On the fourth day out from Noro Kei, they raised a long jagged line of mountains, hazy and blue on the northern horizon. In the three following days the wagons crept steadily towards them. On the seventh day, and the ninth from Zwart Modder, they saw from their vantage point in the air, during their early morning flight, the Bennetts’ outspan disappear into a narrow defile. Its sides rose sharply to rocky krantzes standing out clear and sharp in the sunshine against the higher levels which swiftly mounted to the main range. An hour later the Longs’ wagon had also entered the valley and Cornelius was just about to search out a suitable spot in which to land for the day, when, with a loud series of bangs from the carburetter, his engine petered out.
Sarie’s cheeks drained of their colour as she gripped Sandy’s hand, the whites of Willem’s eyes showed round with fright in his shiny black face.
Cornelius peered anxiously downward and in frantic haste began to search the ground below them for a decent landing place. He knew that the light patches meant loose sand into which the plane would pitch, bury her nose, and perhaps burst into flames. The dark ones indicated more solid ground. Seeing a likely spot at the entrance of the valley in which the wagons had disappeared, he steered for it as the machine, losing speed, began to plane swiftly down.
They bumped, lifted and bumped again, then taxied some two hundred yards, but he managed to pull up just in time to avoid a stretch of nasty rocky ground that lay ahead.
‘What’s happened?’ cried Sandy, scrambling out.
Cornelius sat back in the pilot’s seat for a moment, mopping his perspiring face. ‘God knows!’ he muttered, then he began to examine his engine.
For half an hour the others stood round him, holding nuts and spanners while he laboured in the sweltering sun. At last he gave a despondent shrug. ‘The inlet valve spring is broken and I’m afraid it’s impossible to mend it.’
‘But surely you’ve got a spare?’ Sandy’s voice was a husky whisper.
‘No.’ Cornelius shook his head. ‘One can’t carry spares of everything—and it’s no good my trying to kid you; we’re absolutely stuck.’
‘Oh, hell!’ groaned Sarie. ‘We’re nine days out from Zwart Modder—we’ll never make it—yet we’ll die if we stay here.’
18
Kalahari Hell
Up to the time of leaving Zwart Modder all the English heirs of the late John Thomas Long, had, in their various ways, enjoyed their visit to South Africa. Henry’s appreciation of colour, which had made him a life-long collector of pictures, found a quite satisfaction in the wonderful variety of scenery and the magnificent sunsets. The Bennetts’ commercial sense had been aroused to keen interest by the great modern buildings and teeming industry of Johannesburg. Michael had had an opportunity of tasting South African hospitality and, like Patricia, had been constantly enthralled by the changing scenes in the cities and townships which they visited. For them, too, there had been the discovery of each other, so that up to the last few days they had been living on top of the world.
But soon after they had left the last outpost of civilisation they began to see something of a very different Africa. The sun streamed down and the earth lay dry and quivering beneath it. The gentle oxen plodded on with maddening slowness while flies, coming from no one knew where, swarmed and buzzed about their eyelids. The so-called track to Noro Kei seemed at times to disappear entirely, but the natives were always able to re-discover it by methods of their own.
The country through which they were passing was an endless succession of low valleys. For hours on end they crawled towards the crest of a brown ridge, sharp cut against the fierce hard blue of a cloudless sky, only to find when they had reached it that another exactly similiar lay before them. As a choice of evils they could sit sweltering in their shirtsleeves beneath the wide hoods of the wagons or trudge beside them and bear the penalty of a fiery burn on every exposed portion of their bodies. In the hours that followed it was just as though their limbs were being grilled before a slow fire.
