‘We’d better get out of here,’ I cried. But Ed didn’t need to be told what that low mob growl meant. ‘I guess it’s no good,’ he said, and his voice was resigned.
And as we backed, so the mob advanced, and the sound that emanated from their throats filled the gorge like the growl of a monster. Then, suddenly, they rushed forward. We turned and ran for it.
The others were already well up the side of the gorge on a shelf of rock that slanted up from the bend. And, as I ran, I glimped Kostos, cut off from the rest of the party by his pursuers and being forced out along the cliff top above the entrance to the mine.
Ed, just ahead of me, turned and looked over his shoulder. And then he stopped. ‘It’s all right,’ he said as I halted beside him. ‘They’re not following us.’ I turned and stared back. The gorge was full of weird howls of triumph and blood lust. But it wasn’t directed against us. All their warlike instincts were concentrated on the two bulldozers. ‘Goddam the bastards!’ Ed breathed. The men of Foum-Skhira were clustered round the machines like ants. They shouted and yelled and as though by magic the bulldozers moved. They trundled them down across the tight-packed rocks of the dumping ground and toppled them into the water. There was a splash and then the waters closed over them and the place was suddenly as God had made it again.
And then they moved towards the entrance to the mine shaft. Ali was already there. He had got off his mule and was standing in front of the entrance. My eyes travelled upwards and I saw Kostos balanced precariously on the rocks of the slide almost directly above him. He must have dislodged a stone, for Ali was looking up now. Whether the two men could see each other I don’t know. I think it likely, for Kostos wasn’t looking at the Berbers creeping over the rocks towards him. He held a stick of dynamite and he was looking down at Ali and the scene below him.
A pinpoint flicker of flame showed for an instant in his hand.
My eyes went involuntarily upwards. Not four hundred feet above, the crumbling cliff, that Jan had pointed out to me, towered above him. The flicker of flame was replaced by a wisp of smoke. I wanted to shout, to tell him not to do it. The men were packed tight below him. It was murder. Stupid, unnecessary, pointless murder. His arm swung back and the wisp of smoke curved through the air. From where we were Kostos was no bigger than a puppet and the wisp of smoke curving downwards into the close-packed mob looked as harmless as a feather floating through the air.
It fell into the centre of the crowd which mushroomed out away from it with an instinctive sense of fear. We could see it sizzling away on the ground now, and I felt a sudden relief. Kostos had left too long a fuse. It would injure nobody. But then Ed gripped my arm. ‘The dynamite!’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘Do you see it? That box.’
It was - a small, square patch of yellow close beside the sputtering wisp of smoke. I saw it for a second, and then there was a flash. It was followed instantly by a great, roaring burst of flame. The whole area of beaten rock on which the mob stood seemed lifted skywards. Rocks were flung up and men flattened to the ground. I saw Ali thrown backwards into the mouth of the shaft. And whilst the rocks were still rising in the air, the sound of that explosion hit us and the blast of it rocked us on our feet. It was an ear-shattering, indescribable crash in that confined space. And the noise went on, hammering at the cliff faces, rolling upwards over the mountain slopes, and drumming back at us in a stupendous cacophony of sound, whilst the rocks stopped heaving upwards and began to fall back to the ground.
The sound of the explosion began to diminish as the echoes reverberated back from farther and farther away. And just as a deep, mutilated silence seemed to settle on the gorge, there was a rumble like thunder out of the sky. I looked up. And then Ed’s hand clutched my arm and I knew that he’d seen it, too. The sky was blue. There wasn’t a cloud to mar the pastel shades of sunset.
But against that blue the cliff face where Kostos stood was slowly, lazily toppling outwards. It was catching the reddening rays of the sun so that the rock glowed. It was like something in Technicolor, remote and rather beautiful.
But the sound was not beautiful. It grew in volume, a great, grumbling, earth-shaking roar. The whole cliff was toppling down, hitting the slopes below and rebounding. It was as slow and inevitable as a waterfall, and the dust rose like spray.
