Doom's Caravan

by Geoffrey Household

  I doubted if the Ronson-Bolbecs had anything to do with his disappearance. He sounded an affectionate and occasionally useful dog which followed pathetically where it was not wanted and perhaps gave up its gin too. That mother and daughter knew him was not unnatural. He had moved around a lot in Cairo, though outside the ultra-regimental circles of the colonel’s widow.

  The only security angle seemed to be the correspondence of this lonely couple. Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec’s letters to and from her distinguished relatives would make fascinating reading for an enemy agent if intercepted. So I referred again to Magnat to see if he knew how their mail was handled.

  ‘Does your organisation never tell you anything,’ he asked.

  ‘Not if they can help it. My duties, as you know, are to prevent the French raising a revolt among Australians.’

  ‘I am working on that now. Their mail comes and goes by the diplomatic bag to Beirut. It is correctly handed to the Deuxième Bureau for forwarding to Tripoli where Ahmed, the majordomo, collects it from me. Their outgoing mail in reverse.’

  ‘Ahmed could read the lot on the way up or down.’

  ‘If he carried a kettle to steam them open. Don’t worry! Ahmed is devoted to us and absolutely reliable.’

  That was that; and I should have had no further interest if the bridle path to Hermel had not intrigued me, for it was not marked on the French maps or our own. Once at Hermel you could go on by car to Horns, Hama and Aleppo, or south to Damascus. D’Aulnoy’s valley was not just a cul de sac above our coastal plain, but could be considered as a finger of the Fertile Crescent of Syria pointing towards Tripoli and the sea.

  The short cut, which saved seventy miles, had nothing to do with Security; but I (a)—the honest soldiers who collected operational intelligence—would be glad to hear of it. We often bagged some game for I (a) in the course of keeping poachers out of their preserves. So I decided to explore.

  I took Sergeant-Major Limpsfield along as a companion, for I liked to give him a day in open country whenever I possibly could. He was a son of the soil all through—a tall, angular countryman with a very long bird-like neck and a swelling below his right underlip where the recoil of the gun had just touched it year after year. His employer should have insisted that he fit a longer stock. The best one can say for financial depressions is that they tend to reduce that species of shit which notices nothing.

  We started early for Homs and then rode down the valley of the Orontes on the Baalbek road as far as the turning to Hermel, where we arrived about midday—a hundred miles altogether taken at sergeant-major’s easy pace. Hermel was the end of everything which could be called a road. Several rough tracks led westwards into the mountains, but according to the police none of them went far. There was no communication between Sir and Hermel except all the way round by Homs. They said that no doubt there were paths, and if we had the luck to run into a goat-herd somewhere on the top he could possibly guide us; but we should have to go on foot and leave our motorcycles in Hermel.

  All this stood to reason and was confirmed by the map. The main massif of Qurnat es Sauda, rising to six thousand feet, lay between Hermel and Tripoli. But the information passed on by Valerie was clear and definite, and I was determined to find that bridle path. Limpsfield, I well knew, considered it one of the obstinate bees which the skipper occasionally got in his bonnet, but was all for exploration. The winter sun shone for him and the office could run itself.

  We followed the best of the tracks until it petered out, and then scrambled up on foot to a ridge which promised a good view of the outlying hills. Away to our left was Qurnat es Sauda with a little snow on top and deep drifts in the gullies. North, across two valleys, was a kink in the hillside; where it passed out of sight round a shoulder, the steep slope looked as if it had been cut away. If the kink was a serious path, it ran north-west and avoided the high tops. Trial and error suggested that this possible route could be reached from the Hermel road, a few miles south of the town, where a rough track led into a shallow, hidden valley past a ruined farmhouse.

  We now stood a good chance of being benighted in the middle of nowhere if we went on, so I proposed that we should try it another day. But the usually cautious Limpsfield, perhaps longing for remembered nights on the icy wolds of Lincolnshire, pointed out that we carried four gallons of petrol and our greatcoats. If we ran back again to Hermel we could buy some food and bottles of beer and then, why not, sir?

