The ancient buildings were choked with piled sand and thick with the spiny camel-thorn growth that blocked the narrow streets. While Jake and Gregorius checked the fuelling and lubrication of the vehicles, and Gareth scraped a fireplace against a shielding stone wall, Vicky wandered off to explore the ruins in the dusk.
She did not go far. A tangible sense of menace and human suffering seemed to emanate from the rubble of buildings that had been burned over a century before. It made her skin crawl, but she picked her way cautiously along a narrow alleyway that opened at last into an open square.
She knew instinctively that this had been the trading square of the slave city and she imagined the long chained lines of human beings.
The pervading aura of their misery still persisted. She wondered if she could capture it on paper, and make her readers see that it had not changed. Once again, a consuming greed was to place a nation in chains, once again hundreds of thousands of human beings would be forced to learn the same misery that this city had engendered. She must write that, she decided, she must capture the sense of outrage and despair she felt now and convey it to the civilized peoples of the world.
A small scuffling sound distracted her and she looked down, then drew back with a shudder from the finger-length purple scorpion, with its lobster claws and the high curved tail bearing a single-hooked fang that scuttled towards the toe of her boot. She turned and hurried back along the alleyway.
The chill of horror stayed with her, so that she crossed gratefully to the bright fire of thorn twigs that blazed under the ruined wall.
Gareth looked up as she knelt beside him and held out her hands to the blaze.
"I was just coming to look for you. Better not wander off on your own."
"I can look after myself," she told him quickly, with an edge to her voice which was becoming familiar.
"I agree." He smiled placatingly at her. "A bit too damned well I sometimes think, "and he dug in his pocket.
"I found something in the sand as I was digging the fireplace." He held out a broken circle of metal which gleamed yellow in the firelight. It was fashioned as a snake bangle, with a serpent's forged head and coiled body.
Vicky felt her irritation evaporate magically. "Oh, Gary," she lifted it in both hands, "it's beautiful. Is it gold?"
"I suspect it is." She slipped the heavy bangle over her wrist and admired it with a glowing expression, twisting it to catch the light.
"Not one of them can resist a gift," Gareth thought comfortably, watching her face in the dancing firelight.
"it belonged to a princess, who was famous for her beauty and her compassion to besotted suitors," said Gareth lightly.
"So I thought how fitting that you should have it."
"Oh!" she gasped. "For me." And impulsively she leaned forward to kiss his cheek, and was startled when he turned his head quickly and her lips pressed full against his. For a moment she tried to pull away and then it did not seem worth the effort. After all, it was a truly magnificent bracelet.
In the light of the single hurricane lamp, Jake and Gregorius were studying the large-scale map spread on the engine bonnet of Priscilla the Pig. Gregorius was tracing the route they must take to the shed of the Awash River and lamenting the map's many inaccuracies and omissions.
"If you had tried to follow this, you'd have got into serious trouble, Jake." Jake looked up suddenly from the map, and thirty paces away he saw the two figures in the firelight come together and stay that way.
He felt his pulse begin to pound and the blood come up his neck, scalding hot.
"Let's get some coffee, "he grunted.
"In a minute," Gregorius protested. "First I want to show you where we have to cross the sand desert-" He pointed at the map, tracing a route and not realizing that he was talking to himself alone. Jake had left him to interrupt the action at the fireside.
Vicky awoke in the first uncertain light of dawn to the realization that the wind had dropped. It had whistled dismally all night, so that now when she pulled back her blanket, it was thickly powdered with golden grit and she could feel it stiff in her hair and crunchy between her teeth. One of the men was snoring loudly, but they were three long blanket-wrapped bundles close together, so she was not sure which of them it was. She fetched her toilet bag, towel and a change of underwear, then slipped out of the " laager, climbed the slope of the dune and ran down to the beach.
The dawn was absolutely still, the surface of the bay as smooth as a sheet of pink satin as the glow of the hidden sun touched it. The silence was the complete silence of the desert, unbroken by bird or beast, wind or surf and the dismay she had felt the previous day evaporated.
She stripped off her clothing and walked down the wet sand that the tide had smoothed during the night and waded out into the pink waters, sticking in her belly against the sudden chill of it, and gasping with pleasure as she squatted suddenly neck deep and began to scrub her body of the night's grit and dirt.
When she waded ashore, the sun was cresting the sweeping watery horizon of the Gulf. The tone of light had altered drastically.
Already the soft hues of dawn were giving way to the harsher brilliance of Africa to which she had become accustomed.
She dressed quickly, bundling her used underwear in the towel and combing her wet hair as she climbed the dune.
At the crest, she halted abruptly with the comb still caught in the tangle of her hair and she gasped again as she stared out into the west.
As Gregorius had told them, the still cool air and the peculiar light of the rising sun created a stage effect, foreshortening the hundred miles of flat featureless desert and throwing up into the sky the sheer massif of the highlands, so that it seemed she might stretch out her hand and touch it.
It was dark purplish blue in the early light, but as Vicky watched in awe, it changed colour like some gargantuan chameleon, becoming gilded with bright sun colours and beginning at the same time to recede swiftly, until it was a pale wraith that dissolved into the first dancing heat mirages of the desert -day, and she felt the sultry puff of the rising wind.
She roused herself and hurried down the dune into the laager.
Jake looked up from the pan of beans and bacon that was spluttering over the fire and grinned at her.
"Five minutes for breakfast." He spooned a mess of food into her pannikin and offered it to her. "I thought about night travel to avoid the heat but the chances of smashing up the cars on rough going was too great." Vicky took the food and ate with high relish, pausing only to stare at Gareth Swales as he came to the fire freshly shaven and perfectly groomed, wearing a spotless open-neck shirt and a baggy pair of plus-four trousers in an expensive thorn-proof tweed. His brogues gleamed with polish, and he smoothed his golden moustaches and raised an eyebrow when Jake exploded with delighted laughter.
"Jesus,"he laughed. "Anyone for golf?"
"I say, old son, "Gareth admonished him, amiably running an eye over Jake's faded moleskins, scuffed Chukka boots and plaid shirt with a tear in the sleeve. "Your breeding is showing. just because we are in Africa, there is no need to go native, what?" Then he glanced at Gregorius and flashed that brilliant smile. "No offence, of course. I must say you look jolly dashing in that get-up." Gregorius swathed in his sham ma looked up from his breakfast and returned the smile. "East is east, and west is west," he said.
"Old Wordsworth certainly knew his stuff," Gareth agreed, and dipped a spoon into the pan.
The four vehicles, grotesquely burdened and strung out at intervals of two hundred yards to avoid each other's dust, crawled out of the coastal dunes into the vast littoral where the wind rustled endlessly but brought no relief from the steadily rising heat.