The beginnings of the desert
chapter 24
The wind drops—outskirts of the desert—calculating the water supply—equatorial nights—Samuel Fergusson’s uneasiness—their current situation—upbeat replies from Kennedy and Joe—one more night.
Hitched to a solitary and largely withered tree, the Victoria spent the night in perfect tranquility; the travelers could enjoy a little badly needed sleep; the excitements of the preceding days had left them with melancholy memories.
Toward morning the sky regained its warmth and sparkling clarity. The balloon rose into the air; after several fruitless attempts she met up with a current that carried her to the northwest, although not very quickly.
“We aren’t making any headway,” the doctor said. “If I’m not mistaken, we’ve accomplished half of our journey in roughly ten days; but at our present rate, we’ll take months to finish it. What’s even more troubling, there’s a danger we’ll run out of water.”
“But we’ll find more,” Dick replied. “There’s no way we won’t bump into some river, brook, or pond in this huge stretch of country.”
“That’s all I ask.”
“Could it be that Joe’s cargo is slowing us down?”
Kennedy brought this up to tease the gallant lad; he had been itching to, since Joe’s delusions had taken him in for an instant; but since he hadn’t acted on them, he could play the critic, tongue in cheek, of course.
Joe gave him a piteous glance. But the doctor didn’t answer. With deep misgivings he was thinking about the Sahara’s huge, lonely expanses; there caravans travel weeks on end without finding a well for quenching their thirst. Accordingly he was keeping a very close eye on the tiniest dips in the terrain.
These measures and their recent experiences had noticeably changed the attitudes of our three travelers; they talked less; they were increasingly wrapped up in their own thoughts.
Since his eyes had plunged into that ocean of gold, our worthy Joe wasn’t the same anymore; he kept still; he stared greedily at those stones piled up in the gondola—worthless today, priceless tomorrow.
What’s more, this part of Africa had a worrisome appearance. Little by little it was changing into a desert. No more villages, not even a cluster of shacks. Vegetation was getting scarce. Just a few scrubs looking like heather on some Scottish moor, the beginnings of whitish sand and gray flint, a few mastic trees and thornbushes. Out in this barren environment, our globe’s primitive skeleton is on view in the jagged ridges of the exposed rock. Seeing these signs of arid conditions, Dr. Fergusson got to thinking.
Apparently not one caravan had ever faced this wilderness area; it would have left visible traces of its campsites, the bleached bones of its men or animals. There wasn’t a thing. And you felt that a vast realm of sand would soon overpower this desolate district.
But they couldn’t turn back; it was crucial to forge ahead; the doctor asked for nothing better; he kept hoping a storm would take him out of this country. But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky! By day’s end the Victoria hadn’t gone thirty miles.
If only their water wasn’t running short! But three gallons1 were all they had left! Fergusson set one gallon aside for quenching their thirst, which could rage unbearably in a 90° temperature;2 that left two gallons for the burner’s needs; these could produce only 480 cubic feet of gas; and yet the burner used up some 9 cubic feet per hour, so they couldn’t keep going for more than fifty-four hours. It was strictly a matter of arithmetic.
“Fifty-four hours!” he told his companions. “Yet I’m bound and determined not to travel at night, for fear of missing a brook, spring, or pool, so we have just 3½ travel days left to us, and during that time we need to find water at any cost. I felt I should warn you about this serious state of affairs, my friends, because I’m saving just one gallon for us to drink, and we’ll need to ration it stringently.”
“We’ll ration it,” the hunter replied. “But it’s too early to give up hope; we’ve got three days ahead of us, right?”
“Yes, my dear Dick.”
“Well, no use crying before we’re hurt, and in three days it’ll be time for a decision; till then, let’s be extra watchful.”
At their evening meal they doled out the water meticulously; grogs featured higher dosages of brandy; but they had to be careful with this liqueur, which is more apt to increase your thirst than quench it.
During the night the gondola rested on an immense mesa that featured a sizable hollow. Its elevation was barely 800 feet above sea level. This circumstance offered the doctor a ray of hope; it reminded him of the theories by geographers that a huge expanse of water existed in central Africa. But if this lake did exist, he needed to get to it; and yet nothing was happening in that motionless sky.
The placid night with its starlit magnificence gave way to the unchanging day and its fierce sunlight; at the crack of dawn, the temperature turned boiling hot. At five o’clock that morning, the doctor gave the signal to set out, and for a longish time the Victoria stood stock-still in the leaden air.
The doctor could have escaped that blazing heat by rising into higher zones; but this called for using up a greater amount of water, which was out of the question by then. So he settled for keeping his vehicle a hundred feet off the ground; there a feeble current nudged her toward the western horizon.
Their breakfast consisted of a little dried meat and pemmican. By noon the Victoria had traveled barely a few miles.
“We can’t go any faster,” the doctor said. “We aren’t in command, we take what we’re given.”
“Hang it all,” the hunter said, “this is one of those times, my dear Samuel, when I wouldn’t look down on a propeller!”
“No doubt, Dick, always assuming it doesn’t need water to get going, because then we’d be in the exact same pickle; besides, nothing functional has been invented as yet. Balloons are still at the point where ships were before steam was discovered. It took six thousand years to conjure up paddlewheels and propellers; so we’ll be waiting a while.”
