Crash in the Desert

AT daybreak we mopped up the dew on the wings of our plane with a wad of cotton waste, and squeezed out a few spoonfuls of water foul with grease and enamel. It tasted horrible, but we drank it; anyhow it moistened our lips.

After this apology for a breakfast Prévot observed: ‘It’s as well we have a revolver.’

The remark infuriated me; I swung round on him in a sudden passion that I immediately regretted. There was nothing I should have loathed more at that moment than a display of mawkishness. I have a habit of regarding everything as simple. Birth is simple; growing up is simple; to die of thirst, simplicity itself.

From the corner of an eye I watched Prevot, ready to take a firm line, if need be, and shut him up. But Prévot had spoken without emotion; he was alluding to a simple obligation of hygiene, as who should say, ‘We’d better have a wash!’ Indeed, we were of the same mind, and the sight of the leather holster the day before had set me thinking, too. I had thought about it coolly, not emotionally. The ‘tragic sense,’ indeed, applies only where others are involved. It was our inability to reassure those dependent on us that was tragic now — not the revolver.

So far no planes had crossed our emptysky; they must be searching for us in some other region. Probably, I decided, in Arabia.

A fortnight may be needed to locate an airplane fallen in the desert when the searchers have to cover a strip of countrytwo thousand miles from end to end, and they were probably looking for us all the way from Tripoli to Persia. Yet, frail as was this hope, we had no other, and must provide for it in our plans. Accordingly on this, the third day, I changed my tactics and set out alone across the desert. I asked Prévot to lay a fire and kindle it if visitors showed up in the offing. But that day, too, we had no visitors.

As I started I wondered if my strength would hold out for the return journey. I pieced together all I could recall about the Libyan Desert. In the Sahara the humidity in the air is 40 per cent; here it drops to 18 per cent, and life goes up in vapor. Bedouins, travelers, and colonial officers tell us that a man can survive for nineteen hours without drinking. When in the twentieth hour his eyes begin to flood with light, the end comes swiftly. Dying of thirst is a rapid process.

To the northeast wind, abnormal in these parts, the very wind which had falsified my reckoning and marooned us on the plateau, we obviously owed the prolongation of our lives. How long a reprieve would it accord us before our eyes began to glaze with light? I felt as if I were setting out to cross the Atlantic in a canoe. Yet, somehow, in the dawn light our surroundings seemed less lugubrious. And I stepped out, with my hands thrust into my pockets, like a gypsy taking the road again. On the previous evening we had laid snares across the mouths of some mysterious burrows, and my poaching instincts were on the alert. I began by examining these traps; all were empty.

So I was not to have a drink of blood — in point of fact I’d hardly expected it. But, if little disappointed, I was decidedly puzzled. How did these creatures manage to survive in the desert? Presumably they were fennecs, little fox-like carnivores with enormous ears. I could not resist an impulse to follow up the tracks of one of them. They led me to a narrow river of sand in which every footprint was plainly inscribed. They were graceful little footprints, each with the three toes splayed out fanwise.

I pictured my small friend loping along in the half-light, licking the dewy stones. Presently the footprints were wider apart; here my fennec had put on speed. And here a friend had joined him; they had trotted along side by side. I found something curiously thrilling in this reconstruction of their morning stroll — how fascinating were these tiny vestiges of life! — and I forgot that I was thirsty.

At last I reached their feeding ground. Every hundred yards or so a small dry shrub stood up from the level sand; the branches were festooned with little yellow snails. Here the fennec had come for his early morning marketing. And now a curious mystery of nature held my attention. My fennec had not paused at all the shrubs; some, though they were thick with snails, he had disdained. Others he had skirted with obvious circumspection. Others, again, he had approached, but had not stripped them. After eating two or three snails he had moved on to another hostelry.

Was it to enable the snails to reproduce themselves, I wondered, that he took such pains not to exhaust the stock on any single shrub, indeed on any bough? Or was it a sort of game for him, not to glut himself at once, so as to prolong the pleasures of the morning’s jaunt?

Finally the spoor led me to the animal’s burrow. I pictured him pricking up his ears, startled by the rumble of my footsteps overhead. And I addressed a valediction to my unseen friend. ‘Mon petit, my number’s up, I know; but, queerly enough, that has n’t damped my interest in your little ways!’

And, as I stood there musing, it struck me that one adapts oneself to everything. No man lets the thought that thirty years hence he will probably be dead impair his present zest for life. Thirty years, or three days — it’s all a matter of perspective. . . . Still, certain vistas of the imagination are best ignored. When I set out again I felt that, as my strength declined, a subtle change was coming over me. Now, if there were no mirages, I invented them.

‘Coo-ee!’

