Conversation was easy on so smooth a ride. The Negro, feeling himself to be trusted, relaxed into simplicity. He introduced himself as John Mahene, B.A. of London University and without profession. He didn’t think much of the opportunities of West Africa. He was the grandson of a king, he said, and he would gladly serve a king, but not a bunch of schoolmasters – and that was what they were, those colonial officials: kindly schoolmasters.
“Boss,” he asked, “how would you like to spend your life as a head prefect?”
“The name is Gwynn,” Laurence reminded him.
“Well, Mr. Gwynn, I didn’t. I don’t want to learn democracy. The rule of the strongest, that’s what suits me. Not of the smartest. No, sir!”
The solemn imitation of white man by black was not for him. As soldier, docker, tramp and circus performer he had traveled the world. He had worked as a laborer for a team of oil drillers in eastern Arabia, where his magnificent physique had attracted the admiration of a local sheikh. Mahene had then gone back a century or two in time. He became the picturesque bodyguard of tradition, inspiring terror in the disaffected by the ripple of his black muscles and the weight of his scimitar.
“They took you seriously?” Laurence asked.
“Boss – Mr. Gwynn, I mean – they surely did. Suppose you’ve got a gun and I’ve got a sword. Well, a little hole is all you’ve got time to make, and if you don’t put that little hole in the right place, I’m going to separate a piece of meat you can’t do without.”
His employer, traveling in state, had taken him on a visit to Persia. There John Mahene, feeling in need of rest and comparatively Western ways, had attached himself as porter and privileged clown to the consul of a certain chocolate-colored republic. He was well fed but unpaid, he said, and so this bazaar rumor …
“And what do you expect to find?” Gwynn asked, turning in the driving seat and regarding his companion with tolerant amusement.
“If a man doesn’t get in on the ground floor,” Mahene answered, “he won’t find anything.”
“It’s not uranium, you know.”
“Mr. Gwynn, if the chance is good enough for the Russians, it’s good enough for me.”
“Well, if you were a geologist, it wouldn’t be. How did you guess that I was after the shining light, by the way?”
“What else could you be after? There’s nothing to hunt and nothing to dig up.”
In the late afternoon they came to a low reef of rock jutting out into the desert. Nowhere did it seem to be more than three hundred yards in width, but their even course to the east was checked as absolutely as if the truck had been a motor launch. Gwynn turned south to find and circumnavigate the end of the peninsula; it took him a good hour to reach the point where the rock dived beneath the desert. There, with the sun behind him and the gray, forbidding flats ahead, he had to decide whether to close in again towards the mountains, or to stay far out – keeping, as it were, his sea room, and possibly missing the landfall he wanted. The map, naturally enough, ignored these long reefs across his course. Its makers, never dreaming of wheels in the desert, had not considered conditions of surface.
He compromised, and gradually closed in towards the main range on a northeasterly course. Another reef, no higher than a man but impassable, provided a gap. He took it, and was led into more trouble. The only sensible move was to run back through the gap, camp there, and take to the open desert at first light. He reckoned that he could still find the hill and return, without ever embarrassing Fomin by a trace of his presence.
John Mahene proved himself a useful man in camp. He took Aslan’s gear and duties, and, unlike Aslan, stripped and washed himself from head to foot in a basin of water – a desert luxury permitted by the sixteen-gallon tank in the back of the truck. He spread out his filthy clothes on the ground, and dressed himself for dinner in a blanket.
He had evidently decided that the relationship was to be one of master and man. Laurence Gwynn, however, preferred partnership, for he disliked to give orders when he did not know whether they would be obeyed, or even why they should be. It seemed to him more courteous and less embarrassing to the expedition to uphold Mahene in the position of fellow and equal to which his education entitled him. He had lived long enough in Moslem countries for this attitude to be entirely natural. To him, as to the good Mohammedan, color was a mere accident and breeding the whole world.
