Kitty remained unconscious until dawn the next morning. The sun was beginning to scorch the desert when she struggled from the depths of blackness and focused her eyes on the splintered stub of the propeller. Her vision came blurred. She tried to shake her head to clear the fog and gasped from the pain that stabbed her head. Gently, she touched her forehead. The skin was unbroken but a large knot rose along the hairline. She checked for other injuries and discovered the cracked ankle that had swollen inside her flying boot and the twisted knee.
She unbuckled her safety harness, pushed open the cabin door, and carefully climbed from the plane. Limping a few paces, Kitty sank slowly onto the sand and took stock.
Fortunately, there had been no fire, but the faithful Fairchild would never fly again. The engine, three of its cylinders cracked on impact with the ravine slope, was bent upward on a crazy angle. The wings were amazingly intact as was the airframe, but the undercarriage had been mashed flat with the wheels bent outward.
So much for making repairs and continuing on. Her next problem was to determine her location. She had no idea where she had come down. She judged she had fallen in what they called in Australia a billabong, a dry streambed that is filled seasonally. Only the sand in this one probably hadn't seen water in a hundred years. The sandstorm had died, but the walls of the small gorge where she lay were a good 20 feet high, and she could not see the landscape beyond. Better she didn't. It was colorless, desolate, and ugly beyond description.
She felt a sudden thirst, and the thought of water reminded her of her canteen. She hopped back to the cabin door on one leg, leaned in, and pulled it from under the seat. Its capacity was only half a gallon, and it was less than two thirds full. Kitty realized she'd be lucky if it lasted her more than two or three days and dared not take more than a few sips at a time.
She decided she had to make an attempt at reaching a village or the motor track. It was suicide to stay near the ship. Unless an aircraft flew directly overhead, the Fairchild could not be seen. Still shaky, she stretched out under the shade of the plane and resigned herself to her predicament.
Kitty was soon to discover the incredible contrast of temperatures in the Sahara. During the day, the air climbed to 120 degrees F (49 degrees C) and dropped to 39 degrees F (4 degrees C) at night. The agonizing cold of the night was as torturous as the daytime heat. After suffering twelve hours of burning sun, she scrapped out a burrow in the sand and crawled into it. Then she huddled in a ball, shivering and sleeping fitfully until dawn.
In the early morning of the second day, before the sun began to beat down, she felt strong enough to launch her preparations to abandon the airplane. She fashioned herself a crutch from a wing strut and made a crude umbrella from the wing fabric. Using a small set of tools, she removed the compass from the instrument panel. Despite her injuries, Kitty was determined to strike out for the motor track. She felt she had no alternative.
Feeling better now for having a plan, Kitty took her logbook and began writing the first page of what was to be the account of her perseverance and heroic attempt to survive under the worst conditions imaginable. She opened the entry by describing the crash and sketching her intended trek south down the billabong until she found an easy climb to the rim. Once in the open, she planned to head due east until she picked up the motor track or ran across a tribe of wandering nomads. Then she tore out the page and attached it to the instrument panel so that rescuers could follow her trail in the unlikely event the plane was discovered first.
The heat was rapidly becoming unbearable. Her situation was made even worse by the walls of the gully that reflected and magnified the sun's rays like an open crematorium. She found it difficult to breathe and had to fight off a terrible urge to drink her precious water in large swallows.
One last act before she set out. She unlaced the boot on her fractured ankle and tenderly removed it. The pain forced a soft groan from her lips, and she let it ease before binding the ankle in her silk flying scarf Then with the compass and canteen attached to her belt, the umbrella held high, and the crutch snug under one arm, Kitty set out under the onslaught of the Sahara sun, limping gamely across the sand of the ancient riverbed.
The search for Kitty Mannock continued off and on over the years, but neither she nor her plane were ever sighted. No clue turned up, no camel caravan came across a skeleton in the desert that was dressed in the old- fashioned flying togs of the thirties, no wandering nomad stumbled on the wrecked airplane. Kitty's total disappearance became one of the great mysteries of aviation.
