“I shall let you know if and when the box is to be placed in position — it may be that the box will never be needed at all, if… certain other plans are successful, as indeed we trust will be the case. But of that we shall speak again later. All I am concerned with for now is that you should know what to do when the time comes.”
Siggings sniffed. “It’s something else I’m concerned about, Mr Andersson.”
“And that is?”
“Well, what about me, eh? When do I leave the ship, eh?”
Andersson’s eyes glittered, and he smiled. He said, “Very suddenly, one would imagine.”
“Very funny,” Siggings said sarcastically.
“What I meant to say was this: you must not worry, for you will get due warning and you will be able to leave the ship at a convenient port.”
“What, you mean desert? Jump ship?”
“Exactly, yes.”
Siggings clasped his hands together, raised them above his head. “Boy, oh boy, shall I enjoy doing that! Sea’s a mug’s game, Mr Andersson… once you’re in the lolly…"
When Shaw had given that cry of pain, the cry of agony and horror which had been drawn from him by the bird’s driving beak, the vultures had scattered. At first he didn’t realize the significance of that involuntary cry; and then, very suddenly and almost without any conscious thought, some reflex action tightened his sinews and his leg rose; he lashed out with it.
It was only then that he realized. It had moved.
The drug had worn off.
The vultures scattered into the darkening sky, fighting and squabbling, frightened and angry. Shaw began to breathe properly, struggled stiffly to a sitting position, looked round. For the first time he saw the tower fully, saw the ghastly heaps of bones, the mouldering remains of bodies which had been begun and then left half eaten, saw the stumps of legs and arms and the gaping stomachs of the recently dead.
He closed his eyes. His head swam, and he fell back again, retching agonizingly. For a time he passed right out; then, as he came round, he made a tremendous effort, set his teeth hard, and began to pull himself together. He dragged himself to his feet, painfully, swimmingly, held on to the tower’s rim for long minutes, then staggered away and groped about for a means of getting down. There was a red mist in front of his eyes, and there was in fact very little hope in his heart that he could ever get free from Solli. He would probably be seen as soon as he left the tower, and without transport he was helpless. However, he would prefer to die with a bullet in his body rather than remain up here. Shivering all over now, weak with reaction, he found a stone stairway leading downwards, and he began to climb unsteadily to the earth below.
The new funeral cortège, moving up a dune towards the Tower of Silence from a neighbouring village, had got quite close to the foot of the structure when Shaw stumbled out, a wild, dirty figure, an ‘Indian’ in a shroud. The man who had been brought by the police from afar off to Solli, and who had been committed the day before.
The mourners didn’t wait for one unnecessary moment when the dead man moved stiffly towards them. They left the cart, they left the corpse with its face glaring upward towards the vultures, and they turned about and ran for their lives, shrieking to their Gods to protect them from the evil spirit which possessed that dead body, the body which bore the clear mark of the birds of death but which yet moved towards them, the white shroud gleaming in the dark.
They ran into the little village street, calling out to all they met to run before it was too late. Shaw, listening to their distant voices, acted in instinctive self-preservation despite his feeling of hopelessness. He dropped down behind a big pile of stones, and waited. When nothing happened, he peered cautiously round the hide-out, his nausea and weakness submerging under a new thrill of hope. He could tell by the sounds that the villagers were fleeing, going the other way. Very likely the men, the police, had gone back by now to Port Said; they would see no need to wait really, for they would have been expecting the vultures to take him for dead, and they would be thinking now that he was in fact dead, pecked and torn to ribbons while he was helpless under the drug. Ten minutes later, when all was still quiet, Shaw pulled himself to his feet and went on under cover of the darkness, walking the couple of hundred yards into the village as fast as his condition would allow. When he walked into Solli’s main street, he found the place utterly deserted. There was no sign of life, even the dogs seeming to have run along with the humans.
Evidently the police, as he had hoped, were gone.
He was going to get away with this after all.
When that realization came to him, he seemed to find a new, hidden strength. He walked on, went into the narrow doorway of a hovel off the street, looking for food and drink. Nothing there. But, on a table in the third dwelling, he found a meal which seemed to have been interrupted by the news of his coming. Shaw grinned to himself. He seized a loaf of hard bread, ate ravenously. Some of the loaf he tied in his shroud for use later on. Then he drank deeply, greedily, from an earthenware pitcher, gratefully felt the cold water flow over his face. He sluiced some over his body. After that he felt much better, felt the weakness start to ebb away, knew that whatever happened he had to keep going now. Looking around, he discovered a water-bottle, which he filled from the pitcher and then slung the cord round his neck.
The next thing was transport.
Making for the pool of stagnant, dirty water which gave Solli its only apparent reason for being, in the faint hope that he might find a camel which somebody hadn’t waited to mount, Shaw’s eye was caught by the glitter of the moon on metalwork in the open doorway of a lean-to shed inside a courtyard. He stopped, stared, pulled himself over the low wall and went inside.
Of all things, it was a motor-cycle.
Progress — and Shaw found time to thank God for it — had come to the oasis of Solli. Probably it belonged to some young spark who wasn’t at home and the elders, in their panic, hadn’t been able to work the thing. Unless it was out of juice. Shaking with excitement, Shaw opened the tank, thrust in a handy stick. It was about a quarter full. The canal was… how far? Those men had said Solli was between Zagazig and Ismailia, and Shaw knew that those two places were about fifty miles apart, maybe a little less. And Ismailia was on Lake Timsah, hard by the canal itself. So at the outside the canal couldn’t be more than fifty miles away and was almost certainly a lot less. If he could hit the road running alongside the canal, he could run quickly down into Suez — if the petrol lasted that far — and hope to pick up the liner there, for surely she would have waited a while for him before giving up hope.
Shaw grasped the machine, wheeled it out into the rutted street, got astride and kicked the starter. After two false starts, it roared into noisy, exultant life. That wonderful sound gave him back all the heart he needed.
He raced the machine flat out, roared away from Solli on the road to the north along which they had come earlier. He hoped to find a road crossing it, a road leading into Ismailia. As he passed the Tower of Silence he looked towards the death cart with its load beneath the moon. The vultures were starting in already, not waiting for the tower this time.
Shaw smiled to himself. Somehow, he felt, he must have shaken their faith in human nature.