I beckoned wildly, but that man whom I had just seen waving his arms to me was only a black rock. All the desert was coming to life. The sleeping Bedouin whom I tried to rouse changed suddenly into a coal-black log. But what on earth was a tree trunk doing here? Bending down, I tried to lift a broken branch. It was in solid marble. I drew myself up and looked around me; marble logs lay everywhere — the soil was littered with the wreckage of a prehistoric forest. Myriads of years ago it had been devastated by some primeval hurricane; countless centuries had rolled up to my feet these petrified logs, massive as the shattered pillars of a vast cathedral, jetblack and polished smooth as steel. Each knot in the branches, every torsion of the living stem, stood out, and I could count the rings along the trunks.

Once this forest had been loud with birds and rustling leaves; then the doom had fallen, and it had been transformed to pillars of salt. I could feel the hostility of this landscape that was blacker even than the chain mail of the dunes; these mighty derelicts would have none of me. What place had I, a living man, in this land of marble incorruptibility? My flesh would perish, dust to dust; here all things were eternal. . . .

Since the previous day I had walked nearly fifty miles. My dizziness was due most probably to thirst; partly, perhaps, to the glare. Sunlight blazed on the marble hulks, which shimmered with an oily lustre; as far as eye could reach, the desert shone with scabs of polished stone. Here no sand was visible, no fennec’s track. Only a gigantic anvil on which the sun beat insistently; I could feel the hammer strokes resounding in my temples. But — what was that . . . over there?

‘ Hi — you! Hi!'

‘Don’t excite yourself, old chap! There’s nothing over there — it’s a hallucination.’

I was arguing against myself, trying to invoke the voice of reason. But how hard it was to deny the evidence of sight, to disown my eyes! And to refrain from running towards the caravan slowly moving yonder! ‘There it is,’ I murmured, ‘as large as life.’

‘Don’t be a damned fool! You know you’re making it up, out of your imagination.’

‘ So nothing in the world is real ? ’

Nothing was real — except that cross standing on a hill ten or twelve miles away. Or was it a lighthouse?

The sea, I knew, was not in that direction. Then it must be a cross. I had been studying the map all night, though nothing could come of it, since I could not fix our whereabouts. But I had feasted my eyes on every token of that miracle of miracles, man’s presence. Somewhere my eye had lighted on a little ring topped by a cross. Looking up the explanation of the symbol, I found it meant a ‘Religious Institution.’ Beside the cross there was a small black dot which I likewise found to indicate a ‘Permanent Well.’

My heart had missed a beat, and I had repeated the magic syllables aloud. ‘That’s a Permanent Well ... a Permanent Well!’ What were Ali Baba and all his treasures compared with a permanent well? Further on I discovered two white circles. They stood for ‘Temporary Wells.’ Not quite so good. Around them were no marks at all — the blankness of despair. . . .

That cross, I decided, belonged to my ‘Religious Institution.’ On the hill the monks had set up their landmark calling to shelter the pilgrims of the desert. Now I need only hasten to the cross to be welcomed by those kind Dominicans.

‘ But there are only Coptic monasteries in Libya,’ my other self protested.

‘Dominicans, I say; studious, kindly folk. There’s a big, cool, red-tiled kitchen and a wonderful old rusty pump in the courtyard, and under the pump you’ve guessed it! — is the Permanent Well. And won’t there be a grand to-do up there when you tug the bellpull at the gate and set the great bell jangling!’

‘But, you fool, that’s a monastery in Provence you’re describing; what s more, there is n’t any bell there.’

‘When I set the great bell jangling the gatekeeper will throw up his arms in amazement and exclaim, “The Lord has sent you!” and shout for the monks. They’ll rush at me in a body and fuss over me as if I were a prodigal son come home. Then one will say, “Wait a moment, my son, just a moment, while we draw some water from the Permanent Well.” And I’ll be trembling with joy. . . .'

No, I won’t — I will not weep because there’s no cross on the hill.

The treasures of the west were only dross; I set my eyes towards the north. Anyhow the north had something to offer — the music of the waves.

‘Look! See how the horizon has widened since you crossed the ridge! And there — the loveliest of cities!5

‘You know quite well it’s only a mirage.’

‘Of course I do. D’you take me for a fool? But if I feel like hunting down a mirage, what’s to prevent me? Why should n’t I indulge in hope? Suppose I’ve taken a liking to that fine old city with its crenelated walls beflaggcd in sunbeams? Suppose it pleases me to put my best foot foremost and walk ahead, now I’ve got over my fatigue and feel in form again? Old Prevot and his revolver — what damned nonsense! Much better to be tight, as I am now. Dead drunk — and dying of thirst!’

