'Trap! — March!' I ordered.
We set course into the dunes — for Strandloper's Water.
Four, six, eight, ten steps. The steep incline of the dune and the clinging sand bends our ankles back so that the foot trails like a polio victim's. The toe seeks its hold, penetrates the surface with a curious dry rustle — and finds no firmness. A downward traverse, an uncertain fulcrum at mid-point of the arch, a slow compacting under the ball and toes, a ripple of tautness along the instep muscles, the bones spreadeagled, heel unsupported. Sand pours in the cut-open toe, cold inside, hot on the surface. The foot slides downwards, the knee wrenches, leg muscles cry out.
Four, six, eight, ten steps.
Vapour-trail arabesques smoke at the crests under the rising wind and sand probes through every cavity of shirt, trousers, vest, coating the skin with a white emery abrasive, a goad to straining muscles and a corrosive to the temper.
Four, six, eight, ten steps.
Shelborne had sought expiation and mortification in the dunes: the sun was now a fiery magnifying-glass and the desert its burning-point. Caldwell and Shelborne could not have brought a mule-wagon through this. I looked back. The sand quagmire, the old warship, Mercury — they were as close as they had been two hours before. There was a bloom of smoke seawards — the tug would soon be with the Mazy Zed. My rucksack weighed like a ton of coal on my shoulders. The Bernadelli in a canvas holster on my left hip was balanced against a pocketful of shells on my right; I realized that before long I might have to jettison both. Maybe the binoculars, too. My heavy polo-necked sweater was tied round my waist. The desert would be icy at night and after dark the tightly rolled sleeping-bag above each man's pack would as vital as water.
I drank about two eggcups full of water. It was neutral, unsatisfying, and served only to clog the dried sand and mucus in my mouth. I wiped clean three cartridges for us to suck. The others sat sullen, silent under the threat of the Namib, although we could easily have turned back at this stage and we had plenty of food and water ahead it was impossible to distinguish individual peaks and hills any more for the soft cobalt had now abandoned them to brutal shades of red and orange. Nearby were the skeletons of a group of strange succulents the Hottentots call 'half-mens — half-human,' a man-sized mock-up whose head inclines away to the north. They leaned away from us like a tragic classical Greek chorus foreboding evil for our journey.
We struck towards the ancient river line.
Hours later — blinded, gasping, crying out for water we dared not drink — we stumbled down a wadi. The heat contained in the red-hot defile was appalling. Its sand base absorbed the sound of our footfalls and voices, which fell dead, as in the presence of the dead; we gave up speaking. The open desert had narrowed into a chain of wildly jumbled broken defiles leading to the old watercourse. Koeltas called them gramadullas. The grim flanking cliffs, pitted by heat, flamed every hot colour, red, orange, scarlet, brick. They had a bloom, too, like grapes where the surface of the rock fell in rotten powder. Masses of house-sized rock lay everywhere. We skirted them, pressing onwards — towards what?
We shuffled on, my muscles rebelling at the unnatural sandtrapper gait. The wadi was as tortuous in direction as it was treacherous above. A hundred tons of rock detached itself and fell, noiseless. Dust billowed, but otherwise the rocks' agony was mute. In five minutes we would have been marching across the spot. Johaar, leading, turned and gestured expressively. Yet another bend: we paused in astonishment, even in that region of unlikely colours. The overhang expanded funnel-wise above, but instead of flaming scarlet it was burnished jet-black. It was hornblende, stippled here and there with emerald-green boulders of pure copper. The heat became almost intolerable as the black drank up the sun; two feathery cascades, not of water, but of white sand, ran over the shoulders of the dark cliffs.
Then the gramadullas opened and the terrain became flat — the ancient watercourse!
We threw our packs in the shadow of the banks and lay down exhausted. But even here the late afternoon sun would not leave us alone. The shadow disappeared and there was nothing for it but to return to the stifling defile and the black cliff. The Bernadelli bullets tasted better than the water. I fell asleep sucking raw brass and lead; I was awakened by bitter cold and dark. It was barely eight o'clock and the temperature must have fallen over fifty degrees. There was no fire because there was nothing to burn. We ate an unpalatable meal of bully-beef and dried fruit, washed down with a little water. We decided to trek with the moon and lie up during the heat of the day. The river-bed seemed an impenetrable wash of sand, without a white pock-mark or a dead buck to guide our search for Strandloper's Water.
I shivered in my sleeping-bag and sleep was fitful. I must have fallen into a deeper sleep towards midnight, for I started awake as Koeltas shook me. The muted light caught the yellow bronze of his skin; his eyes were two slits of shadow. In his long oilskin, his Tartar face was as unreal in that goblin-land as a goblin itself. What he said was as strange.
'Put on the shoe of Mantis.'
The bullet rattled awkwardly against my teeth. 'For Christ's sake, what are you talking about?'
He turned away so that his silhouette was lost against the black cliff and he said softly, in his thin, harsh voice. The Bushmen say, the moon is the shoe of Mantis. Let us put it on and get the hell out of this spook-land.'
I kept the compass but jettisoned the Bernadelli, the shells and the binoculars — a holster of dried fruit was worth more than a gun. Koeltas, however, kept the Remington. Johaar and I marched with our sleeping-bag? doubled round our waists; Koeltas's was bundled up neatly on his rucksack. In the heat of the previous day he had been least affected. He drank less water than Johaar or myself.
We trekked. We kept no account of time. The river sand was deep, but level. The sandshuffler gait paid off here without the muscle-cracking strain of endless ascent and descent. The cold was formidable. Sockless, open-toed, I soon lost all feeling in my feet and the numbness worked its way up mid-calf like Socrates's hemlock. The stars were radium needles above the serried lines of endless wadis flowing into the main stream. Of water, of life,there was no sign. The Glory Hole, the diamond fountainhead itself, became unimportant beside the need to lift one unfeeling foot in front of the next. The bullet I sucked felt like a drop of warm water in my palm.
I led. I didn't see the dawn, although my face was towards it. My brain was numb, unresponsive: my eyes were conditioned to the next muscle-sapping step. Nor did I notice that the river-bed was widening — flattening into a sort of sand delta. It was colour that pulled my head up. A mile or two away, a slender monolith of rock stood up one hundred feet from the sandy bed. It was not black, or red, or any of yesterday's colours. It was crushed strawberry. For a moment I imagined it to be the coming flush of light, but it was not the magic of sunrise — the rock itself was that colour. The sun brought no warmth but, momentarily, greater cold. We paused in mid-river within sight of the strawberry rock: if I could have rejoiced then in the thought of diamonds I would have done so at the sight of a striated bank: it was bright blue, like the tailings of the Kimberley diamond mines. This began where the river narrowed the way we had come, but farther on as it fanned out the blue gave way to an astonishing display of reds, yellows, pinks and lighter blues, shot through with a white purer even than the sand. I guessed this to be kaolin, and the others not diamond gravel but clays of various kinds.
This array of colours was remarkable enough. But the column of rose quartz marked the site of something that was of far more interest to us. Under a shimmer of mist to the right lay an outline of palest turquoise, sheening like a lake. Instinctively I looked for the two landmarks which would confirm what leapt to my tired brain. There they were — hard on the right, two enormous dunes! Sand encircled, muted and lovely it lay before our seared eyes — Strandloper's Water!