by Sarban
But when the Colonel turned from Viljoen and began to speak to Duncan they began to see that there was something more required, something that only experience could give.
‘You and I,’ he said, ‘would not treat the desert like that. But then we learned to know it in unmechanised days. We went cautiously, humouring the desert, advancing where it seemed to be a little accommodating, not violating its privacy where it plainly did not wish us to go. I suppose we modelled our ideas of the desert on those of the nomads, and to them it is full of animate powers. Also,’ he turned again to Viljoen and spoke a little wryly, ‘also we have been out, Duncan and I, to look for comrades whom we didn’t find until it was too late. But let us look at your map again.’
Viljoen spread his maps on the Colonel’s desk and the three men bent over them while Alison and Nicola stood and peeped over their shoulders. For a good half hour the discussion went on. Viljoen had calculated his distances and his petrol and water consumption in a way that clearly impressed the officer, but De l’Aubespine’s intimate knowledge of the country made tables of figures seem less conclusive. Point by point, Viljoen yielded.
‘In sum,’ said the Colonel, ‘you must take a longer route. The one you propose is too far east. You must keep clear of this depression, the Jauf, here.’ He drew an arc on the map with his pencil-point. This is where you will run into difficulties. The winds behave in a peculiar fashion about the western edges of the depression at this time of the year. You are almost certain to have a sandstorm there. It may be a bad one, and it is quite easy to lose one’s way, and after that, one’s life and it is very easy for something to go wrong in a bad sandstorm. After all, you are not making war: this is not a military expedition. Speed is not the first consideration with you. Your business is to get your two families and these two young ladies safe and sound to their journey’s end, isn’t it? Well then, what does it matter if you take the longer road and add seven days to your time? You have all the time you want in front of you, haven’t you?’
‘The Colonel is perfectly right,’ said Duncan. ‘You must take the route he says.’
‘You would be prepared to give us a pass, then,’ Alison asked, ‘if we change our route?’
The Colonel looked up and his grave eyes began to smile: ‘Certainly. I would do all in my power to encourage such an adventure. My only concern is that you should not remain for ever in this Sahara which makes no special favours for youth or beauty. See how it has dealt with us, poor Duncan and me! And we have seen some whom it treated worse!’
He then promised that the pass would be sent round to the hotel early the following morning and Viljoen and the two girls took their leave.
Duncan stayed for a while chatting with his friend.
‘They are a pair of handsome girls, your friends,’ said the Colonel. ‘Thirty years ago we would not have let two such go off alone into the Sahara, eh?’
‘They’re not alone,’ replied Duncan. ‘They’re very adequately chaperoned, as far as I can make out, by two married ladies and one redoubtable spinster. Besides, these young women know how to take care of themselves.’
‘Without doubt, without doubt,’ said De l’Aubespine. He swivelled his chair round to look at the great map on the wall behind him. Going over Viljoen’s route had revived many old memories. Duncan gazed at the map, too, and for several minutes the two men sat in silence, each travelling in imagination once again the faint ways through the waste that neither was likely to ride any more in reality.
‘Well,’ said the Colonel, turning round at last to look at his friend and smile, ‘that Viljoen struck me as a man of sense. The posts will report about them. It is not now as it was in our day. The nomads are friendly. They have nothing to fear if they keep to the route I told them. But do you know what came into my mind when I saw the route that Viljoen wanted to go at first?’
Duncan slowly nodded his head. ‘I believe I do. It’s the Hamada’l Makhawif, isn’t it? I never knew anybody who had been across it. I have seen the Jauf, but far to the North. The nomads used to say that the whole depression was a haunt of the Jinn. I remember for the whole of the two days I rode by its edge there were dust devils whirling along in front of me and all the flats away below the cliffs to the east of me were a sea of mirage.’
