By the second day of walking my feet had become separated from my body. They marched on of their own accord, while my head floated somewhere in the cloudless sky. By my side Aunt Hilda groaned, her cheeks flaming in the shade of her cowboy hat. I rarely glanced at Waldo, who was all grim concentration as he plodded on in his leather boots. The desert stretched ahead of us and all around: whorls of sand, barren mountains and those endless shifting dunes. It was bare of all but the most scrubby plants.
I had traveled through an endless desert before, in Egypt. I knew firsthand what it was like: the searing heat; the sand that chokes the back of your throat, creeps into your nose and ears, makes the very act of breathing a painful battle against dust. But in our last voyage through the desert we’d ridden camels and carried provisions. Above all, we’d had water.
Now we walked and walked and walked. With each step the way became harder on our legs and our hearts.
Our water was severely rationed. Waldo had been elected to carry it and gave us just a sip at a time. Enough to wet our parched lips, and moisten the back of our throats. Not enough to have an actual drink. Not enough to feel the sweet liquid glug down your throat and soothe the fire in your gut. Not enough to quell the raging thirst that consumed me.
Have you ever been thirsty before? Really thirsty, dying of thirst?
If the answer is yes, you will know how it is. All you can think of is water. Our vitally important mission to the Grand Canyon to find the tablet that would save our lives and thwart Cyril’s evil twin did not cross my mind. I had almost forgotten what we were doing here; our desperate journey was obscured by burning sand. All I thought of was a trickle of cool water gurgling down my gullet.
“Is it the same for you?” Cyril asked toward evening on the second day as he stumbled on beside me. The burning sun was sinking below the horizon. Falling in the bleached sky, veiled by a shimmering haze of white. A land of white sun.
“What?” I asked, licking a trickle of sweat off my upper lip. “Wanting water?”
I glanced at him with dislike. I had almost forgotten he had sacrificed his wealth for this journey. I saw only a strange, pale creature, his ghastly eyes popping out of his head. Unlike the rest of us, he hadn’t been roasted raw by the sun. Rather, it had seemed to bake all the juices from his body, leaving it a shriveled white husk.
“No, not that. The other thing. Don’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?” I said, a bit impatiently. Words wasted energy and made our throats feel even more sore, like sandpaper.
“I think my brother has left my mind.”
I stared at him for a moment, then turned my head to peer forward. Was that something, just the faintest shine of cool blue on the desert floor? Water. Water. Please let it be water.
“Did you hear me, Kit? Cecil has left my head. Is it the same for you?”
“Ye-es. Maybe. Yes …” Now that he mentioned it, I hadn’t felt that uneasy sense of something crawling in my head recently. Wriggling, squirming. It was too hot to feel anything, however.
“We’ve been set free,” Cyril went on. “I don’t know why, but think what this means. Perhaps we’ve given him the slip. We’re winning somehow.”
“Maybe he’s just resting,” I replied. But I wasn’t really listening. I hadn’t ever really been convinced that Cecil Baker was inside my mind. How was that possible? Besides, over there in front of us, the blue thing. Yes, that was water. It had to be water.
“Water!” I rasped.
“What?” Cyril’s head snapped forward, his brother temporarily forgotten. He scanned the desert. But by now others had seen the lake.
“Water!” Waldo shouted. “Water!”
“It may be a mirage,” Aunt Hilda warned. But hope stirred in our hearts. We ran as fast as our weak legs could carry us toward the great flat basin where water shimmered. A haze of blue, dancing with light. What an exquisite sight. A thing to gladden the heart. A shallow lake, surrounded by jagged white cracks in the desert floor.
I had never seen anything more beautiful.
My heart turned over as I saw Rachel running after Waldo, a mad gleam in her eye. Her usually glossy chestnut hair was dried out by the sun and hung in dirty, brittle ropes. Her skin was burned and cracked. Yet still she had the energy to run.
I must have stopped for a moment, because Isaac was by my side. His glasses were misted, his eyes grave as he looked into mine.
“Don’t give up now, Kit. Just a few more minutes.”
“I’m fine,” I replied. “Don’t worry. I’ll make it.”
“Here,” he said, offering an arm.