  Beer was in Hermel but nothing much else except bread and eggs. However eggs would do, since Limpsfield, like an old soldier, was carrying his mess tin. After some three miles of indecisive paths through rolling, sparsely cultivated country we began to climb steadily over fairly easy turf and arrived at the little cliff which we had seen. The hillside had indeed been cut away, and under the low sun the yellow rock showed chisel marks. I dug into the turf with a tyre lever and sure enough found paving. We were on a very ancient road a yard and a half wide, perhaps Roman, perhaps built by Phoenicians to extract the cedars of Lebanon in days when they covered the whole range. Whoever reported that it was fit for tracked vehicles did not know much about their width.

  The road followed the contours along the northern slopes of Qurnat es Sauda. Though no boulders were sticking up through the earth, plenty had fallen down from above. There was also a bog where snow had only recently melted. Here the tracks of a horse, going up, showed plainly. The rider seemed to have found little difficulty, but wheels could only be pushed across, and it took two of us on each machine to do that.

  I was not surprised that this ancient route was unknown or forgotten. On the lower slopes it ran through dense scrub and could only be detected by someone who was actually on it. Even so we sometimes lost the line and had to turn back on our tracks. Higher up there were no hair-pin bends to give it away from a distance. Its original builders had no objection to a slope of one in four.

  When the light began to fade we had covered little more than half the distance to Sir and had come down a thousand feet into a barren valley. The road—what there was of it—followed the foot of a low cliff, and down the slope to our right was a stream bordered by willow and oleander. The crests ahead of us looked formidable, so we decided to leave them for the morning and bivouac where we were.

  The cliff curved round to the left and became a rocky slope. Beyond was an obvious ford and then a stretch of flat plain, featureless except for a low hillock covered with shrubs and a few dwarf pines not far from the probable course of the road. The most inviting place to spend the night was a ravine we had passed a little way back where overhanging rocks gave some shelter. There we made ourselves as comfortable as we could and boiled our eggs on a fire of dead brushwood—the wretched stuff which blazes up and dies down quickly. Finding the cold too bitter for sleep, we kept watch and watch, one of us staying awake to feed the fire.

  When Limpsfield woke me at two it was pouring with rain and muddy rivulets were wriggling down the hillside. It occurred to me that we had better cross the ford at once, for those mountain streams become impassable in half an hour. Limpsfield did not think much of the move, for he had nursed a good solid blaze. I reminded him of the mud slide behind us. If that started to shift in the rain—and it surely would—we could only get out by walking.

  So we climbed down to our bikes, wheeled them across the now angry ford and on to the hillock. In the dark we could only find miserable shelter between rock and tree roots, improved a bit by our capes and a ground sheet. There we squatted for the rest of the night, listening to the roar of the torrent which had spread far out from its banks of the previous evening.

  By dawn the rain had stopped. While we were stretching ourselves and eating the last of the damp bread, Limpsfield’s sharp sight spotted a horseman coming down from the ridge ahead of us. Unless he had started from some equally remote retreat, it was likely that he came under the head of Mrs. Ronson-Bolbec’s ‘local society’ and t
hat he was Valerie’s informant. I told Limpsfield that I wanted to take a closer look at him without being seen, so we pushed our bikes down behind dripping thorn and waited.

  It was some time before he came abreast of us, for he was taking it easy with nine miles to go to the Hermel road and presumably some distance afterwards. He was mounted on a sturdy horse which looked as if it could carry him anywhere especially as he was of light build. Limpsfield quietly corrected me when I called it a brown horse. He said it was a roan with a large star of some fifteen and a half hands.

  The rider was well dressed in jodhpurs and a heavy riding cloak. He carried slung on his back a rifle in a waterproof casing—proof that he did not expect to meet anyone on the track, for the carrying of arms was a penal offence. The thin hawk features could be those of a Jew or a pure desert Arab, but I did not think he was either. Possibly a Circassian from Transjordan. He was in his late thirties and of self-confident, distinguished appearance.

