"I shall move up immediately," announced Aldo Belli, and glanced anxiously back into the dark depths of the gorge. His intention was to place his command tank fairly in the centre of the armoured column, protected from both front and rear.
The drumming continued, booming and pounding against his brain until he felt he must scream aloud.
It seemed to emanate from the very earth, out of the fierce dark slope of rock directly ahead, and it bounced and reverberated from the rock walls of the gorge, driving in upon him in great hammers of sound.
Suddenly, the Count realized that the darkness was dispersing. He could make out the shape of a stunted cedar tree on the scree slope above his position where, moments before, there had been only black shades. The tree looked like some misshapen monster, and quickly the Count averted his eyes and looked upwards.
Between the mountains the narrow strip of sky was defined, a paler pink light against the black brooding mass of rock. He dropped his gaze and looked ahead, the darkness retreated rapidly, and the dawn came with dramatic African suddenness.
Then the beat of the drums stopped. It was so abrupt, the transition from a pounding sea of sound to the deathly, unearthly silence of the African dawn in the mountains.
The shock of it held Aldo Belli transfixed and he peered, blinking like an owl, up the gorge.
There was a new sound, thin and high as the sound of night birds flying, plaintive and weird, an ululation that rose and fell so that it was many moments before he recognized it as the sound of hundreds upon hundreds of human voices; Suddenly he started, and his chin snapped up.
"Mary, Mother of God," he whispered, as he stared up the gorge.
It seemed that the rock was rolling down swiftly upon them like a dark fluid avalanche, and the ululation rose, becoming a wild loolooing clamour. Swiftly the light strengthened and the Count realized that the avalanche was a sweeping tide of human shapes.
"Pray for us sinners," breathed the Count and crossed himself swiftly, and at that instant he heard Castelani's voice, like the bellow of a wild bull, out of the darkened Italian positions.
Instantly the machine guns opened together in a thunderous hammering roar that drowned out all other sound.
The tide of humanity seemed no longer to be moving forward; like a wave upon a rock it broke on the Italian guns, and milled and eddied about the growing reef of their own fallen bodies.
The light was stronger now strong enough for the Count to see clearly the havoc that the entrenched machine guns made of the massed charge of Harari warriors. They fell in thick swathes, dead upon dead, as the guns traversed back and forth. They piled up in banks in front of the Italian positions so that those still coming on had to clamber over the fallen, and when the guns swung back, they too fell building a wall of bodies.
The Count's terror was forgotten in the fascination of the spectacle.
The racing figures coming down the narrow gorge seemed endless, like ants from a disturbed nest. Like fields of moving wheat, and the guns reaped them with great scythe-strokes and piled them in deep windrows.
Yet here and there, a few of the racing figures came on reached the barbed wire that Castelani had strung, beat it down with their swords, and were through.
Of those who breached the wire, most died on the very lips of the Italian trenches, shot to bloody pieces by close range volleys of rifle fire but a few, a very few came on still. A group of three figures leaped the wire at a point where two dead Ethiopians had fallen and dragged it down, making a breach for those who followed.
They were led by a tall, skeletal figure in swirling white robes.
He was bald, the pate of his head gleaming like a black cannon ball, and perfect white teeth shone in the sweat-coiled face. He carried only a sword, as long as the spread of a man's arms and as broad as the span of his hand, and he swung the huge blade lightly about his head as he j inked and dodged with the agility of a goat.
The two warriors who followed him carried ancient Martini-Henry rifles which they fired from the hip as they ran, each shot blowing a long thick blue flag of black powder smoke, while the leader swung the sword above his head and loolooed a wild war cry. A machine gun picked up the group neatly and a single burst cut two of them down but the tall leader came on at a dead run.
The Count, peering over the turret of the tank, was so astonished by the man's persistence that his own fear was momentarily forgotten.
In the tank parked beside his, the machine gun fired, a ripping tearing burst, and this time the racing white clad figure staggered slightly and Aldo Belli saw the bullets strike, lifting tiny pale puffs of dust from the warrior's robes, and leaving bloody splotches across his chest yet he came on running, still howling, and he leaped the first line of trenches, coming straight down towards the line of tanks, and it seemed as though he had recognized the Count as his particular adversary. His charge seemed to be directed. at him alone, and he was suddenly very close. Standing fascinated in the turret, Aldo Belli could clearly see the staring eyes in the deeply lined face, and noticed the incongruity of the man's rows of perfect white teeth. His chest was sodden with dark red blood, but the swinging sword in his hands hissed through the air and the dawn light flickered on the blade like summer lightning.
The machine gun fired again, and this time the burst seemed to tear the man's body to pieces. The Count saw shreds of his clothing and flesh fly from him in a cloud, yet incredibly he kept coming onwards, staggering and dragging the sword beside him.
The last burst of fire struck him, and the sword dropped from his hand; he sank to his knees, but kept crawling now he had seen the Count and his eyes fastened on the white man's face. He tried to shout something, but the sound was drowned in a bright flooding gout of blood that filled his open mouth. The crawling, mutilated figure reached the hull of the stationary tank, and the Italian almost as though in awe of the man's tenacity. guns fell silent Laboriously, the dying warrior dragged his broken body up towards the Count, watching him with a terrible dying anger, and the Count fumbled nervously with the ivory butt of the Beretta, slipping a fresh clip of cartridges into the recessed butt.
"Stop him, you fools," he cried. "Kill him! Don't let him get in."
But the guns were silent.
With shaking hands, the Count slapped the magazine home and lifted the pistol. At a range of six feet he sighted briefly into the crawling Ethiopian.
He emptied the magazine of the Beretta in frantic haste, the shots crashing out in rapid succession in the sudden silence that hung over the field.
A bullet struck the warrior in the centre of his sweat-glazed forehead, leaving a perfectly round black hole in the gleaming brown skin, and the man slithered backwards and then rolled down the hull, coming to rest at last upon his back, and he stared up at the swiftly lightening sky with wide, unseeing eyes. Out between the slack lips dropped a set of artificial teeth, and the old mouth collapsed and fell inwards.
The Count was shaking still, but then quite unexpectedly a surging emotion swept away the terrors that had gripped him. He felt a vast proprietorial sense of emotional involvement with the man he had killed he wanted to take some part of him, some trophy of his kill. He wanted to scalp him, or take his head and have it cured so that he might preserve this moment for ever, but before he could move, there was the shrilling of whistles, and a bugle began urgently to sound the advance.
On the slope ahead of them, only the dead lay in their piles and mounds, while the last of those who had survived that crazy suicidal charge were disappearing like wisps of smoke back among the rocks.
The road to Sardi was open, and like the hard professional he was, Luigi Castelani seized the chance. As the bugle sang its brassy command, the Italian infantry rose from the trenches, and the formation of tanks rumbled forward.