by John Harris
The sky grew as metallic as a brass gong, the air seeming to hum with the heat even above the dead beat of the engines, and the light appeared to crash to the ground in a dazing glare, glinting on the fragments of stone and grit that reflected it blindingly. All was emptiness around us, and loud silence, bound in a great glitter through the two colours of rust and silver-grey.
We stopped again at midday without a shadow, and Nimmo took the watch on top of the dunes. Phil sat next to me, close enough for her shoulder to rub against mine, but I noticed she made no attempt to allow it to do so. Nobody had much to say because it was too hot to talk. Once or twice I turned as I saw Phil’s eyes on me, and though there was something unfathomable in their depths, I was grateful for the glances.
The wind was stirring more now, as I’d expected it would, and the moving sand and gravel scratched and pawed at the vehicles so that a piece of loose tent canvas sticking out of the Land Rover flapped softly against the metal. Occasionally, it came in strong fitful gusts, whipping low across the bare ridges to ruffle the summits so that it seemed as if they were smoking, or lifting the dust in the hollows into little whirling columns before sighing and dying away once more to resume its restless questing, while the sand sifted down again, secretly, obliterating our tracks.
The going was still poor and I decided to carry on until dusk and then stop for a long break, feeling that in the darkness we could all relax and rest more easily.
The vehicles lurched and rocked over the uneven ground in a powdery fog that swirled around us, covering us in grey-yellow dust that lay on eyebrows and lashes and banked up on the sweat marks. The hot rising wind flapped the tent canvas more loudly against the metal of the Land Rover now, and everywhere, every time the engines died, you could hear the gritty whispering of blown sand. Leach, on watch behind me on the lorry, grumbled constantly about it.
Towards dusk, with the wind blowing harder still in uneven gusts and the empty sky changing to an ugly saffron that grew darker all the time as the dust dimmed it to a yellow-brown haze in a warning of a coming storm, I heard the sound of a horn and became aware of Nimmo ahead swinging the Land Rover round in a wide fast curve and heading back the way we’d come. I stuck my head through the cab window and bawled to Leach and I could tell from the way he replied that he’d been asleep. Then I saw dust moving beyond the top of the next dune and realised that Ghad Ahmed had found us at last.
The two jeeps came rocketing over the summit like tanks with a tommy gun rattling from the leader. The men in them were the same tattered bunch I’d seen with Ghad Ahmed, but he’d obviously not trained them well, because if I’d been doing what they were trying to do I’d have brought them down one on each side of us to divide our fire. Instead, they came down together, clueless as Johnny Newcomes, close enough on each other’s heels to make a target and far too fast for their firing to be effective, though I heard the whacker-whacker-whacker of bullets thumping against the rear of the lorry.
I heard Leach yelling with fright and Phil screamed, and I pushed her to the floor of the cab.
‘We’re going to look like mother’s colander,’ I shouted, suddenly wild with excitement, and I caught a glimpse of her staring up at me from the floor of the cab, her eyes full of bewilderment.
Morena was standing upright in the front of the Land Rover now, holding the tommy gun we’d captured in the Depression, one hand on the winsdcreen as Nimmo swung the vehicle round for him to get his sights on the jeeps. The windscreen flew into fragments and Nimmo ducked, but Morena stood there like a rock and I swear he never even flinched, though there was suddenly blood along his chest.
Phil was beating on my knee and screaming something I couldn’t hear for the roar of the engine – as though she were pleading with me to provide some sort of protection, but I was too busy watching Nimmo and Morena to hear her and brushed her hand away irritably, trying to concentrate on what was going on. Momentarily, I saw the flicker of hurt astonishment in her eyes, then she turned away and buried her face in her hands and, as the two jeeps came closer, I saw Morena shout and Nimmo stood on the brakes.
Morena had only the magazine that had been on the gun when we’d captured it and if he wasted it the weapon was useless, but the Land Rover had stopped dead and Morena stood still, waiting, the blood on his shoulders and chest bright in the fading sunshine.
