‘Kostos was in Marrakech two days ago,’ I said.
‘So, I was right. How do you know this?’
‘Bilvidic told me. And Ali d’Es-Skhira is with him.’
Sitting in the caravan over a large cognac I told them about the interview. And when I had finished Jan said, ‘Well, that settles it. We slip out of Enfida tonight. Julie says if we leave shortly after midnight we’d be across the pass by dawn. By tomorrow night, if we drive hard, we can be at Foum-Skhira.’
‘We’ll need a car,’ I said.
It was Julie who answered. ‘We’ll take the bus.’ She was smiling a little sadly. ‘I don’t want to stay here — not alone. And there’s no hotel south of Ouarzazate; not until you get to Zagora, and you aren’t going there.’
I sat and looked at her. I thought I ought to say ‘No’ — that it was stupid for her to get mixed up in it. But seeing the way she looked — keyed up and excited — I thought maybe it was a good idea. It would take her mind off George’s death.
There were a great many things to be done if we were to start that night — stores to get and the bus to be literally dug out. We agreed that Jan and I should feed at the auberge and retire to bed there in the ordinary way. We would slip out of Enfida at night, just in case.
It seemed a long evening, sitting there in that dreary bar room, talking with Madame, watching the Arabs who guarded the olive piles at night drift in and out for coffee. But at last it was ten o’clock and Madame was seeing us to the door to the stairs. ‘Dormez bien, mes enfants. Dormez bien.’ Her deep, throaty voice was like a benediction and I heaved a sigh of relief. From the window of my room I saw that a light rain was falling. The night was black and quiet.
Two hours later we slipped out by the terrace and the gate leading on to the road. Julie had the old bus waiting for us just below the road. It was exactly twelve as we drove down the winding road and across the bridge and up through the deserted street of Enfida on the Marrakech road. We left the olive trees behind, and the road and the red earth of the plain stretched ahead of us in the headlights. It was like that for hour after hour, except that the plain gave way to mountainsides that loomed like dark shadows on either side of us as the road began to climb.
The first grey light of dawn found us grinding up the hairpin bends to the top of the pass. Julie was at the wheel and the bus swayed heavily on the incessant bends, the wheels skidding in the loose slush of melted snow that covered the road. And then at last we were at the top and there were the gaunt pylons of the teleferrique marching like Wellsian monsters through the cleft in the mountains. We drew in beside a big stone notice — tizi n tichka, alt. 2.250 m., and below were recorded the Army units who had slaved to build the road through the pass.
We were at the top of the High Atlas. We were astride the shining white barrier of the mountains that hide the strange, desert lands of the south. I had never crossed them, but I knew that beyond lay a different world, a world of kasbahs and dusty palmeries set in a land of black stone hills, rounded with age. And beyond those black hills of the Anti-Atlas was nothing — only the limitless wastes of the Sahara, a sea of sand.
We sat there and stared at the pale dawn sky ahead, conscious of a sense of the unknown, as though we were on a peak looking out across a strange sea. I was conscious, too, of a stillness within myself, and within my two companions. I glanced at Jan. His face was tense, his blue eyes fixed with a sort of desperate eagerness. He stood there upon what was for him the threshold of a Promised Land — the thing he dreamed of for himself and his wife, Karen — his last chance of a refuge from the nightmare in which he had lived.
The sun rose and touched the first of the mountain tops. Without a word Julie started the engine and we began the long run down to Ouarzazate. Nobody spoke. Our eyes were fixed on the sky ahead and the road winding down through the mountains. Somewhere, down there among the black stone hills, was Kasbah Foum.
PART THREE
CHAPTER ONE
The mountains changed abruptly the moment we were across the divide as though to emphasize that we were entering upon a wild, strange land. Where, on the northern side, there had been scrub and small trees and slopes of snow glimmering white in the dawn, there was nothing now but naked rock. The sky was pale, a duck’s egg, pastel blue, and above us to the left rose piled-up cliffs of sandblasted stone that flanked the valley in a long ridge, their battlements picked out in gold as the sun rose in the east.
It was a beautiful, pitiless country.
We stopped for breakfast where the road crossed the first big torrent of melted snow. It was bitterly cold with a chill wind whistling down the valley from the peaks behind us. Yet, by the time the tea was made, the sun had risen above the red rock fortresses of the ridge, the wind had gone, and it was suddenly hot. The abruptness of the change was startling.
It was then that Julie remembered she had some letters for me. There were two from England — a Bible Society tract and an offer of old clothes from some association I had never heard of. The third was postmarked Tangier and was from Karen Kavan. As we had agreed, she had written to me, not to Jan. It simply announced that her employers were taking a trip south and would be staying at the Hotel Mamounia for Christmas and then going on to Ouarzazate and Tinerhir. She was travelling with them and she gave the telephone numbers of the hotels they were staying at. The number of the gite d’etapes at Ouarzazate was 12. It was the same number that Wade had noted down in the back of his log against the name of Ed White.
I was still thinking about this as I handed Jan the letter. ‘It’s from your wife,’ I said. He scanned it eagerly and then asked the date.
‘Today is the twenty-third,’ Julie said.
He folded the letter slowly and put it away in his breast pocket, staring out through the side window along the grey ribbon of the road leading south towards Ouarzazate.
‘Is she all right?’ Julie asked.
‘Yes.’ He nodded quickly. ‘Yes, she’s all right. She’ll be in Ouarzazate on the twenty-sixth.’ There was a sort of wonder in his voice as though he couldn’t believe it was true.
‘Then you’ll see her.’
He looked across at Julie and smiled. ‘Yes. Yes, I hope so. It would be wonderful!’
He was thinking of his wife, stopping there at the gite d’etapes. And I was thinking of this man White. If Wade had planned to phone him there… ‘You remember you mentioned a man called White,’ I said to him. ‘When you were telling me about Kasbah Foum.’ He nodded. ‘Do you know anything about him?’
‘No, nothing. Except that he’d tried to contact me through the lawyers.’
‘Wade told you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t know why?’
‘No.’
‘Weren’t you curious about it?’
‘Yes. I asked Wade. But he wouldn’t tell me. Why do you ask?’
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking that perhaps it was White who had started this whole chain of interest in Kasbah Foum. He had been down to the south here. He might even have been to Kasbah Foum. Was that the reason Ali had instructed Wade to purchase the deeds from Jan? ‘Was White ever at Kasbah Foum?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head, staring at me with a puzzled frown.
‘Wade told you nothing about him?’
‘No, nothing. Only what I’ve told you.’
I hesitated and then said, ‘What about Wade? Had he ever visited Kasbah Foum?’
‘No.’ He said it slowly and then added, ‘But I think he intended to.’ He paused for a moment before saying, ‘As I told you, Wade was a crook. I have an idea he didn’t intend to play straight with Ali.’