‘He’s told you then?’ I asked tentatively. ‘About his name? Yeah, he told me.’ ‘It must have come as a bit of a shock to you.’ He looked at me for a moment and then said, ‘Between you and me I don’t care what he calls himself. All I’m interested in is getting through those falls before my dough runs out. This is a new country and what a man was before he came out here doesn’t interest me. All I know is I like the guy and we get on together. Have done from the first. Which was more than I expected from the tone of his letters,’ he added. And then he hitched up his belt and turned away towards the entrance to the shaft.
At that moment Jan emerged, blinking in the sunlight. ‘Philip!’ He came quickly forward. He, too, was stripped to the waist and the dust was white on his thick, hairy body. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. We need your help.’ He stopped and his voice was suddenly nervous. ‘Bilvidic isn’t down at the camp, is he?’
‘No.’
‘That’s all right.’ It was almost a sigh of relief. ‘Look! We need men up here. There’s tons of rock to be hauled. We need twenty men at least.’ The eagerness was back in his voice again. ‘I thought if you could go down and have a word with Moha, maybe we could hire men from his village.’ He seemed to have no thought in his mind except the opening up of the shaft. ‘Come here. I want to show you something.’ He switched on the big torch he had slung on his belt and dived back into the shaft.
‘What is it?’ I asked Ed, for Jan’s voice had been excited.
‘He’s found traces of silver,’ he said and he pushed me towards the shaft entrance. ‘You go ahead. I’ll follow.’ I climbed the piled-up debris and ducked into the entrance to the shaft. It was dark inside and the air was thick with dust. The yellow light of Jan’s torch flashed ahead. We went in about forty feet and then we were crawling over piles of broken rock. ‘You see,’ Jan said. ‘The roof collapsed. We’re having to blast and clear by hand. Now. Look here.’ He had stopped and was directing the beam of his torch into a cavity half blocked by the fallen roof. ‘We’ve just cleared this.’ He gripped my arm and thrust me forward.
The cavity seemed to be a long, narrow fissure in the rock. I couldn’t see it very well. Only a small part of it was so far exposed. But it ran well back, for the beam of the torch failed to reach the end of it. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Part of the mine,’ Jan said. ‘It’s where a seam of ore has been removed.’
‘How do you know?’
He shifted the beam of the torch to the sides of the fissures. ‘See the marks of their tools. And look at this.’ He pulled a piece of crumbled rock from his pocket. ‘That’s polybasite - a complex ore, but one where the extraction of the silver is a simple, quite primitive process. Probably that’s what Marcel found.’
I turned to Ed. ‘Do you agree with him?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘But if he says so, then I guess he’s right. He’s like a walking encyclopaedia. All I know is that this mine must date way back. It wasn’t being worked five hundred years ago when the landslide sealed this shaft.’ He started to back out again. ‘Come on. The sooner we have those natives on the job, the better. I want to get through this fall.’
We scrambled back over the debris and then we were out in the open again, blinking our eyes in the bright sunlight. Once more I saw Ed’s gaze go straight to the cliff top on the far side of the gorge. ‘Look at him -the bastard!’ he cried, and his voice was pitched a shade higher than normal.
‘What is it?’ I asked, shading my eyes.
‘Can’t you see him? Look!’ He took my arm and pointed. ‘I noticed him there for the first time yesterday. He was sitting there all day and again today - just sitting there, watching us.’
I saw him then, a small, turbaned figure, sitting cross-legged and motionless in a natural niche right at the top of the cliff. ‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘How the hell should I know? They change the guard about midday and a new guy takes over. They never move. They just sit there, watching us.’ He turned away to get his clothes. ‘It gives me the creeps.’
I looked at Jan. ‘All?’
‘I imagine so.’ He hesitated and then drew me aside. ‘Did Karen tell you?’
‘About the name? Yes, she told me. Look, Jan,’ I said. ‘This is crazy. You’ll never get away with it.’
He gave me a quick, sidelong glance. ‘All right, it’s crazy,’ he said. ‘But I don’t have to convince anybody. They’re convinced already.’