I had to watch, and I stopped the lorry in spite of Phil’s pleadings to go faster, and reached for the rifle. The wind was making nervous querulous sounds around us now as it skirled round the dunes, setting the sand moving in giddy little zephyrs and flurries that carried the dry tang of dust, then, as the two vehicles swung past, I heard the abrupt rattle of Morena’s gun and saw the ejected cartridges jumping out.
The driver of the first jeep fell forward over his wheel, grabbing at his shoulder, and the vehicle slewed round with a flung bow-wave of yellow sand, and came to a stop so that one of the men in the rear seat fell out. The other vehicle had to swerve abruptly to avoid it and rocked to a halt alongside it, and there were a few desultory bursts from their tommy gun as we revved our engines and got in motion again at once. The man sprawled in the sand scrambled to his feet and I saw him pushing the driver aside, then, as Nimmo brought the Land Rover past us into the lead, the two vehicles turned round and headed back the way they’d come.
‘They always were a gutless lot,’ Morena said flatly across the intervening space.
As we stopped again, I became aware of the turgid sky changing to a queer colour that was translucent yet metallic in the absence of sunshine, and of thickening clouds of flying dust that was as fine as baking powder. The first stars had come out, but they were obscured and the sky was only a blurred reflection of the land that stretched, dim and lonely, to the indeterminate darkness.
I stopped the lorry alongside the Land Rover just as Morena climbed out. As Leach jumped down after me and began his explanations, Morena walked straight up to him and hit him on the jaw so that he went flying into the sand.
‘Next time, keep your bloody eyes open,’ he snapped.
As Leach picked himself up, Morena fingered the blood on his chest and shoulders, his eyes narrow.
‘I thought the bastards had got me at first,’ he said. ‘But it’s only glass.’
There were sharp shining splinters sticking into his flesh and, as I turned, looking for something to bandage the wounds, I saw Phil still crouching on the floor of the lorry with the door open, her eyes wide and dilated.
‘For God’s sake get a move on,’ I said sharply, hoping to shock her out of her fear. ‘We need bandages and water.’
She came to life at once and without a word began to search among the remains of the first-aid kit. She found a piece of lint and bent over Morena’s chest, trying not to grimace at the blood and probing at the wounds with her fingers.
‘I can’t get them,’ she said, her voice high in a wail of despair.
‘Let me do it,’ I said.
I was about to push her aside impatiently, but Nimmo somehow got in front of me.
‘Give her a chance, for Christ’s sake,’ he said quietly.
I stared at him, but his eyes didn’t waver, and I nodded, and after a moment or two she seemed to pull herself together and found a pair of eyebrow tweezers among her kit and picked out as much of the glass as she could with them. When she lifted her head, however, there were still several tiny fragments deep inside the flesh.
Morena shrugged them off. ‘They’ll have to wait till tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The light’s going.’
She managed to bandage the wounds after a fashion, but she was no expert and it didn’t look very secure. It was all I could do to resist pulling it off and doing it again, but Morena moved away quickly, glancing at Phil.
‘It’ll do,’ he said. ‘It’ll keep the dirt out.’
He looked up at the sky. ‘And judging by what’s coming it’ll need to,’ he ended.
Almost as he spoke, the wind grew stronger and t
he flying dust began to obscure the horizon, so that visibility fell to a few yards of unreal light.
‘We’ll stop here,’ I said, and we began at once to prepare food before the dust grew too bad, stumbling around in the swirling dust-clouds like dim shadows seen through smoke.
Morena was crouching with his back to the wind, his eyes half closed, working over the tent, with the sullen Leach alongside him, their heads well down and huddled against the blast as they’d learned twenty years before. Nimmo was spitting out the grit that filled his mouth and nostrils and Phil was hopelessly trying to knock off the dust that gathered in the folds of her clothes, blinking and trying to wipe away the dirt that stuck to the tears streaming down her face.
