Sahara (49 page)

Late in the afternoon Pitt stepped outside the cave into the unremitting fire from the sun to set up his pipe for another compass reading. Only a few minutes in that open oven and he felt as if he was melting like a wax candle. He picked out a large rock that protruded from the horizon about 5 kilometers due east as a goal for the first hour of walking.

When he returned to the cool comfort of the cave of murals he did not have to feel the exhaustion and suffering or realize how weak he had become. His misery was all reflected in Giordino’s hollow eyes, the filthy clothes, and grizzled hair, but especially in the look of a man who had come to the end of his rope.

They had endured countless dangers together, but Pitt had never seen Giordino with the look of defeat before. The psychological stress was winning over physical toughness. Giordino was pragmatic to the core. He met setbacks and hard knocks with characteristic stubbornness, assaulting them head-on. Unlike Pitt, he could not use the power of his imagination to banish the torture of thirst and the screaming pain of a body begging to wind down from lack of food and water. He could not bring himself to sink into a dreamworld where torment and despair were substituted with swimming pools, tall tropical drinks, and endless buffet tables piled high with appetizing delicacies.

Pitt could see that tonight was the last. If they were to beat the desert at its deadly game, they would have to redouble their determination to survive. Another twenty-four hours without water would finish them off. No strength would be left to go on. He was grimly afraid that the Trans-Saharan Track was a good 50 kilometers too far.

He gave Giordino another hour of rest before prodding him out of a dead sleep. “We have to leave now if we want to make any distance before the next sun.”

Giordino opened his eyes into mere slits and struggled to a sitting position. “Why not stay in here another day and just take it easy?”

“Too many men, women, and children are counting on us to save ourselves so we can return and save them. Every hour counts.”

The fleeting thought of the suffering women and frightened children down in the Tebezza gold mines was enough to wake Giordino from the heavy fog of sleep and bring him dazedly to his feet. Then at Pitt’s urging, they feebly managed a few minutes of stretching exercises to loosen their aching muscles and stiff joints. One last look at the astounding rock paintings, their eyes lingering on the image of the rebel ironclad, and they set out across the great, sloping plateau, Pitt leading off toward the rock he’d pinpointed to the east.

This was it. Except for short rest stops, they had to forge on until they reached the track and were found by a passing motorist, hopefully one with a hefty supply of water. Whatever happened, searing heat, sand driven by the wind that blasted skin, difficult terrain, they had to keep going until they dropped or found rescue.

After having done its damage for the day, the sun slipped away and a swollen half moon took its place. Not a breath of air stirred the sand and the desert went profoundly still and silent. The desolate landscape seemed to reach into infinity, and the rocks protruding from the plateau like dinosaur bones still gave off shimmering waves from the day’s heat. Nothing moved except the shadows that crept and lengthened behind the rocks like wraiths coming to life in the evening’s fading light.

They walked on for seven hours. The rock used as a compass point came and went as the night wore on and became colder. Dreadfully weak and wasted, they began to shiver uncontrollably. The extreme ups and downs in temperature made Pitt feel as if he was experiencing seasonal changes, with the heat of day as summer, the evening as fall, midnight as winter, morning as spring.

The change in terrain came so gradually, he didn’t realize the rocks and iron outcroppings had grown smaller and vanished completely. Only when he stopped to glance up at the stars for a heading and then looked ahead did he see they had come off the gradual slope of the plateau onto a flat plain cut by a series of wadis, or dry streams, carved out by long dead water flows or forgotten flash floods.

Their progress slowed with fatigue and tapered to a plodding stumble. The weariness, the sheer exhaustion, were like weights they were forced to carry on their shoulders. They walked and kept on walking, their misery deepening. Yet they made slow and even progress toward the east on what little strength they could spare. They were so weak that after the rest stops they could hardly rise to their feet and take up the struggle again.

Pitt kept himself going with images of how O’Bannion and Melika were treating the women and children in that hell pit of a mine. He had visions of Melika’s thong viciously striking helpless victims and slaves, sick from deprivation and overwork. How many had died in the days since he had escaped? Had Eva been carried to the chamber of corpses? He might have pushed aside such dire thoughts, but he let them linger since they only served to spur him to become a man beside himself, ignoring the suffering and continuing with the cold fortitude of a machine.