I glanced round me in sudden fear, expecting all the cliffs around us to be toppling. But it was only that one cliff and below it Kostos stood, his body twisted round so that I knew he was looking upwards, seeing the ghastly thing he had let loose, but standing transfixed, knowing it was death that was pouring down upon him in the form of millions of tons of rock and unable to do anything to save himself. And below, by the entrance to the mine, the men of Foum-Skhira lay dazed, barely aware of what was descending on them from above.
All this I saw in a flash and then my gaze returned to the mountainside. The cliff was hidden now by a cloud of dust that shone red in the sunlight, and below it, the great tide rolled like a tidal wave, and as it rolled it seemed to gather the mountainside with it, so that the whole slope on which Kostos stood was thrust over the lip of the cliff, taking him with it, still oddly standing erect staring up at the main body of the landslide.
And in that split second in which my eyes recorded his fall, the whole gorge was suddenly filled by chaos. The sound pounded at the ground under our feet. Pieces of cliff from the farther side were shaken loose. Small avalanches were started. And all the time the noise gathered volume, the dust rose white like steam till it caught fire in the sunlight, and all the mountain poured into the gorge, thundering and crashing and filling it with rock.
Long after the movement had slowed and the weight had gone out of the sound, Ed and I stood there, incapable of action, stunned by the terrible vastness of it. It had a sort of horrible fascination. It took an effort of will-power to make me turn my head and look behind me, up the gorge, to see that the others were safe. Thank God, they were. They were in a little huddle as though clinging to each other, and they were as motionless as we were.
I looked back again at the scene of desolation and felt slightly sick. The dust was settling now and the sunset colours on the mountain top were flaming into vivid beauty. And into the dark cavern of the gorge a stillness was creeping, not a graveyard stillness, but the deep, satisfied stillness of Nature. And then, clear across that stillness, came a cry. It was a high, piercing cry, and I heard the name of Allah. Down by the gorge mouth, clear of the outer spill of the slide, was a little knot of men. They were waving their arms and calling down curses on our heads. One of them, a big, bearded man, was shaking his fist at us and clawing his way towards us across the debris of the slide.
I turned and started up the slope of rock towards the others. ‘Come on,’ I shouted at Ed. ‘Hurry, man. We’ve got to be out of this gorge by nightfall.’
He caught the urgency of my voice and came hurrying after me. ‘There’s only a handful of them left,’ he said breathlessly as he caught up with me. ‘And anyway it was that damned Greek that caused the explosion. It was nothing to do with us.’
‘They don’t know that,’ I said. ‘He was a European. That’s all they know. If they catch us in these mountains at dawn…’ I didn’t bother to finish the sentence. I needed my breath, for we were climbing at a desperate rate to join up with the rest of the party.
CHAPTER FOUR
The trek out of that gorge was a nightmare. It wasn’t that we were followed. The men who had screamed their need of vengeance at us were fully occupied searching the debris for their dead. But the sun was setting fast and if darkness overtook us before we had climbed out of the gorge, we should be trapped there, and when dawn came we should be hunted down amongst the rocks of the mountainsides and killed.
The ledge up which we were moving gradually narrowed until it finished abruptly at a sheer rock climb of twenty feet or more. It sloped slightly and there were hand-and footholds, but except for Ed we were all wearing shoes, and we had nothing with which t
o rope ourselves together. Below us was an almost vertical drop of some four hundred feet to the bottom of the gorge. We paused there a moment, looking back. The slide filled the whole mouth of the gorge and water was already building up against this natural dam to form a wider and deeper lake, red like a gaping wound. The flowing robes of Berber men moved ghostlike amongst the debris of the fall, searching for their dead.
There was no going back and we turned to face the cliff of rock that towered above us. ‘We’ll never get up there,’ Karen said.
‘Sure you will,’ Ed said cheerfully. ‘There’s nothing to it.’ He had her take her shoes off. ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ he said as he started her off. His tough, rubber-soled boots gripped the rock as he climbed, encouraging her all the time, sometimes bracing her foot with his hand. Jan stood with his head back, watching her until she reached the top. ‘Come on,’ Ed called down to us. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’ He climbed back down the face of the rock and met Julie halfway, helping her up as he’d helped Karen.
