savage.
'That's what it will be like.' His head was turned away from her to
listen and his eyes were haunted.
'I'm coming,' she said stubbornly, and he did not reply, but broke away
and hurried forward towards the glowing reflection of the Galla fires
which turned the branches of the camel-thorns to high cathedral roofs
of ruddy light over the encampment.
There were no sentries posted, and they passed unnoticed through the
horse lines and the hastily thatched tukuLs and leather tents,
coming suddenly into the centre of the camp where the fires were
burning and the Gallas were assembled, a huge dark circle of squatting
figures; the firelight bronzed their eager hawk features, and the whole
assembly hummed with the charged tension that always holds the
spectators at a blood spectacle. Jake remembered it from a prize fight
in Madison Square Garden and again from a cock fight in Havana.
The blood lust was running high, and they growled like an animal
pack.
'That is Ras Kullah, whispered Vicky, tugging at Jake's sleeve,
and he glanced across the open arena of beaten earth.
Kullah sat on a pile of carpets and cushions, a silk shawl striped in a
dozen brilliant colours was draped across his head and shoulders,
masking his soft smooth face with shadow but the firelight caught his
eyes and made them glitter with a peculiarly feverish fury.
One of his fat ivory-coloured hands was clenched in his lap, while his
other arm was cast around the waist of the woman who sat beside him,
and his hand kneaded and Wworled her yielding flesh. The hand seemed
to have life of its own, and it moved, pale and obscene, like a huge
slug pulsing softly as it devoured the swollen ripe fruits of the
woman's bosom.
Beyond the fires, on the far side of the circle of open earth a group
of three Italian soldiers were clustered fearfully, their faces shiny
white with sweat and terror in the firelight, and their hands bound
behind their backs. They had been stripped to their breeches,
and the exposed skin of their backs and arms was welted and bruised
where they had been beaten and abused. Their naked feet were swollen
and bloody; clearly they had been forced to march thus for long
distances across the harsh stony earth. Their dark eyes, huge with
horror, were fastened on the spectacle that was being enacted on the
open stage of bare earth in the limelight of the fires.
Vicky recognized the woman as one of Ras Kullah's favourites whom she
had last seen that night at the rest house of Sardi. Now she knelt,
heavy-breasted and intent on her work. The round madonna face was
alight with an almost religious ecstasy, the full lips parted and the
dark sloe eyes glowing like those of a priestess at some mystic tire.
However, more prosaically the sleeves of her sham ma were drawn up in
businesslike fashion above the elbows like those of a butcher, and her
hands were bloody to the wrists. She held the thin curved dagger like
a surgeon, and its silver blade was dull and red in the firelight.
The thing over which -she worked still wriggled and moved convulsively