“Ruddy heat!” Joe said as he mopped his dripping brow.
“If we had more water, this heat would be of real service to us, because it causes the hydrogen in our balloon to expand; then the flame in the coil needn’t burn as high! The truth is, if we weren’t down to the last of our liquid, we wouldn’t have to be so frugal. We lost our precious tank because of that blasted savage!”
“You aren’t sorry you acted as you did, Samuel?”
“No, Dick, since we managed to snatch that poor man from a horrible death. But we certainly could use that hundred pounds of water we dumped; it guaranteed us another twelve or thirteen days of travel, definitely enough to get us across this desert.”
“Isn’t our trip at least half over?” Joe asked.
“In terms of distance, yes; but not in terms of time if the wind dies. Right now it’s showing a tendency to give out completely.”
“Come on, sir,” Joe continued, “no need to complain; so far we’ve scraped through pretty well, and I’m not the sort to give up hope, no matter what fix I’m in. Take it from me, we’ll find water.”
But the ground kept sinking mile after mile; the gold-bearing mountains quit rolling and simply died away into the plain; they were the last assertions of a depleted nature. Sparse weeds replaced the lovely trees to the east; a few strips of degraded greenery still fought off the invading sand; big rocks had fallen from distant summits, were crushed in their descent, got scattered around as sharp pebbles, soon turned into coarse-grained sand, and then intangible dust.
“This is Africa as you’ve pictured it, Joe; I was right in telling you to be patient!”
“Well, sir,” Joe remarked, “at least it’s perfectly natural! Heat and sand! It’d be silly to expect anything else in a country like this. Look here,” he added with a grin, “I’ve never had any faith in your forests and meadows; they don’t add up! A bloke doesn’t take the trouble to come all this way just to see an English countryside. For the first time I feel like I’m in Africa, and I don’t mind sampling a little of it.”
Toward evening the doctor noted that the Victoria hadn’t gone twenty miles during that boiling day. After the sun vanished below the horizon, which was as clean-cut as a straight line, a sultry darkness surrounded him.
The next morning was Thursday, May 1; but the days went by with discouraging monotony; each morning was like the one before; the noonday sun shed the same lavish, constant, unending rays, and the darkness at night distilled the diffuse heat that the next morning would hand off again to the next evening. The wind was now barely noticeable, more like an exhalation than a breeze, and you could foresee the time when this wind would run out of breath itself.
The doctor fought against the dreariness of these circumstances; he still had the calm and composure that come from steely courage. Spyglass in hand, he examined every corner of the horizon; he saw its last hills shrinking little by little, its last vegetation fading away; in front of him stretched the desert in all its vastness.
The responsibilities on his shoulders affected him a good deal, although he kept his feelings to himself. These two men, Dick and Joe, were both his friends—he had dragged them far away, almost solely on the grounds of friendship or duty. Was this defensible behavior? Wasn’t he trying to go down forbidden ways? Wasn’t his journey attempting to go beyond the bounds of the impossible? Wasn’t God saving this thankless continent for the scholars of much later centuries?
As happens in times of discouragement, all these ideas mushroomed in his brain, turning into an irresistible train of thought that took Samuel to an irrational and unreasonable place. Acknowledging that he shouldn’t do this to himself, he then wondered what he should do.3 Wouldn’t it be possible to retrace his steps? Weren’t there higher currents that would take him back to less arid regions? Confident of the countries he had traveled over, he wasn’t too sure about the countries to come; accordingly, prodded by his conscience, he decided to have a candid talk with his two companions; he clearly laid out the situation for them; he showed them the things that had been done and the things left to do; in a pinch they could backtrack, or at least try to; what were their views?
“My views are the same as my master’s,” Joe replied. “I can put up with anything he can and then some. Wherever he goes, I go.”
“What about you, Kennedy?”
“My dear Samuel, I’m not a fellow who gives in to despair; nobody’s more at home than I am with the dangers of this undertaking; but that doesn’t mean I want to see you facing ’em. So I’m with you body and soul. The way things stand, I think we should keep at it, carry on to the finish. Anyhow I figure it’s just as risky to backtrack. So follow your nose, we’re behind you all the way.”
“Thank you, my worthy friends,” the doctor replied, genuinely touched. “I expected this kind of dedication, but I needed the encouraging words. Once again, thank you.”
And the three friends shook hands heartily.
“Give me your attention,” Fergusson resumed. “According to my last position fix, we’re no more than 300 miles from the Gulf of Guinea; the desert can’t go on indefinitely, since the coast is populated and the region explored a good way inland. If necessary we’ll head for that coast, and I can’t believe we won’t find some oasis or well where we could replenish our water supply. But what we lack is a wind, and without one, we’re stalled up here in a flat calm.”
“Let’s wait and see what happens,” the hunter said.
During that never-ending day, they took turns examining the sky, to no avail; nothing came in sight that raised their hopes. Swelling one last time, the terrain vanished into the setting sun, whose horizontal rays stretched in long fiery lines over an immense flatland. It was the desert.
Our travelers hadn’t covered even fifteen miles—yet, as they had done the day before, they used up 135 cubic feet of gas to run the burner, plus they had to sacrifice two pints of water out of eight to quench their raging thirst.
The night went by quietly, too quietly! The doctor didn’t fall asleep.
