the man who led them, Ras Muguletu, was the ablest and most experienced
of all the warlords. But he was powerless and uncertain in the face of
such strength and fury as now broke around him. He had not imagined it
could be so, and he lay with his men, quiescent and stoic. There was
no enemy to confront, nothing to strike out at, for the huge Caproni
bombers droned high overhead and the great guns that fired the shells
were miles below in the valley.
All they could do was pull their dusty shammas over their heads and
endure the bone-jarring, bowel-shaking detonations and breathe the
filthy fume-laden air.
Day after day the storm of explosive roared around them until they were
dazed and stupefied, deafened and uncaring, enduring, only enduring not
thinking, not feeling, not caring.
On the sixth night the drone of the big three-engined bombers passed
overhead, and Ras Muguletu's men, peering up fearfully, saw the
sinister shapes pass overhead, dark against the silver pricking of the
stars.
They waited for the bombs to tumble down upon them once more, but the
bombers circled above the flat-topped mountain for many minutes and
there were no bombs. Then the bombers turned away and the drone of the
engines died into the lightening dawn sky.
Only then did the soft insidious dew that they had sown come sifting
down out of the still night sky. Gently as the fall of snowflakes, it
settled upon the upturned brown faces, into the fearfully staring eyes,
on to the bare hands that held the ancient firearms at the ready.
It burned into the exposed skin, blistering and eating into the living
flesh like some terrible canker; it burned the eyes in their sockets,
turning them into cherry-red, glistening orbs from which the yellow
mucus poured thickly. The pain it inflicted combined both the seating
of concentrated acid and the fierce heat of live coals.
In the dawn, while thousands of Ras Muguletu's men whimpered and cried
out in their consuming agony, and their comrades, bemused and
bewildered, tried unavailingly to render aid, in that dreadful
moment,
the first wave of Italian infantry came up over the lip of the
mountain, and they were into the Ethiopian trenches before the
defenders realized what had happened. The Italian bayonets blurred
redly in the first rays of the morning sun.
The cloud lay upon the highlands, blotting out the peaks, and the rain
fell in a constant deluge. It had rained without ceasing for the two
days and three nights since the disaster of Aruba Aradarn. The rain
had saved them, it had saved the thirty thousand survivors of the
battle from being overtaken by the same fate as had befallen the ten
thousand casualties they had left on the mountain.
High above the cloud, the Italian bombers circled hungrily; Lij
Mikhael could hear them clearly, although the thick blanket of cloud
muted the sound of the powerful triple engines. They waited for a
break in the cloud, to come swooping down upon the retreat. What a
target they would enjoy if that happened! The Dessie road was choked
for a dozen miles with the slow unwieldy column of the retreat, the
