الفصل الفصل 6 · WATER! WATER!

. WATER! WATER!

Two hours later, that is, about four o’clock, I woke up, for so soon as

the first heavy demand of bodily fatigue had been satisfied, the

torturing thirst from which I was suffering asserted itself. I could

sleep no more. I had been dreaming that I was bathing in a running

stream, with green banks and trees upon them, and I awoke to find

myself in this arid wilderness, and to remember, as Umbopa had said,

that if we did not find water this day we must perish miserably. No

human creature could live long without water in that heat. I sat up and

rubbed my grimy face with my dry and horny hands, as my lips and

eyelids were stuck together, and it was only after some friction and

with an effort that I was able to open them. It was not far from dawn,

but there was none of the bright feel of dawn in the air, which was

thick with a hot murkiness that I cannot describe. The others were

still sleeping.

Presently it began to grow light enough to read, so I drew out a little

pocket copy of the “Ingoldsby Legends” which I had brought with me, and

read “The Jackdaw of Rheims.” When I got to where

“A nice little boy held a golden ewer,

Embossed, and filled with water as pure

As any that flows between Rheims and Namur,”

literally I smacked my cracking lips, or rather tried to smack them.

The mere thought of that pure water made me mad. If the Cardinal had

been there with his bell, book, and candle, I would have whipped in and

drunk his water up; yes, even if he had filled it already with the suds

of soap “worthy of washing the hands of the Pope,” and I knew that the

whole consecrated curse of the Catholic Church should fall upon me for

so doing. I almost think that I must have been a little light-headed

with thirst, weariness and the want of food; for I fell to thinking how

astonished the Cardinal and his nice little boy and the jackdaw would

have looked to see a burnt up, brown-eyed, grizzly-haired little

elephant hunter suddenly bound between them, put his dirty face into

the basin, and swallow every drop of the precious water. The idea

amused me so much that I laughed or rather cackled aloud, which woke

the others, and they began to rub _their_ dirty faces and drag _their_

gummed-up lips and eyelids apart.

As soon as we were all well awake we began to discuss the situation,

which was serious enough. Not a drop of water was left. We turned the

bottles upside down, and licked their tops, but it was a failure; they

were dry as a bone. Good, who had charge of the flask of brandy, got it

out and looked at it longingly; but Sir Henry promptly took it away

from him, for to drink raw spirit would only have been to precipitate

the end.

“If we do not find water we shall die,” he said.

“If we can trust to the old Dom’s map there should be some about,” I

said; but nobody seemed to derive much satisfaction from this remark.

It was so evident that no great faith could be put in the map. Now it

was gradually growing light, and as we sat staring blankly at each

other, I observed the Hottentot Ventvögel rise and begin to walk about

with his eyes on the ground. Presently he stopped short, and uttering a

guttural exclamation, pointed to the earth.

“What is it?” we exclaimed; and rising simultaneously we went to where

he was standing staring at the sand.

“Well,” I said, “it is fresh Springbok spoor; what of it?”

“Springbucks do not go far from water,” he answered in Dutch.

“No,” I answered, “I forgot; and thank God for it.”

This little discovery put new life into us; for it is wonderful, when a

man is in a desperate position, how he catches at the slightest hope,

and feels almost happy. On a dark night a single star is better than

nothing.

Meanwhile Ventvögel was lifting his snub nose, and sniffing the hot air

for all the world like an old Impala ram who scents danger. Presently

he spoke again.

“I _smell_ water,” he said.

Then we felt quite jubilant, for we knew what a wonderful instinct

these wild-bred men possess.

Just at that moment the sun came up gloriously, and revealed so grand a

sight to our astonished eyes that for a moment or two we even forgot

our thirst.

There, not more than forty or fifty miles from us, glittering like

silver in the early rays of the morning sun, soared Sheba’s Breasts;

and stretching away for hundreds of miles on either side of them ran

the great Suliman Berg. Now that, sitting here, I attempt to describe

the extraordinary grandeur and beauty of that sight, language seems to

fail me. I am impotent even before its memory. Straight before us, rose

two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to be

seen in Africa, if indeed there are any other such in the world,

measuring each of them at least fifteen thousand feet in height,

standing not more than a dozen miles apart, linked together by a

precipitous cliff of rock, and towering in awful white solemnity

straight into the sky. These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of

a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts,

and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a

recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently

from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth;

and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly

corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. The stretch of cliff

that connects them appears to be some thousands of feet in height, and

perfectly precipitous, and on each flank of them, so far as the eye can

reach, extend similar lines of cliff, broken only here and there by

flat table-topped mountains, something like the world-famed one at Cape

Town; a formation, by the way, that is very common in Africa.

