King Solomon's Treasure

Chapter 10 Water!water! (2)
At eleven o'clock we were exhausted, and in short, very badly.It was all volcanic slag all the way, although smoother than what I've heard about eg Ascension Island's slag, it was still very rough and painful to step on, and with all the other hardships we almost died .A few hundred yards ahead there were a few gigantic blocks of lava, so we gritted our teeth and walked over to lie down beneath the lava and take a break from the harsh sun.When we got there, we were astonished to find a small plateau, or ridge, covered with greenery, though we were too tired to be curious.Obviously, the soil was formed after the lava weathered. The birds took the seeds and put them in the soil. The seeds took root and germinated, which turned into the current scene.But we have little interest in these plants, we are not Nebuchadnezzar II, we do not live on grass.Besides, we have not been specially favored by God to have special digestive organs for digesting grass.We sat under the rock and moaned.I wish I had never embarked on this stupid journey.That's when I noticed Ambopa stood up and staggered toward the grass.A few minutes later, Ambopa, who is usually serious and noble, was jumping and screaming like a madman, waving something green in his hand.We scrambled across, weary, hoping he'd discovered the water.

"What is this, Ambopa? You fool!" I yelled at him in Zulu.

"This thing can satisfy both satiety and thirst." As he spoke, he waved the thing in his hand to me again.

Only then did I see clearly that it was a watermelon.It turned out that we came to a field of wild melons by accident. There were thousands of watermelons growing in the field, all of which were ripe.

"There's watermelon!" I yelled at Goode behind me.In a blink of an eye, he took a rude bite of melon with his dentures.

We each ate about six melons, and though the wild watermelons were poor in taste, they tasted better than any good food in our mouths.

After quenching our thirst, we picked some watermelons, cut them in half, and put them in the sun. The water vapor evaporated from the watermelons made us feel a little bit cooler.Our stomachs were growling with hunger, and there was some dried meat in our luggage, but we were sick of it.Also, one never knows when more food will be found, so it must be saved.At this time, luck came again.I found more than a dozen large birds flying towards us.

"Shoot, master, shoot quickly." The Hottentot lay on the ground and whispered, and we followed his example and lay on the ground.

Then I saw clearly that a group of bustards flew over our heads with waving wings, at a height of about fifty yards.I picked up a Winchester repeater, and just as the bustard flew overhead, I sprang to my feet.When the bustards saw me, they immediately gathered together, which was in my favor.I quickly fired two shots into the thickest part of the flock, and by luck, a bustard landed on the ground, a big fat bustard weighing about twenty pounds.Half an hour later we lit a fire with dried melon vines and roasted the bustard over it.Everyone devoured it as if they hadn't eaten for a week, except for the beak and bones, we ate up the bustard.Later, we never had a more delicious meal than this one.

After the moon rose, we continued on our way, taking a lot of watermelons with us.We were pleasantly surprised and relieved to find that the higher we climbed, the cooler the air was.At dawn we were not more than twelve miles from the snow on the summit by eye.We found watermelon again on the way, now we don’t have to worry about running out of water, and we will see snow soon.But then, the road up the mountain became extremely steep, and we had to slow down and walk carefully, at most one mile an hour.We ate the last of the jerky that night.Except for the bustard, we found no other creatures on the mountain, not even a spring or a stream, which made us feel very strange, since there is snow in front of us, so there should be melted snow.We found out later that, for some unexplained reason, all the streams flowed down the north side of the mountain.

We started worrying about food again.Although he escaped the danger of dying of thirst, he may now starve to death.I have recorded in detail in my diary the sufferings I experienced during the next three days, and I will now extract a few passages.

May 21: Departure at [-]:[-] am, the weather is very cool, you can go forward during the day.We had a rough day with watermelons.We didn't see any more watermelons along the way, obviously we had already walked out of the melon field.Also, no prey was seen.At sunset we stopped to rest and hadn't eaten for hours.It was very cold at night.

May 22: As the sun rose we were on the road again, all feeling extremely weak and powerless.Just walked five miles all day, found a few patches of snow, we ate some snow, and had nothing else to eat.In the evening we camped on the edge of a high ground.It was unbearably cold.Everyone drank a little brandy, and everyone curled up and huddled together in blankets so as not to freeze to death, hungry and tired, and I was afraid that Witterügger, who was afraid of the cold, would not make it through the night.