Each day the same routine was followed by both parties. They were up by sunrise and on the move soon after, making the most of the cool hours of the early morning. By eleven o’clock—already weary—their eyes smarting from the ceaseless glare of earth and sky despite dark glasses, they halted and out-spanned, nibbled a little fruit and crouched in the narrow patch of shade underneath the wagon. It was too hot to sleep, their throats were too dry to talk, and their minds dulled by physical discomfort to a pitch where even reading was impossible. At four o’clock they would limber up and set off again, trekking on over the rough parched grass which seemed to survive miraculously despite the utter absence of any water in that desolate land. An hour after sundown they would once more out-span and form their camp for the night.
Michael and his head boy, Johnnie, shot game—principally consisting of small buck—for one party, and Philbeach, Darkie and Ginger for the other. But the native cooks seemed to know only one method of preparing it and after a few days they all became heartily sick of the half-raw, fresh-killed meat which was put before them each evening. They talked for a little in the circle formed by the camp fires, which the natives lit all round them to scare away the wild things of the desert. Then, as the African night closed down they crawled into their bivouacs to face new tortures.
Their arms, hands, and faces, swollen and slightly puffy, seemed to glow with a devouring inward fire from the sunburn which had caught them in the daytime. Although after a first experience they took every precaution, it seemed impossible for them to avoid exposing themselves to those white-hot, blistering rays, however careful they were. Then, in the darkness, while they endeavoured to snatch a little uneasy sleep there came the warning ping that nightly signalled the onslaught of myriads of mosquitoes. Oil of citronella, antiinsect lotions and all the things which they had provided seemed no protection against these ferocious enemies. In vain they tossed and turned, burying their heads until they stifled beneath their coverings and then with hasty, bitter violence sat up to slap their hands, necks and faces, in the hope of driving off the pests. The low infuriating hum continued each night above their prostrate bodies, until, exhausted from lack of sleep, they rose again to face another gruelling day. In addition they felt depressed and heavy from the quinine they were forced to take as a precaution against fever.
In the Bennett party it was George who took the discomfort most to heart. All his jovial cordiality seemed to drop away under the rigours to which he found himself subjected. The first day out he and his brother had been badly sunburnt, and while Ernest joked philosophically about his reddened neck and forearms, George proceeded to take it out of Michael who, as the only sensible member of the party, had had the forethought to exercise reasonable precautions.
As time wore on George began to persuade himself that he had never meant to come at all but that Ernest and Michael had cajoled him into joining them, and he annoyed the others by a greedy disregard for their wish to economise the supply of water. At all hours of the day and night he poured copious draughts of lime juice and water down his throat and, despite Michael’s warning that it was unwise to touch alcohol before sundown, he laid his hands on their gin so heavily that after five days the half-dozen bottles which they had brought were finished.
To add to their troubles their native guide, Ombulike, lost his way on the sixth day. They had found him untiring at first. He tramped doggedly on ahead of the wagons, his naked feet appearing callous of the burning earth. Then, after four days, he started a bout of dagga smoking which made him stupid, lazy and quarrelsome. Michael, who was watching the sun, became convinced that they were going the wrong way. After a heated argument with the little yellow Hottentot he succeeded in turning the convoy in the direction in which he imagined their goal to lie.
On the seventh day they passed out of the monotonous rolling grassy plains and entered hilly country. They wound through great mountainous, treeless gorges where at times rocky krantzes overhung their heads, a
nd seemed to be entering one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno. Although in the grassy waterless wilderness they had seen no trace of man, it at least gave the impression that they might come upon great herds of cattle with attendant ranchers or some isolated farmstead; but here there was the utter eerie loneliness of stark Nature in her most unfriendly role. It was a world unrealised by modern man—primeval, terrible, and with something ghostly about it even under the blazing noonday sun. The rocky cañons shimmered under the relentless glare, not even a lizard was to be seen sunning itself upon those dry stones, bleached by an eternity of blinding light. The place seemed haunted by some evil, menacing power as though all the bad souls that ever lived and died were congregated there, resentful of this intrusion upon their privacy; watching with silent malevolence for an opportunity to crush these humans who had ventured into their domain.