To describe the comprehensive grandeur of that view is beyond my

powers. There was something so inexpressibly solemn and overpowering

about those huge volcanoes—for doubtless they are extinct

volcanoes—that it quite awed us. For a while the morning lights played

upon the snow and the brown and swelling masses beneath, and then, as

though to veil the majestic sight from our curious eyes, strange

vapours and clouds gathered and increased around the mountains, till

presently we could only trace their pure and gigantic outlines, showing

ghostlike through the fleecy envelope. Indeed, as we afterwards

discovered, usually they were wrapped in this gauze-like mist, which

doubtless accounted for our not having seen them more clearly before.

Sheba’s Breasts had scarcely vanished into cloud-clad privacy, before

our thirst—literally a burning question—reasserted itself.

It was all very well for Ventvögel to say that he smelt water, but we

could see no signs of it, look which way we would. So far as the eye

might reach there was nothing but arid sweltering sand and karoo scrub.

We walked round the hillock and gazed about anxiously on the other

side, but it was the same story, not a drop of water could be found;

there was no indication of a pan, a pool, or a spring.

“You are a fool,” I said angrily to Ventvögel; “there is no water.”

But still he lifted his ugly snub nose and sniffed.

“I smell it, Baas,” he answered; “it is somewhere in the air.”

“Yes,” I said, “no doubt it is in the clouds, and about two months

hence it will fall and wash our bones.”

Sir Henry stroked his yellow beard thoughtfully. “Perhaps it is on the

top of the hill,” he suggested.

“Rot,” said Good; “whoever heard of water being found at the top of a

hill!”

“Let us go and look,” I put in, and hopelessly enough we scrambled up

the sandy sides of the hillock, Umbopa leading. Presently he stopped as

though he was petrified.

“_Nanzia manzie_!” that is, “Here is water!” he cried with a loud

voice.

We rushed up to him, and there, sure enough, in a deep cut or

indentation on the very top of the sand koppie, was an undoubted pool

of water. How it came to be in such a strange place we did not stop to

inquire, nor did we hesitate at its black and unpleasant appearance. It

was water, or a good imitation of it, and that was enough for us. We

gave a bound and a rush, and in another second we were all down on our

stomachs sucking up the uninviting fluid as though it were nectar fit

for the gods. Heavens, how we did drink! Then when we had done drinking

we tore off our clothes and sat down in the pool, absorbing the

moisture through our parched skins. You, Harry, my boy, who have only

to turn on a couple of taps to summon “hot” and “cold” from an unseen,

vasty cistern, can have little idea of the luxury of that muddy wallow

in brackish tepid water.

After a while we rose from it, refreshed indeed, and fell to on our

“biltong,” of which we had scarcely been able to touch a mouthful for

twenty-four hours, and ate our fill. Then we smoked a pipe, and lay

down by the side of that blessed pool, under the overhanging shadow of

its bank, and slept till noon.

All that day we rested there by the water, thanking our stars that we

had been lucky enough to find it, bad as it was, and not forgetting to

render a due share of gratitude to the shade of the long-departed da

Silvestra, who had set its position down so accurately on the tail of

his shirt. The wonderful thing to us was that the pan should have

lasted so long, and the only way in which I can account for this is on

the supposition that it is fed by some spring deep down in the sand.

Having filled both ourselves and our water-bottles as full as possible,

in far better spirits we started off again with the moon. That night we

covered nearly five-and-twenty miles; but, needless to say, found no

more water, though we were lucky enough the following day to get a

little shade behind some ant-heaps. When the sun rose, and, for awhile,

cleared away the mysterious mists, Suliman’s Berg with the two majestic

Breasts, now only about twenty miles off, seemed to be towering right

above us, and looked grander than ever. At the approach of evening we

marched again, and, to cut a long story short, by daylight next morning

found ourselves upon the lowest slopes of Sheba’s left breast, for

which we had been steadily steering. By this time our water was

exhausted once more, and we were suffering severely from thirst, nor

indeed could we see any chance of relieving it till we reached the snow

line far, far above us. After resting an hour or two, driven to it by

our torturing thirst, we went on, toiling painfully in the burning heat

up the lava slopes, for we found that the huge base of the mountain was

composed entirely of lava beds belched from the bowels of the earth in

some far past age.

By eleven o’clock we were utterly exhausted, and, generally speaking,

in a very bad state indeed. The lava clinker, over which we must drag

ourselves, though smooth compared with some clinker I have heard of,

such as that on the Island of Ascension, for instance, was yet rough

enough to make our feet very sore, and this, together with our other

miseries, had pretty well finished us. A few hundred yards above us

were some large lumps of lava, and towards these we steered with the

intention of lying down beneath their shade. We reached them, and to

our surprise, so far as we had a capacity for surprise left in us, on a

little plateau or ridge close by we saw that the clinker was covered

with a dense green growth. Evidently soil formed of decomposed lava had

rested there, and in due course had become the receptacle of seeds

deposited by birds. But we did not take much further interest in the

green growth, for one cannot live on grass like Nebuchadnezzar. That

requires a special dispensation of Providence and peculiar digestive

organs.

