by W E Johns
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: THE GREAT SAND SEA
CHAPTER 2: A FATHER SEEKS ADVICE
CHAPTER 3: AN UNEASY RECONNAISSANCE
CHAPTER 4: AN UNPLEASANT SURPRISE
CHAPTER 5: STRANGE DEVELOPMENTS
CHAPTER 6: ASTONISHING REVELATIONS
CHAPTER 7: ADRIAN IS OBSTINATE
CHAPTER 8: THE TOMB
CHAPTER 9: AN EXPERIMENT THAT WORKED
CHAPTER 10: ADRIAN GOES ALONE
CHAPTER 11: WHY ADRIAN DID NOT RETURN
CHAPTER 12: NO FUN FOR GINGER
CHAPTER 13: BIGGLES SPEAKS HIS MIND
CHAPTER 14: SEKUNDER MAKES A MISTAKE
CHAPTER 15: HOW IT ENDED
CHAPTER 1
THE GREAT SAND SEA
The palms of the abandoned oasis of El Arig, the last outpost of the habitable world, hung motionless under a sky of burnished steel and heat that struck like a hammer.
On the rim of the depression from which the oasis sprang like a miracle Police-pilot ‘Ginger’ Hebblethwaite gazed through double-dark glasses, shaded by a green-lined sun hat, across a world of sand. The great desert, for as far as he could see, lay lifeless. An immense ocean of sand, utterly empty, utterly barren, utterly sterile; the parched skeleton of a land that had died under the merciless flogging of the everlasting sun. There was no shade; no rest for the eyes. No sound. No smell. No life. For nothing can live where no rain ever falls, no water ever flows.
There are deserts in which some forms of life have through the ages adapted themselves to endure eternal heat and drought. Here there was nothing. Only pitiless distances to horizons that reeled drunkenly in the thin, quivering air, the mocking sand, and silence. Absolute silence. The silence that is the silence of death. Everywhere a flat, tortured sameness. Or so it appeared.
Ginger, from past experience, knew better. He knew that this timeless, tideless ocean, was not flat. That the sand rolled in waves, like the waves of a storm-tossed sea suddenly frozen; great dunes, curving like horseshoes, which to the east and south marched in line abreast, if not to eternity as it appeared, then for a thousand miles or more. But with the sun directly overhead they cast no shadows and so could not be seen, either from ground level or from the air.
This was the region that even the Tuareg, those veiled nomads of the Sahara, called the Land of Devils; where, if you heard an echo, it was a devil calling. Ginger also knew that not all the fearful Libyan Desert was like this. He knew that out there beyond his view in the trackless waste a great rock formation broke through the sand, four hundred miles of gaunt black hills and silent canyons; mountains worn down by wind-blown sand to monstrous, misshapen stumps, like rotten teeth.
He also knew that there were vast depressions of cracked hard-baked mud, hundreds of feet below sea level, thought to be the beds of ancient lakes or inland seas. There were still some lakes, mostly salt; some, with vegetation, surprisingly beautiful. Or perhaps it was comparison with the surrounding desolation that made them appear beautiful. But in the great dunes there was nothing. Only sand.
What grim secrets did it hide? Ginger wondered.
He knew, as a matter of historical fact, that beneath this hideous sea lay the mortal remains of at least one army; an army of fifty thousand men, their pack animals, their weapons, their baggage wagons. In the year 525 BC Cambyses, son of Cyrus the Great of Persia, was in Egypt, destroying the Egyptian gods and seeking plunder. From Khargar Oasis in Upper Egypt his army set off across the Great Sand Sea bound for another oasis, Siwa, intending to destroy and sack the fabulously wealthy Temple of Jupiter-Ammon. The distance was four hundred miles. It never arrived. This great host vanished, never to be seen again. What happened? No one knows. But reasonable conjecture is that it was overwhelmed by a storm and buried for all time under the unforgiving sand — the vengeance, the Egyptians claimed, of their outraged gods. The Tuaregs say there are three armies under the sand. Who the others were we do not know; but it could be true, for this land is very, very old, and native legends linger long.