I almost wanted to laugh. Isaac, with his glasses and his lanky uncoordinated limbs, was weaker than I am in most normal circumstances. But now, for me, the world was shimmering, the lake moving up and down. For a second the sky went black, and when I looked at Isaac I saw nothing. I looked again and saw him standing there, holding out his hand. He looked as weary as Rachel, his eyes hectic and red patches on his cheeks. He was at the end of his tether, yet still he was trying to help me.
“Thank you,” I whispered, as I took his arm.
Waldo had turned round, on the edge of the lake, to see what the problem was. When he saw me leaning against Isaac and hobbling toward the lake, he smiled, sort of, and turned away again. I really didn’t think I could make those last few steps to the lake—but somehow I did.
“Not a mirage,” Aunt Hilda shouted joyfully, kneeling down at the water’s edge, dipping her fingers in. “A real lake. Praise heaven. Praise everything! We are saved!”
I had a moment to think it wasn’t much of a lake. The water was muddy and brown-looking. But still so cool, so real, so heaven sent.
Aunt Hilda, Waldo, Rachel, Isaac and Mr. Baker were all cupping their hands, using them to scoop up handfuls of the water. One by one they brought them to their lips. For some reason, though all I had thought of was water, I hung back, watching.
“Phhoooo!” Aunt Hilda spat out a mouthful of the water, which arced over Mr. Baker and hit Waldo in the chest. “Disgusting!”
One by one my friends were spitting out the water. I looked at them in wonder. It certainly looked a bit brackish and brown, but water is water. When it is going to save your life, it doesn’t matter how clean it is.
“Salt!” explained Aunt Hilda. “It’s a salt lake.”
Waldo was swearing, while Mr. Baker had simply collapsed.
“Shouldn’t we drink it anyway?” I took a drop of water in my hand and licked. It had the briny tang of seawater.
“No!” yelped Aunt Hilda. “It will only make things worse. The salt in the water dries out your body quicker—which means you die quicker, you dolt!”
“You don’t have to abuse me,” I said, sinking on to the dry sand. I understood what had made the layers of white cracks, radiating away from us. They were caused by the salt in the drying earth. Beautiful, like a layer of paper snowflakes laid over the desert. But for us they spelled defeat.
I looked at Aunt Hilda, who was towering over me. A single tear welled up in her right eye and dropped down her cheek. She was crying. I couldn’t remember her ever crying before.
“We will make it,” I said softly.
“How?” She sank down on her legs beside me. “We should never have come through this place. Never. It’s called Death Valley, for heaven’s sake. But, no, I was stupid. I thought it was a short cut. It would save us time.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Cyril said. “I was the one—I couldn’t wait. I didn’t have much time left anyway and this route seemed the quickest—”
“We all know that you’re dying, Mr. Baker,” Isaac cut in. “Doesn’t seem fair that the rest of us have to join you.”
Waldo coughed. Like the rest of us he was squatting on the sand, the precious water canisters hanging from strings around his neck. All our eyes turned to look at him. All the water we had in the world. A dribble in one bottle and the other totally empty.
“No sense in going over the past. No sense in squabbling,” he said quietly. “It wastes precious energy. Only way we’re going to get out of this is if we save all our energy—”
“Stop!” Aunt Hilda’s tears were all gone. A new determination blazed forth from her. “I have the answer! A desperate measure, but it will save us.”
“I’ll do anything!” Rachel said.
“We must drink our own urine,” Aunt Hilda announced.
“Urgh!” Rachel said. “Anything but that.”
“Revolting idea,” Mr. Baker muttered, shuddering.
“It is the only way,” Aunt Hilda said. “I believe Mr. Livingstone tried it in Africa when he was stuck somewhere. Or was it Lady Hester Stanhope? Urine is said to be quite nutritious.”
Radiating determination, she strode up to Waldo and held out her hand. “The bottle, please, young Waldo. I feel the call of nature.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said. Waldo was hanging on to the empty bottle, showing no sign of giving it to Hilda.
“This is it,” she said, her outstretched hand trembling slightly. “If drinking my own … er … water … is the difference between living and dying, I’ll do it … I’d go even further, I would—” Thankfully she stopped before we learned what she would do, because Waldo interrupted.
“Hilda is right,” he announced, finally giving her the bottle. “If we don’t take in some liquid, we’ll die. The life is being slowly sucked out of our bodies by the sun and the heat coming from the sand. I saw you, Kit.” His eyes flashed at me, blue and angry. “You were close to blacking out. I’m not going to let that happen.”