There were times when Michael felt an overwhelming desire to scream rather than suffer that dread, appalling silence any longer. Once, he loosed off his gun simply in order to shatter the eerie stillness. The report echoed back again and again from the stark rocky walls that hemmed them in and George, half-delirious from alcohol, and fever engendered by mosquito bites, came bounding out from the back of the wagon where he had been lying in a semistupor.
The least movement in that grilling heat caused them to sweat profusely and now his sudden activity made a hot dew break out all over his body. It streamed from his bald forehead and drenched his scanty clothing. In a fit of ungovernable anger he wrenched the long whip from the native driver’s hand and lashed out at Michael. With an angry laugh the boy cantered out of range of the long throng, but the episode made him even more thoughtful than before about George’s condition.
Gently nurtured as he had been, and the idol of his mother, these nightmare days were one long agony to him, but with a determination which must have been inherited from the uncle who had undergone this same physical distress ten years before, he set his teeth and resolved to keep a sense of proportion. He and the Bennetts hated each other now as men are apt to do who are cooped up together for a considerable period under extremely trying conditions, but he knew instinctively that their best chance of succeeding lay in talking as little as possible, sinking their own individualities, and concentrating all their energies in plodding like automatons towards their goal.
In those long nights when his limbs smarted from the blistering sun and the mosquitoes buzzed overhead, he thought much of Patricia. His anger against her had evaporated again and he could only feel now a little sad that anyone so lovely and apparently so frank could lend herself to such despicable treachery. He visualised again that night when he had held her in his arms at Johannesburg and, like a nightmare vision, the red coarse face of the man he now knew to be Roger Philbeach loomed up, leering at him in the close, hot darkness.
He knew from the horsemen who occasionally appeared against the skyline in their rear that the other party had followed them into this great barren area of the Kalahari. As he dozed after desperate attempts to drive off the insects, he saw her in his imagination, somewhere out there upon the trackless veldt, plagued as he was himself by heat, thirst, mosquitoes—and worse—unprotected, but for her father, from those small, dark, lecherous eyes of Philbeach’s which had swept over her so revoltingly that night in the palm court of the Carlton.
In the second party Patricia, despite an abundant supply of face lotions and ointments, was suffering equally. If she neglected to grease her face, neck and arms at night she found that she paid for it by a skin as dry as sandpaper in the morning. If, on the other hand, she used the creams which she had brought, they seemed to clog the pores of her skin so that at times she felt she would suffocate with the stifling heat which came more from inside herself than from the baking ground or fiery sky. The perfumes of these preparations were designed to give added attraction to beauty in the social round of a normal world. Here they aroused the lively interest of every insect, all of whom inflicted on her their particular variety of irritation, bite or sting. Worst of all, perhaps, the use of water was restricted entirely to drinking and, although she tried washing with sand, she found it a hopelessly inadequate substitute. As the days wore on she began to loathe her body. She became sick and disgusted with the ever-increasing filth and stickiness which she had no means of removing from it.
In addition to her physical discomfort, she was suffering considerable mental distress, for the situation between her father and herself was distinctly strained. When she had cooled down after her last angry scene with Michael she had asked Henry if Wisdon was actually Philbeach. He admitted that fact but refused any explanation and Philbeach seemed to exercise such a strong fascination over him that he would not listen to Patricia’s plea that they should secure some other white man to accompany them on the expedition. He told his daughter once more that she could stay behind if she liked and since this was no business for a woman he would be heartily glad if she did.
Even if she had thought of drawing back that would have settled it, for Patricia was just as pigheaded as it was possible for any young woman to be. With her small Roman nose cocked in the air she had marched out of the room, slamming the door in her father’s face. At this exhibition, so alien to the manner of the meek and obedient daughter he had known in England, Henry had been livid with righteous anger and the two had hardly spoken to each other since.
