The River of Diamonds

15

Ancient land barrier!

Sand and sky merged at a distant line of stark, saw-edged peaks, pale cobalt in a vast cyclorama, a line robbed of all decisiveness by the white glare of the sky. Deeply keeled, serried lines of enormous dunes, some of them a thousand feet high, ran north-eastwards in an eccentric, rock-ribbed agglomeration. Barrier it was, for the north was different terrain from the south. The dunes went no farther than the demarcation; on the other side stretched a vast, gravelly plain shot through with razor-edged outcrops — broken, corroded, ripped. Under the vertical eye-glare of the sun the enclaves and divides of the dunes were indistinguishable from their doppelganger shadows, eaten away as canker devours the pearly-white mouth of the puff-adder. I stood incredulous at this nakedness bankrupt of all life, with a lineal pedigree of two hundred million years without the bastardy of one flower, one fully-grown tree, or the crudest prototype of man, a quite unmitigated infinitude of sand. It was absolute, like space; primal as man's killer-instinct; an inexorable as a countdown.

I pointed to the line of mushroom-lipped blowholes, which climbed out of the quicksands into firmer country beyond. That is our route.'

'Jesus!' exclaimed Koeltas. 'I never leave the sea again!'

Johaar kicked a bare foot into the ankle-deep sand. 'Five miles a day, maybe, through this stuff. We want plenty water.'

I carried two of Shelborne's canteens. Johaar had roped to his belt a half-gallon wine jar I had found on the Mazy Zed's deck and Koeltas had two empty brandy bottles in the pockets of his faithful oilskin. The water from Shelborne's room condensers was insipid but there was none available from the Mazy Zed as the tanks were in the sealed-off living quarters. Koeltas carried the Remington and I the short Bernadelli VB automatic as well as Rhennin's superlative Hensoldt Diasport binoculars, pocket-sized and amazingly powerful. Looking at the emptiness before me, I felt a fellow-feeling with Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who had carried the same make of glasses into space. I had commandeered haversacks and some tinned food from Shelborne's larder. The dead buck which covered the beach would have stocked an army, but we dared not venture near.

Koeltas and I had cut out the toes of our veldskoens in 'sandtrapper' tradition to get rid of the sand. Ordinary boots are useless, since the abrasive action of the sand strips the stitching in days. Koeltas wore his greasy skipper's cap and I a big sombrero from Shelbome's slop-chest: Johaar was in a guano-worker's hat.

I had plotted our route beforehand to the Uri-Hauchab mountains, the complex vaguely shown on the map, and now I checked my bearings with a small boat's compass. I had also set the time limit as four days: a little over a pint of water each per day. My first objective, if I could find nothing at the coast to solve the problem of ingress to the Glory Hole, was Strandloper's Water. The immediate interior seemed to offer nothing but signs of death. Farther inland — well, I told myself, Shelborne had lived for a year in it, and there must be water.

'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!

But there was no water.

The lake-like sheen was as much a delusion as the name. Perhaps in Caldwell and Shelborne's time it might have earned it, for there was solidified mud in the pan. The contorted corpse of a moringa tree, squat, silver-barked, stood near it, and a moringa stores water and lives on it for years. But it, too, had died of thirst. There was no sign of Shelborne's mule wagon. I knew that he must have lied about it, for no vehicle could possibly have traversed the dunes. The other side of the ancient watercourse was as impassable to the wheel as to the foot — mile upon mile of endless file of razor-edged outcrops of rock.

I searched Strandloper's Water for Caldwell's. grave. There was nothing except a fireplace of blackened stones near the moringa tree skeleton. The place was as featureless as a mirror. Had Shelborne's year in the desert been fiction too? I began to wonder: water there was none, nor animal life, vegetation, insect or shade. The pitiless glare forced us back into the sundial shadow of the isolated monolith. We slept, oblivious, in its shadow until the sun moved and woke us. We cursed and shifted; slept and were woken by the sun; cursed and shifted yet once again. At sunset the stunning chill struck at us.

We decided to return to the coast.

The Uri-Hauchab mountains, fine and near on the map, took no account of the Namib. We were without much food and our precious water supply was dwindling. Our bodies were beaten, lame, exhausted. The fountainhead recurred again and again to my mind, but what I most wanted was water, shade, shelter from the desert's pitilessness. We decided to rest the next day and make for Mercury the following night.

That was, until I heard the Bells that night; until Johaar saw the moving helio in the dunes; until the water demijohn burst.

The Bells brought me out of sleep. Through the insulating sand came the familiar long reverberation. The river-bed trembled under me, but its tremor was slight compared to the heave of Mercury. I was awake in a flash, but Koeltas was before me, sitting up in his sleeping-bag, rifle in hand, his eyes wide with terror.

'Shelborne!' he — said thickly. 'Shelborne brings the Bells… We die…'

'Shelborne is at sea on his way to Waivis Bay,' I snapped.

Johaar was muttering to himself.

