“And Fomin?”
“Ran after ’em, shouting. He gave it up pretty soon. And when he came back to his tent, I sort of uncoiled myself from the pile of blankets. He’s a brave man, Mr. Fomin – but he did spend a second wondering just what the target was. And that was one second too long.”
“He’s all right?” Gwynn asked, dreading the answer.
“Sure! I tied him up tight and left him in the open. It won’t do him any harm to lie in the sun awhile and wonder if I’m coming back.”
“I’ll have to let him go after his men, you know. He’d better take two ponies and a waterskin, and clear out.”
“It’s my breakfast I was thinking of,” John Mahene replied.
Gwynn suddenly laughed as unrestrainedly as the Negro.
“For God’s sake clean yourself up while I get it,” he said. “I take it we haven’t got to worry about water any more?”
There was enough for coffee and the journey, but not for a wash. Mahene rubbed his skin with petrol and fine dust, and then resumed his clothes. After a full day spread out in the sun, the seams were empty of life as if they had passed through a delousing oven.
They packed such extra food as could easily be carried, and mounted. Gwynn found a holster and pistol strapped to his saddle.
“You keep that,” said Mahene.
Laurence Gwynn shook his head, and pitched the holster into his derelict truck.
“Fomin might get it back,” he replied. “We’ll sleep sounder without it. And we’re two to one anyway.”
At ten o’clock they reached Fomin’s camp. It looked like a huddle of gypsy rags upon the desert. Three ponies were trampling the remains of the matting that had been stretched over them in readiness for the heat of the day. Fomin’s tent had been hurled upwards and collapsed by the struggle beneath it. The drivers’ blankets were scattered over the salt. Cooking pots and saddlery showed every sign of a stampede of terrified men and horses. Fomin, shapeless as another waterskin, lay on his side with his wrists tied behind his back and his ankles lashed together.
Gwynn untied the ropes, and supported Fomin while the painful blood flowed back along his arteries. He had met the Russian at several diplomatic parties in Teheran, and had even exchanged publications with him; yet he recognized, with a shade of surprise, that the present bond of attempted murder which lay between him and this very angry man was a deal more natural than the heartiness with which they had clinked their glasses of vermouth and vodka. He had never felt, as with a colleague of any other nationality, that their interest in the common science could overcome their political allegiance. Fomin had remained far more of an impenetrable Asiatic, in spite of his fair and handsome features and his excellent English, than the dark, stag-eyed Persians whom he loved and understood.
“You might at least have left us water,” said Gwynn, as conversationally as he could manage.
“Why should I?”
“Well – let us say, as one prospecting geologist to another.”
“What has the profession to do with it?” Fomin stormed. “I tell you this shall be settled between Moscow and London.”
“Will it? It’s just your word against mine – and that won’t make a diplomatic incident.”
“My men will report straight to the Embassy.”
“And say that they saw a ghost and left you to die? They won’t, my dear Fomin. They are Persians first, and communists after. They’ll take the easiest way out and just disappear. And if Mahene and I don’t talk, it will simply be assumed they murdered you.”
John Mahene returned from picketing and watering the ponies. He showed as little resentment as Gwynn, and contented himself with a grin and an exhibition of shadowboxing, as if inviting Fomin to join in the memory of a violent but amusing experience.
His clowning was the last straw. Fomin passed in one beautiful blaze of emotion from anger to martyrdom. He liked to strike an attitude, even when he was sincere. He had been told so often by heroic comrades that his face was noble – as indeed it was.
“Kill me then, you and your hired slave! I don’t need hypocrisy.”
Gwynn obediently withdrew his supporting arm, and Fomin dropped to the ground in an undignified bundle.
“What shall we do with him for the day, Mahene?” he asked.
“Shove him in his tent, Mr. Gwynn, and encourage him to have some sleep. See here, commissar—”
“I have already told you I am not a commissar,” Fomin interrupted.
