A stone rampart had been thrown round a low rise of ground. Mokhtar went forward on his belly like an alligator, loaded with grenades. The others spread a few yards apart, flattened, waiting. He considered that you hadn’t really experienced the wilderness unless you’d been completely alone it it, hunting and hunted in the dark middle of the night, full of uncertainty about your own self but clear on the universal laws that sent you there. The wind searched out your marrow to blow it dry and empty. He pushed forward the safety-catch, no more safety from this second on, the mechanism easy and silent, William Posters strikes again, black heart and white heart, blue brain and red, roulette-wheel spinning behind those bleeding milksop stars.
A line of sound rumbled from the hills, then a ripple of ammunition paying its own way as battle was joined with jackals and phantoms. The humping burst of a grenade carried back, and all attention in the camp was on that side. A flare issued from the hills, momentarily hung like a grey jellyfish, an unwanted diminishing moon bursting into a dazzling chandelier as if a state reception were to be held beneath it. It threw a faint light over them, and he made out the dim shadows of Shelley and Mokhtar. When the flare died and scattered its ash the night was so intense that Mokhtar, not at the closest range for throwing bombs, stood up to full height and urged them to get nearer, looking as if he would walk into the camp and shake hands with the first man he met. The Lion of Judah, he breaks every chain. Once it used to be: Kiss the hand you cannot sever.
Men were bending over the fire, some slept, and four sentries were outlined faintly in a renewed glimmer of starlight. The pain raged in his hand as if all blood were rushing there in the final tensed wait, and only the rifle lying heavily on the open palm stopped it actually jumping.
A ribbon of machine-gun fire came from the hills and, using this as a signal, Mokhtar stood again. Five of them windmilled two bombs each to the middle of the camp and fell flat before the collective roar. Frank lifted his head after the earth cracked, and while stones and gravel and death-screams raged in the chaos, he joined the rapid fire into the smoking ruin of the camp on which three rifles and three light machine-guns now played. Shelley sent a magazine bursting at the antennae, hoping to wreck the signals unit. There was an impression around Frank as he knelt for better aim at the stunned, slow-moving figures, that bees were being thrown through the air at fantastic speed. His ear burned, then turned cold as he loaded, fired, and reloaded and slotted in another clip. ‘They’ve got me,’ he thought, still firing and in plain view. Sweat and a more copious liquid dropped on to his shirt at the shoulder. Shelley’s gun leapt free, and he fell back into cover. Frank steeled himself to run forward, but wanted a general rush. He smiled at such impotence. It’s all at once, or none at all, for no one man can clean up that butcher’s shop. He flattened, worked towards the left: ‘You all right?’
‘My hand’s gone. It’s knocked right out.’ A stone splinter caught his cheek. Steel hooks were pulling up the ground from left to right. The Lion of Judah launched his last grenade and the machine-gun stopped its multiple biting. Ahmed lay still. Dust in his mouth tasted like iron shavings and, thrown by some explosion in himself, he ran towards the parapet. Flames crawled up the tent, and his course was fixed on it, insects biting the air around him. He took cover, and Mokhtar crashed by his side: ‘Allons y!’
They moved back through shattering stones, while Idris and Mohamed covered them from the front. I hope they think there are more than six of us, that we’re holding off in the hope that they’ll show the white clout. But we’re finished, the ragtags of the wide open spaces: Ahmed killed, Shelley’s hand paralysed, my face bloody and fit only to show its paint-side to the moon: and the guide is unarmed, which leaves four of us to make for those lovely, endearing blister-hills.
He carried Shelley’s gun. ‘Bury me with it,’ he said, ‘so that I can shoot the jackals when they come in to rip my meat, if there’s anything left on my bones by then. I’ll never see the deep, blue sea from the highest pass of the Kabylie mountains — after the fashion of Xenophon and his ten thousand nits.’
‘We did damage,’ Frank said. ‘Or Mokhtar did.’ Out of the fire, there were no more boiling bullets to sneak up your backbone, or go ping at the neck. They ran, shots following.
‘It lasted ten blind minutes,’ Shelley said, tearfully.
‘Twenty,’ Frank insisted, his breath rasping. ‘Your watch stopped. It’s one o’clock.’
‘We’ve got four hours then to get into the hills and bury ourselves, if tomorrow isn’t going to be our last day on this earth that we hoped to make so bright and marvellous.’
‘They’ll pick up our tracks.’
‘They might on God’s earth, but this is the devil’s.’ They stopped to swallow water. A heavy lorry roared, blazing headlights set for the camp. ‘Helicopters in the morning.’
‘Let them come,’ Frank said bitterly. ‘It’ll be a relief.’
They ran, and in three hours were stumbling over the rocks of a defile. The guide was an old man, brown cloth turned round his head, the gentle, half-idiotic, smiling face of one who had grazed goats and camels all his life on these slopes and knew every curve and twist of the range. They came to a valley and crossed it at right angles, crawled and cursed at the boulders.
He walked asleep, senses anywhere but where his body was. It felt as if the grazing bullet had left him bald, the wind flickering across to restart the fires of pain. There was nothing to his body but lungs and legs, engines and wheels, hands for rudders, eyes for a compass, a machine made only to transport the body without which his senses would vanish into a grave of blackness. All it could do was show him the charnel-houses of the moon and the sherbet-gardens of the sun. His body was the four-pronged cogwheel of his retreat, out of the desert, into the desert, a retreat and at the same time an orderly advance given importance by the visions which his body carried, exuded from the pores of his sweating tormented skin.
A depression in the earth held a lake of sand which they waded through, ankle-deep, waist-deep, salt and grit blowing against all wounds and eyes. The rhythm of his legs pushed it back into the machine which he could ignore. He was climbing a great tree with many convenient branches, clothed with numerous twigs of small green leaves. It reached high, and his legs and arms took him up with the speed and ease of an orang-utan that had been born and bred in that particular tree. The wind blew cool and leaves rustled. Soon he was a few branches above the surrounding trees and able to look out of his own tree-angle at the forest ceiling that went on for ever. There was nothing to see but this gentle green undulating ocean of giant treetops, a vast extent of emerald as if, were he to launch himself surreptitiously from the end of the branch and start walking, he would find them solid enough to support him, a new earth made from the tops of massed trees. But where and in what direction would he go? It was the same wherever he looked, so he climbed higher, hoping to reach the highest branch and twig, as if this would give him a different view, some clue at least concerning the direction he should go in. Arms and legs carried him upwards pleasantly enough, so that he could imagine no better way of using his life’s strength. Once he thought of going down again to the undergrowth of the forest, but the idea almost brought the vomit into his mouth, in a way that alarmed him. After years he reached the top, wiped sweat from his forehead and looked at the perfectly flat green sea of treetops hundreds of feet below. He saw himself flying, arms outstretched as he drifted down and over it, but arms not moving and head held back, legs together, gliding perfectly in a wide arc between the sun in a blue sky and the plain of tree-tops. The thought made him dizzy, but he felt great pleasure even at contemplating such a flight, and when it beckoned him he spread his arms and took a long breath of the cool air to give strength and force back the vomit and flex his heels for the leap.