11

Shankar must have drifted off to sleep, or perhaps he had even lost consciousness. At any rate, when he came to his senses again, the clock showed twelve at night—or so it must have been. He got up and began to walk once more. At one point, a wall of stone appeared before him, seeming to block his way. He flashed the red beam of his torch just once and saw that this wall stood perpendicular to the one he had been following, barring his path.

Suddenly, he pricked up his ears. Wasn’t that the faint sound of water somewhere in the darkness?

Yes, it was true, it was indeed the sound of water… Kulu, kulu, kulu, kulu—the sound of a flowing spring, as if water were coursing somewhere over pebbles, breaking its flow from time to time. Listening closely, it seemed to him that the sound was coming from the other side of this stone wall. When he pressed his ear to the wall, this belief grew stronger. Searching by the red glow of his torch for a gap large enough to pass through, he found a very low and narrow natural fissure. Crawling through it for some distance, his hand touched water. Cautiously feeling upwards, he realised he could stand there. He stood up, and after a few steps into the thick darkness, his feet sank into an icy cold, flowing current.

There, in the dense darkness, he bent down and drank his fill of the cold water. Then, by the torch’s faint light, he observed the direction of the stream. In this kind of spring, the mouth of the cave is not usually found upstream. Switching off the torch, he walked for a long time through that profound, deep darkness, feeling his way with his feet along the stream. The spring meandered, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. At one place, it seemed to have split into three or four streams, large and small, and gone off in different directions.

Reaching that spot, he became completely disoriented. He lit the torch and saw the currents flowing in various directions. He remembered what Alvarez had said: if you didn’t leave a trail, you risked getting lost here.

Bending down to look for something suitable to mark his path, he saw that on both banks of the clear, limpid stream lay a profusion of a certain kind of pebble. The main current flowed over these same kinds of pebbles as well.

Putting a number of pebbles in his pocket, he decided to test each branch to its end, placing two pebbles along the side of the stream as he went. A short distance along one current, many more forks appeared. At each junction, he arranged pebbles to form the letter ‘S’.

Many of the distributaries seemed to turn back and head in the direction Shankar had come from. Without the trail he had left, Shankar would have been utterly confused. At one point, his foot brushed against something very cold, and lighting his torch, he saw an enormous python coiled by the water’s edge. At his touch, the python shed its lethargy and raised its head, but its cowrie-shell eyes were dazzled by the torchlight—otherwise, Shankar’s life would have been in grave danger. Shankar knew the python was a terrifying creature; one might escape from the jaws of a tiger or a lion, but to be freed from the python’s deadly embrace was impossible. Had it just once flicked its tail and wrapped it around his leg, it would have been all over.

Now he was terrified of walking in the dark. Who knew where another python lay coiled? After exploring two or three of the streams, he used his markers to return to the junction. At the main junction, he had made a cross sign with the pebbles. This time, he followed what seemed to be the main current, only to find that it, too, did not run straight. After a short distance, it also branched out in various directions. In some places, the cave roof descended so low that he had to walk hunched over, or even with his back bent double like an octogenarian.

Suddenly, in one spot, he lit his torch and, even in that extremely faint light, Shankar could see that the cave there was triangular in shape—that very triangular cave which, for want of finding it, had brought him to death’s door. A little later, he saw, far in the distance, a few stars twinkling as if framed in darkness. The mouth of the cave! There was nothing to fear now. For this journey, at least, he was saved.

When Shankar came out and stood in the open, it was three in the morning. The vegetation was sparser there; a star-filled sky was visible overhead. Emerging from the Stygian gloom of Rourab, the clear, starlit darkness of the night seemed to him like a city street bedecked with lamps. With all his heart, he thanked God for this unexpected deliverance.

Dawn broke. The sun’s light blossomed on the branches of the trees. Shankar thought he would not stay another moment in this inauspicious place. There was still a stone pebble in his pocket; instead of throwing it away, he kept it as a memento of his ordeal in the cave.

The next day, elephant grass appeared in the forest, and that same evening, before dusk, the forest ended and an open space appeared. That night, Shankar sat for a long time studying the map. The open, prairie-like country that lay before him stretched for nearly three hundred miles from here, right up to the banks of the Zambezi River. A part of these three hundred miles—about 175 miles of it—fell within the famous Kalahari Desert, a terrifying, desolate, waterless, pathless wilderness. Alvarez had noted from the military map that unless one followed a specific route aiming for the northeastern corner of this region, attempting to cross it through the middle meant certain death. On the map, it was named the ‘Thirstland Trek’. Once he reached Rhodesia, the journey would become much easier, as there were people in those parts.

