Death Runs Downhill

Chapter One: The Hollow That Breathed

October 1909.

The column came down off the stone country at four in the afternoon, forty-one men, ninety-two oxen, three wagons, and one surveyor with a fever he had been denying for six days.

Oskar Hartmann rode at the back because the dust was thinner there and because he did not want Lieutenant Frese to see how he sat his horse. He was thirty-four years old, a Bavarian with a jaw like a spade blade, and he had spent two seasons triangulating a country that seemed designed to refuse measurement. Black rock. White glare. Riverbeds that ran once in a decade and killed men when they did.

The basin below the escarpment was the only water for thirty kilometres. It sat like a soup bowl pressed into the plain, perhaps four hundred metres across, its rim low on three sides and closed on the fourth by a wall of dark lava that rose two hundred metres and went on rising in steps beyond that. A seep at the eastern lip made a green stain and a puddle the size of a dinner table. Grass grew there. Nothing else for a day's march grew anything at all.

"Here," said Frese, with satisfaction.

The Damara guides stopped at the rim and would not come down.

There were four of them. The eldest, a thin man named Tsaub who had brought the column through the sand belt without once hesitating, stood with his hands loose at his sides and spoke for a long time. The interpreter, a coloured man from the coast, listened and then shrugged in a way Hartmann had learned to distrust.

"He says this place sleeps," the interpreter said. "He says when it wakes it takes the breath. He says his people do not lie down here."

Frese laughed. He was twenty-six. "Tell him there is water."

"He knows there is water, Lieutenant. He says that is why the animals come, and that is why the bones are here."

Hartmann got off his horse. He walked out along the rim with his boots sliding on scree and found, without having to search, what the guide meant. Bones. Not a few — a field of them, half-buried, sun-bleached to the colour of old paper. Springbok. Zebra. The great scrolled horn-cores of gemsbok. A giraffe's femur like a fallen pillar. They lay where they had lain down, most of them, legs folded, necks curved back. No scatter. No gnawing. Scavengers had not worked this ground.

He stood with his hand over his mouth and felt the fever ringing in his ears.

"Lieutenant," he called. "We should camp on the rim."

"The rim is wind and stone. The wagons cannot make the rim." Frese was already shouting the oxen down the slope. "Herr Hartmann, you are ill. Go and lie down."

The guides left at dusk. They did not argue and they did not ask for payment. Tsaub came to Hartmann last, put two fingers to his own throat, and pressed them there, and then made a slow gesture with his flat hand, palm down, sinking — the way water finds the lowest part of a floor.

Then they walked north into the blue dark and were gone.

Hartmann took his blanket and his instrument case and climbed. He told himself it was the fever, that he wanted air; he told Frese it was so he could shoot the stars for a longitude fix, which was half true. He got two hundred metres up the lava steps before his legs refused, and he lay down in a shallow scrape with the case under his head and watched the camp fires below turn from yellow to red to the dull orange of coals.

Sometime in the night he woke because the sound had changed.

The oxen had been restless all evening — he had heard them shifting, the bells, the low complaining. Now there was nothing. Not a bell. Not a hoof. The whole basin lay under a silence so complete that his own pulse seemed loud and vulgar.

And there was a smell that was not a smell: a flatness in the air, a sourness at the back of the tongue, like the inside of a wine cellar. It came up the rock face past him, slow and cold, and moved on, and the cold of it was the thing he would write about afterwards, again and again, in the months when no one would listen. Cold air, on a night when the stone still held the day's heat. Cold air, sliding uphill along the wall and then away.

He was too sick to go down. He told himself so. He lay shaking under the blanket and did not go down.

At first light he went.

The camp was exactly as it had been. That was the horror of it — nothing had been disarranged. The wagons stood with their tarpaulins lashed. The cook fire had burned out under its tripod. Frese lay half out of his tent on his back, one boot on and one off, his hands open beside his head. Every man was down. The ones on their blankets looked asleep, and the ones who had risen had fallen where they stood, a private with a mug still gripped in his hand, the sergeant three steps from the picket line with his face in the dust.

No wounds. No blood. No sign of struggle anywhere.

The oxen lay in their spans, folded down, heads flat. Ninety-two of them. The picket line was not broken.

Hartmann walked through his dead column and his boots made the only noise in the world. He knelt by Frese and put his ear to the boy's chest and heard nothing, and when he sat back his head swam so hard that he had to put both palms on the ground. Down there, low, the sourness was stronger. He stood up quickly.

On the tarpaulin of the second wagon there was a fly, on its back, legs curled. He found another. Then a dozen. In a country where flies came to a carcass before the eye had dulled, there was not one fly alive in that basin and not one feeding.

He went out of the hollow on his hands and knees at the northern rim, and when he was above it he vomited until there was nothing left, and then he took out his notebook.

He wrote for four hours, because writing was the only thing left that he knew how to do. He wrote the time he had woken and the temperature and the absence of wind. He wrote that death had come up to a level and stopped there, and he proved it: the birds in the low thorn were dead and the birds in the high thorn were not. He wrote that the dead line lay at about four metres above the basin floor and was as flat as the surface of a pond.

Then he climbed the lava wall to find where the cold breath had come from.

He found them at midday, two hundred and forty metres above the camp: vents. Cracks in the old lava, some no wider than a hand, some wide enough to swallow a wagon wheel, running along a line as straight as a ruled edge across the shoulder of the escarpment. He held his handkerchief over the nearest and the cloth pushed up, steadily, as if a patient mouth were beneath it. He lit a match and lowered it and the match went out. He lit another and the same. The air coming out was cold and it stank faintly of eggs, and it did not stop coming out.

He sketched the line of them. He paced the distances and wrote them down. He drew the escarpment in profile, and the fault trace beneath it as he read it in the rock, and he wrote in his careful hand: *The ground here breathes. It is not fancy. It is a machine of some kind, below, and it is filling.*

Going down he fell twice. The second time he could not get up for a long while, and he understood that he would not carry both himself and the brass instrument case any further. He crawled it into a cave mouth in the lava — a smooth-lipped hole that went back into blackness and exhaled its own cool breath — and wedged it above the flood line, and stacked three stones on the lip so that a man who knew to look would look.

The notebook he kept inside his shirt.

Two of the Damara guides came back for him on the third day. They would not go below the rim. They carried him nine days to the coast on a litter of thorn poles, and for most of it he talked, and none of it made sense to them.

In Swakopmund a board of three officers heard him and wrote: *fever; loss of the column attributed to poisoned water at the seep.* A doctor added a note about mania. The notebook went into a crate with his other effects, and the crate went into a store, and Oskar Hartmann died of pneumonia the following June at the age of thirty-five, still insisting to a bored orderly that the ground out there was breathing, that it had been breathing for longer than anyone had been counting, and that one day it would take a bigger breath than that.

The vents went on exhaling into an empty country for another hundred and fourteen years.

Nobody counted.