The Long Walk (27 page)

‘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.

Kolemenos settled the issue. The bright blade of his axe swished down and separated the snake’s head from its body. The still wriggling length was hauled into the sunlight. The thing was
nearly four feet long. It was as thick as a man’s wrist, black above, with a creamy-brown belly lightening to a dull cream-white at the throat.

Zaro struck a pose. ‘There’s your dinner, boys.’

The thing still twitched as we carried it back to the fire. We laid it on my sack and, under the direction of the American, I started to skin it. The beginning of the operation was tricky. Smith
said the skin could be peeled off entire but I could get no grip at the neck. Eventually I slit the skin a few inches down and with difficulty started to part the snake from its tight sheath. I had
never seen an unclothed snake before. The flesh was whitish at first, but in the sun it turned a little darker while we waited for the fire to bring the flat stone to the right heat. We cut the
body lengthwise and cleaned it out.

There was still a little reflex of life left as we curled the meat up on the stone over the fire. It sizzled pleasantly. Fat trickled down off the stone and made the fire spit. We streamed sweat
as we sat around the fire. We could not take our eyes off the snake. With our sticks we lifted the stone off, turned the meat and put it back for the final stage of grilling, When we thought it was
ready to eat we lifted it, stone and all, on to the sand to cool a little.

It lay eventually on my sack a yard or two away from the dying fire. We squatted round it but nobody seemed in a hurry to start carving it up. We looked at one another. Kolemenos spoke. ‘I
am bloody hungry.’ He reached forward. We all went for it at the same time. Paluchowicz, the man without teeth, stretched his hand out to me for the knife. We ate. It was not long before the
snake was reduced to a skeleton. The flesh was close-packed and filling. I had thought the taste might be powerful, even noxious. It was in fact mild, almost tasteless. It had no odour. I was
faintly reminded of boiled, unseasoned fish.

‘I wish I had thought of snakes earlier,’ said Mister Smith.

We drank some more of the muddy water. We watched the sun drop from its zenith. We knew that soon we must move again, and we were reluctant to go, to leave this precious ribbon of moisture and
launch out again into the unknown, heat-baked country ahead. Sprawled out there, my stomach rumbling as it contended with its barbaric new meal, I longed for a smoke. We still had newspaper but the
tobacco had long gone.

No one wanted to bring up the subject of when we should leave, so we talked about other things. For the first time we exchanged ideas freely about Kristina and Makowski. Why should death have
overtaken them and left the rest of us still with the strength to carry on? There was no answer to this question, but we mulled it over. We talked of them with sadness and affection. It was, I
suppose, an act of remembrance for two absent friends. And it took some of the heavy load of their great loss from us.

I found myself looking at the five of them, taking stock of them, trying to assess our chances. We were all sick men. Kolemenos had his moccasins off and I could see the inflamed raw patches
where blisters had formed on punctured blisters, and I knew he was no worse off in this respect than any other of us. All our faces were so disfigured that our nearest relatives would have had
difficulty in recognizing us. Lips were grotesquely swollen and deeply fissured. Cheeks were sunk in. Brows overhung red-rimmed eyes which seemed to have fallen back in their sockets. We were in an
advanced state of scurvy. Only the toothless Paluchowicz escaped the discomfort of teeth rocking loose in sore gums. Already Kolemenos had pulled two aching teeth out between finger and thumb for
Marchinkovas and he was to practise his primitive dentistry several times more in the future for others of the party.

Lice, scurvy and the sun had played havoc with our skin. The lice had multiplied with the filthy prolificacy of their kind and swarmed about us. They fed and grew to an obscenely large size. We
scratched and scratched at our intolerably irritated bodies until we broke the skin and then our sweat-soaked clothes and untended dirty finger-nails caused the tiny cuts to become septic. This
unclean affliction, superficial though it was, was a constant source of depression and misery. I killed the lice when I caught them with savage joy. They were pre-eminently the symbol of our
fugitive degradation.

