Deathwatch (7 page)

Gradually then, as the pressure beneath the earth diminished, a solid core of rock filled the hole in the mountain. This rock, because it cooled more slowly than the lava exposed on all sides to the outside climate, formed a harder, more dense stone, basalt.

As the volcano died, the winds, loaded with fine particles of sand and pumice from the volcanoes, began to erode its conical sides, and rain ran down the slopes, washing them slowly away, and cold, which froze the water caught in stone
cracks, split and splintered the surface, and a sea rose and lapped at the top of the basalt core.

Until, at last, there was nothing left of the high, conical, lava mountain except this core, the plug of the volcano. It towered straight up from the floor of the desert, steep-sided, erect, slender. A monument to those ancient times of violence. A tombstone.

And its shadow beckoned him, its shape haunted his mind.

Ben estimated the butte to be about four hundred feet tall and half a mile in circumference. In some places enormous, almost flat-surfaced slabs had been broken away and lay scattered on the desert below, making a rubble of stone called breccia around the base. The breaking away of these thin slabs had left flat ledges like giant steps up the sides of the butte, and other erosive elements, such as the cold of the glacial period, had split the surface stone, leaving long, perpendicular cracks in the sides.

The top of the butte had been worn flat.

There was little on that monument of stone to interest an animal, no vegetation for the bighorn and so no carcasses for the coyotes; no reason for a cougar to lurk there. Vultures might use it for a roost, snakes would investigate the cracks for lizards and rats. But that stony pinnacle would be home for few.

In the morning the butte had been a beautiful reddish copper color, the areas where the slabs had broken away looking almost golden. Now,
with the sun behind it, the face toward him was a deep, dark purple.

With his one seeing eye Ben studied the butte and the desert floor around it. He studied the landmarks of rain-cut arroyos, mountain peaks, the small mesas, other buttes.

The one whose shadow reached out to him was the most majestic of them and, with the sun setting behind it, almost seemed to move toward him as the stone merged with the shadow.

Now the sun was completely behind the butte, turning it into a tower of blackness.

And then a single brilliant ray of light appeared to come straight through the solid stone of the butte. It lasted for only a moment and then the stone was solid and black again.

That was all Ben needed to see and for a second he felt a great triumph, for he knew now where he was going.

He turned his head and looked down at Madec.

The whole desert was tinged with a soft red glow. Even the white Jeep was pink now and Madec, moving around his camp, was a tiny, red-tinged man.

Darkness came very slowly as Ben sat there, waiting. But at last the sunset faded and the moonless sky grew black and the stars began to appear.

Ben picked up the slingshot and pouch and pulled himself up. Then he set out, going down
the northern flank of the mountains so that Madec could not see him.

He had not gone far before doubt began to eat at him. The pain of the stones against his feet was enormous, breathtaking, and he could never tell when some sharp edge was going to send it shooting through him.

But when he at last saw the dark shape of the giant saguaro lying there on the sand, other younger ones standing like dumb, motionless sentinels around it, the going seemed a little easier, the pain a little less.

Oh, little Gila woodpecker, Ben begged, be here. Like this place; make your nests here. I need you.

He had often wondered angrily how a woodpecker could be so much smarter than a man. The Gila woodpecker knew better than to kill a giant saguaro. The bird, like men, left its mark on the great cactus but, unlike men, it never killed one.

A saguaro ten years old is no bigger than a baseball. At twenty-one it is as tall as a man. After seventy-five years of life in the rugged desert it will have grown to twelve feet but it will still be a dwarf among its elders for, after two hundred years, when the saguaro is full grown, it towers fifty feet above the desert, a great thorny stalk of growth, with strong, upright, praying arms.

A man carving his initials in the skin of a
saguaro, initials that will probably never be seen again by another man, can cause this giant, two-hundred-year-old plant literally to bleed to death.

And many men have done just that.

