our direction. From inside his coat he drew a contraption which I can best describe as a metal cylinder on a long rod. From within the cylinder he drew out a length of silk ribbon in the manner that a Westerner will produce a tape measure of the mechanically-retracting kind. The silk was covered with symbols in a series of frames like the separate pictures on a cine film. He spent some time tranquilly contemplating the ribbon and finally, with a spinning motion of the hand returned the roll within its case. This performance we took to mean a prayer for the happy completion of our pilgrimage. Mister Smith bowed his acknowledgment.
The man in charge of the cauldron produced a brick of compressed tea, black in colour, broke a piece off and fed it into the water. For several minutes he stirred the brew with a long-handled wooden spoon and the fragrance from the boiling pot assailed our noses most agreeably. Next was produced a wooden jar from which the lid was removed to reveal a substance that looked to me like honey but which later turned out to be butter. Spoonsful of the stuff were added to the brew and the stirring and simmering went on for some time.
Two mugs were produced and these were sufficiently unusual for me to ask to handle one before it was used for the tea. It was of burnished brass and had once been the lower part of the casing holding the explosive charge for a small shell. A strip of the same metal had been bent round and attached to the cup by bronze rivets to make a handle. I turned the cup upside down to see if there were the usual marks of origin on the base. There were a few faint imprints but they had been so worn away with use that I could make nothing of them. The Mongols seemed flattered by my interest and I was sorry that I could not have asked them where they picked up the mugs.
The procedure for passing around the tea was rather amusing, since it involved guessing our ages in order that the more senior on both sides should be first served. About Mister Smith they had no difficulty. The first two cups dipped into the brew went to him and the Mongol gun-owner. When we turned over our own mug to the cook, he filled it and passed it without hesitation to Paluchowicz. I saw the Sergeant make a face of great distaste at his first gulp, look at the American and then smack his lips as Smith was doing to show appreciation of what he was drinking. Smith sipped away with great composure.
Kristina and I were the last to be served. While we awaited our turn I teased her about the custom of a country that ruled ‘Ladies last’. She replied that placing her last might mean only that they recognized her as the youngest of us. The Mongols watched the laughing exchanges between us and I am sure they would have loved to know what we talked about. When our turn did come I could sense the others looking at us surreptitiously. The tea was comfortingly hot but it tasted foul. We kept our faces straight and avoided each other’s eyes. The savour of the fragrant leaves was overborne by the sickening tang of rancid butter which floated in glistening globules of fat on the surface. But we got through it and I had to exercise great self-control to stop laughing out loud as Kristina gave out a couple of decorous lip-smackings.
The Mongols’ hospitality was rounded off with the gift of a little tobacco and a few nuts. We all stood and made our farewells. We walked away and when I looked back from fifty yards away they were squatting down again, their backs towards us. In that short distance we had passed out of their lives and they out of ours.
I was to remember later that they thought our trail to Lhasa merited a special prayer. We were striding into the burning wastes of the Gobi waterless and with little food. None of us then knew the hell we were to meet.
16.
TWO DAYS without water in the hillocky, sand-covered, August furnace of the Gobi and I felt the first flutterings of fear. The early rays of the sun rising over the rim of the world dispersed the sharp chill of the desert night. The light hit the tops of the billowing dunes and threw sharp shadows across the deep-sanded floors of the intervening little valleys. Fear came with small fast-beating wings and was suppressed as we sucked pebbles and dragged our feet on to make maximum distance before the blinding heat of noon. From time to time one or other of us would climb one of the endless knolls and look south to see the same deadly landscape stretching to the horizon. Towards midday we stuck our long clubs in the sand and draped our jackets over them to make a shelter. Alarm about our position must have been general but no one voiced it. My own feeling was that we must not frighten the girl and I am sure the others kept silent for the same reason.
The heat enveloped us, sucking the moisture from our bodies, putting ankle-irons of lethargy about our legs. Each one of us walked with his and her own thoughts and none spoke, dully concentrating on placing one foot ahead of the other interminably. Most often I led the way, Kolemenos and the girl nearest to me and the others bunched together a few yards behind. I was driving them now, making them get to their feet in the mornings, forcing them to cut short the noon rest. As we still walked in the rays of the setting sun the fear hit me again. It was, of course, the fundamental, most oppressive fear of all — that we should die here in the burning wilderness. I struggled against a panicky impulse to urge a return the way we had come, back to water and green things and life. I fought it down.
We flopped out against a tall dune and the cold stars came out to look at us. Our bone-weariness should have ensured the sleep of exhaustion but, tortured with thirst, one after another twisted restlessly, rose, wandered around and came back. Some time after midnight I suggested we start off again to take advantage of the cool conditions. Everybody seemed to be awake. We hauled ourselves upright and began again the trudge south. It was much easier going. We rested a couple of hours after dawn — and still the southerly prospect remained unaltered.
After this one trial there were no more night marches. Makowski stopped it.
‘Can you plot your course by the stars?’ he asked me. The others turned haggard faces towards me.
I paused before answering. ‘Not with complete certainty,’ I confessed.
‘Can any of us?’ he persisted. No one spoke.
‘Then we could have been walking in circles all through the night,’ he said heavily.
I sensed the awful dismay his words had caused. I protested that I was sure we had not veered off course, that the rising sun had proved us still to be facing south. But in my own mind, even as I argued, I had to admit the possibility that Makowski was right. In any case, the seed of doubt had been sown and we just could not afford to add anything to the already heavy burden of apprehension.
So we went on through the shimmering stillness. Not even a faint zephyr of air came up to disperse the fine dust hanging almost unseen above the desert, the dust that coated our faces and beards, entered into our cracked lips and reddened the rims of eyes already sore tried by the stark brightness of the sun.
The severely-rationed dried fish gave out on about the fifth day and still we faced a lifeless horizon. In all this arid world only eight struggling human specks and an occasional snake were alive. We could have ceased to move quite easily and lain there and died. The temptation to extend the noonday halt, to go on dozing through the hot afternoon until the sun dropped out of sight, invited our dry, aching bodies. Our feet were in a pitiable state as the burning sand struck through the thin soles of our worn moccasins. I found myself croaking at the others to get up and keep going. There is nothing here, I would say. There is nothing for days behind us. Ahead there must be something. There must be
On the sixth day the girl stumbled and, on her knees, looked up at me. ‘That was foolish of me, Slav. I tripped myself up.’ She did not wait for my assistance. She rose slowly from the sand and stepped out beside me. That afternoon I found to my faint surprise and irritation I was on my knees. I had not been conscious of the act of falling. One moment I was walking, the next I had stopped. On my knees, I thought… like a man at prayer. I got up. No one had slackened pace for me. They probably hardly noticed my stumble. It seemed to take me a very long time to regain my position at the head again. Others were falling, too, I noticed from time to time. The knees gave and they knelt there a few unbelieving seconds until realization came that they had ceased to be mobile. They came on again. There was no dropping out. These were the signs of growing, strength-sapping weakness, but it would have been fatal to have acknowledged them for what they were. They were the probing fingers of death and we were not ready to die yet.
The sun rose on the seventh day in a symphony of suffused pinks and gold. Already we had been plodding forward for an hour in the pale light of the false dawn and dully I looked at Kristina and the other shambling figures behind me and was struck with the unconquerable spirit of them all. Progress now was a shuffle; the effort
