by W E Johns
The day passed, and another night; and when the following morning the long-overdue caravan was still unsighted, Biggles called a council of war, for all nerves were on edge with the anxiety of waiting.
‘Well, everybody, this is the position,’ he announced gravely, as they forgathered under a palm-tree near the idle machine. ‘I think you all know how we are fixed, but I will just run over the situation so that there can be no misunderstanding. Our stores have not arrived. They were scheduled to be here three days ago. It is obvious, therefore, that something has gone wrong, and although it may sound pessimistic, my own feeling is that they will not now arrive at all. In the ordinary way, that need not have caused us anything worse than irritation that our plans should have miscarried, but the incident of the leaking tank has altered the position very considerably. As you know, I made allowance for the possible non-arrival of the caravan by carrying enough petrol to get us back home again independently of it. Of that spare petrol more than two-thirds has been lost in a manner which suggests foul play. The same influence might account for the non-arrival of the caravan—we do not know; but what it boils down to is this:
‘In still air, we are three hours from Dakhel, and still more from Siwah, those being our nearest points of contact with the outside world. We have enough petrol for one hour’s flying, so whichever way we go we shall be compelled to land more than two hundred miles from our objective. I need hardly say that such a course is utterly out of the question. It would be plain suicide. The alternative to that is, we stay here. Very well, what is the position then? We have left out of the emergency rations which we always carry three small tins of bully beef, a few biscuits, six cubes of Bovril, some chocolate, and one or two odds and ends. In short, we have enough food, used sparingly, to last for another two days. Two days, three days, or four days, it matters little: the end must be the same. Still, while we stay here we shall not die of thirst or starvation. There is water in the spring, which Kadar assures me has never been known to dry up, and there are dates on the palms. How long we can live on a diet of dates and water without going crazy, I do not know, but it is at least possible to live. Arabs exist on nothing more than that for weeks on end; whether we shall be able to remains to be seen.
‘Now as far as I can see there is only one course open to us. We can’t reach civilization, so we must, therefore, stay here; but before we resign ourselves to that it is possible for us to make a last attempt to get into touch with the outside world. As I have said, we still have a little petrol in the tank, enough for an hour’s flying, possibly a little more, but a few minutes either way is neither here nor there. We might as well use that petrol while we have it, for in a hot dry temperature like this it will have evaporated inside a week. For desert use, petrol in cans has to be hermetically sealed; that which we bought in Cairo to go with the caravan was sealed in that way. On what petrol we have left our cruising speed gives us a range of about seventy-five miles; that is to say, we can fly seventy-five miles out and get back here. My suggestion is that we make a reconnaissance in the direction of Siwah, that being the direction from which the caravan should have come, in the hope of seeing something of it. If we find it, all so well and good; if we do not, then we must return here and resign ourselves to the inevitable. There is always a chance, of course, that, when we do not return, Kadar’s father will send out a rescue party to look for us, but some time must elapse before that is likely to happen, because, as we declared our intention of being away for some weeks, we shall not be reported missing until the end of that time. Well, that’s all. If any one has a better suggestion, let him make it, but I can think of nothing else myself.’
Biggles took out one of his three remaining cigarettes, broke it in halves, gave Algy one half, and then lighted both with the same match.
‘It isn’t much use trying to think of an alternative plan, for the simple reason that there isn’t one,’ declared Algy. ‘The one you have suggested is the only thing we can do.’
‘I’ve nothing to add to that,’ said Ginger.
Kadar shook his head. ‘Nor I, except that I am sorry to have brought you—’
Biggles waved him to silence. ‘Very well, then, that’s settled,’ he declared.
‘When do you propose to make this trip?’ asked Algy.
‘Now. There is no point in waiting. From the top of the palm I climbed at dawn I estimated that I could see between thirty and forty miles. The caravan was not in sight. That means that even if it is approaching it will not get here before dark. By tomorrow morning we shall have lost, due to evaporation, perhaps five per cent, of our petrol. That is why I say let us go now, and, if necessary, learn the worst at once.’