To emphasize the desired relationship he gave Mahene a whisky and water while he himself symbolically opened tins. Mahene caught what he was up to, and accepted the drink with a broad Negro’s grin in which was neither insolence nor exaggerated gratitude, but plain, friendly intelligence. Gwynn found himself suddenly enjoying his companion. When the helmet and cymbals were put aside, this Negro was worthy to be the grandson of a king.
They made ready for an early start and settled down, Gwynn in his sleeping bag, Mahene rolled in Aslan’s blankets. They slept at some distance from the truck – for there was no need to keep watch – in a cove of the reef where the wind had piled a beach of soft gray dust. The utter silence, the absolute surety that the oxygen of the desert was theirs and theirs alone to breathe gave the two travelers a sounder rest than man in the open is permitted by his subconscious guardian to enjoy. That guardian had no creep of insect or flutter of grass to hold him ready to wake the sleeper. There was not even nourishment for snakes. Nothing ventured out so far into the salt but the leaping, fast-traveling caravans of the gazelle.
Twice Gwynn thought he heard a stirring in the empty desert. He paid no attention. It seemed to be one of those sounds that the country Persians ascribed to Jinn. For them – and not for them alone – the conception of a noisy mineral was hard to assimilate. To Gwynn, however, the crackle and purr and even singing of inorganic matter subjected to extreme changes of temperature was perfectly familiar. He was no unreasoning skeptic and wouldn’t have denied the possibility of a spirit life upon the otherwise lifeless salt, but all such manifestations as had come his way could be – though sometimes with difficulty – explained by the cooling and contraction of minerals.
On this occasion he put too much trust in the vagaries of inorganic chemistry. The visitor had been organic, decidedly organic. It had worn good Russian boots. It had opened the cock of the sixteen-gallon tank, buried the end of the piping in the ground so that the drip of water could not be heard, and then – as was clear from its tracks in daylight – walked a couple of miles back to its pony.
John Mahene was up first, and discovered the disaster. At his shout Gwynn ran to the truck. The Negro was standing by the tailboard with a dignity that even for him was unusual. He almost stood to attention. That he expected to be blamed was obvious. He had, after all, somewhat overdone his eccentricities in the village, and the incalculable white man might fairly think him mad or a murderer.
The thought, however, never occurred to Gwynn. He didn’t even waste time in curses.
“We had better get back to the river before the heat,” he said.
There was a canvas chatti of water hanging by the driving seat, which the raider had missed. It held about three quarts, enough for drinking and the radiator – which under that sun and in anything but top gear could be nearly as thirsty as a man. The run back to the river alongside their own tracks could not take more than three or four hours.
They loaded kit and supplies. The engine started with two devastating backfires and stopped. The self-starter was so dead that it seemed an indecency to pull it a second time. Gwynn opened the bonnet. One cylinder head was cracked, and in another the plug was loose. To a miner the smell of the fumes was unmistakable. The visitor had unscrewed a couple of plugs, dropped in two detonators and replaced the plugs.
“The bloody, bloody fool!” Gwynn muttered. “What harm did he think I could do?”
His exasperation with the Russian’s unnecessary cruelty met with no response from John Mahene.
“He sure made certain that you couldn’t do any,” the Negro answered, a
s a man of action defending another man of action.
The hard ground held little trace. It was the merest luck that half a mile away they found the tracks of a single man plowing through a bed of windblown detritus such as that on which they had slept. From the reef above it Gwynn picked out with his glasses a pile of droppings and a roughening of the baked surface where the close-hobbled pony had awaited the return of its rider.
“How in hell could he know where we were?” Mahene exclaimed.
“Dust. The dust behind the truck. You could see that cloud twenty miles away. And if he were watching from the mountains – well, he’d only to follow the right reef to come to us. It’s my fault. I came in too close. But I never dreamed of this.”
“Where he is, there’s water,” said Mahene.
“Not necessarily. He’s probably carrying enough to get there and back, as we were. I wouldn’t bet on there being any water at all in the southern valleys.”
They looked at the great folds of the mountains, which changed from magenta to copper to yellow in the furnace of the risen sun.
