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Sands of the Scorpion Page 6
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Peter swallowed the beetle down. ‘Can’t wait . . . ’
‘Me neither. Let’s get back to work.’
* * *
Once they got the hang of it, it didn’t take long to finish their silk wraps. Beck stretched, then peered out of the shelter. The sun was now almost level with the sand dunes. The sky was lighting up in an orange flare that stretched across the horizon.
‘Wow,’ Peter breathed.
‘Yeah,’ Beck said again. He looked almost fondly at the sun. Earlier it had been a scorching presence so bright you couldn’t look at it, and it would be again. But now it was a glowing orange ball that seemed suddenly much safer, and it lent itself to beautiful scenes like this.
‘You sure get excellent sunsets in the desert,’ Peter commented.
‘It’s the dust in the air. It scatters the light so that only the red wavelength gets through.’ Beck glanced sidelong at his friend and shrugged. ‘My dad used to tell me that as a kid,’ he added quietly. Then, straight away, he added, ‘It’s time to go. Help me get the shelter down?’
It was a very convenient kind of tent, Beck thought. It folded into two pieces of silk that either of them could carry without noticing it. He looked wistfully at the two parachutes. He was sure there were so many things he could use them for . . . but they were heavy. There was just too much silk. He contented himself with cutting off as much parachute cord as they could carry, and the complete upper layer of one of the parachutes. Then he looked thoughtfully at the ripcord that you pulled to open the chute in the first place – a metal handle tied to wire. The wire was made of several strands wound together. Wire could be good for snares. So he cut away the wire from its housing and folded it up with the parachute cord. The parachute container itself could be used as a kind of rucksack if they tied it up.
The last thing Beck did was get Peter to help him spread the remaining parachute silk out on the sand. ‘Pin it down with rocks,’ he told his friend. ‘I don’t want the wind blowing it away. If any plane flies over they might spot this and know someone is lost out here.’
Beck then laid some extra rocks out in the shape of an arrow. ‘This will tell anyone who spots it which way we have gone. OK, let’s get moving.’
And the two boys set off on the journey of their lives.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sun was below the level of the dune now and they were in the shade, though with plenty of light to see. After an hour of steady walking they broke open the emergency rations they had taken from the plane. It was a pack of six food bars – dried oats and fruit, compacted together.
‘We’ll eat one each now, another at midnight, and have the last for breakfast,’ Beck decided. ‘After that we’re on cans of tuna and desert food.’
As they sat in the twilight, Peter looked mournfully at the bars. ‘That full breakfast was a long time ago,’ he commented.
‘One now, and another at midnight,’ Beck repeated.
‘You da boss.’
They ate their bars and put on their packs again. Peter carried the parachute rucksack; Beck had the one with their supplies.
‘Peter, can you set your watch to go off every . . . oh, thirty minutes?’ Beck asked as they started off once more.
‘Sure.’ Peter’s watch beeped as he set it. ‘Why?’
‘There’s a tribe in Mexico,’ Beck explained, ‘called the Tarahumara. They live in the Chihuahua Desert . . . ’
Peter sniggered. ‘The Chihuahua Desert? Is that right next to the Pekinese Plains and the Small Yappy Mountains?’
‘I know – it always makes me laugh too,’ Beck said with a grin that Peter couldn’t see behind his face wrappings. ‘The Tarahumara conserve water by taking a mouthful and holding it there. They breathe through their noses. The water soaks slowly into their bodies and the mouthful lasts a lot longer than if they just swallowed it down. We’re going to try it. It’s difficult, and you really, really want to swallow, but you should be able to hold it for around fifteen minutes.’
He matched actions to words by taking a gulp and carefully holding it in his mouth. Every part of him wanted to chug the whole bottle down. He saw the reluctance in Peter to stop drinking – the way he paused before taking the bottle away from his mouth and handing it back.
Beck looked at his friend, then glanced down at himself. They must make a strange sight in their silk ponchos and turbans, and him with his silk leggings too. But they were dressed as sensibly as they could be.
