the hottest season, the limits of the water had receded inwards from the stone ring, and we had to climb over to reach it. The whole, green, life-giving spot could have been contained inside half-an-acre.
Zaro had the mug but we could not wait for him to fill it and hand it round. We lay over the water lapping at it and sucking it in like animals. We allowed it to caress our fevered faces. We dabbed it around our necks. We drank until someone uttered the warning about filling our empty bellies with too much liquid. Then we soaked our food sacks and, sitting on the big stones, gently laved our cracked and lacerated feet. For blissful minutes we sat with the wet sacking draped about our feet. With a mugful of water at a time we rinsed from our heads and upper bodies some of the accumulated sand and dust of the six-and-a-half days of travail. The very feel and presence of water was an ecstasy. Our spirits zoomed. We had walked out of an abyss of fear into life and new hope. We chatted and laughed as though the liquid we had drunk was heady champagne. We wondered what hands had brought these stones and planted these palms to make of this miraculous pool a sign that could be seen from afar by thirst-tortured men.
The full extent of our good fortune was yet to be discovered. Some twenty yards east of the pool, on the opposite side from which we had approached, there were the remains of a still-warm fire and the fresh tracks of camels and many hoof-marks, telling of the recent halt of a big caravan. It had probably departed at sunrise. These men, whoever they were, had cooked and eaten meat, and the bones, as yet quite fresh and untainted, were scattered around the wood ashes. They were the bones of one large and one small animal and the meat had been sliced from them with knives, leaving small, succulent pieces still adhering. We shared out the bones and tore at them with our teeth, lauding our luck. Poor toothless Paluchowicz borrowed the knife from me and did as well as anybody. When there was no more meat we cracked each bone with the axe and sucked out the marrow.
For two or three hours during the heat of the afternoon we lay stretched out near the water under the blessed shade of the palms. Kolemenos, who had that rare gift of complete relaxation in any situation, snored with his arms behind his head and his cap pulled down over one eye. The sun’s rays began to slant and I came out of a sleep haunted by blazing light and never-ending desert. I picked up the mug, climbed over the stones, scooped up water and drank again. The American stood up, stretched and joined me. Soon we were all up and about.
Zaro moved away. ‘I’m going to have a look at that pile of tins,’ he called back. ‘Maybe we’ll find one we can carry water in.’
The puzzle of that dump of civilized junk in the heart of the South Gobi must remain unsolved. There were about a hundred of the box-like metal containers and they had been there so long that, even in the dry air of that place, they had rusted beyond use. We turned them over one by one but could find nothing to indicate what they had contained or from where they had come. As we examined them we stacked them on one side. Beneath the pile, half-buried in the sand, Zaro pulled out a complete coil of rust-covered quarter-inch wire held together by circlets of thinner wire which broke away at a touch. I held a handful of sand in a fold of my sack and rubbed away at the heavy wire until I cleared the rust. The coating was thin; the wire was strong and sound.
That night we made a low-walled shelter from the tins, searched around for small pieces of wood and lit a fire. I lay awake for a long time trying to decide how long we should remain in this place, but the answer would not come. Sleep when it did come was dreamless and complete. I opened my eyes, according to the habit of the desert, about an hour before dawn, and Zaro was already pottering around, tugging tentatively at the free end of the coil of wire.
A conference of suggestion and counter-suggestion developed about that length of wire. We lugged it over to the pool and began pulling it out and rubbing it down with sand. No one had any clear notion what to do with it but there was unanimity on its probable usefulness to us some time in the future. Any metal object was precious. We just could not bring ourselves to leave treasure behind. Since we had to take it with us, the discussion finally boiled down to shaping it into an easily-portable form. That was how we came to spend hours of that day cutting off about four-feet lengths, turning the ends into hooks and making loops which could be slung around the neck. The metal was tough and bending it caused hard work with the back of the axe-head while the wire ends were jammed and firmly held in interstices between the close-set stones. When each of us had been supplied with a loop, Zaro and a couple of others made a few metal spikes about two feet long, one end beaten out to a point and the other looped to hang on the belt. Plenty of wire still remained when we had finished, but we thought we
had all we could conveniently carry. The operation gave us a sense of achievement. To use our hands and our skill again was stimulating, and there was, too, the prisoner’s fierce pride of possession, be the object only a loop of discarded wire.
