The Quest of Julian Day

by Dennis Wheatley

  While the girls were busy and a new camp was being formed I took Harry aside to tell him a thing that had been worrying me the whole day; O’Kieff’s statement to me that he had deliberately let us set off to find the site of the treasure with the intention of coming out to get it himself later on. When he did return it was clear that he would bring a considerable number of his henchmen with him, and he had spoken of digging over the whole valley, although to do that, the question of water-supply would make it necessary for him to come out to the place a number of times over a period of several weeks.

  ‘I don’t think we need worry,’ Harry shrugged optimistically. ‘We can’t remain here for more than another three days now, ourselves. Today’s only January the 19th so it’s still quite early in the digging season and he’s got to get his outfit together. It’s hardly likely he’ll come back again before we’ve gone.’

  ‘I agree about that,’ I said. ‘But I think we ought to take precautions.’

  ‘What sort of precautions can we take?’ he asked.

  ‘For one thing, we can have a man posted up on the ridge all the time we’re digging to keep a look-out for his ’plane; and for another, we can dig a deep trench so as to be able to take cover in it if we’re attacked.’

  Accordingly it was decided that we should make the trench on the following morning and in doing so we killed two birds with one stone. As a lot of sand had already been turned up from the spot a little way up the slope where we had unearthed the sedan-chair, we made this the centre of our trench and dug a big ditch, clearing the ground to either side of it.

  It wasn’t an easy business as the sand filtered back in a most infuriating manner, nullifying our work as soon as we got a little way down; but we managed to make quite a good job of it in the end by riveting the sides of our ditch with some of the packing-cases which held our stores and the water-containers which we had already emptied.

  As we got further away from the sedan-chair even the objects of minor interest we were turning up became less frequent, so in the afternoon we tackled two of the other sites that I had marked down. One of them produced a fine suit of armour and a handsome metal helmet which must have made a gallant figure of some officer who had lived and loved and fought in the dim long ago. But although we worked like heavers for many hours on the two sites we did not succeed in finding anything that really counted.

  Having now only two days to go we made a very early start the following morning and attacked the other three sites I had selected just as dawn was breaking. Two of them proved unfruitful except for spearheads and javelins which we now had by the score; but in the third we found the remains of a chariot, three more helmets, two bronze shields, several small idols, a ring, a heavy bracelet set with semi-precious stones and four small bars of gold that weighed about ten ounces each.

  Rather reluctantly we knocked off for lunch and were hurrying through our meal in order to get back to this promising dig as soon as possible, when our watchman up on the ridge let out a shout and, jumping up, pointed to the sky towards the west.

  From our camp in the bottom of the valley we could see nothing, but in that great desolation inhabited neither by man nor beast nor bird, we knew that the alarm could only mean one thing. O’Kieff was descending on us and, next moment, we saw his plane.

  25

  Death in the Sands

  The men were having their meal on the far side of our camp and were a good three hundred yards further from the trench than we were. I shouted to them to get their rifles and we began to run.

  The ’plane was a much bigger machine than the one in which O’Kieff had arrived three days before; a great twin-engined monster capable of carrying twenty people. It was flying at only about two thousand feet. As we dashed up the slope it dived and came straight down at us.

  Harry and I had grabbed up our rifles but the men were still getting theirs from the lorries when a sharp rat-tat-tat-tat-tat rang out through the valley. The great ’plane was armed with machine-guns. That was worse than anything I had bargained for and, sick with apprehension, I pulled Sylvia away from a line of little puffs where the bullets were spraying up the sand within ten feet of us.

  We four reached the trench in safety and jumped down into it at the same moment as our sentry, a porter named Kait who had come charging down the hill; but the rest of the men were a long way behind. The ’plane zoomed right down over our heads, blacking out the bright sunlight on the sand around us for a second with its huge shadow. Its arc of fire had passed a little to the left of our entrenchment but it impinged direct on the camp a hundred yards away. How many machine guns were in operation I could not tell but we heard the bullets smack like a storm of huge hailstones into the tents and lorries. I saw two of our men fall hit and one of them began to scream as he writhed in torture on the ground.

  The first attack was over before we had got our breath. Harry and I barely had time to send a shot apiece from our rifles winging after the plane as it flashed over the opposite ridge and was momentarily lost to sight. A second later we saw it again climbing steeply.

  The men had taken refuge under the lorries but I knew that our only hope of defeating the enemy was by concentrated fire which might bring the plane down when next it flew low overhead. I yelled at the top of my voice for them to leave their temporary shelter and hurry to us while the coast was clear. To my horror that order proved our undoing.

  It was not altogether my fault, as if they had come at once they could have covered the open ground in safety; as it was they were naturally scared half out of their wits and Harry and I had to shout ourselves hoarse for the best part of two minutes before we could get them to make a move. Only Amin and Mussa, the more intelligent of our two servants, started towards us without delay and the two of them reached the trench, breathless but safe. The other nine who remained unwounded hesitated and then began to run up the slope in a ragged bunch.