The Gila woodpecker, on the other hand, knows when it is not safe to nest in a saguaro. It will never injure the plant during the rainy season for the little bird depends on the saguaro and will not hurt it.

However, when a nest will do no damage, the woodpecker cuts a small, round hole through the tough hide of the plant and works its way into the saguaro’s pulpy, wet interior. Then the bird hollows out a place for a nest, and the plant soon coats the walls of the nest with a tough, dry, corky plaster which not only keeps the moisture of the plant from running out and thus killing it, but keeps the nest dry and snug for baby Gila woodpeckers.

In an old plant there will be dozens of these nests which, when the plant eventually dies, remain, looking like dry, somewhat shapeless boots.

The moon was coming up when Ben reached the old cactus, now long dead as it lay on its side on the floor of the desert. Nothing was left of it now except a cylindrical cage of what, in the first moonlight, looked like long, slim fishing poles. These hollow ribs had once been the pipes for water storage, pumping water almost as fast as it was gathered from the roots which often
spread out for sixty feet around the base of the plants.

Now they were bone dry and crackled as he pulled them aside and lifted out one of the woodpecker nests, a tough-skinned, gourd-shaped thing with a hole at one end of it.

Ben worked two of them out from among the dried ribs and, first shaking them carefully to get rid of any scorpions that might be in them, he sat down on the sand and put them on his feet. It was a painful process but once his feet were inside the nests the pain eased and, when he stood up, he knew that, with just that much protection from the stones, he could go ahead.

They would not last long, the corky stuff being brittle and thin, but by walking carefully, picking his way and putting his feet flat down and lifting them straight up, he could move.

There were five more nests and he got them all, carrying them in his arms as he turned west and began to walk.

One by one the nests wore out as he went on westward, the moonlight full on the desert now, making distance deceiving.

Ben passed up the occasional yucca, hoping to see the tall, swablike flower of a sotol rising seven or eight feet above the compact plant.

He had almost given up hope of finding one and, now barefooted again, the last nest worn through, was heading for a yucca when he saw the swab over to his right, the flower stalk standing
straight and motionless, shaped like an oversized bottle brush.

Neither the sotol nor the yucca are cacti but are of the lily family. However, the sotol doesn’t have the vicious thorn at the end of its leaves that have given the yucca the name Spanish bayonet and the leaves are tougher.

It was a good, young plant and Ben went to work with it. Tearing off a few of the older leaves, he sat down with them and stripped them of their outer edges which were barbed the entire length of the leaf so that they made a sort of double-edged bandsaw blade.

The sharp edges gone, he continued to work with the leaf, pulling off half-inch-wide strips and laying them in a pile. When he had enough he took new leaves and tore them into wider bands. These he wove together, layer on layer, each layer laced to the others with the thinner strips. When the foot-shaped pad was an inch thick, he wove the thin laces across it and then continued adding layers of the woven leaf.

At last he had two clumsy sandals, thick-soled and with laces of leaf strips which he tied around his feet and ankles.

They were painful to walk in but not nearly as painful as being barefoot among the stones.

Gathering more of the leaves, he strung them together and started out again, carrying the bundle of leaves by a knotted strip.

He went on westward toward the butte, the moon now setting, the night far advanced.

Added to the pain of his feet was the increasing pain of thirst. His tongue was very dry and felt as though it had cracked open in places. It filled his entire mouth, a great, stiff swollen mass that pressed against his lips. His throat felt hot and as though coated with dust, and the pain in it came in slow, long-lasting throbs, each one seeming more intense than the one before.

In the fading moonlight the butte seemed as distant as the far mountains, and there was no shadow from it on the desert now. It was still far away, standing silent and somehow, sullen, in the empty desert. It looked ominous and black, threatening, forbidding.

He had to stop occasionally to replace the thongs which kept breaking, and at each stop he could see that the layer of woven leaves between his feet and the stones was thinner.

