By Water
By Algernon Blackwood

The night before young Larsen left to take up his new appoint­ment in Egypt he went to the clairvoyante. He neither believed nor disbelieved. He felt no interest, for he already knew his past and did not wish to know his future. ‘Just to please me, Jim,’ the girl pleaded. ‘The woman is wonderful. Before I had been five minutes with her she told me your initials, so there must be something in it.’ ‘She read your thought,’ he smiled indulgently. ‘Even I can do that!’ But the girl was in earnest. He yielded; and that night at his farewell dinner he came to give his report of the interview.

    The result was meagre and unconvincing: money was coming to him, he was soon to make a voyage, and—he would never marry. ‘So you see how silly it all is,’ he laughed, for they were to be married when his first promotion came. He gave the details, however, making a little story of it in the way he knew she loved.

    ‘But was that all, Jim?’ The girl asked it, looking rather hard into his face. ‘Aren’t you hiding something from me?’ He hesitated a moment then burst out laughing at her clever discernment. ‘There was a little more,’ he confessed, ‘but you take it all so seriously; I—’

    He had to tell it then, of course. The woman had told him a lot of gibberish about friendly and unfriendly elements. ‘She said water was unfriendly to me; I was to be careful of water, or else I should come to harm by it. Fresh water only,’ he hastened to add, seeing that the idea of shipwreck was in her mind.

    ‘Drowning?’ came the question quickly.

    ‘Yes,’ he admitted with reluctance, but still laughing; ‘she did say drowning, though drowning in no ordinary way.’

    The girl’s face showed uneasiness a moment. ‘What does that mean—drowning in no ordinary way?’ There was a catch in her breath.

    But that he could not tell her, because he did not know him­self. He gave, therefore, the woman’s exact words: ‘You will drown, but will not know you drown.’

    It was unwise of him. He wished afterwards he had invent­ed a happier report, or had kept this detail back. ‘I’m safe in Egypt, anyhow,’ he laughed. ‘I shall be a clever man if I can find enough water in the desert to do me harm!’ And all the way from Trieste to Alexandria he remembered the promise she had extracted—that he would never once go on the Nile unless duty made it imperative for him to do so. He kept that promise like the literal, faithful soul he was. His love was equal to the somewhat quixotic sacrifice it occasionally in­volved. Fresh water in Egypt there was practically none other, and in any case the natron works where his duty lay had their headquarters some distance out into the desert. The river, with its banks of welcome, refreshing verdure, was not even visible.

    Months passed quickly, and the time for leave came within measurable distance. In the long interval luck had played the cards kindly for him, vacancies had occurred, early promo­tion seemed likely, and his letters were full of plans to bring her out to share a little house of their own. His health, however, had not improved; the dryness did not suit him; even in this short period his blood had thinned, his nervous system deteriorated, and contrary to the doctor’s prophecy, the water­less air had told upon his sleep. A damp climate liked him best. And once the sun had touched him with its fiery finger.

    His letters made no mention of this. He described the life to her, the work, the sport, the pleasant people, and his chances of increased pay and early marriage. And a week before he sailed he rode out upon a final act of duty to inspect the latest diggings his Company were making. His course lay some twenty miles into the desert behind El-Chobak towards the limestone hills of Guebel Haidi, and he went alone, carrying lunch and tea, for it was the weekly holiday of Friday, and the men were not at work.

    The accident was ordinary enough. On his way back in the heat of early afternoon his pony stumbled against a boulder on the treacherous desert film, threw him heavily, broke the girth, bolted before he could seize the reins again, and left him stranded some ten or twelve miles from home. There was a pain in his knee that made walking difficult, a buzzing in his head that troubled sight and made the landscape swim, while, worse than either, his provisions, fastened to the saddle, had vanished with the frightened pony into those blazing leagues of sand. He was alone in the Desert, beneath the pitiless after­noon sun, twelve miles of utterly exhausting country between him and safety.

    Under normal conditions he could have covered the distance in four hours, reaching home by dark; but his knee pained him so that a mile an hour proved the best he could possibly do. He reflected a few minutes. The wisest course was to sit down and wait till the pony told its obvious story to the stable, and help should come. And this was what he did, for the scorching heat and glare were dangerous; they were terrible; he was shaken and bewildered by his fall, hungry and weak into the bargain; and an hour’s painful scrambling over the baked and burning little gorges must have speedily caused complete prostration. He sat down and rubbed his aching knee. It was quite a little adventure. Yet, though he knew the Desert might not be lightly trifled with, he felt at the moment nothing more than this—and the amusing description of it he would give in his letter, or—intoxicating thought—by word of mouth. In the heat of the sun he began to feel drowsy. He was exhausted. A soft torpor crept over him. He dozed. He fell asleep.

