Right of Thirst (21 page)

The river was growing larger as we descended, joined by thin streams tumbling off the walls, and we passed the mouths of several branching gorges that released little rivers of their own into the channel. Several times Rai consulted his map to be sure we were on the correct path.

I asked him how many days were left.

“We are not going fast,” he said. “So perhaps four. But there is no hurry.”

Both Ali and his nephew had adjusted to their loads, or so it seemed, and walked without much difficulty, talking to one another from time to time. Elise and I mostly stayed together, as we'd done since we started, and Rai kept a few paces ahead. For the most part we didn't speak, but I was always aware of her anyway, and from time to time, when I'd regained myself enough to struggle for normalcy again, I'd point something out—another bush high on the cliffs above us, a strip of ice, a collection of cactus flowers. She'd look with interest, intent, and smile at me, her eyes very blue against her burned cheeks, her hair growing blonder in the sun.

“This is very nice now,” she said, at lunch, when the sun was out again for a while and the wind had died down. “I like these clouds.”

It was, and I tried my best to focus also on the moment, to let time pass as slowly as I could. I felt as if I was paying very careful attention to something I knew I would think back on for years. By mid-afternoon, the valley had narrowed enough for the sound of the river to thunder back and forth in places between the walls, and the path began to rise up the rocky hillside above it. It became harder going, the trail undulating up and down, and the load carriers began to fall behind. Several times Rai stopped, tapping his foot, waiting for them to catch up, at which point he would set off again without giving them time to rest.

Sometimes the path rose quite a good way above the river—perhaps thirty or forty feet, and in places the hillside was steep enough that I could look almost directly down at the water. For the first time, however, the path had obviously been improved; it was wider, and better marked.

At one point, as we waited for Ali and his nephew again, Rai turned to me.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I have made a small mistake.”

“About what?” I asked, looking down the narrow gorge in the distance. It was a spectacular thing, the river churning in the canyon, spray in the air.

“We should have stopped earlier,” he said. “I was not sure where we were. But now it will be several more hours before we can camp. It will be a long day.”

I was feeling fine, and took a sip of water more from reflex than from thirst.

“It's all right,” I said. “It's early enough.”

“Are you feeling okay?” Rai asked Elise, who had joined us, breathing lightly.

“Of course,” she said, giving him a look, peeling a strip of sunburned skin off her wrist and inspecting it. She let the skin fall, and it spun down to the ground like a tiny gray leaf.

Ali and the others appeared. They looked tired, and so Rai let them sit and rest for a while before continuing.

Rai had underestimated his mistake, however, because several hours later we were still walking and there was no end in sight. The trail, if anything, rose up and down even more steeply. My shoulders ached, and the sun was only just visible over the high walls of what had become a steep canyon. But there was no turning back at that point. Rai periodically apologized.

“I'm sorry,” he said again.

“Don't worry,” I replied. “If we have to, we'll just sleep along the trail.”

But I could see that his error upset him. At times, we were high above the river, and at other times we were nearly beside it, walking in and out of icy mist. Nonetheless, the trail remained clear, and there was little sense of risk. Ali and his nephew were both wearing out, though. I could see it clearly in their faces, and the way they released themselves from their duffel bags when we rested. Even the soldier looked weary, heaving his enormous pack up and down and up again.

Then the sun retreated below the walls, and it quickly got colder, and the whole canyon retreated into twilight. By then Rai was clearly looking for any area that might serve as a resting place for the night. But it was all loose rock, a hillside steep enough to use one's hands, and a narrow corkscrew of a path along it. Soon it would be fully dark, and we would have to resign ourselves to sleeplessness, sitting on the cold trail with our legs off the edge, with nowhere comfortable to lie. My body ached, and Elise looked drawn as well, though full of the endurance of youth, and no doubt she could have continued all night if necessary.

It was becoming rapidly unpleasant. I could only imagine what Ali and his nephew must have felt—several times Rai called out to them, pausing for their reply before continuing on.
“Maybe we should just stop,” I said. “It doesn't look like it's getting any better.”

“When it is dark,” Rai replied, “we will stop. It is only a few minutes more.”

So we continued, in growing darkness. The path was too narrow to walk together. Rai was ahead of me, Elise forty of fifty feet behind, followed by the soldier. Ali and his nephew were last in line.

At one point, the path rounded a large boulder protruding from the hillside. The boulder was chest high, and extended a few feet out over the trail. I stepped around it easily, looking down at the river as I did so—it was a few dozen feet below, but the incline was not any steeper than it had been for hours, and I passed by it without a thought.

A few moments later I heard a cry, followed by a rattling of stones. I heard it clearly, and turned around to look back, but saw nothing.

Then someone began to shriek in the darkness behind me, and Rai came sprinting back toward me, his flashlight playing across the rocks as he ran. Someone had fallen in the river. For a heart-stopping moment I thought it was Elise.