The wisdom of this plan was apparent to every one, and preparations were at once made for the trip. Every available vessel that would hold water was filled and put aboard, as well as what was left of the stores and a quantity of dates. When there was nothing more to be done the dust-covers were removed and stowed away, and the airmen took their places.
Biggles walked the entire distance of the probable run before he attempted to take off, but the sand, while soft on the surface, was firm, and there were no obstacles. Satisfied that all was well, he climbed into the cockpit, and in a few moments the Tourer was in the air, climbing into the western sky.
As the machine gained altitude all eyes looked into the direction from which the caravan should come. The quivering needle of the altimeter crept round the dial until at length it rested on the ten-thousand mark, but as far as the eye could see not a moving speck broke the surface of the silent sea of sand.
Biggles turned to Algy, who was sitting next to him. His face was grim. ‘Another five minutes and we must turn back,’ he said.
Algy nodded, his eyes still questing the western horizon. A moment or two later he started. ‘I can see something,’ he said.
Biggles gazed long and steadily ahead. ‘Yes, there is something,’ he agreed, ‘but it doesn’t move.’
‘No, it’s nothing alive,’ returned Algy.
Another two minutes went by and Biggles spoke again. His voice was hard and dry. ‘It is a caravan,’ he said. ‘Or the remains of one,’ he added, dropping his voice.
‘The remains of one—I think.’
Biggles took the throttle in his left hand, and then hesitated, uncertain as to the wisest course when so much depended on the issue. ‘What shall we do?’ he asked Algy. ‘I ought to turn in another minute. Dare we go down? We are eighty miles from home. I shall not be able to make up any altitude that I lose.’
Algy glanced up, caught Biggles’s eyes, but looked away quickly. ‘Go down,’ he said. The petrol may still be there. If it isn’t, we’re sunk, anyway.’
Biggles was faced with a gamble in which life was at stake, and he knew it. Upon the events of the next few minutes hung all their lives. If the sand was soft and he attempted to land on it, it would be the end beyond all possible shadow of doubt. Even if they did not land, the flight back, with the fast-dwindling petrol, would be a nightmare. Already he doubted if they could reach the oasis, although they might get within walking distance.
The noise of the engines died away suddenly as he cut the throttle, and thereby announced his decision. The Tourer’s nose tilted down and the machine began to lose height; and as it went down the details of the scene on the ground grew clearer. As Algy had prophesied, it was not a caravan. It was the remains of one. Soon it became possible to distinguish objects—camels lying outstretched on the sand— saddles— bundles— garments— bodies.
‘There has been dirty work done here,’ muttered Algy, white-faced.
‘Tuareg work, I fancy,’ answered Biggles through his teeth.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I must land.’
‘It’s a ghastly risk.’
‘I know. But I must go down. Some of those poor devils may only be wounded. Again, there is just a chance that there may be some petrol in those panniers. Either way, it is
a risk that we have got to take.’
Algy nodded. ‘Go ahead,’ was all he said.
With the wind moaning over the wings, the aeroplane swept lower. Twice Biggles circled, unable to bring himself to take the terrible risk of landing. His eyes scrutinized the ground yard by yard. It was at least clear of obstacles. The third time he clenched his teeth and glided in to land. Beads of perspiration stood out on his face, so intense was the mental strain as he flattened out. The next few seconds would decide their fate. It was queer to think of that. Five seconds. The scene became unreal—was it really happening, or was he dreaming? The muscles of his face twitched as the wheels touched and the machine quivered, and he braced himself for the inevitable somersault should the sand be soft. The wheels touched again. There was a jar as the tail wheel dragged, and the next moment the machine was running sluggishly over the ground. The sand was soft, but not too soft, although it pulled the machine up quickly.
Algy did not wait for it quite to finish its run. He opened the door, jumped out, and ran towards the scene of the tragedy. A cloud of flies (for there are flies even in the desert) rose into the air as he dashed up; then he recoiled in horror. In his life he had seen some unpleasant sights, but that which now met his eyes nearly made him ill. Still, he ran to the nearest pannier, saw that it was empty, and hurried on to the next.
