Next second she had thrown the plane into a spin. Gyrating madly they plunged down, down, down, while the spinning earth rushed up to meet them.
Lovelace held his breath; waiting for the terrific impact which he knew must come before oblivion. Suddenly they came out of the spin and seemed to flash along the surface of the ground at breakneck speed, almost scraping it. There was a frightful jolt; they bounded into the air again with the ground still racing away beneath them until a wing-tip caught upon a giant boulder. The plane swerved violently. With the scream of tearing fabric and twisted metal it turned right round, lurched sideways, and came to a standstill.
For a moment they were too dazed to move. Christopher recovered first and began to scramble out through the roof of the cabin. “Come on!” he called, stretching down a hand to grab Valerie’s arm. “Come on! They’re still shooting at us.”
Lovelace thrust her up and followed her through the aperture. They saw Zarrif’s plane, far above them now, circling in the wide blue sky. Its guns still flashed and a hail of bullets was tearing the left wing of Valerie’s machine to pieces.
As they jumped to the ground the fierce heat of the stones struck up to their feet through the soles of their shoes but they did not heed it as they dashed for cover. Instinctively they headed for a natural arch formed by two big rocks, about a hundred yards away, and flung themselves down beneath it.
For a few moments bullets continued to clatter on the stones about them; then there fell a sudden silence broken only by the drone of the plane above. It grew fainter and Lovelace peered out. The enemy were apparently content with having shot them down; for the plane had turned and was heading away towards Addis Ababa.
He wondered that Zarrif should be satisfied to leave them still alive when, by expending a little more time and ammunition, he could have descended to a closer range and massacred them in spite of their scant cover. Yet they must be thirty, if not fifty, miles now from the railway line and a hundred from a village that contained a white man. They would die of thirst and starvation in that blistering desert before they could cover half such a distance. All the same it was strange that Zarrif should have left them even so slender a chance of life.
Suddenly he saw something move behind a boulder. Through the shimmering heat haze a savage, brown face, surmounted by fuzzy, black hair, was peering at him.
Valerie gave a cry and gripped Christopher’s arm. She was looking in a different direction and had seen another. The whole region seemed to come to life and there were scores of dark, shiny faces glaring at them.
Lovelace understood then why Zarrif had left them. He had seen the tribesmen from above. This was Danakil country where whites were first terribly mutilated and then murdered. He had gone on to Addis Ababa, quite satisfied that there was not the slightest chance of their ever troubling him again.
There was only one thing for it, Lovelace knew. He had got to shoot Valerie first and himself afterwards.
CHAPTER XVII
THE LAND OF SATAN’S CHILDREN
Lovelace stared out into the heat haze. The blistering sun was already scorching his back and shoulders through his thin tunic. The yellow-brown rocks danced and shimmered. Above them, no more than twenty yards away, peered the brutal faces of the savage Danakils. It was no nightmare, but reality. This was Abyssinia, and an end to their mad venture before they had been two hours over the frontier of the country. A swarm of the fuzzy-haired warriors were already looting the wrecked plane.
“Speak to them!” Valerie’s voice came low-pitched and urgent at his side. “Speak to them and tell them we’re not Italians.”
He shook his head helplessly. Even if he could have said in the dialect of the tribe: “We are neutrals on our way to Addis Ababa to stop war—not to make it,” he doubted if it would have made the least difference.
These barbarous Danakils were killers of unprotected travellers in normal times, as even then the Emperor’s writ was so much waste paper more than fifty miles from his capital. He had to collect his taxes by a series of armed forays each year, and the townships of his so-called Ethiopian Empire, which was six times the size of Abyssinia proper, were only kept in subjection by garrisons of Amhara soldiery. Lovelace knew the complicated system of guides and presents by which any visitor to the interior of the country had to be passed on from one local chieftain to another if he was to escape attack. Now it had filtered through to tribesmen that their country was at war they would risk attacking even armed convoys under the impression that rewards would be forthcoming for every white they slaughtered. He could speak Arabic, Urdú, “pidgin” French and “pidgin” English, and had a smattering of various other non-European languages, but Danakil, or even Amharic, was utterly beyond him.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I can’t, and, anyhow, these people don’t know one European nation from another—only that it’s no longer necessary even to make excuses when they murder white men.”