    It was a long, a dreamless sleep… for when he woke at length the sun had just gone down, the dusk lay awfully upon the enormous desert, and the air was chilly. The cold had waked him. Quickly, as though on purpose, the red glow faded from the sky; the first stars shone; it was dark; the heavens were deep violet. He looked round and realised that his sense of direction had gone entirely. Great hunger was in him. The cold already was bitter as the wind rose, but the pain in his knee having eased, he got up and walked a little—and in a moment lost sight of the spot where he had been lying. The shadowy desert swallowed it. ‘Ah’, he realised ‘this is not an English field or moor. I’m in the Desert!’ The safe thing to do was to remain exactly where he was; only thus could the rescuers find him; once he wandered he was done for. It was strange the search-party had not yet arrived. To keep warm, however, he was compelled to move, so he made a little pile of stones to mark the place, and walked round and round it in a circle of some dozen yards’ diameter. He limped badly, and the hunger gnawed dreadfully; but, after all, the adventure was not so terrible. The amusing side of it kept uppermost still. Though fragile in body, his spirit was not unduly timid or imaginative; he could last out the night, or, if the worst came to the worst, the next day as well. But when he watched the little group of stones, he saw that there were dozens of them, scores, hundreds, thousands of these little groups of stones. The desert’s face, of course, is thickly strewn with them. The original one was lost in the first five minutes. So he sat down again. But the biting cold, and the wind that licked his very skin beneath the light clothing, soon forced him up again. It was ominous; and the night huge and shelter­less. The shaft of green zodiacal light that hung so strangely in the western sky for hours had faded away; the stars were out in their bright thousands; no guide was anywhere; the wind moaned and puffed among the sandy mounds; the vast sheet of desert stretched mockingly upon the world; he heard the jackals cry....

    And with the jackals’ cry came suddenly the unwelcome realisation that no play was in this adventure any more, but that a bleak reality stared at him through the surrounding darkness. He faced it—at bay. He was genuinely lost. Thought blocked in him. ‘I must be calm and think,’ he said aloud. His voice woke no echo; it was small and dead; something gigantic ate it instantly. He got up and walked again. Why did no one come? Hours had passed. The pony had long ago found its stable, or—had it run madly in another direction altogether? He worked out possibilities, tightening his belt. The cold was searching; he never had been, never could be warm again; the hot sunshine of a few hours ago seemed the merest dream. Unfamiliar with hardship, he knew not what to do, but he took his coat and shirt off, vigorously rubbed his skin where the dried perspiration of the afternoon still caused clammy shivers, swung his arms furiously like a London cabman, and quickly dressed again. Though the wind upon his bare back was biting, he felt warmer a little. He lay down exhausted, sheltered by an overhanging limestone crag, and took snatches of fitful dog’s-sleep, while the wind drove over­head and the dry sand pricked his skin. One face continually was near him; one pair of tender eyes; two dear hands smoothed him; he smelt the perfume of light brown hair. It was all natural enough. His whole thought, in his misery, ran to her in England—England where there was soft fresh grass, big shel­tering trees, hemlock and honeysuckle in the hedges—while the hard black Desert guarded him, and consciousness dipped away at little intervals under this dry and pitiless Egyptian sky....

    It was perhaps five in the morning when a voice spoke and he started up with a sudden jerk—the voice of that clairvoyante woman. The sentence fled away into the darkness, but one word remained: Water! At first he wondered, but at once explanation came. Cause and effect were obvious. The due was physical. His body needed water, and so the thought came up into his mind. He was thirsty.

    This was the moment when fear first really touched him. Hunger was manageable, more or less—for a day or two, certainly. But thirst! Thirst and the Desert were an evil pair that, by cumulative suggestion gathering since childhood days, brought terror in. Once in the mind it could not be dislodged. It spite of his best efforts, the ghastly thing grew passionately—because his thirst grew too. He had smoked much; had eaten spiced things at lunch; had breathed in alkali with the dry, scorched air. He searched for a cool flint pebble to put into his burning mouth, but found only angular scraps of dusty limestone. There were no pebbles here. The cold helped a little to counteract, but already he knew in himself subconsciously the dread of something that was coming. What was it? He tried to hide the thought and bury it out of sight. The utter futility of his tiny strength against the power of the universe appalled him. And then he knew. It was the sun. The merciless sun was on the way, already rising. Its return was like the presage of execution....

