The horn began to blare then and they broke and ran. I was running, too, now. I shouted something — something in English. I caught a glimpse of White peering out of his tent. There was a stab of flame and the crack of a gun. Then he started to run. We were all running — running towards a still body that lay in a tight bundle on the piste. By the time I reached it, the man’s assailants — three or four of them — had vanished into the darkness that lay outside the beam of the headlights.
The body lying on the piste was alive. I saw that at a glance. The man was breathing heavily, his heaving chest thrusting the air out in great gasping sobs. But there was blood on the sand. ‘I didn’t hit him,’ Ed White panted. ‘I fired over their heads to scare them.’
‘Of course,’ I said and turned the man over.
It was our missing guide — Moha. There was a cut above his right eye that extended across his forehead and into his hair. It looked as though a stone had hit him. But down by his waist his djellaba had been ripped open with a knife and there was more blood. Jan thrust me aside, tearing the djellaba apart to expose the torn flesh of the man’s buttocks. He examined the wound quickly and then nodded and said, ‘He’s all right. Just a flesh wound.’ He sat back on his haunches, staring at the inert body. The man was still panting as though he had just flopped down after winning a race. ‘Why did they attack him?’ he asked, twisting his head round and looking up at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We’d better get him up to the camp.’
As we lifted him up, I saw he had something tightly clutched in his right hand. It was a roll of paper. I prised the fingers from their grip on it and then we carried him to the larger of the two tents, where we laid him on one of the camp beds. Julie joined us there, carrying a bowl of water and some bandages. Whilst she set to work to bathe the man’s wounds, I took the crumpled paper over to the pressure lamp. It was written in Arabic, the writing thin and shaky, but recognisably the same as the writing on the deeds of Kasbah Foum. It was signed Caid El-Hassan d’Es-Skhira.
I touched Jan on the shoulder as he bent over the knife wound in Moha’s body. ‘Here’s the answer to your question,’ I said. ‘He was attacked because he was bringing you this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Confirmation of your title to Kasbah Foum.’
‘But I thought the Caid — ‘ He almost snatched the paper from me and stood staring down at the writing.
‘Does this mean Kasbah Foum belongs to me?’ he asked, and he held the paper out to me so that I could read it.
‘Yes,’ I said, peering over his shoulder. ‘The letter states quite clearly that the Caid agrees to Duprez’s choice of a successor to the title and requests the authorities to make the necessary registration. It further states that so long as you live, neither he nor any member of his family shall have any interest in the property.’ I hesitated.
‘What is it?’ he asked quickly.
‘He doesn’t mention your name anywhere. He simply refers to you as “the bearer of the deeds”.’
‘Probably he couldn’t remember my name.’ He was holding the paper tightly in his hand as though afraid it might vanish. ‘Does it make any difference, do you think?’
‘I don’t imagine so. You have the deeds and you have his letter confirming the title. It should be all right.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t understand, Philip. I never thought he’d agree to it so quickly. I thought he’d want to talk to Legard and make some enquiries … What do you think made him do it in such a hurry?’
The man on the camp bed groaned and moved. I turned and saw that he had recovered consciousness. ‘Maybe that’s your answer,’ I said. ‘The old man knows his son only too well.’
There was a movement in the entrance to the tent. It was the goat boy from the old Kasbah, Moha’s son. He stood there with wide, shocked eyes, staring at his father. Then he looked at us and there was anger and fear on his small, immature features. It was best that the boy knew the truth of it and I asked his father what happened.
Apparently Moha had received a message from the Caid to attend him in his room. He had found him alone on his couch writing a letter. This he had handed to Moha with instructions that it should be delivered to us with all possible speed. He had left with it at once, but, as he came through the palmerie, he realised that he was being followed. He was past his village then and all he could do was run on in the hope of reaching our camp before his pursuers caught up with him. He had almost made it.
We patched him up as best we could and then drove him down the piste to the nearest point to his village and escorted him to his house. Afterwards we drove back to the camp and had a meal. That night I insisted on Jan moving into Ed White’s tent. The American was the only one of us who had a gun. I had Julie lock herself in her own compartment and I was just settling down in the passenger seat where I should be within easy reach of the controls, when the door was flung open. It was Jan. He was half-undressed. ‘What is it?’ I said, for he was excited about something.
‘This.’ He threw something into my lap.
It was a small blue book — a British passport. And when I opened it I saw that it was Wade’s. ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked him.
‘It was in my suitcase.’
‘But — ‘ I stared at it. ‘How could it be in your suitcase?’
‘I think Kostos must have put it there this morning. You remember there was nobody at the camp that first time he came here. We were up in the gorge.’
‘But why should he return it to you like that?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I wanted to ask you.’
It occurred to me then that Kostos, suspecting Jan of murder, was getting rid of the one piece of evidence that involved him.
I didn’t tell Jan this, but long after he’d gone back to the tent I was still thinking about it.
The passenger seat made an uncomfortable bed and I slept little. Nothing happened during the night and when dawn broke and showed me the empty expanse of desert leading down to the palmerie, I transferred myself to the bunk and slept through till almost midday.
By the time I had washed and shaved and had some coffee, Jan and Ed White were coming down out of the gorge for their midday meal. They were talking together and laughing as though they had known each other all their lives. Julie came out of the cook tent and stood beside me, looking up the track, watching them approach. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. I glanced at her and she added, ‘If Ed hadn’t been as nice as he is … it could have been horrible here if they’d hated each other. They’re so completely unalike.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They have things in common. They’re both strangers in a new country. And there’s the mine. They’re both absorbed in Kasbah Foum.’
‘Philip!’ Jan’s voice reached me on the light breeze. He seemed excited. ‘We’ve found it,’ he shouted to me. ‘We’ve found the entrance to the mine. There’s just one corner of it exposed now, but by tomorrow we’ll have cleared it entirely.’
‘Fine,’ I said and sat down on the step of the bus and lit a cigarette, looking down across the sand and the dusty green of the palmerie to the Post gleaming white in a sudden shaft of sunlight. I was thinking that Legard would be back and wishing I had Jan’s power of concentration, his ability to shut his mind to everything but the immediate problem.
‘Jan’s right,’ Ed said. His eyes, too, were aglint with excitement. ‘I guess we’ll have the entrance fully exposed by tomorrow. After that, all we’ve got to do is to clear the rock fall inside the shaft.’
Their enthusiasm should have been infectious. But I felt strangely flat. Whether it was the place or just the fact that I saw the situation too clearly, I don’t know, but my gaze kept turning away from the gorge down the piste towards the Post.
It was an odd sort of day, almost English. Julie had laid the table out in the open under the fly of the big tent. The air was cool, despite the periodic bursts of sunshine, and there was a lot of cloud about, especially towards the west, where it was banked up in great cotton-wool piles of cumulus. ‘I’ve been ransacking your stores,’ Julie said to Ed. ‘I opened up some of your tinned turkey. I hope you don’t mind.’