open beach between the ruined city and the headland, and now the
evening wind was sweeping dust and grit across their exposed
position.
Jake selected a sheltered hollow under the lee of the ruins, and they
moved the cars up and parked them in the protective hollow square of
the laager.
The ancient buildings were choked with piled sand and thick with the
spiny camel-thorn growth that blocked the narrow streets. While
Jake and Gregorius checked the fuelling and lubrication of the
vehicles, and Gareth scraped a fireplace against a shielding stone
wall, Vicky wandered off to explore the ruins in the dusk.
She did not go far. A tangible sense of menace and human suffering
seemed to emanate from the rubble of buildings that had been burned
over a century before. It made her skin crawl, but she picked her way
cautiously along a narrow alleyway that opened at last into an open
square.
She knew instinctively that this had been the trading square of the
slave city and she imagined the long chained lines of human beings.
The pervading aura of their misery still persisted. She wondered if
she could capture it on paper, and make her readers see that it had not
changed. Once again, a consuming greed was to place a nation in
chains, once again hundreds of thousands of human beings would be
forced to learn the same misery that this city had engendered. She
must write that, she decided, she must capture the sense of outrage and
despair she felt now and convey it to the civilized peoples of the
world.
A small scuffling sound distracted her and she looked down, then drew
back with a shudder from the finger-length purple scorpion, with its
lobster claws and the high curved tail bearing a single-hooked fang
that scuttled towards the toe of her boot. She turned and hurried back
along the alleyway.
The chill of horror stayed with her, so that she crossed gratefully to
the bright fire of thorn twigs that blazed under the ruined wall.
Gareth looked up as she knelt beside him and held out her hands to the
blaze.
"I was just coming to look for you. Better not wander off on your
own."
"I can look after myself," she told him quickly, with an edge to her
voice which was becoming familiar.
"I agree." He smiled placatingly at her. "A bit too damned well
I sometimes think, "and he dug in his pocket.
"I found something in the sand as I was digging the fireplace." He
held out a broken circle of metal which gleamed yellow in the
firelight. It was fashioned as a snake bangle, with a serpent's forged
head and coiled body.
Vicky felt her irritation evaporate magically. "Oh, Gary," she lifted
it in both hands, "it's beautiful. Is it gold?"
"I suspect it is." She slipped the heavy bangle over her wrist and
admired it with a glowing expression, twisting it to catch the light.
"Not one of them can resist a gift," Gareth thought comfortably,
watching her face in the dancing firelight.
"it belonged to a princess, who was famous for her beauty and her
compassion to besotted suitors," said Gareth lightly.
"So I thought how fitting that you should have it."
"Oh!" she gasped. "For me." And impulsively she leaned forward to
kiss his cheek, and was startled when he turned his head quickly and
her lips pressed full against his. For a moment she tried to pull away
and then it did not seem worth the effort. After all, it was a truly
magnificent bracelet.
In the light of the single hurricane lamp, Jake and Gregorius were
studying the large-scale map spread on the engine bonnet of Priscilla
the Pig. Gregorius was tracing the route they must take to the shed of
the Awash River and lamenting the map's many inaccuracies and
omissions.
"If you had tried to follow this, you'd have got into serious trouble,
Jake." Jake looked up suddenly from the map, and thirty paces away he
saw the two figures in the firelight come together and stay that way.
He felt his pulse begin to pound and the blood come up his neck,
scalding hot.
"In a minute," Gregorius protested. "First I want to show you where we
have to cross the sand desert-" He pointed at the map, tracing a route
and not realizing that he was talking to himself alone. Jake had left
him to interrupt the action at the fireside.
Vicky awoke in the first uncertain light of dawn to the realization
that the wind had dropped. It had whistled dismally all night, so that
now when she pulled back her blanket, it was thickly powdered with
golden grit and she could feel it stiff in her hair and crunchy between
her teeth. One of the men was snoring loudly, but they were three long
blanket-wrapped bundles close together, so she was not sure which of
them it was. She fetched her toilet bag, towel and a change of
underwear, then slipped out of the " laager, climbed the slope of the
dune and ran down to the beach.
The dawn was absolutely still, the surface of the bay as smooth as a
sheet of pink satin as the glow of the hidden sun touched it. The
silence was the complete silence of the desert, unbroken by bird or
beast, wind or surf and the dismay she had felt the previous day
evaporated.
She stripped off her clothing and walked down the wet sand that the
tide had smoothed during the night and waded out into the pink waters,
sticking in her belly against the sudden chill of it, and gasping with
pleasure as she squatted suddenly neck deep and began to scrub her body
of the night's grit and dirt.