  He was a hardy fellow, too. He took that icy ford without hesitation, his feet up on his horse’s withers. His reaction then was instant and puzzling. He swung his horse round to be under cover of the steep slope and was off in a second. He buried a piece of paper which looked very like an envelope, but at that distance one could not be sure. After tethering his mount to a root he took the rifle off his back and started a fast and efficient stalk from rock to rock, sometimes crouching, sometimes crawling. At last we realised what he had seen to disturb him. It was the thin plume of smoke from our dying fire in the ravine.

  He paid no attention at all to the far bank of the stream and the hillock where we were very inadequately hidden, reckoning perhaps that if anyone had been waiting for him there he would be dead already. His whole interest was in reaching a point from which he could look down on the fire. Evidently he was familiar with the lie of the land and knew exactly where it was likely to be.

  When he found the ravine empty he returned to his horse with no precautions, dug up whatever he had buried and trotted on briskly out of sight. So that he would not hear the noise of the motorcycles we gave him plenty of time to cross the top of the pass and go down the other side.

  The track up to and over the tumble of ridges was far better than expected and always hard under the turf or gravel. On the barren top, about four thousand feet up, the original paving showed clearly. The golden coast and the wine-dark sea—dawn and evening often justify Homer’s adjective—were in full view from Tripoli to the Island of Ruad. Somewhere below us, among the foothills still very sparsely inhabited, was d’Aulnoy’s valley.

  After two more ridges we had a momentary view of it. Then our track led us along the reverse slope, getting more and more overgrown until we reached a small clearing where hoof marks and a fresh patch of horse dung showed that the rider had indeed left the Ronson-Bolbecs that morning. The path he had followed, roughly levelled by pick and shovel, climbed up from the Arab hamlet and appeared—to a casual eye—to end for good at the village rubbish dump on the far side of the clearing.

  I had hoped to go down for breakfast to the house, if Ma did not object to sergeant-majors; but I was now all against it, feeling that it might embarrass one or both of the women who would realise that we must have met their visitor. I also considered that it might be unwise to show ourselves if that temporarily buried envelope had anything to do with our line of business. My objection was only instinctive but strong enough for me to say to Limpsfield that we would have to turn back to Hermel.

  He was naturally reluctant. He said that the chap on the horse must know somebody had been around and that he could not miss our tracks when he came to the mud. I was sure, however, that the mud slide was the last place he would find them after all that rain and that they would be washed out everywhere and indiscernible to anyone but a skilled tracker actually searching for tyre marks.

  ‘I don’t want to look as if I were keeping tab on visitors to the valley,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what we’re doing?’

  ‘It wasn’t, but it is now.’

  ‘Well, sir, unless your Romans were bloody barmy our road must go on to somewhere. And to judge from what you say about the track from this d’Aulnoy’s place to Sir it didn’t go down there.’

  Not a sound argument, but it suggested a better one. If the road was originally aimed at Sir, it would not have skirted d’Aulnoy’s valley on the south but would have run several miles to the north over fairly level high ground. So it might go on directly to Tripoli. We tried it, trusting to the line where it ought to be and finding occasional traces of it.

  Above the lower end of the valley we saw a solitary figure appear from the myrtles and cross our path. We called and waved to him in the hope that he spoke some French and could tell us about the goat paths, but he vanished. He was wearing a light-coloured kaftan and head-cloth which implied that he was a Moslem of some substance from the Syrian plain; the usual dress of the mountain villagers could be Turkish or European or a mixture but was generally black. We passed the sheltered spot where he had been squatting. A shallow bed of ashes showed that he had collected and lit a fire to warm himself after the rain stopped. All I could tell about him was that he was not a pious Moslem, for he had left an empty bottle of Lebanese brandy. Whoever he was, he had more experience of February nights than we.

