The Strange Land

by Hammond Innes

  I didn’t talk to him on that two-hour journey out to Enfida.

  I thought if I didn’t talk, maybe he’d find it easier to adjust himself to his new surroundings. Also, I had my own problems. I hadn’t given much thought to the Mission whilst I had been in Tangier. Now I needed to plan. There was the surgery to organise and people I wanted to see - people who had been sick or had suffered some misfortune like Yakoub at the olive factory who had lost his little son. And Jan would have to be introduced to Frehel, the Civil Controller, and to the Caid, and then I’d have to take him on a tour of the villages. I had hardly got all these matters sorted out in my mind before the bus was climbing up out of the plain to the fringe of the foothills and we had come to the first of the olive plantations.

  Everything looked very wet. There were pools of water steaming in the sunshine and the roadway itself was creamed with mud. ‘There’s been a lot of rain up here,’ Jan said.

  I nodded, remembering the paper I had picked up in Jose’s bar. It seemed ages ago. I wondered whether it could have snowed here.

  ‘Have you had somebody looking after the Mission whilst you’ve been away?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Two English people - a painter named George Corrigan and his sister, Julie. I think you’ll like them. They run an old single-decker bus which they converted into a caravan. They’ve been touring Morocco in it.’

  ‘Do they know the south at all?’

  ‘Still thinking about Kasbah Foum?’ I said. And then, because my tone had sounded angry, I added, ‘If anybody knows it, they will. They’ve been all over the country. For all I know, George may have done a painting of it. One room of the Mission is stacked with his paintings. There are a lot of kasbahs amongst them.’

  We had turned up into Enfida now and a moment later we drew up at the bus stop behind a truck piled high with a load of black olives going down to the press. There was a little crowd standing in the mud waiting for the bus and the rushing sound of the river flooding under the bridge filled the town.

  Yakoub, the man who had lost his little son, was standing talking to the driver of the olive truck, his woolly cap and ragged djellaba black and stiff with the rancid oil of the press.

  ‘Salaam ealykum!’ I called to him, but he didn’t answer. And when I went up to him, he seemed ill-at-ease and refused to look me in the face. ‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked him.

  He moved his shoulders awkwardly and mumbled something about the wrath of Allah being terrible.

  ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘It is the mountain, sidi,’ he murmured. ‘It has fallen into the valley. It has fallen upon the Dar el Mish’n.’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Jan asked me.

  ‘Something about the Mission.’ Yakoub had turned away now. The people by the bus were all standing watching me. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’d better get up there right away.’ And we began walking up towards the open space by the Auberge de la Ravine, where the track into the mountains started. There was something about the atmosphere of the place and the way the people stood silently watching us that scared me. The air was heavy with the humid heat of mud steaming in the sunshine and the river roared in a brown flood under the bridge. And in the place of olives outside the auberge, the drivers of the asses and the men who bent over the scales stopped and stared, and when I spoke to them they were silent as though they had been struck dumb. A feeling of disaster hung over the place.

  PART TWO

  THE MISSION

  CHAPTER ONE

  We came out above the olive trees on to the hillside and everything looked quiet and peaceful in the midday sun. The mountains were a massive line of white shouldering up into the blue sky and the air was still and calm and crystal-clear. Down below us the river wound through the valley, a turgid, brown flood of water, and the only sound was the persistent braying of a donkey. The slope of the ground ahead screened the Mission, but soon I could see the creamy white of the Corrigans’ caravan parked in an olive grove down to the left and then I breasted a rise and all the hillside above the Mission came suddenly into view, and I stopped.

  Above -the road there was a great, raw gash of newly-exposed rock and rubble. It ran from the very top of the sheer hill-slope, broadening out as it swept down, and disappeared beyond the next rise of the road. I stood there, my chest heaving, my whole body suddenly paralysed at what I saw. It was a landslide, and I was rooted to the spot by fear of what I should find when I topped the final rise.