The twilight sobered me down. Suddenly I halted, appalled to realize how far I was from our base. Mirage dies with the nightfall. Horizons are stripped of their pomps and palaces, their priestly vestments, and the desert comes into its own again.

‘A lot of good it’ll do you! You’ll only get benighted on the way, and have to wait for daylight. And by then your footprints will have been effaced and you’ll be . . . nowhere.’

‘Then I’d do just as well to carry on. What’s the good of turning back yet once again? Why, it’s unthinkable, turning tail just here and now — just when very likely I’m within arm’s length of the sea.’

‘The sea! Whereabouts is that sea of yours? Anyhow you could n’t walk that distance. And don’t forget that Prévot’s looking out for you by the Simoon. Quite likely he’s been spotted by a caravan.’

Yes, I decided, it was wiser to return; but first, on the off chance, I’d try a call for help.

‘Coo-ee!’

No answer — and I’d always thought our planet was inhabited!

‘Coo-ee! Anyone there?’

The last word was a croak — my voice was gone. Still I tried one more ‘Coo-ee!’ before turning on my tracks.

After two hours’ tramp I saw a glow on the horizon; panic-stricken at the idea I might have lost my way, Prévot had launched a signal on the sky. Thoughtful of him — but how futile! . . . Another hour’s walk; five hundred yards to go, then fifty.

‘What?’

I halted in sheer stupefaction. Joy surged up in my heart, irresistibly, triumphantly. There, in the firelight, Prevot was chatting with two Arabs, who were leaning against the engine. Engrossed in his delight, he had not seen me yet. If I’d had the sense to stay behind with him, I’d have been saved already!

‘Ahoy!’ I cried exultantly.

The nomads gave a start and stared in my direction. Turning his back on them, Prévot hastened towards me. I flung my arms out wide. Prévot caught me by the elbow and steadied me — was I tottering?

‘So they’ve come?’

‘Eh?’

‘The Arabs?’

‘What Arabs?’

‘Those two chaps over there, damn it! The ones you were talking to.’

Prévot eyed me strangely; when he spoke I had the impression he was imparting to me, reluctantly, a profound secret.

‘There are n’t. any Arabs.’

And now it seemed no use fighting back my tears. . . .

II

All we had had to drink for twentyfour hours —since the last sundown—was a spoonful of dew water gleaned at daybreak from the wreckage. Happily for us a northeast wind had prevailed throughout the day, and retarded to some extent the evaporation from our bodies. As usual when a northeaster blows across the desert, a towering mass of clouds had banked up on the horizon. Fervently we longed for them to drift towards us, and break in rain. But in this desert rain is never known to fall.

‘I’ve an idea, Prévot! How about dismantling one of the parachutes and clamping the pieces down with stones? If the wind does n’t turn they’ll be soaked with dew by sunrise and we can wring the water out into one of the tanks.’

Accordingly we spread out under the stars the six triangles of white cloth that compose a parachute, and Prévot took down a tank. Now there was nothing we could do but await the dawn.

Meanwhile, however, we had had a stroke of luck. Prévot had unearthed an orange amongst the débris. We shared it between us. I felt like crying for joy — yet what was half an orange when what we needed was several gallons of water each?

Lying beside our campfire, feasting my eyes upon the glowing rind, I murmured half aloud: ‘An orange — nobody on earth has an idea of what it really is!’ And then: ‘Again to-night the certainty we’re done for does n’t spoil my pleasure in the least. Rarely have I enjoyed anything so much as the piece of orange that I’m squeezing.’ I rolled over on to my back and, while I sucked the fruit, counted the shooting stars. For a moment I felt preposterously happy. ‘No one,’ I thought, ‘has any inkling of the world of men, the scheme of human things, until he’s plunged into the thick of it.’

For the first time I guessed the feelings of the condemned prisoner when he is handed a cigarette and a tot of rum on his way to the gallows. Hitherto I had pictured him waving away, disgusted, this last indignity. Now I knew better; he thoroughly enjoys it. When he smiles we think him a stout-hearted ruffian, when, in reality, he is relishing his rum! We fail to realize he sees things in a new perspective, and of his last ten minutes makes a lifetime. . . .

At dawn we found we had collected a large supply of water, almost two quarts. So the long agony of thirst was ended; we could drink our fill; we were saved.

From the tank I ladled up a draft in a tin mug; the water was tinged a brilliant yellow-green, and at my first gulp I found its flavor so appalling that, thirsty as I was, I could not bring myself to swallow it. If need be I might put up with liquid mud, but that acrid, metallic taste turned my stomach.