Christopher’s thoughts were racing wildly. He was much younger than Lovelace, and this was the first time in his life that he had ever found himself outside the protection of organised law and order. At the first sight of the natives he wondered why they did not use their long, old-fashioned guns or cast their tufted spears. Then he realised that the encircling ring of warriors had crawled nearer and meant to capture them alive. His next thought was the appalling one that Lovelace had had only a few seconds before. He must shoot Valerie first and himself immediately afterwards.
Lovelace had already drawn his pistol. He knew far better than Christopher the terrible mutilations and tortures that all three of them would suffer if they allowed themselves to be captured. He gazed round him, hoping desperately to find one friendly face in the ring of evil masks; a chief to whom they might offer ransom, or a semi-cultured type; but they were all stupid, brutal, bestial; their black hair wild and shaggy, their eyes fierce with the lust for blood.
He raised his automatic. Sweat was pouring off his face in rivulets. With an almost superhuman effort of will he jerked the gun up behind Valerie’s shoulder until it was pointing at the base of her skull behind the left ear. She would know nothing about it; feel nothing but a smashing blow and then be beyond all physical joy or pain for ever.
At that instant she turned. She could not see the pistol, but his raised arm and half-crazed expression told her of his intention. Instinctively, blind terror gripped her. Her mouth fell open, her grey eyes started from her head, and she ducked with such suddenness that she stumbled and fell forward on her knees.
Hardly a moment had elapsed since their first sight of the Danakils. As though her fall had been a signal, the native warriors gave a yell of triumph and, leaping from their cover, came dashing pell-mell across the twenty yards of open ground.
In a second Valerie grasped the full horror of her situation. To fall alive into the hands of these murderous savages meant twenty deaths instead of one. Far better that Lovelace should blow her brains out. She wrenched herself round on her knees and threw her head back.
“All right!” she gasped. “Go on—shoot me!”
Lovelace had let his pistol-hand drop to his side. Now he raised it again until the weapon pointed at her breast. For split seconds, each of which seemed like an eternity, he strove to force himself to press the trigger.
He could have managed it before, when she was not looking; but now that she was staring up at him, her eyes riveted on his, waiting for the bullet to sear through her body, he could not.
Christopher had turned and was shouting something. His black eyes shone feverishly in a face drained of blood. His Millers’ lethal gas pistol, too, was now aimed at Valerie, but her fall had lost them precious seconds, and before either of the men had time to nerve himself for his terrible act the Danakils were upon them.
At the last moment, Christopher, swerving from his purpose, swung round and discharged his weapon at one of the warriors. Lovelace kept his pistol levelled at Valerie and pulled the trigger, but a huge na
tive leap, upon her as the automatic flashed and took the bullet in his thigh.
After that all chance to kill each other or themselves was gone. They were borne down by a solid mass of black, stinking humanity. It was all over within one minute of the warriors having left their cover. Battered, bruised, breathless, the two white men and the girl were lugged to their feet, alive but captives, to find themselves staring half-dazed into a host of hostile, brutish faces.
Without further delay they were pushed and pulled over the hot stones, past their wrecked plane and on through the wilderness.
It seemed to stretch interminably behind them and on either side, with neither tree, nor shrub, nor waterhole to break the endless monotony of sun-scorched rock, but before them rose a great range of cliffs; the first step to the highlands of the interior. Black, precipitous, apparently unscalable, they towered up in the near distance, cutting sharply across the skyline.
