The Abrupt Physics of Dying (34 page)

Flailing in the Void

He covered the distance to the edge of the wadi so quickly that his eyes had not adjusted to the enveloping darkness by the time he launched himself into the void. He knew the cap-rock layer was only about a metre thick all along this part of the wadi and that the slope of loose shale fell away from its base at about a 45-degree angle. But as he fell through the cool night air, both time and space seemed to stretch out, and he hovered as if suspended on some current, so that the solid ground his feet expected did not come, and still did not come.

He hit the slope with a crunch. Such was his speed that he catapulted forward, somersaulting down the slope in a shower of clanking ironstone plates. After a few rotations his angular momentum slowed and he pushed his legs out hard, down into the loose rock to break the spin. On the second attempt his boots dug in, preventing the forward motion of his head, and his body snapped back to the slope. And then he was ploughing through the rock on his back with feet facing the wadi floor.

He slid to a stop and lay on his back breathing heavily, shaking from the cold or from shock or both. The mangled appendage clutched in his right hand was spiky and raw, a throbbing alien mass that he could not look at, and he was glad for the darkness. He lay very still and looked up into the stars, listening for any sound behind him. There was the whisper of a breeze flowing along the wadi floor, and then, over the efficient hum of the generators, farther away to the north, the distant crack-crack of AK47 fire.

Karila had seen him go. Soon they would be coming after him. He lurched to his feet and tried to focus on the terrain ahead, but a tide of nausea and dizziness flowed over him, and he fell back onto the shale. He sat on the slope and looked down into the depths of the wadi. His hand throbbed and the pain was a presence within him, indifferent and uncaring as the ocean.

He put his head between his knees and tried to regulate his breathing, calm himself. He pulled off his canvas vest and his T-shirt and then using his teeth and his good hand he covered the wound and tied the shirt down as hard as he could on the hand, grunting involuntarily as the knot pushed down onto the flesh and protrusions of bone. He sat hunched over, breathing hard, fighting back the pain and the fear that squeezed up from his diaphragm and into the back of his throat like vomit.

More gunfire crackled in the distance. If they followed him down, if they were coming right now, he would surely hear them scrabbling over the loose slates. He reached for the Beretta, as much for comfort as for any reasonable likelihood of defence. It was not in his belt. He searched his pockets and felt out across the stones like a blind man groping for a light switch, but he knew that it was gone, somewhere behind on the slope, irretrievable.

He pushed himself on, sliding towards the wadi floor, stumbling in the darkness. When he reached the old Bedouin well, the moon was gone and the steep sides of the canyon had collapsed the night sky into a narrow ribbon of time above him. He was shivering uncontrollably. His mouth felt as if it was full of sand and his throat ached. Dehydration and shock were taking over. He knew he needed to rest and drink and get warm soon. He sat on the ground by the lip of the well and breathed in the heady benzene vapours flowing up from the depths. And though the rock walls and the sand under his feet and the stars above and everything insensate stood deaf and uncaring, he cursed them all and then he cursed himself.

Then he remembered the wedge of rock and the ridge of sand and wadi stone – and the cave beneath. He felt his way along the chine
of sand towards the wedge and then past the inner plane where the huge slab had cleaved away from the cliff. In the dim starlight he could see that the wedge had toppled inwards, pinning a smaller lozenge of rock beneath it, leaving two gaps, a smaller one below, the opening no larger than a television screen, and a larger one higher up which reached its apex halfway up the canyon wall. Like a wounded animal, he wriggled over the top of the chine and skulked down into the lower opening.

Inside, the darkness was complete. He shuffled on his flanks deeper into the shelter, pushing himself along with his legs and his good hand until he reached a spot where the ground felt soft and he could lean up against the rock. Then he pulled off his pack, placed it between his legs, pulled out Karila’s medical kit, the jacket Hussein had given him, and the water bottle. He held the plastic cylinder between his knees and unscrewed the top. He drank deeply, gulping down more than half a litre, more than he had intended, his throat muscles contracting hungrily even as he willed himself to stop. He would need it even more later. When he finally tore the bottle away from his mouth, there was less than a quarter of a litre left, enough for two or three good gulps at most. He swirled the meagre remnants around in the bottle. Water everywhere.

