Johaar was dead when we found him after moonrise, maybe a mile and a half away. His tracks were clear. He hadn't died of thirst or sunstroke.
His own knife stood out between his shoulder-blades.
Koeltas rolled him over and pointed to the gaping mouth. The lips were ringed with scum. 'He fight — look! They fight here.' The sand was stamped and disturbed. He said something in patois which I didn't understand. It might have been a prayer or an epitaph. But there was fear in his eyes. 'Johaar was very strong. To kill Johaar, a man must be stronger.' He spat. 'That bastard Shelborne!'
His fear was infectious. My recollection of the resonant, educated voice made the killing at my feet more hideous.
'We trek,' I said harshly.
Fatalism was mixed with the little Hottentot's terror. 'He watches us. Maybe we see him.' He lifted the rifle expressively. A man could be behind the next dune and we would not see him.
We saw the helio of light, the sharp flash of reflected sun, from a dune-top next morning after a hard night's march. We must have put nearly ten miles between ourselves and Strandloper's Water. The terrain became more broken. Sand-blasted, wind-eroded hills began to show among the dunes. What was Shelborne — for now I was sure it was Shelborne — carrying which reflected the sun? He wasn't careless or unwise enough to advertize his position.
'Not a gun,' said Koeltas decisively. Too much light.'
There was no sign of water. When we drank sparsely and ate some of our unpalatable food, I realized that we had travelled beyond the point of no return. Our water would never bring us back to Mercury. Our best — and only — hope was to continue. By noon we were unable to stumble on. There was no shade; the banks were too low for it. We pulled the sleeping-bags loose over our heads for protection. Soon, the sand was damp with my sweat and my temples were throbbing. All afternoon the sun sapped our strength, striking through the fabric. When it sank and the first of the night's frightening chill struck, I pulled on my thick sweater, climbed into the bag, and fell into a sleep of utter exhaustion.
I woke after midnight, frozen, hungry, uneasy. I reached out my hand for my water-bottle. It wasn't there. Panic gripped me. I started upright, but Koeltas hadn't made off — his head was jutting out of his bag. Between us lay a battered water-bottle, its rough brown cloth covering almost worn off, the aluminium showing through dully. A trickle of icy fear ran through me. Someone had stolen our water! I reached out for the old bottle. It was heavy, full. A scrap of paper was stuck through the chafed strap. By matchlight I read: John, follow my tracks. I must speak to you alone. Johaar came for me and I had to kill him. So leave Koeltas and the gun when you come. Fred Shelborne.
John! I smiled grimly. A nice familiar approach when you were trying to lure someone away from the protection of a rifle! I weighed the water-bottle in my hand. The most precious bribe added — water. I drew the cork with my teeth. It tasted good, a little sandy. It wasn't Mercury water. I wasn't fool enough to fall for that sort of blandishment. If Shelborne had anything to say, let him come to us. Koeltas and I would stick together, close together, from now on.
Before dawn we trekked.
16
It was common Gestapo torture to take a man out of boiling water, and plunge him in ice up to his neck. But our next three days were every bit as excruciating. The blaze of the sun was too much for our ebbing strength and our treks were made at night. The nightmare became more substantial as the light waned insubstantial; there were times when I wavered between a detached, somnambulistic stumble through the red-hot grieshoch of sand and an uncaring delirium. I threw away the compass, steering only at the twin spitskoppe peaks of Uri-Hauchab, bullet-shaped, scored like a dumdum bullet. They would fade to invisibility in the blackness before moon-rise, — when they did become visible I was unsure whether their wavering, uncertain outline was not a mirage. On two occasions we jerked from our stunned sleep to find our water-bottles full and a row of tracks running into the dunes, but there were no more notes from Shelborne. Koeltas saw his plan clearly, too, but we had no strength to stand sentry. He fired once at the unaccountable helio of light, but Shelborne was out of range and the clap of the shot fell sick against the sound-absorbing sand.
I woke. The sun stabbed my eyelids. The hills were absurd. Some were upside down and their sides leaned over impossible overhangs. The twin spitskoppe of Uri-Hauchab, at whose foot we had camped in exhausted triumph the night before, hung suspended from the sky like the teats of a monster cow. The flanking ridges, chopped into light and shadow waves by last night's moon, this morning were built up of globes and plates alternately: here and there others rose like inverted mushrooms. The edges were shimmering, ill-defined, and the lines which the moon had carved so firmly were evanescent, fragmentary. My weak laugh was lost, — I knew that I was at the end of the line. I raised my fist and screamed an obscenity towards the dunes. Shelborne! He had prolonged our agony with his canteens of water. Shelborne! Christ! How he must have enjoyed killing Caldwell! Now, thirty and more years after, he'd pulled the same killer-gag on the next person to try to find his secret! I rose to my knees. The whole sky and landscape reeled, turned upside down, stood out clear. Not death, but a mirage. A few hundred yards ahead was a rough cairn of stones. The Namib, in all its wild contortions, hadn't invented that. It was man-made. Those stones had been placed in position.
I shook Koeltas to make sure I was not imagining it. He stirred, but lay still. With some frenetic last reserve of strength, I hauled him up so that he faced it.
His eyes went wide. 'Hadje Aibeep!' he click-clacked. 'On my mother's grave, Hadje Aibeep!'
Then the whole scene spun, altered, reversed — the mirage spun its wild patterns again before our eyes.
'What is it?' My lips were rubbery, congealed. 'What is Hadje Aibeep, for God's sake?'
He shook himself like a dog. 'I never thought to see it. The cave of Hadje Aibeep — the little wild men of the desert throw their dead into it. Each puts a stone above for a dead man. The cave is deep. They say there is a lake at Hadje Aibeep, under the desert. Let us look.'
We stumbled to the cairn. Next to it a deep shaft went down into the bowels of the earth. The hole was circular, about twenty feet across. Its lips, for about ten feet all round, were smooth, polished, of a substance I could not identify — not volcanic lava but some strange sort of solidified mud from the depths below.
We could smell water. I dropped a stone, and from far below came an answering splash.
This was the ancient river; this was the bearer of diamonds!
We had to get to the water, but we had neither rope nor strength. Somehow we would have to negotiate the smooth incline, up which the air came pure and sweet. I took a rock to the geyser-like mud. If we couldn't cut steps, we might as well be out in the parched dunes. I hacked at it; my crude tool sank easily: it was as soft as soapstone.
'I want something sharp,' I told Koeltas. 'I'll cut the first lot of steps and you the next — in turns.'
He held up the water-bottle. 'We drink all this first, eh?'
'Yes.' If we couldn't reach the water below, we'd die anyway. We finished it. I went to the cairn for a sharp stone.
'No!' said Koeltas. 'Not those stones — bad luck. Each stone is a dead man.'
At the base, half-covered by sand, were the remains of Bushmen arrows — the shafts had gone but the flint-heads remained — thongs of bows, primitive stone-head axes and crumbled wooden shafts. Bushmen buried weapons with the dead. I found one axe with about a foot of shaft, and the thongs lashing it to the head looked fair.