“Russian for boss,” said Mahene. “And you listen to me! If you stick your head outside the flies of that tent, I’m going to bat it straight back again.”
Fomin gave no trouble. He seemed to have the acceptance of the Asiatic in face of violence. Or was it, Gwynn wondered, that the long and illogical party training helped a man to recognize the occasions when revolt was hopeless?
Mahene slept through the day, while Gwynn kept watch on the silent tent. Horses and men sweated under the mat awnings. There was nothing to do but to endure heat without movement; that itself was an occupation.
When the sun was low, they called to Fomin. The Russian, pacified by deep draughts of cooler air as much as by food and drink, grudgingly permitted conversation.
“When did you last water?” Gwynn asked Fomin.
“In the afternoon, the day before yesterday.”
“Well or spring?”
“Mudhole.”
“Yes, it tastes like it. Are you sure of its position?”
“I am not a child.”
“Then you’d better take a pony and a waterskin and start now. You should reach the hole some time tomorrow night.”
“I will not,” said Fomin. “I shall follow you.”
“Very well, if you prefer it. We are returning straight to the river.”
“You are not going on?” Fomin exclaimed, as if shocked by such a dereliction of duty.
“Good God, no – not enough water! You took a crazy risk, Fomin.”
“I took no risk. We were all mounted and could move fast. I was going on to the spring migration track and home by it. There is a well half a march to the east of the hill. My drivers were sure.”
Gwynn looked at the map. The valley by which shepherds and flocks must enter the mountains was clear enough, but there was no guessing their track across the desert. It was a reasonable assumption, however, that somewhere to the east of the shining hill was water.
“Mr. Gwynn,” said Mahene, “if the drivers could find it, we can find it.”
“Mahene, what the devil do you think there is in this that is worth risking your life for?”
“Money,” replied John Mahene.
“And you, Fomin?”
“My orders are to report on that hill.”
“Just fear of the consequences?” Gwynn asked.
“No. My duty to the future. But you will not understand that, imperialist!”
“Oh, Mahene is the only imperialist – as near as we can get to it today! All he wants is a concession. But look here, Fomin! Speaking as one geologist to another, do you for one moment suppose that the luminescence of that hill is due to radioactivity?”
“That is not my business.”
“And what happens when you come back and say: I told you so?”
The dead nobility of Fomin’s profile suddenly twitched into life. He replied with a proverb, speaking perfect Persian. The use of that aristocratic language seemed for a moment to relieve him of party discipline.
“Falsehood with good intentions is preferable to truth with controversy.”
“You believe that?” Gwynn asked indignantly.
“What I believe does not matter. That is what they may tell me.”
“And yet you obey!”
“For the sake of mankind, I obey.”
“Oh hell!” said Gwynn, giving it up. “We haven’t a sane motive for going on between us. Very well, let us go on! Fomin, if I promise not to tell a soul of your co-operation with the enemy, will you gi
ve me your word that you won’t try to sabotage this expedition?”
Fomin struggled with his conscience, and then shook Gwynn’s hand with extreme proletarian heartiness.
“It is wrong,” he said, “and I know it. But we Russians – ah, we are far too ready to be friends. Come now, a bottle! I have a bottle in my tent. We drink a bottle to the shining light.”
“I think we’d better keep it till we get there,” said Gwynn mildly. “Shall we start now?”
There was water enough for two full marches and the intervening day. They trudged over the salt on a compass course, walking alongside the three ponies laden with food, water, Fomin’s instruments and a long strip of matting rolled around its bamboo poles. At midnight they rested and mixed some of Fomin’s bottle with their water. Then at first light, they forced the pace for a couple of hours, and camped.
The hill, their objective, was now in full view – a crouching black bulk that blotted out the sunrise. It performed no spectacle for them. It was a dead lump of minerals on a dead plain.
