Stewart, Angus (34 page)

He would lock his consciousness to a control. Something that was familiar, at peace. He chose the winter scene from the window of his childhood home: a ridge of hill, black against a sky of white plate glass. It was spread with ragged, twilight clouds, and crossed by a distant scatter of birds. Perhaps they were migrating; or merely returning home with the night.

With the light off, he began to see all manner of eyes. They appeared in extreme close-up, and, although only inches from his own, regarded him without curiosity. The stare of large birds was particularly cold. He was being considered by the eye of an eagle. The creature had more than sentience. It was drawing conclusions about Harold Lom. What these were remained an enigma. So fine and authentic were the details of the eyes he saw, that Lom wondered how his mind could have acquired, and stored them. Where had they come from? Why were they so precisely available in his consciousness? Then the succession of eyes, single, or at most a pair, incurious, yet calculating in the withdrawn obstinacy of their stare, gave way to artefacts of incredible intricacy, colour, and splendour. He walked now through vast halls of latticed ivory; over astounding geometric mosaics the size of Trafalgar Square. Everywhere, finesse of workmanship and material riches staggered the senses; yet the harmony of these things was flawless, inevitable. No proportion stood false. Whatever the intricacy of jewelled inlay, where gold seamed ebony, silver threaded tapestries more finely than spiders' web, or pearls studded delicate arches, nothing was heavy, garish or obtrusive. It was a divine harmony. And as Lom looked about him he saw that the technology as well was beyond the capabilities of men.

He began to wonder why he walked here alone. What was he looking for? Or what, perhaps, was he seeking to avoid? So far, panic had remained in abeyance. There had been no need to force his consciousness back to the carefully nurtured scene of the winter landscape, held ready in some pocket of his mind as though it were a colour slide in his hand.

And as Harrik Lom steadily ate
majoun
there was no time, and the loneliness was less. He was outside reality, and so became free.

  *  *  *  *  *

'No, I speak a bit because Daddy's a professor in Cairo, and we dig up old ruins and things. What a beautiful uniform! Is it a very big war?'

Sighing inwardly, Brown closed the door courteously upon Caroline as she began to chatter away happily to Abdslem. He and Jay were to follow in the Land Rover he had rented. Lom still rode in the military jeep. If he was conscious of this sudden change to vivacity on the part of the girl who until recently had been the interpreter attached to his film team, gave no sign of it. Caroline had already explained to Abdslem that it were best if Lom didn't know she was really there to watch over his health. The mission to rescue Achmed, on the other hand, was common knowledge.

'If it hadn't been for your casual remark at Sidi Ali,' Jay had said to him, 'I should never have fallen to Achmed's danger at all.'

Lom, when Jay explained this, had remained vague as to whom his original informant might have been. In fact he appeared to be in a world of his own. He sat hunched in the back of the police jeep, with the earthenware jar of
majoun
Abdslem had obtained wedged in safety beside him. He thought only of the photographs he might take. At casual halts in the course of the morning he took a number, rather surreptitiously, of their party. One or other of them would unexpectedly become aware of a click; and it would be Lom at work.

Jay drove. It was break-neck work keeping up with the speeding jeep; but at least the Land Rover was enclosed.

'Is it Zambia, and that copper? Ghana? Sierra Leone?' Jay wondered idly once.

'Is what?' Brown was nonplussed a moment; then said, 'Ah!' long and mysteriously.

'Must be well paid,' Jay suggested, thinking about the question of the baby allowance he had yet to raise.

'Would that I could tell you,' Brown said unhappily. 'But I must be mum. That woman's a terror.'

'And clearly boss,' Jay said. 'Though I see you share a bed.'

'And boss,' Brown repeated. 'But there simply
aren't
two singles in that sort of hotel.'

'Rough world,' Jay conceded.

They were motoring over the vast empty plain, and through the first of Marrakesh's famous palm groves, by the time the sun was fully up. The massive ramparts were touched a dull pink. Behind the city lay an obliterating haze of smoke-grey cloud, although the sky above was a cold, infinite blue, opaque and fragile as bone china. Jay experienced a twinge of disappointment; then almost gaped his astonishment aloud. He had simply been searching for the peaks of the Atlas inches too low on the horizon, while dismissing the actual line of snow-clad mountains as altogether too high to be other than a freakishly lit cloud formation rearing above the haze.

