Cry Wolf - Smith Wilbur - Страница 36

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"You pick for me," Vicky invited.

"It is difficult," Sara admitted. "One is very strong and has much

warmth in his heart, the other is very beautiful and will have much

skill." She shook her head and sighed. "It is very difficult.

No, I cannot choose for you. I can only wish you much joy." The

conversation had disturbed Vicky more than she realized, and

although-she was exhausted by the long hard driven day, she could not

sleep, but lay restlessly under a single blanket on the hard sun-warmed

earth, considering the wicked and barely thinkable thoughts that the

girl had sown in her mind. So it was that she was still awake when

Sara rose from beside her and, silently as a wraith, crossed the laager

to where Gregorius lay. The girl had discarded the robe and wore only

the skintight velvet breeches, encrusted with silver embroidery. Her

body was slim and Polished as ebony in the light of the stars and the

new moon. She had small high breasts and a narrow moulded waist. She

stooped over Gregorius and instantly he rose, and hand in hand,

carrying their blankets, the pair slipped out of the laager, leaving

Vicky more disturbed than ever. She is of the desert. Once she lay

and listened to the night sound thought she heard the soft cry of a

human voice in the darkness, but it may have been only the plaintive

yelp of a Jackal. The two young Ethiopians had not returned by the

time Vicky at last fell asleep.

The radio message that Count Aldo Belli received from General De

Bono on the seventh day after leaving Asmara caused him much pain and

outrage.

"The man addresses me as an inferior," he protested to his officers. He

shook the yellow sheet from the message pad angrily before reading in a

choked voice, "I hereby directly order you"." He shook his head in

mock disbelief "No "request", no "if you please", you notice." He

crumpled the message sheet and hurled it against the canvas wall of the

headquarters tent and began pacing in a magisterial manner back and

forth, with one hand on the butt of his pistol and the other on the

handle of his dagger.

"It seems he does not understand my messages. It seems that I

must explain my position in person He thought about this with

burgeoning enthusiasm. The discomfort of the drive back to Asmara

would be greatly reduced by the superb upholstery and suspension

designed by Messrs Rolls and Royce and would be more than adequietely

offset by the quasi-civilized amenities of the town. A marble bath,

clean laundry, cool rooms with high ceilings and electric fans, the

latest newspapers from Rome, the company of the dear and kind young

hostesses at the casino all this was suddenly immensely attractive.

Furthermore, it would be an opportunity to supervise the curing and

packaging of the hunting trophies he had so far accumulated. He was

anxious that the lion skins were correctly handled and the numerous

bullet holes were properly patched. The further prospect of reminding

the General of his background, upbringing and political expendability

also had much appeal.

"Gino," he bellowed abruptly, and the Sergeant dashed into the tent,

automatically focusing his camera.

"Not now! Not now!" The Count waved the camera aside testily.

"We are going back to Asmara for conference with the General. Inform

my driver accordingly." Twenty-four hours later, the Count returned

from Asmara in a mood of bile and thunder. The interview with

General

De Bono had been one of the low points in the Count's entire life. He

had not believed that the General was serious in his threat to remove

him from his command and pack him off ignobly back to Rome until the

General had actually begun dictating the order to his smirking aide

de-camp, Captain Crespi.

The threat still hung over the Count's handsome curly head. He had

just twelve hours to reach and secure the Wells of Chaldi or a

second-class cabin on the troopship GaribaLdi, sailing five days later

from Massawa for Napoli, had been reserved for him by the General.

Count Aldo Belli had sent a long and eloquent cable to Benito

Mussolini, describing the General's atrocious behaviour, and had

returned in high pique to his battalion completely unaware that the

General had anticipated his cable, intercepted it and quietly

suppressed it.

Major Castelani did not take the order to advance seriously,

expecting at any moment the counter-order to be given, so it was with a

sense of disbelief and rising jubilation that he found himself actually

aboard the leading truck, grinding the last dusty miles through rolling

landscape towards the setting sun and the Wells of Chaldi.

The heavy rainfall precipitated by the bulk of the Ethiopian massif was

shed from the high ground by millions of cascades and runners,

pouring down into the valleys and the lowlands. The greater bulk of

this surface water found its devious way at last into the great

drainage system of the Sud marshes and from there into the Nile

River,

flowing northwards into Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.

A smaller portion of the water found its way into blind rivers like the

Awash, or simply streamed down and sank Without trace in the soft sandy

soils of the savannah and desert.

One set of exceptional geological circumstances that altered this

general rule was the impervious sheet of schist that stretched out from

the foot of the mountains and ran in a shallow saucer below the red

earth of the plain. Runoff water from the highlands was contained and

channelled by this layer, and formed a long narrow underground

reservoir stretching out like a finger from the base of the Sardi

Gorge, sixty miles into the dry hot savannah.

Closer to the mountains, the water ran deep, hundreds of feet below the

earth's surface, but farther out, the slope of the land combined with

the raised lip of the schist layer forced the water up to within

forty-five feet of the surface.

Thousands of years ago the area had been the grazing grounds of large

concentrations of wild elephant. These indefatigable borers for water

had detected the presence of this subterranean lake. With tusk and

hoof they had dug down and reached the surface of the water.

Hunters had long since exterminated the elephant herds, but their wells

had been kept open by other animals, wild ass, oryx, camel, and, of

course, by man who had annihilated the elephant.

Now the wells, a dozen or more in an area of two or three square miles,

were deep excavations into the bloodred earth. The sides of the wells

were tiered by narrow worn paths that wound down so steeply that

sunlight seldom penetrated to the level of the water.

The water itself was highly mineralized, so that it had a milky green

appearance and a rank metallic taste, but nevertheless it had supported

vast quantities of life over the centuries. And the vegetation in the

area, with its developed root systems, drew sustenance from the deep

water and grew more densely and greenly than anywhere else on the dry

bleak savannah.

Beyond the wells, in the direction of the mountains, was an area of

confused broken ground, steep but shallow wadis and square hillocks so

low as to be virtually only mounds of dense red laterite. Over the

ages, the shepherds and hunters who frequented the wells had burrowed

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