Pitt found it odd that he couldn’t remember when he last spit. Though he sucked on small pebbles to relieve the relentless thirst, he could not even recall when he felt saliva in his mouth. His tongue had swelled like a dry sponge and felt as if it was dusted with alum, and yet he found he could still swallow.

They had lessened the loss of perspiration by walking in the cool of nigh! and keeping their shirts on during the day to help control sweat evaporation without missing some of its cooling effects. But he realized that their bodies were badly desalinated, which contributed to their weakened condition.

Pitt tried every trick he could dredge up from his memory on desert survival, including breathing through his nose to prevent water loss and talking very little, and only then when they took a rest.

They came to a narrow river of sand that ran through a valley of boulder-strewn hills. They followed the riverbed until it turned north, and then climbed its bank and continued on their course. Another day was breaking, and Pitt paused to check Fairweather’s map, holding up the tattered paper away from the brightening sky in the east. The rough drawing indicated a vast dry lake that stretched nearly unbroken to the Trans-Saharan Track. Though the level ground made for easier walking, Pitt saw a murderous environment, an open holocaust where shade did not exist.

There could be no resting during the fiery heat of the day. The ground was too gravelly firm to burrow under its surface. They would have to keep going and endure heat with the ferocity of an open flame. Already the sun was bursting into the sky and signaling another day of hideous torture.

The agony wore on and a few clouds appeared, hiding the sun, giving the men nearly two hours of grateful relief. And then the clouds drifted on and dissipated and the sun returned, hotter than ever. By noon Pitt and Giordino were barely clinging to life. If the heat of the day didn’t conquer their agonized bodies the long night of intense cold surely would.

Then abruptly, they came to a deep ravine with steeply sloping banks that dropped 7 meters below the surface of the dry lake, slicing across it almost like a man-made canal.

Because he was staring down at the ground Pitt nearly walked off the edge. He staggered to a halt, gazing despairingly at the unexpected barrier. There was simply not enough left in him to climb down into the bottom of the ravine and struggle up the other side. Giordino stumbled up beside him and collapsed, his body sagging limply before sinking to the ground, his head and arms hanging over the rim of the ravine.

As Pitt gazed across the crack in the dry lake at the vast nothingness ahead, he knew their epic struggle of endurance had come to an end. They had covered only 30 kilometers and there were another 50 to go.

Giordino slowly turned and looked up at Pitt, who was still on his feet, but swaying unsteadily, gazing at the eastern horizon as if seeing the goal that was tantalizingly near but impossible to reach.

Pitt, spent and played out as he was, appeared magnificent. His rugged, severe face, his full stature, his incisive piercing opaline eyes, his nose thrust forward like a bird of prey, his head enveloped by a dusty white towel through which straggled the strands of his wavy black hair—none gave him the appearance of a man suffering defeat, and facing certain death.

His gaze swept the bottom of the ravine in both directions and stopped, a puzzled expression forming in the eyes that peered through the narrow opening in his toweled turban. “My sanity is gone,” he whispered.

Giordino lifted his head. “I lost mine about 20 kilometers back on the trail.”

“I swear I see . . .” Pitt shook his head slowly and rubbed his eyes. “It must be a mirage.”

Giordino stared across the great empty furnace. Sheets of water shimmered in the distance under the heat waves. The imagined sight of what he so desperately craved was more than Giordino could bear. He turned away.

“Do you see it?” Pitt asked.

“With my eyes closed,” Giordino rasped faintly. “I can see a saloon with dancing girls beckoning with huge mugs of ice cold beer.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I, but if you mean that phony lake out there on the flats, forget it.”

“No,” Pitt said briefly. “I mean that airplane down there in the gully.”

At first, Giordino thought his friend had lost it, but then he slowly rolled back on his stomach and stared downward in the direction Pitt was facing.