I glanced at Prévot; he was walking round and round, his eyes fixed on the ground, as if he were hunting for something. Suddenly he bent forward and vomited, without ceasing to walk in a circle. Thirty seconds later I followed suit, retching so violently that I fell forward on my knees, digging my fingers into the sand. Neither of us said a word. For a quarter of an hour we stayed thus, our bodies racked with spasms of vomiting, bringing up only a little bile.

At last it was over; all I now felt was a faint, evanescent nausea. But our last hope was gone. (I never found out if this mischance was due to the coating of the parachute or to some chemical deposit in the tank.)

It was high time to make a move. The day was breaking. En route! Now we would turn our backs on this accursed plateau and walk straight ahead across the desert till we dropped. Since the previous day I had been turning over in my mind Guillaume’s experience in the Andes; we must follow his example. I would disobey the airman’s golden rule

— that he must stand by his fallen plane; no one would come to look for us here.

Once more we realized that we were not the shipwrecked party; victims of a wreck were, rather, those who were awaiting us. It was they to whom our silence was a menace. Already, perhaps, they were blundering in a maze of errors; it was for us to make our way to them, to set them right. Just so Guillaume, when he came back from the Andes, had said to me: ‘They were lost; I found my way to them.’ That was the truth of it — a universal truth.

‘If I were left to myself,’ Prévot remarked, ‘I’d just lie down and sleep.’

’En route,’

We set out, side by side, on the day’s march, heading east-northeast. If we had crossed the Nile it meant that with every step we were plunging deeper into the unfathomable desert.

Of that day my memory is a blank. All I can recall is an impression of desperate hurry — of hastening towards no goal, to an inevitable breakdown. I kept my eyes fixed on the ground; the mirages were more than I could bear. Now and again we corrected our course by compass; now and again, lying on the sand, we took a breather. Somewhere I flung away the cape I had brought with me for the night. All the rest of that day has faded from my memory; it was as if I, too, had turned to sand, my thoughts to dust. Only with the twilight, the first cool hour, did my memory return.

At nightfall we decided to halt. I knew we should have done better to push on; another waterless night would be the end of us. However, we had brought with us the strips of parachute cloth; if the poison did not come from the chemicals with which they had been dressed, we could reckon on a drink at dawn. So once again we laid our dew traps under the stars.

But that night the north was cloudless; the wind had veered, and changed its savor. It was as if the desert had wakened to our presence and stalked us down. Now we were in its clutches; I could feel its rough tongue licking my hands and cheeks, could smell its fetid breath.

Yet, if I set out on the march again, I should not last, six miles. In three days I had covered a hundred miles, with practically nothing to drink.

Just as we halted, I heard Prévot’s voice. ‘That’s a lake over there, I’ll stake my soul on it.’

‘You’re raving.’

‘Don’t forget it’s sunset. There can’t be any mirages at this hour.’

I did not reply. I had long since given up believing my eyes. Perhaps it was not a mirage; only a hallucination, a figment of delirious fancy. How could Prévot still believe in what he saw? But he would not give in.

‘Well, I’m going to have a look, anyhow. It’s not twenty minutes’ walk away.’

His obstinacy got on my nerves.

‘Have it your own way. Take the air a bit; it’s excellent for the health. But if that lake of yours exists, it’s salty — that’s a certainty. And, salty or not, it’s an invention of the devil. Not to mention that there is n’t any lake!’

Prévot was up and moving, his eyes fixed in a glassy stare, before I had finished speaking. These imperious obsessions were nothing new to me. Had n’t I read of somnambulists flinging themselves under the wheels of locomotives?

I knew Prévot would never return. The void around him would go to his head, he would be seized by a sort of vertigo and find himself unable to turn back. A few steps farther and he would collapse, to die out there in his tracks ... as here I should die in mine. Anyhow — what difference did it make?

It struck me that this feeling of indifference was a bad sign. Once before, submerged and almost drowned in the cabin of my plane, I had felt that unnatural placidity. I took advantage of it to write a ‘farewell letter,’ lying face downward on the pebbles. How far gone was I, I wondered. I tried to summon up some saliva on my palate, — how long was it since I last spat? — but none would come. I had no spittle left. When I closed my mouth some gluey substance sealed my lips, forming, as it dried, a solid crust upon them. However, I still could swallow, and as yet no flashes of light had developed in my eyes. Once I was treated to that spectacular display, the end, I knew, would lie an hour or two ahead.

Night came, lit by a moon perceptibly enlarged since I last saw it rise. Prévot showed no sign of returning. Stretched on my back, I turned these facts over and over in my mind. A memory, a dim impression, was hovering in the background of my thoughts; I tried to give it form. I was . . . where was I? I was at sea. Yes, on a ship bound for South America. I was lying on the deck, watching a masthead swinging slowly to and fro across the stars. Here there was no mast, but I was outward bound again — to a bourne not of my choosing. Fate had manacled my hands and feet and thrown me down on the deck.

