It couldn’t be done.
It had to be.
When the giraffe took away with him his patch of shade I realised how fierce the sun had grown. If I did nothing about it, I thought, I would have me a nasty case of sunburn.
The parts of me most relentlessly in the sun were oddly enough my hands. As in most hot-country cars, the top third of the windscreen was tinted green against glare, and if I rolled my head back I could get my face out of the direct rays; but they fell unimpeded on to my lap. I solved the worst of that by unbuttoning my shirt cuffs and tucking my hands in the opposite sleeves, like a muff.
After that I debated the wisdom of taking my shoes and socks off, and of opening a window to let in some fresh and cooler air. I could get my feet, one at a time, up to my hands to get my socks off. I could also swivel enough in my seat to wind the left-hand window handle with my toes.
It wasn’t the thought of invasion by animals that stopped me doing it at once, but the niggling subject of humidity.
The only water available to me for the whole of the time I sat there would be what was contained at that moment in my own body. With every movement and every breath I was depleting the stock, releasing water into the air about me in the form of invisible water vapour. If I kept the windows shut, the water vapour would mostly stay inside the car. If I opened them, it would instantly be lost.
The outside air, after all those rainless months, was as dry as Prohibition. It seemed to me that though I couldn’t stop my body losing a lot of moisture, I could to some extent re-use it. It would take longer, in damper air, for my skin to crack in dehydration. Re-breathing water vapour would go some small way to postponing the time when the mucous linings of nose and throat would dry raw.
So what with one thing and another, I didn’t open the window.
Like a man with an obsession I turned back again and again to the hope-despair see-saw of rescue, one minute convinced that Evan and Conrad would have sent out sorties the moment they found me gone, the next that they would simply have cursed my rudeness and set off by themselves towards the north, where Evan would become so engrossed with olifant that E. Lincoln would fade from his mind like yesterday’s news.
No one else would miss me. Everyone back in Johannesburg — the van Hurens, Roderick, Clifford Wenkins — knew I had gone down to the game reserve for the rest of the week. None of them would expect to hear from me. None of them would expect me back before Tuesday.
The only hope I had lay in Evan and Conrad... and the peasant passing by with his donkey.
At some point during the long afternoon I thought of seeing if I still had in my trouser pockets the things I had had there the day before. I hadn’t emptied the pockets when I undressed, I had just laid my clothes on the second bed.
Investigation showed that my wallet was still buttoned into my rear pocket, because I could feel its shape if I pushed back against the seat. But money, in these circumstances, was useless.
By twisting, lifting myself an inch off the seat, and tugging, I managed to get my right-hand pocket round to centre front, and, carefully exploring, brought forth a total prize of a packet of Iguana Rock book matches, with four matches left, a blue rubber band, and a three-inch stub of pencil with no point.
I put all these carefully back where they came from, and reversed the tugging until I could reach into the left-hand pocket.
Two things only in there. A handkerchief... and the forgotten screwed-up plastic bag from Evan’s sandwiches.
‘Don’t throw plastic bags out of car windows,’ Haagner had said. ‘They can kill the animals.’
And save the lives of men.
Precious, precious plastic bag.
Never cross a desert without one.
I knew how to get half a cup of water every twenty-four hours from a sheet of plastic in a hot climate, but it couldn’t be done by someone strapped into a sitting position inside a car. It needed a hole dug in the ground, a small weight, and something to catch the water in.
All the same, the principle was there, if I could make it work.
Condensation.
The hole in the ground method worked during the night. In the heat of the day one dug a hole, making it about eighteen inches deep, and in diameter slightly smaller than the available piece of plastic. One placed a cup in the hole, in the centre. One spread the sheet of plastic over the hole, and sealed it down round the edges with the dug out earth or sand. And finally one placed a small stone or some coins on the centre of the plastic, weighing it down at a spot directly over the cup.
After that, one waited.
Cooled by the night, the water vapour in the hot air trapped in the hole condensed into visible water droplets, which formed on the cold unporous plastic, trickled downhill to the weighted point, and dripped from there into the cup.
A plastic bagful of hot air should produce a teaspoonful of water by dawn.
It wasn’t much.
After a while I pulled one hand towards me as far as it would go, and leaned forward hard against the seat belt, and found I could reach far enough to blow into the bag if I held its gathered neck loosely with an O of forefinger and thumb.
For probably half an hour I breathed in through my nose, and out through my mouth, into the plastic bag. At the end of that time there were hundreds of small water droplets sticking to the inside of the bag... the water vapour out of my lungs, trapped there instead of escaping into the air.
I turned the bag inside out and licked it. It was wet. When I’d sucked off as much as I could, I laid the cool damp surface against my face, and perhaps because of the paltriness of what I had achieved, felt the first deep stab of desolation.
I fished out the blue rubber band again, and while the sunlit air was still hot, filled the bag with it, twisting the neck tight and fastening it with the band to one side of the steering wheel. It hung there like a fool’s balloon, bobbing lightly away if I touched it.
I had been thirsty all day, but not unbearably.
After dark some hovering internal rumbles identified themselves as hunger. Again, not unbearably.
The bladder problem reappeared and was again a disaster. But. time, I supposed, would lessen the difficulty: no Input, less output.
Hope had to be filed under ‘Pending’, after dark. Twelve hours to be lived before one could climb on to the will-they-won’t-they treadmill again. I found them long, lonely, and dreadful.
The cramps which I had so imaginatively constructed for the film began to afflict my own body in earnest, once the heat of the day drained away and let my muscles grow stiff.
At first I warmed up by another dozen wrenching attempts to break the steering wheel off the control column, the net result of which was considerable wear and tear on me, and none on the car. After that I tried to plan a sensible series of isometric exercises which would keep everything warm and working, but I only got about half of them done.
Against all the odds, I went to sleep.
The nightmare was still there when I woke up.
I was shivering with cold, creakingly stiff, and perceptibly hungrier.
I had nothing to eat but four matches, a handkerchief, and a blunt pencil.
After a small amount of thought I dug out the pencil, and chewed that. Not exactly for the food value, but to bare the lead. With that pencil, I decided, I could bring Danilo down.
Before dawn the realisation crept slowly in that Danilo could not have abandoned me in the car without help. He would have needed someone to drive him away when he had finished locking me in. He wouldn’t have walked through the game reserve, not only because of the danger from animals, but because a man on foot would have been as conspicuous as gallantry.