It is now thought that there were civilizations here reckoned to date back to 300,000 years BC. Little is known of these people. Only ruins remain; runs of dwellings and temples with stones inscribed with an unknown writing; and graveyards of sun-bleached bones that lie as they may have lain for thousands of years.
North Africa was not always as it is today. The Romans called it Libya. It was from here that they obtained the wild beasts for the famous Roman circuses. To them, from the Atlantic to the Nile, was Libya; the southern part, Libya Interior. The modern name, Sahara, was introduced by the Arabs, the word Sahh’ra simply being Arabic for desert. What caused the tremendous change in this mysterious world is a matter for conjecture. There are several theories. One is that the Nile, or perhaps that other great river, the Niger, once flowed through the region, and at some unknown period of time changed its course, so leaving the land to dry up. The sand came on the prevailing wind from the deserts of Asia.
That could have happened. For as if heat alone were not enough to destroy life, here the sun has an ally. Wind. The wind that breeds the sand-storm. It can be born anywhere at any time. There is seldom any warning. A writhing yellow carpet rises from the desert floor. A gust of air as from the open door of a furnace picks it up and drives it forward until it seems the world has turned to sand, searing, blinding, suffocating. The dunes smoke. The sun, bloated and out of shape, disappears. A brown darkness falls. Earth becomes an inferno. Rocks are blasted to dust. Things that are not there appear, dissolve in sand and vanish. Nothing can survive.
After a storm, when the sand falls it can lay another trap. According to the way the grains lie the sand can pack down so hard as not to show a foot-mark. Elsewhere it can be as soft as snow, so that a man can sink up to his knees, and a wheeled vehicle to its axles. An aircraft cannot get off the ground in such conditions. Woe betide the pilot who finds himself bogged down, for under the desert sun the limit of time a man can live without water is twenty-four hours. Then the sun dries him up like an autumn leaf.
Even today the maps of this vast country are deceptive. Boundaries may be shown plainly enough, but they do not present a true picture. Egypt, for example, appears to be a country five hundred miles wide, and so it is as far as land surface is concerned. In actual fact, habitable Egypt is no more than the course of its great river, the Nile, seldom more than fifty miles wide. The rest is sand. Again, the boundary between Egypt and Libya is shown as a straight line running due south for seven hundred miles from the Mediterranean to the Sudan; but it would not be easy to find, for it passes across the Great Sand Sea where there are no marks, only the interminable yellow dunes. This may be the last part of the Earth’s surface to be surveyed.
As we have said, the country could not always have been like this. Of what lost civilizations it hides little is known, but the names of prehistoric kings and queens linger on in the tales of the dying tribes that cling to the oases on the fringe. There are tales of treasure, too; and there may be some truth in these, for there has long been a trickle of gold and precious stones from the region. Where these come from nobody knows, for they are sold surreptitiously, and the Arab finders, taciturn and suspicious of strangers, will not talk. Until recent times it would have been death for a Christian to go near them.
Perhaps the most famous oasis in the Sahara is Siwa, a series of lakes one hundred and twenty-five miles long, with rocky outcrops, inhabited by people who may be the last survivors of the earlier civilizations. Two thousand years ago, and more, it was a magnet that drew to it the greatest men of the known world, kings and conquerors who came to learn their fate at the celebrated Temple of Jupiter-Ammon, found
ed in 1385 BC. There, an oracle of high priests professed to be able to foretell the future. The ruins can still be seen on the hill of Agourmi. Close by are more ruins, the remains of the huge citadel and palace of the old kings of Ammonia. A quarter of a mile away is the Fountain of the Sun, mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century BC and other ancient writers.
This was the objective of the ill-fated army of Cambyses. Here, too, among others, came Alexander the Great, to learn from the high priests whether he was human or a god. He had reason to think he was divine, for he lost his way in the desert and ran out of water; and he would surely have perished had not a miracle occurred. It rained — where no rain had fallen for three hundred years. Rocks named after him tell us the course he took. From Marsa Matruh, on the Mediterranean coast (where Cleopatra, the famous Egyptian queen, had her magnificent summer palace) it is about one hundred and ninety miles, ten days’ march, to Siwa.
