The platform at the top was perhaps ten feet in diameter, and about seven feet high. On one side there was what seemed to be a large oval window, but this was made of dark glass and it was impossible to see beyond it from where we stood. Beneath the platform was a mechanical mounting, rather like gimbals, and it was this that enabled the platform to rotate slowly to and fro, thus causing the sun’s reflection to flash at us earlier. The platform was moving from side to side now, but apart from this there was no sign of anyone about.
“Hallo up there!” I called, then after a few seconds repeated the call. Either they could not hear me, or my voice was weaker than I had realized, but there was no reply from the occupants.
While I had been examining the tower, Amelia had moved past me and was staring towards the weed-bank. We had walked diagonally away from the vegetation to visit the tower, but now I saw that the bank here was even further away than I would have expected, and much lower. What was more, working at the base of it were many people.
Amelia turned towards me, and I could see the joy in her expression.
“Edward, we’re safe!” she cried, and came towards me and we embraced warmly.
Safety indeed it was, for this was clear evidence of the habitation we had been seeking for so long. I was all for going over to the people at once, but Amelia delayed.
“We must make ourselves presentable,” she said, and fumbled inside her bag. She passed me my collar and tie, and while I put these on she sat down and fussed with her face. After this she tried to dab off some of the worst weed-stains from her clothes, using her face-flannel, and then combed her hair. I was in dire need of a shave, but there was nothing that could be done about that.
Apart from our general untidiness, there was another matter that was troubling us both. Our long hours exposed to the hot sunshine had left their mark, in the fact that we were both suffering from sunburn. Amelia’s face had gone a bright pink—and she told me mine was no better—and although she had applied some cold-cream from a pot in her bag, she said she was suffering considerably.
When we were ready, she said: “I will take your arm. We do not know who these people are, so it would be wise not to give the wrong impression. If we behave with confidence, we will be treated correctly.”
“And what about that?” I said, indicating her corset, all too evident between the handles of her bag. “Now is the time to discard it. If we wish to appear as if we have been enjoying an afternoon stroll, that will make it clear we have not.”
Amelia frowned, evidently undecided. At last she picked it and placed it on the soil, so that it leaned against one of the pillars of the tower.
“I’ll leave it here for the moment,” she said. “I can soon find it again when we have spoken to the people.”
She came back to me, took my arm and together we walked sedately towards the nearest of the people. Once again the clear air had deceived our eyes, and we soon saw that the weeds were farther away than we had imagined. I glanced back just once, and saw that the platform at the top of the tower was still rotating to and fro.
Walking towards the people—none of whom had yet noticed us—I saw something that rather alarmed me. As I wasn’t sure I said something about it to Amelia, but as we came closer there was no mistaking it: most of the people—and there were both men and women—were almost completely unclothed.
I stopped at once, and turned away.
“I had better go forward alone,” I said. “Please wait here.”
Amelia, who had turned with me, for I had grasped her arm, stared over her shoulder at the people.
“I am not as coy as you,” she said. “From what are you trying to protect me?”
“They are not decent,” I said, very embarrassed. “I will speak to them on my own.”
“For Heaven’s sake, Edward!” Amelia cried in exasperation. “We are about to starve to death, and you smother me with modesty!”
She let go of my arm, and strode off alone. I followed immediately, my face burning with my embarrassment. Amelia headed directly for the nearest group: about two dozen men and women who were hacking at the scarlet weeds with long bladed knives.
“You!” she cried, venting her anger with me on the nearest man. “Do you speak English?”
The man turned sharply and faced her. For an instant he looked at her in surprise—and in that moment I saw that he was very tall, that his skin was burned a reddish colour, and that he was wearing nothing more than a stained loincloth—and then prostrated himself before her. In the same instant, the other people around him dropped their knives and threw themselves face down on the ground.
Amelia glanced at me, and I saw that the imperious manner had gone as quickly as it had been assumed. She looked frightened, and I went and stood by her side.
“What’s the matter?” she said to me in a whisper. “What have I done?”
I said: “You probably scared the wits out of them.”
“Excuse me,” Amelia said to, the people, in a much gentler voice. “Does any one of you speak English? We are very hungry, and need shelter for the night.”
There was no response.
“Try another language,” I said.
“Excusez-moi, parlez-vous français?”Amelia said. There was still no response, so she added: “¿ Habla usted Español?” She tried German, and then Italian. “It’s no good,” she said to me in the end. “They don’t understand.”
I went over to the man whom Amelia had first addressed, and squatted down beside him. He raised his face and looked at me, and his eyes seemed haunted with terror.
“Stand up,” I said, accompanying the words with suitable hand-gestures. “Come on, old chap…on your feet.”
I put out a hand to assist him, and he stared back at me. After a moment he climbed slowly to his feet and stood before me, his head hanging.
“We aren’t going to hurt you,” I said, putting as much sympathy into my words as possible, but they had no effect on him. “What are you doing here?”