  The ’plane had made a wide half-circle, veering off towards the south, but with quick dismay I saw that instead of completing the circle and coming at us from over the hill again, it had descended into our valley and was heading straight for the camp, flying very low. It had entered the valley about two miles away and came streaking up with its machine-guns blazing. Our wretched men were caught half way between the camp and us. In the next ten seconds there was the most appalling massacre. Shrieking, cursing, stumbling, they were mown down by that devastating fire.

  We were too horrified even to shoot at the ’plane ourselves as it flashed past us. Where there had been a group of running natives only a moment before, there was now a writhing heap of twisted, moaning bodies. Out of the whole nine only one of them a driver named Hamid, remained unhit and he had dropped his rifle. His eyes were staring out of his black face with terror as he cast himself headlong down into the trench among us.

  Some of the men who had been mown down were only wounded and I knew that we must get them in if possible. Harry, having the same thought, had begun to climb out of the trench but I pulled him back again.

  ‘One of us must stay with the girls,’ I said. ‘I’ll go out and do what I can.’

  With flying feet I dashed down the slope but when I reached the group of dead and dying I hardly knew which to aid first. Two of them were already dead, three others were clearly past help; the rest had leg wounds and I grabbed the nearest by the arm to pull him up and help him up the slope. His ankle was shattered and he fell again. At that moment there came a cry of warning from Sylvia. Repeating its previous tactics the ’plane had circled and was rushing up the valley once more.

  I flung myself flat beside the wounded man as the machine-guns opened. On my other side was Abdulla, our cook, stone-dead from a bullet through his heart. With lightning speed I grabbed his body to me and rolled over with it so that it was between me and the approaching ’plane. The bullets hummed, whined and spattered to right and left of me; the cries of the natives who were still living rose in a crescendo of fear and pain.

/>   When I dared crawl out from underneath Abdulla’s body I found that three more of the men were now dead including the poor fellow whom I had tried to help. One, mad with fear, was staggering back to the camp dragging a wounded foot that left a trail of blood in the sand; and the other two were rolling about clutching their stomachs with wounds that I knew were fatal.

  My own escape was miraculous, even with Abdulla’s body on top of me which had saved me from two bullets in the groin as I saw by his freshly-shattered head and shoulder. There was nothing more that I could do there.

  The fourth attack came only a moment after I had regained the trench and, having massacred the natives who were in the open, O’Kieff now made the trench his objective.

  ‘Heads down!’ Harry yelled as the first bullets sent the sand spurting up a few feet in front of us, and we crouched there in the bottom of our ditch while the shots clanged and thudded into the water-containers and packing cases which formed our parapet.

  It was appallingly hot, which I put down to our exertions, and it was only later, while we were crouching there as the ’plane circled to come at us again and again, that I noticed how stifling the air was and that the day had turned exceptionally sultry.

  Time after time the guns in the great ’plane raked the trench, and each time it swooped at us we were unable to retaliate until it had passed since had we exposed ourselves to do so we should have been shot to pieces. All we could do was to blaze off a few rounds apiece in the frightfully short interval between it passing over our heads and flashing out of sight across the ridge behind us. The porter, Kait, was killed by a bullet through the top of the skull at the seventh attack and at the ninth Harry was hit in the left shoulder. As he could no longer use his rifle he started potting at the ’plane with his automatic, although it must have been out of range most of the time he was firing at it.

  We had made the girls lie dead flat in the bottom of the trench although they both kicked about it, but it kept them out of danger; the rest of us put up a desperate but ineffective defence with an increasing sense of hopelessness. According to our own account given out in Luxor, Kharga and Dakhla, we had merely gone into the desert to survey a portion of it, so no one knew where we were; and if we failed to return people would only assume that we had got lost and died of thirst just as had happened to many other exploring parties before us. O’Kieff could murder us all without the slightest fear that it would ever be brought home to him. We could hope for no help in that great desolation so many hundreds of miles from any human being and there was not even any likelihood of our remains being discovered for centuries.

  It could only be a question of time before O’Kieff wore us down and out ammunition became exhausted; nightfall might have saved us temporarily but the ’plane had appeared shortly before one o’clock and so there were yet many hours to go before sundown. Grimy, sweating, panting for air in the awful heat, and spattered with the blood of our casualties, all we could do was to stick there while we were picked off one by one.

  At the twelfth attack Amin was wounded in the neck and in spite of all we could do he lost blood so quickly that we knew the wound was mortal. He died in my arms five minutes later. Although I have said very little of Amin, his death shook me most terribly. He was such a splendid fellow, quiet, good-humoured, brave and kindly. During the many weeks we had spent together I had come to regard him as a true friend, and it was I who had drawn him into this wretched adventure.

  I suppose I should have felt sorry, too, about all the other poor fellows who had been killed that afternoon on our account; and I was, in a general sense, both distressed and horrified at the fate which had overtaken them solely because we had hired them for our expedition; but there was nothing personal about that sorrow. Amin’s death was somehow different and it touched me to the very roots of my being.

  We were now reduced to two rifles, my own and Mussa’s, as Hamid, the driver who was with us through being the one man to escape the first massacre, simply crouched in the bottom of the trench gibbering with fear and was too frightened to expose his head for a moment even when the ’plane had passed over.

