The woman’s name, she told him, was Rosa Harsch. She was a geomorphologist, surveying and mapping the great triangle of uncharted forest which lay between Halakaz, Wau and Wadi Elmira on behalf of a development corporation—which she did not name. “There’s thousands of square miles of jungle here practically unexplored,” she said. “Underneath, most of it’s limestone—but the strata are still with unconformities and there are igneous intrusions all over the place and probably veins of anything you care to mention. It is a most interesting area.”
“It seems surprisingly poorly provided with rivers, when you consider how rich the vegetation is,” Illya said.
“Ah, that is because they all run underground: the limestone is riddled with potholes and caves and subterranean channels, like the Département of Haute Savoie in France. Most of them drain into the Bahr-el-Arab, the Bahr-el-Homr or the Soueh—and thus eventually into the Bahr-el-Ghaza river.”
While they ate a surprisingly sophisticated meal, Illya extended the story of his photographic expedition, mentioning the fictitious Waverly that he was supposed to meet. He was getting increasingly anxious about being out of touch with Solo and wondered if perhaps Rosa Harsch might have come across him.
“No, we have seen nobody except refugees from the burned villages,” she said. “And the forest is full of them. Trying not to starve, poor devils, and wondering all the time what is going to happen to them. So far as hiring animals at Halakaz is concerned, forget it. Halakaz is a six hundred year old mud fort with one street of tumbledown hovels leading up to it. If the inhabitants had seen a spare beast in the past ten years they would have cooked and eaten it. Where is the actual place of the rendezvous with your partner?”
“It was supposed to be somewhere near Gabotomi—only we were to keep in touch by radio, and mine was taken from me by an irregular colonel named Ononu…Speaking of Gabotomi, I believe that is a most interesting place, although it is not on the map. These so-called forbidden cities often are. Perhaps you could give me more explicit directions how to find it?”
But Rosa Harsch, whose replies had until then been detailed and specific, suddenly appeared to succumb to an attack of vagueness. She wasn’t quite sure, she said, where the place was—if it existed at all—and as far as she knew they had been nowhere near it. A few minutes later she rose to her feet and clapped her hands. “If you will excuse me,” she said, “there are two matters of a disciplinary nature which must be attended to before we retire. Mustapha! Ibrahim! Prepare things for the punishments, please.”
Two tall Nubians, who seemed to be in charge of the bearers, started shouting orders and the camp suddenly buzzed with activity. A trestle table was set up in the firelight and a bearer wearing only a pair of shorts was led up to it. He leaned forward over the end of the table. The Nubians spread his legs and tied the ankles to the table legs, binding his wrists and attaching them with another rope to the far trestle, so that he was stretched forwards across the length of the table.
The woman walked into her tent and reappeared with a peeled switch. “This man was discovered helping himself to more than his share of the liquor ration,” she said unemotionally. “Six strokes.”
She approached the table, measured her distance, and raised her arm. The switch hissed down and raised a livid weal. Illya watched in astonishment as the following five strokes fell in metronomic precision. Apart from a sharp intake of breath at each blow, the pinioned man uttered no sound. Nor was there any comment from the rest of the party, who watched in a grave-faced circle around the fire. As soon as the last stroke had fallen, Rosa Harsch turned her back and the Nubians rapidly released the victim, who limped back to his tent. A minute later they led a thin, bearded white man of about twenty-six to the table.
“This man, by his carelessness in his duties as clerk, caused us to lose a rucksack containing notebooks filled with irreplaceable data,” Rosa Harsch said. “Ten strokes.” And the process was repeated exactly as before.
When it was over, the members of the party dispersed to their various sleeping quarters and the woman returned to Illya by the fire. The flickering light smoothed out the network of fine wrinkles around her eyes and softened the contours of her face. From a certain rigidity about the waist and the twin bulges of flesh at each side of her back just below the arms, he guessed that she was wearing a laced corset beneath the shirt. But for all that she was still remarkably attractive.
“I see you have no color bar in your expedition,” he said lightly as she unbuckled the Sam Browne and dropped to the ground beside him.
“No,” she said seriously. “No color bar. Everyone is treated the same. It is best. In places as remote and as dangerous as this, it is unfortunately necessary to impose strict discipline. Without it, they take advantage—all of them. And that impairs efficiency. Without complete efficiency, an expedition of this sort is doomed from the start.”
“They all seem to take it for granted. Nobody resents such…discipline…being administered by a woman?”
“But of course not. I am the leader of the expedition.”
She offered Kuryakin a cigarette, and lit one herself. “And now,” she said, leaning towards him in the glow of the embers, “it is time to relax. Tell me about yourself; you could interest me, young man…”
Chapter 11
School is Dismissed.
WHILE ILLYA HAD been filling his radiator from the trickle of water in the wadi, Napoleon Solo, more than a hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, was guiding his horse between the stones of a moraine sloping down to a plain. Somewhere ahead of him, the caravan with the camel carrying the container of Uranium 235 was winding its way among the tall grasses and scrub oak that had supplanted the ubiquitous thorn trees.
He rode slowly, the homing device open on the saddle in front of him. At first, turning the pointer to ensure that he was taking the direction in which the bleeps were loudest was almost a formality: the trail was well marked and there was no other route the caravan could have taken. Later in the afternoon, when he was climbing another of the interminable series of limestone ridges with which the country was barred, he had cause to be glad of his foresight—for the track itself petered out among a wilderness of rock outcrops, and he was constantly having to check and recheck his route. Such food as he had had been abandoned with the camel and he was ravenously hungry. He was worried about the horse, too, for the animal had taken neither food nor water since he had escaped from Ahmed and the soldiers. He had ripped a length of cloth from his burnoose to improvise a headdress against the scorching rays of the sun. The remainder of his robes he had discarded and buried with the “pilgrim’s” papers. Now—thankful that he had been wearing his bush shirt and shorts underneath them—he was again beardless and normal of nose, in the guise of Napoleon Solo: mineralogist of Russian extraction, equipped with a laissez-passer countersigned by His Excellency Hassan Hamid…
Several times he attempted to contact Illya but the radio remained obstinately silent.
From the top of the ridge, he swept the country beyond with his glasses. It was becoming less barren, definitely: there were squares of cultivation here and there, and vegetation covered the rolling contours more thickly. Far off towards a range of tree-covered hills which reared, blue-hazed, against the horizon, a long line of dust marked the position of the caravan. He slid the binoculars back into their case and rode on down.