The prisoners were being taken towards the west, and the morning sun beat down with relentless force upon their backs. Valerie had lost her hat, and only her chestnut hair, now hanging about her head in damp, tangled rats’ tails, protected her from sunstroke. As she was hurried along, tripping and stubbing her toes on the hot, uneven ground in the firm grip of two perspiring natives, she thought of that; then realised how little sunstroke mattered. In a few hours she would be raving mad from the atrocities these animals in human form would practice upon her.
Lovelace and Christopher were both thinking of the same thing, and each was cursing himself for his cowardly hesitation at the moment when he might have shot her. They trudged on blindly, hastened by jabs from spear-points and blows from the muzzles of ancient blunderbusses.
Before they had covered five hundred yards of their terrible journey all of them had lapsed into semi-consciousness from heat, nightmare imagination, and brutal beating. The naked rocks underfoot had given way to tough, dry, desert grass and through this they were half-dragged, half-carried, until they arrived within a hundred yards of the cliff face. There, they sensed rather than saw that they had arrived outside a village.
A swarm of screaming women and a host of naked children came out to meet them, dancing and grimacing with delirious glee, while the warriors broke into a shrill, unmelodious song of triumph at their capture.
The village was no more than a collection of daub-and-wattle huts clustered together at the foot of the cliff. It was so primitive that it had not even an open space at its centre. By the nearest hut an old, old man, with a fringe of white hair round his polished skull and a wizened, monkey-like face, stood leaning on a staff. As the gibbering mob dragged their prisoners before him he regarded them with small, cruel, rheumy eyes for a moment, then muttered a few words in his own dialect. Without further parley they were jostled another twenty yards and flung head foremost into an empty hut.
Immediately the screen was pulled across the entrance it became pitch dark inside, but Lovelace caught a glimpse of Valerie’s face before the light was blotted out and saw that she had fainted.
The place stank worse than any kennel; with the mixed odours of goats, pigs, and filthy humanity. Almost instantly the hundreds of fleas which infested it settled upon them.
For a long time they were too broken and bemused even to stir from the places where they had fallen. Lovelace, knowing what was in store for them, was thinking feverishly of the knives of the Danakil women as they would cut into his shrinking flesh, when Christopher roused at last and muttered: “If they’re going to kill us, why the hell don’t they get on with it?”
Lovelace knew the answer. They were being kept for a night’s entertainment. It was highly probable that never before in its history had this village experienced the undreamed-of pleasure which could be provided by the skilful mutilation of two white men and a white woman. If they were dead before the morning they would be lucky and the Danakils intensely disappointed. His one prayer was that they might all go mad and cease to suffer early in the game, but he forebore to voice his thoughts in case Valerie had regained consciousness.
Actually she had never quite lost it, and now she had recovered sufficiently to speak clearly again. With uncanny precision she guessed his thoughts, and said:
“It seems years since we crashed in the plane, but it can’t be midday yet. That means we’ve got a long while to wait until sundown.”
Christopher stretched his bruised arms, clasping and unclasping his stiff fingers. Their captors had not troubled to bind them. The ghastly thought had come to him that, since his gun had gone, he had better strangle Valerie, because he loved her. As he moved she spoke again, deliberately and bitterly.
“I wish some of the people who want to go to war to save the Abyssinians were in our place now. They don’t understand—they can’t. These brutes are worse than animals—worse than reptiles—even a snake doesn’t bite you unless you provoke it in some way. I’ve never seen such fiendish cruelty as stared at me out of the eyes of these loathsome creatures when they dragged us here, and the women who met us looked even more ferocious than the men. They’re not human, but soulless devils incarnate whose one delight is inflicting pain.”
Her voice rose to a shrill note of hysteria. “I don’t care any more for ideals and all the senseless nonsense that is talked about Leagues and Covenants and Treaties. I hope the Italians win! I hope they wipe these people out, man, woman and child. Destroy them and blast them limb from limb until there’s not a single one of them left to pollute the decent earth they tread on.”
As she ceased speaking the first bomb fell.