When she waded ashore, the sun was cresting the sweeping watery horizon
of the Gulf. The tone of light had altered drastically.
Already the soft hues of dawn were giving way to the harsher brilliance
of Africa to which she had become accustomed.
She dressed quickly, bundling her used underwear in the towel and
combing her wet hair as she climbed the dune.
At the crest, she halted abruptly with the comb still caught in the
tangle of her hair and she gasped again as she stared out into the
west.
As Gregorius had told them, the still cool air and the peculiar light
of the rising sun created a stage effect, foreshortening the hundred
miles of flat featureless desert and throwing up into the sky the sheer
massif of the highlands, so that it seemed she might stretch out her
hand and touch it.
It was dark purplish blue in the early light, but as Vicky watched in
awe, it changed colour like some gargantuan chameleon, becoming gilded
with bright sun colours and beginning at the same time to recede
swiftly, until it was a pale wraith that dissolved into the first
dancing heat mirages of the desert -day, and she felt the sultry puff
of the rising wind.
She roused herself and hurried down the dune into the laager.
Jake looked up from the pan of beans and bacon that was spluttering
over the fire and grinned at her.
"Five minutes for breakfast." He spooned a mess o
f food into her
pannikin and offered it to her. "I thought about night travel to avoid
the heat but the chances of smashing up the cars on rough going was too
great." Vicky took the food and ate with high relish, pausing only to
stare at Gareth Swales as he came to the fire freshly shaven and
perfectly groomed, wearing a spotless open-neck shirt and a baggy pair
of plus-four trousers in an expensive thorn-proof tweed. His brogues
gleamed with polish, and he smoothed his golden moustaches and raised
an eyebrow when Jake exploded with delighted laughter.
"Jesus,"he laughed. "Anyone for golf?"
"I say, old son, "Gareth admonished him, amiably running an eye over
Jake's faded moleskins,
scuffed Chukka boots and plaid shirt with a tear in the sleeve. "Your
breeding is showing. just because we are in Africa, there is no need
to go native, what?" Then he glanced at Gregorius and flashed that
brilliant smile. "No offence, of course. I must say you look jolly
dashing in that get-up." Gregorius swathed in his sham ma looked up
from his breakfast and returned the smile. "East is east, and west is
west," he said.
"Old Wordsworth certainly knew his stuff," Gareth agreed, and dipped a
spoon into the pan.
The four vehicles, grotesquely burdened and strung out at intervals of
two hundred yards to avoid each other's dust, crawled out of the
coastal dunes into the vast littoral where the wind rustled endlessly
but brought no relief from the steadily rising heat.
Jake was pointing the column on a compass-bearing slightly southerly of
that which he would have chosen without Gregorius's advice. They aimed
to pass below the sprawling salt pans which
Gregorius warned were treacherous going.
For the first two hours, the fluffy yellow earth offered no serious
obstacle to their passage, except that the narrow solid tyres cut in
deeply and created a wearying drag that kept the speed down below ten
miles an hour and the old engines grinding in the lower gears.
Then the earth firmed, but was strewn with black stone that had been
rounded and polished by the grit-laden wind and varied in size from
acorns to ostrich eggs. Their speed dropped away a little more as the
cars bounced and jolted over this murderous surface, and the black rock
threw the heat back at them, so they rode with all hatches and
engine-louvres wide open. Though all of them, including Vicky, had
stripped to their underwear, still they ran with sweat that dried
almost immediately it oozed from their pores. The exposed metal of the
cars, although it was painted white, would blister the hand that
touched it, and the engine heat and stench of hot oil and fuel in the
driver's compartments was swiftly becoming unbearable as the sun
climbed to its zenith.
An hour before noon, Priscilla the Pig blew the safety valve on her
radiator and sent a shrieking plume of steam high into the air.
Jake earthed the magneto and stopped her immediately. He climbed,
half-naked and shiny with sweat, from the turret and shaded his eyes to
peer out across the wavering heat-distorted plain. There was no
horizon in this haze and visibility was uncertain after a few hundred
yards.
Even the other vehicles lumbering far behind him seemed monstrous and
unreal.
He waited for the others to come up before calling, "Switch off.
We can't go on in this. the engine oil will be thin as water, and
we'll ruin all the bearings if we try.
We'll wait for it to cool a little." Thankfully, they climbed from the
cars and crawled into the shade of the chassis where they lay panting
like dogs. Jake went down the line with a five-gallon tin of
blood-warm. water and gave them each as much as they could drink
before collapsing on the blanket beside Vicky.
"It's too hot to walk back to my own car," he explained, and she took
it with good grace, merely nodding and closing one more button of her
half-open blouse.