So we sat down under the rocks and groaned, and for one I wished

heartily that we had never started on this fool’s errand. As we were

sitting there I saw Umbopa get up and hobble towards the patch of

green, and a few minutes afterwards, to my great astonishment, I

perceived that usually very dignified individual dancing and shouting

like a maniac, and waving something green. Off we all scrambled towards

him as fast as our wearied limbs would carry us, hoping that he had

found water.

“What is it, Umbopa, son of a fool?” I shouted in Zulu.

“It is food and water, Macumazahn,” and again he waved the green thing.

Then I saw what he had found. It was a melon. We had hit upon a patch

of wild melons, thousands of them, and dead ripe.

“Melons!” I yelled to Good, who was next me; and in another minute his

false teeth were fixed in one of them.

I think we ate about six each before we had done, and poor fruit as

they were, I doubt if I ever thought anything nicer.

But melons are not very nutritious, and when we had satisfied our

thirst with their pulpy substance, and put a stock to cool by the

simple process of cutting them in two and setting them end on in the

hot sun to grow cold by evaporation, we began to feel exceedingly

hungry. We had still some biltong left, but our stomachs turned from

biltong, and besides, we were obliged to be very sparing of it, for we

could not say when we should find more food. Just at this moment a

lucky thing chanced. Looking across the desert I saw a flock of about

ten large birds flying straight towards us.

“_Skit, Baas, skit!_” “Shoot, master, shoot!” whispered the Hottentot,

throwing himself on his face, an example which we all followed.

Then I saw that the birds were a flock of _pauw_ or bustards, and that

they would pass within fifty yards of my head. Taking one of the

repeating Winchesters, I waited till they were nearly over us, and then

jumped to my feet. On seeing me the _pauw_ bunched up together, as I

expected that they would, and I fired two shots straight into the thick

of them, and, as luck would have it, brought one down, a fine fellow,

that weighed about twenty pounds. In half an hour we had a fire made of

dry melon stalks, and he was toasting over it, and we made such a feed

as we had not tasted for a week. We ate that _pauw_; nothing was left

of him but his leg-bones and his beak, and we felt not a little the

better afterwards.

That night we went on again with the moon, carrying as many melons as

we could with us. As we ascended we found the air grew cooler and

cooler, which was a great relief to us, and at dawn, so far as we could

judge, we were not more than about a dozen miles from the snow line.

Here we discovered more melons, and so had no longer any anxiety about

water, for we knew that we should soon get plenty of snow. But the

ascent had now become very precipitous, and we made but slow progress,

not more than a mile an hour. Also that night we ate our last morsel of

biltong. As yet, with the exception of the _pauw_, we had seen no

living thing on the mountain, nor had we come across a single spring or

stream of water, which struck us as very odd, considering the expanse

of snow above us, which must, we thought, melt sometimes. But as we

afterwards discovered, owing to a cause which it is quite beyond my

power to explain, all the streams flowed down upon the north side of

the mountains.

Now we began to grow very anxious about food. We had escaped death by

thirst, but it seemed probable that it was only to die of hunger. The

events of the next three miserable days are best described by copying

the entries made at the time in my note-book.

“21st May.—Started 11 a.m., finding the atmosphere quite cold enough to

travel by day, and carrying some water-melons with us. Struggled on all

day, but found no more melons, having evidently passed out of their

district. Saw no game of any sort. Halted for the night at sundown,

having had no food for many hours. Suffered much during the night from

cold.

“22nd.—Started at sunrise again, feeling very faint and weak. Only made

about five miles all day; found some patches of snow, of which we ate,

but nothing else. Camped at night under the edge of a great plateau.

Cold bitter. Drank a little brandy each, and huddled ourselves

together, each wrapped up in his blanket, to keep ourselves alive. Are

now suffering frightfully from starvation and weariness. Thought that

Ventvögel would have died during the night.

“23rd.—Struggled forward once more as soon as the sun was well up, and

had thawed our limbs a little. We are now in a dreadful plight, and I

fear that unless we get food this will be our last day’s journey. But

little brandy left. Good, Sir Henry, and Umbopa bear up wonderfully,

but Ventvögel is in a very bad way. Like most Hottentots, he cannot

stand cold. Pangs of hunger not so bad, but have a sort of numb feeling

about the stomach. Others say the same. We are now on a level with the

precipitous chain, or wall of lava, linking the two Breasts, and the

view is glorious. Behind us the glowing desert rolls away to the

horizon, and before us lie mile upon mile of smooth hard snow almost

level, but swelling gently upwards, out of the centre of which the

nipple of the mountain, that appears to be some miles in circumference,

rises about four thousand feet into the sky. Not a living thing is to

be seen. God help us; I fear that our time has come.”