'It's going to be hot enough right here,' Brown said. 'Goodness knows what it'll be like the other side of that lot. Did the captain say where this place was?'

Jay shook his head, his foot still hard down in pursuit of the dust eddy half a mile ahead of them. 'He wouldn't. But presumably it's one of the more easterly kasbahs.'

'Miles from anywhere,' Brown mused glumly; then perked up. 'If there's a whole
fortress-full
of these mal-behaved boys, and they're just going to be
blown-up
. . .' he
beg-an. 'No, I suppose Manolito would object,' he finished hastily, realising Jay did not regard his humour sympathetically.

They had swept into the French town, still scarcely awake amid its formal concrete lamp-standards and arcaded shop fronts, although the broad boulevard already basked hotly beneath the steadily climbing sun. With every minute the cloud screen dispersed along the horizon, slowly unveiling the tremendous panorama of the High Atlas. Dwarfing bright trees, the solitary minaret of the Koutoubia mosque, itself destroyed centuries before, towered nobly in the foreground, an assertion both of man's own aspiration, and perhaps the symbol he had raised in response to the challenge with which the spectacle of so awesome an accident in nature had always confronted his city.

The jeep had pulled up. Jay drew in to the kerbside behind it. They had parked before a solid-looking villa over whose gateway there pranced a golden lion and unicorn on a peeling blue plaque.

'Whatever can they want with the consulate?' Jay asked. 'Caroline probably just wants to see if there are picture postcards from Daddy. He's a professor in Cairo,' Brown said hollowly. But his heart was behaving with such agitation at the unexpected suddenness with which they had reached his moment of crisis, that he got out of the Land Rover from a need for physical movement. He hesitated on the pavement, his made his way hack to a group of shops they had passed. When he returned, it was with an oblong object wrapped in
tissue-paper. Caroline had still not reappeared from the consulate.

'Yes! Johnnie Walker!' Brown volunteered rather nervously, stowing his bottle away. 'Might come in useful' He produced a large silver flask, and after offering it to Jay, who shook his head, took several long swallows. 'Can't put
new spirit in half-filled flasks,' he explained confusedly.

Now Caroline had bobbed out from the
consulate's archway and was coming towards the Land Rover. Obstructing any view from the other vehicle with her back, she leant in at Brown's window and slipped a cheap, buff envelope into the breast pocket of his shirt. 'Congratulations,' she said, with only the lightest irony, 'I hope you'll both be very happy.—We U-turn,' she
went on, addressing them both, 'collect picnic provisions at those shops back there, and drive on. Lunch on top of the world. All right?' She looked questioningly at Jay.

'Suits me.' Jay leant to the starter.

'How are you making out with the army?' Brown asked.

'He's gorgeous!' Caroline said; perhaps only for Jay's benefit.

'And Harold?'

'Totally absorbed with his little lenses, and a sort of sticky honey-jar of drugged toffee Abdslem got him last night apparently.' Caroline laughed. 'He says he wants to develop a photograph in a mountain stream which will show me
what I'm really like.'

'I'm sure that will be charming.' Brown deferentially inclined his head.

'Yes,' Caroline said. And Jay was aware only of some further vein of irony being tapped between them. Once more Brown offered his
flask. 'Not at nine a.m., and before motoring into the Sahara, I think,' Caroline explained. Brown shrugged with exaggerated despair, and took another drink.

In front of them the jeep made a furious U-turn: Abdslem with a sense of his own consequence. Jay engaged gear to follow more cautiously.

'What was all that about? The congratulations?' he
asked.

Brown was absorbed in the message, which looked like a single line of typescript 'Ah!' he said. 'A great triumph! In fact the one I said I'd share and celebrate with you.'

Jay smiled at him sideways. 'Hence the whisky?'

'Correct!' Brown agreed. 'But let's wait until you've pulled off your rescue before broaching the new
.
Besides,' he looked at his watch, 'A party
would
be indecent at eight-fifteen in the morning. Girl can't tell the time.'

'Okay!' Jay said, baffled. He braked once more for the shops.