Jake wet his handkerchief from the water can and offered it to her.
Gratefully, she wiped her neck and face and sighed with pleasure.
"It's too hot to sleep," she murmured. "Entertain me, Jake."
"Well now!" he grinned, and she laughed.
"I said it's too hot. Let's talk."
"About "About you. Tell me about you what part of Texas are you
from?"
"All of it. Wherever my pa could find work."
"What did he do?
"Wrangled cattle, and rode rodeo."
"Sounds fun." Jake shrugged.
"I preferred machines to horses."
"Then?"
"There was this war, and they needed mechanics to drive tanks."
"Afterwards? Why didn't you go home?"
"Pa was dead a steer fell on him, and it wasn't worth the journey to go
collect his old saddle and blanket." They were silent for a while,
just lying and riding the solid waves of heat that came off the
earth.
"Tell me about your dream, Jake," she said at last.
"My dream?"
"Everybody has a dream." He smiled ruefully.. "I've got a dream-" he
hesitated, "there is this idea of mine. It's an engine, the Barton
engine.
It's all there." He tapped his forehead. "All I need is the money to
build it. For ten years, I've tried to get it together.
Nearly had it a couple of times."
"After this trip, you will have it," she suggested.
"Perhaps." He shook his head. "I've been too sure too many times to
make any bets, though."
"Tell me about the engine," she said and he talked quietly but eagerly
for ten minutes.
It was a new design, a lightweight, economical design. "It would drive
anything, water pump, saw mill, motorcycle, that sort of thing."
He was intent, happy, she saw. "I'd only need a small workshop to
begin with, some place back west I've thought about Fort Worth-" he
stopped himself, and glanced at her. "Sorry, I was running on a
bit."
"No," she said quickly. "I enjoyed listening. I hope it works out for
you, Jake." He nodded. "Thanks. And they rode the heat for a few
more minutes in companionable silence.
"What's your dream?" he asked at last, and she laughed lightly.
"No, tell me,"he insisted.
"There is this book. It's a novel I have thought about it for years. I
have written it in my head a hundred times all I have to do is find the
time and the place to write it on paper--2 she broke off,
and then laughed again. "And then, of course, it sounds corny but I
think about kids and a home. I have been travelling too long."
"I know what you mean." Jake nodded. "That's a good dream you've got,
"he said thoughtfully. "Better than mine." Gareth Swales heard the
murmur of their voices and raised himself on one elbow. For a while he
thought seriously about crossing the dozen yards of sunbaked black
stones to where they lay but the effort required was just too much and
he fell back. A fist-sized rock jarred his kidneys and he cursed
quietly.
It was five o'clock before Jake judged they could start the engines
again. They refuelled from the cans strapped on the sponsons,
and once more they set off in column at an agonized walking pace over
the rough surface, each jolt shaking driver and vehicle cruelly.
Two hours later, the plain of black boulders ended abruptly, and beyond
it stretched an area of low red sand hills. Thankfully Jake increased
speed and the column sped towards a sunset that was inflamed by the
dust-laden sky until it filled half the heavens with great swirls of
purple and pink and flaming scar lets The desert wind dropped and the
air was still and heavy with memory of the day's heat.
Each vehicle drew a long dark shadow behind it and threw up a fat
rolling sausage of red dust into the air above it.
The night fell with the tropical suddenness that is alarming to those
who have known only the gentle dusks of the northern continents.
Jake calculated that they had covered less than twenty miles in a day
of travel and he was reluctant to call a halt, now that they had hit
this level going and were bowling along with engine temperatures
dropping in the cool of night and the drivers" tempers cooling in
sympathy. Jake took a bearing off Orion's belt as the easiest
constellation, then he switched on the headlights and looked back to
see that the others had followed his example. The lights threw a
brilliant path a hundred yards ahead of Jake's car, giving him plenty
of time to avoid the odd thick clump of thorn scrub, and occasionally
trapping a large grey desert hare, dazzling it so that its eyes blazed
diamond bright before it turned and loped, long-legged, ahead of the
car, seemingly unable to break out of the path of light, dodging and
doubling with its long floppy ears laid along its back, until at the
last instant it ducked out from under the wheels and dived into the
darkness.
He was just deciding to call a halt for food and drink, with a possible
further march later that night, when the sand hills dropped away
gradually and in the headlights he saw ahead of him a glistening white
expanse of perfectly level sand, as smooth and as inviting as the
Brooklands motor-racing circuit.
Jake changed up into high gear for the first time that day, and the car
plunged forward eagerly for a hundred yards before the thick hard crust
of the salt pan collapsed and the heavy chassis fell through, belly
deep, floundering instantly so that Jake was thrown violently forward