Survivor: The Autobiography (57 page)

My great hope and consolation now was that I might soon meet the relief party. But where was the relief party? Echo could only answer – where? About the 29th I had emptied the keg, and was still over 20 miles from the Circus. Ah! who can imagine what 20 miles means in such a case? But in this April’s ivory moonlight I plodded on, desolate indeed, but all undaunted, on this lone, unhallowed shore. At last I reached the Circus, just at the dawn of day. Oh, how I drank! how I reeled! how hungry I was! how thankful I was that I had so far at least escaped from the jaws of that howling wilderness, for I was once more upon the range, though still 20 miles from home. There was no sign of the tracks, of anyone having been here since I left it. The water was all but gone. The solitary eagle still was there. I wondered what could have become of Gibson; he certainly had never come here, and how could he reach the fort without doing so?

I was in such a miserable state of mind and body that I refrained from more vexatious speculations as to what had delayed him: I stayed here, drinking and drinking, until about 10 a.m., when I crawled away over the stones down from the water. I was very footsore, and could only go at a snail’s pace. Just as I got clear of the bank of the creek. I heard a faint squeak, and looking about I saw, and immediately caught, a small dying wallaby, whose marsupial mother had evidently thrown it from her pouch. It only weighed about two ounces, and was scarcely furnished yet with fur. The instant I saw it, like an eagle I pounced upon it and ate it, living, raw, dying – fur, skin, bones, skull, and all. The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget. I only wished I had its mother and father to serve in the same way. I had become so weak that by late at night, I had only accomplished 11 miles, and I lay down about 5 miles from the Gorge of Tarns, again choking for water. While lying down here, I thought I heard the sound of the footfalls of a galloping horse going campwards, and vague ideas of Gibson on the Fair Maid – or she without him – entered my head. I stood up and listened, but the sound had died away upon the midnight air. On the 1st of May, as I afterwards found, at one o’clock in the morning, I was walking again, and reached the Gorge of Tarns long before daylight, and could again indulge in as much water as I desired; but it was exhaustion I suffered from, and I could hardly move.

My reader may imagine with what intense feelings of relief I stepped over the little bridge across the water, staggered into the camp at daylight, and woke Mr Tietkens, who stared at me as though I had been one new risen from the dead. I asked him had he seen Gibson, and to give me some food. I was of course prepared to hear that Gibson had never reached the camp; indeed, I could see but two people in their blankets the moment I entered the fort, and by that I knew he could not be there. None of the horses had come back, and it appeared that I was the only one of six living creatures – two men and four horses – that had returned, or were now ever likely to return, from that desert, for it was now, as I found, nine days since I last saw Gibson.

At the foot of the last pass we halted for a short rest, then climbed it very slowly. I took charge of the camels, for on these narrow and vertiginous tracks the donkeys needed all the men’s attention. The Pearl was moving stiffly and eyed the world with distaste, but when we reached the last razor-backed ridge it was pleasant to look back on the peaks massed behind us round the towering snows of the Tokuz Dawan and to reflect that from now on it would be all downhill. Below us, hidden by a dust haze, lay the desert.

We plunged down sharply by the zigzag track into a tremendous gorge, a huge gash in the side of the mountain between whose high enclosing walls we marched with the unfamiliar sense of being shut in, of no longer having distances about us. At four o’clock we made camp near a little salty water hole, after a good stage of ten hours.

The next day, 13 June, was a long one. Soon after dawn we moved off down the narrow, winding gorge, following a dried-up stream-bed through a succession of highly romantic grottoes. Presently it widened, and we passed clumps of flowering tamarisk at which the camels snatched greedily. Everything was deathly still; only a little bird from time to time uttered a short and plaintive song whose sweet notes echoed anomalously under those frowning cliffs. The silence, the tortuous and hidden way, made me feel as if we were engaged on a surprise attack.

After five hours we came to a place which both our map and our guides called Muna Bulak. But once more ‘adam yok’, the looked-for tents were absent, and there was only a little spring of very salt and brackish water. We filled the keg and went on for two more hours, debouching from the gorge into a huge desert of sand and piedmont gravel which stretched as far as the eye could see. The mountains with which for so long we had struggled at close quarters were relegated to a hazy backcloth.

At one o’clock we halted, cooked a meal, and wolfed great lumps of boiled mutton. The sun beat down on us savagely and we propped a felt up with tent-poles to make a little shade; this was a sharp contrast to the uplands. We drank a great deal of curiously tasting tea.

At dusk we started off again, marching north-west through a waste of tufted dunes. As the light faded the low patches of scrub took on strange shapes, became dark monsters which, as you watched them, moved; it was all very like that night-march with the Prince of Dzun. We were a long way from water and the men took the caravan along at a good pace. Presently we came out of the dunes into stark desert, as flat and naked and unfriendly as a sheet of ice. The camels were groaning with exhaustion and had to be tugged along. There was no landmark, no incident, to mark the passing of the hours; the stars looked down dispassionately on the small and battered company lungeing blindly forward in the darkness. I whooped mechanically at the camels till my voice went. The Turkis were imprecise about our programme, and we wished that we knew how much longer the ordeal would last.