The climb wasn’t really difficult, but it took time. The sun had already set before we had all gathered at the top. The gorge was cold and dark now, and, above us, the slopes of the mountain seemed to stretch into infinity. We started up, climbing as quickly as we could. But we made slow progress. Karen slipped a great deal in her leather soles and Jan was out of training for this sort of thing. ‘Latham!’ Ed called back to me. I’ll go ahead to find the track. It’ll be too dark to see soon. I’ll call directions down to you. Okay?’
It was the only thing to do. ‘Yes, you go ahead,’ I told him.
He was fit and seemed to have the feel of the mountains. He climbed fast and in a few minutes he was lost to sight over the brow of a hump. Darkness fell swiftly. It was odd the way it came. Our eyes adjusted themselves to the diminishing light and even when the stars were out I could still see my way ahead. Then I looked down to negotiate a tumbled patch of rock and when I looked up again I could see nothing - only the vague shape of the mountain humped against the studded velvet of the sky.
I shouted and Ed’s voice hallooed back to us, very faint and far away. Sound was deceptive, curving round the larger rock buttresses, so that we worked too much to the left and found ourselves up against a cliff. It took us a long time to negotiate it and then, when we could climb again, we found ourselves in an area of massive great rocks as big as houses with deep gashes between that appeared as dangerous as crevasses in a glacier. We called and called, but could hear no response.
I worked away to the right then, calling all the time. But a wind had sprung up from off the top of the mountain and we heard nothing. I kept on working to the right, hoping to get downwind from Ed and hear his calls, but I must have gone too far, for we reached an area where the rocks were piled in absolute confusion. I tried to cross this, still attempting to get downwind, but it was a very bad patch. Loose rubble slid away from under our feet and even some of the bigger rocks showed a tendency to move. And then, as I was climbing round an extra large piece of rock, my foot braced against it, the thing moved. I shouted a warning to the others and clutched hold of the ground above me. The rock crunched as it moved. I could see it as a vague shape moving gently over on to its side. It hung there a moment and then moved again, dropping away out of my field of vision. We stood there, braced against the slope, listening to the sound of it crashing and banging down the mountain, gathering stones in its path so that there was a rustling, slithering sound of rubble behind it. There was a heavy splash and then silence.
I knew then where I was. I had come much too far and we were right out on the face of the new slide with the broken, crumbling cliff above us. It was already past nine. We had been clambering and stumbling across the face of the mountain for almost three hours. I tried to estimate how far across the face of the slide we had come. ‘Do we go forward or back?’ I asked Jan, trying to remember which side of that cliff face was the better going.
‘If we go forward,’ Jan said, ‘we’ll be on the route Karen and I came down last night. With luck I might be able to find my way back to the piste.’
‘And if we go back?’
‘I don’t know.’ His voice sounded nervous. We were both thinking about the chances of getting across the slide without disturbing it and starting the whole new slope on the move.
I asked the two girls which they would prefer to do. They both agreed. ‘Let’s go on.’ And so we inched our way forward across the face of the slide, scarcely daring to breathe, let alone put our weight on to any of the rocks. Stones clattered down, little drifts of scree and dirt were started. Occasionally a larger rock shifted and then went bouncing and thudding down the slope. And each time the sound ended in a splash of water.
It took us nearly two hours to cross the face of that slide and all the time the retina of my memory carried the picture of how the slide had been after Kostos hurled that stick of dynamite. The picture was appallingly vivid and every time I heard a stone shift or a trickle of rubble start, my heart was in my mouth and the sweat stood cold on my forehead. And each time I cursed myself for having led them too far to the right, for not having realised that we hadn’t climbed above this obstruction.
But a little after ten-thirty we came out on to undisturbed _ mountainside and lay there, panting and exhausted, with a bitter cold wind drying the sweat of physical and nervous exhaustion on our tired bodies.