Nothing manufactured by man disintegrates or rots in the desert. The worst that can occur is the pitting of metal by the driving sand. There, resting against one bank of the sterile streambed like an alien aberration, scoured and rustless, with almost no erosion or coating of dust, sat a wrecked airplane. It appeared to be an old high-wing monoplane that had lain in crippled solitude for several decades.

“Do you see it?” Pitt repeated. “Or have I gone mad?”

“Not if I’ve gone mad too,” said Giordino in abject astonishment. “It looks like a plane all right.”

“Then it must be real.”

Pitt helped Giordino to his feet, and they stumbled along the brink of the ravine until they were standing directly over the wreck. The fabric on the fuselage and wings was amazingly still intact, and they could plainly read the identification numbers. The aluminum propeller had shattered when it came in contact with the bank, and the radial engine with its exposed cylinders was partially shoved back into the cockpit and tilted upward in broken mountings. But for that, and the collapsed landing gear, the plane seemed little damaged. They saw, too, the indentations on the ground, made when the plane made contact before running off the edge into the bottom of the dry wash.

“How long do you think it’s been here?” croaked Giordino.

“At least fifty, maybe sixty years,” Pitt replied.

“The pilot must have survived and walked out.”

“He didn’t survive,” said Pitt. “Under the port wing. The legs of a body are showing.”

Giordino’s stare moved beneath the left wing. One old-fashioned lace-up leather boot and a section of tattered khaki pants protruded from under the shadow of the wing. “Think he’ll mind if we join him? He’s got the only shade in town.”

“My thoughts precisely,” said Pitt, stepping off the edge and sliding down the steep bank on his back, raising his knees and using his feet as brakes.

Giordino was right beside him, and together they dropped into the dry streambed in a shower of loose gravel and dust. As in their initial excitement during their discovery of the cave of the paintings, all cravings of thirst were temporarily deprived of stimulation as they staggered to their feet and approached the long-dead pilot.

Sand had drifted over the lower part of the figure that lay with its back resting against the fuselage of the airplane. A crude crutch fashioned from a wing strut lay near one exposed foot that was missing a boot. The aircraft’s compass lay nearby, half embedded in the sand.

The pilot was amazingly well preserved. The fiery heat and the frigid cold had worked together to mummify the body so that any skin that showed was darkened and smoothly textured like tanned leather. There was a recognizable expression of tranquility and contentment on the face, and the hands, rigid from over sixty years of inertness, were clasped peacefully across the stomach. An early flier’s leather helmet with goggles lay draped over one leg. Black hair, matted and stiff and filled with dust after weathering the elements for so long, fell below the shoulders.

“My God,” muttered Giordino dazedly. “It’s a woman.”

“In her early thirties,” observed Pitt. “She must have been very pretty.”

“I wonder who she was,” Giordino panted curiously.

Pitt stepped around the body and untied a packet wrapped in oilskin that was attached to the cockpit door handle. He carefully pulled open the oilskin, which revealed a pilot’s log book. He opened the cover and read the first page.

“Kitty Mannock,” Pitt read the name aloud.

“Kitty, who?”

“Mannock, a famous lady flier, Australian as I recall. Her disappearance became one of aviation’s greatest mysteries, second only to that of Amelia Earhart.”

“How did she come to be here?” asked Giordino, unable to take his eyes off her body.

“She was trying for a record-breaking flight from London to Cape Town. After she vanished, the French military forces in the Sahara made a systematic search but found no trace of her or her plane.”

“Too bad she came down in the only ravine within 100 kilometers. She’d have easily been spotted from the air if she’d landed on the dry lake’s surface.”

Pitt thumbed through the pages in the log book until they went blank. “She crashed on October 10, 1931. Her last entry was written on October 20.”

“She survived ten days,” Giordino murmured in admiration. “Kitty Mannock must have been one tough lady.” He stretched out under the shade of the wing and sighed wearily through his cracked and swollen lips. “After all this time she’s finally going to have company.”

Pitt wasn’t listening. His attention was focused on a wild thought. He slipped the log book into his pants pocket and began examining the remains of the aircraft. He paid no regard to the engine, checking out the landing gear instead. Though the struts were flattened out from the impact, the wheels were undamaged and the tires showed little sign of rot. The small tail wheel was also in good condition.