Inevitably came the question of when to depart. Two of our problems were insoluble. The oasis had water but no food. We had nothing in which to carry water, except our metal mug. Makowski argued that if we waited here a few days we stood a chance of meeting a caravan and securing ourselves a stock of food for the next stage. But I wanted to go. I said that, as we had just missed one caravan, there might not be another for weeks. We would wait on for days until we were too weak from lack of food to move at all and the next travellers might find us dead from starvation. In the light of what was to come, I hope I may be forgiven for my insistence. Yet I think I may have been right. But there is no way of judging the issue now, nor was there then. There was no acrimony about the debate. We were in desperate straits and we had to decide immediately one way or the other. The thing was decided late that evening. We would set out before dawn.
We were on our way when the sun came up and for half a day we could look back and see the trees of the oasis. I was glad when I could no longer see their shape against the skyline. For hours Zaro carried the mug, one hand underneath, the other over the top. He had filled it with water after we had all taken our final drinks and as he walked it slopped warm against his palm and little trickles escaped down the sides. When we halted at midday he had lost nearly half the quantity through spillage and evaporation and was complaining about the cramping of his arms in holding so tightly to the can. So, very carefully, sitting up under the small shade of our jackets slung over our clubs, we handed the water round and disposed of it a sip at a time.
This was the pre-oasis journey all over again, but this time we were deprived of even the scant sustenance of a few dried fish. For the first three days I thought we moved surprisingly well. On the fourth day the inescapable, strength-draining heat began quite suddenly to take its toll. Stumbles and falls became increasingly frequent, the pace slowed, speech dried up into short grunted phrases. I remember Makowski saying, ‘Hell can’t be hotter than this bloody desert.’
On the fifth day Kristina went to her knees. I turned slowly round to look at her, expecting her to get to her feet as she had done before. She remained kneeling, her fair head bowed down on her chest. She was very still. I moved towards her and Kolemenos stepped back at the same time. Before we could reach her she swayed from the hips and slumped forward, her face in the sand. We reached her at the same time and turned her on her back. She was unconscious. I opened the neck of her dress and started talking to her, gently shaking her, while Mister Smith set to with sticks and fufaikas to make shade for her.
She came to quickly. She looked at our anxious ring of faces, sat up, smiled through split lips and said, ‘I feel better now. I must have fallen over – I don’t know how it happened.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I consoled her. ‘We’ll rest here a while and then you’ll be all right again.’
She leaned forward and lightly patted the back of my hand. ‘I won’t fall down again.’
We sat there a while. Kristina reached down to scratch her ankle and my eyes idly followed the hand. The ankle was swollen so that the skin pressed outward against the narrow-fitting ends of her padded trousers.
‘Has anything bitten you, Kristina?’
‘No, Slav. Why?’
‘Your leg looks swollen.’
She pulled up the trouser leg and looked, turning her foot about as she did so. ‘I hadn’t noticed it before,’ she said.
We struggled on for a couple more hours. She seemed to be refreshed. Then she fell again and this time her knees buckled and her face hit the sand in almost one movement without even the action of putting her arms out to break the fall.
We turned her over again and wiped away the sand which had been forced into her nose and mouth. We put up the shelter. She lay with eyes closed, breathing in harsh gasps through her mouth. I looked at her ankles and they were a pitiful sight. Both were badly discoloured and so swollen that it seemed they would burst the restricting bottoms of the trousers. I took out my knife and slit the cloth upwards. The skin appeared to be distended by water right up to the knees. I touched the swelling and the mark of my fingers remained for some seconds.
Kristina was unconscious for an hour while we tried to stifle our gnawing anxiety with banalities like, ‘It must be just a touch of sunstroke.’ I had a feeling like lead in the pit of my stomach. I was frightened.
She was quite cheerful when she came round. ‘I am becoming a nuisance,’ she said. ‘What can be the matter with me?’ We fussed around her.
Kristina got to her feet. ‘Come on. We are wasting time.’
I walked alongside her. She stopped suddenly and glanced down at her legs, her attention attracted by the flapping of slit trousers about her legs.
‘My legs are getting quite thick, Slav.’
‘Do they hurt you, Kristina?’
‘No, not at all. They must be swelling because I have walked so far.’