He had hoped to have covered more ground in the cool of night but, as he walked on, he knew that he would be lucky to reach the area of breccia by dawn.

At this slow pace he might even still be walking in the desert, perfectly visible to Madec from his vantage point on the cut terrace.

There was nothing to gain by turning back and climbing again into the low mountains. He would die there as surely as he would die in the breccia.

There was nothing to do but go on. But not at this slow pace.

It took all his willpower and all his strength to force himself to start running.

He ran awkwardly, the thick, ungainly sandals flopping, the bundle of leaves flapping against him, the slingshot swinging in the moonlight.

From the Jeep, if Madec was watching, Ben would have been a pitiful thing to see; a naked man running in the moonlight across a savage waste of desert.

B
EN STOOD
at the base of the butte and hated it. The black column of stone went straight up into the starlit sky, rising from the rock-strewn desert as though it did not want to be associated with such a place.

The stone of the butte was warm and smooth to his touch. It felt as implacable as the steel door of a vault. There seemed to be no flaw, no crack, no hand or foothold in the vertical wall. High above him it looked as though the climbing would be easy, but standing here at the base he could find no way to begin, no way to get his body up the first few feet of the smooth, black, silent stone.

He had been all the way around the butte, hoping to find a way up the far side, out of sight of the Jeep, but the far side was even smoother than this side, and there was not a shadow of a crack lower than fifty feet.

Here, in plain view of the Jeep which he could just make out on the terrace, there was a ledge or the edge of a stratum, or a crack—he could not tell what it was with only starlight—about twelve
or thirteen feet above him, but he could not reach it. He had felt all along the face of the rock for some crevice or grip but there was none.

Ordinarily it would have only taken some hard work to reach that ledge, but Ben recognized now that he was approaching the last stages of thirst; he was weak with it and spells of dizziness were coming faster. The flesh of his tongue was peeling off and, of all the pains of his body, he was most aware of the aching of his lips.

The first symptoms of severe thirst had come during the time he was running. He had felt then the sudden loss of strength, a lassitude that made him think that he could not possibly raise his foot and swing it forward and put it down again. Even running, and knowing that his life depended on his running, he had felt a desire to sleep—to sleep as he ran, to sleep anywhere, anyhow.

As he began the job of reaching that little ledge, what would have been a simple task was now an enormous obstacle, for he not only had to exert the physical effort, he also had to fight off both sleep and panic.

Ben knew what the next symptoms would be. Toward the end after the lassitude and sleepiness and odd lack of hunger, a man dying of thirst begins to get dizzy. He vomits and his head aches. He aches all over. Finally the intolerable itching begins, an itching which affects every inch of his skin and does not stop until he dies. During this time a man is tortured with hallucinations; he sees water within reach and
knows
that it is there
and he will, as many men have, scoop up dry sand with his hands and try to drink it.

Ben hoped he could endure the physical symptoms, but he was afraid of the hallucinations; afraid that he would not recognize them when they came, afraid that there was no way he could stop them or continue to operate rationally through the periods of imagining.

He was a pitiful sight as he worked, naked, at the base of that towering stone monument. Picking up boulders so small that ordinarily he could have thrown them like rocks now required all his strength. Staggering, he lifted and carried each stone to the base of the butte and placed it on the little pile he was building there.

When he thought the pile was high enough he rested for a moment, preparing himself. Afraid that if he sat down he wouldn’t be able to get up again, he stood against the butte, his body sagging against it as he tied the slingshot and the sotol leaves together and then strung the tie thong around his neck so that the stuff hung down his back.

Climbing onto his pile of stones he reached up, his hands flat against the smooth rock, his fingers reaching beyond his sight, for his face, too, was flat against the cliff.

His fingers felt nothing, no place that curved inward. Just smooth, warm stone.

Twisting a little so that he could bend his knees, he flattened against the butte again and, taking a deep, sobbing breath, rammed himself
upward, his hands groping high above his head, his body scraping upward against the hard rock.