After the first massive shock of impact, the lion had rolled to his feet and flattened into a dead streaking run, jinking away below the level of the coarse scrub. Although a dozen more bullets had thrown up soft jumping spurts of dust around him, one so close as to throw grit into his eyes, not another touched him.
There had been seven lions in the pride. Another older, heavier, darker-maned male, two younger daintier breeding females, one with her lithe-wasted body thickened with the heavy bearing of young in her womb, and three immature animals still dappled with their cub spots and boisterous as kittens.
The younger male was the only one to survive that long shattering roll of rifle fire, and now as he moved on he felt the thick jelly-like weight of congealing blood sloshing back and forth across his belly cavity at each step. There was a heavy lethargy slowing his movements, but thirst drove him onwards. Thirst was a scalding agony that consumed his whole body, and the lower pools of the Awash River were a dozen miles ahead.
In the dawn Priscilla the Pig was heavily bogged down on her belly with all four wheels helpless in the porridge of pale salt mire below the crust of the pan.
Jake stripped to the waist and swung the long two handed axe relentlessly, while the others gathered the piles of thorny scrub he mowed down, and, cursing at the pricks and scratches, carried them out across the snowy surface of the pan.
Jake worked with a self punishing fury, angry with his lack of attention which had bogged the car and was going to cost them a day at the least. It was no valid excuse that exhaustion and heat had clouded his judgement that he had not recognized the treacherous smooth white surface of the pan for Gregorius had warned him specifically of this hazard. He worked with the axe from an hour before sunrise until the heat had climbed with the sun and a small mountain of cut branches stood beside the car.
Then Gareth helped him build a firm foundation of flat stones and thicker branches under the engine compartment of the car. They had to lie on their sides and grovel in the dust to get the big screw jack set up on the base and they slowly lifted the front of the car, turning the handle between them.
As the front wheels rose an inch at a time, Vicky and Gregorius packed the wiry scrub branches under them. It was slow and laborious work which had to be repeated at the rear of the car.
it was past noon before Priscilla the Pig stood forlornly balanced on four piles of compacted branches but her belly was clear of the surface "What do we do now?" Gareth asked. "Drive her back?"
"One spin of the wheels will kick that trash out and she'll bog down again," Jake grunted, and wiped his sweat glistening chest on the bundled shirt in his hand. He looked at Gareth and felt a flare of irritation that after five hours" work in the sun, after grovelling on his belly in the dust, and heaving on the jack handle, the man had barely raised a/ sweat, his clothes were unmarked and final provocation his hair was still neatly combed.
Working under Jake's direction, they cut and laid a corduroy of branches back to the hard ground at the edge of the pan. This would distribute the weight of the vehicle and prevent it breaking through the crust again.
Then Vicky manoeuvred and reversed Miss Wobbly down to the edge of the pan and lined her up with the causeway of branches. The men joined three coils of the thick manila line and carried it out to the stranded vehicle, unrolling it behind them as they went, until at last the two cars were joined by that fragile thread.
Gareth climbed in and took the wheel of Priscilla while Jake and Gregorius, armed with two of the thickest branches, stood ready to lever the wheels.
"You any good at praying, Gary? "Jake shouted.
"Not my strong suit, old son."
"Well, stiffen the old upper lip then. "Jake mimicked him, and then let out a bellow at Vicky who acknowledged with a wave before her golden head disappeared into the driver's hatch of Miss Wobbly. The engine beat accelerated and the line came up taut as Miss Wobbly rolled forward up the incline above the pan.
"Keep the wheels straight," shouted Jake, and he and Gregorius threw their weight on the branches, giving just that ounce of leverage sufficient to transfer part of the vehicle's weight on to the corduroyed pathway.
Slowly, ponderously, the cumbersome vehicle rolled back across the pan, until she reached the hard ground and the four of them shouted with relief and triumph.
Jake retrieved two celebratory bottles of Tusker beer from his secret hoard, but the liquid was so warm that half of it exploded in a fizzing gush from the mouth of each bottle as it was opened, and there was only a mouthful for each of them.
"Can we reach the lower Awash by nightfall?" Jake demanded, and Gregorius looked up and judged the angle of the sun before replying.
"If we don't waste any more time," he said.
Still on a compass heading, and giving the salt-white pans a wide berth, the column ground on steadily into the west.
In the mid afternoon they reached the sand desert, with its towering whale-backed dunes throwing lovely lyrical shadows in the hollows between. The colour of the sand varied from dark purple to the softest pinks and talcum white, and was so fine and soft that the wind blew long smoke-like plumes from the crest of each dune.
Under Gregorius's direction they turned northwards, and within half an hour they had found the long narrow ridge of ironstone that bisected the sand desert and formed a narrow causeway through the shifting dunes. They crept following its winding course slowly across this rocky bridge, for twelve miles, while the dunes rose on each side of them.
Vicky thought that this was much like the passage of the Red Sea by the fleeing Israelites. Even the dunes seemed like frozen waves that might at each moment come crashing down to swamp them and she despaired that she could ever adequately describe the wild and disordered beauty of this multicoloured sea of sand.
They emerged at last and with startling suddenness into the dry flat grasslands of the Ethiopian lowlands. The desert proper was at last behind them and although this was a harsh and and savannah, there was, at least, the occasional thorn tree and an almost unbroken carpet of se red grass the grass was so amongst the low thorny scrub.
Altho fine and dry that all colour had been bleached from it by the sun, it shone silver and stiff as though coated with hoar frost.
Most cheering of all was the distant but discernible blue outline of the far mountains. Now they hovered at the edge of their awareness, a far beacon calling them onward.
Over the short crisp grass, the four vehicles roared forward joyously, bumping through an occasional ant-bear hole and flattening the clumps of low them that stood in their way as they plunged ahead.
In the last glimmering of the day, just when Jake had decided to halt the day's march, the flat land ahead of them opened miraculously and they looked down into the steep boulder-strewn gorge of the Awash River fifty feet below them. They climbed out of the parked vehicles and gathered stiffly in a small group on the lip of the ravine, "There is Ethiopia, two hundred yards away. It's two years since last I stood upon the soil of my own country," said Gregorius, his big dark eyes catching the last of the light.
He stopped himself and explained. "The river rises in the high country near Addis Ababa and comes down one of the gorges into the lowland. A short distance downstream from here it ends in a shallow swamp. There its waters sink away into the desert sand and disappear.