‘And what about the British authorities?’ I asked.
But he smiled and shook his head. ‘Their only worry would be if they discovered I was alive. So long as I’m dead they don’t have to try and explain the disappearance of another scientist.’ He looked up at me anxiously. ‘It’s up to you now, Philip.’ And then he added with sudden violence, ‘Don’t you see? This is the perfect solution.’
I shook my head. He seemed utterly blind to the real problem. ‘You seem to forget that a body has been washed up.’
‘Well, it was an accident, wasn’t it?’ And then he added quickly, ‘Whether I’m Wade or Kavan, I’ve still got to explain that.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘But you’ve entered Morocco illegally.’
He nodded, but he didn’t seem worried about it. ‘I think I can make them understand. If Kostos keeps his mouth shut, I know I can. And if we could prove this mine…’ He glanced towards Ed White who was pulling on his clothes. He was frowning again. ‘Did Karen tell you what happened when we arrived at the camp last night? Ed met us with that German Luger of his in his hand. He seemed scared stiff. He was all packed up, too, ready to clear out.’
‘Why? Because Ali has men watching him?’
Jan nodded. ‘That and something that happened yesterday afternoon. He had a visit from the Caid’s younger son - the man who made tea for us when we visited the kasbah that night. He rode out on a white mule to give Ed a message from his father.’
‘Well, what was the message?’ I asked.
‘The man only spoke a few words of French. But he kept pointing to the Post — ‘
Ed White’s shadow fell between us. ‘I got the idea anyway,’ he said. ‘I was to get out, and quick.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘How the hell do I know why? Could be that the food trucks haven’t arrived and the people are getting sore. Could be that your friend Ali is just trying to scare me. I don’t know. But I can tell you this; I was plenty scared last night.’ His gaze swung again to the watcher on the cliff. ‘Those three Ay-rabs I had working for me were paid good dough. They wouldn’t have quit for nothing.’ He shook his head angrily, buttoning up his bush shirt. ‘I suppose Miss Corrigan is down at the camp now?’
‘Yes.’
‘At least those two girls ought to go down to the Post. I don’t mind staying on here so long as you guys are with me. But they should be down at the Post. They’d be safe there.’
His attitude made me feel uneasy. ‘What are you expecting to happen?’ I demanded.
He pushed his fingers up through his hair. ‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t be so Goddamned jittery.’
Jan had scrambled down the rock tip to the water to wash the dust off his body. He was out of sight and for a moment Ed and I were alone. There was something I had to find out and now was the time to do it. If Jan had really convinced Ed, then there was just a chance he could get away with it. I hesitated, wondering how to put it. ‘Sooner or later,’ I said, ‘the police will want a statement from you.’
‘From me? What about?’
‘About him,’ I said, nodding towards Jan.
‘Well, they won’t get much out of me.’ He seemed to consider the matter. ‘The only intelligent comment I could make is that he doesn’t seem British the way you do. And he talks differently.’ He said it slowly, as though it were something that had been on his mind for a long time.
‘He’s Cornish,’ I said, remembering the details of Wade’s passport.
‘Cornish? Oh,
you mean dialect. And then he’s knocked around a bit. I guess that would make him different.’ He nodded to himself, frowning slightly. And then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, Mrs Kavan should know. I feel sorry for that girl. When she came down here she must have been thinking there was a chance that her husband was alive. Instead, it’s a stranger, impersonating him. That’s not very nice, is it?’ He had been staring down at his boots, but now he looked up at me. ‘Wasn’t Kavan going to act as doctor at your Mission?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded, staring at me, and then turned away. ‘What I’ve seen of the people here, they could have used a doctor.’ Jan climbed up from the water and he called to him: ‘Come on. Let’s get some food.’
Jan picked up his clothes and joined us. ‘Pity about that shaft,’ he said, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Fortunately Ed had that dynamite and he knows how to use it. But even so, it may take several days to break through the falls.’