“There’s nothing for it but to march back to the river in a couple of nights,” Gwynn went on. “We’ll cut across the bad ground and pick up the tire tracks on the other side. Then it’s only sixty miles with a good gallon between us if we empty the radiator. Lying up by day will be the worst. It’s pretty bad without shade, you know.”
“You’re the boss, Mr. Gwynn,” Mahene agreed. “Still I’d just like to catch him asleep.”
“You haven’t got a pony.”
They returned to the truck and breakfasted. They had no need to start on the precious chatti of water until the march. There were tins of fruit which would be awkward to carry, but provided enough liquid for the day.
Mahene prowled impatiently between the truck and a flat-topped crag, from which the lower slopes of the mountains could be watched. He did not easily accept defeat. Pride, Gwynn thought, was perhaps the essence of his character. Only a man whose sense of his own worth was unshakable could allow himself, quite calmly, such buffooneries.
“They won’t march till five in the afternoon,” Gwynn assured him. “Lie down and rest.”
Mahene controlled himself till four. Then he settled on top of the crag with Gwynn’s powerful binoculars and a doubled blanket to lie on – for even his black skin was instantly blistered by the rock. Gwynn squatted in the patch of shade that was beginning to grow on the northern side. At five he asked.
“What’s the good, Mahene?”
“Give me another hour, Mr. Gwynn. That won’t make any difference to us. I hate to let him get away with it.”
Mahene had his reward. When the rays of the sun had lengthened from heat that would fry to heat of a slow oven, he called out. Gwynn joined him on the rock. There were seven small specks moving diagonally down the slope where once the delta of a river had dropped into the prehistoric sea whose salt was all about them.
“What’s the distance, Mr. Gwynn?”
“Fifteen miles, more or less.”
“What sort of men has Fomin?”
“All communists from Azerbaijan. But desertworthy.”
“I watched their camp one evening,” said Mahene. “I was far above them, but I could see they didn’t pray.”
“Quite likely. I don’t suppose they are practicing Mohammedans any longer. There is no God, and Stalin is his prophet.”
“Mr. Gwynn, if I had a pony with water, would you go on?”
“No.”
“Can we wait here another day if we have to?”
“No.”
“Will you wait half an hour for me at the foot of this rock?”
“Yes, Mahene. But what’s the good?”
The sincerity and keenness of the man were pathetic. Gwynn’s answer was just to humor a child, a child who might very well be dead in forty-eight hours. Then, when the Negro had gone, he said to himself: O my God, he’s taken the chatti and cleared out.
It was hard to sit there and trust his own judgment of character. He comforted himself with the thought that, after all, there was nothing else, never had been anything else he could trust. He couldn’t fight Mahene, or even catch him.
The shadow of the crag was very long. By watching closely he could see it crawl from pebble to pebble like a rising tide. To his tired eyes the lifeless desert was a world sharp and uncolored as a photograph. Then the singing began. It was a little tune of great sweetness in no human voice, and there was no telling where it came from. His whole body tingled. For three seconds he felt that this was a symptom of death, commanding panic and worship together. In the next second he knew, and sprang up to face the rock.
Over the top of it appeared a black face, streaked with white paint. The white hair from a horse guard’s helmet was stuck to the sides of the mouth, forming a nightmare mustache. The mouth contained a remarkable set of tin teeth, two of which hung down outside the lips like the fangs of a leopard. There was little doubt what the effect would be on an Azerbaijan driver in the dead of night, with no faith in the Prophet to protect him.
“How on earth did you make that noise, Mahene?” he asked.
The Negro produced it. At close quarters there was no mystery at all. It was a soprano hum, of singular, reedy clarity, warbled through the nose with mouth closed. It still seemed to pervade the whole atmosphere, to be as directionless as distant bird song.
Mahene removed his tin teeth and grinned.
“Think it will work?”
“If they aren’t still more afraid of Fomin,” Gwynn answered. “But, my dear man, how are you going to reach them?”