He nodded towards the north, towards Morocco, with a gesture that said, Shall we?
* * *
The faint glow of dusk lingered in the west for a while, but it soon faded away. The colours of the desert leached away into shades of grey. Peter saw Beck’s outline grow dimmer until his friend looked like a solid ghost, trudging across the endless dunes.
‘Walk so you’re making good, heavy steps,’ Beck told him. ‘It’ll scare off any snakes.’
Peter said nothing but his footsteps grew distinctly louder.
With the sun went the warmth of the day. Beck felt the skin on his arms goose-pimple, even beneath the silk. At least the poncho was keeping a little body warmth in; protecting him from the cold night air. And as he knew all too well, every little bit of body warmth helped.
The ground was tilting up ahead of them. It was a high dune, steep too. In daylight and with a proper compass, Beck might have considered going round the base of it. In the dark, with no clear sight of the stars yet, he knew there was a danger they would just start walking in circles as they stuck to the low ground. No, he thought grimly. Pressing on straight ahead was the only answer.
‘This is going to be hard—’ he started saying; then there was a grunt as Peter fell flat on his face.
‘My feet were going backwards!’ Peter said indignantly as Beck tracked back to help him up. ‘The ground just slid . . . ’
‘Yeah, it does. Come on.’ Beck fell in beside him, encouraging him up the dune. A dune was just a pile of sand with nothing to hold it together. All those millions of grains wanted to follow gravity, and needed only a little encouragement to do so. Encouragement like the feet of someone trying to walk up them. Every time he put his foot down, he felt it sink in. Loose sand cascaded down over his shoes with every step. And yes, as Peter had said, it felt like he was walking backwards. Two steps back for every one step forward.
‘Blimey . . . ’ Peter gasped next to him. Beck heard the effort in his voice. With every step you had to lift your leg much further than usual, and it only got you a few centimetres further ahead. On normal ground the same energy would move you up a metre or so.
‘Yup,’ Beck agreed tightly. No more conversation was needed.
If the dune had just been a small hill they would have been up it in a couple of minutes. As it was, Beck guessed it took the better part of fifteen minutes, and he could hear Peter’s heavy breathing as they reached the top.
‘Break,’ Peter gasped. ‘Please.’
‘Sure,’ Beck agreed reluctantly. He didn’t want them to hang around. The chill of the desert was really setting in, and if Peter got this tired after just one small dune, with the rest of the Sahara to cross . . . He didn’t want to think about it. But he could see his friend’s chest heaving with effort.
As if on cue, Peter’s alarm beeped. They smiled and each had a swig of water. Even if they couldn’t keep it in their mouths for very long, it still made sure they rationed the water carefully and made use of every drop.
Sitting on top of the dune, the boys could see a clear pattern emerging below them. Like waves on the sea, the dunes all tended to form in the same direction. One sharp steep side and one longer undulating side, sculpted by the wind.
‘Hey, Beck, look!’ Peter exclaimed. ‘If we keep walking in the same direction across these dunes, we’ll know we’re heading in a straight line. You can see all the dunes are sculpted in the same direction.’
‘Good work, Peter,’ Beck said. ‘Until the stars come up we
can use these to navigate by – it’ll stop us going round in circles.’
After another hour of walking Beck glanced up. The moon had risen, half full, and some of the stars were out.
‘Look, Peter, we can see the stars now,’ he said.
‘So which way?’ Peter asked. His voice was a little less strained than it had been going up the dune, but he still sounded weak.
‘Look for the Big Dipper,’ Beck said. He craned his head up and scanned the heavens.
‘You mean the Plough? The big saucepan?’
Beck grinned. ‘The whatever.’
‘It’s over there.’
The constellation hung in the sky to their left. Beck had never been quite sure why it was called the Big Dipper. Or even the Great Bear. But you could see why it was known as the Plough. The big saucepan was even more appropriate. It had a long handle with a sharp angle halfway along it, and a pan with three straight sides.
‘Look at the right-hand side of the pan,’ Beck said. ‘There’s two stars in a dead straight line.’
