It seemed as if some hidden reserves of resinous sap were feeding the flames, sent them bristling high and forcefully, as if the only hope of the tree to keep its upright shape was to succour the fire that was sure to destroy it. When the quick of the tree was reached, the flame turned white, spilling pyrotechnic fire for a few seconds. Then the whole tree burned black and smoky once more, and two of the strongest branches fell into it.
It was only now that he noticed a man in the tree, having missed him in the confusion of the first shock. He was halfway up, astride the main branch forking left, arms held around the trunk and head pressed against it. The bomb was so close that the impact must have killed him. He supposed now that the pilot had seen him move, that the man heard the plane and ran up the tree for safety. For some, a chicken in every pot, for others a bomb on every human being to keep the chicken in every pot for themselves. It was a cruel blighting expense of spirit. As soon as people take to the hills or the wilderness, God pulls out of them. You’ve no business in the hills as far as God is concerned: if you aren’t prepared to stay in the valleys and suffer, He won’t look after you. He tried to spit, but the permanent condition of his choked throat spared no saliva to put out the vision of the burning man. What sins was he booked for, to end in such a way? The smoke plumed to vanishing point not too far up, a shaky impermanent stalagmite, the only movement of Nature for hundreds of miles, all that remained of a war between man-made chemicals and an earth-succoured tree. His binoculars showed the body falling into the base of the smoke.
When you light a match in such heat, the flame is invisible, and if you aren’t careful, you burn your fingers on it. With all smoke gone, a blue trunk appeared, air shimmering around it where the flame was active. They waited thirty minutes to give the plane time to come back and fly away again. New rules were conceived every day. They would not even talk, as if it might hear them with its complex spikes of homing and radar devices. In this life, there was no hope, no luck, only meticulous plotting and the certainty of what had already happened. Before survival had become an obsession they had foolishly thrown away half their force in a fight when the rest of them were lucky to have broken free, but now it had become a profession, a way of breathing, that had flattened them into the earth even before the plane was heard. He pressed hard into the grit and sand, though his body felt airless and light, fought to get deep into the earth as if to relieve the fever of thirst in him, and escape the danger clamped at his spine like a grappling-hook. If he could not cover himself in grit and dust, it was only because it wasn’t deep enough. Walking, walking, walking, you seemed to hold down firmly in your body all the incurable diseases of the world, and when you have to stop and stay flat, you imagine they have got you at last, each one disjointing and attacking the longer you lie there.
The tree was a black stump that had died long before the fire beat at it, whose white bones had given up through old age, only to suffer this cremation before being blown off the face of the earth by the crepitating slick winds of the Sahara that met in battle with all-battering gusts rolling down from the Atlas. But it seemed as if the stump would last, that the fire would not reach its marrow. He’d seen trees similarly blasted in a grove near Aflou, a meeting of milestone stumps gathered to discuss what to do now that they had lost the distance-marks on their faces. Yet, an anaemic green shoot always grew from part of the sheltered base. It was hard to understand why they were so bent on survival, though looking at them, it seemed that it was not in their power to ask such a question.
He had been frightened by Algeria before getting used to it. The excess of space had no limits, as much because he was unfamiliar with the geography, as that it was really vast. At dusk, the sun went down as if setting into a sea, with the far-off humps of camels drowning in it, or the shipwreck of some oasis foundering at an inexplicable low tide by a mirage of mountains. In dangerous areas, during the weeks of great walks they had done, they marched by night, following a pocket compass, sometimes an Arab guide. The silence made them afraid to talk, and after some hours, it seemed as if it had destroyed their voices, Frank being resigned to never talking again and thinking it wouldn’t be so hard an affliction as long as he could hear and see.
The fear narrowed him down, became part of growth and helped him to see his lonely stature against an enormous land-mass that was so big in fact and imagination (which fear welded together), that it also eliminated all idea of time. At first, he looked at his watch often during the day, but now it was constantly running down. Only Shelley had any check on what minutes passed from the first red spread in the east to the final blue and gold bath in the opposite direction. In the wilderness, the man who measured time was a god, until the mainspring of his watch finally packed in.
They burrowed against the scorching shale-troughs several times a day. The valley was a wide, long depression, running south-west to north-east, pointing like a javelin towards the Kabylie mountains where most of the fighting was going on, and where the guerrilla front of the FLN had friendly bridgeheads backing into the sea. From one of them, Shelley hoped to get on to an Egyptian arms ship one dark night and be floated out to Morocco or Alexandria. From Tangier again, or Libya, he would come back on the same run with another load of guns. As for Frank, here he was and here he would stay while the fighting lasted, looking on his commitment as the great oceanic end of the line for him, the wide spaces of the world that he must allow himself to be swallowed by if he was to do any good in it.
Their line of march was neither along the bed of the valley nor by one of the level crests on either side, but took the more difficult line that invisibly ran half-way up from the oued bottom, so that their brown garb, painfully threading the scorching rocks and thorn bushes of a never-varying contour-line, was least likely to be seen by any plane coming on them before its warning noise scraped out of the sky.
Keeping so still in the body-worn crevasse, where each grain of sand was a live ant pricking his skin, his joints froze, and arms and legs, so that at one point he felt panic turning over in his depths, ready to surface and drive him to madness. He held on, limbs dying one by one, knowing that if someone were to stick needles in him at this moment he would not feel it, that the points would go through dead flesh and his face would stay pressed against scorching rock without a tremor passing the mouth. To lie dead wasn’t always so difficult, but now under the dead eye of the furnaced midday sun spreading its diamond heat across the whole ashen and stony plateau, his sweat poured out like insects breaking from every surface and running over any space between skin and cloth, columns advancing and crisscrossing in all places inaccessible. He tried to pinpoint each fresh spring, but failed because there were so many. When a river of sweat flicked on to his neck, it seemed to have some mysterious signalling system that caused another to spring from the calf of his leg, as if all outbreaks and sweat-heads were working to a co-ordinated system too subtle and complex for the human brain to pick through. Yet there seemed no purpose in it except to drive him mad, so he gripped his teeth and eventually quietened himself by saying that to succeed in such a project as to send him mad was so minor an achievement for the spending of so much force and plotting that it was not worth succumbing to.