They waited, impatiently accepting the uneasy sleepiness of the heat, and knowing that the bodies of men and horses, in spite of idleness, were ticking away their water with the regularity of a clock. In the afternoon, earlier than was prudent, they started across the desert in order to have some light for the examination of the hill. The short daylight march exhausted men and horses, and the carefully calculated ration of water had to be increased.
On the western side the rocks were mercilessly hot, and would have been hard climbing even if bearable to the naked palm. Fomin took a pony and rode round the hill. On his return to camp an hour later, the pony died. Yet they admitted that his ruthless speed was justified. He had found a gully on the northern side up which they could climb in the shade, with a fair chance of reaching the top in daylight.
The height was only twenty feet more above the plain than the five hundred and sixty that the long-dead surveyors had allowed. Even so, the effort to all but the tireless Mahene was very great. There was nothing to see on the top or upper slopes but an outcrop of gneiss and signs of slight volcanic activity in the Tertiary period. Worse still, there was no sign whatever that flocks or any living thing had ever crossed the featureless plain of salt to the east of the hill, where the track of the shepherd’s regular migration should be.
The second hill, the other possibility, was some forty miles to the southeast. The surveyors, who could only have glimpsed its cone from the main range in the clear air of morning or evening, had put it too low and too near. It was far more than the hillock shown, with a question mark, on the map.
Gwynn trained his glasses on its fast-fading image. Then he lay down and steadied his elbows, and remained motionless for a full minute.
“Tell me what you see,” he said, handing the glasses to Fomin.
“A star through a gap,” Fomin pronounced, and added more hesitantly, “but – but it has size, and it is too faint.”
“Let Mahene try.”
From toe to lens, Mahene’s recumbent body pointed at the hill with the concentrated purpose of a black gun barrel. Then he rolled over on his back, kicked, and with an acrobat’s arching of the spine sprang upright.
“That’s it! That’s it, Mr. Gwynn! That’s what we’re after!”
“It might as well be in the moon,” Gwynn answered.
His voice was angry, and he checked himself. A casual curiosity, just enough for what should have been a casual and uneventful trip – that had been his motive. And now that he found he couldn’t reach it, he had to see that the damned phenomenon was really there, and as inexplicable to a geologist as it had been to half-naked nomads.
“We know there is water beyond,” said Fomin.
“We hope,” Gwynn corrected him sharply.
“There’s nothing much left to carry, Mr. Gwynn,” Mahene suggested. “You both ride, and I’ll run. I can do it. You’ll see I can. How long would it take us then?”
“Six hours or so – if the ponies can stand it. But what afterwards? Only our feet and about two quarts apiece.”
“For a Russian soldier that is enough,” said Fomin superbly.
Gwynn didn’t ask exactly what it was enough for. The recklessness of his two companions appalled, but fascinated him. He contented himself with pointing out that if they rode northeast towards the mountains, they had at least a better chance of water and life. The speck of light upon that distant hill, whose outline had now vanished, made his argument seem empty even to himself.
An hour after midnight they started. The two remaining ponies were still thirsty and in doubtful condition. One carried Fomin, their food and a little grain; the other, Gwynn and two nearly empty waterskins that hung down from the saddle like the slack udders of an old goat. The speed that Gwynn had estimated was impossible. In five hours they covered only twenty miles.
Then the sun rose, and soon afterwards Fomin’s pony stumbled and laid out upon the desert, relieved and accepting, the head it could no longer raise.
“Shoot him,” said Fomin.
“Nothing to shoot him with.”
“My pistol – isn’t it in your pack or his? Why not?”
“How the hell do I know why not?” Gwynn replied irritably. “I hate the things. I suppose I’d rather give my own life than take someone else’s.”
Mahene unroped a cooking pot. He took out his knife and laid the pot by the horse’s throat.
“Pity to waste it, Mr. Gwynn,” he apologized.
The blood spurted into the pot and over Mahene’s arms.
“Tomorrow I shall wish I had,” Gwynn said, “but I can’t yet.”