‘For God’s sake,’ I shouted to them, ‘use your loaves! Turn your backs to it!’
As the leaden light decreased, we erected the tent and started to brew some tea, but, shuffling round inside to make room for Phil, Nimmo kicked the stove over and we had to start again.
‘Sort yourself out this time,’ I said sharply to him. ‘This isn’t the Ritz and we can’t spare the water.’
Neither of them spoke, but I saw their eyes meet as Morena got the stove going again. We drank the tea silently, huddling together under the rippling canvas that smelled of staleness and dust, to keep the flying grit from our food. It was oppressively hot inside the tent, with the lamp swinging like a corpse between us and the flap of the canvas in our ears and the whispering of the sand outside. The night stirred uneasily and I could see that the faces around me wore the agonised concentration of weariness and strain.
‘We’ll be safe tonight,’ I said, hoping to relieve them from tension. ‘Nobody’ll come near us with this lot around. Least of all the Arabs.’
The shadows flickered unnervingly under the swelling shout of the wind, and beneath the thrumming whistling square of canvas that flowed with restless movement the gritty sand filled our plates and mugs, and the cigarette smoke stirred and eddied and dispersed in gusts as the tent swelled and collapsed and shuddered in the blasts.
The wind was increasing all the time and the sand that came whirling through the opening was swift enough to sting our faces, then we heard a tremendous rip as the sun-rotten material tore across and the whole lot came down on us. We scrambled for the outside, and instinctively I grabbed for Phil and pulled her free of the whipping, maddening folds, then we were lying face-downwards together out of the needle-sharp bite of the sand in the lee of the lorry and the unloaded cases that contained the rations. The others seemed to have disappeared, though I guessed they couldn’t be far away from us, obliterated by the flying dust and lost in the pounding of the wind.
The temper of the storm rose to an intermittent wailing and then to a howl as the pall of dust swept over the bone-dry plain, and you could hear above it the hissing sound as the hard sand particles rubbed against each other and against the floor of the desert in their headlong rush. As it struck us like a blow, searing and blinding and parching with a thousand fiery tongues, I tried to make a shelter with my body for Phil, and she crouched against me, under my arm, so that I could feel the softness of her flesh with a hard yearning that longed for the storm to die away and leave us in the warm darkness of the desert. Her fingers touched my neck, then the silent, infiltrating dust came between us in a hot solid fog, creeping against the skin, beneath clothes, into eyes and throats with the hot air we breathed, even into the mind, until it was a case of merely hanging on until it stopped.
The stars had gone, rubbed out by the yellow clouds of storm-dust, and then a blanket, blown from somewhere, fell across us and, pulling it over us, we rolled in it together, gaining some blessed relief from the biting sand but tortured by sweat and the clammy heat of our own breathing.
‘For God’s sake, make it stop,’ I heard Phil whimpering, and I pulled her closer to me and felt her fingers gripping mine.
The hours of darkness were agony as we lay filthy and exhausted, unable to sleep, fighting for breath, licking dry lips and swallowing with difficulty; and when dawn came daylight brought no relief from the misery of the night. The wind seemed to lose its ferocity at last, but the flying sand made it impossible to see more than a yard or two and impossible to contemplate movement or action of any kind. We could see with the coming of daylight, but the murk was unchanged, except for an incandescent glow where the sun was.
The atmosphere was darkened by a reddish haze and the intolerable air dried our tongues, matted our hair and burned our eyelids.
All perspiration seemed to have stopped, and our clothes all had an itching gritty coating. The light was grey and leaden like a glimpse of hell and occasionally a tuft of shrub, torn out by the storm, came bowling past, probably from miles away.