After this long digression, intended to let the reader know something of the country in which Ginger now found himself, without breaking into the narrative later, let us return to him.
Feeling that his skin was cracking, for in such dry heat perspiration evaporates as it forms, he turned about and walked down into the wadi where, under the palms that formed the oasis, protected by sheets of black polythene stood an aircraft, the Air Police ‘Merlin’. The palms, with some acacia scrub, were there because the floor of the depression, being much lower than the surrounding sands, enabled their roots to get within reach of moisture drawn up by capillary attraction from the reservoir of subterranean water which everywhere has accumulated through the ages deep down in the earth.
This fact was known by men from the earliest times, for which reason they knew where to dig to reach the life-giving water. El Arig was no exception and could boast a shallow pool of blue water. Nearby, a light tent had been pitched, and within its meagre shade Biggles and Bertie sat in earnest conversation.
Seeing Ginger coming Biggles asked: ‘What do you think of it?’
‘I don’t like it,’ answered Ginger shortly, as he joined them. ‘In fact, I hate the sight of it.’
‘I don’t like it, either. I didn’t like it before we started,’ returned Biggles.
‘What are we going to do about it?’
Biggles shrugged. ‘Carry on, I suppose. We shall have to put up some sort of a show. What else can we do? I don’t feel like going home and admitting I was afraid of the sand.’
‘Aren’t you?’ inquired Ginger.
‘Of course I am.’
‘That would be the sensible thing to do, old boy,’ put in Bertie. ‘Frankly, this bally place scares me rigid.’
‘We’ve flown over deserts before,’ reminded Biggles.
‘But not this one, old boy — not this one,’ said Bertie vehemently. ‘Oh no. This is the desert of all deserts. In most, even in the Sahara, a few tough guys, like the Tuareg, who know the drill, manage to scrape along. But not here. They know this is the end and keep well clear of it. So would anyone with a grain of common sense.’
‘Mander must have been out of his mind,’ declared Ginger.
‘A case of a lunatic jumping in where angels fear to tread,’ resumed Biggles. He lit a cigarette and went on: ‘It’s a queer thing, but for some people a desert is an irresistible lure. Once they’ve seen one they can’t keep away from it. If they go they come back. There’s something about it that seems to fascinate them. Perhaps it’s because a desert is one of the few places where there is still peace on earth. I wouldn’t know. You might almost call it a disease. Desert fever. Anyone can catch it.’
‘I shall do my best not to,’ asserted Ginger.
Ignoring the interruption Biggles continued: ‘The British seem particularly susceptible to the disorder — Charles Doughty, Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell, Lawrence of Arabia, to name only one or two. They were prepared to suffer the most appalling discomforts and take the most fearful risks.’
‘And at the end most desert explorers have ended up in the sand,’ put in Bertie. ‘I know a bit about it. Major Laing was strangled by his Arab escort. Davidson, too, was murdered. Richardson died of thirst. Macguire was killed by Tuaregs.’
‘You won’t see any Tuaregs here. Besides, the people you’re talking about travelled on foot.’
‘I hope you’re not trying to kid yourself that flying is any safer,’ argued Ginger. ‘I can think of several machines which, taking a short cut across the desert, were never seen again. General Laparrine was one. He tried air exploring and died in the sand. Dying of thirst isn’t my idea of a comfortable way to end up.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not taking any short cuts if I can prevent it.’
Bertie broke in. ‘Not all the machines that ended up in the sands were taking short cuts. Nor were they exploring or out to break records. What about that American bomber that went west with a crew of seven?’
‘That was a shocking business,’ admitted Biggles. ‘The result of a blunder.’
‘What was that?’ asked Ginger. ‘I don’t remember it.’
Biggles explained. ‘During the war an American heavy bomber based on North Africa was briefed to crack a target in Italy. It wasn’t seen again until long afterwards when the remains of it, and the crew, were spotted in the sand. That’s how the story got into the news. It was then possible to work out what happened. The bomber did its job, a night operation, and headed for home. Moreover it reached the North African coast. Then, finding visibility poor the pilot asked the base wireless operator for his position.’