Shivering from the cold, he replaced the lid and stood the bottle upright on the sand to one side and felt for the jacket. He found the collar and the arms and threaded in his good arm and reached behind him to gather the jacket around his shoulders. The other arm dangled uselessly. He was warmer immediately, and soon the shivering stopped. He took a deep breath and reached into the pack and pulled out the torch and turned it on. The light dazzled his night eyes as the beam split and then split again. The whole surface of his rocky crypt was encrusted in a thick vein of crystal gypsum so pure and translucent that the light penetrated deep into the mineral layer before refracting back out from a million crystal faces. He played the torch over the worthless jewels for a moment, and then opened the medical kit.

First he flipped open the lid of the codeine package and jerked out the formed foil panel of painkillers. In succession he punched four pills through the covering and pushed them into his mouth, swallowing each one hard to force them down his already dry throat. Next he untied the T-shirt, releasing the pressure on the wound. A torrent of pain flooded over him. He sunk his head to his knees as the turbulence roiled through him, brutal and strangely sinister, like a gale at night, until finally it ebbed away and smoothed into something more laminar.

He tore open a phial and poured saline over the wound, washing away sand and partially coagulated blood, the lumpy red liquid dripping from claws of bone. He repeated the procedure, cleaning away grit and more blood, thinner now, and what appeared to be fragments of shattered bone. Then he doused the whole offending thing in antiseptic, turning his face away, eyes shut hard as the chemical seared into his raw flesh. Tears filled his eyes and streamed down his face and he had to wipe them away before he could focus again to apply the sutures across the open edge of his hand. As quickly as he could, he ripped open a compress and folded it over the sutures. He held the compress in place against his chest and unravelled a bandage. He wound it around the compress, across his palm and over the remaining knuckles, alternating over and under the thumb, pulling the gauze in tighter with each turn.

He had started to tape the bandages in place when he heard the echo of voices. He flicked off the torch and waited, ears straining. A beam of light sliced past and for the briefest moment his crystal vault lit up like day. He was sure he had been seen. He sat blinded in the darkness with the sound of voices rising, echoing from the rock walls, cancelling, amplifying, until they were upon him, and he could see lights flashing all around outside his hide.

He stayed perfectly still.

Outside, soldiers with guns stood near the well, talking, shining their torches on the ground. They had seen his footprints. They seemed to be arguing. Torches flashed up-wadi, some down-wadi,
some directly past him in the direction of the
jebel
where Abdulkader had left him so long ago now. Four men broke off from the group and started towards the entrance of his cave. They had seen him. He closed his eyes.

And she was out there somewhere, he hoped, he prayed, in a fine European hospital, at home even, curled up safe asleep, and he wondered if he would ever see her again.

The voices rose and then passed, moving up the tributary wadi, others receding back towards the facility. He opened his eyes. Darkness again. They were gone.

More than an hour had passed, by his reckoning, and the soldiers had not returned. He wondered how Abdulkader had fared, if he had reached the farm safely, managed to find enough fuel for the Land Cruiser, or if he too had been apprehended, shot, killed, or if he had simply abandoned him altogether. He pushed the doubts away and scrabbled to the opening and out into the starlight. Water and warmth and the bandaging of his hand had stabilised him. The bleeding had stopped. He moved steadily along the wadi floor, working with gravity, quickening his pace as he descended towards the coastal plain and the Indian Ocean, still so far out of sight. Soon the sun would rise again and pronounce its death sentence on the Masila, and there would be nowhere to hide.