“Run.”
“And find their camp?”
“I reckoned you could tell me how to do that, Mr. Gwynn.”
John Mahene slithered down the rock and joined his companion in the shade. He was stark naked, and painted down to the navel with fine white lines. Lower markings were more solid and of great complexity. It was hard to tell what the effect would be against a background of pitch-black shadow, but certainly that of a tenuous, indefinite horror growing out of a base of terrifying indecency.
“One of my aids to travel,” said Mahene, apologetically. “The paint is luminous. And why not, Mr. Gwynn? Didn’t you like a ride on a ghost train yourself when you were the age of a Persian villager?”
With this extraordinary figure squatting by his side and eagerly unfolding the map, Gwynn was overcome by a sense of unreality. Not only was he, Laurence, at last and as a fact in that desert disaster where imagination had often placed him, but he was accompanied by a black man – a friendly and on the whole delightful black man with a horsehair mustache and tin teeth. Though never more sober, he felt that lifting of the spirit, that willing surrender to fantasy with which a drunken man accepts the unfamiliar.
“We are about here,” he said, placing a tiny pencil cross in a blank space of the map. “We know where Fomin is now –” and he put another cross on the last hatchings of high ground. “We know where he is going, and that there is every reason why he should march on the shortest line. Hell stop at latest when the moon sets, and perhaps an hour or two earlier. He’ll pass within about twelve miles of us, and he’ll camp along this straight line from fifteen to twenty miles away from us.”
Then he pulled himself together.
“Mahene, this is lunacy. If you aren’t killed, you’ll be lost in the desert. I can’t allow it.”
“That’s understood, Mr. Gwynn. But you can’t stop it. Now, if you like to start back, I’ll come after you with any ponies and water I can get. And if you like to wait – well, I don’t look much like the Managing Director of Consolidated Persians without my trousers. But I’m near enough not to want to turn back.”
Gwynn pressed him to take half the contents of the chatti. He would not. Fomin’s water was what he wanted, and if he failed to get it, he would return, he said, by morning. No, he couldn’t get lost any more than Fomin had. The reefs running out at right angles to the main ran
ge were as good as a compass.
John Mahene loped away over the desert, with an hour of twilight ahead of him which would merge into the stranger but even clearer light of a waning moon. Naked, long-legged and steady-paced, Gwynn saw him go, and thought that for him as for the gazelle the salt flats might be ally rather than enemy. To a build and stride like his, forty miles in a night were no impossibility.
Gwynn returned to the truck. He ate a little, and poured out a fair and careful ration of water. With dusk and in the absence of any companion, he was full of melancholy foreboding. He wished to heaven that he had not lent himself to Mahene’s fantastic confidence. The Negro’s damn-fool scheme had brought death a good deal nearer than it need have been. He had no doubt that the immediate result would be startling, but afterwards? Mahene would either be shot by Fomin, or lose his way. Gwynn saw himself wandering hopelessly over the salt with the last of the water to find nothing but a body.
He rested, not daring to sleep too heavily. Before dawn he heard the tumble of hoofs, and rolled out of his bag with the shotgun that he used in kinder country to supply the pot. He never carried any other weapon.
Mahene’s voice hailed him. He blinked at the formless thing above the salt, dimly perceived to be riding one pony and leading a second. In the semidarkness there were no legs to be seen. It appeared to be a sort of loathsome idol balanced upon the saddle by supernatural attraction.
It let loose a deep scream of laughter, easily recognizable as the very human release of nervous tension.
“Got here, boss! Three ponies and all the water and Fomin, boss! That’s what we have. The three drivers bolted – oh my Lord, like a donkey race! Slashed the halters and off they were. Bareback. One man on each of them and a loose horse. They won’t stop till it’s too far to come back. And then a nice walk with pony blood to drink. That’ll teach ’em not to believe their eyes, Mr. Gwynn. Ya-ha! Ya-ha! Ya-ha!”
Tales of Adventurers Page 17