Future in doubt
The desert. It was a deadly
place to be in. It was probably the deadliest place to be in on the entire
planet. He had realized that by now. The cruel, unrelenting heat in the daytime
was wearing them out. The sun was burning down on them mercilessly. It felt as
if the skin was smoldering off their bones – or at least he felt like this. He
could not tell what his companions were thinking, for they were silent most of
the time. Did they not speak to save their energies? He would not have blamed
them. He did not know anything about surviving in a desert, and coming there
had been a really bad idea. But, as usual, curiosity had won against reason.
This kind of ‘adventure’
was nothing new to him. Wearily he remembered that one time when he had taken
up a similarly stupid endeavor: climbing Mount Everest with the help of some
really experienced people. That had been thrilling, but not nearly thrilling
enough, so this time he had decided upon something far more extreme.
Eventually, however, it had turned out that going into the desert on his own
was not extreme, nothing to be proud of, and definitely an idea born out of
sheer stupidity. It was too late, however, to redeem his decision now, and so
he could do nothing but trust these people around him, who had literally picked
him up an indefinable time ago.
These strangers. Who were
they anyway? What purpose had they? Had they picked him up for charity’s sake?
Was charity even something they knew? What was he to them? He was nobody, an
idiotic stranger having got lost in a desert whose name he could not even
recall now. He remembered the people he had called his friends telling him not
to go on this ‘crazy trip’, as they had called it. But where were they now, his
‘friends’? They were far away now, and so unreal, as if he was in another
universe altogether. There were no friends out here. There was no civilization,
or modern world. There was only the desert, and the struggle for survival which
he had unconsciously burdened on these people.
How did they survive out there? How did anything survive, or come to life, in
this hostile place? As he took a look around, his eyes burning from being
strained to look into the distance, he only saw the heat glimmering above the
sand.
Oh how he missed the cold
of Mount Everest, that biting cold that had made his face freeze! Back then, he had thought it the worst thing
to endure, but now there was nothing that seemed more desirable to him. Had
there been an ocean laid bare right in front of him, he would have drunk it
completely, so thirsty was he.
He shook involuntarily as
his body seemed to remember that soon nighttime would come again, and then it
would get unbearably cold, especially in contrast to daytime. How could anyone
endure this?! How would he be able to endure this one more night? For an endless period of time, he had
lost count of days and nights, he had
been wondering if he would wake up
the next day.
Was this how he was going
to die? In a dire place like this, surrounded by strangers, either freezing to
death at night or drying out in the relentless desert heat in the daytime? His
plans had certainly been otherwise. Nature did not seem to care much about his
plans though. To the desert he was only yet another organism trying to survive.
It was useless to try and convince himself of something else.
And what if, by some
miracle, he was going to survive? What if he could return to that other
universe which mankind called civilization? Was he going to learn from this
mistake? Take another path in life, settle down finally, or was he going to
challenge his luck again, like he had after returning from the Himalaya? Back
then he had been so sure that it had been enough, yet here he was in a desert,
about to die. Was he ever going to learn, or was this his fate? To go on
challenging nature in its various ways until it cut him down to size?
Was mankind, like him,
destined to go on challenging whatever there was to challenge? He hoped not. If
they did, they would, like him, realize that they had to stop their follies
when it was already too late.
With his fainting
consciousness he clung to his thoughts on the future, while his eyes clung to
the horizon. Was that an oasis in the distance?
Claudia
Elsdörfer