his sham ma The mouth collapsed into a dark empty pit, and immediately
he looked his age again.
Quickly Gregorius explained this new phenomenon to the old man,
and while he listened he ran the blade of his sword into the dune
between his feet, scrubbing it clean of the clotted black blood in the
dry friable sand. He spoke suddenly in his tremulou's old man's
voice.
'My grandfather says that Ras Kullah is a piece of dried dung of a
venereal hyena,' Gregorius translated quickly.
'And he says my uncle, Lij Mikhael, was wrong to treat with him,
and that you were wrong to trust him.'
'Now what the hell does that mean?' Jake demanded fretfully, and
lifted the binoculars sweeping again towards the mouth of the Sardi
Gorge away across the undulating golden plain then he exclaimed again.
'Damn it to hell, everything is blowing up. That crazy woman! She
promised me, she swore on oath that she would keep out of it for once
and now here she comes again!'
Emerging through the curtains of rain, indistinct under the dark
rolling mass of cloud, throwing no dust column on the rain-dampened
earth, the tiny sand-coloured shape of Miss Wobbly came bowling towards
them with its distinctive stately gait. Even at this distance, Jake
could make out the dark speck of Sara's head in the hatch of the
high,
old-fashioned turret.
Jake started to run down the slip-face of the dune to meet the oncoming
car.
'Jake!' Vicky screeched above the engine beat, before she came to a
halt, her head thrust out of the driver's hatch, her golden hair
shaking in the wind and her eyes huge in the pale intense face.
'What the hell are you doing? 'Jake shouted back angrily.
'The Gallas,' Vicky screeched. 'They've gone! Every last man of them!
Gone!' She braked hard and tumbled down to the ground so that
Jake had to catch and steady her.
'What do you mean gone?' Gareth demanded, coming up at that moment and
Sara answered him from Miss Wobbly's turret with her dark eyes
sparkling hotly.
'They went, like smoke, like the dirty hill bandits they are.'
'The left flank-'Gareth exclaimed.
'Nobody there. The Italians have come through without firing a shot.
Hundreds and hundreds of them. They are at the gorge, they have
overrun the camp.'
'Jake, they would have cut off all our own Harari,
it would have been a massacre Sara gave the order, in her grandfather's
name, she ordered them to abandon the right flank.'
'Oh,
good Christ!'
'They are trying to fight their way back into the gorge now but the
Italians are covering the mouth with machine guns. It's terrible,
Jake, oh the desert is thick with the dead.'
'We've lost it all. Everything we gained, at a single throw, it's all
