disappeared, swallowed by the cloud monster, and the soft mass heaved
like a belly digesting its prey.
For the first time since they had entered the Danakil, the sun was
obscured. The cold came off the clouds in gusts, touching Jake with
icy fingers of air, so that the gooseflesh pimpled his muscular
forearms and he shivered briefly.
Gregorius sat beside him on the turret, looking up also at the silver
and dark blue of the thunderheads.
'The big rains will begin now.'
'Here?'
'No, not down here in the desert, but upon the mountains the rain will
fall with great fury.' For a few moments longer, Jake stared up at the
pinnacles and glaring slopes of grandeur and menace, then he turned his
back upon them and swept the rolling tree-dotted plains to the
eastward. As yet, there was no) sign of the Italian advance that the
scouts had reported, and he turned again and focused his binoculars on
the lower slopes of the gorge at the point from which Gareth would
signal the enemy's movements to him. There was nothing to be seen but
broken rock and the tumbled slopes of scree and rubble.
He dropped his scrutiny lower to where the last small dunes of red sand
lapped like wavelets against the great rock reef of the mountains.
There were wrinkles in the surface of the plain, sparsely covered with
the pale seared desert grasses, but in their troughs thick coarse bush
had taken root. The bush was tall and dense enough to hide the
hundreds of patiently waiting Harari under its cover.
Gareth had worked out the method of dealing with the Italian tanks, and
it was he who had sent Gregorius up the gorge to the village of Sardi
with a gang of a hundred men and fifty camels. Under Greg's
direction,
they had torn up the rails from the shunting yard of the railway
station, packed the heavy steel rails on to the camels and brought them
down the perilous path to the desert floor.
Gareth had explained how the rails were to be used, split his force
into gangs of twenty men each and exercised them with the rails until
they were as efficient as he could hope for. All that was needed now
was for Priscilla the Pig to lead the Italian tanks into the low
dunes.
Without armour, Gareth estimated they could hold the Italians for a
week at the mouth of the gorge. His order of battle placed the
Harari on the left and centre, in good positions that interlocked with
those of the Galla on the right flank. The Vickers guns had lanes of
fire laid down that would make any infantry assault by the Italians
suicidal without armoured cover.
They would have to blast their way into the gorge with artillery and
aerial bombardment. It would take them a week at the least that is, if
they could dissuade Ras Golam from attacking the Italians, a task which
promised to be difficult, for the old Ras's fighting blood was coursing
through his ancient veins.
Once they forced the mouth of the gorge and drove the Ethiopian forces
into its gut, they had another week's hard pounding to reach the top
