I am now an animal, he thought. I must have animal cunning. I must sense water and then I must get to it. Where things grow there must be water. A stream. A well.
He got to his knees, started to crawl deeper into the plowed field, putting another few yards between himself and the road. He crawled into a clump of weeds. The dew on their leaves brushed against his face. "It's water," he said, and he licked the dew from the weeds. The thirst remained.
Fire. Build a fire and attract a watchman, a farmer, another bus rolling along the deserted road. No, don't build a fire. Cane burns like oil. Remember what poor old Fielding said? No fire. You'll be roasted alive. Find water. It's a sugar field. Must be an irrigation ditch around. Find the ditch.
More ground gained by crawling. Then the sleep of exhaustion, no dreams only sleep until the thirst becomes stronger than the exhaustion and then more crawling until ... God! there is a ditch. Hear it, smell it. Must be water, couldn't be this much mulepiss. Now drink your fill and bathe your face and get your head away from the top of the ditch before you fall asleep again and drown in two inches of it. It has a name. It's water.
This time Hall rolled over on his back when he felt that sleep was overtaking him.
There were a million bugs on the mud walls of the ditch. They crawled on Hall's hands, on his face, and one column of intrepid bugs slithered into his mouth and got caught in his throat and he was sick. He moved away from the mess, tried to sit up. He could see a mound of rocks near the road. With all his remaining strength, he started to crawl toward the mound.
It took him two hours to negotiate the twenty yards between the ditch and the rocks. He lost count of the number of times he collapsed to his face and fell asleep on the journey. All he knew was that when he woke up, he had to get to the rocks. He could sit on the rocks and wait for a truck or a bus to pass by. Then he could hail the driver.
But when he reached the fence, he saw that the mound was on the other side of the road. Fall asleep in the middle of the road and the next truck that rolls along crushes you like a roach. Putas y maricones! Maricones y putas! Blood will run in the streets of the city when I get up, the brown blood, the black blood, the blue blood. Arriba España in a pig's eye. You mean Deutschland Erwache, señor, and come a little closer, you with the yoke and the five arrows on your cap, come a little closer and get your filthy head bashed in. God, when I get up I'll kill them I'll kill them if these chills ever go away I'll kill them I'll kill all the baby killers when these chills go away oh God look at the baby killers marching through Burgos with the holy men shaking holy water on their lousy heads. Whores and faggots! Faggots and whores! I'm getting up!
He was asleep when the army lorry roared by and then stopped down the road, brakes screeching, rubber biting into macadam.