  It swooped twice again after Amin died and then it roared away and suddenly its engines were cut off. For a second I hoped that one of our bullets had hit it in a vital spot but the engines came on again and we could hear them humming although we could no longer see the machine as it was now behind us over the crest of the slope we occupied.

  The engines were cut out again and I knew that the ’plane must be landing in the next valley. Evidently, now our fire was reduced to two rifles, O’Kieff had decided that the time had come for a closer form of attack in order to finish us off more quickly. For an hour or more the insistent drone of the ’plane’s engines had either sounded from the distance or increased to a great roar each time it sailed low overhead, so the renewal of silence seemed quite unnatural. It was desperately hot and we all took a swig of water to quench our thirst while we waited for O’Kieff’s next move.

  It came within ten minutes of the ’plane’s landing. Each previous attack had been delivered from our front as we stood facing down into the valley; now it came from the higher ground behind our backs. O’Kieff’s gunmen had occupied the ridge and they began to pour a steady stream of bullets into the trench from above.

  It was no longer possible to stand upright, even for a moment, and we had to remain on our knees to avoid the shots that peppered the cans and cases which had previously formed the front breastwork of the trench. All we could do was to save ourselves for a last, desperate stand when they found that they could not kill us that way and left their cover to take the trench by storm.

  The attack did not develop as I had expected and the firing from the ridge was not very fierce. It was maintained quite regularly but consisted only of single bullets at short intervals and a burst of machine-gun fire about every couple of minutes. We had been crouching under it for over a quarter of an hour, fighting for breath in the stifling heat when Clarissa said that she could smell smoke. Harry agreed with her and I could smell it myself after sniffing the air a little. Very cautiously I raised my head a few inches and popped up for one swift glance over the paapet down into the valley. I understood then why O’Kieff had been content for the time being to let his men only force us to keep our heads down by a steady fire instead of driving them on to finish us. He was busy looting our camp and destroying it.

  As we had all our most valuable finds upon us I knew that he would not get much from the camp except the two gold cups and a fine collection of old weapons; but, with what seemed to me senseless fury, he and half a dozen of his thugs had poured our remaining petrol over our lorries, tents, and stores which were now going up in one huge bonfire.

  The second I popped my head above the edge of the trench a blast of hot air struck it, which I took to be the intense heat radiating in all directions from the flaming camp, and as I ducked down again Sylvia exclaimed, ‘Just look at the sky!’

  I saw then that the sky had taken on a strange, reddish tinge and that, too, I put down to the raging furnace just below us as a steady wind was now blowing the smoke and sparks in our direction.

  ‘It’s our camp,’ I said. ‘O’Kieff’s soused everything with petrol and the whole outfit is going up like tinder.’

  ‘So that’s his game,’ muttered Harry.

  ‘It seems a pretty pointless one,’ I replied. ‘He’ll have to form a camp here himself if he’s going to dig the valley over, and the sensible thing would have been to keep our stuff for his own use. Destroying everything like this is just stupid vandalism.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Not a bit of it, old man. They haven’t hit one of us since they’ve been firing from the ridge. O’Kieff knows now that he can’t get us that way as long as we stay here and any attempt to finish us off means a hand-to-hand scrap in which some of the devils are sure to get killed. He doesn’t mean to risk the skins of his people.’

  ‘I get you,’ I nodded. ‘He�
��s thought of a way to do us in without losing a single man. Having destroyed the whole of our supplies he’ll fly off again and come back in a few days’ time knowing that by then we shall all be dead from lack of water.’

  Clarissa groaned. ‘We’re scuppered, then. There isn’t a hope in hell of our being picked up here or being able to reach an oasis, is there?’

  ‘Siwa is the nearest,’ Sylvia sighed. ‘But that’s the best part of a hundred miles and it might as well be a thousand for all the chance we’ve got of reaching it on foot and with no drink except what we’ve got in our water-bottles. Just look at that sky.’

  Great clouds of smoke had been drifting over for the last couple of minutes but now the wind had dropped entirely and the smoke hung above us in a thick pall which had a livid red background. With the dropping of the wind the stillness seemed almost uncanny. We could still hear the crackle of the flames down in the valley but some other noise was missing. It dawned on us then that the almost regular crack of the rifles on the crest above us and the thudding of the bullets into the breastworks of the trench only a foot above our heads, had ceased.

  Suddenly the wind came again, a steady, searing blast increasing in velocity until it was tearing at us, even where we crouched below the level of the ground, and whipping up the sand all round the trench like sheets of fly spray.

  ‘The Gibli! The Gibli!’ gasped Sylvia, and even as she spoke her voice was almost drowned in the hideous moaning of the wind rushing down the valley. The moan increased to a high, screaming note and next second the full violence of the desert hurricane was upon us.

  I knew then why the firing had ceased so abruptly; the men on the ridge had seen the approach of the dreaded sandstorm when it was still a few miles distant, whereas we had been caught by it without even a moment’s warning. We were enveloped now in dense clouds of sand which made it impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction and were safe from the enemy’s bullets but threatened with suffocation unless we could secure some sort of cover.