The time was afternoon on the fifth day. She walked on for hours without more than an occasional small stumble and was still keeping up with Kolemenos and I when the sun had gone and we stopped for the night. Sitting there among us she stole frequent looks at her legs. She said nothing and we affected not to notice.
It was a disturbed night. All except Kolemenos seemed too weary and worried for sleep, Kristina lay still but I sensed she remained awake. I chewed on the pebble in my mouth. My teeth ached, my gums were enlarged and tender. Thoughts of flowing water constantly invaded my mind. I had clear pictures of the sampans I had seen on those northern rivers. I had little fits of shivering that made me stand up and walk around. My head felt constricted. I ached from head to foot.
For the first two hours of the sixth day the air was cool and walking was as pleasant as ever it can be in the desert. But soon the sun began to blaze at us out of a sky empty of clouds.
I took Kristina’s elbow. ‘Can you keep going in this?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Five minutes later she had folded up and was out, face down in the sand. Again we ministered to her and waited for her to open her eyes. She appeared to be breathing quite normally, like a tired child.
I stood a few steps away from her and the others came over to me. ‘She is very swollen,’ I said. ‘Do any of you know what that means?’ Nobody knew the symptoms. We went back to her and waited. I flapped my cap over her face to make some air.
She smiled at us. ‘I am being a trouble again.’ We shook our heads. ‘I am afraid you had better leave me this time.’
We all broke into protest at once. Kolemenos dropped down on his knees beside her. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t be a silly little girl. We shall never leave you.’ She lay there for another half-an-hour and when she tried to force herself up on her elbows she fell back again.
I spoke to Kolemenos. ‘We must give her a hand.’ We lifted her to her feet. ‘I can walk if you stay near me,’ she said.
Amazingly she walked, Kolemenos and I lightly holding her elbows. After a quarter of a mile we felt her start to fall forward. We steadied her and she went on again. She pulled herself erect and there was not a sound of distress, not a whimper. The next time she slumped forward we could not hold her. She had played herself utterly out and even the gallant will in that frail body could not produce another torturing effort. We were all in a bunch around her as the sun climbed up over our heads. Kolemenos and I each put an arm about her and, half-carrying, half-dragging her, set off again. A mile or so of that and I had no reserve of strength to give her. We stopped and I bent double fighting for breath.
‘Stick beside me, Slav,’ said Kolemenos. ‘I am going to carry her.’ And he lifted her into his arms, swayed for a moment as he adjusted himself to the weight, and staggered off. He carried her for fully two hundred yards and I was
there to ease her down when he paused for a rest.
‘Please leave me, Anastazi,’ she begged. ‘You are wasting your strength.’ He looked at her but could not bring himself to speak.
We made a shelter there and stayed for perhaps three hours through the worst heat of the day. She lay still – I do not think she could move. The ugly swelling was past the knees and heavy with water. Kolemenos was flat on his back, restoring his strength. He knew what he was going to do.
The sun began to decline. Kolemenos bent down and swung her into his arms and trudged off. I stayed with him and the rest were all about us. He covered fully a quarter of a mile before he put her down that first time. He picked her up again and walked, her head pillowed on his great shoulder. I can never in my life see anything so magnificent as the blond-bearded giant Kolemenos carrying Kristina, hour after hour, towards darkness of that awful sixth day. His ordeal lasted some four hours. Then she touched his cheek.
‘Put me on the ground, Anastazi. Just lay me down on the ground.’
I took her weight from him and together we eased her down. We gathered round her. A wisp of a smile hovered about the corners of her mouth. She looked very steadily at each one of us in turn and I thought she was going to speak. Her eyes were clear and very blue. There was a great tranquillity about her. She closed her eyes.
‘She must be very tired,’ said Sergeant Paluchowicz. ‘The poor, tired little girl.’
We stood around for several minutes, dispirited and at a loss to know what to do next. The shoulders of Kolemenos were sagging with exhaustion. We exchanged glances but could think of nothing to say. I looked down at Kristina. I looked at the open neck of her dress, and in a second I was down at her side with my ear over her heart. There was no beat. I did not believe it. I turned my head and applied the other ear. I lifted my head and picked up her thin wrist. There was no pulse. They were all looking at me intently. I dropped her hand and it thumped softly into the sand.
The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom Page 19
