its rocky bed. Her arms and back were painfully cramped with the
effort of fighting the kicking wheel, and-sweat had drenched the hair
at her temples and stung her eyes. She wiped it away with her forearm,
and went at the slope, braking hard the moment that the car began
rolling down the thirty-degree incline.
With rock and loose earth kicking and spewing out from under the big
wheels, they descended in a heavy lumbering rush, and halfway down
Vicky realized that she had no control and that the vehicle was
gradually slewing sideways and swinging its tail out towards the edge
of the cliff.
She felt the first lurch as one rear wheel dropped slightly,
riding out over the hundred-foot drop, and instinctively she knew that
in this instant of its headlong career, the car was critically hanging
at the extreme edge of its balance. In a hundredth of a second, it
would go beyond the point of recovery, and she made without conscious
thought a last instinctive grasp at survival. She jumped her foot from
the brake pedal, swung the wheel into the line of skid and thrust her
other foot down hard on the throttle. One wheel hung over the cliff,
the other caught with a vicious jerk as the engine roared at full
power, and the huge steel hull jumped like a startled gazelle, and
hurled itself away from the cliff edge, struck the far bank of earth
and rocky scree and was flung back, miraculously, into its original
line of track.
At the bottom of the pitch, the slope eased. Vicky fought the car to a
standstill there and dragged herself out of the driver's hatch.
She found that she was shaking uncontrollably, and that she had to get
to a private place off the track, for in reaction she was close to
vomiting and her control of her other bodily functions was shaken by
that terrible sliding, bucking ride.
She had left the column of horsemen far behind, and could only faintly
hear their voices and the clatter of hooves on the rocky track as she
scrambled and clawed her way up the side of the gorge to a thicket of
dwarf cedar trees, where she could be alone.
There was a spring of clear sweet water amongst the cedars and when her
body had purged itself and she had it under control again, she knelt
beside the rocky pool and bathed her face and neck. Using the surface
of the shining water as a mirror, she combed her hair and rearranged
her clothing.
The reaction to extreme fear had left her feeling lightheaded and
slightly apart from reality. She picked her way out of the cedar
thicket, and down to where the car stood upon the track. The Galla
horsemen had arrived and they and their mounts crowded the entire
area,
back up the track for half a mile, and in a solid mob about the
armoured car.
Those nearest the car had dismounted, and when she tried to make her
way through their ranks they gave her only minimal passage, so that she
must brush close to them.
Suddenly she realized with a fresh lunge of fear in her chest that the