  Jan joined me. He didn’t say anything, but just stood there beside me, breathing heavily. There was nothing to be said. I started forward again, slowly now, reluctantly. As we climbed the rise, more and more of the hillside became exposed, showing a broader, more chaotic tumble of heaped-up debris. And then, suddenly, we were over the rise and the full extent of the disaster was revealed. A quarter of a mile ahead of us the road ceased, swept away and overlaid by tons of wet, red earth and rock. The Mission had vanished utterly, blotted out as though it had never been. And where the olive trees had stood and the children’s playground and the stables I had built for sick donkeys, there was nothing - nothing but raw, broken earth.

  The landslide had swept over it all, obliterating five years’ work and all my hopes.

  I didn’t know what to do. I seemed suddenly without feeling. It just didn’t seem real to me. This spot was my home, my whole life. It had been beautiful - a long, whitewashed building looking out across the olive groves to the valley and across to the mountains. It was as much a part of me as my body.

  I stared uncomprehendingly at the gang of labourers with their long-handled shovels already at work on the road. They were like pygmies trying to shift a mountain. I felt I must have come to the wrong place, that this couldn’t really be Enfida, couldn’t be Le Mission Anglais - the Dar el Mish’n.

  I followed the great red sweep of the landslide down the slopes to the valley bottom and understood why the river had seemed so brown. It was pouring in a white cascade over the base of the landslide.

  I felt dazed - bewildered by the violence, the utter ruthlessness of it all. If it had left something - a wall, part of a building … But there was nothing; not a tree, not a stone, not a single vestige of the place. All my personal things were gone, my books, my notes, my clothes, George’s pictures, the medical stores, the van .. , every single thing completely and utterly vanished below that ghastly, piled-up chaos of broken hillside.

  Jan touched my arm. ‘It’s no good looking at it,’ he said quietly. ‘Better come down to the auberge and have a drink.’

  No good looking at it! That was true. ‘I never want to see the damned place again,’ I said savagely. ‘All the time, all that effort! You’d think if God…’ I stopped myself there and pushed my hand through my hair. Then I turned my back abruptly on the spot that had been my home and walked slowly down with Jan to the inn.

  And that was where we met Julie, by the piled-up heaps of olives in the open space by the inn. She came towards us, walking slowly, her black hair hanging limp, her face white and strained. I was too dazed by the disaster of it all to notice then how desperately tired she was. I only knew I was glad she was there.

  ‘You’ve seen?’ she asked as she reached us.

  I nodded, afraid to trust myself to speak.

  ‘I was hoping to catch you before you went up there, to break it to you gently. But you didn’t tell me you were coming back today.’ Her voice sounded flat and lifeless.

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Two days ago; just after three o’clock in the afternoon.’

  ‘Thank God you weren’t in the house,’ I said. ‘Where were you? Did you see it?’

  She nodded, her lip trembling. She was suddenly on the verge of tears. ‘I was at the caravan, turning out a drawer. George … George was doing a painting of the house. He was sitting at his easel down near the donkey stable. He wanted the house and the hills in shadow behind it. It was to be a surprise
for you, Philip. A welcome-home present. And then…’ She closed her eyes and shook her head, the tears welling slowly, uncontrollably from between her tight-pressed eyelids.

  ‘You mean - George?’ I was too horrified to move.

  She nodded slowly. ‘He was there - just below the house. I saw him.’ She opened her eyes, staring at me. ‘There was a sort of rumble … like thunder. I went to the door. I thought it might be another heavy downpour and I had some washing out. But it was clear and sunny. I heard George shout. He shouted to me and then he began to run and I looked up and saw the whole hillside pouring down. I couldn’t run. I just stood there and saw the first wave of rocks pour over the roadway, down to the house and then … then George fell and the whole ghastly landslide rolled over him. And then it hit him and… and suddenly he wasn’t there any more.’

