Vicky's head appeared in the hatch. She must have found an opportunity to bathe, for her hair was newly washed and shiny and caught behind her head in a silk ribbon. The sun had bleached her hair to a whiter gold, but the peachy velvet of her complexion had been gilded by that same sun to a darker honey colour. Immediately Jake and Gareth moved forward, neither trusting the other to be alone with her for an instant.
But she was brusque, and concerned only with the injured girl who was laid out on the floor of the cab on a hastily improvised bed of blankets and skins. Her leave-taking was off-hand and distracted while the Lij climbed in through the rear doors, and she pulled away again up the steep track followed by a squadron of the Prince's bodyguard looking like a gang of cut-throats on their shaggy mountain ponies, festooned with bandoliers of ammunition and hung with rifles and swords. They clattered away after the car, and Jake watched them out of sight. He felt a sense of deep unease that the girl should be up there in the mountains beyond any help that he could give her. He was staring after the car.
"Put your mind back in your pants," Gareth advised him cynically.
"You're gain" to need it for the Eyeties, now." from the foot of the gorge to the lip of the bowl of land in which stood the town of Sardi was a few dozen miles across the ground, but the track climbed five thousand feet and it took six hours of hard driving for Vicky to reach it.
The Prince's labour gangs were working upon the track still, groups of dark men in mud-stained shairmias, hacking away at the steep banks and piles of boulders that blocked the narrow places. Twice these men had to rope up the car to drag and shove it over a particularly treacherous stretch with the torrent roaring in its bed a hundred feet below and the wheels of the car inches from the crumbling edge of the precipice.
In the middle of the afternoon the sun passed behind the towering ramparts of stone leaving the gut of the gorge in deep shadow, and a clammy chill made Vicky shiver even as she wrestled with the controls of the heavy vehicle. The engine was running very unevenly, and back-firing explosively at the change of atmospheric pressure as they toiled upwards. Also Sara's condition seemed to be worsening rapidly.
When Vicky stopped briefly to rest her aching arms and back muscles she found that Sara was running a raging fever, her skin was dry and baking hot and her dark eyes were glittering strangely. She cut short her rest and took the wheel again.
The gorge narrowed dramatically, so the sky was a narrow ribbon of blue high above and the cliffs seemed almost to close jaws of granite upon the labouring car. Although it seemed impossible, the track turned even more steeply upwards so that the big back wheels spun and skidded, throwing out fist-sized stones like cannon balls and scattering the escort who followed closely.
Then abruptly Vicky drove the car over the crest and came out through rocky portals into a wide, gently inclined bowl of open ground hemmed in completely by the mountain walls. Perhaps twenty miles across, the bowl was cultivated in patches, and scattered with groups of the round tukuL-, the thatch and daub huts of the peasant farmers.
Domestic animals, goats and a few milk cows grazed along the course of the Sardi River where the grass was green and lush and thick forests of cedar trees found a precarious purchase along the rocky banks.
The town itself was a gathering of brick-built and white, plastered buildings, whose roofs of galvanized corrugated iron caught the last probing rays of the sun as it came through the western pass.
Here in the west, the mountains fell back, allowing a broad gentle incline to rise the last two thousand feet to the level of the plateau of the highlands. Down this slope, the narrow-gauge railway looped in a tight series of hairpins until it entered the town and ended in a huddle of sheds and stock pens.
The Catholic mission station was situated beyond the town on the slopes of the western rise. It was a sadly dilapidated cluster of tin-roofed daub buildings, grouped around a church built of the same materials.
The church was the only building that was freshly whitewashed. As they drove past the open doors, Vicky saw that the rows of rickety pews were empty, but that lighted candles burned upon the altar and there were fresh flowers in the vases.
The church's emptiness and the sorry state of the buildings were a reflection of the massive power of the Coptic Church over this land and its people. There was very little encouragement given to the missionaries of any other faith, but this did not prevent the local inhabitants from taking advantage of the medical facilities offered by the mission.
Almost fifty patients squatted along the length of the veranda that ran the full length of the clinic, and they looked up with minimal interest as Vicky parked the armoured car below them.
The doctor was a heavily built man, with short bowed legs and a thick neck. His hair was cropped close to the round skull and was silvery white, and his eyes were a pale blue. He spoke no English, and he acknowledged Vicky with a glance and a grunt, transferring all his attention to Sara. When two of his assistants rolled her carefully on to a stretcher and carried her up on to the veranda, Vicky would have followed but the Lij restrained her.
"She is in the best hands and we have work to do." The telegraph office at the railway station was closed and locked, but in answer to the Prince's shouts the station master came hurrying anxiously down the track. He recognized Mikhael immediately.
The process of tapping out Vicky's despatch on the telegraph was a long, laborious business, almost beyond the ability of the station master whose previous transmissions had seldom exceeded a dozen words at a time. He frowned and muttered to himself as he worked, and Vicky wondered in what mangled state her masterpiece of the journalistic art would reach her editor's desk in New York. The Prince had left her and gone off with his escort to the official government residence on the outskirts of the village, and it was after nine o'clock before the station master had sent the last of Vicky's despatch a total of almost five thousand words and Vicky found that her legs were unsteady and her brain woolly with fatigue when she went out into the utter darkness of the mountain night. There were no stars, for the night mists had filled the basin and swirled in the headlights as Vicky groped her way through the village and at last found the government residence.
It was a large sprawling complex of buildings with wide verandas, whitewashed and iron-roofed, standing in a grove of dark-foliaged cosa flora trees from which the bats screeched and fluttered to dive upon the insects that swarmed in the light from the windows of the main building.
Vicky halted the car in front of the largest building and found herself surrounded by silent but watchful throngs of dark men, all of them heavily armed like the Harari she knew, but these were a different people. She did not know why, but she was sure of it.
There were many others camped in the grove. She could see their fires and hear the stamp and snort of their tethered horses, the voices of the women and the laughter of the men.
The throng opened for her and she crossed the veranda and entered the large room which was crowded with many men, and lit by the smoky paraffin lamps that hung from the ceiling. The room stank of male sweat, tobacco and the hot spicy aroma of food and tej.
A hostile silence fell as she entered, and Vicky stood uncertainly on the threshold, scrutinized by a hundred dark suspicious eyes, until Lij Mikhael rose from where he sat at the far end of the room.