CHAPTER XVIII
DOLOMENCHI OF THE DEATH SQUADRON
The explosion occurred with such frightful suddenness that for a second they did not grasp what was happening. The ground they lay on shuddered under the impact, a shower of dried mud rattled down from the unseen walls and roof of the hut, the hot dark air quivered, and the crash nearly burst their ear-drums. There came another before the echoing reverberations of the first, thrown back from the cliff face, had subsided.
“Bombs!” yelled Lovelace, staggering to his feet. “Quick—we must get out of this!”
He kicked aside the wicket covering the entrance to the hut, and with the others hard on his heels, dashed into the open. Any guards who might have been keeping watch a moment earlier had disappeared. In the blinding sunlight a ghastly spectacle lay before them.
A third of the village had been blown to fragments. Men, women and children shrieked and screamed as they fled in all directions; here and there brown figures lay in terribly distorted attitudes, some deadly still in pools of glistening blood, others contorted into fantastic shapes by an agony of pain.
Valerie glimpsed one headless body and another with both legs blown away as Lovelace, gripping her by the arm, raced her across the tough grass out into the open.
Another bomb burst behind them. It was not big stuff, Lovelace knew, otherwise there would have been only great craters where the village stood, but extremely deadly, nevertheless. The attacker was using light bombs with instantaneous fuses specially designed for spreading their metal laterally and causing casualties to troops rather than wrecking buildings. Tiny pieces of jagged steel, capable of inflicting frightful wounds, sang past them as they ran.
Three hundred yards from the wreck of the village he pulled up for a second. Christopher was close behind. They halted, gasping for breath after their desperate race.
An intensely bright light that was almost unbearable to look upon suddenly appeared on the edge of the remaining huts. Instantly the whole lot burst into flames like a stand of matches upon which the end of a lighted cigarette has been dropped.
A pitiful whimper in the tall grass near by caused Valerie to switch round just as Lovelace was urging her on again. It came from a naked child, about three years old, who had been scampering away in front of them. A large piece of the last explosive bomb had taken off his right foot, severing it at the ankle, so that it now hung from the leg by only a shred
of skin.
She ran to him and snatched him up, regardless of the blood which poured over her soiled skirt. The others seized her by the arms and forced her on while the child struggled wildly in her fierce grip; more terrified to find itself clutched to the breast of a white woman than at the pain of its shattered limb.
The bombing had ceased and they eased their pace after they had covered another hundred yards. Valerie sank down exhausted with her quivering burden. As she fell she burst into a passionate flood of tears.
“The brutes!” she sobbed. “The fiends!—how could they? Oh, my lamb, my lamb, what have they done to you?”
Christopher bent over her. The old fanatic gleam had come back into his dark eyes. “This is war,” he muttered. “War! The curse of humanity. The horror we’re out to stop. Can you ever doubt again that the Millers of God are right? Oh, how I wish I’d killed that devil Zarrif when I had the chance.”
“He’s coming down.” Lovelace was staring upward into the fierce blue sky where a single Italian war-plane circled gracefully above their heads. “Look! he’s coming down.”
The village was now only a smouldering pile of ruins; the surviving Danakils had disappeared as though by magic. As they watched the plane circled lower, seeking an even stretch of the coarse grass on which to land. It came to earth a few hundred yards away.
A man got out of it and walked over to a hummock on which he halted to scan the surrounding country.
Christopher waved, the man waved back, and they started to run towards him, Valerie still clutching the child whose moans had grown more feeble now.
As they approached they saw that the man was lithe and dark and handsome. He wore a pair of beautifully cut breeches, field-boots that shone with the reflection of the sun, an open-necked sleeveless shirt, and an air-helmet. He was smoking a cigarette with quiet enjoyment.
A rifle cracked and the bullet sent up a little spurt of dust just to his left; another zipped a rock in the rear. Some of the Danakils who had managed to retain their weapons had now regained their courage. He lifted the hand that held his cigarette; a machine-gun on the plane began to sweep a rocky patch where the survivors of the massacre had taken refuge, and the feeble attempt at retaliation was silenced.
The Secret War Page 18