‘It was a sea once,’ said the Colonel. ‘Or at least a great lake. There is still water there, I know. The Abbé Fresnil says that in times not so very remote—in a geologist’s computation, that is—the slopes all round the depression were forested. I myself have heard nomads say that in times past lions were to be found there, and they tell tales about great fish or water-monsters in the lake. There may have been, thousands of years ago, but I’m not sure that the evidence, in spite of the Abbé, is much stronger than it is for the Arab’s assertion that the sandstorms are raised by the Jinn to prevent men entering on their territory. It’s strange that the Arabs will never go down there, though they know there are pools.’
‘The water is bitter, perhaps,’ Duncan suggested.
The Colonel spread his hands. ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. But it is a frightening desolation. They do well to call it the Desert of Fears. I thought it best to persuade Mr Viljoen and your two pretty young friends to keep far away from it.’
II
The order of travelling had been, first, Viljoen, his wife and young son in their Ford station-wagon, then Alison and Nicola in their jeep and last Riggs and his wife and sister and two children in the truck. The vehicles kept distances of a quarter of a mile or so to avoid each other’s dust. Viljoen was the navigator, and Riggs, who never had any trouble with his own vehicle, was placed so as to be able to help if either of the two ahead broke down. In five days’ travelling from Marrakesh everything had gone like clockwork. The jeep had suffered minor disorder, but nothing that Nicola herself could not have put right without Riggs’ help. Viljoen had guided them with very little hesitation. There had been a disappointing lack of adventures.
The third night out they had camped near the fort at Tagourirt and had been accompanied a short distance on their way next morning by the young officer in charge. He had been very solicitous in going over the route for their next stage with Viljoen and his last words had been a warning to make sure of leaving the hills called Jebel Agoura to the east of them.
Viljoen had listened to all the officer’s directions without saying much. When they were well away from the fort he halted and after the others came up held a conference.
He got out the maps and with brisk confidence pointed out the exact route the French authorities wanted them to take and the route he had originally planned.
‘They had two real objections to my route,’ he said. ‘First that the going is soft across this depression up here. Second, that here, east of it, we should have to depend on our own supply of water for three days’ travelling. Well, we’ve followed their route as far as this point where we are now. That is, we are south of the depression. But if we carry on, going round to the west of Jebel Agoura, the way they tell us to, we shall add at least five days to our time as far as the Niger. I reckon we none of us want to spend more time driving over this howling wilderness than we need, do we? Now, if we strike east from here, passing north and east of the hills, we shall just skirt the depression and we shall come into my original route about here. See? True, there’s no water, but as I’ve planned our supplies on just that assumption, we’ve got an ample margin. What do you say?’
Alison and Nicola opposed the change on the ground that they had promised Colonel De l’Aubespine they would follow his route. The Riggs family, however, voted solidly for shortening the trip. They had formed the lowest opinion of the Sahara. Overruled, therefore, the two girls acquiesced, only remarking that they hoped it would cause none of the French authorities further on to turn awkward with them.
‘Why should it?’ demanded Viljoen. ‘They gave us the pass on the understanding that we absolve them from responsibility. Look, I think we don’t need to consider their advice
as an order to us.’
Alison and Nicola did not see it in quite that light, but they were not prepared to dispute the matter since to go their own way with one vehicle would be clearly foolish as well as a breach of the agreement they had made at starting to submit to Viljoen’s ruling on the route.
A little before sunset on the day they left Tagourirt they had seen the black peaks of Jebel Agoura very far away on their right hand. They had camped that night on a vast level plain of gravel, swept by gusty winds that seemed to come at them from all points of the compass in turn and kept them fretfully awake, shifting their positions, trying to find a little shelter. They had limited their use of water strictly to the ration that the leader of the party had laid down, and in measuring it out they had experienced a certain solemn feeling that they were now entirely dependent on their own resources, that their lives might hang on the soundness of Viljoen’s organisation of the expedition and the care with which they carried out his instructions.
