The Quest of Julian Day (51 page)

I instinctively put my hand to my belt to feel for my gun and it was only then that I remembered I had given up carrying it a few days before because there did not seem the most remote likelihood of an occasion arising where I might need it, and it was an additional weight which added slightly but persistently to the toil of ploughing about in the sands under the hot sun. Sylvia saw my movement and interpreted it correctly.

‘You left it in the mess-tent,' she said. ‘I saw it there before we started; but even if you had it I wouldn't let you shoot me I'm not going out that way.'

‘I hope we're not going out any way,' I replied with more conviction than I was feeling. ‘We've got our water-bottles and there's a reserve supply in the car so we ought to be able to hang out all right until the others find us.'

She nodded. ‘I hope you're right, although I know you don't believe that. Now our car tracks have been wiped out there's not the least indication as to where we've got to and these wretched dunes are as like each other as the rows of pins in a paper packet. They limit the range of vision, too, so much You know yourself that you can rarely see more than the half-mile from one crest to another. There's about as much hope of their locating us as there would be of a trawler picking up a rowing-boat in the English Channel with a high sea running.'

‘Don't let's take too gloomy a view,' I pleaded. ‘And if the
worst does come to the worst there's an easier way out than letting thirst or a bullet finish us. I had plenty of time to think of it when I was cooped up in that filthy tomb.'

‘Perhaps, but I've told you already that I'm not having any. While there's life in us there's always hope; and I've got my own reasons for preferring even the most painful death to suicide.'

‘What are they?' I asked curiously.

‘I don't believe that any of us are ever called on to suffer more than we can bear,' she said slowly. ‘And although we should avoid suffering by any normal means we can, we've got to take it when it's thrust upon us, because it's a kind of test of our spiritual strength; and if we can succeed in passing it we get good marks for it later on.'

‘You mean, in some future life?'

‘Yes. Anybody who's had to study ancient religions as much as I have must realise that the ancients held much more logical beliefs about the hereafter than those usually accepted in the modern world. It would be so frightfully unfair to judge everybody on just one microscopic span of about sixty-odd years and then award them either a harp and crown or eternal damnation for the countless millions of years which go to make up eternity.'

‘You believe that we have many lives, then?'

‘Yes. Here or elsewhere.'

I knew a little about the purer Buddhism myself and our conversation about the possibilities of what might happen after death became so intriguing that for the next few hours we almost forgot the desperate situation we were in.

Gradually the sun sank down like a fiery ball to the western horizon, the magnificent colourings which we had seen night after night during our journey through the desert again filled the sky. Slowly the afterglow faded and we were wrapped in darkness.

Both of us had water-bottles with us and I had a packet of chocolate in my pocket so we took a modest drink and shared the chocolate between us for our evening meal.

There is a strange fascination in sleeping out in the desert; the utter stillness brings a feeling of complete peace and in the crystal-clear air the myriads of stars twinkle in the heavenly
canopy with a brightness hardly believable to those who have only viewed them from the streets of cities.

Our long talk about the possibility of lives to come had fortified us both to a most astonishing degree. There was nothing that we could do to save ourselves and' for the time being we had accepted the fact quite calmly that it lay on the knees of the gods whether we were rescued or must die there.

Our only discomfort at the moment was the chill that had crept into the air after sundown and the knowledge that it would increase to a bitter cold before morning. With a view to protecting us from it as much as possible I scooped out a shallow trench with my hands about six feet long, eighteen inches wide and a foot deep.

‘There you are,' I said to Sylvia when I had done, ‘Lie down in that and cover the lower part of your body with the sand. It ought to protect you from the cold a bit, and I'll dig another for myself near by.'

‘We should be much warmer together,' she remarked quietly.

I knew she was quite right although I hadn't liked to suggest it, so I broadened the trench and we lay down in it side by side; then I put my arm round her neck so that she could rest her head on my chest and be more comfortable.