I knew he was thinking about Bilvidic and I asked him how long he thought he’d be allowed to stay up here. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I hope he’ll leave us here until the piste is open. He knows I’m here. That orderly from the Post rode out to the camp on a mule this morning to check that. And he knows I can’t get out -not unless I walk, and the Military would soon be informed if I tried to do that.’ His eyes lifted to the slope of the mountain above us. It was very steep and about five hundred feet up there was a sudden cliff face, not high, but sheer and crumbling. It shone red in the sunlight. ‘I didn’t like it when I first saw it,’ he muttered. ‘But now that we’re blasting …’ He shook his head and turned and started to walk down the track towards the camp.
‘It’s the Ay-rabs that worry me,’ Ed said. ‘Legard’s away and with the piste cut, God knows when the food trucks will get through. And now there’s this discoloration of the water.’
We had reached the entrance of the gorge and in the sunlight the water pouring down the stream-bed was almost the colour of blood against the yellow of the sand. ‘How far does the discoloration extend?’ I asked. , ‘Right down into the palmerie,’ Jan said over his shoulder. ‘There was quite a rush of water coming out of the gorge last night.’
None of us spoke after that and we walked down to the camp in silence. We were thinking about the water and the watcher on the cliff top. For the moment I had forgotten about Jan’s personal problems. But it was impossible to forget about them once we had reached the camp, for Karen was there to remind me. She ignored Jan completely. He might not have been there, and not by a single glance, even when Ed’s back was turned, did she betray the fact that she was conscious of him. Her self-control was so rigid that I began to understand how it must have been for her in Czechoslovakia.
Lunch was laid out in the open under the fly of the big tent as it had been on Christmas Day. But the atmosphere was very different. There was a sense of strain. As though conscious that she was partly responsible, Karen announced at the end of the meal that she had arranged for Julie to take her down to the Post. ‘It will be better if I go.’ She said it to Ed, but it was directed at Jan. He stared at her for a moment and then turned abruptly away.
‘What about you?’ I asked Julie.
‘I’ll drop Karen and then bring the bus back here.’
‘No, don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Stay down at the Post, It’d be safer.’
‘My view is we should all go down to the Post,’ Ed announced. ‘When Legard gets back — ‘
‘No,’ Jan said, almost violently. ‘I’m damned if I’ll leave here now. A day’s work might see that shaft opened up. And if it is a workable mine …’ He hunched his shoulders, staring up towards the gorge. He was thinking that it would give him a stake in the country. That was the thought that was driving him.
‘Well, of course, I see your point,’ Ed said. ‘I’m pretty interested myself to know whether there’s still silver to be got out of it. But that isn’t the reason I’m here, as you know. The way I see it — ‘
‘Then what is the reason?’ Jan demanded.
‘Exactly what I told you.’ He sounded surprised. ‘I never knew there was a chance of finding silver — ‘ He checked himself. He was staring at Jan with a puzzled frown. ‘Didn’t you bother to read my letters?’
Jan’s eyes widened slightly with the shock of realising that he had nearly given himself away. It was Karen who covered up for him. ‘But I thought you were a prospector, Ed? When we stopped at Agdz on the way down I heard Capitaine Legard talking about you to Monsieur Bilvidic. He said you had been granted a mining concession.’
‘That’s right.’ Ed was grinning to himself like a boy. ‘It seemed the smart thing to say. I didn’t want people asking a lot of questions.’
‘But if you’re not a prospector,’ Julie said, ‘what are you?’
‘An archaeologist.’
‘But why ever didn’t you tell us?’
He shrugged his shoulders, still grinning. ‘Nobody bothered to ask me.’ And then he turned to Jan. ‘Anyway, you knew. I explained it all in that second letter. Or didn’t you get it?’