‘Which is where the latest navigational aids came unstuck,’ put in Bertie. ‘The pilot must have been right over his own airfield at the time.’
‘Exactly. But he didn’t know that. The tragedy was, neither did the base operator. As far as he was concerned the aircraft was dead on the beam. This is what the pilot was told, so, naturally, he carried straight on, not realizing he had already overshot the airfield and was now heading out over the Great Sand Sea. By the time he spotted the mistake it was too late to do anything about it. He was nearly out of petrol. Remember, he had already been to Italy and back. A crash landing in the dunes now being inevitable he ordered his crew to bale out, which they did. He stuck to his ship and put it down in what turned out to be soft sand. The crew got together and did the only thing left for them. They marched north, hoping to get back to the coast, or somewhere near it. They never got out of the sand. They all died of thirst. The machine went on the “missing” list and for a long time what had happened to it remained a mystery. It was known to have reached the coast. Then what? I believe I’m right in saying it was a native rumour of a machine out in the sand that resulted in a search being made for it. So the lost machine was found.’
‘How do we know what happened?’ asked Ginger.
‘The bodies were spotted, one by one, strung out over a distance as each man had struggled on till he dropped. One of the crew had kept a diary to the end.’
‘I wouldn’t call that the sort of story to tell here,’ muttered Ginger.
‘You asked for it.’
Bertie came in again. ‘Never mind lost machines, what about this emerald mine young Mander was looking for? Do you believe in it?’
‘Who knows what to believe in a place like this? The story could be true. Native rumours, maybe exaggerated, usually have a foundation of fact. Remember, storytelling here, as elsewhere where there is no written word, is a business, a profession. The story-teller carries with him the tools of his trade, in this case a little leather bag filled with pebbles. To us they would all look alike, but not so to the owner. He knows them all. Each one represents a certain story. He takes one out of the bag, haphazard, and tells the story it indicates. The trade — or art if you like — has been handed down from father to son for heaven only knows how long. One of these tales, often told, concerned a fabulous Tuareg queen who once dominated the entire land that is now the Sahara. Her name was Tin-Hinan. According to the tale, when she died she w
as buried in a great rock tomb with much ceremony — and, of course, with all her treasure of gold and jewels. Few people took this seriously. But one man did, a French explorer with desert experience who knew the Tuareg. Deciding there might be some truth in the story, in 1927 he made a search for the tomb — and found it. There lay what remained of the queen’s body.’
‘But no treasure though, I’d bet,’ put in Ginger.
‘You’d lose your money. The treasure exceeded anything the Count de Prorok — that was the explorer’s name — had imagined; gold and silver ornaments, necklaces and bracelets and strings of precious and semiprecious stones. Apart from their intrinsic value the find caused an archaeological sensation in that it revealed a new page in the history of the world. The treasure is, or was, in the museum in Algiers. As in most places nowadays anything found has to be handed over to the country concerned.’
‘If the Tuareg knew about this why didn’t they rifle the tomb?’ inquired Ginger, practically.
‘They have a saying, the dead are best left alone.’
‘Perhaps Mander is trying to find another tomb like it,’ suggested Bertie.
‘Could be; but if what his father told me is correct, being an ardent archaeologist he’d be less concerned with treasure as a clue that would enable the ancient language to be read. There are certainly plenty of old tombs in North Africa about which nothing is known.’1
‘There is this about it,’ observed Ginger, perhaps trying to strike an optimistic note. ‘The only thing we have to contend with is all this confounded sand.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ corrected Biggles grimly. ‘At this particular spot, perhaps. But according to Saharan explorers there are some oases, particularly where there are rocks, that fairly swarm with snakes, small but deadly; the cobras, or asps, one of which Cleopatra is said to have used to commit suicide. There is also a horrible little beast, a lizard called the ouragen. It’s only about eighteen inches long, but it has four sets of teeth, each fitted with first-class poison glands. If one of those devils gets his fangs into you, you’ve had it, chum. There’s no known antidote.’