He pressed on, threading through the rhombic jumble of massive dolomite blocks and tilted sheets of sandstone. Every few minutes he paused to listen, but hearing only the whispers of the rock, continued on. His pursuers must have tracked down this way, beams of light jerking across the jagged landscape, weapons levelled. Perhaps some of them were in Al Urush now, waiting for him. His mind raced through the possibilities, each darker and more sinister. But he could not go back, could not go up. The only way was down.

When he reached the last precipice the sky was lightening in the east. He stood at the edge of a flat dolostone sill wedged like a plank step between the sheer walls of the defile and looked down the featureless vertical face of the drop to the wadi floor below and then
along the contour of the scree to the upper pool of the Al Urush
ghayl
in the distance. The dead palms were clearly visible against the canyon wall, but he could see no soldiers or Abdulkader – or any other soul.

The drop must have been twenty metres, more. He moved to his left, along the sill towards the far wall. He peered over the side, searching for a route that would take him to the wadi floor and on to the
ghayl
. At the far wall he looked back across the full width and height of the rock face towards the other side of the gorge. There was no way down.

He moved to the edge of the fall, put his good hand on the sheer wall of the canyon and looked back across the face. He studied each joint and crevasse in the improving light. The precipice was as smooth and accusatory as one-way glass, without fault, and with no flaw to seize. He stood for a long time gazing at the rock all around until each slab and face and all the wondrous diversity of it blended and blurred and there was no contrast or dissemblance to any of it.

He slumped to the ground and closed his eyes as the pain overwhelmed his will. For what felt like a long time he sat and cradled his injured hand and let the barbiturates of agony wash through him.
Yallah
, Abdulkader had said. Go. Find it. He opened his eyes and looked across the valley.

There, on the far wall, about a metre below the bench, was a small ledge. It was no more than a hand wide, less, jutting out along the canyon wall, a bedding plane in the limestone, only two or three metres long. Below it was another ledge and then another, each longer and wider than the next so that they formed a pyramid of steps building up from the wadi floor. It was the only way.

He slung off the pack and removed the fleece jacket, pulling his bandaged hand gingerly through the sleeve, and then rolled up the jacket and put it in the pack. Then he tightened the shoulder straps a notch and shouldered the pack over his vest and moved to the edge of the step. The ledge was just wide enough for one boot side-on. He stepped forward and placed one foot on the ledge. He twisted
his torso to face the rock and glued his cheek against the wall. With the fingers of his good hand he hooked into a fracture just above his head. Then he swung his back foot around and forward. He edged along the narrow strip of rock, one step at a time. High above, a falcon’s cry echoed off the canyon walls. The second ledge was now somewhere just below, although he could not see it. He would have to crouch down, use the first step as a handhold, and swing his legs over to the ledge below.

The first part of the manoeuvre was simple enough. He crouched, balancing his weight on his front foot, and lowered the trailing leg slowly down into the void, searching for the step with the toe of his boot. His palm was splayed flat on the ledge behind him. Then, in one movement, he pivoted off his right hand and swung the other leg over the side, twisting his torso towards the ledge and taking the full weight of his body onto both forearms laid flat across the ledge. His feet flailed in the void below, boots scrabbling against the sheer canyon wall as he searched for the step.

He pointed his toes and lowered his shoulders, probing further down the wall. The muscles in his upper arms burned with the effort. He lowered himself further, a few more inches, but still could not find the ledge. It had to be there, somewhere, just out of reach. He walked his forearms away from the wall, trying to keep weight off the bandaged hand, and gained a few more centimetres. He swung his legs back and forth, kicking at the wall. Nothing. Crumbs of loosened rock ticked and tapped down the cliff face to the wadi floor below. Now his forearms were right at the outer lip of the ledge. There was nowhere else to go. His shoulders screamed with the strain. He couldn’t hold this. He would either have to pull himself back up to the sill, or let go and trust that the ledge was where it should be and that he would somehow be able to cling to it.