‘But I thought you were a construction engineer,’ Karen cut in. ‘You were telling me last night — ‘
‘Sure. That’s right. I am a construction engineer. But I got a bee in my bonnet about this place Kasbah Foum. Look,’ he said, facing the two girls. ‘Maybe I’d better explain. Archaeology is a sort of a hobby I picked up in college. Old cities and things; they fascinated me. Well, a friend of my father’s was a collector of books and he used to let me browse around in his library when I was a kid. There was an old manuscript there that particularly intrigued me; it was the diary of an Englishman who had turned Muslim and lived in North Africa as an Arab trader in the early fifteen hundreds. It was an incredible story — “of wars and love-making and long camel treks through the desert. In it, he described a great stone city built at the entrance to a gorge down here south of the Atlas. He had traded from that city for several years and he knew it well. And this is what interested me. He described a shaft or tunnel running into the cliff face at the entrance to the gorge. There were rooms cut back into the rock from the sides of this tunnel and these had been used partly as the city treasury and partly as an arsenal. He went to Mecca and on to Arabia, and some years later he came back to the same city. It had been sacked and was partly in ruins. And a great landslide had poured down the mountains, completely covering the entrance to the tunnel.’ He glanced round at us. ‘Well, two years back I got this job at Sidi Slimane air base and I came down here - just out of curiosity. And there were the ruins of the city and there was the slide he’d described.’ He had turned his head so that he could see the entrance to the gorge. ‘I just had to find out whether that shaft did exist and, if so, what was in it.’
‘But it’s fascinating,’ Julie said. ‘You might find all sorts of treasures there.’
‘Maybe,’ Ed said. ‘On the other hand, the people who sacked the city may have looted the treasury. But whatever I find, when it’s opened up, I shall be the first man to set foot in there for almost five centuries. That’s pretty exciting. At least to me.’ He turned and glanced at Jan. ‘That’s why my angle on this is different from yours. A few days one way or the other won’t make any difference to me. But if I open it up and there’s trouble -well, I don’t want a lot of ignorant natives getting in there and maybe busting up stuff that’s priceless. There could be things in there dating back to …’ He laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know - to the first nomadic infiltration from the desert.’
‘Not if it were originally the shaft of a silver mine,’ Jan said.
‘No. That’s right, I guess.’
A silence settled on the table. I was thinking how strange it was that these two - the Czech refugee and the American construction engineer - should be working together to open up this shaft for two such different reasons.
Jan suddenly got to his feet. ‘You do what you like,’ he said to Ed. ‘But I’m going straigh
t on clearing the debris out.’ He turned to me. ‘Will you go down and see Moha about labour for me, Philip?’
‘Now wait a minute.’ Ed, too, had risen. ‘Get this straight, Wade. Our interests don’t conflict. But mine come first. Okay?’ He was much taller than Jan and he had moved towards him so that he towered over him. ‘If I decide that we wait until Legard returns and things have settled down — ‘
‘All right,’ Jan said. He was looking up at Ed and then his eyes shifted towards the gorge. ‘I understand your point. But suppose we have another rainstorm like we did last night? It could bring the whole mountainside down and cover the entrance again.’
‘Yeah. It could.’
‘The mine won’t run away any more than your antiques will, if they’re there. But if the mountain comes down …’ He stared up at Ed and then said, ‘I think we should push straight on with opening up the shaft.’
Ed stood there, considering it. His gaze, too, had shifted to the gorge. In the end he nodded. ‘Okay,’ he agreed. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘I’ll go and see Moha,’ I said. ‘How many men do you want?’
‘As many as he can let us have,’ Ed answered. Twenty at least.’
‘And how much are you prepared to pay them?’
‘Whatever he asks, within reason. I leave that to you.’
I had Julie drive me down in the bus to the point on the piste nearest the village, and then I entered the palmerie and crossed the irrigation ditch by the bridge of palm logs. Even here the water was strangely red, instead of its normal muddy colour. I knocked at the wooden door of the chief’s house and was admitted by one of his sons and taken to an upper room. Moha lay on a bed of cushions and rugs. There was little light in the room and it was very cold. The lines on his face were more deeply etched, the gash on his forehead a brown scab of dried blood. His wound, he said, did not worry him except that he could not sit and if he walked it started to bleed again. He lay there, watching me, and I had the feeling that I wasn’t welcome.
The Strange Land Page 23