Here, Shankar showed immense courage. Even knowing the terrible state of the path ahead, he did not lose heart, did not fall into despair. Alvarez had said he would go this way alone to buy bullets and food from Salisbury. Was he, Shankar, to back down from what a sixty-two-year-old man had resolved to do?

But courage and fearlessness are one thing; knowledge and experience are quite another. Shankar lacked the ability to determine his destination’s direction from the map. He realised he understood nothing of it. The military maps gave the latitude and longitude of two wells in the middle of the desert; Alvarez used to perform some complicated calculation involving ‘magnetic north’ and ‘true north’—Shankar had seen him do it, but had not learned how.

So what choice was there but to trust in fate? It was on fate that Shankar now prepared to rely as he set out to cross this impassable desert. The result was that within two days, Shankar became completely lost. A waterhole that any experienced person could have found with their eyes closed by looking at the map—Shankar passed three miles to the north of it, at a time when his water had run out and his life would be in peril if he did not collect fresh drinking water.

At first, there was only prairie and hills, forests of cactus and euphorbia, and here and there, mounds of granite. Then what a terribly difficult journey it became! No food, no water, no clear path, not a human face to be seen. Day after day, only that desperate trek towards the distant, empty horizon—the sun like fire overhead, the sand and stones beneath his feet like burning coals. The sun rose, the sun set—the stars rose, the moon rose—and set again. Desert lizards called out in a monotonous drone; crickets chirped—in the evening, in the dead of night.

There were no milestones; there was no way to reckon how many miles had been covered. Food consisted of a bird or two, sometimes a desert buzzard, whose meat was tough and tasteless. One day, even a venomous mountain scorpion, whose sting meant death, seemed like the most delectable delicacy, a great stroke of fortune to find.

After two days of suffering from intense thirst, he found a waterhole in a rock crevice. But the water was reddish, with some kind of insects floating on it—and on the bank, some animal had died, swelled up, and was rotting. Shankar drank this water to his heart’s content and saved his life.

Day after day passed—whether a week, a month, or a year had gone by, there was no telling. Shankar had grown thin, emaciated. He had no idea where he was going—he only knew he had to keep moving forward. Forward lay India—Bengal.

Then came the real desert, a part of the Kalahari. Seeing its appearance from a distance, Shankar shuddered with fear. How could a human being cross this fire-scorched plain? Nothing but sand hills, a sea of coppery sand. It seemed to shimmer and burn in the midday sun. On the very first day at the desert’s edge, the thermometer rose to 127 degrees in the shade.

The map had repeatedly warned that no one should try to cross this desert through the middle, but only by sticking to the northeastern corner. To do otherwise was death, because there was absolutely no water there. Not that there was water along the northeastern edge either, but there were three natural springs at intervals of thirty, seventy, and ninety miles where water could be found. These springs were usually in rock fissures and very difficult to locate. That was why the military map provided their latitude and longitude.

Shankar thought, I won’t be able to find them. He had a sextant, he had star charts, but he didn’t know how to use them. Whatever will be, will be. God is my only hope. Still, he tried his best to stick to the northeastern corner.

On the third day, by sheer luck, he spotted a spring. The water was muddy, as hot as fire, but at that moment, it was as rare and precious as nectar. The desert grew progressively more forbidding. All signs of life, animal or vegetable, gradually vanished. Before, when he lit a lamp at night, a few insects would be drawn to the light; gradually, even they stopped coming.

As fierce as the heat was by day, so was the cold by night. In the last hours of the night, the cold was such that his hands and feet would go numb. And then, the means to light a fire disappeared, as there was no firewood at all. Within a few days, his stored water ran out. To find a single familiar grain of sand in that vast sea of sand was impossible enough; to find a spring of water, a mere one or two hands in diameter, was more impossible still.

That evening, Shankar was nearly mad with the torment of thirst. By now, he understood that trying to cross this terrible desert alone was tantamount to suicide. He had come to a place from which there was no way back.

Climbing a high dune, he saw that all around there were only coppery sand hills, rising gradually to the east. Though the sun had set in the west, the whole sky was red with the afterglow of sunset. A short distance away was a small, mound-like hill, and from afar, it looked as if there was a cave in it.

Small granite mounds of this kind were everywhere in this country—in the Transvaal and Rhodesia, they are called ‘Kopjes’, meaning little hills. To escape the cold of the night, Shankar took shelter in that cave.

Here, something happened.