My thoughts drifted back to Prévot, my lost companion. A fine fellow, Prévot. Never once had I heard him whimper. I could n’t have endured it had he done so. Yes, Prévot was a man. . . .

What? What was that? There he was five hundred yards away, swinging his lamp. He must have lost the trail. I had no lamp with which to signal back, so I stood up and shouted. He did not seem to hear. Then another lamp flashed out two hundred yards from his; then a third lamp. So that was it a search party!

‘Coo-ee!’ I shouted.

Still they seemed not to hear. The three lamps went on signaling towards me. ‘I’m sane,’ I murmured. ‘I’ve all my wits about me. There’s nothing wrong with my sight. And there I see three lamps, five hundred yards away.

' Coo-ce! ’

Still no one heard. A gust of panic swept over me — that was the only time I felt it. Thank goodness, I still could use my legs, could run. Damn it! Wait! I’m coming!’ They seemed to be turning away, going to look elsewhere. And I felt myself tottering, falling on the very threshold of escape, when friendly arms were stretching out towards me.

‘ Coo-ee! Coo-ee!'

An answering call — at last! My breath caught in my throat, but I kept on running towards the voice. It was Prévot. I stumbled forward, fell.

‘When I saw all those lights I could n’t help . . .'

‘What lights?’

Then I saw — he was alone. And now I felt no despair, only a rankling sense of outrage.

‘Well, how about that lake of yours?’

I asked sarcastically.

‘It kept moving farther away as I went on. I followed it up for half an hour, but it was n’t any use. So I turned back. Anyhow, I’m positive it was a lake.’

‘You’re mad — stark, staring mad! Why did you do that? Tell me — why?’

What had he done? Why had he done it? I could have wept with rage — but I had no notion why I was indignant. Prévot stammered out an explanation.

‘I hoped to find some water, for you to drink. Your lips have gone so white. . . .’

So that was it. My anger fell. I passed my hand over my forehead, as if I were waking from sleep. I felt dejected. Now it was my turn to explain.

‘I saw those lights as clearly as I see you,’ I said in a low voice. ‘There were three lamps. I ’ll swear I saw them.'

Prevot sat silent for a moment; then, ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘we’re in a damned bad way.’

III

In the vaporless air the radiation from the soil was rapid, and already the night was turning cold. I got up and began to walk about. I had not gone far when a violent trembling fit pulled me up. Deprived of its water ration, my blood was circulating sluggishly, and an icy chill, due not only to the coldness of the air, was numbing my body. My teeth began to chatter, my limbs to twitch convulsively. My fingers were shaking so much that I could not switch on my electric torch. I have never been worried by low temperature, yet now it seemed I was to freeze to death — and that, oddly enough, as the effect of thirst!

Tired of carrying my cape in the heat, I had dropped it somewhere on the way. A bitter wind was rising, and I made the discovery that there is no shelter in the desert. Smooth as a marble pavement, by day it holds no shadows, by night it turns you over, naked, to the wind. There is no hedgerow, no tree, no rock behind which to take cover.

Like a cavalry charge across open country the wind bore down on me. Vainly I twisted and turned to avoid it; lay down and stood up again. Lying or standing, I could feel it jabbing my limbs with ice-tipped lances. There was no escaping its fierce onslaught; my limbs gave way under me, and falling on my knees, my head between my hands, I waited for the death stroke.

Some time later I realized what had happened; I had struggled to my feet and, shivering with cold, started to walk ahead once again. Where was I? Then I heard Prévot’s voice; his shouts must have aroused me. I went back to him, still trembling from head to foot, my whole body convulsed by a sort of hiccup. ‘It is n’t only the cold,’ I murmured. ‘It’s something more. It’s the end. All the water’s been drained out of me; I overdid it yesterday and the day before when I went off on my own.’

I loathed the thought of dying of cold; far preferable had been those phantasms of my mind: the trees, the lights, the cross. Indeed, I had been beginning to find them rather fascinating. But to be whipped to death like a slave revolted me.

I sank once more on to my knees.

We had brought along some of our medicines; a hundred grammes of ether, a hundred of ninety-degree alcohol, and a bottle of iodine. I tried some sips of pure ether; it was like swallowing a razor. Then a little of the alcohol, but it closed my gullet.

I dug a trench, lay down in it, and blanketed myself with sand. Only my face emerged. Prévot had collected some twigs and lit a fire, but there was little warmth in it. He declined to bury himself as I had done, thinking it better to keep on the move. He was wrong.

My throat stayed shut — a bad sign, that. Still I was feeling better now; and preposterously calm, calm with a peace that passed my understanding. I was being carried overseas, lashed to the deck of a slave ship, under the stars. Yet somehow I felt little or no distress.