And now I will drop the journal, partly because it is not very

interesting reading; also what follows requires telling rather more

fully.

All that day—the 23rd May—we struggled slowly up the incline of snow,

lying down from time to time to rest. A strange gaunt crew we must have

looked, while, laden as we were, we dragged our weary feet over the

dazzling plain, glaring round us with hungry eyes. Not that there was

much use in glaring, for we could see nothing to eat. We did not

accomplish more than seven miles that day. Just before sunset we found

ourselves exactly under the nipple of Sheba’s left Breast, which

towered thousands of feet into the air, a vast smooth hillock of frozen

snow. Weak as we were, we could not but appreciate the wonderful scene,

made even more splendid by the flying rays of light from the setting

sun, which here and there stained the snow blood-red, and crowned the

great dome above us with a diadem of glory.

“I say,” gasped Good, presently, “we ought to be somewhere near that

cave the old gentleman wrote about.”

“Yes,” said I, “if there is a cave.”

“Come, Quatermain,” groaned Sir Henry, “don’t talk like that; I have

every faith in the Dom; remember the water! We shall find the place

soon.”

“If we don’t find it before dark we are dead men, that is all about

it,” was my consolatory reply.

For the next ten minutes we trudged in silence, when suddenly Umbopa,

who was marching along beside me, wrapped in his blanket, and with a

leather belt strapped so tightly round his stomach, to “make his hunger

small,” as he said, that his waist looked like a girl’s, caught me by

the arm.

“Look!” he said, pointing towards the springing slope of the nipple.

I followed his glance, and some two hundred yards from us perceived

what appeared to be a hole in the snow.

“It is the cave,” said Umbopa.

We made the best of our way to the spot, and found sure enough that the

hole was the mouth of a cavern, no doubt the same as that of which da

Silvestra wrote. We were not too soon, for just as we reached shelter

the sun went down with startling rapidity, leaving the world nearly

dark, for in these latitudes there is but little twilight. So we crept

into the cave, which did not appear to be very big, and huddling

ourselves together for warmth, swallowed what remained of our

brandy—barely a mouthful each—and tried to forget our miseries in

sleep. But the cold was too intense to allow us to do so, for I am

convinced that at this great altitude the thermometer cannot have

marked less than fourteen or fifteen degrees below freezing point. What

such a temperature meant to us, enervated as we were by hardship, want

of food, and the great heat of the desert, the reader may imagine

better than I can describe. Suffice it to say that it was something as

near death from exposure as I have ever felt. There we sat hour after

hour through the still and bitter night, feeling the frost wander round

and nip us now in the finger, now in the foot, now in the face. In vain

did we huddle up closer and closer; there was no warmth in our

miserable starved carcases. Sometimes one of us would drop into an

uneasy slumber for a few minutes, but we could not sleep much, and

perhaps this was fortunate, for if we had I doubt if we should have

ever woke again. Indeed, I believe that it was only by force of will

that we kept ourselves alive at all.

Not very long before dawn I heard the Hottentot Ventvögel, whose teeth

had been chattering all night like castanets, give a deep sigh. Then

his teeth stopped chattering. I did not think anything of it at the

time, concluding that he had gone to sleep. His back was resting

against mine, and it seemed to grow colder and colder, till at last it

felt like ice.

At length the air began to grow grey with light, then golden arrows

sped across the snow, and at last the glorious sun peeped above the

lava wall and looked in upon our half-frozen forms. Also it looked upon

Ventvögel, sitting there amongst us, _stone dead_. No wonder his back

felt cold, poor fellow. He had died when I heard him sigh, and was now

frozen almost stiff. Shocked beyond measure, we dragged ourselves from

the corpse—how strange is that horror we mortals have of the

companionship of a dead body—and left it sitting there, its arms

clasped about its knees.

By this time the sunlight was pouring its cold rays, for here they were

cold, straight into the mouth of the cave. Suddenly I heard an

exclamation of fear from someone, and turned my head.

And this is what I saw: Sitting at the end of the cavern—it was not

more than twenty feet long—was another form, of which the head rested

on its chest and the long arms hung down. I stared at it, and saw that

this too was a _dead man_, and, what was more, a white man.

The others saw also, and the sight proved too much for our shattered

nerves. One and all we scrambled out of the cave as fast as our

half-frozen limbs would carry us.