He gave a nervous little shrug. ‘It’s not the same. Here I would have been lost to the world.’
We sat in silence after that, drinking tea, wrapped in our own thoughts. For each of us that landslide meant something different. And for each of us the future was uncertain.
As soon as I finished my tea, I got up and went out into the hard, bright sunshine, walking through the shade of the olives until I came to where they ceased abruptly and there was nothing but great, piled-up heaps of mud and stone. It rose higher than the trees, the surface of it drying and caking in the sunshine.
Insh’ Allah! I kicked out viciously at a clod of earth. That’s what they’d be saying, here in Enfida and up the valleys at Kef and Tala and all the other mountain villages. Like disease and poverty and the loss of crops through water, it was the will of Allah and you shrugged your shoulders and did nothing about it.
I clenched my fists. Somehow I must fight back; show them that disaster wasn’t something to accept, but a thing to struggle against.
But how? How?
I bowed my head then, praying to God for some guidance for the future, for some hope; praying that I’d have the strength to go on, that I wouldn’t have to turn my back on it and admit that I’d wasted five years of my life.
But the answer to one’s prayers comes from inside, not from outside, and I was too raw and hurt by the shock of what had happened to feel any revival of spirit.
A hand slipped under my arm and Julie was standing there beside me. She didn’t say anything and we stood there, looking at what the giant force of Nature had done to the hillside. Twenty thousand bulldozers couldn’t have done it in a year, and yet it had happened in a few moments — in less time than it had taken a man to try and run half the width of it.
The slide stretched like a giant scar from the valley bottom to the very summit of the sheer hillside.
‘You mustn’t be too bitter about it,’ Julie said. She had seen my face, knew what I was thinking.
‘I don’t know where to begin,’ I said.
‘Something will turn up.’
I stared at her, seeing her standing there, straight and firm-lipped, remembering what she had lost there under that landslide. I should have been comforting her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She smiled and shook her head. ‘We’d better go down to the auberge now and see Madame Cast.’ Her voice was suddenly practical, though it trembled slightly. ‘I expect she’ll have rooms for you both.’
The news that I’d returned had spread and the open space outside the auberge was crowded with people. There were women there, as well as men — Arab women, their eyes watching us curiously from the safety of their veils; Berber women in their gaily-coloured cottons. The men, standing in little huddles by the heaped-up piles of black olives, carefully avoided my gaze. They were superstitious — curious but frightened; Allah had struck down the Dar el Mish’n and to talk to the Englishman would be unlucky. Men I had helped, whose sons I had trained as mechanics and joiners in my workshops, averted their gaze, afraid to speak to me, afraid to give me even a word of sympathy. They still believed in the Evil Eye. They wore charms to protect themselves against it — the charm of the Hand of Fatima. ‘Damn them all to hell!’ I muttered with sudden, pointless anger.
Julie’s grip on my arm tightened. ‘It’s not their fault,’ she said.
No, it wasn’t their fault. But what was the point of going on? Why bother to struggle against centuries of ignorance?
And then we were in the cold, dark interior of the auberge and Madame Cast was sitting, waiting for us, with her cat. She was a Frenchwoman who had married a German in the Legion. But, sitting there in her ugly, Victorian chair, there was no indication of a colourful background. The girl who had followed the Legion had been obliterated by the widow who for twenty years had run an auberge in Enfida and now she was like a huge-bodied female spider huddled in the centre of her web. She fed on gossip and her little eyes sparkled as she saw us. Both she and her cat were immense and shapeless, like the old carpet slippers she wore. Little grey eyes stared at us curiously out of the big, sagging face.
‘I have rooms ready for you, mes enfants,’ she said. She had known we must come to her.
‘I’ll leave you now,’ Julie said quickly. ‘Come and see me in the morning.’
Madame Cast watched her go and then she shouted to the Berber kitchen boy to bring us some wine. The room was big and dreary. Down one side ran the bar and in the corner, where Madame Cast sat, was a big white-tiled Austrian stove. The walls were decorated with discoloured posters of French holiday resorts and there was a rack of faded postcards.
The wine came and we sat and drank it, listened to Madame’s account of the disaster. Three farms had been destroyed as well as the Mission and the landslide had dammed up the river and flooded several olive groves. ‘And they blame me for the disaster?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘What else do they say?’ This old woman knew everything that was said in Enfida.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Does it matter, monsieur?’ She hesitated and her eyes softened. ‘Tell me, what are you going to do now?’
‘What are the people expecting me to do?’ I asked her.
‘They think you will leave Enfida and go back to your country across the sea. They say that it is the will of Allah.’
‘And if I stay?’
She folded her thick, work-stained hands in her lap. ‘They do not expect you to stay.’ There was silence between us for a moment and then she said, ‘Monsieur Frehel telephoned about an hour ago. He would like to see you.’
‘What’s he want to see me about?’ I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I expect, like everybody else, he is curious to know what you are going to do.’
So they were all waiting for me to admit defeat. Frehel was all right. We got on quite well together. But officially he didn’t approve of an English missionary at Enfida. A bitter sense of loneliness had come over me.
I got up then. I felt I couldn’t stay in that room any longer. It was so cold and dreary. And I wanted to think. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ I told Jan.
It was brighter outside. A cool wind blew down off the mountains, but the sun was warm. I walked up through the place of the olives, conscious of the stares and whispers of the crowd. I walked steadily up the road until I came to where the landslide had spilled across it and the gang of workmen were cutting into it with their shovels. I turned off to the right then and began to climb up through the olive groves, climbing towards the top of the slide. Maybe the attitude of the Berbers of the mountain villages would be different. There were too many Arabs in Enfida. Tomorrow I would go up to the villages at the head of the ravine.
It was dusk when I got back to the auberge. The single electric light bulb under its white porcelain shade barely illuminated the big, empty room. A table had been laid for the two of us in a corner. I stopped to warm myself at the stove. The cat was sitting in Madame’s chair half-concealing a copy of La Vigie. A headline caught my eye: TANGIER YACHT MYSTERY — What Happened to Second Man? — Police Search for Missing Captain Intensified.
I pulled the paper out from beneath the recumbent cat and glanced quickly through the news story. It was date-lined Tangier… and it is now known that there was a second man on board the yacht. His identity is being kept secret, but the police state that the search for M. Roland Wade, captain and owner of the Gay Juliet, who disappeared from the Hotel Malabata in Tangier two days ago, has been intensified. They wish to question him about the fate of this second man. Wade stated, when he was rescued from the wreck, that he was the only person on board. It is thought that Wade, who is a short, dark-haired man, may have slipped across the International Frontier at some unguarded point into Spanish or French Morocco. A close watch is being kept on all forms of transport and a description has been … There followed a description of Jan as he was when he had shared my room at the Malabata and a brief account of how the yacht was wrecked in the gale. And then: Wade was last seen when he left the Hotel Malabata in the company of M. Philip Latham, the Englishman who rescued him from the sea. M. Latham is believed to have returned to French Morocco where he is living. Inquiries are being made by the Moroccan police.