The next morning they had set off in their customary order across the monotonous plain. There was no track either of wheel or beast; their only guide was the long plume of dust from Viljoen’s station-wagon ahead of them. For hour after hour there was not a change in the landscape. Only every now and again a little sandy gully came to relieve the monotony, and, by showing them Viljoen’s tyre-marks, gave a kind of familiarity and definition to the vast vague waste.
They changed places at the wheel every hour, and at nine o’clock they found Viljoen halted in a shallow hollow, brewing tea on a petrol-can fire. The Riggs’ arrived within a few minutes and the whole party rested for half an hour. Then, on a signal from Viljoen, they climbed into their vehicles again.
‘My god!’ said Nicola, after a silence of nearly an hour. ‘This may be a shorter way, but it’s a bit too like an excursion through one of the drabber suburbs of hell for my liking. Did you ever imagine there could be any space quite so empty on the face of the earth? I haven’t seen even a lizard since we started, and it feels like a week since I saw a twig of anything vegetable. At least on the other route one saw a few bones of camels here and there. I shouldn’t think anybody else has been over this bit of desert since the Flood.’
Alison was driving. ‘It’s the stretch the Colonel called le desert des choses qui font peur,’ she said. ‘The depression they talked so much about must be over there to our left.’
Nicola stared out. The plain sloped very gently up and met the sky in the remote distance as a level, black line.
She grunted. ‘Even a hole in the ground would be interesting.’
Some time later they stopped to change places.
‘You’d better drive a bit faster,’ Alison remarked. ‘Viljoen’s stepping on it, for some reason.’
The plume of dust ahead of them had dwindled. There must have been three miles between the vehicles now, and, looking back round the side of the hood, Alison saw that an equal distance seemed to separate them from the other little dust cloud which showed where the Riggs were.
‘Of course,’ observed Nicola. ‘The blessed surface had to wait until it was my turn before it changed.’
The land had begun to slope more steeply up on their left and they were crossing at right angles a series of gullies separated by rounded ridges of gravel which frequently hid the Viljoen’s car altogether from their sight. Nicola found her efforts to make a better speed nullified by the need to nose carefully down the steep little banks. She did not always find the tracks where Viljoen had gone over, but relied on picking up his dust-cloud from the next vantage point.
The wind, after its wayward career all night, had dropped completely and the heat had been oppressive since a little after sunrise.
Alison suddenly said: ‘I wonder if that’s why he’s hurrying?’
‘What?’ asked Nicola, who had been attending strictly to her driving.
‘Out there to port,’ said Alison.
Nicola gave a quick glance to the left.
‘My god!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where did that come from all of a sudden?’
The hard line where the rising desert met the sky had quite disappeared. Instead of a sharp edge of land, a wall of dense cloud closed their view on that side. It was indigo above and dun beneath and it seemed to have the bulk and solidity of a mountainside. Yet it moved. It was rolling steadily along, a compact, lowering mass, obliquely to their course. If they held on as they were going it seemed as if they would meet it in a couple of miles.
‘What on earth is it?’ cried Nicola. ‘It can’t be a thunderstorm!’
‘It must be dust,’ said Alison. ‘A sandstorm.’
Nicola gave it another hasty glance and accelerated.
‘I never knew they were that colour,’ she said. ‘What do we do when it hits us? Stop and dive into our sleeping bags?’
They reached the top of a ridge and saw Viljoen’s dust once more, like a tiny puff of ochreous smoke now against the blue on the horizon out to the right of the dark mass of the sandstorm.
‘I think he’s beaten it,’ said Alison. ‘We are going almost parallel to it now, I think, and it seems to stop or curve round somehow ahead there. It looks as if it might pass behind us.’
‘Yes, but what about the Riggs’? Are they coming on?’
‘They were a minute ago,’ replied Alison. ‘I can’t see them just now. Wait till we get on another rise.’