After a few dozen seconds—it could not have been more—Elise appeared behind me, and I realized, from his nephew's screams, that it was Ali who had fallen. I felt a terrible kind of relief. The boy sat wailing and striking his head with both hands. The soldier, to my surprise, crouched sympathetically beside him, rubbing his shoulder. Elise stood a few feet away, clutching her arms tight, and I was shaking as well.

“Stay here,” Rai said, quickly, turning away.

“I'll come with you,” I said, but he shook his head.

“No. Stay here. I will look for him.” And with that, he was gone.

There was nothing to do but wait. A few minutes later it grew so dark in the canyon, shielded from the stars, that I could barely see my hand before me. The dark pinned us to the ground.

It was the boulder—suddenly I knew it. The boulder must have caught his pack, and knocked him off balance. He was tired, the pack was heavy, and he'd lost his footing, fallen perhaps to a knee, the heavy pack rising up his shoulders, and then it had simply twisted him over the edge, down the slope, and into the water. I'm not sure, of course—no one saw the exact moment when he slipped. He had passed right under me, but I'd missed him. I must have been looking back along the path. Had I looked down, I would have seen him in the foam and spray, tumbling, all his chances gone. But I had not looked down, and he had passed like a ghost below me. He was tired, the light was bad. It happened quickly. And so on.

My chest felt thick and heavy. My fingers and lips tingled. I was breathing hard. I noticed all these things, even as I realized that there was no hope for Ali, that he had gone into the freezing torrent with at least fifty pounds strapped to his back. He would have had only an instant to comprehend what was happening before the first few breaths of foam, and the blows of the rocks, and the weight on his back, dragged him under. I'm sure he couldn't swim, though that hardly mattered. Probably he did not even feel the cold—only the shock of it, like the jaws of an animal, or a knife through a fingertip.

Rai, to his credit, took a very long time. It was several more hours before I saw the bead of his flashlight down the canyon. It came and went, winking on the trail, growing nearer all the while, splashing along the rocks, and finally he was back among us, his face drawn and strained.

“I could not find him,” he said. He looked pale and exhausted.

“But maybe he is alive,” Elise said. “Maybe he is on the bank. It is possible. We should not give up.”

“He's not alive,” I said, more bluntly than I intended. “But if he is, we'll find him in the morning. There's nothing more we can do tonight.”

Periodically, Ali's nephew would wail and beat his fists against his head. He'd stop for a while, then begin again. At first, my heart went out to him entirely—his open grief, unrestrained, seemed purifying and honest. But as the hours passed, and the boy continued, I grew profoundly tired of it. I wanted him to be quiet, to stop reminding us, to let all of us settle back against the rocks in our sleeping bags, and get what rest we could. But he wouldn't let us. He sobbed on and off all night, moaning, and I nearly said something. I didn't, of course. Instead I crouched, and bore it, as we all did.

At Rachel's funeral, I had kept myself together, standing beside Eric, holding his hand, both in our suits. He had cried, but almost silently, and I had taken my own tears back to the house. All this wailing and gnashing of teeth—as the night passed, my view of it began to change, and I began to suspect that it was perhaps, in its own way, as dishonest as the stoicism I'd shown. Surely there was an element of performance there. If so, Ali's nephew did it well, and moaned all night.

We dug our sleeping bags out of our packs, and crawled into them fully dressed, but we were hungry, worn out from the walk, and the cold seeped out of the rocks and dirt of the path directly into us. We drank the last of our water quickly. It was impossible to get comfortable. My mouth was dry enough to burn. Elise leaned against me, though, and we talked in low tones from time to time. I put my arm around her once, for a little while, until my arm grew cold in the open air and I pulled it back into my sleeping bag. Even that gave me no solace. The hours passed with extraordinary slowness. I knew that I was not directly responsible. It was the dark, and physical exhaustion, and the boulder, the slope just steep enough—it had lined up so perfectly against him. Had he not been carrying a load, I couldn't see how it would have happened. Had he not been so tired, it wouldn't have happened. Had Rai simply known where he was, and stopped us earlier, it wouldn't have happened. And so on. But there was something else as well, and as I sat there on the trail I could not shake it. It seemed as if those dead men on the wall, the soldiers Rai had killed, had somehow struck back at us. I knew it was nonsense, that it was only a trick of my own mind, searching for patterns again, but it was there all the same. I had thought we were safe, I thought we were nearly there, and, as in so many things, I was wrong.

Rai was mostly quiet beside us, but several times I heard him
cursing under his breath. We just sat and shivered, waiting for first light, listening to the river.

 

At first the lightening in the eastern sky was so faint I thought I was deceiving myself. We were too deep in the canyon, the walls too narrow and high above us, for any kind of sunrise. Instead, it was a gradual return to twilight, without warmth. We began to see one another—dust on our faces, and our tangled, matted hair, as we stood up shivering in our damp clothes.

Despite the cold I was as thirsty as I've ever been, but as the light revealed the trail and the slope down to the thundering river, I realized that even in daylight there was no safe way of getting close enough to drink.

