Five hundred feet We swooped downward like a bird with a broken wing. Three hundred. The acacia trees slid past underneath. One hundred. Salomos' face was rigid with tension, and his arms were corded with his efforts at the controls. Then there was a rushing of grass and thornbush at a dizzying speed, a wing being rent by the limb of a twisted tree, and the plane nosing up slightly at the last moment, sliding around sideways. The impact threw us against the front of the plane. There was a grinding and screeching of metal and a loud shattering of glass, and our bodies were punched around in the small cabin. Then came the final crashing stop, with my door flying open and my body flying head over heels through the grass to a crunching impact with the hard ground.
I remember nothing beyond that, except for. crawling painfully through the grass, instinctively dragging myself away from the plane, and then the explosion with the sound of flames crackling somewhere behind me.
Two
I tried to push the memory of the crash out of my mind as I leaned heavily against the hard clay of the tall termite mound. But it was more difficult to eliminate the expression on the face of Alexis Salomos, the way it had looked in Salisbury, when I had said I would fly to Bulawayo with him.
There was still the insistent buzzing of flies beyond the glinting metallic hulk of the wrecked plane, but I tried not to listen. I focused again on the distant line of fever trees on the grassy horizon. Somewhere I had learned that fever trees sometimes announce the presence of water. But these trees were not in the direction that I had to walk to reach the village.
In a way I felt responsible for Salomos' tragic death. He had trusted me to help, and I had been incapable of doing so when he had needed me. He had expected counsel from me, and I had not foreseen the danger of the small plane. Also, I felt guilty because I had not totally believed his incredible story. However, his bloody corpse was blatant proof that at least part of his theory had been valid. Someone had wanted him dead. Whether that person was someone living in the penthouse above the Apollo offices in Athens was still open to question.
I caught a movement in the corner of my eye and turned toward one of the chimney entrances of the termite mound. A small, bright green snake glided out of the opening a short distance from my left arm and seemed to stare at me. I jumped away. I didn't know that snakes took up residence in termite mounds. This one was a green mamba, one of the world's three steps snakes. If bitten, the victim would be able to put about three steps between himself and the reptile before its venom would kill him. The mamba, out of striking distance for the moment, slithered into an adjacent chimney.
I stumbled over to the wreckage as my pulse subsided. I looked around for a moment and found a sharp sliver of metal about a foot long on the ground. One end of it was very sharp. Ripping off a piece of wooden molding, partly charred, from a section of fuselage, I broke it into two pieces of equal length and splinted the wide end of the shard, tying the sticks on with my handkerchief to make a handle for my makeshift knife. I stuck the crude weapon into my belt and, without looking back at the wreck, started off toward the trees.
It was difficult just to walk in the bush country. The tall grass and the thornbushes pulled at my clothing and raked my flesh, grabbing at me and holding me back. A hornbill shrieked at me from a nearby acacia. I found myself calculating the odds against survival. There are a hundred ways to die out there, and none of them are pleasant. In that grass, a man can walk right into a lion before he sees it. But it is the small creatures that generally cause the most trouble: snakes no bigger around than a man's finger and scorpions and ticks that burrow deep under the skin. If you find and drink the water, you may be plagued with liver flukes and other parasites that eat at a man from inside. And if you avoid these, you may still be attacked by the mosquitoes that carry yellow fever and malaria.
When I finally arrived at the trees, I found only the remains of a waterhole. The place had dried up. There was thick, black mud at the center and the hoofprints of many animals at the perimeter of the area.
I leaned against the green trunk of the nearest tree and rested in the shade. I had wasted my time and energy in coming here. The direction to the nearest village, the one that Salomos had mentioned in the plane, was at ninety degrees to the course that had brought me to this place. The walk in the boiling sun had weakened me even more. My mouth was like tanned leather. I remembered the thermos with its cold water that Salomos had brought aboard the plane. I had seen its crushed cylinder in the wreckage; its contents had boiled away in the fire. I tried not to think of the tropical sun overhead, or of the thirst in my throat, and began walking.
It must have been a couple of hours later when I came to the realization that I could go no farther without rest. My legs were trembling with weakness, and I was drawing air into my lungs in long rasping breaths. I saw the dead stump of a tree, part of it in the sparse shadow of an adjacent thornbush, just a few yards ahead. I slumped heavily to the ground and propped myself against the stump. Just the act of sitting down, the relief from the physical exertion of walking, was satisfying.
My eyelids closed, and I ignored the aching in my body. I tried to forget the small muscles twitching in my thighs and the insect bites on my face and arms. I needed rest and I was going to get it. To hell with anything else.
A sound came from the bush.
My eyelids fluttered open. Had I been mistaken? I peered into the tall grass, but I saw nothing. It must have been my imagination. I closed my eyes again, but the sound was repeated.
This time my eyes opened more quickly. There was no doubt of it; it had been the sound of a human voice. I strained my ears and heard a twig break.
"It was something!" I muttered.
Then the sound became more constant and more distinct. Two men were talking in what appeared to be some bush dialect that I had never heard.
"Hello!" I yelled with the last of my strength. "Over here!"
In another moment I saw their heads moving toward me above the grass. Black heads and khaki shirts. As they saw me, their voices increased in volume, and one of them pointed.
I relaxed a little. I had been closer to civilization than I had thought. There must be a village somewhere nearby, or at least a road. The men were emerging from the grass and staring at me. They were tall, slim, and grim-faced.
"Hello," I said. "Do you have water?"
The men looked at each other, then back at me. They came and stood over me. I didn't try to get up. "Water," I said.
They were both dressed very shabbily in western clothes and wore makeshift sandals. The taller of the two pointed at my feet, and in a moment he was bending down and untying my shoe. Before I could ask what he was doing, he had taken it off and was holding it up to his companion. The one holding my shoe up for inspection had a large, wide scar that ran diagonally across his face. The other wore a small mirror in the stretched lobe of his right ear. Both carried pangas, machete-type knives, in their belts.
The tall one spoke to the other, and I realized he was speaking Swahili. "Mzuri sana," he said, grinning, referring to my shoes. He continued in Swahili. "This is my lucky day."
"Listen to me," I began weakly.
They ignored me. The tall man bent and untied my other shoe. I tried to pull my foot back, but he gave me a vicious look and yanked the second shoe from it. He kicked off his own shabby sandals and jammed my shoes onto his feet, not bothering to tie the laces. "Sawasawa!" he said to his companion, ignoring me completely now.
I realized, quite abruptly, that these men were not going to be my saviors. And it occurred to me that I just might be worse off than before their arrival, if I was counting on survival.