It took another tragedy to dull the sharp edges of our memory of her. Oddly, too, it relieved some of the load of guilt I felt about her death.
On the eighth day out from the oasis Sigmund Makowski pitched over into the sand. His arms were still at his sides when his face thumped down and he had made no effort to use his stick to prevent the fall. He lay there a minute or two and was barely conscious. We looked down at him and saw the tell-tale sign. Over the top of his moccasins the flesh was soft and puffy. We exchanged glances and said nothing. We turned him round and flapped our sacks in his face and he recovered quickly. He got to his feet, shook his head from side to side, grabbed his stick and plunged off. He keeled over again and again, but he kept going. And all the time the sickening flabby swelling grew upwards and weighed upon his legs.
Makowski lasted longer after the first onset than Kristina had done. On the ninth day he must have slumped down half-a-dozen times in a couple of hours. Then, lying flat and heaving desperately with his arms to get himself to his knees, he called out the name of Kolemenos. Both Kolemenos and I knelt down beside him.
‘If you give me a hand to get to my feet, I can keep going.’
Kolemenos took one arm, I took the other. We got Makowski upright. Feebly he shook our hands off and stood swaying. I felt myself choking as he staggered off like a drunken man, still going forward, but weaving from side to side, stabbing his stick into the yielding sand as he went. The six of us stood there hopelessly and watched him go.
‘Mustn’t let him fall again,’ Kolemenos said to me.
It was not difficult to catch up with him. Kolemenos took his stick from him and we took an arm each. We put his arms about our shoulders and stepped out. He swung his head round to each of us in turn and gave a bit of a smile. He kept his legs moving, but progressively more weakly so that towards the end of the day he was an intolerable, sagging burden about our necks.
That night he seemed to sleep peacefully and in the morning of the tenth day he was not only still alive but appeared to have regained some strength. He set off with the rest of us dragging his feet but unaided. He moved for half-an-hour before his first fall, but thereafter he pitched over repeatedly until Kolemenos and I again went to his rescue. When the time came to make our noon-day halt he was draped about our shoulders like a sack and his legs had all but ceased to move. Mister Smith and Paluchowicz eased his weight away from us and gently laid him down on his back. Then we put up the shelter and squatted down around him. He lay quite still and only his eyes seemed to be alive.
After a while he closed his eyes and I had thought he had gone, but he was still breathing quietly. He opened his eyes again. The lids came down and this time he was dead. There was no spasm, no tremor, no outward sign to show that life had departed the body. Like Kristina, he had no words for us at the end.
The dossier for Sigmund Makowski, aged 37, ex-captain of the Polish frontier forces, Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, was closed. Somewhere in Poland he had a wife. I would like her some day to know he was a brave man. We buried him there in the Gobi. The first grave we scratched out was too small and we had to lift out the body and enlarge the hole. We laid his sack, empty of food for so long, that he had carried with him for two thousand or more miles, over his face, and scooped the sand over him. Kolemenos made another small wooden cross, we said our prayers and we left him.
I tried hard to keep count of the days. I tried, too, to remember if I had ever read how long a man can keep alive without food and water. My head ached with the heat. Often the blackest pall of despair settled on me and I felt we were six doomed men toiling inevitably to destruction. With each hopeless dawn the thought recurred: Who will be next? We were six dried-out travesties of men shuffling, shuffling. The sand seemed to get deeper, more and more reluctant to let our ill-used feet go. When a man stumbled he made a show of getting quickly on his legs again. Quite openly now we examined our ankles for the first sign of swelling, for the warning of death.
In the shadow of death we grew closer together than ever before. No man would admit to despair. No man spoke of fear. The only thought spoken out again and again was that there must be water soon. All our hope was in this. Over every arid ridge of hot sand I imagined a tiny stream and after each waterless vista there was always another ridge to keep the hope alive.
Two days after Makowski’s death we were reaching the limits of endurance. I think it was about the twelfth day out from the oasis. We walked only for about six hours on that day. We moved along in pairs now. There was no effort to choose partners. The man next to you was your friend and you took each other’s arms and held each other up and kept moving. The only life we saw in the desert about us were snakes which lay still, heads showing and the length of their bodies hidden in deep holes in the sand. I wondered how they lived. They showed no fear of us and we had no desire to molest them. Once we did see a rat, but generally the snakes seemed to have the desert to themselves.
At the end of that twelfth day I was arm-in-arm with Zaro. Mister Smith and Paluchowicz were helping each other along and Kolemenos walked with Marchinkovas. In the middle of the night I felt a fever of desire to get moving again. I think I knew that if the miracle did not happen within the next twenty-four hours we could not expect to survive. I stuck it out until a couple of hours before dawn. Marchinkovas, Zaro and the American were awake, so I shook Kolemenos and Paluchowicz. I rasped at them through my dry and aching throat. I stood up. No one argued. As I started away they were with me. Paluchowicz stumbled a little at first because he was still not quite awake and his legs were stiff, but soon we were paired off again and making distance south.
It was easy to imagine in those pre-dawn hours that we were re-covering ground we had trudged over before, but the first light of the rising sun showed we were on course. We tacked from side to side as we walked, two by two, but it seemed to me we had made a remarkable number of tortured miles by the time the heat forced us to stop and rest. It was almost too much trouble to erect our flimsy canopy, but we did it because it was by now one of the habits of survival.
We sweated it out for about three hours in throbbing discomfort, mouths open, gasping in the warm desert air over enlarged, dust-covered tongues. I eased the sticky pebble round my sore gums to create a trickle of saliva so that I could swallow. I was at my lowest ebb, working on the very dregs of stamina and resolution. It was the devil’s own job to haul ourselves upright again. We were all perilously weak and dangerously near death.
All my visions of water had been of exquisite cool ponds and murmuring streams. The water that saved our lives was an almost dried-out creek, the moisture compounded with the mud at the bottom of a channel not more than a couple of yards wide. We came over the last ridge and failed to see it. We were looking for water and this was no more than a slimy ooze which the killing desert was reluctant to reveal to us. We were almost on it before we saw it. We fell on our faces and sucked at the mud and dabbled our hands in it. For a few minutes we acted like demented men. We chewed mud for the moisture it contained and spat out the gritty residue.