May 23: The sun came up, warming our icy extremities a bit, and we struggled to hit the road again.Everyone's situation is terrible now, and I worry that if we can't find food again, today will be the anniversary of our death next year.There was still a little brandy left, and Goode, Sir Henry, and Ambopa held on tenaciously.But things were not going well for Wittruegl.Like most Hottentots, he is not frost resistant.The torment of hunger is not unbearable, the stomach is already numb.Others feel the same way.We have come to the steep rocky cliff that connects the Queen of Sheba's breasts.The views here are spectacular.Below you lay the vast desert, glistening in the sun's rays, stretching to the distant horizon.Miles of snow stretched overhead, hard and slippery layers of snow rising gradually, and in the center of the snow layer was the teat part of the breast, miles in circumference, about four thousand feet high, straight into the sky.There are no living things here.I think our end is near.God bless you.

The diary is excerpted here, because this thing is really meaningless to read, and what happened later needs to be described more accurately and carefully.

For the whole day on May 23, we hobbled on the snow slopes, lying on the ground to rest from time to time.Everyone looked strange and emaciated, dragging their heavy legs through the blinding snow, looking around with hungry eyes, but they didn't see even a little food to eat.We walked less than seven miles that day.Before sunset, we came under the nipples of the left peak of the Queen of Sheba's twin breasts.Thousands of feet high, the left peak plunges into the sky and is covered with huge, smooth ice and snow.Although our situation was terrible at the time, we couldn't help admiring the beauty in front of us.The blood-red afterglow sprinkled on the white snow, as if wearing a bright crown for the majestic mountain peak.

"I think," panted Good, "that we are not far from the cave that the old gentleman mentioned."

"Yes," I said, "if there is such a cave."

"Don't say that, Quitman," groaned Sir Henry, "I take the old gentleman's word for it. Remember the puddle? We'll find the cave soon."

"We'll all be dead if we don't find it before dark. That's what it is," I said.

For the next 10 minutes, we walked on without saying a word.Ambopa, who walks beside me, is wrapped in a blanket and belted tightly around his waist, "to reduce hunger," as he puts it.His waist was strangled to be as thin as the girl's.Suddenly he grabbed my arm.

"Look!" he said, pointing to a raised snow slope at the top of the mountain.

Looking in the direction of his finger, there seemed to be a hole in the snow slope about two hundred yards from us.

"That's the cave," said Ambopa.

We ran over quickly, and the hole was indeed the entrance of the cave, and there was no doubt that this was the cave that Darth West was talking about.As soon as we entered the cave, the sun went down and the whole cave was pitch black.Evening twilight is barely visible at this latitude.We stooped and groped in the hole.The cave is not big, we were close together to keep each other warm, each drank a sip of the little brandy left, and prepared to temporarily put aside the pain and have a good sleep.However, the temperature was so low that we couldn't sleep at all.At this altitude the temperature must have been fourteen or fifteen degrees below zero.We experienced all kinds of hardships along the way, suffering from hunger, extreme heat, and thirst. Our bodies have become quite weak and our physical strength has been severely exhausted.So what this temperature means to us, I don't think I need to elaborate, readers can imagine.In short, I felt that death was not far away.We sat in the cave and endured the severe cold. For a while, our fingertips were frozen, our feet were frozen and we couldn’t move, and our faces were numb for a while.We got closer and closer, huddled tightly together, but it didn't help, our hungry and tired bodies couldn't feel any warmth.Occasionally someone fell asleep, but woke up after a few minutes of sleep.But this may be a good thing, if you sleep for too long, you may never wake up again.I believe it was through sheer willpower that we survived in the end.

The Hottentot Wittruegl spent the night with his teeth chattering like castanets.When it was almost dawn, I heard him let out a long sigh, and his teeth stopped chattering coldly.I didn't think much of it at the time, thinking he was asleep.He and I were back to back, and I noticed that his body was getting colder and colder, until it was almost like a block of ice.

There was a gleam of light in the sky, and then the golden morning light sprinkled on the white snow, and the brilliant sun shone through the lava wall, shining on our frozen bodies, and also on Wittruegel's body.He sat there, cold and hard as a rock.No wonder his back is so cold, poor fellow, that sigh I heard was his last breath, and now his body is almost completely frozen.We were so shocked and horrified at the thought of spending the night with a dead body that we hurried away, leaving the dead body sitting there quietly with its hands folded over its knees.

Then the icy sun shone into the hole.Suddenly I heard someone yelling in horror, and I turned back to look into the cave.Just at the end of the cave, at most twenty feet away, there was another figure with his head buried on his chest and his long arms hanging down.I took a closer look, and it turned out to be a corpse, and it was a white man.

Others also saw such a terrifying scene. Now, our already fragile nerves couldn't take it anymore, and we stumbled out of the cave with our half-frozen bodies.

(End of this chapter)