Mr. Baker and Rachel were holding back, their faces rigid with horror. It sounded awful, drinking your own urine, but I think I was ready to do it. To close my eyes and—well, I was so light-headed already I think I could stomach any taste. This journey was my fault; I couldn’t let everybody die.
“I agree with Hilda,” I said softly. “We have to do this.”
Isaac began to laugh. He ran his hands through his hair and his face crumpled with something between laughter and tears.
“It’s not funny,” Waldo said.
“I know, I know. I don’t know why I’ve been so darn stupid. It must be the heat or something.”
“What?”
“We don’t need to drink our urine,” Isaac explained. “We’ve got all the water we need here.” His hands gestured toward the lake.
“It’s salt, you fool—” Waldo began, then stopped, and a smile spread over his face. “Can we, do you think?”
“All we need is to turn this salt water into drinking water. We need to desalinate it.”
“Bravo! Israel, you’re a genius,” Aunt Hilda said. “You can boil the salt away, can’t you?” Then she paused, her face falling. “You foolish, foolish boy, raising our hopes for nothing. We don’t have a cooking pot. How can we de-sal-i-what’s-it the water without a cooking pot? You should think before you raise all our hopes, you—”
“Whoa. Calm down.” Isaac raised his hand, as if soothing a snapping dog. “I’ve thought of a way.”
We drank our last water, each person receiving just enough to wet the tongue and the back of the throat. We followed Isaac’s instructions carefully, digging two small pits in the sand. Using our bottles we filled the pits up with salt water from the Badwater Basin. Then we put our bottles in the water, with the tops up. We covered the pits with strips from Waldo’s waterproof coat. Finally we weighted down the covering with a pebble, placed exactly above each bottle’s spout.
If Isaac was right, the natural heat in the sand, which was boiling hot, would cause the water to evaporate and collect in droplets on the waterproof-coat covering above, leaving the salt behind on the sand. The droplets of clean water would run down the covering toward the pebble placed above the spout and drip into the bottle.
Isaac is very often clever about things I have no understanding of at all. We all hoped that this was one of those times he would be right. While we waited, time ticked on, the sun sinking under the horizon and shadows lengthening around us. I heard the howl of prowling wolves, or perhaps coyotes. At one stage Isaac lifted the cloth. A puff of vapor rose in the darkness.
Waldo had disappeared to see if he could find anything edible around the lake. We still had a few strips of the dried meat pounded with berries called pemmican, which is a staple food of American pioneers. The bandit, who had so callously left us to expire in the heat of the desert, had at least left us a few strips of this. Probably because he couldn’t stomach it himself. Horrible tasting, like eating pieces of old shoe leather, but it had saved our lives.
Time passed, and then with an excited cry Isaac held up one of the metal water canteens.
“Ladies first,” he said, and handed the bottle to me. I smiled at Isaac and then passed it to my aunt.
She didn’t stand on ceremony. She tipped her head back and drank from the bottle. Then, soon, it was my turn. I drank. There was not too much, just a dribble, enough to wet my mouth and keep away the worst of the thirst. It was warm and brackish, with a taste of roots and sand. Never mind. It was delicious. Life-giving.
Waldo had returned with a few roots and berries, which he pronounced edible. I believe one of them was called mesquite. We sat, huddled in a circle, and ate and drank. The leathery pemmican. The odd, tangy berries and roots. Our voices rang low in the desert, set against the call of wild things in the dark. There was life here, slithering things that hunted at night. The rattlesnake, the coyote, the road-runner. The magnificent golden eagle that soared far above. We were each other’s protection, so we sat tight together, lighting a fire not for heat but for safety.
I thought of other feasts I’d had. Magnificent seven-course dinners. Trifle. Chocolate cake. Those sweet-sour Chinese dumplings. Apple pie and normal things like hot toast. The butter dripping into the crunchy bread. Nothing could compete with the joy of that simple meal in the desert, that tough old meat eaten with a few mashed berries and washed down with gritty water.
I was happy that night with my friends so near. Confident we would survive. We would distil more water and fill our canisters with at least enough to keep going. We would eat roots and berries. We would make it out of the desert and reach our goal of the Grand Canyon. That was when darkness descended in my mind, for who knew what we would find there?