    It came. With true horror he watched the marvellous swift dawn break across the sandy sea. The eastern sky glowed hurriedly as from crimson fires. Ridges, not noticeable in the starlight turned black in endless series, like flat-topped billows of a frozen ocean. Wide streaks of blue and yellow followed, as the sky dropped sheets of mauve light upon the wind-eaten cliffs and showed their under sides. They did not advance; they waited till the sun was up—and then they moved; they rose and sank; they shifted as the sunshine lifted them and the shadows crept away. But in an hour there would be no shadows any more. There would be no shade.

    The little groups of stones began to dance. It was horrible. The unbroken, huge expanse lay round him, warming up, twelve hours of blazing hell to come. Already the monstrous Desert glared, each bit familiar, since each bit was a repetition of the bit before, behind, on either side. It laughed at guidance and direction. He rose and walked; for miles he walked, though how many, north, south, or west, he knew not. The frantic thing was in him now, the fury of the Desert; he took its pace, its endless, tireless stride, the stride of the burning, murderous Desert that is waterless. He felt it alive—a blindly heaving desire in it to reduce him to its conditionless, awful dryness. He felt—yet knowing this was feverish and not to be believed— that his own small life lay on its mighty surface, a mere dot in space, a mere heap of little stones. His emotions, his fears, his hopes, his ambition, his love—mere bundled group of little unimportant stones that danced with apparent activity for a moment, then were merged in the undifferentiated surface underneath. He was included in a purpose greater than his own.

    The will made a plucky effort then. ‘A night and a day,’ he laughed, while his lips cracked smartingly with the stretch­ing of the skin, ‘what is it? Many a chap has lasted days and days...!’ Yes, only he was not of that rare company. He was ordinary, unaccustomed to privation, weak, untrained of spirit, unacquainted with stern resistance. He knew not how to spare himself. The Desert struck him where it pleased—all over. It played with him. His tongue was swollen; the par­ched throat could not swallow. He sank.... An hour he lay there, just wit enough in him to choose the top of a mound where he could be most easily seen. He lay two hours, three, four hours.... The heat blazed down upon him like a furnace.... The sky, when he opened his eyes once, was empty... then a speck became visible in the blue expanse; and presently another speck. They came from nowhere. They hovered very high, almost out of sight. They appeared, they disappeared, they— reappeared. Nearer and nearer they swung down, in sweeping stealthy circles… little dancing groups of them, miles away but ever drawing closer—the vultures....

    He had strained his ears so long for sounds of feet and voices that it seemed he could no longer hear at all. Hearing had ceased within him. Then came the water-dreams, with their agonising torture. He heard that... heard it running in silvery streams and rivulets across green English meadows. It rippled with silvery music. He heard it splash. He dipped hands and feet and head in it—in deep, clear pools of generous depth. He drank; with his skin he drank, not with mouth and throat alone. Delicious! Ice clinked in effervescent, sparkling water against a glass. He swam and plunged. Water gushed freely over back and shoulders, gallons and gallons of it, bathfuls and to spare, a flood of gushing, crystal, cool, lifegiving liquid.... And then he stood in a beech wood and felt the streaming deluge of delicious summer rain upon his face; heard it drip luxuriantly upon a million thirsty leaves. The wet trunks shone, the damp moss spread its perfume, ferns waved heavily in the moist atmosphere. He was soaked to the skin in it. A mountain torrent, fresh from fields of snow, dashed foaming past, and the spray fell in a shower upon his cheeks and hair. He dived—head foremost.... Ah, he was up to the neck... and she was with him; they were under water together; he saw her eyes gleaming into his own beneath the copious flood.

    The voice, however, was not hers. ... ‘You will drown, yet you will not know you drown....!’ His swollen tongue called out a name. But no sound was audible. He closed his eyes. There came sweet unconsciousness....

    A sound in that instant was audible, though. It was a voice— voices—and the thud of animal hoofs upon the sand. The specks had vanished from the sky as mysteriously as they came. And, as though in answer to the sound, he made a movement— but an automatic, an unconscious movement. He did not know he moved. And the body, uncontrolled, lost its precarious balance. He rolled; but he did not know he rolled. Slowly, over the edge of the sloping mound of sand, he turned sideways. Like a log of wood he slid gradually, turning over and over, nothing to stop him—to the bottom. A few feet only, and not even steep; just steep enough to keep rolling slowly. There was a—splash. But he did not know there was a splash.

    They found him in a pool of water—one of these rare pools the Desert Bedouin mark preciously for their own. He had lain within three yards of it for hours. He was drowned... but he did not know he drowned....