Later, when we were beginning to feel we were going mad, the wind dropped abruptly, but, as we lifted our heads, it changed direction almost at once and blew all the sand back again, coming brutally off the desert on the other side of us, the same dry burning wind, as though an eerie twilight had fallen across the world, a weird tawny half-light which rolled and eddied and blotted out the sky with a great curtain of dust that whirled into the heavens, thinned by the wind as it climbed into the upper air. Clutching the ground, it was as though a million men were marching over us, roaring with strange voices, tramping us into the depths of a pit that was full of darkness and reeking heat.
When we were goaded beyond endurance by the overpowering need to drink, the wind dropped at last and we were able to sit up. Feeling dehydrated and close to death, I saw the red sun briefly through the murk. My mouth was on fire and my tongue stuck to my palate as I dragged Phil to her feet, her face drawn and strained, her skin and hair grey-yellow under the coating of dust, her clothes layered with thick patches of it where it had collected in the folds. She looked at me, her lips muddy and her eyes big and full of tears.
We were still standing like that, weak with the relief from the nagging wind and the bite of the sand that seemed to have abraded every stone, when I heard the soft shuffle of hoots and I saw Morena approaching. He stopped in front of me and I swear I thought he was going to salute, so powerful was the feeling of it all having happened before.
‘The Land Rover’s gone,’ he said shortly. ‘That bastard Leach took it.’
Part Three
Ancient Battlegrounds
One
So Leach had cracked at last. In the physical isolation the protective covering of courage had proved too thin and fragile, and there was now only a patch of oil where the Land Rover had stood.
At first I was dully angry, then I realised that perhaps we were better off without him. Now, at least, I could trust those of us who remained, and there would no longer be the necessity to watch our own party as well as look out for Ghad Ahmed.
I felt no grief for Leach’s treachery. His greed had been greater than his sense of comradeship, which, in any case, had probably died, like mine, and like Morena’s and everybody else’s, once the crisis of war had passed. The influences of the present had been stronger than the influences of the past.
‘It’s my fault, I suppose,’ Morena said heavily. ‘I only removed the rotor arm last night. I could have done more, but I never thought anybody would be bloody fool enough to move off in that lot. He must have had a spare.’
He kept wincing as he moved, as though the fragments of glass in the cuts on his chest and shoulders were jabbing at his flesh, and the strips of shirt that were tied over the wounds were grimy and caked with dust which must have chafed and ground on the rawness. He seemed faintly depressed, too, as though he’d let us down, in the way he’d always seemed depressed whenever he’d felt there’d been the slightest neglect of duty on his part. Though, God knows, nobody could ever complain about Morena on that score.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘We expected it, and he’s got away with nothing except a box of rocks he thinks is money. He’s still in short supply for petrol and water and rations. It’ll do him no
good, and he doesn’t seem to have got away with any weapons.’
‘God help him if Ghad Ahmed catches him,’ Nimmo said in a flat voice, and I saw Phil give him a quick frightened look.
We stood in a tattered dusty group, staring round us at the empty desert, the small delicately shaped mounds at our feet showing the half-hidden items of equipment that had disappeared when the tent had blown over. Morena kicked at one of them and it turned out to be the lamp.
‘He got the compass,’ he said slowly. ‘It was under the seat. The other one got smashed up the night of the fire.’
‘We’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘We can still steer a course by the stars and we’ve only got to keep going north to hit the sea.’
Though the wind had dropped it was still dry and burning and stirred up the sand and gravel to scratch at our skin, and eddies of yellow dust twirled and fell like collapsing tops.
We moved about with drooping heads and half-closed eyes, keeping our backs as much as possible to the dying wind, our eyes and ears and nostrils blocked by grit that grated between our teeth, then, as we searched for our equipment, the wind died completely and the dust fell so that the day became one of luminous clarity again, metallic and sharp with an immense hush that was terrifying after the storm.
Our eyes were sore and inflamed as we sat round the brew of tea, thankfully quenching our thirsts with the thick, sweet liquid, and munching grittily on biscuits and bully beef, while Morena painstakingly cleaned the sand from our weapons.
‘We’ll move off straight away,’ I said. ‘It’ll be safer, and we might even run into Leach.’