Within a few hours of their leaving Zwart Modder, Patricia realised that she had been unjust to Michael in accusing him of deliberately setting the Van Niekerk girl to mislead them. Every now and again Darkie or Ginger rode on ahead to observe the doings of the forward party—and neither Sandy nor the Van Niekerks were with them.
She began to worry then about Michael and, knowing how unused he was to roughing it, her heart ached at the thought of what he must be going through during these days and nights of unaccustomed strain and fatigue.
Unwelcome as Philbeach’s presence might be in her own party, at least he was competent in ordering their arrangements and with occasional assistance from Ginger seemed to find no difficulty in providing adequate supplies of game for their consumption. But how, she wondered, were the others faring? Neither of the Bennetts could handle a gun, she knew, and none of the three had any experience of the ways in which the most acute hardships of this ghastly pilgrimage could be lessened, or at least made bearable.
In her imagination she saw Michael toiling on daily under this sweltering sun, the sole provider for his party’s pot, and when night came on the only one among them with any knowledge of horses or cattle. He would also be called upon to nurse the useless town-bred Bennetts through the hundred petty worrying problems of their journey.
Philbeach continued to press his disagreeable attentions on her, and the open stare of admiration with which he now regarded her as she moved about their temporary camping places was horribly embarrassing. He seemed to have no conception of how to set about making love to her in a normal fashion, although that would have been bad enough, but just stared at her out of his little eyes embedded in fat or endeavoured to joke with her in a rough sort of humour. Once when he caught her alone behind the wagon he tried in a clumsy fashion to kiss her. After that she took extra care never to be far from her moody, silent, father who, curiously enough, seemed to support the rigours of the journey better than any of them.
The insects apparently took no interest in his dry, parched skin. He did not drink as the other men did each night to dull the aching of their sun-scorched bodies. He economised his energies by the simple process of lying absolutely still upon a pile of matting in the bottom of the wagon, protected by the hood from the blazing sunshine, as it rumbled on hour after hour. Silent and uncomplaining, he suffered the other hardships with a grim determination to reach that valley where his brother had gathered a fortune from the ground.
On the seventh evening out from Noro Kei they reached the foothills of the great mountain range which Michael’s party had entered in the aftern
oon and halted a little after sundown in the entrance of a desolate valley.
The usual wearisome routine of which they were all so heartily sick was gone through and then they settled down for the night. After an hour or so Patricia fell into an uneasy sleep, tossing and turning on her palliasse in the narrow bivie. She awoke with a start to find a burly figure bending over her outlined by the faint light of breaking dawn which filtered in under the canvas flap.
‘Quiet—don’t make a noise now.’ Philbeach thrust a hand over her mouth and wriggled down beside her ‘You’re going to be nice to me—see! ’cause I can’t damn well stand this any longer.’
With a violent jerk she wrenched her head away and let out a yell of repulsion and loathing as he threw himself upon her; his week’s growth of stubbly beard rasping her chin.
Next moment Henry thrust his head and shoulders through the narrow opening of the low bivouac. In his right hand he clutched his ancient service revolver.
‘What’s all this?’ he demanded harshly.
Philbeach released the struggling girl with an angry grunt and swung round on his knees. ‘Put that damn’ thing away, you old fool—it might go off.’
‘It might,’ Henry agreed dryly. ‘You had better come out of that.’
‘All right—give me some room then,’ Philbeach snarled, from where he was crouching beside Patricia. The low, pointed roof of the little tent made it impossible for him to stand upright and as Henry moved aside he crawled out into the open.
‘Now!’ Henry shot at him in a fierce undertone. ‘There’s to be no more of this sort of thing—understand!’
‘Oh, cut it out,’ the big man shrugged, endeavouring to pass the matter off with a sudden guffaw of laughter. He had no wish to quarrel with Henry at the moment. ‘I was taking a walk round and mistook the girl’s bivie for my own—that’s all. There’s nothing to make all this song and dance about.’
The Fabulous Valley Page 16