Nicola concentrated on her driving. Each time she caught sight of Viljoen’s dust it seemed to be further away in spite of her wild bursts of speed over the stretches of hard gravel. Nicola muttered to herself in exasperation to see that little tuft of yellowish dust so far ahead holding so obstinately to a course that was taking them not further from the menacing indigo mass on their left, but ever nearer to it. It seemed as if he had quite forgotten the distances that separated the other cars or as if he presumed them capable of miracles of speed over broken ground.
‘He may have beaten it,’ Nicola exclaimed fretfully. ‘But he might think about us. I can’t understand what he’s doing. Why doesn’t he swing off to the right?’
But the little dust plume which was all she had to steer by kept its position steadfastly in relation to the edge of the storm. There it travelled, far ahead, swiftly over the dark brown gravel, always the same short distance from that lowering bulk which bellied out there like an enormous sable sail against the blue sky.
‘I don’t know,’ said Alison. ‘I expect the thing’s quite local, going round and round on its own centre. He must be well beyond it. Better press on as hard as you can.’
‘Hang on then, and god help us if we come to a hole! Where’s the truck now?’
Alison stared back for some time, clutching the hand hold on the jeep’s side, as they went bumping and bouncing over some badly broken ground. ‘I can’t just see.’ she answered, in jerks and gasps. ‘Storm seems to be curling round—behind us.’
The jeep suddenly staggered violently and a wild blast made the hood crack like a gun shot. Nicola shrieked something that the wind tore instantly away from her lips and with a wrench of the wheel she brought the vehicle round with its back to the furious rain of stinging sand which in that instant began to lash their arms and faces.
The sun was extinguished like the switching off of a lamp. They were shrouded in an angry brown and purple gloom through which they could barely see the end of the jeep’s bonnet. The hood had no sides; they cowered down on their gear in the back, pulling out their sleeping bags to wrap round them for protection against the intolerable bombardment of the sand and the fine vaporous dust that choked like a poisonous gas. The wind came searing like invisible flames, burning their bodies through the sleeping bags and their clothes, and it howled as though all the lunatics on earth had risen in revolt and were shrieking triumph through a concentration of all the world’s amplifiers. It tore in frenzy at the canvas hood until with one loud report the fabric gave way, flapped madly for a few moments and then was rent clean off its supports and
whirled away into the dark. The jeep shuddered, but it was heavily loaded and without its hood more stable. The girls shrank down, holding on for dear life. The dust penetrated, seeping through the layers of their covering as persistently as water. It filled their eyes; it crept into nostrils, mouths and throats, until it seemed impossible that they could continue to breathe.
They were terrified by the sudden transformation of the desert into something so evilly animated, shocked by the unimagined violence of its attack. No anger of the guns in the most furious nights of war and no shattering force of bombs had ever frightened them so much as this dead land and lifeless air risen suddenly alive and maniacal. Those searing blasts of wind might have blown from the heart of a blazing city; they were more terrifying for blowing from the heart of a land they had believed empty. They clung to the sides of the jeep and to each other in dumb, stifled panic, bound down in a burning pit of darkness.
Alison was the first to move. One idea had begun to force itself insistently upon her: if she could unscrew the cap of one of the water tins and soak the stuff she held to her face, she might be able to breathe without the air scorching her lungs. She freed an arm from the sleeping bag and groped among their tightly stowed luggage for the tin that was supposed to be kept handy.
The wind snatched the flap of the sleeping bag away, and then Alison noticed that the rain of sand had slackened, and the wind was less furious. She partly uncovered her face and peered out. The darkness had changed to an umber twilight in which she could see rivers of blown sand streaming across the polished black gravel for a distance of twenty or thirty yards away from the jeep. There was less of the powdery dust in the air. The centre of the storm was beyond them now, howling away over the desert westward. The sun began weakly to penetrate the thinning fog of dust. The wind was steadier; it was still hotter than Alison had ever imagined any natural air could be, but in the first moment of escape from the stifling wrappings, it felt almost refreshing.