were both Gareth and Jake. Each of them had used the lull to set his
own department in order.
Jake had gone out under cover of night behind a screen of
Ethiopian scouts to the deserted battlefield, where he had stripped the
carcass of the Hump. Working by the light of a hooded bull's-eye
lantern, and assisted by Gregorius, he had taken the big Bentley engine
to pieces, small enough for the donkey packs and lugged it all home to
the encampment below the camel-thorn trees. Using the replacements,
he had rebuilt the engine of Tenastefin ruined by the Ras in his first
flush of enthusiasm. Then he had stripped, overhauled and reassembled
the other two cars. The Ethiopian armoured forces were now a squadron
of three, all of them in as fine fettle as they had been for the past
twenty years.
Gareth, in the meantime, had selected and trained Harari crews for the
Vickers guns, and then exercised them with the infantry and cavalry,
teaching the gunners to lay down sheets of covering fire.
Foot soldiers were taught to advance or retreat in concert with the
Vickers.
Gareth had also found time to complete the survey of the retreat route
up the gorge, mark each of his defensive positions, and supervise the
digging of the machine-gun nests and support trenches in the steep
rocky sides of the gorge. An enemy advancing up the twisting hairpin
track would come under fire around each bend of the road, and would be
open to the steam-roller charge of the foot warriors from the concealed
trenches amongst the lichen-covered rocks above the track.
The track itself had been smoothed, and the gradients altered to allow
the escape of the armoured cars once the position on the plains was
forced by the overwhelming build-up of Italian forces. Now all of them
waited, as ready as they could be, and the slow passage of time eroded
all their nerves.
It was, then, with a certain relief that the scouts who were keeping
the Italian fortifications under day and night surveillance reported
back to the Ras's war council that a host of strange vehicles that
moved at great speed without the benefit of either legs or wheels had
arrived to swell the already formidable forces arrayed against them,
and that these vehicles were daily engaged in furious activity, from
sun-up to sun-down, racing in circles and aimless sweeps across the
vast empty spaces of the plains.
'Without wheels,' mused Gareth, and cocked an eyebrow at Jake.
'You know what that sounds like, don't you, old son?'
'I'm afraid I
do.' Jake nodded. 'But we'd better go and take a look.' Half a moon
in the sky gave enough light to show up clearly the deeply torn runners
of the steel tracks, like the spoor of gigantic centipedes in the soft
fluffy soil.
Jake squatted on his haunches, and regarded them broodingly. He knew
now that what he had dreaded was about to happen. He was going to have
to take his beloved cars and match them against tracked vehicles with
heavier armour, and revolving turrets, armed with big-bored,
