Long after the movement had slowed and the weight had gone out of the sound, Ed and I stood there, incapable of action, stunned by the terrible vastness of it. It had a sort of horrible fascination. It took an effort of will-power to make me turn my head and look behind me, up the gorge, to see that the others were safe. Thank God, they were. They were in a little huddle as though clinging to each other, and they were as motionless as we were.
I looked back again at the scene of desolation and felt slightly sick. The dust was settling now and the sunset colours on the mountain top were flaming into vivid beauty. And into the dark cavern of the gorge a stillness was creeping, not a graveyard stillness, but the deep, satisfied stillness of Nature. And then, clear across that stillness, came a cry. It was a high, piercing cry, and I heard the name of Allah. Down by the gorge mouth, clear of the outer spill of the slide, was a little knot of men. They were waving their arms and calling down curses on our heads. One of them, a big, bearded man, was shaking his fist at us and clawing his way towards us across the debris of the slide.
I turned and started up the slope of rock towards the others. ‘Come on,’ I shouted at Ed. ‘Hurry, man. We’ve got to be out of this gorge by nightfall.’
He caught the urgency of my voice and came hurrying after me. ‘There’s only a handful of them left,’ he said breathlessly as he caught up with me. ‘And anyway it was that damned Greek that caused the explosion. It was nothing to do with us.’
‘They don’t know that,’ I said. ‘He was a European. That’s all they know. If they catch us in these mountains at dawn…’ I didn’t bother to finish the sentence. I needed my breath, for we were climbing at a desperate rate to join up with the rest of the party.
CHAPTER FOUR
The trek out of that gorge was a nightmare. It wasn’t that we were followed. The men who had screamed their need of vengeance at us were fully occupied searching the debris for their dead. But the sun was setting fast and if darkness overtook us before we had climbed out of the gorge, we should be trapped there, and when dawn came we should be hunted down amongst the rocks of the mountainsides and killed.
The ledge up which we were moving gradually narrowed until it finished abruptly at a sheer rock climb of twenty feet or more. It sloped slightly and there were hand-and footholds, but except for Ed we were all wearing shoes, and we had nothing with which to rope ourselves together. Below us was an almost vertical drop of some four hundred feet to the bottom of the gorge. We paused there a moment, looking back. The slide filled the whole mouth of the gorge and water was already building up against this natural dam to form a wider and deeper lake, red like a gaping wound. The flowing robes of Berber men moved ghostlike amongst the debris of the fall, searching for their dead.
There was no going back and we turned to face the cliff of rock that towered above us. ‘We’ll never get up there,’ Karen said.
‘Sure you will,’ Ed said cheerfully. ‘There’s nothing to it.’ He had her take her shoes off. ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ he said as he started her off. His tough, rubber-soled boots gripped the rock as he climbed, encouraging her all the time, sometimes bracing her foot with his hand. Jan stood with his head back, watching her until she reached the top. ‘Come on,’ Ed called down to us. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’ He climbed back down the face of the rock and met Julie halfway, helping her up as he’d helped Karen.
The climb wasn’t really difficult, but it took time. The sun had already set before we had all gathered at the top. The gorge was cold and dark now, and, above us, the slopes of the mountain seemed to stretch into infinity. We started up, climbing as quickly as we could. But we made slow progress. Karen slipped a great deal in her leather soles and Jan was out of training for this sort of thing. ‘Latham!’ Ed called back to me. I’ll go ahead to find the track. It’ll be too dark to see soon. I’ll call directions down to you. Okay?’
It was the only thing to do. ‘Yes, you go ahead,’ I told him.
He was fit and seemed to have the feel of the mountains. He climbed fast and in a few minutes he was lost to sight over the brow of a hump. Darkness fell swiftly. It was odd the way it came. Our eyes adjusted themselves to the diminishing light and even when the stars were out I could still see my way ahead. Then I looked down to negotiate a tumbled patch of rock and when I looked up again I could see nothing — only the vague shape of the mountain humped against the studded velvet of the sky.
I shouted and Ed’s voice hallooed back to us, very faint and far away. Sound was deceptive, curving round the larger rock buttresses, so that we worked too much to the left and found ourselves up against a cliff. It took us a long time to negotiate it and then, when we could climb again, we found ourselves in an area of massive great rocks as big as houses with deep gashes between that appeared as dangerous as crevasses in a glacier. We called and called, but could hear no response.
I worked away to the right then, calling all the time. But a wind had sprung up from off the top of the mountain and we heard nothing. I kept on working to the right, hoping to get downwind from Ed and hear his calls, but I must have gone too far, for we reached an area where the rocks were piled in absolute confusion. I tried to cross this, still attempting to get downwind, but it was a very bad patch. Loose rubble slid away from under our feet and even some of the bigger rocks showed a tendency to move. And then, as I was climbing round an extra large piece of rock, my foot braced against it, the thing moved. I shouted a warning to the others and clutched hold of the ground above me. The rock crunched as it moved. I could see it as a vague shape moving gently over on to its side. It hung there a moment and then moved again, dropping away out of my field of vision. We stood there, braced against the slope, listening to the sound of it crashing and banging down the mountain, gathering stones in its path so that there was a rustling, slithering sound of rubble behind it. There was a heavy splash and then silence.
I knew then where I was. I had come much too far and we were right out on the face of the new slide with the broken, crumbling cliff above us. It was already past nine. We had been clambering and stumbling across the face of the mountain for almost three hours. I tried to estimate how far across the face of the slide we had come. ‘Do we go forward or back?’ I asked Jan, trying to remember which side of that cliff face was the better going.
‘If we go forward,’ Jan said, ‘we’ll be on the route Karen and I came down last night. With luck I might be able to find my way back to the piste.’
‘And if we go back?’
‘I don’t know.’ His voice sounded nervous. We were both thinking about the chances of getting across the slide without disturbing it and starting the whole new slope on the move.
I asked the two girls which they would prefer to do. They both agreed. ‘Let’s go on.’ And so we inched our way forward across the face of the slide, scarcely daring to breathe, let alone put our weight on to any of the rocks. Stones clattered down, little drifts of scree and dirt were started. Occasionally a larger rock shifted and then went bouncing and thudding down the slope. And each time the sound ended in a splash of water.
It took us nearly two hours to cross the face of that slide and all the time the retina of my memory carried the picture of how the slide had been after Kostos hurled that stick of dynamite. The picture was appallingly vivid and every time I heard a stone shift or a trickle of rubble start, my heart was in my mouth and the sweat stood cold on my forehead. And each time I cursed myself for having led them too far to the right, for not having realised that we hadn’t climbed above this obstruction.
But a little after ten-thirty we came out on to undisturbed _ mountainside and lay there, panting and exhausted, with a bitter cold wind drying the sweat of physical and nervous exhaustion on our tired bodies.