From the height of the mountain they saw into an adjacent valley. Two trucks were set across the end of it like a barricade. Ants moved out, filtering between brushwood. Shelley adjusted the centre-wheeclass="underline" ‘They’ll need alpine troops to flush us from this. They used them in the Kabylie, but lost too many. We set up the avalanche, and rolled ’em down again. They pulled ’em out quick. There will be trucks in the next valley as well. We’ll go all night and lie flat tomorrow. I’ve got to get this hand fixed.’
His eyes were points of grey light, ready for the uncontrollable madness of pain. Frank wondered how he could stand it. The hand was blue, swollen enormously, and part of it turned pink and was beginning to split. ‘We’ll tell Mokhtar.’
‘What can he do? In a few days, we’ll find someone to hack it off. That’s all I want.’
‘Let’s go down to the French. I’ll take you. We’ll make up a good story,’ Frank said. He put a hand on Shelley’s arm. ‘Even a field-dressing would help.’ They had nothing except food, water, guns and ammunition.
‘Forget it,’ Shelley said. ‘What’s gangrene between friends? The devil’s bite.’
Pain was contagious, his jovial madness catching, the violent shaking of his good hand unnerving. Feeling sorry didn’t help, so he tried not to. This was impossible, for it burned into him also. To share it was only to double it, not halve it, but he shared it nevertheless. It would neither help nor cure, as if sympathy were only a way of bearing other people’s troubles without lessening their pain.
An enchanting fairyland of mountains lay all around them at dusk, under a few bars of purple cloud, the javelins of insurrection subtly out of reach except for those who climbed such heights. They were suspended, self-assured, outstanding, turning blue and pale against the whitening sky around and above, for there was no land higher. A cool breeze ran gently against them, the javelins thickening and growing into iron-purple. The mountain rock-tables were unevenly spread, reddening, a mad abandoned stone-age restaurant that a tribe of giants had fled from after a last vast angry supper. The cliffs were precipitous, so that he could not understand how they had humped their bodies up to the summit they stood on. Ravines and gullies divided them to the north-east, and the sloping sun beamed itself on the trackless direction they still had to take. The tables looked flat, but they were spread with boulders, indentations, cover, declivities. They found a pool among stunted bushes. He pulled out his hand, and it was covered with leeches, festoons of abundance drawing hungrily on the rich bonanza of his blood. With the free hand he found a cigarette and lit it from Shelley’s pipe. ‘You’d better make haste,’ Shelley said, ‘or there’ll be nothing left of you. It’s the first time they’ve fed on good rich yeoman blood coursing with the loam and foam of England.’
‘There’s little of that left.’ They dropped off, or burst. ‘Dip your hand in. They cure everything, as well as the fits and miseries. Take the black blood out of your soul, and the life out of your heart. Nature’s remedy for life, meaning death.’ The old man filled his goatskin, scooping water into a mug and straining it through a rag, now and again throwing aside a mash of leeches to make their way back to the source of life.
‘I’m not drinking that,’ Frank said. Whether sweet, pure, magnesium or brackish, the water never lost its fulsome taste of the old goat in whose skin it was carried. He’d suffered the pains of dysentery and the blisters of desert-mouth, and unknown ailments that merely nagged at the stomach till he had spots and freckles in front of his eyes so that when he slept he seemed to have lost half his weight and when he walked he swore he’d doubled it.
The fairyland blackened, became a province of coal while the sky kept its pale blue. Ebony tables and cuttings flowed away, showing outcrops that weren’t noticed when the sun was higher. ‘I wish they were padded with two feet of snow,’ Shelley said. ‘We’d freeze to death, but what else could anyone wish for? I dream of it while I’m walking. I’m up to my waist in snow. If I concentrate I can smell it, blue and bitter, menthol and juniper berries, New England snow, toboggan-sledding in the Hampshires. What do you fix your mind on, Frank?’
‘Whatever’s in front of my eyes. If I can’t stand that, there’s a black wall I can conjure up. Or I see Myra and her house in England, but that means I’ve got my tenth wind and am travelling well. Or I theorise on where we’re going and what we’re part of, making up tactical exercises that are so optimistic they make me laugh. I dream of having a book to read when we stop. I’m print-starved. When I get somewhere where there’s print I’ll read anything, though maybe I’ll be so choosy by then, I’ll read very little. I wish that youth had brought some of his newspapers, at least. Still, I think of the books I’ve read, make them up again and watch words passing in front of my eyes on an endless tape.’
They went on, through deep snow for Shelley, blank walls of the crowding night for Frank. They grumbled, grunted, staggered, no rest because every inch of distance had to be put behind them while it was dark. The half-moon rose and gave them a few hours of shadow, each figure with a mocking, moving twin imitating every slide and footstep, weaving clowns vitiating the bile he wanted to spit at them, but which always stuck in his throat. An icy wind blew against the graze on his head, so that it itched and chafed, as if healing from what salt was in the air. When he once pressed it the burn was like pulp and he drew back his hand, vowing to leave it alone.
When they stoppped, they shivered, were glad to stand and move on. A wild dog of the mountains took up its night noise and filled the sky with a long undulating never-broken wail, the binding sound a dog in the wilderness could make yet would never help you to find it. You’d need a whole nation of soldiers to catch a few hundred dogs if they were dispersed, not ten to one, but a thousand to one. It spoke on the wind as if it were a microphone, and he thought it might be the same dog heard every night from the Moroccan frontier, a huge, wild, soulful dog following their stench and footsteps. He’d never so much as seen its silhouette, Anubis of the sand and stone, mountains and saltmarsh, a unique tree-climbing dog that, at the smell of an aeroplane in the wind, leapt down and ran, its four long legs rattling over rock and gravel before the flame-bomb exploded in the tree and an oily uprushing fire sent its death-breath after him.
What’s it got to do with me? Its refugee howl runs up my back like danger and flame, but all the same it makes comforting company on the long marches of the night in which you need a soul of stone, a moonstone lit enough to show the way, to lead and beckon you, push and guide. If I saw that dog I’d want to take aim and get its hot flea-blown carcase hugging the dust, but in this sort of day and night I’d bring a thousand bullets down on us. But if I give a second thought, always worth more than the first, I wouldn’t want to floor its anarchy and freedom even though I’m half-way frightened at its soulful howl from the dog-Posters world tracking me into this great self-induced desert of death. I can talk to myself, I can talk, talk myself into the grave of survival, yet that dog tells me that survival is no grave but a state of blessedness to travel for instead of staying behind and howling alone like him.
He walked easily, no effort to get him forward at the quick goat-like progress dictated by Mokhtar and the guide, who travelled together like four shadows ahead. He let the baying of the dog lull him, turned its noise into music and speech as he watched his own shadow continually in motion before the moon’s suffering light. They traversed the long hog’s back of the range, slowly descending. The guide suddenly led them on a roundabout way down the steep northern slope, so that they could cross where the valley was narrow and danger least.