‘Two stars will always be in a dead straight line,’ Peter pointed out logically. ‘But OK.’
‘Fair point!’ Beck said. ‘Follow the line up . . . four times the distance . . . and there’s a star up there.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Peter obediently followed the line. ‘Got it.’
‘And that is Polaris. The North Star. It’s always in the north. It’s not the brightest, but it doesn’t move like the rest of them. So if you can see it – or, hey, if you can just see the saucepan – then you know where north is.’
‘Cool.’ In the dark, Peter’s teeth flashed white as he grinned – a contrast to the strain Beck could still hear in his voice.
‘You lead for a bit, buddy,’ Beck suggested.
Heading down dunes was also hard work. In daylight it would have been no problem. You leaned forward and just let gravity do the job for you. You took long, plunging steps to keep upright but that was all. It was tiring, but it was quick.
But in the dark, all it needed was one rock they failed to spot, one misplaced footstep. Then one of them would have a broken bone and be as good as dead. They had a torch, but just one flash would ruin their night vision.
So, instead, they slithered and stumbled on down the sides of the dunes in much the same way as they went up. Both boys felt the strain in their legs and the effort of staying upright. Soon their shoes were full of sand. Beck wasn’t surprised. ‘Get your shoes off, Pete, and empty them out,’ he told his friend. ‘If we walk like this for long then the grains will just cut our feet to pieces.’
They both spent a couple of minutes emptying out their shoes and dusting the sand off their skin.
‘We’re going to do this every half-hour,’ Beck added. ‘My dad always said that your feet are your most important assets. Keep them working and the rest of you will follow . . . Right. On we go . . . ’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
That set the pattern for the next few hours.
Sometimes the ground was level, or only sloped a little. Sometimes a dune reared up in their way and they had to tackle it like they had tackled the first one. And each time they did so, they were a little more tired than they had been before.
Light from the moon threw them into a half-world where everything was shades of grey. Darker patches loomed up every now and then – a rock, the occasional tuft of dune grass, the silhouette of a twisted tree. Mostly it was just sand.
Now that they could see the North Star, they were able to make a detour around the really serious obstacles. But the danger there was that they might veer too far off course and spend more time and energy than if they had just gone straight ahead. So wherever possible Beck kept them heading due north.
The cold soon started to attack them. At their next stop Beck opened up Peter’s pack and they wrapped their upper bodies in an extra layer of parachute. It helped a little – silk is a good insulator, but not as good as a coat would have been.
‘Why so cold?’ Peter muttered at one point as they trudged through the endless gloom. There was a very faint tremor to his voice. Beck was fairly sure his teeth were chattering. He knew his own were.
‘You’re the physics expert. You tell me.’ Beck thought he knew the answer but he wanted to keep Peter’s mind active. It would take it off the cold that his body was feeling.
‘Sand’s a rubbish insulator,’ Peter said after a moment’s thought. ‘It can’t retain heat. It sucks it up during the day, which is why it gets so hot, and loses it the moment the sun goes down. The heat just runs away.’
Of course, Beck thought.
‘And heat always passes from hot things to cold things, and at the moment we’re warmer than the sand. So, basically, we’ve got an entire desert sucking the heat out of us. Wow. No wonder it’s cold.’
‘That’s why, when we stop to sleep, we’ll have to put down a layer of something,’ Beck added. ‘Silk or palm leaves, if we can find them. Something that will insulate us. But that won’t be for another couple of hours.’
‘Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just keep going . . . ’
Peter lapsed into silence after that. Beck glanced sidelong at him in the dark.
He remembered Peter struggling to touch the bottom of the swimming pool. He had just kept working at it until he succeeded. So yes, Beck knew Peter was right. He would just keep going. But the bottom of the pool had been only three metres away. Their destination was many, many miles distant. The same stubbornness that made Peter learn to dive would make him walk himself into the ground. Beck had to make sure that didn’t happen.