Rumors of Kitty's ultimate fate grew and spread over the decades. Some claimed that she had survived but was suffering from amnesia and living under another name in South America, and many thought she was captured and enslaved by a tribe of Tuaregs. Only Amelia Earhart's flight into the unknown caused more speculation.
The desert held its secret well. The sands became Kitty Mannock's burial shroud. The enigma of her flight to nowhere would not be solved for another half a century.
FRENZY
May 5, 1996
Asselar Oasis, Mali, Africa
After traveling through the desert for days or weeks, seeing no animals, meeting no humans, civilization, no matter how tiny or primitive, comes as a stunning surprise. To the eleven people in the five Land Rovers, plus five tour driver/guides, the sight of a man-made habitat came as a great relief. Hot and unwashed, tired after a week of driving across pure desolation, the adventurous tourists on the Backworld Explorations' twelve-day Across the Sahara Safari were only too happy to see humans and find enough water for a refreshing bath.
They sighted the village of Asselar sitting in barren isolation in the central Sahara region of the African nation of Mali. A sprawl of mud houses clustered around a well in the dry bottom of what must have been an ancient riverbed. Scattered around the outskirts were the crumbling ruins of a hundred or more abandoned houses and beyond them the low banks that dropped below the alluvial plain. From a distance the village was almost impossible to see, so well did the timeworn buildings merge with the austere and colorless landscape.
'Well, there she is,' pointed Major Ian Fairweather, the safari leader, to the tired and dusty tourists who exited the Land Rovers and grouped around him. 'You'd never know to look at her that Asselar was once a cultural crossroads of western Africa. For five centuries it was an important watering hole for the great trade and slave caravans that passed through to the north and east.'
'Why did it go into decline?' asked a comely Canadian woman in halter-top and brief shorts.
'A combination of wars and conquests by the Moors and the French, the abolition of slavery, but mostly because the trade routes moved south and west toward the seacoasts. The deathblow came about forty years ago when its wells began to dry up. The only flowing well that still supports the town has been dug nearly 50 meters deep.'
'Not exactly a metropolitan paradise,' muttered a stout man in a Spanish accent.
Major Fairweather forced a smile. A tall, lean ex-Royal Marine who prodigiously puffed on a long filtered cigarette, he spoke in clipped, seemingly rehearsed tones. 'Only a few Tuareg families that gave up the nomadic tradition reside in Asselar now. They mainly subsist on small herds of goats, patches of sandy soil irrigated by hand from the central village well, and a few handfuls of gemstones gleaned from the desert that they polish and carry by camel to the city of Gao where they sell them as souvenirs.'
A London barrister, impeccably dressed in khaki safari suit and pith helmet, pointed an ebony cane at the village. 'Looks abandoned to me. I seem to recall your brochure stating that our tour group would be `enthralled by the romance of desert music and native dancing under flickering campfires of Asselar.''
'I'm sure our advanced scout has made every arrangement for your comfort and enjoyment,' Fairweather assured him with airy confidence. He gazed for a moment at the sun setting beyond the village. 'It will be dark soon. We'd better move on into the village.'
'Is there a hotel there?' asked the Canadian lady.
Fairweather stifled a pained look. 'No, Mrs. Lansing, we camp in the ruins just beyond the town.'
A collective groan went up from the tourists. They had hoped for a soft bed with private bathrooms. Luxuries Asselar had probably never known.
The group reboarded the vehicles, then drove down a worn trail into the river valley and onto the main road leading through the village. The closer they came the more difficult it was to visualize a glorious past. The streets were narrow alleyways and composed of sand. It seemed a dead town that reeked of defeat. No light was seen in the dusk, no dog barked a greeting. They saw no sign of life in any of the mud buildings. It was as though the inhabitants had packed up and vanished into the desert.
Fairweather began to feel uneasy. Something was clearly wrong. There was no sign of his advance scout. For an instant he caught a glimpse of a large four-legged animal scurrying into a doorway. But it seemed so fleeting, he shrugged it off as a shadow from the moving Land Rovers.
His merry band of clients would be grumbling tonight, he thought. Damn those advertising people for