With this I looked at the weed-bank in a significant way. His response was immediate: he turned to the others, shouted something incomprehensible at them, then reached down and snatched up his knife.
At this I took a step back, thinking that we were about to be attacked, but I could not have been more wrong. The other people clambered up quickly, took their knives and continued with the work we had interrupted, hacking and slashing at the vegetation like men possessed.
Amelia said quietly: “Edward, these are just peasants. They have mistaken us for overseers.”
“Then we must find out who their real supervisors are!”
We stood and watched the peasants for a minute or so longer. The men were cutting the larger stems, and chopping them into more manageable lengths of about twelve feet. The women worked behind them, stripping the main stems of branches, and separating fruit or seed-pods as they found them. The stems were then thrown to one side, the leaves or fruit to another. With every slash of the knife quantities of sap issued forth, and trickled from the plants already cut. The area of soil directly in front of the weed-bank was flooded with the spilled sap, and the peasants were working in mud up to twelve inches deep.
Amelia and I walked on, carefully maintaining a distance from the peasants and walking on soil that was dry. Here we saw that the spilled sap was not wasted; as it oozed down from where the peasants were working it eventually trickled into a wooden trough that had been placed in the soil, and flowed along in a relatively liquid state, accumulating all the way.
“Did you recognize the language?” I said.
“They spoke too quickly. A guttural tongue. Perhaps it was Russian.”
“But not Tibetan,” I said, and Amelia frowned at me.
“I based that guess on the nature of the terrain, and our evident altitude,” she said. “I think it is pointless continuing to speculate about our location until we find someone in authority.”
As we moved along the weed-bank we came acro
ss more and more of the peasants, all of whom seemed to be working without supervision. Their conditions of work were atrocious, as in the more crowded areas the spilled sap created large swamps, and some of the poor wretches were standing in muddy liquid above their waists. As Amelia observed, and I could not help but agree, there was much room for reform here.
We walked for about half a mile until we reached a point where the wooden trough came to a confluence with three others, which flowed from different parts of the weed-bank. Here the sap was ducted into a large pool, from which it was pumped by several women using a crude, hand-operated device into a subsidiary system of irrigation channels. From where we were standing we could see that these flowed alongside and through a large area of cultivated land. On the far side of this stood two more of the metal towers.
Further along we saw that the peasants were cutting the weed on the slant, so that as we had been walking parallel to their workings we eventually found what it was that lay beyond the bank of weeds. It was a water-course, some three hundred yards wide. Its natural width was only exposed by the cropping of weeds, for when we looked to the north, in the direction from which we had walked, we saw that the weeds so choked the waterway that in places it was entirely blocked. The total width of the weed-bank was nearly a mile, and as the opposite side of the waterway was similarly overgrown, and with another crowd of peasants cutting back the weed; we realized that if they intended to clear the entire length of the waterway by hacking manually through the weeds then the peasants were confronted with a task that would take them many generations to accomplish.
Amelia and I walked beside the water, soon leaving the peasants behind. The ground was uneven and pitted, presumably because of the roots of the weeds which had once grown here, and the water was dark-coloured and undisturbed by ripples. Whether it was a river or a canal was difficult to say; the water was flowing, but so slowly that the movement was barely perceptible, and the banks were irregular. This seemed to indicate that it was a natural watercourse, but its very straightness belied this assumption.
We passed another metal tower, which had been built at the edge of the water, and although we were now some way from where the peasants were cutting back the weed there was still much activity about us. We saw carts carrying the cut weed being manhandled along, and several times we came across groups of peasants walking towards the weed-bank. In the fields to our left were many more people tilling the crops.
Both Amelia and I were tempted to go across to the fields and beg for something to eat—for surely food must be there in abundance—but our first experience with the peasants had made us wary. We reasoned that some kind of community, even be it just a village, could not be far away. Indeed, ahead of us we had already seen two large buildings, and we were walking faster, sensing that there lay our salvation.
v
We entered the nearer of the two buildings, and immediately discovered that it was a kind of warehouse, for most of its contents were huge bales of the cut weed, neatly sorted into types. Amelia and I walked through the ground area of the building, still seeking someone to whom we could talk, but the only people there were more of the peasants. As all their fellows had done, these men and women ignored us, bending over their tasks.
We left this building by the way we had entered: a huge metal door, which was presently held open by an arrangement of pulleys and chains. Outside, we headed for the second building, which was about fifty yards from the first. Between the two stood another of the metal towers.
We were passing beneath this tower when Amelia took my hand in hers, and said: “Edward, listen.”
There was a distant sound, one attenuated by the thin air, and for a moment we could not locate its source. Then Amelia stepped away from me, towards where there was a long metal rail, raised about three feet from the ground. As we walked towards it, the sound could be identified as a queer grating and whining sound, and looking down the rail towards the south we saw that coming along it was a kind of conveyance.