Finally a cluster of solid dark shapes loomed up out of the darkness. Their irregular outlines suggested they were rocks. They surrounded a small depression, something like a small crater. Over to one side the trunk and leaves of a palm tree blocked out the stars.
‘Time?’ Beck asked. A pause.
‘Four o’clock and I am beat.’ They had been walking for over nine hours.
Beck hesitated, but only for a moment. Although he would have liked to press on a bit longer, Peter just wasn’t used to hiking miles at a time and he could hear his friend’s breath shuddering with cold. His own wasn’t much better.
No, he reckoned. A rest would do them both good. Time to recharge. This was a good spot.
‘We’ll take a break here,’ he announced. ‘Then we’ll—’
Peter kept walking. ‘No,’ he mumbled. ‘Got to press on . . . Got to keep going . . . Can’t just stop, Beck . . . Can’t afford to—’
‘Hey. Hey!’ Beck grabbed his arm. Peter stopped without any resistance. ‘You’re allowed to take a break, you know. We both need it. Otherwise we’ll just collapse, if the hypothermia doesn’t get us first.’
‘Wassat?’
‘C’mon, Mr Biologist. You tell me.’
Beck led him over to the rocks. Peter’s feet shuffled through the sand.
‘Oh, that,’ he muttered. ‘It’s when your body cools down faster than you can make warmth to replace it. You lose coordination. You go numb. And you die.’
‘Got it in one.’ Beck smiled grimly at the irony. The last time he had been worried about hypothermia, he had been frantically digging to avoid a snowstorm in the mountains of Alaska. Now he was in one of the hottest places in the world and hypothermia was still just round the corner.
‘Wow. That could really spoil the holiday.’ Peter’s teeth were definitely chattering now.
Beck sat down next to the nearest rock; his friend dropped straight down next to him, hugging his knees to himself and shivering. ‘I’ll never complain when my mum turns the central heating up. Dad says the heating bills are too high – well, tough!’
Beck smiled, though he was shivering himself. ‘Funny you should mention central heating. I thought I’d turn on some natural central heating.’
‘Oh, ha ha.’ Peter leaned back against the rock – and went rigid with surprise. ‘Wow!’
‘Told you!’
Beck la
y back too. The rock was warm to the touch and he could feel the heat seeping into his body. It was bliss. He was cold enough that the slightest change in temperature made all the difference.
‘The sun warms them up during the day,’ he explained, ‘and they slowly let their warmth out at night. During the day they’ll just cook you like an oven. You shelter with vegetation during the day. But at night, rocks are perfect.’
‘It works for me,’ Peter assured him. He was hugging his knees to his chest and pressing his back against the stone. ‘Environmentally friendly too.’
‘Yeah, well. I’m going to have to increase our carbon footprint, I think.’ Beck reached into his rucksack and pulled out the torch. ‘Wait there.’
‘What, when there’s so much to see and enjoy?’ Peter added ironically.
Beck chuckled and switched on the torch. He flashed the light over the palm tree and nodded, pleased. It was surrounded by a layer of dead leaves and twigs. All bone dry, he thought with satisfaction. Not difficult to get a fire going here.
He crouched down to start gathering some up into a pile. His fingers brushed against a leaf; it moved.
Beck snatched his hand away. The leaf continued to move.
He slowly reached for a stick and used it to flick the leaf away.
Sitting in the middle of the torch’s pool of light, like the star of a stage show, a yellow fat-tailed scorpion raised its pincers and tail in threat. Beck looked down at one of the most poisonous creatures in the world.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Well, hello, Mr Andro-whatnot,’ Beck murmured. The creature’s full scientific name had appeared in the magazine back at the hotel but he couldn’t remember it. But he could remember everything else he’d read about the creature.
The scorpion didn’t advance but raised its tail. Maybe it didn’t know what Beck was but it did know he was a lot bigger. It wasn’t going to attack if it could get the same result – making Beck go away – just by being threatening.
Beck stepped a few paces back, keeping the torch on the little creature. It turned a quarter-circle on the spot and started to crawl away. Beck kept the light on it and picked up a stick.