After that Jan took the lead. We moved very slowly. He was just about all in and so was Karen. She was slipping a lot and she had cut her head open on a rock. Her hand, when I helped her over a bad patch, was sticky with blood.
About an hour later we heard Ed calling from higher up the mountain. The sound of it came to us quite clearly on the wind. But I knew it was a waste of breath to answer him and we climbed doggedly on until we found the piste. I left the others there and trudged on up to the bend where the piste had been repaired. From that point I was able to make contact with Ed. A few minutes later he joined me. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve been waiting up there for hours, bawling my head off. What happened to you?’
I explained as we went down to join the others. ‘Well, thank God you’re here now,’ he said. ‘I’d just about given you up. Once I heard some rocks crashing down…’ He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he murmured, ‘It’s a terrible business, that landslide. There must have been thirty or forty of them buried under it. But it wasn’t our fault,’ he added quickly.
‘They’re not to know that,’ I reminded him.
‘No, I guess not.’
When we rejoined the others, we found them discussing whether we should make for the Post or go on up over the pass towards Agdz. It was over forty kilometres to Agdz and the Berber tribesmen from Foum-Skhira could easily overtake us on the piste. At the same time there would probably be a road gang working on the break in the piste higher up the mountainside. There might be transport there. But even so, it was a stiff climb and I wasn’t sure we could make it. ‘What do you think, Ed?’ I asked.
There was a long pause and then he said, ‘I didn’t tell you this before, but the reason why you lost me was that I had to stop calling down to you. I’d almost reached the piste when I heard mules coming up from the direction of Foum-Skhira. They were Berbers and they passed quite close to me, about ten of them, going up towards the pass and riding hard.’
That decided us. We headed downhill, back towards Foum-Skhira and the Post.
It was then just on midnight. It didn’t take us long to reach the foot of the mountain, but from then on the going was heavy in the deep sand of the piste and our progress became slower and slower, our stops more frequent. According to the map it was five kilometres from the foot of the mountains to the Post, but it seemed infinitely farther and it took us nearly three hours. And for the last hour of that journey we could hear the sound of wailing from Foum-Skhira. It was a high-pitched, quavering sound, strangely animal in the darkness of the night, and it grew steadily
louder as we approached the Post.
At last the dark shape of the first fort loomed up, the domed roofs curved like some Eastern temple against the stars. We left the piste, making a wide detour round it, so that we approached the Post from the south. We went slowly, not talking, moving cautiously. They might have a lookout posted to watch for us. I didn’t think it likely, but it was just possible. A dog barked - a sudden, harsh sound in the stillness. And beyond the sound of the dog was the remote, persistent sound of the women of Foum-Skhira keening for their dead.
I think we were all a little scared. We were bunched close together and I could just see that Ed had his gun in his hand. We were braced mentally against the sudden, blood-curdling yell, the rush of an attack out of the night. It is easy to be frightened at night in a strange country among a strange people. Darkness should be the same everywhere. But it isn’t. This was desert country. These were desert people. We could feel the difference in the sand under our feet, see it in the brightness of the stars, the shadowed shape of the bare mountains. The chill of it was in our bones. It was as alien as the moon, as cold and naked. And the agony of that death-wailing froze our blood. The dog barked incessantly.
‘Goddammit!’ Ed muttered. ‘Why can’t that bloody dog keep quiet?’
A hand gripped my arm. It was Julie. ‘I wish we’d crossed the mountains and made for Agdz,’ she whispered.
We were in the open space between the two forts now. The shape of one of the towers was outlined against Orion. ‘Where do we go now?’ Ed asked. ‘The Bureau?’
‘That’s no good,’ I said. There won’t be anybody there.’
‘No, but there’s the telephone. We need to get on to the Commandant at Agdz, and quick.’
‘Well, we can try,’ I said. ‘But they probably lock the Bureau at night.’
‘What about Bilvidic?’ Jan asked. ‘He’ll be at the house, I imagine.’
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