Amelia said: “Edward, could that be a railway train?”
“On just one rail?” I said. “And without a locomotive?”
However, as the conveyance slowed down it became clear that a railway train was exactly what it was. There were nine coaches in all, and without much noise it came to a halt with its front end just beyond where we had been standing. We stared in amazement at this sight, for it looked to all appearances as if the carriages of a normal train had broken away from their engine. But it was not this alone that startled us. The carriages seemed to be unpainted, and were left in their unfinished metal; rust showed in several places. Furthermore, the carriages themselves were not built in the way one would expect, but were tubular. Of the nine carriages, only two—the front and the rear—bore any conceivable resemblance to the sort of trains on which Amelia and I regularly travelled in England. That is to say that these had doors and a few windows, and as the train halted we saw several passengers descending. The seven central carriages, though, were like totally enclosed metal tubes, and without any apparent door or window.
I noticed that a man was stepping down from the front of the train, and seeing that there were windows placed in the very front of the carriage I guessed that it was from there he drove the train. I pointed this out to Amelia, and we watched him with great interest.
That he was not of the peasant stock was evident, for his whole manner was assured and confident, and he was neatly dressed in a plain grey outfit. This comprised an unadorned tunic or shirt, and a pair of trousers. In this he seemed no differently dressed from the passengers, who were clustering around the seven central carriages. All these people were similar in appearance to the peasants, for they were of the reddish skin coloration, and very tall. The driver went to the second carriage and turned a large metal handle on its side. As he did this, we saw that on each of the seven enclosed carriages large doors were moving slowly upwards, like metal blinds. The men who had left the train clustered expectantly around these doors.
Within a few seconds, there was a scene of considerable confusion.
We saw that the seven enclosed carriages had been packed to capacity with men and women of peasant stock, and as the doors were wound open these stumbled or clambered on the ground, spilling out all around the train.
The men in charge moved amongst the peasants, brandishing what had seemed to us on first sight to be short canes or sticks, but which now appeared to have a vicious and peremptory function. Some kind of electrical accumulator was evidently within the sticks, for as the men used them to herd the peasants into ranks, any unfortunate soul who was so much as brushed by the stick received a nasty electrical shock, accompanied by a brilliant flash of green light and a loud hissing sound. The hapless recipients of these shocks invariably fell to the ground, clutching the part of the anatomy that had been afflicted, only to be dragged to their feet again by their fellows.
Needless to say, the wielders of these devilish instruments had little difficulty in bringing order to the crowd.
“We must bring a stop to this at once!” Amelia said. “They are treating them no better than slaves!”
I think she was all for marching forward and confronting the men in charge, but I laid my hand on her arm to restrain her.
“We must see what is happening,” I said. “Wait a while…this is not the moment to interfere.”
The confusion persisted for a few minutes more, while the peasants were force-marched towards the building we had not yet visited. Then I noticed that the doors of the enclosed carriages were being wound down into place again, and that the man who had driven the train was moving towards the far end.
I said: “Quickly, Amelia, let us board this train. It is about to leave.”
“But this is the end of the line.”
“Precisely. Don’t you see? It is now going to go in the opposite direction.”
We hesitated no more, but walked quickly across to the train and climbed into the passenger compar
tment that had been at the front. None of the men with the electrical whips paid the least bit of attention to us, and no sooner were we inside than the train moved slowly forward.
I had expected the motion to be unbalanced—for with only one rail I could not see that it would be otherwise—but once moving the train had a remarkably smooth passage. There was not even the noise of wheels, but simply a gentle whirring noise from beneath the carriage. What we were most appreciative of in those first few seconds, though, was the fact that the carriage was heated. It had been growing cold outside, for it was not long to sunset.
The seating arrangements inside were not too dissimilar from what we were accustomed to at home, although there were no compartments and no corridor. The inside of the carriage was open, so that it was possible to move about from one part to another, and the seats themselves were metal and uncushioned. Amelia and I took seats by one of the windows, looking out across the waterway. We were alone in the carriage.
During the entire journey, which took about half an hour, the scenery beyond the windows did not much change. The railway followed the bank of the waterway for most of the distance, and we saw that in places the banks had been reinforced with brick cladding, thus tending to confirm my early suspicion that the waterway was in fact a large canal. We saw a few small boats plying along it, and in several places there were bridges across it. Every few hundred yards the train would pass another of the metal towers.
The train stopped just once before reaching its destination. On our side of the train it looked as if we had halted at a place no larger than where we had boarded, but through the windows on the other side of the carriage we could see a huge industrial area, with great chimneys issuing copious clouds of smoke, and furnaces setting up an orange glow in the dark sky. The moon was already out, and the thick smoke drifted over its face.
While we were waiting for the train to re-start, and several peasants were being herded aboard, Amelia opened the door briefly and looked up the line, in the direction in which we were heading.
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