  We were now practised at finding the line of the road. If there were no boulders, that was it—however many bushes might be growing on it. On the last slope, where agriculture began, it disappeared altogether, built over, terraced over, ploughed up; there was only a maze of little paths, navigable but usually leading round three sides of a rectangle. When at last we were down in the coastal plain we tried to line up fences, roofs, wells, anything in the damned huddle of Lebanese subsistence agriculture, to give us the point where we had entered the labyrinth. It was no good. We stopped for coffee in a reed hut which was the communal café, but neither the proprietor nor the odd dozen of bystanders fingering our bikes knew anything of a possible road to the east. Just as at Hermel, they said that there were goat-paths and nothing else.

  So the final stretch of our route was unknown and unused; anyone who wished to avoid observation and road controls by taking the short cut to Hermel passed through d’Aulnoy’s valley. That was the business of the Lebanese Gendarmerie. All that was of interest from the Security angle was the lonely rider’s connection with the Ronson-Bolbecs. It seemed highly likely that he was Valerie’s informant. A possible motive for his journey across the watershed was that he had fallen heavily for her and kept clear of the normal route by Sir in order to avoid comment.

  But questions remained. Why avoid Hermel? Clearly he did, since the inhabitants knew nothing of the road. And why tell Valerie about it and not her mother? Valerie’s excuse was that Mummy couldn’t keep her mouth shut. What did that matter if he wanted the information to get out?

  The always reliable Boutagy was the right man to report to me about that ‘local society’. He lived in the billet as one of the section and was thoroughly popular in spite of being ten years older than most of them. He was prepared to interpret for them anywhere at any time, to get special prices for them in back-street bars and eating-houses and to introduce them to respectable Lebanese families where they could get the feeling of the country. We dressed him in battle-dress, of which he was very proud.

  I told him to pick up a Beirut taxi with a driver who would not know his face and spend a night in Sir as a prosperous business man on a visit. A corn buyer, perhaps? No, he thought, a search for distant relatives among the few Christian families would be more in keeping; if he looked well-heeled everyone would be eager to invent a claim to kinship and to talk about the district.

  He spent two days there, drawing on my wretched little expense account for hardly more than the taxi. His report put the Ronson-Bolbecs in a more prosaic day-to-day setting. Ahmed, the majordomo, rode down to Tripoli about once a fortnight to dr
aw money to pay wages, and acted as postman. The inhabitants of the valley seldom bothered to make the journey.

  Two horses, a chestnut and a grey, had been left by d’Aulnoy at Sir for the use of visitors; these were all well known except for two strangers, one of whom was notably fat and strapped a large cushion over his saddle. The Englishwomen, it was said, were not very free with their money, but friendly and polite. Madame doctored anyone who needed attention and had been specially helpful in a nasty case of miscarriage. That was a new aspect of her. Evidently she had the efficiency of an army wife, trained in First Aid and able to cope with accidents in the wild.

  Boutagy had pretty well established that the lonely rider never visited Sir, but there might be another path to the valley which avoided the village. So I rather too casually made use of Holloway who knew the foothills behind Tripoli better than any of us.

  ‘Those two Englishwomen you told me about…’ I began.

  ‘Any luck, sir?’

  ‘The young lady is for brigadiers and above.’

  I don’t think we called it the top brass then. A useful phrase.

  ‘Bit steep for them, that climb.’

  ‘Yes. I wish I could lay my hands on a mule.’

  ‘I can do that for you, sir, but you’ll have to return it.’

  ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘Oh, me! Been ’alf over the ’Imalayas on a mule.’

  ‘Everest included?’

  ‘You mustn’t believe all you hear, sir.’

  It was impossible to score off Holloway. He always made me wish I was a real soldier and had half a dozen of him in my platoon.

  I explained the simple job I had for him: to wander about the goat tracks and find out if there was any reasonable route to d’Aulnoy’s valley without passing through Sir. If there was, who used it and why?

  ‘Trouble is, they don’t understand my Arabic round ’ere.’