The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 81

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sky, and for a moment longer it seemed that the destruction was

complete. Then the silhouette of the cliff began to alter.

Slowly at first the wall of rock started to lean outwards.

He saw great cracks appear in the face, opening like leering mouths.

Sheets of rock collapsed and in slow motion slithered down upon

themselves like the silken skirts of a curtseying giantess. The rock

groaned and crackled and rumbled as the entire cliff began to fall into

the river far below.

Nicholas was mesmerized by the awful sight, and his brain seemed to have

been numbed by the explosion. It took a huge effort to force himself to

think and to act. He saw that the centre of the explosion had occurred

further down the trail, near the head of the mule caravan. Tamre was up

there, beside Aly. He and Royan were at the tail of the caravan. The

bomber up on the cliff had obviously been waiting for them to come

directly into the epicentre of his explosive trap, but had been forced

to trigger it when he saw them running back down the trail and realized

that they had been alerted and were about to escape.

Yet they were not clear - they were about to catch the peripheral force

of the landslide that was developing above them. Still holding Royan,

Nicholas stared up the falling cliff face and made a desperate

calculation.

He watched in petrified fascination as the vast tide of falling rock

swept over the trail ahead of him, picking up men and mules and carrying

them with it over the edge and down into the river bed. It swallowed

them, lapping them up like the tongue of some fearsome monster and

chewing them to pulp with razor fangs of red rock. Even above the

rumbling roar of the rock tide he heard the terrified screams of men and

animals as they were ploughed under.

The wave of destruction spread towards where he and Royan stood upon the

trail. If they had been directly under the explosion they would have

stood as little chance as those others, but as it ran down the cliff its

destructive momentum was dissipating. On the other hand, Nicholas

realized that there was no hope that they would be able to outrun it,

and what was about to fall upon them would still be devastating.

There was no time to explain to Royan what they had to do - he had only

seconds left in which to act. Sweeping her up in his arms, he leaped

over the bank towards the river. He lost his footing almost immediately

and they went down together, rolling end over end, but thirty feet down

there was a spur of rock the size of a house. As they came up against

the upper side of it, it broke their fall.

They were half-sturined, but Nicholas dragged Royan to her feet and

guided her into the lee of the rock wall.

"Mere was a cut-back here, and they crept into it and crouched flat.

Pressing themselves hard against the wall, they both held their breath

as the first chunk of cliff came bounding and bouncing down towards them

like a gigantic rubber ball, picking up speed with gravity, until it

smashed in to their shelter with a force that made the solid rock

against which they were cringing vibrate and resound like a cathedral

bell, and the hurtling missile leaped high over their heads, spinning

massively in flight before it dropped into the river. It raised a tidal

wave from the surface that broke like storm surf on both banks.

This was merely the forerunner of the maelstrom that now poured over

them. It seemed that half the mountain was falling upon them. As each

slab crashed into their shelter daggers and splinters burst from its

leading edges, filling the air they breathed with fine white dust and

the sulphurous stink of sparking flint. This immense cascade flew over

their heads or piled up in front of their shelter, and loose chips and

pebbles rained down upon them.

Nicholas crawled over the top of Royan, and covered her with his body. A

stone struck the side of his head a lancing blow that made his ears

ring, but he gritted his teeth and fought the impulse to lift his head

and look up.

He felt something warm and ticklish snaking through the short hairs

behind his right ear. It crept down his cheek like a living thing, and

it was only when it reached the corner of his mouth and he tasted the

metallic salt that he realized it was a trickle of blood.

The fine talcum dust powdered them and irritated their throats, so that

they coughed and choked in the uproar.

The dust seeped into their eyes, and they were forced to clench their

lids and keep them tightly shut.

One mass of rock the size of a wagon sprang high in the air and then

fell back close beside where they lay. The impact made the earth jump so

violently that Royan, with Nicholas's weight on top of her, was struck

in the belly and diaphragm with a force that drove the wind from her

lungs, and she thought that her ribs had been crushed.

Then gradually the downpouring of earth and rock began to subside. The

breath-stopping impact of great boulders into their shelter became less

frequent: The fine dust they were breathing began to settle. The

rumbling and roaring let up gradually, until the only sound was the slip

and slide of settling earth and rock and the burble of the river below

them.

Warily, Nicholas at last lifted his head and tried to blink the dust off

his eyelashes. Royan stiffed under him, and he crawled back to let her

sit up. They stared at each other. Their faces were caked into kabuki

masks with the antimony-white dust, and their hair was powdered like the

wigs of eighteenth-century French aristocrats.

"You are bleeding," Royan whispered, her voice husky with dust and

terror.

Nicholas lifted his hand to his face and it came away covered with a

paste of dust and blood. "It's just a nick," he said. "How are you!'

"I think I may have twisted my knee. I felt something give when we fell.

I don't think it's serious. There is very little pain."

"Men we have both been ridiculously lucky," he told her. "Nobody

deserved to survive that."

She made an effort to stand, but he restrained her with a hand on her

shoulder. "Wait! The entire slope above us is broken and unstable. Give

it time. There will be loose rocks coming down for a while yet." He

untied the Paisley bandana from around his throat and handed it to her.

"Besides which, we don't want-' But he changed his mind and did not

finish his sentence, While she wiped her face she asked shakily, "You

were going to say, besides which-?"

don't want to give those bastards

"Besides which, we up there any idea that we have survived their little

party.

Otherwise we will have them down here finishing the job, cutting

throats. Much better they believe that we snuffed it, as intended."

"Do you think- they are still up She stared at him.

there, watching us?"

"Count on it," he answered grimly. "They must be pretty chuffed with the

fact that they have at last succeeded in getting rid of you. We don't

want to pop our heads up right now and spoil it for them."

"How did you know what was going to happen?" she asked. "If you hadn't

grabbed me-' Her voice petered out.

In a few words he explained about the scrap of gelignite wrapping.

"Simplest thing in the world to pick one of the narrowest sections of

the trail and mine the cliff-' He broke Off as, faintly but

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