  I said something. I don’t know what it was, but she was suddenly clinging to me, sobbing hysterically. ‘It was horrible. Horrible. And I couldn’t do anything.’ She was trembling and all I could do was stroke her head the way you do a sick animal.

  Gradually she stopped trembling and her grip on my arm relaxed. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice was steadier, more controlled. ‘It happened two days ago. I should have got used to it by now.’ She straightened up and dried her eyes. ‘It was just that there was nobody …’ She blew her nose hard. ‘Ever since it happened I’ve just felt screwed up tight inside. And then, when I saw you …’ She shook her head as though trying to shake the picture out of her mind. ‘I’m all right now.’

  ‘Where are you staying - at the auberge?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I’m still living in the caravan. I didn’t want to see any strangers. I wanted my own things round me. Oh, Philip - why did it have to be George? Why did he have to choose that afternoon?… He’d been painting up in the hills for days.’

  I took her arm. She was still trembling. ‘I think perhaps some tea would help.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She nodded, clutching at the suggestion. ‘If you come back to the caravan I’ll make you some.’ As she turned, she came face-to-face with Jan. I don’t think she’d noticed him till then. The sight of a stranger seemed to brace her. ‘You must be Dr Kavan.’ Her voice was steadier as she held out her hand to him. ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t a very pleasant welcome….’ She let her hand drop to her side.

  He didn’t say anything and she turned quickly and led us down to the caravan.

  The bus had been converted into two rooms with a shower bath and kitchenette between. She led us through into the front half, which was bedroom, living-room and studio combined and which merged into the driver’s seat. It had been George’s room. His things were everywhere, his clothes, his paints, the inevitable stack of canvases. It was impossible not to imagine that he was away painting somewhere in the hills and would return today or tomorrow or the next day.

  I sat down, feeling dazed, thinking how senseless it was. There were hundreds of square miles of mountains. Why did it have to be here, in this exact spot? I looked up and stared out through the windscreen. The bus was parked facing towards Enfida. I was looking out on to a pattern of silver grey against the sky with the holes of the olive trees dark streaks in the shade. But the tranquillity of the scene only sharpened the memory of that broken slash of rubble lying over the Mission.

  Julie came in then with the tea. ‘It’s no good brooding over it, Philip,’ she said in a small, taut voice. ‘We must think of the future, both of us. Think of the new Mission you’ll build.’

  ‘The new Mission?’ I stared at her. She didn’t understand. ‘There won’t be any new Mission,’ I said. ‘I’ve no money to start again.’

  ‘But weren’t you insured?’ Jan asked.

  ‘Against fire and theft. Not against an Act of God.’

  ‘But your Mission Society?’ His voice was suddenly tense. ‘Surely they will help — ‘

  ‘Why should they? I put up most of the capital. The Society isn’t really interested in a Mission here.’ And then I realised what was worrying him. ‘You’ll be all right,’ I added. ‘You’re a doctor. They need doctors out here in Morocco.’

  He gave a nervous little shrug. ‘It’s not the same. Here I would have been lost to the world.’

  We sat in silence after that, drinking tea, wrapped in our own thoughts. For each of us that landslide meant something different. And for each of us the future was uncertain.

  As soon as I finished my tea, I got up and went out into the hard, bright sunshine, walking through the shade of the olives until I came to where they ceased abruptly and there was nothing but great, piled-up heaps of mud and stone. It rose higher than the trees, the surface of it drying and caking in the sunshine.

  Insh’ Allah! I kicked out viciously at a clod of earth. That’s what they’d be saying, here in Enfida and up the valleys at Kef and Tala and all the other mountain villages. Like disease and poverty and the loss of crops through water, it was the will of Allah and you shrugged your shoulders and did nothing about it.

  I clenched my fists. Somehow I must fight back; show them that disaster wasn’t something to accept, but a thing to struggle against.

  But how? How?