The cold no longer troubled me, provided I did not stir a muscle. My body was asleep under the sand; I forgot its existence. I resolved to keep quite motionless; thus I should have no more pain. Really in such a death one suffers very little; exhaustion and delirium weave their fantasies upon the pain’s insistence, till everything becomes like a child’s picture book, a quaint and rather cruel fairy tale.

A little while ago the wind was after me; now, to escape it, I turned in circles like a frightened animal. Then I had found it hard to breathe, as if a knee were planted on my chest. I had wrestled with the angel and he had downed me. Never, so far, had the desert left me to myself. But, now I had said good-bye to the world around me, I could withdraw into myself; my eyelashes had stopped fluttering, my eyes were shut. Now I could set my mind adrift upon a stream of fancies sweeping me away towards a quiet ecstasy, as every torrent comes to rest at last in the abysmal slumber of the sea.

I bade farewell to eyes that I was never to see again under their golden aureole. Was it my fault if the human body cannot survive three days of drouth? Never had I dreamed myself so tributary to the water springs; I had not suspected that a man’s autonomy gave him so short a rope. He always thinks that he can ‘forge ahead,’ that he is master of his fate. He cannot see the rope that tethers him to the well; that, like a navel cord, links him with the belly of the earth. One step beyond it, and he dies.

‘Physical suffering apart,’ I mused, ‘there’s nothing to regret. When all is said and done, I’ve had the better part, and, if ever I return, I will set out again. The great thing is to lead a human life — and such a life is no longer feasible in cities. Not that aviation is the only way out. The airplane is a means, not an end. A man does n’t risk his life for the sake of his plane, any more than a peasant tills his field for the plough’s sake. But thanks to the plane a man can quit the city and the market place; he can regain the ploughman’s solid foothold in reality.

‘Aviation is a man’s job; its problems are the proper study of a man. He is in touch with the winds, with darkness and the stars, with sand and sea. He must finesse against the forces of nature. As a gardener waits for the spring, he waits for the dawn, looking forward to the next halt as to a promised land. And in the stars he seeks and finds his verities.

‘No,’ I mused, ‘I won’t complain. For three days I have tramped the desert and endured the pangs of thirst, staking my hope upon a thimbleful of dew. I have tried to regain contact with my kind, whose very place on earth has passed out of my memory. These, anyhow, are vital preoccupations, and I can’t help ranking them higher than, let’s say, the choice of a music hall at which to spend the evening. I have ceased to understand those good folk who day after day crowd suburban trains, conditioned by forces of which they have no inkling, like the ants, to the service of utility. When Saturday comes round, how, I wonder, do they fill their hollow little week-ends?’

I have been in Russia, where Mozart is played to workers in the factories. I published an account of my experiences and, for my pains, received a couple of hundred abusive letters. I have nothing against the people who prefer the noise that goes for music in our popular cafes; they know no better. But I have my knife in the owners of those restaurants — I do not like to see men bestialized.

I remembered having read in the Ra-dio News a letter from a woman who complained that there was ‘too much Ravel in the programmes.’ I gathered that she wanted more ‘light music’ — crooners and so forth. I do not blame the young woman for remaining — why mince matters? — at a rudimentary stage of evolution; but I do blame the editor who printed the letter and endorsed her grievance.

Mozart and Ravel — for me an airplane always evokes music. A night flight on the Saïgon air route — what a counterpoint of sounds! Flying and music. ... Yes, some occupations are fit for man; others are subhuman. These are the only criteria I admit. W hat distinction is there between the musings of a pilot at his task and those of an astronomer? One man writes; another flies; the gardener tends his rose trees that they may bring forth flowers in due season. All three are men. Personally I enjoy my calling; I see myself a peasant ploughing the waste of air.

My sufferings at that moment were less than those I’d undergo in a suburban train. By contrast, all things considered, this was luxury!

‘No,’ I said to myself, ‘I regret nothing. I have staked my life, and lost. It was all in the day’s work. Yet not all was loss, for I have tasted the sea wind on my lips. Those who have known its savor once can never forget it.

‘“Living dangerously” is not the point; I can make nothing of that Nietzschean formula; toreadors do not appeal to me. It’s not danger that I enjoy. I know what I like; it is — life.’

There was a hint of brightness in the air. One of the panels of the parachute was within reach, and, lifting an arm out of the sand, I ran my fingers over it. It was dry. Too early, I supposed; the dew begins to fall only at dawn. . . . But now the dawn was rising and still no moisture formed upon the cloth. My thoughts grew turbid in the waxing light, and I heard myself murmuring, ‘Here the heart of things is parched, dry as a stone; a heart that scorns the grace of tears.’ I pushed aside my coverlet of sand and stood up.

