that's an old Swales family motto,' and he chuckled lightly. 'We'll be
able to hold them at the mouth of the gorge for another week now. No
trouble at all.' Abruptly the sunlight was obscured, and instantly the
temperature dropped sharply. Both of them glanced up involuntarily at
the sky, at the gloom and the sudden chill.
In the last hour, the masses of cloud had come slumping down from the
mountains, blotting them out completely, and spreading out on to the
fringes of the Danakil desert.
From this thick, dark mattress of swirling cloud, fine pale streamers
of rain were already spiralling down towards the plain. Jake felt a
droplet splatter against his forehead and he wiped it away with the
back of his hand.
'I say, we're in for a drop or two,' murmured Gareth, and as if in
confirmation the deep mutter of thunder echoed down from the
cloud-shrouded mountains, and lightning flared sulkily, trapped within
the towering cloud masses and lighting them internally with a
smouldering infernal glow.
'That's going to make things-' Gareth cut himself off, and both of them
cocked their heads.
'Hello, that's decidedly odd.' Faintly on the brooding air,
carrying above the mutter of thunder, came the popping of musketry and
the sound of machine-gun fire, like the sound of tearing silk, made
indistinct and un warlike by distance and the muting banks of heavy
cloud.
'Deuced odd.' Gareth repeated. 'There should not be any firing from
there.' It was in their rear, seeming to come from the very mouth of
the gorge itself.
'Come on,' snapped Jake, picking his binoculars out of Priscilla's
hatch and scrambling through the loose red sand for the crest of the
tallest dune.
The cloud and misty streamers of rain obscured the mouth of the gorge,
but now the sound of gunfire was continuous.
'That's not just a skirmish,' muttered Gareth.
'It's a full-scale fire fight,' Jake agreed, peering through the
binoculars.
'What is it, Jake?' Gregorius came up the dune to where they stood. He
was followed by his grandfather but the old man moved slowly, exhausted
and stiff with age and the aftermath of burned-out passions.
'We don't know, Greg. 'Jake did not lower the binoculars.
'I don't understand it.' Gareth shook his head. 'Any Italian probe
from the south would have run into our positions in the foothills, and
from the north it would have run into the Gallas. Ras
Kullah is in a pretty strong spot there. We would have heard the
fighting. They can't have gone through there-'
'And we are here in the centre, 'Jake added, 'they didn't come through
here.'
'It doesn't make sense.' At that moment, the Ras reached the crest. He
paused wearily and removed the teeth from his mouth, wrapped them
carefully in a kerchief and tucked them away in some secret recess of