The pot was offered to Fomin. He made an effort to drink. It was his logical, material duty to drink, but he could not.
Mahene slowly sipped half a pint, and smacked his lips and grinned.
“No need, John,” said Gwynn. “You didn’t like it, but you’re the only one of us with any sense.”
“Mr. Gwynn, I want to live about twice as much as the rest of you. And that’s the truth,” Mahene answered.
There was a little more water now for the last pony, and its effect was instant. He had accepted an end to weariness, but now he shied away from the blood and from Mahene, and gave trouble in the reloading.
They went on. There was no other hope but a march straight through the heat of the morning. They went on steadily. Mahene’s even pace kept them from falling into the exhausted spurts and sudden halts of the dying caravan.
At midday the character of the desert changed. The salt crystals no longer waited and winked from their flat gray world. There was a scattering of black dust on the surface which gradually thickened. Soon they came to pimples and corrugations, of infinite relief to the eyes, where the wind had piled dust against the roots of vegetation that had lived for a few weeks in spring.
Gwynn scraped with his foot one of these tiny mounds, and found a dead tuft of coarse grass and a sheep dropping. He called to his companions to look. It was plain that they were crossing the route of those shepherds who, once in a generation, had found green growth and wandered by the western side of the hill, whose curious report had brought three men and a staggering pony into this desolation.
They were more cheerful for the sign of humanity. As if they themselves had been present, they chattered wildly of the vanished green and the shallow rain pools, until pain insisted that parched tongues must be kept covered. In their imaginations, as mile after mile they weakened, this journey became a walk to the world’s end, to riches, to an infinite source of proletarian power. Though two of them, at least, knew that whatever they discovered would be only a geological curiosity, worth no more than a picture postcard, they could not admit, in self-protection, that such suffering was only for such an end.
The shade of the outlying rocks promised sanity as well as rest – freedom at last from the overwhelming temptation to lie down and drink. The rocks, the blessed rocks, were a far more compelling objective than the hill its
elf. That was a mere forbidding cone. There was no trace of the phenomenon of the night. On and on they dragged their feet over the dust until there was reason at last for a man to look where he was going.
The sun was still so high that there was no patch of shade large enough for them all. They drank, and then lay down, each at the foot of his own rock or in the curve of his own gully, clinging to the darkened strip that was soothing as a woman, and no wider. The pony did not look as if he were likely to rise again.
There was so little time. The last brackish quart from the skin had gone to the pony. The men had each a full water bottle left. That allowed them the evening, and only the evening, in which to climb the hill, to look eastwards from the top and to spot the migration track and its well or wells which might, with luck, lead them back alive to the mountains. It was the hope of water rather than the secret of the hill which persuaded them at last to their feet.
The climb was steep but of no difficulty. They traversed the lower slopes and turned onto the northern face. There in the comparative coolness they rested, and breathed deeply of air that seemed to wash their lungs. They allowed themselves a cup of water apiece. It acted on their spirits as if it had been alcohol, and reminded them that for all their weariness they were still fit men. Fomin and Gwynn began to exchange their professional impressions of the hill. It had undoubtedly been formed by some volcanic upheaval in geologically recent times. The lava flow had been slight. There was no sign of any mineral of commercial value except zinc. The ore suggested that it was rich even for Persia.
After climbing some four hundred feet, they were stopped by a low, precipitous ridge which had once been the lip of a crater. Mahene settled himself on a ledge halfway up, and from his shoulders Gwynn reached the top. He looked down into a rough bowl, two hundred yards across. He remained quite still. Detail, every detail, was clear, so what he saw could not be a mirage. And it was credible. A warm spring in such a place was in accordance with the laws of nature. Sulphurous, of course, it would be. Perhaps undrinkable. He fought down his ecstasy lest the resulting disappointment should be unbearable. And all the time he was conscious of Mahene’s grip on his ankle.
Tales of Adventurers Page 18