The Arab listened to the talk with little more comment than a grunt here and there. Mark was uncertain whether his silence covered fatalistic acceptance, or profound thought. Whichever it was, he seemed of all the party, the least affected by the situation. When he did talk it was usually to give reminiscences or to tell some Arab fable of which the point was completely incomprehensible to the European mind. His chief link with the others seemed to be a mutual admiration between Smith and himself. The big frame and the slow strength of the American found its complement in the wiry agility of the Arab.
Mark, growing stronger, began to develop a more active interest in his surroundings, and a desire to know how he came to be in his present company. His own method of entry was, beyond doubt, unique. He demanded to know how Smith had found his way in.
Smith pulled his ear thoughtfully, and looked at the others with some doubt. Mark realised that the three must know one another's stories by heart.
'I don't mind. Carry on,' said Gordon, and the Arab nodded amiably.
'Well, it ain't much of a yarn, but here it is. We—a company of us, that is—had been moved up to do some police work in the mountains north of Ghardaia—and let me tell you that if you don't know where Ghardaia is, you ain't missed much.
'Now, the Frenchies have an idea that a guy who's still alive after a couple of months in the Legion is so tough that he can't be killed anyway. And they behave according. They dress you up in the heaviest clothes they can find, give you a camel-sized pack and send you hiking for thousands of kilometres where the sun's shining twice as hot as it does any place else. I can't say how many blasted, blistering miles we put away that day, but I do know they marched us till we was pretty near dead. Some of the poor devils were all but asleep on their feet, and I was as near all in as makes no difference.
'I guess they didn't mean us to fight. The big idea was to make a nice bright show of uniforms, and whatever local sheik it was that had gotten a bit above himself would just naturally curl up and reflect on the glory of la France. Yes, that was the idea, right enough. The trouble was the Arabs didn't see it that way—maybe the uniforms didn't look smart enough, or something. Anyway, they waited till we were about played out, and then took a hand. We were in the open, and they were on the cliffs above us, skipping about just like antelopes-—'cept that they had guns—and taking playful pot shots—most of 'em bulls. It wasn't so funny, and we got orders to do the only possible thing—leg it to the cliff foot and take cover.
'There were a lot of caves there, all sizes, and not wanting to stay outside and have rocks dropped on our nuts, we made for 'em. And there we stayed put. They'd got us all nicely bottled up, and how! All you'd got to do for a fatal dose of lead poisoning was to take one look outside. Some guys who'd been told that Arabs can't shoot tried it—once.
'Maybe it sounds worse than it looked. Anyway, we weren't worrying a lot—I reckon we all just wanted to sleep. It wouldn't be long before somebody at headquarters missed us and started raising hell to know what we were at. We'd nothing to do bar sit tight and wait.
'But the local sheik didn't see the fun of that. He'd started something, and he was going through with it. It'd probably be easier for him to explain away the disappearance of a whole company than to account for a few dead bodies. He was wholesale-minded, that fellow. We'd been there about an hour when there was hell's own crash, away on the right. A couple of our men looked out to see what had happened—maybe they did, but it wasn't much help to us, seeing that they got bullets through their heads for their trouble. The rest of us were content to sit tight and guess what particular form of hell-raising was going on outside. A half-hour later we knew for certain. There was a Gawdalmighty explosion right above us. Half the cliff face must have split off and come down with a run. Leastways, it was enough to bury the mouth of our cave, and put paid to four poor devils who were standing near. The wily sheik had hit on a swell idea for covering up his tracks, and it looked like we were buried alive____I reckon the guys in the other caves were; I ain't seen none of 'em in these parts.
'Well, that left three of us standing. Olsen, Dubois, and me. And we had the choice of sitting down to die right there, or looking round the cave to see whether there wasn't some other way out. We hadn't a hope of shifting the tons of stuff in the entrance. After a bit we found a kind of a crack at the back. There was a draught through it, which meant it went some place. We shoved in and started hiking again, with a few bits of candle between us.
'I don't know how long it was before Olsen and me found ourselves looking down a split into one of those lighted tunnels—some days, most likely. And it's no good my telling you the way those lights struck us; you must've felt the same way yourself when you first saw 'em. If it hadn't been that Olsen saw 'em, same as me, I'd 've thought I was nuts.
'We'd lost Dubois. He'd fallen into a crevice some place back along, and broken his neck—poor devil. Olsen wasn't in too good shape, either; he'd broken an arm, and pretty near knocked himself silly on a stalactite. But we'd made it—just.
'A bunch of them white pygmies found us wandering around. They didn't seem much surprised to see us. They brought up some food, and let us sleep a bit, then they marched us off here.'
He stopped. Apparently he considered his tale was finished. From Mark's point of view, it was scarcely begun.
'But what is this place?' he prompted. 'You forget I've seen practically nothing of it except this particular cave.'
'This? Oh well, you could call it a kind of jail. It's a corner of their system of caves, and there's only one way in to it. You were "out" when they lugged you along, or you'd have seen the way it is. They brought you down a tunnel much the same as the rest, only it stops short on a ledge. And that ledge is about a hundred feet up the side of one of the biggest of our caves. There's no ramp, nor steps, nor nothing leading from it. They just put a rope round you and let you down in here, and that's that. You can't climb up a hundred feet of smooth rock—not even if you're a human fly.'
'But do you mean to say that nobody's tried to get up?'
'Tried? By gosh, they have. But there's always some of the little grey guys watching for 'em. There's marks near the bottom where somebody had a try at cutting hand-holes—they say he was stopped by a rock being dropped on his head. I once saw a fellow try to make a break for it, Frenchie, he was, and about half crazed, or he'd never have tried it. They'd just let down a new specimen into this corral when this guy thinks he sees a chance. He rushes out of the crowd of us watching, grabs the rope and starts climbing like a monkey. They let him get three-quarters of the way up before they cut the rope.'
Mark remained almost as puzzled as before. Smith had been so long below ground that he failed to understand the bewilderment of a newcomer. Familiarity had wiped away his earlier amazement at this system of caves. Its existence had become an accepted, unsurprising fact, and the life within it a misfortune rather than an astonishment.