‘Let’s make a start, Prévot. Our throats are open still, and we’d best keep moving while we can.’

IV

A west wind, the wind that desiccates a man in nineteen hours, was blowing. My throat was not quite closed as yet, but it was getting hard and painful, and felt as if a rasp were lodged inside it. Before long, no doubt, the dry cough I had heard described would start; I was on the watch for it. My tongue, too, was giving trouble. But — worst symptom of all — motes of light were dancing in my eyes; once they changed to flames, there would be nothing for it but to lie down.

We set off at a quick pace, to make the most of the cool early hours. Only too well we knew that when the sun was high we should walk no more. We had no right to sweat; no right even to a breather. For all the coolness of the air, there was only 18 per cent humidity in it; the wind that fanned us had come across the desert, and under its soft, insidious caress our veins were gradually running dry.

On the first day we had eaten a few grapes; during the last three days half an orange each and half a spongecake. Now, even if food had been forthcoming, we could not have masticated it; we had no saliva left. Still I was not hungry in the least; all I felt was thirst. And, from now on, I suffered less from actual thirst than from its consequences: the hardening of my throat, a tongue that felt like plaster of Paris, a rasping in the gullet, a foul taste in the mouth. These sensations were wholly novel to me; presumably water would have alleviated them, but I had no memories associating water with their relief. Thirst was becoming more and more a malady, less and less a craving.

When I conjured up a mental picture of fruits and flowing streams I found that their appeal was losing poignancy; everything, indeed, was growing dim, even the lustre of that heaven-sent orange, of those dark, haunting eyes under the wide sun hat. I was already halfway to complete oblivion.

We had given up walking long distances without a pause. After a stretch of five hundred yards our legs gave way beneath us. What a relief it was to lie down for a few minutes! But always something urged us on and on.

After a while the landscape changed. The pebbles grew less abundant, giving place to a bare expanse of sand. A mile or so ahead a line of dunes, dotted with low shrubs, closed the horizon. Anyhow the sand was preferable to the black, metallic crust of pebbles over which we had been toiling. The reaches of pale yellow sand had a familiar look; I fancied myself back in the Sahara.

Now we broke down every two hundred yards.

‘Let’s carry on anyhow,’ I whispered, ‘as far as those bushes over there.’

We were at the end of our tether. When, a week later, in a car, we retraced our tracks on our way back to the Simoon, I found that this, our last lap, totaled forty-eight miles. So, all told, I had walked a hundred and twenty miles — what wonder if my legs would carry me no farther?

‘Yesterday,’ I mused, ‘I abandoned hope; to-day the very word is meaningless. We are walking blindly, mechanically on, like oxen harnessed to a plough. Yesterday I dreamed of paradisal orange groves; to-day I have lost faith in paradise, I do not believe in oranges. . . .’

When I took stock of my feelings it seemed as if my heart had dried up, like my throat. I was on the verge of collapse, yet I felt no despair, not even much distress. ‘So much the worse,’ I reflected; ‘grief would have been refreshing as a draft of water. There is comfort in self-pity; it is like a friendly consolation. But now I have no friend left on earth.

‘When our bodies are found, our eyes burnt out, they will imagine we have cried despairingly for help, have suffered horribly. But emotions, regret, the solaces of grief — all these are luxuries; and we have done with luxury. When first love dies, a young girl learns the meaning of sorrow, and finds relief in tears. Grief is implicit in the vibrant heart of life. But I have no grief left.’

Suddenly . . . what was it I had seen? Like a breeze ruffling the sea, a gust of hope swept over me. Instinct had lit on something before my consciousness had taken its meaning. Nothing had changed — yet everything was different. Now the waste of sand, the knolls and tufts of brushwood, were suddenly transformed from a mere landscape into a stage setting. True, as yet the stage was empty, but everything was set in readiness. I stared at Prévot. He seemed to share my stupefaction, and to be equally unable to clear up his impressions.

At that moment I could have sworn that something was about to happen. I could have sworn the desert had come to life; the silence of the sand was charged with rushing sounds, loud with the cheerful bustle of a country fair.

We were saved. I had seen footprints in the sand.

Like derelicts of a world-wide migration, we had been abandoned in the wilderness; outcast from the tribe of men, we had lost all traces of our kind. Now suddenly the ban was lifted. We had found, graven on the sand, that divine emblem, the imprint of a human foot.

‘Here, Prévot, two men parted company.’

‘And here a camel knelt down.’

‘And just here . . .’

Still, we were not saved yet. We could not afford to dawdle. In an hour or two we should be past rescuing. Once the ‘thirst cough’ sets in, death gives a man short shrift. And just now our throats were in a bad way.

