The Gobi Desert (2015 Edition) by Pierre Benoit

Author:Pierre Benoit [Benoit, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Action & Adventure, Travel, Asia, General
ISBN: 9781785894565
Amazon: B016WU7L3K
Publisher: Matador
Published: 2015-10-18T11:00:00+00:00

XI

Like most people who have had to learn to read only late in life, he was a voracious reader, was Sanders. Every hour which was not taken up with his duties as leader of the caravan found him with a book in his hand. Not poetry, of course. Travelogues, most of all. As for those works which dealt with hunting for tigers, he already knew them all by heart.

One of the old books which he was particularly fond of was something written by an Italian by the name of Marco Polo, who a good number of centuries earlier had come to look around in these regions. At that time China was ruled by a khan called Kublai. I don’t know why this name was so pleasing to Sanders, but he delighted in repeating it over and over again.

‘Kublai Khan! Kublai Khan!’ he said. ‘With the permission of the Good Lord, Michel, that’s what we shall call our little friend. Just wait till you see him. You will realise straightaway why he can’t be called anything else. Kublai Khan was the greatest emperor in the history of the world, did you know that?’

I don’t know what use the book by this Italian could have. But as for what it said about the terrible region to which we had committed ourselves, you had to agree that it wasn’t far wrong. ‘When you ride in this desert by night,’ it said, ‘and if a traveller remains behind or leaves his companions to sleep or for some other reason, when he wants to resume his journey or tries to re-join the group, he sometimes hears spirits or voices which seem to be his companions; sometimes the spirits call out his name, and often they divert him from his path, and in this way many have become lost and have perished. I assure you that even during the day you can hear these spirits. You can sometimes hear them playing different instruments, especially a drum . . . . . ‘ Rocks shattered by ice, the howling of sand storms, the muffled roar of rock falls in the night - those who think they know about these things, sitting by their fireplace, they can smile and put forward all sorts of theories. But as for me, I’m certain that these noises exist, and that in the abominable solitude of that desert I have heard my name called out like that; and I can swear that on many occasions I have been on the point of collapsing in a faint, and Sanders and Neratov also, and even Nain-Sain, in other words people who are not exactly babies.

*

The days now followed one after another without us meeting a single human being. We could manage without them. ‘Yes, but what about animals?’ you might ask. Well, the animals didn’t show themselves either. Apart from a strange type of crow, of an unusual size, we only found bobaks, those curious marmots that you shoot with a small-calibre rifle while

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