'Let's march,' said Koeltas.

The hell with that — at this time and the state we're in,' I replied roughly. I lay down again, my thoughts racing. My sealed gas pockets on the sea-bed would obviously not be audible at this distance and through the intervening land mass. They could not explain the Bells, then. Koeltas sat and smoked his rank tobacco endlessly. The dunes were black and white under the hard moon, like some unreal zebra's flank. The Bells, the ancient river line… What, I asked myself if we were lying on the dome roof of a gigantic underground cavern, not only stretching under Mercury in the form of the Glory Hole, but under the desert itself? Could the mushroom-shaped blowholes be vents from it? With the uplift of the coast, had the river been forced underground, now flowing beneath its original bed? Had Strandloper's Water run dry for the same reason? If we were on top of the diamond fountainhead, the diamonds must be under an overburden of sand which would make even the Oranjemund experts with their tournadozers and tournascrapers blanch. Yet, I believed, Caldwell had found some way in… It was impossible to prospect: I had no trommel and even if I had, you need water to wash gravel. Water was life, and our store was scanty enough.

It was scantier in the morning.

I was aroused by an urgent, hysterical note in Johaar's voice.

The half-gallon jar was cracked, frozen from the bitter night. There were chunks of ice left, but most of it had been lost. We gathered the precious pieces together and thawed them in empty cans, carefully pouring the food-tainted liquid into my two canteens. Koeltas had one bottle left. During our wretched, silent breakfast the Bells sounded softly. Koeltas's eyes were staring. A day lying around under the scourge of the sun would send them both round the bend.

'Kulunga!' muttered Johaar. 'Kulunga comes!'

'Pull yourself together!' I said sharply. 'Who the hell is Kulunga anyway?'

'He walks among us, but you don't see him,' he replied, as if glad to get it off his chest. 'Man-god. He has two baskets. One has the good things, the other death. Kulunga comes here.'

'Rubbish!'I replied.

'No,' he went on seriously. 'Kulunga kills, or I kill Kulunga.' He took out his big knife and looked round 'Maybe Shelborne is Kulunga.'

There was no use trying to rationalize his primitive fear. 'Listen,' I told him and Koeltas. 'We can make out for two days more with the water we have. It will take us every bit of that to reach the sea. We trek — now!'

The bolt snapped shut and he pointed the Remington at me from where he sat, cross-legged, not six feet away. 'We go on,' he snarled. 'If we go back, the Bells will kill us. Maybe ahead we find water. Maybe not. We die anyway. But better die away from the Bells.'

I looked at the hard, closed slits of eyes and at the rifle. Two days! That would take us, going hard, to Uri-Hauchab. Or almost. If I was right about the ancient river and the lift of the land, its underlying bedrock might have been cupped at the mountains into a lake or a dam… Shelborne had lived for a year in the desert — among the wild peaks of Uri-Hauchab he might have found water and game…

I replied, 'It suits me to go on. But I don't like doing things at gunpoint, see. I don't want a couple of lily-livered yellow bastards hanging like a stone round my neck in a tough spot like this.'

Koeltas was dispassionate. 'Mister, if I shoot you, Johaar and I have more water. No one will know. No one will find you. No one come to look for you.' Shelborne might have used the same logic about Caldwell.

'Rhennin will send a helicopter to bring me out,' I bluffed. Shoot me, and they'll take you back and hang you.'

He didn't smile, but the muscles jerked along the line of his cruel lips and high cheekbones. He went on grudgingly, 'I'd like to shoot you for the water, mister. But you're as tough and as slim as a Richtersveld goat and maybe you bring us alive out of this, huh?

'I haven't any intention of dying,' I said tersely. 'Right, let's trek then. Beyond Strandloper's Water we'll pick up the course of the river…'

Johaar was on his feet. 'Kulunga!' he mouthed. 'Kulunga!' He pointed to the dunes high above.

I swung round in time to catch the helio flash. It was gone in a split second. The dunes were empty.

'Kulunga comes!' he raved. 'I go and kill Kulunga!'

I grabbed him by the shoulder, but he brushed me aside. Knife in hand, he started across the river-bed.

'Johaar!' I yelled, following him. 'Come back, you bloody fool! There's nothing there! A bit of bright quartz, that's all…'

I stumbled and fell. Koeltas was beside me. Johaar was on his way to the nearest defile.

'He sees spooks,' said Koeltas casually. 'Let him go — more water for us.'

'He's crazy! He'll die in a couple of hours out there…'

'Look how the spook gives him strength,' said Koeltas nonchalantly. Johaar moved at speed across the last patches of river-bed before entering the wadi. 'First it burns him up and then it kills him! Let him go!'

'I won't leave a man to die,' I replied. 'Fair enough, let him chase things in his own mind. He'll drop soon — I'll go and bring him in.'

He looked at me with a curious sadness, as if I were a child. Then he shrugged. 'We wait today, drink no water. Tonight we follow his tracks.'

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.