Looking at her, I wondered what she’d do now that her brother was dead. She’d have to do something, for I was pretty sure that George would have left her nothing but a few pictures. George hadn’t been the saving type. He’d spent money as he made it — always travelling, always painting.
I was remembering how I had first met them. It must be seven years ago now, when I was in Tangier. Their mother had died and left them some money, and they’d come out to Tangier because in Tangier there are no taxes. I had helped them get their money out. That was how I’d met them. Julie had been little more than a schoolgirl then, wide-eyed, excited by everything, deeply concerned at the poverty she saw side-by-side with the rich elegance of the crooks and tax-evaders who occupied the villas on La Montagne. They had stayed for a few months, and then they had gone to Greece and on to Turkey and Syria. Occasionally Julie had sent me a postcard — from Baghdad, Cairo, Haifa, and one, I remember, from Lake Chad after they had done a trip from Algeria right across the Sahara. It wasn’t difficult to understand why Julie had stayed with her brother. He had given her all the excitement and colour she had wanted. And it had suited George, for he was interested in nothing but his painting.
She glanced at me suddenly and our eyes met. ‘What are you thinking about, Philip?’ she asked. ‘About what an odd trip this is?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about you.’
‘Oh,’ Her mouth spread into a smile and the corners of her eyes crinkled with laughter. But she didn’t say anything further, just sat there, her gaze on the faint track of the piste.
‘I was wondering what you were going to do now,’ I said after a while.
She shrugged her shoulders. It was a very Latin shrug. But she didn’t answer my question and I was conscious of the stillness between us, It was as though we had suddenly touched each other and then as quickly withdrawn. I felt a softening in the marrow of my bones and I sat back, watching her face, absorbing the straight line of her nose, the smallness of her ears, the way her hair curled at the back of her neck. I’d never thought of her quite like that before. When I had first met her she had seemed very young and then, when they had descended on the Mission three months ago, she had just been George Corrigan’s sister. That was all.
And now… Now I didn’t quite know.
‘What’s that? Up there.’ Jan’s voice cut across my thoughts, tense and excited. He was leaning forward over my shoulder and pointing through the windshield. We were climbing now, and far ahead, high up where the dark shadow of a hill cut across the starry velvet of the sky, the yellow pinpoint of a fire showed.
Our radiator was boiling by the time we reached it. It was a petrol fire flickering ghostlike out of a pile of stones beside a battered jeep. Four men were huddled round it. Three of them were town Arabs, but the fourth was a Berber and behind him his two camels stood motionless, hobbled by the foreleg. I signalled Julie to stop and called out to them, enquiring if the piste led to Foum-Skhira.
The Arabs stared at us nervously, whispering together, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the headlights. It was the Berber who answered me. ‘lyyeh, sidi.’ Yes, Foum-Skhira was beyond the mountain. The piste had been washed away by the rains, but it was almost repaired now. The souk at Foum-Skhira had also been washed away. He shook his head gloomily. ‘Thanks be to Allah I have left that place.’
The three Arabs had got to their feet. They were moving nervously towards their jeep, which still carried the American Army star. ‘I’m going on,’ Julie said.
‘No, wait…’ But already her foot was pressed down on the accelerator and as we moved off she said, ‘I didn’t like the look of them. I’m sure that jeep wasn’t their own.’
I had been thinking the same thing, but I didn’t say anything and we climbed steadily up the mountainside. Out on the top it was bitterly cold. There was nothing between us and the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas, and the sense of space was immense. We stopped where the road dipped down on the other side. The sky was already paling in the east. We made some tea and watched the sun rise, turning the dark hills first pink, then gold, then a hard, arid brown.
I took over the driving then and we started down the mountain, which was black in shadow and cleft by the start of a deep gorge. Below us lay a brown valley broken by the green of a palmerie, which was shaped like a fist, with the forefinger extended and curving towards the base of the mountain away to our right. From the centre of the fist rose the sun-baked walls of a kasbah. It was Kasbah Foum-Skhira, and close by were the forts of the French Post.
Away to the south the valley opened out, vanishing into the morning haze as though running straight out into the sands of the Sahara: it was like a broad estuary, and on the far side — ten, maybe fifteen miles away — the containing hills were ruler-straight as though cut from the bed of an ancient sea. The sky was palest blue, the earth almost yellow in the clear, dry air. The piste leading to Foum-Skhira was a faint line drawn across the valley floor like the tracing of a Roman road in an aerial photograph.
We swung down in sharp curves until we came to a crumbling cliff and looked down a thousand feet into the black depths of a gorge. The piste seemed to hang on the very edge of the drop and as we rounded the cliff, we came upon a road gang cutting their way through a fall of rock. ‘Look!’ Jan gripped my arm, pointing down towards the entrance to the gorge. A walled kasbah with four mud towers, two of which had crumbled away, was picked out in the slanting sunlight. And beyond it, on the edge of a stream bed, was a little cluster of tents.
Kasbah Foum! It couldn’t be anything else, standing like that in the entrance to the gorge. And those would be Ed White’s tents. I glanced at Jan. Though his face looked tired under the dust-white stubble, his blue eyes gleamed with excitement. ‘We’re almost there,’ he breathed.
But it was half an hour before we were driving into Foum-Skhira. The Post consisted of two large forts with a big, open space like a parade ground between them and a single European house. One of the forts was white, with adobe roofs that made it look like a mosque. I learned later that it had been built by the Legion. The other, built by native Goumiers, was of mud with embrasured walls and little square towers like a kasbah. They were both of them empty and as we drove past they had the silent, deserted look of lost cities. A Tricolour fluttered from a white flagstaff outside the European house.
I suggested to Jan that we make contact with the French officer in charge of the Post first. But he said. ‘No. Drive straight on to Kasbah Foum. If those were White’s tents, I’d like to find out what he’s doing before I talk to the French.’
I drove on, past the European house, down towards the palmerie where ruined mud walls marked the site where the souk had been. There were camels hobbled there and mules, and there was a large crowd of people who stood and stared at us, not curiously and not hostilely, but with a strange air of waiting for something. It was the same when we skirted the walls of Ksar Foum-Skhira, the village of the kasbah. The place teemed with people who stood and watched us go by in silence. The women, clustered round the well holes, let go of the ropes so that the long poles for lifting the water stood curved against the sky like the gaffs of dhows. But all the palmerie seemed deserted and the cultivated patches had a neglected look, the little earthen banks to contain the water flattened almost to the ground.
Dust rose in choking clouds through the floorboards as we ran along the edge of the palmerie. Gradually the trees thinned and fell away so that we could see the dried-up stream bed we were following. ‘There it is!’ Jan cried, leaning forward. ‘Right at the entrance to the gorge. And there’s the old city and the watch tower just as Marcel described it to me.’