The heat was a heavy oppressive pall, pressing down upon the earth, beating like a gong upon Gareth's head.
The sweat dried almost instantly upon his skin, leaving a rime of salt crystals, and he screwed up his eyes as he swept the horizon with the glasses.
The glare and the mirage had obscured the horizon, blotted out even the nearest ridges behind a shifting throbbing curtain of hot air that seemed thick as water, swirling and spiralling in wavering columns and sluggish eddies.
Gareth blinked his eyes, and shook the drops of sweat from his eyebrows. He glanced at his watch. It was still another hour until Jake's shift, and he contemplated putting his watch forward. It was distinctly uncomfortable up on the hull in the sun, and he glanced again at the sleeping form in the shade.
Just then he caught a sound on the thick heated air, a soft quiver of sound, like the hive murmur of bees. There was no way in which to tell the direction of the sound, and Gareth crouched attentively, straining for it. It faded and returned, faded and returned again, but this time stronger and more definite. The configuration of the land and the flawed and heat-faulted air were playing tricks on the ear.
Suddenly the volume of sound climbed swiftly, becoming a humming growl that shook in the. heat.
Gareth swung the glasses to the east; it seemed to emanate from the whole curve of the eastern horizon, like the animal growl of the surf.
For an instant the glare and swirling mirage opened enough for him to see a huge darkly distorted shape, a grotesque lumbering monster on four stilt-like legs, seeming as tall as a double-storey building.
Then the mirage closed down again swiftly, leaving Gareth blinking with doubt and alarm at what he had seen. But now the growl of sound beat steadily in the air.
Jake," he called urgently, and was answered by a snort and a changed volume of snore. Gareth broke off a branch from the layer of camouflage and tossed it at the reclining figure. It caught Jake in the back of the neck and he came angrily awake, one fist bunched and ready to punch.
"What the hell-'he snarled.
"Come up here, "called Gareth.
"I can't see a damned thing," muttered Jake, standing high on the turret and peering eastwards through his glasses. The sound was now a deep drumming growl, but the wall of glare and mirage was close and impenetrable.
"There!" shouted Gareth.
"Oh my God!" cried Jake.
The huge shape leaped out at them suddenly. Very close, very black and tall, blown up by distortion and mirage to gargantuan proportions. Its shape changed constantly, so at one moment it looked like a four-masted ship under a full suit of black sails then it altered swiftly into a towering black tadpole shape that wriggled and swam through the soupy air.
"What the hell is it? "Gareth demanded.
"I don't know, but it's making a noise like a squadron of Italian tanks and it's coming straight at us."
The Captain who commanded the Italian tank squadron was an angry, disgruntled and horribly disillusioned man a man burdened by a soul corroding grudge.
Like so many officers of the cavalry tradition, the anne blanche of the army, he was a romantic, obsessed by the image of himself as a dashing, reckless warrior. The dress uniform of his regiment still included skin-tight breeches with a scarlet silk stripe down the outside of the leg, soft black riding boots and silver spurs, a tightly fitting bum freezer jacket encrusted with thick gold lace and heavy epaulets, a short cloak worn carelessly over one shoulder and a tall black shako.
This was the picture he cherished of himself all Man and swagger.
Here he was in some devil-conceived, god-cursed desert, where day after day he and his beloved fighting machines were sent out to find wild animals and drive them in on a set point, where a mad megalomaniac waited to shoot them down.
The damage it was doing his tanks, the grinding wear on tracks running hard over rough terrain and through diamond-hard abrasive sand, was as nothing compared to the damage his pride was suffering.
He had been reduced to nothing but a gamekeeper, a beater, a peasant beater. The Captain spent much of each day at the very edge of tears, the tears of deep humiliation.
Every evening he protested to the mad Count in the strongest possible terms and the following day found him once more pursuing wild animals over the desert.
So far the bag had consisted of a dozen lions and wild dogs, and many scores of large antelope. By the time these were delivered to where the Count waited, they were almost exhausted, lathered with sweat, and with a froth of saliva drooling from their jaws, barely able to trot after the long chase across the plains.
The condition of the game detracted not at all from the Count's pleasure. Indeed, the Captain had been given specific orders to run the game hard so that it came to the guns docile and winded. After his alarming experience with the beisa oryx, the Count was not eager to take foolhardy risks. An easy shot and a good photograph were his yardsticks of the day's sport.
The greater the bag, the greater the pleasure and the Count had enjoyed himself immensely since the arrival of the tanks. However, the wastes of the Danakil desert could not support endless quantities of animal life, and the bag had fallen off sharply in the last few days as the herds were scattered and annihilated. The Count was displeased.
He told the Captain of tanks so forcibly, adding to the man's discontent and sense of grudge.
The Captain of tanks found the old bull elephant standing alone, like a tall granite monument, upon the open plain. He was enormous, with tattered ears like the sails of an ancient schooner, and tiny hating eyes in their webs of deep wrinkles. One of his tusks was broken off near the lip, but the other was thick and long and yellow, worn to a blunt-rounded tip at the end of its curve.
The Captain stopped his tank a quarter of a mile from where the elephant stood, and examined him through his binoculars while he got over the shock of his size then the Captain began to smile, a wicked twist of the mouth under his handsome mustache, and his dark eyes sparkled.
"So, my dear Colonel, you want game, much game," he whispered.
"You will have it. I assure you." He approached the elephant carefully from the east, crawling the tank in gingerly towards the animal, and the old bull turned and watched them come. His ears were spread wide and his long trunk sucked and coiled into his mouth as he tested the air, breathing it onto the olfactory glands in his top lip as he groped for the scent of this strange creature.
He was a bad-tempered old bull, who had been harried and hunted for thousands of miles across the African continent, and beneath his scarred and creased old hide were the spear-heads, the pot legs fired from mule-loading guns, and the jacketed slugs from modern rifled firearms. All he wanted now in his great age was to be left alone he wanted neither the demanding company of the breeding cows, the importunate noisy play of the calves, nor the single-minded pursuit of the men who hunted him. He had come into the desert, to the burning days and coarse vegetation to find that solitude, and now he was moving slowly down to the Wells of Chaldi, water which he had last tasted as a young breeding bull twenty-five years before.
He watched the buzzing growling things creeping in towards him, and he tasted their rank oily smell, and he did not like it. He shook his head, flapping his ears like the crash of canvas taking the wind on a new tack, and he squealed a warning.
The growling humming things crept closer and he rolled his trunk up against his chest, he cocked his ears half back and curled the tips but the tank Captain did not recognize the danger signals and he kept on coming.
Then the elephant charged, fast and massive, the fall of his huge pads thumping against the earth like the beat of a bass drum, and he was so fast, so quick off the mark that he almost caught the tank. If he had he would have flicked it over on its back without having to exert all his mountainous strength. But the driver was as quick as he, and he swung away right under the outstretched trunk, and held his best speed for half a mile before the bull gave up the pursuit.