  I bowed my head then, praying to God for some guidance for the future, for some hope; praying that I’d have the strength to go on, that I wouldn’t have to turn my back on it and admit that I’d wasted five years of my life.

  But the answer to one’s prayers comes from inside, not from outside, and I was too raw and hurt by the shock of what had happened to feel any revival of spirit.

  A hand slipped under my arm and Julie was standing there beside me. She didn’t say anything and we stood there, looking at what the giant force of Nature had done to the hillside. Twenty thousand bulldozers couldn’t have done it in a year, and yet it had happened in a few moments - in less time than it had taken a man to try and run half the width of it.

  The slide stretched like a giant scar from the valley bottom to the very summit of the sheer hillside.

  ‘You mustn’t be too bitter about it,’ Julie said. She had seen my face, knew what I was thinking.

  ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ I said.

  ‘Something will turn up.’

  I stared at her, seeing her standing there, straight and firm-lipped, remembering what she had lost there under that landslide. I should have been comforting her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘We’d better go down to the auberge now and see Madame Cast.’ Her voice was suddenly practical, though it trembled slightly. ‘I expect she’ll have rooms for you both.’

  The news that I’d returned had spread and the open space outside the auberge was crowded with people. There were women there, as well as men - Arab women, their eyes watching us curiously from the safety of their veils; Berber women in their gaily-coloured cottons. The men, standing in little huddles by the heaped-up piles of black olives, carefully avoided my gaze. They were superstitious — curious but frightened; Allah had struck down the Dar el Mish’n and to talk to the Englishman would be unlucky. Men I had helped, whose sons I had trained as mechanics and joiners in my workshops, averted their gaze, afraid to speak to me, afraid to give me even a word of sympathy. They still believed in the Evil Eye. They wore charms to protect themselves against it - the charm of the Hand of Fatima. ‘Damn them all to hell!’ I muttered with sudden, pointless anger.

  Julie’s grip on my arm tightened. ‘It’s not their fault,’ she said.

  No, it wasn’t their fault. But what was the point of going on? Why bother to struggle against centuries of ignorance?

  And then we were in the cold, dark interior of the auberge and Madame Cast was sitting, waiting for us, with her cat. She was a Frenchwoman who had married a German in the Legion. But, sitting there in her ugly, Victorian chair, there was no indication of a colourful background. The girl who had followed the Legion had been obliterated by the widow who for twenty years had run an auberge in En
fida and now she was like a huge-bodied female spider huddled in the centre of her web. She fed on gossip and her little eyes sparkled as she saw us. Both she and her cat were immense and shapeless, like the old carpet slippers she wore. Little grey eyes stared at us curiously out of the big, sagging face.

  ‘I have rooms ready for you, mes enfants,’ she said. She had known we must come to her.

  ‘I’ll leave you now,’ Julie said quickly. ‘Come and see me in the morning.’

  Madame Cast watched her go and then she shouted to the Berber kitchen boy to bring us some wine. The room was big and dreary. Down one side ran the bar and in the corner, where Madame Cast sat, was a big white-tiled Austrian stove. The walls were decorated with discoloured posters of French holiday resorts and there was a rack of faded postcards.

  The wine came and we sat and drank it, listened to Madame’s account of the disaster. Three farms had been destroyed as well as the Mission and the landslide had dammed up the river and flooded several olive groves. ‘And they blame me for the disaster?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Oui, monsieur.’

  ‘What else do they say?’ This old woman knew everything that was said in Enfida.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Does it matter, monsieur?’ She hesitated and her eyes softened. ‘Tell me, what are you going to do now?’

  ‘What are the people expecting me to do?’ I asked her.

  ‘They think you will leave Enfida and go back to your country across the sea. They say that it is the will of Allah.’

  ‘And if I stay?’

  She folded her thick, work-stained hands in her lap. ‘They do not expect you to stay.’ There was silence between us for a moment and then she said, ‘Monsieur Frehel telephoned about an hour ago. He would like to see you.’