A moment or two later Biggles joined him. ‘Petrol,’ he said tersely. ‘Is there any petrol?’
Algy looked up. His face was ashen and curiously set. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘Not a drop.’
Chapter 8
The Haboob
Biggles waited for the others to come up. He turned to Kadar. ‘This was our caravan, wasn’t it?’ Unashamed tears were running down Kadar’s face. ‘Yes,’ he answered chokingly. ‘There is old Mahomout, the caravan leader. He has ridden his last trail. What can we do with them?’
‘Nothing,’ answered Biggles shortly. ‘If any one is alive we will take him back to the Oasis, although heaven knows what we can do for him there even if we do. You’d better leave it to me to find out, although from what I can see it will be a waste of time. Are these—mutilations—Tuareg work, Kadar?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Well, we are in no case to be squeamish. Go through the panniers and collect any food you can find, also any water-skins.’ Biggles turned away to commence his gruesome task.
‘It is as I thought,’ he said in a hollow voice, when a few minutes later he joined the others again. ‘They are all dead. I wonder why the camels all seem to be in such poor condition.’
‘The others will have been taken,’ replied Kadar.
‘They would be needed to carry the petrol,’ put in Algy.
Biggles knitted his brow. ‘These shocking murders may have been Tuareg work,’ he muttered, ‘but why should they burden themselves with petrol? What use could it be to them? My feeling is that although Tuaregs may have done the work, there was somebody else behind them. Either that, or they had definite orders to take the petrol. Look, that is the way they went.’ He pointed to where a broad trail of hoof-marks wound away into the dunes. ‘The murderers went that way, so the Arabs we saw at the oasis could not have been responsible—that is, unless they made a detour. But we mustn’t stand talking here. The sooner we get back to the oasis the better. My heavens! Isn’t the heat dreadful? Did you find any food?’
Possibly on account of the tragedy, the lesser demon of heat had been temporarily overlooked, but they now began to be conscious of it.
Algy pointed to a little heap of tins. ‘Those were all in the same pannier,’ he said. ‘I found it under one of the dead camels, which is probably why it was overlooked. There are a few tins of meat and some dried fruits.’
‘We’ll take them with us,’ declared Biggles. ‘I fancy we shall need them. Come on, let’s get back. We can do nothing more here.’
They all helped to carry the salvage into the machine. As they approached it Biggles pointed to the wheels; already the tyres had half disappeared into the sand.
‘She’s sinking. An hour, and we should not be able to budge her,’ he said. ‘We shall have to watch out for that sort of thing.’
A last glance at the pitiable spectacle behind them and they took their places. The port engine roared as Biggles swung round to get into position to take off over the same ground on which he had landed. Reaching the place, he closed his eyes for a moment before choosing a mark on which to fly, for the dunes appeared to be rocking in the heat. Then, slowly, he opened the throttle. The machine surged forward, running more and more lightly as it gathered speed. It took a long run to get off, but in the end the wheels unstuck, and at a height of a few hundred feet Biggles gave a sigh of relief and turned its nose to the east.
He allowed the machine to climb up to a thousand feet, then he levelled out and throttled back to the most economical cruising speed, all the while holding the machine as steady as he could in the choppy atmosphere. The ‘bumps’ were almost continuous, and often so severe that it was necessary for the airmen to hold themselves in their places by gripping their seats.1
For perhaps five minutes these conditions prevailed, and then, without warning, the Tourer was impelled upwards to more than double its altitude by one of the most vicious ‘bumps’ Biggles had ever experienced. The effect was almost precisely that of going up in an express lift; but whereas a lift is seldom more than a hundred feet high, the bump in question was sustained for more than a thousand. Kadar clasped his stomach and rolled his eyes. ‘I shall be sick if it does that again,’ he said desperately.
Hardly were the words out of his mouth when the machine dropped several hundred feet like a stone, as if all support had been snatched from under its wings—as indeed it had. At the bottom of the bump it struck solid air again with a shock that made it quiver.