Rai stood, stretching, stamping his feet, his face dark and angry.

“He was carrying the stove,” he said. That was all. He felt something for Ali, that was clear, but in equal measure he was angry at himself, and the generalized misfortune that had fallen on us, full of the knowledge that he had not done well. Ali, in a sense, had been under his command, one of his soldiers, and he had not been equal to the task. So he was curt, quick in his movements, roughly stuffing his sleeping bag into his pack after lacing up his boots with quick, hard jerks, like tearing paper to pieces.

“We must start walking,” he said, then switched to his own language and addressed the boy, who alone among us had made no move to rise.

The boy did not reply, but the soldier, again with unexpected tenderness, helped him with the blanket, and his pack, urging him, as one might a child, and after a while he stood up. I looked at Elise—her hair pressed against her forehead, her dirty
face—but she did not meet my eye, expressionless, as if she'd exhausted whatever sentiments had washed over us all during the long night. I only wanted to get on with it, to get out of the narrows into the sun again.

We set off, shivering. But Rai, just ahead, was keeping a careful eye on the river, and so our pace was slow—he was, I realized, looking for Ali's body. The river, boiling and hissing below us, seemed increasingly monstrous. But we saw nothing anyway, and from the speed of the current, I knew that he probably had been carried for miles, and that we might never find him at all.

After a while, the walking loosened us, but it only made our thirst worse. My mouth felt full of nettles, my tongue tingled and throbbed, and I could feel the cold, dry air passing through my lips with each breath. The trail coiled up and down, and the canyon, if anything, grew narrower. Finally, after an hour or so, Rai stopped again, fumbling with his map, unfolding it on a knee and studying it.

“We should be almost out,” he said, touching a finger to a point on the map. “Only one or two kilometers more, I think.”

Elise joined us also, and offered a weary smile.

“Are you doing all right?” I asked.

She shrugged, her lips cracked and covered with gray paste.

I was as dry as I've ever been, yet the river below us seemed somehow detached from thirst, no different than the gray granite walls, or the gravel beneath our feet. It was a torrent, a crash of white—it almost didn't look like water at all.

So we continued on, one endless foot in front of the other, but Rai, finally, was correct. Less than an hour later, as we rounded a bend, the canyon abruptly opened once again into a valley, and the river slowed down and spread out into a gray sheet. And then, as we descended down the last steep and rocky slope, we crossed into the sunlight again. It felt blessedly warm
as it fell on us. The banks were wide, and the river was nearly quiet, though the sound of whitewater in the canyon behind us was loud in the air. The river ran straight off into the distance as far as I could see. Though we were much lower, the hillsides were as dry and as featureless as before.

There was no sign of Ali. By then, he would have passed slowly, bobbing, rolling, bloody from the rocks above, staining the water around him like a bag of tea. By then, it was clear he wasn't alive, that he had not found himself gasping and coughing on the bank, delivered by a providential hand. I'd held out that dim hope despite myself. But then I stopped thinking about Ali—all I wanted was a drink of water. When we were close enough, all of us dropped our packs and trotted to the river's edge.

In the past, I'd always carefully treated my water before drinking. I'd drop in a little black pellet of iodine, and wait as it slowly dissolved in red and orange strings. I'd shake the bottle carefully, and wait some more—the instructions said an hour, if possible. But then I just plunged my bottle into the water, and drank again and again. The water was cold, and settled in my stomach like a stone. My teeth sang. But I drank, as did all of us—the boy and the soldier sucked it greedily out of their cupped hands. It was delicious, it was an indescribable relief, and it was scalding and painful at the same time. I squatted at the water's edge, my knees aching, and after I could drink no more I cupped my hands as well and washed my face as best I could. I could feel the grease in my hair, and my rough unshaven cheeks across my dirty hands, which were nearly numb from the water. I did it several times, but the water was too cold, and I hardly felt cleaner when I retreated to where our packs lay on the dusty ground and sat down against them in the sun.

I'd drunk too much, too quickly, and a sudden wave of chills
and nausea passed through me. For an instant I thought I was going to vomit on the ground, but it eased after a few moments. I ran my wet fingers through my hair to untangle it, but after a while gave up, and simply sat there, shaking violently, looking absently at the rocks at my feet.

“We will stop here,” Rai said. “We will rest today.”

As he spoke, and my nausea settled, and as I leaned back against my pack on the gravel, trying to warm up, I realized how tired I was. I think the others felt the same; in any case, we simply murmured our agreement, and I managed to rouse myself enough to drag my sleeping pad from my pack, and unroll it on the ground, and lie down, with my jacket zipped tight and my sleeping bag over me and my hat pulled down on my face. I didn't want to talk to anyone just then. I was shivering, and I wanted only to close my eyes and get warm as quickly as possible. Only Rai was up and working, strong enough to be restless, compulsively going through the packs, sorting out our provisions—the rest of us simply lay down as soon as we could. We didn't speak. All I thought about, as I slowly warmed up again, with my eyes closed beneath my hat, was the sun.