Yet I did not lose heart. Somewhere near by I knew a caravan was floundering through the sands, laden with all the riches of the earth. We forced ourselves ahead — then suddenly I heard a cock crow. What was it Guillaume told me? ‘Towards the end I heard cocks crowing and railway trains passing in the distance.’ The words flashed into my mind at the precise moment I heard the cockcrow. ‘First of all,’ I thought, ‘my eyes played me false. Now, I suppose, my thirst is playing tricks on me. Still, so far, my ears have held out better than my eyes.’

Prévot gripped my arm. ‘Hear that?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘A cock.’

‘Why, then

Then — there was no disputing it — we were saved!

I had one last hallucination — of three dogs running after each other. Prévot, looking in the same direction, saw nothing. But both of us together beckoned to a Bedouin who suddenly appeared; both of us racked our throats shouting to him. And both of us burst out laughing with delight.

But our voices did not carry fifty yards. The Bedouin who had just loomed up beyond a hillock moved slowly out of sight with his camel. ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘the man is alone; some evil genius has shown him for a moment only to tantalize us.’ And we had no strength left for running after him.

Another Arab showed up in profile on the dune. We shouted to him, but our voices failed again. Then we began to wave our arms, churning the sunlight with our frantic gesturings. But the Bedouin persisted in looking away, to his right.

At last, with an agonizing slowness, he swung round. ‘Once his eyes meet ours,’ I thought, ‘it is the grand finale; on the instant that he sights us, he will banish mirage and thirst and death. See! He is beginning to turn in our direction, and already the whole world is changed! With a casual movement of his body, by a mere deviation of his eyes, godlike he is creating life.’

The miracle had come to pass! He was walking towards us across the sands, as a god walks the waves.

You, our rescuer, will dwell forever in my memory, yet never shall I be able to recall your features. You stand for Man; I see in you incarnate the lineaments of all mankind. Our paths had never crossed before, and yet at once you knew us. We were your kin, and you a wellbeloved brother, and I shall see you in the guise of all men.

I saw you then, as still I see you, invested with all nobility and loving-kindness. All my friends, all my foes, personified in you, were coming towards me. And it seemed to me that you were bringing, not deliverance, but forgiveness. Water lay in your gift; yours was the surest patent of nobility. And I felt I had no enemy left in all the world.

Beyond the pale of race and language we understood each other. The Arab merely glanced at us. Then, laying his hands on our shoulders, he pressed on them. Yielding to the pressure, we sank down on the sand. At that moment racial distinctions, difference of language, were of no account. All that counted was the poor nomad of the desert, laying angelic hands upon our shoulders.

For a while we waited, our foreheads pillowed on the sand. At last the man came to us with a basin of water and, lying on our bellies, we plunged our mouths in it, like cattle drinking at a pool. Our eagerness alarmed the Bedouin, who forced us to stop drinking from time to time. The moment he released us we plunged our lips again into the water.

As I drank, my mind was ringing with a pæan of water, the element that, more than a necessity of life, is life itself. Tasteless, colorless, scentless, it eludes description; we relish it unwittingly. It thrills us with a joy far subtler than any satisfaction of the senses. With the first draft of water, feelings we have prized and lost are given back to us; by its grace the dried-up wellsprings of emotion flow again.

Of all things hidden in the womb of earth, water is the purest; nothing in the world is so precious — and nothing so precarious. A man may die of thirst beside a mineral spring, or within arm’s length of a salt lake; and he may die despite a gallon of dew when it holds certain chemicals in solution. For water, that fastidious nymph, allows no promiscuity. . . . And yet how infinitely simple is the joy pervading us when we quench our thirst!

That is the end of my tale. The Bedouins conveyed to us as best they could that there were Europeans in the neighborhood. Mounted on a camel’s back, we set out to join them, but after three hours’ jolting we had had enough of it. We persuaded our rescuers to leave us in a camp while the cameleers went ahead to fetch help.

Towards six in the evening a car manned by armed Bedouins picked us up. Half an hour later we alighted at the bungalow of M. Raccaud, a Swiss engineer who manages a soda factory far out in the desert, near a saltern. By midnight I was in Cairo. . . .

I awoke to find myself between white sheets, with the sun, an enemy no longer, stealing past the curtains. I buttered a roll and spooned honey on to it; I found it tasted exactly like the rolls and honey of my boyhood. And, with my sense of taste, the childish sense of living in a perpetual wonderland had returned to me. My eyes strayed back to the telegram lying on the counterpane; three common French words, yet, coming from those dearest of all to me, most wonderful of messages: —

' Sommes tellement heureux. . . ’