We lay there in silence for a bit and the warmth we gave each other with the sand over our legs was just sufficient to dispel the cold we had been feeling. I was not the least sleepy and lay there on my back studying the patterns of the constellations; but I thought that Sylvia had dropped off, when she moved her head a little and spoke.

‘You know, Julian, when we met that first night out by the Pyramids I thought we were going to have a love-affair.'

‘So did I,' I agreed. ‘But you had a quaint idea of showing it in the way you treated me when we got back to the Semiramis.'

She laughed softly. ‘Well, you must confess that little trip through the cotton fields was enough to fray any girl's temper; and of course you couldn't know then that you had ruined one of my few presentable dresses and that I was much too hard-up to buy another.'

‘You poor dear. That was pretty hard. If only I'd known I would have bought you a dozen.'

‘How lucky you are to have lots of money, Julian.'

‘Surely you don't need telling that money doesn't necessarily bring happiness.'

‘It can carry one the devil of a long way towards it.'

‘I suppose that's true; but no amount of money could ever set
me
on my feet again, unfortunately.'

‘You
are
a mystery-man, aren't you?'

‘Are you tired?' I asked.

‘Not a little bit. It's only about half-past eight and I shan't sleep for hours yet.'

‘Then if it would amuse you I'll tell you now about my murky past.'

‘I wish you would.' She wriggled herself down more comfortably beside me. ‘I've got all the average female's allowance of curiosity and you've no idea how many hours I've spent wondering what the mystery is that you've kept hidden so carefully from us all.'

I told her then about my brief career in the Diplomatic Service and its tragic termination. She seemed to think that I was making mountains out of molehills and behaving like an idiot to hide myself under an assumed name. As she said, the whole thing had been appallingly bad luck and nobody could possibly blame me if they knew the full story.

I pointed out that the tragedy of it was, that I couldn't possibly tell
everybody
the full story; I could let my personal friends know the truth and any fresh friends that I made but that wouldn't stop other people who didn't know the facts believing me to be the worst sort of traitor who had sold his country's secrets.

‘Just think for a moment,' I said. ‘How would you like to be the wife of a man who was constantly being cut by all sorts of people and have to face a never-ending situation in which, as soon as you started to make new friends, they heard some beastly rumour about your husband and dropped you like a hot brick?'

‘I shouldn't mind,' she said firmly, ‘If I loved him. Two people who really love each other don't need anybody else, and the few real friends one had would know the truth and continue as friends just the same.'

‘You would make a grand wife, Sylvia,' I said suddenly.

‘Is that a proposal?' she laughed.

‘No, my dear. I'm afraid it's not. In spite of all you say I'm not quite such a blackguard as to contemplate asking any decent girl to share the furtive sort of existence that has been thrust upon me. And anyway, you don't love me.'

‘How do
you
know?'

‘Because you told me yourself only a few days ago that you were still bats about that young excavator you had such a hectic affair with.'

‘That's quite true. I'd marry him tomorrow if I were safely out of this and we had just enough cash to start a little home together with a reasonable prospect of not having to starve. But there are different sorts of love, aren't there?'

‘Of course,' I said slowly.

‘I loved him in every way; mentally and physically. We lived together for nearly three months but I knew with an absolute conviction that when our passion had worn off we should still be immensely happy together. That's real love and if only we had had the money to get married I should have been absolutely faithful to him. There is the other kind, though; just physical attraction. One knows quite well that it's not going to last but it can play the very devil with one's imagination while it does.'

‘You needn't tell me.' I smiled. ‘I've only just got over the attack I had with Oonas.'

‘You wouldn't have married her, then, if you hadn't got your unfortunate past, and she had been just the same but free of her appalling criminal instincts?'

‘Good lord, no! She was a simply marvellous mistress but her crookedness apart, we should have tired of each other in a couple of months at most.'

‘Yes, I know just what you mean. At times like that one's hardly responsible for one's actions.'