In the end no one took the initiative over our departure. There came a time when Kolemenos and Zaro stood up together. We all rose. We adjusted the wire loops about our necks, picked up our
sacks. Into my sack went the flat cooking stone. The American carefully stowed away the little pile of fuel. Grimacing, Kolemenos pulled on his moccasins. We drank a little more water. And in the
late afternoon we started off.

Many miles we walked that day, until the light of day faded out and until the stars came out in a purple-black sky. We slept huddled close together and were awake before dawn to start again.

Half-an-hour later Paluchowicz stopped with a groan, clutching his belly, doubled up. In the next hour we were all seized with the most violent, griping pains. All of us were assailed with
diarrhoea of an intensity that left us weak and groaning. With the frequent stops we could not have covered more than five miles by late afternoon, when the attacks began to subside.

What had caused it – the snake-meat or the water? We asked one another this question.

Said Mister Smith, ‘It might well have been the dirty water. But most probably it arises simply from the fact that our empty stomachs are reacting against the sudden load of food and
water.’

‘There’s one good way to find out,’ Kolemenos said. ‘We’ll eat some more snake. I am still hungry.’

Marchinkovas shrugged his shoulders. ‘It will be snakes or nothing.’

Paluchowicz gasped with another spasm of stomach ache.

‘May God help us,’ he said, fervently.

U
NQUESTIONABLY
the snakes of the Gobi saved us from death. We caught two within minutes of each other the next day. One was
like the common European grass snake, the other arrayed in the brilliance of a silver-grey skin marked down the back with a dull red broad stripe flanked closely parallel with two thin lines of the
same colour. Profiting by the experience of my difficulty in skinning the first specimen, we clubbed these two to death and held the heads in Zaro’s forked stick while I stripped off the
skins.

We did not like these two coloured snakes as much as we had the first capture. They were thinner-bodied and we imagined they tasted less pleasantly. I think the colours affected our judgment.
The big black was not unlike a conger eel in appearance and in the texture of the flesh. Thereafter we sought specially for this species and counted ourselves lucky when we found one.

The clear fat which oozed out over the heat of the fire we used as a balm for our lips, our sore eyes and our feet and the soothing effect lasted for hours.

Two days after leaving the creek we had visitors. First there wheeled lazily over us half-a-dozen ravens. They stayed with us throughout the morning and then made a leisurely departure as we
erected our shelter at midday. We were wondering what had prompted their departure when two great shadows skimmed along the sand. We looked up and saw not twenty feet above a pair of magnificent,
long-necked eagles, their plumage looking black against the sun. They passed over us several times and then alighted on the top of a sandy hillock twenty yards away and looked down on us. The
spread of wings as they came in to land was enormous.

‘What do you think
they
want?’ someone asked.

The American considered. ‘It’s fairly obvious, I think, that they saw the ravens and came to investigate the prospects of food.’

Zaro said, ‘Well, they’re not having
me
.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I assured him. ‘They won’t attack us.’

Zaro stood up and shouted at the great birds. He made motions of throwing. The pair disdained to notice his antics. He scratched away at the sand and produced a couple of pebbles. He aimed
carefully and threw. The stone sent up a puff of sand a yard short of them. One held its ground and the other did an ungainly single hop. Zaro hurled the second stone wide of its mark and the two
eagles sat unmoved. They took off in their own good time as we dismantled the shelter and followed us for about an hour, high in the sky, before swinging away to the south and disappearing.

‘Eagles live in mountains,’ said the American. ‘Perhaps we haven’t far to go to get out of the desert.’

We could see a long way ahead and there were no distant mountains. ‘They can also fly great distances,’ I said.

For three or four days we were tormented with stomach pain and its attendant diarrhoea; then, as we began to long for water again, the stomach trouble passed away. As we trudged on there were
days when we caught not a glimpse of a snake. Another day and we would pick up a couple basking in the sun in a morning’s search. We ate them as soon as we found them. There was a red-letter
day when we caught two of the kind we called Big Blacks within half-an-hour. The days dragged by. We were inspected again by both the ravens and the eagles. We were able now to make a fix on a
couple of bright stars and sometimes walked long after dark. We began again to dream longing dreams of water.