THIRTY CLICKS OF NOTHING

Synopsis

The dune country south of the road runs a hundred miles in every direction and looks, from any point in it, exactly like every other point. Four men are walking through it toward a smudge of smoke. Their column came apart in the night. Their map ends four kilometers behind them. Their compass took a rifle butt on the first morning and now points eleven degrees away from north, which not one of them can prove and all of them suspect. The corporal reads ground. The farm boy reads sky. They disagree, politely, on the second day, and the water is down to two days for four men. Somebody has to be followed, and nobody has said so yet.

Who this is about

Four men from a scattered column in southern Tunisia, 1943: a corporal who reads terrain, a farm boy who reads weather, a clerk with the map, and a man nobody has heard speak.

What goes wrong

The compass takes a rifle butt on the first morning and reads eleven degrees wrong, which none of them can prove. The map ends four kilometers back. The smoke could be anybody's.

What's at stake

Water for two days, four men, and thirty kilometers of dune. Whoever they follow is right or all of them are wrong, and there is no second attempt at the choice.

Why it keeps going

Each episode is one day, one argument about direction, and one man agreeing to walk somewhere he believes is wrong because the alternative is walking alone.

Takeaway

Men lost together will follow a wrong man rather than scatter, and they are usually right to.

Shelves

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Story, in the creator's words

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