‘You seem to have been bitten by the same bug yourself sometime or other,' I remarked.

‘Well, I'm twenty-six, you know, and although I don't think you could really call me a bad lot, I had rather a rotten break when I was eighteen. I knew next to nothing and the chap was rather a swine. Having once taken the downward path
there were two occasions later on when, having really fallen pretty hard, I went off the deep end again of my own free will. It wasn't real love in either case although, of course, I persuaded myself that it was at the time. I admired them both tremendously too, and I had rather the same sort of feeling for them as I had for you when you pulled me out of that hellish place down at Ismailia.'

It was, I suppose, our acceptance of the virtual certainty that we were going to die out there in the desert that made us talk with such absolute freedom. There seemed no point whatever in observing any sort of conventionality or hiding anything from each other any more. Neither of us was in love with the other in the real sense but we had been strongly attracted from the beginning, and I said thoughtfully:

‘I'm not going to tell you that I regret the Oonas episode because I don't; but I do feel that both of us have missed something through her coming on the scene. We
did
make a good start along the old, old road, that night out at Mena and by the time I had got you out of the House of the Angels I had as good as fallen for you. Even if I could have, I'm not saying that it would ever have got to the point where I should have asked you to marry me, because I honestly don't think we've got enough in common to hitch up for life together; but I am quite sure that I shouldn't have been able to resist making love to you if I hadn't left Cairo in such a hurry to contact Oonas on the Nile boat.'

Sylvia moved her head slightly and turned her face up to mine. Her eyes were shining in the starlight as she said:

‘I wouldn't marry you, Julian, even if we were out of this and you asked me. There's only one man in the world whom I would marry. But I don't see any reason why you shouldn't kiss me good night.'

One kiss begets another and although the Angel of Death was hovering over us we defied him because youth and life were still pulsing in our veins. It was late when we finally dropped asleep like tired children after play.

In the morning we were woken by dawn flaming in the eastern sky; no sound disturbed the stillness and no hoped-for figures broke the utter desolation of the sand-dunes. We took a swig of water apiece from our flasks but had nothing left to eat
and I knew that we must now attempt to get back to the car if we could find it.

During the previous afternoon and evening we had shifted our position a little from time to time on the top of the ridge so we should not even have known which way to set out if it had not been for the sun which gave us our direction roughly. Sylvia's foot was stiff and ached a little but was no longer acutely painful and now that we were no longer trying to beat the coming of sunset, as we had been when we started out on the previous afternoon, we were able to take our time. Leaning on me she managed a slow limp quite easily and I made her sit down and rest for a few moments every quarter of a mile.

Fortunately I remembered that in our effort to get back as far as possible along our own track to the rendezvous we had crossed four ridges, so when we made our way slowly down the far slope of the fourth I knew that it was the valley in which misfortune had overtaken us; but the car was not in sight.

Both of us felt we had gone a little too far to the right so we turned left and walked along the valley bottom. After covering about two hundred yards Sylvia noticed a dark object sticking up in the sand some little way ahead of us and as we came nearer I thought it was a small brown rock. Even the sight of such an ordinary object quite excited us when our eyes had looked upon nothing but sand for so many dreary days and we experienced something of what Robinson Crusoe must have felt on coming upon Man Friday's footprint. On stooping down to examine it we saw that it was not a rock at all, and when I went to pick it up it fell to pieces in my fingers.

Closer examination showed that it had once been a thick, bowl-shaped piece of leather but the passing of endless years had blackened it and made it so brittle that it fell into dust as we handled the broken pieces. All that remained worth looking at was an iron rim and a round, iron stud which had been in its centre. We knew then the strange trick that Fate had played us. Cut off from our base, hopelessly lost in the Sea of Sand almost resigned to the prospect of the death that was stealing relentlessly upon us, we had at last found our first real trace of the lost legions of Cambyses. The thing which had fallen
to pieces at our touch had once been the crude leather helmet of a Persian infantryman.