In fact there was also something about Simon Brown that caused him to want to nurse his triumph alone for a while. Nashib was to grow up legitimate after all. The repair he had discovered with Manolo pretending indignation had not been a false dawn. His intuition that the far-off machinery in London would remunerate him in the way he stipulated had been right. Brown became conscious that engaging clutches of school-bound
Marrekeshi
were passing
along the pavement. The woman, Caroline, was shopping in an
alimentation générale
.
Lunch too, presumably, would be on expenses. Just then things were as right with the world as they could be; though that, perhaps, always left an indefinable something to be desired.

They climbed to nearly ten thousand feet to cross through the Tizi n' Tichka pass. The ranges of the High Atlas were a breathtaking world. Everywhere the villages, clinging among precipitous gorges, exactly matched their background, from which they were made. There were bright red villages and dung-coloured villages; villages harshly cold as granite, and rich mud ones. They came into the vast cedar forests, dense, and sweet smelling in the sharp morning air, and upon water meadows that were sap-green, extravagantly embroidered with bright alpine flowers. Now the fast mountain streams plunged in contrary directions, choosing their destinations unknowingly between the fertile valleys of the north; and the south, where they must rapidly dry to nothingness in the withering heat, among the great red rock canyons of the pre-Sahara.

It was beside one of these clear, leaping streams, as yet
uncommitted to either destiny in so far as Jay could judge, that they halted for lunch. Lom, patently living in some world of his
own, went off to develop photographs as promised. The results he would show to no one, explaining them to be still drying. Brown endeavoured to communicate with a herdsboy who wore a single gold ear-ring. The child looked suspiciously at the glistening section of french bread filled with cheese which he had been offered; but eventually consumed it. Brown then produced a bag of boiled sweets, kept presumably against just such an encounter. Caroline, meanwhile, seemed determined to give Abdslem all her attention. They sat some distance apart, and might well have become lovers. The sunlight filtered down through the giant cedars, and lay dappled on the ground, and upon the bright, preoccupied ripples of the hurrying stream. Unless one were to plot a route very carefully, this could well be the last shade, and the last water for something like four thousand miles. The thought came soberingly to Jay. It was still scarcely mid-morning. They filled tin water bottles, which Abdslem had spirited from nowhere whilst Caroline had been shopping. An hour later they moved on.

After another hour the first great heat was striking at them. Brown had ceased making even the most perfunctory remarks. He was still drinking. The long descent to the Sahara took them through a gigantic landscape of desolation. First the trees ceased; then there was no vegetation of any kind. Instead there rose only horizon upon horizon of massive rock, timelessly polished by sun and wind, contorted often into towering, incredible shapes, that were forever immobile. The colours were as nowhere else on earth. The spectrum of the rainbow lay veined in the endless succession of escarpment, gorge, and scree. A broken mountain threw back the dazzling sheen of burnished copper. The conical pyramid thrown up against the harsh sky was a delicate, rose-petal pink. Smooth, sprawled formations, like severed and forgotten limbs littering the floor of some giants' sculptorium, were the palest indigo. Huge causeways of oiled black rock exploded like brilliant white star-shells where fragments of mica hurled back the reflection of the sun. There were rock falls suggestive of an earthquake in a biscuit factory. Pebbles filled crevices like secret caches of marbles. Neat rectangles of stone lay arbitrarily scattered, mammoth, inexplicable offerings, fresh as new cheese. Sometimes, far below, a fuse wire of gold, unbearably bright to the eyes, marked the last withering trickle of what, only miles before, had been a cascading torrent, ceaselessly fed by the cold weight of snow water from the highest Atlas peaks.

Everywhere now was complete stillness; and their own motion seemed a dangerous violation of the desert's rigid watchfulness. The sun scorched pitilessly.

'Vulture,' Brown said, when perhaps another hour had passed.

Jay smiled, to find his face hard-glazed; his lips already taut, and cracking like old leather. He motioned to Brown for the water bottle. It was still a desperate job following the jeep. A mile ahead, it sped on like a lone column of smoke from some racing prairie fire; only now there was nothing that might ignite on the face of the earth, unless it be their vehicles, and themselves, so intrepidly crawling out upon an unending wilderness.