It was perhaps half a minute before the beetle emerged, bewildered by the flames and the black smoke. The movement of the entrance stone had made the hole higher and narrower, so the beetle had to struggle to extricate itself. Standing above the entrance, his arms raised above his head, Thorg waited until it was almost clear before he dashed down the heavy rock with all the force of his arms. It struck the thorax just behind the prominent eyes. Another stone, hurled by Hrolf, smashed a front leg at the joint. The beetle opened its great striped wings in an attempt to fly, and Jomar darted forward and drove his spear into the segmented abdomen; the creature twisted in agony, and the powerful mandibles gripped Jomar’s leg. Jomar screamed, and tried to pull himself free. Then another big rock crashed down, destroying an eye and smashing the tough integument that covered the head. The mandibles released Jomar, who was bleeding heavily from the thigh. Hrolf drove his own spear deep into the flesh where the wing joined the body. The beetle gave a convulsive jerk that knocked Ulf and Jomar flat, and landed on its back several yards away. It continued to twitch for perhaps five minutes more.
It was Veig, peering into the burrow, who noticed a movement behind the burning creosote bushes. There’s another in there!” Instantly, they were all alert, prepared for another attack. But none came. Jomar limped into the shade of a parasol and took a long drink of water. Hrolf tended the wound, while the others ignited the remaining creosote bushes and threw them into the burrow. Then, suddenly overcome by the heat, they lay there, panting, and watched to see what happened. Half an hour later, when the creosote bushes had burned themselves to ashes, there was a movement in the entrance to the burrow and the long antennae of a beetle emerged. The female beetle, much smaller than her dead mate, dragged herself out of the hole, followed by half a dozen larvae, each about two feet long. Describing it later to his younger brother, Veig said that he suddenly felt sorry for the beetles — although he knew that if he ventured too close, even the larvae would attack him. The men watched them drag themselves over the burning sand, moving towards a gulley half a mile away. They behaved as if some terrible natural disaster had struck; their only instinct was for self-preservation.
When, later in the day, they explored the burrow, they were surprised to find it was so deep. Jomar’s theory was that it had once been the lair of a family of wolf spiders. It was virtually an underground cave, the walls cemented with a mixture of sand and the beetles’ saliva. Two half dead larvae lay in its deepest recess, overcome by the smoke; the desert wind, blowing direct on the entrance, had driven the smoke and sparks in like a poison gas. They killed the larvae and threw the corpses outside — the flesh of the tiger beetle had an unpleasant flavour that made it unsuitable for food. Then they sealed the entrance and collapsed into a long sleep in the cool depths of the lair, which still stank unpleasantly of creosote and smoke.
The next day, two hours before dawn, Ulf, Thorg and Hrolf set out to fetch the women and seven-year-old Niall from the cave at the foot of the inland plateau. Jomar and Veig remained in the burrow, in case the tiger beetles made an attempt to repossess their home — a precaution that proved to be unnecessary. Later, they discovered that the tiger beetle has a deep antipathy to the smell of burning creosote, and would not even cross a strip of land where there was any trace of it.
Niall could still remember the excitement when his father came back. His first intimation was when Ingeld, Thorg’s wife, began to shout, then to wail; she had seen only three men and assumed that the other two had been killed. Then, when the men arrived and described their new home, she became hysterical with excitement — she had always been a woman with poor control of her emotions — and wanted to set out immediately; it took a great deal of persuasion to make her understand that none of them would survive if they set out in the midday heat. Even so, she remained fretful and impatient for the rest of the day.
When they finally left, two hours before dawn, Niall was the most excited of all. They chose this hour to travel because most of the desert predators hunted by night; as dawn approached, they made their way back to their lairs. The temperature was around freezing point; even wrapped in a hide made of caterpillar skins, Niall shivered uncontrollably. But inside, there was a glowing happiness as he peered over his mother’s shoulders — for part of the time she carried him in a pouch — and an excitement that made him feel as if he might float up into the air. He had only once been more than a few hundred yards from the cave, and that was in the week the rains came. The wind had turned pleasantly cool; black clouds came from the west, and suddenly water was gushing from the sky. He had stood in the warm rain and laughed and jumped up and down. His mother took him for a walk, to a point where a dried up watercourse cracked the edge of the plateau. There he stood and watched with amazement as the ground heaved and split open and a large bullfrog pushed its way out; half an hour later, it was happening in a dozen places at once. The creatures hopped down to the pools that were beginning to form, and soon there was a loud, non-stop chorus of croaks as they called for the females to join them. The sight of coupling frogs struck Niall as unbelievably funny, and he shrieked with laughter as he splashed in the stream that had sprung up around his feet. Plants and flowers also began to push their way up from the sand, which had now turned into oozy mud. There were hundreds of tiny explosions as dried pods sent their seeds into the air like bullets. Within hours, the surface of the ground had been covered with an amazing carpet of flowers — white, green, yellow, red, blue and mauve. Niall, who had never seen any colour but the yellow-grey of sand and rock and the fierce blue of the sky, felt as if he was in fairyland. When the rain stopped, bees appeared from nowhere and burrowed into the flowers. The brown pools, looking like mushroom soup, were full of tadpoles who writhed and thrashed and devoured one another. In other, clearer pools, tiny newts devoured fragments of green algae. After four years of living in a lifeless wilderness, Niall was suddenly surrounded by seething, blossoming life, and the sensation filled him with a kind of intoxication.
This is why, as he bounced along on his mother’s back or trotted by her side, he experienced the same joy. His father had used the word “fertile” about their new home, and he imagined a place full of flowers and trees and tiny animals. There awakened in him a sense of boundless anticipation of marvels to come. If his father, who had spent his whole life in the desert, had been able to read his mind, he would have shaken his head sadly.
At midday, when the sun became too hot, the men dug deep holes in the sand, covered them with parasols, then poured more sand on top. A few inches below the surface, the sand was quite cool. Less than a mile away, there were pillars of wind-eroded sandstone which might have afforded some shelter; but in the searing heat, they would never have reached them. Niall and his mother and father lay in one of the holes, sweating and chewing at a succulent tuber to prevent dehydration. Niall slept a little, and dreamed of flowers and flowing water. Then once more they were on the move.
The wind had changed direction and seemed cooler. Niall pointed in the direction from which it was blowing and asked his father: “What lies over there?”
“The delta,” Ulf said. His voice was tired and indifferent, yet something about the word made Niall shiver.
When they arrived, an hour before nightfall, they were all totally exhausted. Niall’s first sight of his new home was of acacia trees on the horizon, then of the immense, many-branched organ-pipe cactus. He had never seen a tree before, although his father had described them. As they came closer, he saw, to his disappointment, that there were no flowers; neither was there the running water he had been dreaming about. Instead, there was barren, rocky ground with a thin covering of sand. The ground was covered with grey-looking shrubs, creosote bushes and alfa grass, and with exposed rocks and stones. Only the tree-like euphorbia cactus, with its deep green leaves, provided a touch of colour. In the distance there were more of the strange columns of distorted red rock, while on the southern horizon, behind them, he could see the inland plateau towering like a mountain range. Yet in spite of its dreariness, this was undoubtedly an improvement on the endless sand dunes of their former home.