Tales of Adventurers (22 page)

Something of this nature – known but forgotten, interesting but valueless – was what he expected to find, certainly nothing that was worth driving Fomin into a frenzy of suspicion.
He didn’t want to meet the Russian. Fomin was too willing to change the history of the world on evidence which, if it were geological, wouldn’t have sufficed him for the drilling of a
wildcat well; the mere presence of Gwynn would send him rushing back to Teheran with stories of imperial plots. Well, with luck, a meeting might be avoided. By batting straight across the desert he
could reach the hill, be back at the river and away to Ispahan while Fomin and his ponies were still toiling down their valley to the edge of the salt.

“Can you drive a truck?” he asked the Negro.

“No, boss. But I could mighty near lift it.”

That honest answer clinched the deal. There was, of course, risk in lying out in the desert with a helmeted and cymbaled eccentric. But Gwynn rejected it; he unhesitatingly placed his man in
that class of pilgrims who, before the war, could be found in Persia or on any of the walkable routes round the world, selling picture postcards of themselves as a means of subsistence.

“Jump in!” he said.

The Negro settled his helmet, and saluted the assembled villagers with an impressive upward thrust of the arm that suggested the lord of Africa dismissing his black and blood-stained legions. He
followed this dignified improvement upon Mussolini by a fair attempt at all the Persian politenesses of leave-taking. The villagers evidently felt that he had been well worth the price of
admission.

It was midday when Gwynn and his companion reached his solitary camp of the previous night. There, under the shade of the truck’s canvas cover, they drank and forced themselves to eat a
little – even the Negro’s appetite failed in such an oven – and drove out into the desert on a compass course.

The route of the wandering shepherds was by no means a certainty; and the map, such as it was, depended on a mid–nineteenth century survey by the Government of India. That name at the head
of the sheet seemed an imposing enough authority, but Gwynn knew well that the accuracy of the map depended on nothing but the lonely integrity of a young Englishman and his Punjabi assistant, both
of whom, on a subsequent journey, had died of thirst.

Still, there were only two hills the shepherds could have passed. One was at the end of a narrow peninsula of broken rocks that ran far out into the desert; the other, a more isolated hillock,
was twenty miles beyond it – at any rate, according to the triangulation of those brown and white hands, sweating, unsteady, and long since mummified.

The truck made fifty miles of easting with as little effort as if it had been running on tarmac. Only the high and trailing cloud of gray dust behind showed that the surface was friable. To the
north, curving to meet the Hindu Kush, was the line of yellow mountains where Fomin was waiting in one of the folds for the heat of the day to pass, or perhaps debouching onto the plain with full
water skins gently compressing the ribs of the ponies. To the south was nothing until a man came to the old caravan route to India; and that was so nearly nothing that he might cross without
noticing it.

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, as 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.