My throat was starting to dry up and I knew what that meant. Thirst would be worse than hunger, especially out here, but they'd made me a candidate for both of them. As the day wore on, I began to feel dried out. Not only my throat but my body felt dry, baked. I began to walk in short spurts, resting between each one to conserve strength. But I knew that distance and strength weren't the real problem. It was the sun, relentlessly, unyielding, drying me out, withering, sapping all energy — the life-giving sun that was giving death.
By the end of the day my mouth was dry cotton wadding and I'd used up all of my own saliva. My stomach was starting to cramp up and I welcomed the night that covered the sun. The coolness was a form of relief, the millions of stars overhead, somehow a form of hope. I found a small hollow of hard soil and stretched out on it. Sleep was not hard to come by. It drifted over me gently, as though it were a dress rehearsal for death.
I woke up in bright sun, hot and burning, and found my lips cracked and painful. Standing up took an effort. My throat was raw — crying for water — and my stomach was still cramped with hunger. But I moved on to nowhere, in a land that was a huge, burning bush and I an insect on that bush. Only the bush was the arid land, with not even a cactus to break for its precious fluid.
I had kept some track of hours, but as my eyes ached more and more, time became a meaningless nothing, like everything else. By the afternoon, I no longer walked. I crawled along the ground in small moments of energy. The pain in my stomach was a constant, dull ache now, and my throat was swollen and raw. I could have gone much longer without water, certainly without food, if it were not for the relentless sun. But I was being dried away, little by little, and I knew that if I found no relief, I'd soon be as the dust, blown away by the first wind. I had reached a point where anger began to seize me, anger at the unseen foe that I couldn't fight. I staggered to my feet again, fed by the adrenalin inside me, lurched forward like a drunk and then fell. The process was repeated until I had no more anger and no more strength. When night came, I hadn't moved in hours. The night wind stirred me and I opened my mouth to it, hoping it would blow something wet into it. But there was nothing — and I fell back and lay spread-eagled on the ground.
I no longer knew if another day came, or two days, or three. I only knew there was the sun and my aching body, my mind hardly able to think any longer, my eyes barely able to focus. I was crawling along the ground when I raised my head, a major effort now, and strange shapes swam in front of my eyes. I squinted and pressed my hands against my pupils, squeezing out a few drops of lubricating fluid. I finally focused and saw a clump of trees, the short, zig-zag trunked tree the Australians call the Gidgee. My mind thought in slow motion but I realized that no tree lives without water some place. Yet to dig down to where there might be underground water to nourish the roots was as impossible as it would be to climb to the moon. The soil was hard as rock, dried clay, as unyielding as the sun above it.
But then I saw other shapes, some motionless, others moving in long jumps. Kangaroos, the big gray variety, grouped under the Gidgee trees. They would need water to survive. They would lead me to water. I crawled forward. But the mind, distorted by thirst and sun, functions like a short-circuited system, giving off sparks in the wrong places, sending electrical currents through the wrong wires. I inched forward like some hungry wolf, drawing closer to the kangaroos. Dimly, I remembered that the kangaroos had a kick that could kill a man. I had to watch out for those huge back legs and feet. Inching still closer, I rose up on my haunches and stayed motionless.
The kangaroo is a curious beast and finally two of them hopped toward me cautiously. A big male came closest and, with my sun-baked mind intent on the impossible, I waited. When he hopped still closer, I leaped with the strength borne of desperation. I landed on his back, wrapping my arms around his neck, my legs around his back like a big jockey on a strange steed. The big 'roo, as the Australians call the animals, took off in a gigantic bound. He landed and I lost my grip. He leaped again and I went sailing off into the air to come down on the hard, dry ground with a tremendous crash. It would have been a doubtful move in possession of all my strength and wits. In my present state, it was a piece of pure foolishness — the result of my tortured, distorted mind.
I lay there and felt the sun drift away as everything closed in on me, a blanket of grayness deepening into a void of nothingness. I lay still, unfeeling, uncaring, and the world stopped for me.
V
I felt the wetness as though it were coming from some distant world. I was no longer a part of it. And yet it was calling to me, beckoning me through the senses. The dried, stiffened, sunbaked muscles of my eyes moved and my eyelids fluttered, finally opening on a blurred world of fuzzy shapes. Again I felt the wetness, this time cool and soothing against my eyes. Slowly, the fuzzy shapes began to sort themselves out and I saw heads looking down at me. I tried to raise my head but the effort was too much and I opened my mouth, gasping, like a fish out of water. I felt the cool wetness dripping into my mouth, trickling down my throat and suddenly it came to me. I was alive. 1 swallowed and more water trickled down through the swollen, raw lining of my throat.
I looked up at the faces again. Some were brown, some beige, some had dark, wavy hair, one old man had hair that was almost blond. They had wide noses and fine lips, weathered eyes. Strong but gentle hands were helping me to sit up, and I saw old women in tattered shirts and young naked girls, with small breasts already hanging low. The men were fine boned mostly, none too large. I knew who they were, but they couldn't say the same about me. I was a human being they'd found near death, alone, without water or food, on this severe, unrelenting land — their land, the land of the Australian aborigine. They were a distinct people, these aborigines, anthropologically and racially, probably the oldest race of nomadic tribesmen in the world. Their origins still shrouded in the dim mists of history, they lived on in the vast Australian outback, some rubbing shoulders with civilization, others remote as their ancestors were a thousand years ago.
I looked around. They had carried me to their village, if it could be called a village. It was little more than a collection of cloths hung on poles around which a family or a group gathered in small knots. But the effort of looking around was exhausting and I fell back upon the ground. I felt damp cloths being wrapped around my blistered skin and I went to sleep.
It was probably hours later when I woke to see an old man on his haunches beside me and a small campfire burning low. He took a clay bowl from the fire and gestured for me to sit up and drink. The liquid, whatever it was, had a sharp, almost bitter taste to it, but I got it down and I could feel it inside me, warming, the way good bourbon makes your body tingle.
I lay on my side and watched the old man as he worked on a boomerang with crude tools. A spear and a woomera, a device for throwing the spear, lay on the ground beside him. I watched him for a while and then fell asleep again. It was night when I woke and the land was dotted by small campfires. My throat felt better and my strength a returning. A young girl came over to me holding the leg of a bird, a huge leg that could only have come from an emu, the giant flightless bird related to the ostrich, I ate it slowly — it had a strong but not unpleasant flavor. I realized, of course, that a piece of rawhide would probably have a not unpleasant flavor to me at the time. I was still quick to tire and I fell asleep again after eating. But in the morning, I managed to get up, a little shaky at first, but able to walk. I towered over most of the aborigines but here, in this, their land, I was a pretty helpless giant. We could not communicate in words, but I learned how effective the use of signs and gestures could be.