Tales of Adventurers (23 page)

“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 range 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!”

“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?
”