It ended at half past one in the morning. We had done two stages of more than seven hours each and the camels were dead beat. They slumped down in their tracks and we unloaded and lay down in the lee of the baggage, refreshing ourselves with the dregs of the last brandy bottle and a little salt water. Then we slept, sprawling like corpses on the iron-hard ground.

After two hours Tuzun woke us. Feeling stiff and stale, we made tea with the last of the water, loaded up, and moved off. Sunrise showed a discouragingly empty world; even the mountains were already lost behind the dust haze which is chronic in the Tarim Basin. We stumbled muzzily on, uncomfortably aware that it would soon be very hot.

Presently we heard a kind of roaring sound. Kini, who had crossed the Kizil Kum and claimed to know something of deserts, said it was the wind in some sand dunes we could see to the north. Happily she was wrong; another half-mile brought us to the lip of a low cliff beneath which a wide stony bed was noisily threaded by the channel of the Cherchen Darya. We scrambled down and watered the animals in a current that was opaque with yellow silt and looked as thick as paint.

Tuzun spoke hopefully of reaching Cherchen that day, and we climbed out of the riverbed for the last lap. The sun was well up now; the heat seemed to us terrific and was in fact considerable. The world around us jigged liquidly in a haze. Before long we hit a bad belt of dunes about a mile wide. The soft sand was cruel going for tired animals; once Number Two lost his balance and collapsed sideways, and we had to unload him before he could rise. When we struggled out again on to hard desert there was not much life left in any of us. We crawled on for an hour or two, but the sun was pitiless and at last Tuzun called a halt on a little bluff above the river.

Here we lay up for five hours, and I disgraced myself by drinking a whole kettle of tea while Kini was bathing in the river. She came back so glowing and self-righteous that in the end I went and bathed too, wallowing in the swift khaki water and speculating lazily about Cherchen. Our ignorance, our chronic lack of advance information, must be unexampled in the annals of modern travel. We had neither of us, before starting, read one in twenty of the books that we ought to have read, and our preconceptions of what a place was going to be like were never based, as they usefully could have been, on the experience of our few but illustrious predecessors in these regions. Cherchen, for all we knew or could find out, might be a walled city, or a cluster of tents, or almost any other variation on the urban theme. This state of affairs reflected discreditably on us but was not without its compensations. It was pleasant, in a way, to be journeying always into the blue, with no Baedeker to eliminate surprise and marshal our first impressions in advance; it was pleasant, now, to be within one march of Cherchen and to have not the very slightest idea what Cherchen was going to look like.

We enjoyed the halt. The felt gave very little shade, and a light wind that had sprung up coated our somnolence with half an inch of sand; but at least we were no longer moving, no longer pressing forward. We dreaded – passionately but surreptitiously, as children dread the end of holidays – the imminent beginning of another night-march of indeterminable length.

At four o’clock, though it was still vindictively hot, we began to load up. The skeleton camels – whose thick wool now appeared, and was, anomalous but who had had no time to shed it – knelt and rose again not without protest. With far-fetched prudence, fearing an examination of our effects like the one in Lanchow, I removed from my bundled overcoat, which came from Samarkand and should properly have clothed a cavalry officer in the Red Army of the Soviet Union, buttons embossed with the hammer and sickle. At half past four we started.

Men and animals moved groggily; this was our fourth stage in thirty-six hours, and even Tuzun, who had started fresh five days ago, showed signs of wear and tear. Very soon we came into dunes again; the animals floundered awkwardly and the march lost momentum. The camels showed signs of distress; one of the donkeys was dead lame and another, from sheer weakness, bowled over like a shot rabbit on a downhill slope. A kind of creeping paralysis was overtaking the expedition.

We knew that we were near Cherchen, but there comes a point, while you are suffering hardship or fatigue, when you cannot see beyond the urgent business of endurance. This point we had reached. We might have been a month’s journey from our goal, instead of a very few hours, for all the difference that its proximity now made to us. We could no more think than we could see beyond the next ridge of dunes; our reprieve, no doubt, had been signed, but we were still in prison. Our minds told us that this was the last lap; but our hearts and our bodies could take only an academic kind of comfort from the assurance. We were absorbed in the task of finishing a difficult stage.

The sun began to set. The donkeys tottered along very reluctantly, and the tired camels wore that kind of dignity which you associate with defeat; it was clear that we should not make Cherchen that night. Then, suddenly, from the top of a high dune, my eye caught a strip of queer eruptions on the horizon to the north-west; the skyline, for months either flat and featureless or jagged and stark, was here pimpled with something that did not suggest a geological formation. I got out my field-glasses . . .

It was like spying on another planet. The green of the trees, with the approach of dusk, had turned a soft and bluish grey; but they were trees beyond a doubt – a deep, serried phalanx, pricked here and there with the lance-heads of tall poplars. For all that we had been expecting a phenomenon, it was incredible; we had grown so accustomed to the life of nomads in an empty winter world that we had not bargained for so concrete, so delightful an intimation of spring and domesticity. The peaceful and luxuriant silhouette before us suggested a kind of life to which we had overlong been strangers.