After that Jan took the lead. We moved very slowly. He was just about all in and so was Karen. She was slipping a lot and she had cut her head open on a rock. Her hand, when I helped her over a bad patch, was sticky with blood.
About an hour later we heard Ed calling from higher up the mountain. The sound of it came to us quite clearly on the wind. But I knew it was a waste of breath to answer him and we climbed doggedly on until we found the piste. I left the others there and trudged on up to the bend where the piste had been repaired. From that point I was able to make contact with Ed. A few minutes later he joined me. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve been waiting up there for hours, bawling my head off. What happened to you?’
I explained as we went down to join the others. ‘Well, thank God you’re here now,’ he said. ‘I’d just about given you up. Once I heard some rocks crashing down…’ He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he murmured, ‘It’s a terrible business, that landslide. There must have been thirty or forty of them buried under it. But it wasn’t our fault,’ he added quickly.
‘They’re not to know that,’ I reminded him.
‘No, I guess not.’
When we rejoined the others, we found them discussing whether we should make for the Post or go on up over the pass towards Agdz. It was over forty kilometres to Agdz and the Berber tribesmen from Foum-Skhira could easily overtake us on the piste. At the same time there would probably be a road gang working on the break in the piste higher up the mountainside. There might be transport there. But even so, it was a stiff climb and I wasn’t sure we could make it. ‘What do you think, Ed?’ I asked.
There was a long pause and then he said, ‘I didn’t tell you this before, but the reason why you lost me was that I had to stop calling down to you. I’d almost reached the piste when I heard mules coming up from the direction of Foum-Skhira. They were Berbers and they passed quite close to me, about ten of them, going up towards the pass and riding hard.’
That decided us. We headed downhill, back towards Foum-Skhira and the Post.
It was then just on midnight. It didn’t take us long to reach the foot of the mountain, but from then on the going was heavy in the deep sand of the piste and our progress became slower and slower, our stops more frequent. According to the map it was five kilometres from the foot of the mountains to the Post, but it seemed infinitely farther and it took us nearly three hours. And for the last hour of that journey we could hear the sound of wailing from Foum-Skhira. It was a high-pitched, quavering sound, strangely animal in the darkness of the night, and it grew steadily louder as we approached the Post.
At last the dark shape of the first fort loomed up, the domed roofs curved like some Eastern temple against the stars. We left the piste, making a wide detour round it, so that we approached the Post from the south. We went slowly, not talking, moving cautiously. They might have a lookout posted to watch for us. I didn’t think it likely, but it was just possible. A dog barked — a sudden, harsh sound in the stillness. And beyond the sound of the dog was the remote, persistent sound of the women of Foum-Skhira keening for their dead.
I think we were all a little scared. We were bunched close together and I could just see that Ed had his gun in his hand. We were braced mentally against the sudden, blood-curdling yell, the rush of an attack out of the night. It is easy to be frightened at night in a strange country among a strange people. Darkness should be the same everywhere. But it isn’t. This was desert country. These were desert people. We could feel the difference in the sand under our feet, see it in the brightness of the stars, the shadowed shape of the bare mountains. The chill of it was in our bones. It was as alien as the moon, as cold and naked. And the agony of that death-wailing froze our blood. The dog barked incessantly.
‘Goddammit!’ Ed muttered. ‘Why can’t that bloody dog keep quiet?’
A hand gripped my arm. It was Julie. ‘I wish we’d crossed the mountains and made for Agdz,’ she whispered.
We were in the open space between the two forts now. The shape of one of the towers was outlined against Orion. ‘Where do we go now?’ Ed asked. ‘The Bureau?’
‘That’s no good,’ I said. There won’t be anybody there.’
‘No, but there’s the telephone. We need to get on to the Commandant at Agdz, and quick.’
‘Well, we can try,’ I said. ‘But they probably lock the Bureau at night.’
‘What about Bilvidic?’ Jan asked. ‘He’ll be at the house, I imagine.’
We turned the corner of the fort and struck the beaten path that led to the Bureau. The French truck was still parked outside. The door of the Bureau was locked. ‘Let’s try the sleeping quarters,’ Ed said. ‘Maybe your friend Bilvidic is there.’ The guest rooms were built on to the Bureau in the form of an L. The door was locked and Ed beat on the wooden panels with the butt of his gun. The noise seemed shatteringly loud in the night stillness. The dog’s barking became frantic. The sound of the wailing continued unchanged — insistent and agonised. The building outside which we were clustered remained silent as the grave.
‘We’d better try the house,’ Jan said.
Ed beat once more upon the door, but nobody answered, and we trudged, coldly, wearily, through the sand to the house. The dog barked his fury at us from the wired-in enclosure. Once more Ed shattered the night with the hollow thudding of his gun-butt against wood. A window was thrown open and a voice demanded, ‘Qui va la?’ It was Bilvidic. I never thought I should be glad to hear his voice. ‘I’ll come down immediately,’ he said as soon as he discovered who we were.
It was bitterly cold standing there waiting outside that door. The sweat lay against my body like a coating of steel. The dog had stopped barking now and there was utter silence except for the sound of wailing which came to us loud and clear on a chill breath of wind. A light showed between the chinks of the heat-contracted woodwork of the door. The bolts were drawn back and there was Bilvidic. He peered at us in the beam of the torch he carried. ‘Come in,’ he said. His face was puffed with sleep and his voice sounded irritable.
It was as cold inside as it was out, except that there was no wind. ‘You must phone Agdz immediately,’ Ed said in his halting French. ‘They must send troops. Something terrible has happened.’ He glanced quickly round the room. It looked bare and chill in the hard beam of the torch. ‘Where’s the telephone?’
‘The telephone is broken,’ Bilvidic said. ‘It is cut when the piste is destroyed.’
So that was that. ‘We should have gone over the mountains,’ Jan said.
‘If we’d done that we might all be dead by now,’ I answered sharply.
Karen had slumped into an easy-chair. ‘It’s so cold,’ she said. She was shivering and I glanced at Julie. Her face was pale and she looked desperately tired. We were all of us tired.
Bilvidic’s assistant joined us then. He was angry at having been got out of bed. ‘What’s happened?’ he demanded. ‘Why have you returned here at this time of the — ‘
But Bilvidic cut him short. ‘Georges. Go to the Capitaine’s room and bring the cognac and some glasses.’ He turned to us. ‘First you have something to warm you and we get a fire lit. Afterwards we talk, eh?’ He went to a door leading out to the back and shouted, ‘Mohammed! Mohammed! Venez ici. Vite, utter My estimation of him soared then, for he must have been consumed with curiosity and a man is seldom at his best when rudely woken in the small hours.
Mohammed came and was ordered to produce a fire immediately. We moved into Legard’s study. Paraffin blazed in the wood-piled grate and Bilvidic handed each of us a quarter tumbler of neat cognac. ‘Eh, bien. Now we will talk. What happened last night at Kasbah Foum? There were rumours that the Caid was dead and that several indigenes had lost their lives. What happened, monsieur?’ He was looking at me.