‘Getting rocky,’ murmured Biggles laconically to Algy, without any particular concern, for he had flown through bumps too often to be alarmed by them, and knew that in a reliable aircraft, with no risk of structural failure, there was no danger.
As he levelled out at the bottom of the bump something made him glance to the left, which, as he was flying eastward, was towards the north. For perhaps five seconds he stared unbelievingly, then he turned to Algy with an air of almost hopeless resignation.
‘I don’t usually give up,’ he said, ‘but this looks like settling any further argument as far as we are concerned.’
Algy, staring towards the northern horizon, saw a terrifying spectacle. Racing towards them, blotting out the blue sky as effectively as a thick curtain, was what appeared to be an enormous brown cloud that twisted and writhed within itself as it bore down on them. He knew what it was as well as Biggles.
‘It’s a haboob2,’ he said calmly. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
In normal circumstances only one course is open to a pilot who encounters one of these terrifying meteorological disturbances. He must go down quickly, land, turn the nose of his machine into the wind, and anchor it by tying sandbags to the wings, tail, and fuselage, after which he takes refuge in or under the machine. The bags are carried empty, of course, but they are soon filled with the most common commodity in the desert. Aeroplanes of the French Air Force, and passenger machines operating in North Africa, are nearly always provided with bags for this purpose. But they adhere to regular routes, where they are soon found if for any reason the machine is unable to take off again after the storm has passed.
Biggles’s position was a very different one. Should he follow the usual practice and land, there was no hope of rescue in the event of his machine being damaged, as it was not unlikely to be. He was well aware of the danger of trying to get above a haboob, against which pilots are warned, even if his tanks had been full. Yet what else could he do? He could not hope to reach the oasis before the swirling sand engulfed him, and to run before the storm would, within half an hour, see him on the ground with empty tanks in the very worst part of the desert,
perhaps the most inaccessible spot in the world, in the path of the sand demon. In the short time he had for reflection it seemed to him that his only possible hope—how slim it was he knew only too well—lay in getting above the sand, still keeping on his course, trusting either that he would get beyond the disturbed area, which seemed unlikely as he could not see the eastern extremity of it, or that the haboob would soon pass. With these forlorn hopes in view he shoved the throttle wide open and began to climb as steeply as his engines would take him.
He managed to reach six thousand feet before the first sharp spatter of sand struck the side of the machine. The sun had become a fast-fading orange ball. He could still see the ground dimly, as through a thick brown haze, but, even as he watched, it was blotted out, and the Tourer was alone in the heart of the storm. For a time visibility was limited to a sort of dim twilight, but as he continued to climb, listening to every beat of the engines for the first warning of seizure, it became somewhat lighter. With the needle of his altimeter registering twelve thousand feet he was almost clear, with the sky showing as a greenish ceiling; but it was on his petrol gauge that his eyes were fixed. He was still running on his main tank, but it was nearly down to zero, and he knew that at any moment the petrol supply might fail.
He had no idea of where he was because he did not know the speed of the wind that was blowing at right angles across his path of flight. He knew the compass-bearing of the oasis, but without knowing his speed of drift he could only hold his course by guesswork He estimated the speed of the wind at fifty to sixty miles an hour, but in view of what subsequently happened it must have been considerably more than that during the worst of the storm. The ground was buried under a ten-thousand-feet-thick layer of flying sand, so what lay beneath that he did not know, although he could only assume—and hope—that it was the desert over which he had flown on the outward journey.
He had now throttled back again to the minimum speed that would keep the machine airborne, for his chief concern was to conserve his petrol in order to remain in the air as long as possible. It may have been in some measure due to this that nearly another ten minutes elapsed before a warning cough from one of his engines told him that his main tank was nearly dry. He held on until the engines began choking, and then switched over to the gravity tank, which contained, at the outside limit, enough petrol to keep them in the air for another ten minutes. A fine film of dust had settled on his lips, and he wiped them with his sleeve before turning to speak to Algy.
