It was the American who got the right idea. He swung his sack off his back and thrust a corner of it down into the mud. He waited some minutes, pulled out the sack and sucked at the damp corner. We followed his example. The amount of water we obtained in this way was infinitesimal compared with our raging, thirteen-day-old thirst, but it was something and it gave us hope. We began to talk again for the first time for days, to exchange suggestions. We decided to walk along the watercourse with the idea that if at this point there was dampness, somewhere there must be real water.
The creek narrowed until it was a mere crack in the ground and here we found water collected in tiny pools in the mud. By pressing down our cupped hands, palms uppermost, we were able to drink, really to drink again, to feel water trickling down our parched throats. We drank it, sand, mud and all, in ecstasy. It was probably as well that we were prevented from gulping it down in large quantities. After each drink there was a waiting period of several minutes before the little hollows filled again with up-seeping water. My split, puffed and bleeding lips burned as the water touched them. I held the water in my mouth before swallowing and washed it about my tongue, my tender gums and aching teeth.
For a couple of hours we lay sprawled out exhausted close against the creek. Then we drank some more. Late in the afternoon Zaro pulled off his moccasins and sat with his feet deep in the cool mud. He smiled through his broken lips at the bliss of it and called out to us to join him. We sat round in a rough circle. After those never-ending hot days with blistered and cracked feet being pushed on and on through the burning sand, this was an experience of wonderful relief. After a while I felt the water slowly trickling through into the depressions made by my feet. The balm of it seemed even to ease the aching bones. Now and again I pulled out my feet just for the joy of dropping them back again into the squelching mud.
Sitting there in the only comfort we had known since the far distant oasis, we began to talk, to face up to our still bleak future and to plan. The first fact was that we were starving and near the end of our strength. The second was that, in spite of this God-sent ribbon of moisture, we were still in the desert and the prospect was unchanged for as many miles ahead as we could see. The first decision reached was that we would stay here for a night and a day. This night we would sleep and in the morning we would make an extended exploration along the creek, hoping to find at some point flowing water. Where there was water, we reasoned, there might be life, something we could eat.
Early next morning we piled our fufaikas in a mound, split into two trios and set off in opposite directions along the creek. Kolemenos, the American and I in one party walked a mile or more eastward and found nothing. At times the watercourse disappeared entirely, as though it had gone underground. When we found it again it was still only a damp trail. Reluctantly we concluded that if there were flowing water it must be in some spring below ground and inaccessible to us. Two remarkably healthy-looking snakes were the only sign of life we encountered. We turned back and arrived at the meeting point. We had some time to wait for Zaro, Marchinkovas and Paluchowicz, and had begun to entertain some hopes that their delayed return might mean good tidings when we saw them approaching. Zaro stretched out his hands palms downwards to indicate that the investigation had produced nothing.
‘No luck,’ said Marchinkovas as they came up to us.
‘We found nothing, either,’ I told them.
We drank more of the brown, turgid water. We bathed our feet again and watched the sun mounting in the sky.
Kolemenos spoke. ‘All this bloody desert and only us and a few snakes to enjoy it. They can’t eat us and we can’t eat them.’
‘Only half-true, that statement.’ It was Mister Smith. ‘It is not unknown for men to eat snakes.’
There was an immediate ripple of interest.
Mister Smith stroked his greying beard thoughtfully. ‘American Indians eat them. I have seen tourists in America tempted into trying them. I never tried to eat snake myself. I suppose it’s a natural human revulsion against reptiles.’
We sat in silence a while thinking over what he had said.
He broke in on our thoughts. ‘You know, gentlemen, I think snakes are our only chance. There’s hardly anything a starving man can’t eat.’
The idea fascinated and repelled at the same time. We talked for a while about it but I think we all knew we were going to make the experiment. There was no choice.
‘We need a forked stick to catch them,’ said Marchinkovas, ‘and we haven’t got one.’
‘No difficulty about that,’ I told him. ‘We’ll split the bottoms of a couple of our sticks and jam a small pebble into the cleft.’
Kolemenos got up off his haunches. ‘Let’s make a start with the sticks straightaway.’
We decided to use Zaro’s and Paluchowicz’s. The splitting was done by Kolemenos with the axe. The wood was bound with thongs above the split and the small stones rammed home. The result was two efficient-looking instruments.
‘How shall we know if the snakes are poisonous? Shall we be able to eat the poisonous kind?’ This was Paluchowicz, and he was echoing a doubt that existed in most of our minds.
‘There is nothing to worry about,’ said the American. ‘The poison is contained in a sac at the back of the head. When you cut off the head you will have removed the poison.’
Apart from catching our meal, there remained one problem — fuel for a fire to do the cooking. We turned out our bags for the bits of tinder we always carried. Heaped together the pile was bigger than we had expected. From the bottom of his sack Zaro brought out three or four pats of dried animal dung and solemnly placed them on the collection of hoarded fuel. On another occasion we might have laughed, but smiling through split lips was painful.
‘I picked it up at the oasis,’ said Zaro. ‘I thought it might be needed for fires some time.’
I was sorry that we all had not done as Zaro had done back there. This dried animal waste was excellent fuel which burned slowly and produced fair heat. There had been occasions, too, since the oasis when we had come across little heaps of sun-dried debris deposited by the swirling, dancing whirlwinds which we had seen spiralling across the desert. But we had been too intent on our plodding progress to stop and gather these tiny harvests of the wind. From now on the search for tinder was to be a preoccupation ranking almost in importance with the hunt for snakes.
Smith and I got down to the job of preparing a fire while the others went off with the two forked sticks. We scratched down through the powdery top sand to the layer of bigger grains below and through that to the bed of small stones beneath. We were looking for a thin flat stone on which to cook our snake. It was fully an hour before we found one. Among the surrounding dunes we had glimpses of the others creeping quietly around in their quest for some unsuspecting reptile. In the way of things in this life, they spent a couple of hours without seeing a sign of one. When we cared nothing for them we seemed always to be finding them.
The fire was laid. In the blazing sun the flat stone seemed already hot enough for cooking (certainly I think it would have fried an egg easily). Marchinkovas came back to us droop-shouldered. ‘The snakes must have heard we had changed our minds about them,’ he said wryly. The three of us sat around the unlighted fire in silence for about another half-an-hour. There came suddenly a great yell from Zaro. We could not see him but we saw Kolemenos and Paluchowicz running in the direction of the sound. We got up and ran, too.
About fifty yards away Zaro had his snake. His stick was firmly about the writhing body a couple of inches behind the head and Zaro was sweating with the exertion of holding it there. We could not judge the size of the creature because all but about six inches of it was hidden in a hole in the sand and the wriggling power of the concealed length was slowly inching the stick back towards the hole. We were tired, weak, slow and clumsy and we ran around and got in one another’s way in an effort to help Zaro. Then Paluchowicz jabbed his stick a couple of inches behind Zaro’s. I pulled a thong from about my waist, slipped a loop about the snake against the hole and heaved. But there was too much snake inside and too little outside. It was stalemate.