Mokhtar gripped his forearm. ‘You were about to fall.’ They had reached the summit, sky faintly blue to the east, and for a moment stood grunting and still, bent over like apes, faces and clothes as grey as the rock. The old man led them down and when almost at the bottom of the narrow valley turned into a cleft concealed by a huge boulder. They passed, one at a time, squeezing their bodies between smooth slabs of rock only a foot apart. It led through a damp, narrow corridor that opened slightly to a ledge with enough space for them to lie on. From a rock water trickled, clear and icy, and Mokhtar unhooked a mug and set it underneath so that it filled in a few minutes.
He lay flat, eyes pinned open by stars in a sky that was turning grey. They had made it. I understand you, he said, fixing them in his stare, and they became flatter, closer, lost the mystic phosphorescence in the dawn. They needed the night to flower in, to bleed themselves white for. The dawn flattened them into a sheet of paper so that the sun could burn them up. He lay calm, wide awake while the others slept, looking at the softening stars as if he’d never seen them before, or as if he’d just been born. Three months in the desert and he’d lost his identity. Killing didn’t give him one, and neither did being hunted. They were part of it though, joined by this long cool examination of the stars fading above the parallel cliffs as if they would never come back. The clarity of the grey rock and the stars made him feel as if he were dying, the sky turning blue and powdery the more his eyes tried to penetrate it. He was afraid of dying, but only when he thought of going to sleep. The blank exhaustion left him heavy and boneless, yet without the need of immediate rest and like watching the minute-hand of a clock move he pressed the sky across its colour from black of night to the day’s pale blue. He belonged nowhere, basked in the disembodied serenity that comes only after driving the mind and body to their limits. But the body and mind had, after all, driven you, driven themselves which were you, completed you by their movement. He belonged here, emptied even of ideas that had sent him to this particular hiding-spot in the mountains of love and desolation, and being emptied of them at such a time meant that he was fulfilling them. A man of extremes loses his identity, but a man of the middle way is referred to by the two extremes which hedge him in. Starving, riddled with exhaustion like a disease, he belonged nowhere except where he was, and saw no limit to the world that he lived in. Down in the hidden basin of the hills he could see nowhere except upwards. ‘Flesh into heaven, and bones into hell. The soul falls apart.’ He wrote the words across the patch of sky as if to send them somewhere as a telegram. People who feel that the full life is not sufficient end up in the desert, if they fight hard enough to get there. The greater the fight to reach it, the more bitterly scorched is the earth that you left behind. It forces you to search the bottom of the heart, where you reach sand, stones, rock and slate, the geologic ages of your own private earth — scorched earth and sun, frost and scorpions, salt water and bitter thorns that fester your hands at a single touch. Once in the desert you have to cross it, forget what sent you there and for what spiritual loot and lot, or what you might find on the other side, but survive in it, live in it, and move over it. The salt of the earth comes out of the desert. The great spirit rests in the wilderness — Sinai, Sahara, Takla Makan. You choose the desert, or reject it, but you reject it before you get to the point of choosing it. If chosen it is because there is no other way, because the longer way would be through death, and no one would choose that when there is no chance of resurrection, so you take the short-cut through the desert because a chance of survival is easier to believe in than the possibility of salvation.
A huge black-winged bird skimmed over the blue corridor of sky, and flew away as if falling to earth. Water was dripping into a cup. He reached and drank some, then replaced it. Falling drops of water were the only sound. There is no greater silence than that which opens around you when you are exhausted, worn to the bone. I must live, he said, I must live, and the regular fall of the waterdrops smoothed his consciousness away.
Chapter Sixteen
Heavy rotor-blades thumped, as if the helicopter were descending because the clear blue burning air no longer had the density to support it. They lay, hidden under ledges of rock, like loaves thrown at random into an oven. He felt fresh after some sleep and food, and all the good water he could drink, and wondered why the four who were there didn’t open fire at the huge precise monster, force it to burst and crumble onto the rocky land, so that those inside who wanted to bomb and spray them with fire as if they were animals would instead be pinned on the bloody end of wrath as they tried to escape from metal and burning fabric. But the consensus was that they should sweat in their hideout till the pimping angel of Satan passed over without claiming them. But if by some fluke it suspected their presence and landed to look, they would be killed before they could scramble clear.
Shelley denied this: ‘They have to get in here first, and our good shepherd knows a way out. Take ’em a year and twenty thousand men to throw a trapnet over the whole range. Even then they might not get us in the end. As long as we don’t move during the day, and go quietly by night.’
A shadow passed under the sun, darkened the glaring slate. ‘I’d like to look at it. I don’t believe in anything I can’t see.’
‘They’ve got machine-gunners on board. Poke your head up and we’ll sell you to a circus, if we can keep you alive: the man without head, hands or feet.’
‘Drop dead yourself.’
‘Willingly. It’s a flying platform. In some places they carry Alsatian dogs. When the helicopter lands twenty rush out, and God doesn’t help those who get in their way: children, women, people in the fields, even a man with a gun — when he’s not right out of it. Hard to get the dogs back, in spite of good training. They seem to vanish, go black in the night. There are no unmixed blessings, no secret weapons, just a nightmare humiliating grind. It’ll be the same scuffle when it’s finished, though you can’t let that blunt your finer feelings while it’s still on, otherwise you are not a man, and will never become a saint or commissar.’
Engine-sound weakened far out along the valley. Safe for a while. He saw nothing, suspected nothing. Heavy machine-gun fire thumped back, a man and goats being spread all over the rocks. Its chatter and the damage it did seemed utterly insignificant in such great spaces. It ceased far away, the motor noise squashed like a fly against the hot wall of the sun. The raw, tender graze along his temple no longer throbbed to the beat of pistons or gunfire. He winked at the sky — grey edges and pale blue middle. Their refuge was an oasis never to be forgotten while they were in it.
Shelley blew a trail of ants from his shattered hand. Tonight, so the promise went, they would enter a village where an Italian doctor lived, who helped the FLN and asked no questions. Flesh had been honed from Shelley’s face, turned grey since yesterday and left his eyes helpless and bitter, a new phase for him. He read his holiest of bibles, Mao Tse Tung’s treatise on protracted warfare, drew maps of imaginary tracts of land on the endpapers with his fountain pen, and with pencil and rubber carried out intricate exercises to make plainer precepts of the great man that he had read many times. His best hand was shattered, a finger smashed and the back a blue hump of broken veins and bone, a map left in the rain whose river delta ran its colours into the mangrove of uncontrollable terrain. He sat in one place, and Frank took water and food to him. ‘At least I’ve still got my legs and eyes,’ Shelley said.