'Yaahooo!' hooted the Ras, and swung around in the turret to wave on
his men at arms. They needed no further invitation. In a loose mob,
they spurred their ponies past the stymied cars and, brandishing their
rifles above their heads, robes streaming in the wind like battle
ensigns, they lunged up the steep bank into the open and galloped
furiously on to the flank of the scattered Italian column.
'Oh my God,' sighed Gareth. 'Every man a bloody general-'
'Look!'
shouted Jake, pointing back down the course of the dry river-bed, and
they all fell abruptly silent at the spectacle.
It seemed as though the very earth had opened, disgorgeing rank upon
rank of wildly galloping horsemen. Where a moment before the sweep of
land below the mountains had been empty and silent, now it swarmed with
men and horses, hundreds upon hundreds of them, dashing headlong upon
the lumbering Italian column.
The dust hung over it all, rolling forward like the fog off a winter
sea, shrouding the sun, so that horses and machines were dark infernal
shapes below the sombre clouds, and the ruddy sun glinted dully on the
steel of rifle and sword.
'That does it,' Gareth agreed bitterly, and reversed his car to clear
Jake's front, before swinging away, engine roaring and the wheels
spinning for purchase in the steep loose earth of the river-bank.
Jake turned wide of the other car and took the bank at an angle to
lessen the gradient, and the two cumbersome machines burst out into the
plain, wheel to wheel.
Before them was the open flank of massed soft-skinned vehicles, as
tempting a target as they had ever been offered in their long and
warlike careers. The two iron ladies swept forward together,
and it seemed to Jake that there was a new tone to the deep engine note
as though they sensed that once again they were fulfilling the true
reason for their existence. Jake glanced quickly at the Hump as she
sailed along beside him. Her angular steelwork, with its flat abrupt
surfaces from which rose the tall turret, still gave her the ugly
old-maidish silhouette, but there was a new majesty in the way she
plunged forward her bright Ethiopian colours fluttered gaily as a
cavalry pennant and the high thin, rimmed wheels spurned the sandy
earth like the hooves of a thoroughbred. Beneath him, Priscilla drove
forward as gamely, and Jake felt a warm flood of affection for his two
old ladies.
'Have at them, girls!' he shouted aloud, and Gareth Swales, head
protruding from the driver's hatch of the Hump, turned towards him.
There was a freshly lit cheroot clamped in the corner of his mouth,
seeming to have sprouted there miraculously of its own accord, and
Gareth grinned around it.
'Nob Xegitind carbomndum!' Jake caught the words faintly above the
roar of wind and motor, then turned his full attention back to
controlling the racing machine, and bringing her as swiftly as possible
into the gaping breach in the Italian line.
Abruptly the pattern of movement ahead of him changed. The exultantly
pursuing Italian warriors had realized belatedly that the roles had
