the shouts and wild laughter of the Gallas, drunk on blood and te,
and the chilling sound of the few Harari captives who had been saved
from the initial massacre to provide entertainment during the long wait
before Ras Kullah arrived in the captured town.
Vicky did not know how long she had lain. Her hands and feet were
without feeling, for the rawhide ropes were tightly knotted. Her ribs
ached from the blow that had felled her, and the icy cold of the
mountain night had permeated her whole body so that the marrow in her
bones ached with it, and fits of shivering racked her as though she
were in fever. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably and her lips were
blue and tight, but she could not move. Any attempt to alter her
position or relieve her cramped limbs was immediately greeted with a
blow or a kick from the guards who stood over her.
At last her mind blacked out, not into sleep, for she could still dimly
hear the din from around the hut, but into a kind of coma in which
sense of time was lost, and the acute discomfort of the cold and her
bonds receded.
Hours must have passed in this stupor of exhaustion and cold, when she
was roused by another kick in her stomach and she gasped and sobbed
with the fresh pain of it.
She was aware immediately of a change in the volume of sound outside
the hut. There were many hundreds of voices raised in an excited roar,
like that of a crowd at a circus.
Her guards dragged her roughly to her feet, and one of them stooped to
cut the rawhide that bound her ankles, and then straightened to do the
same to those at her wrists. Vicky sobbed at the bright agony of blood
flowing back into her feet and hands.
Her legs collapsed under her and she would have fallen, but rough hands
held her and dragged her forward on her knees towards the low entrance
of the hut. Outside, there was a dense pack of bodies that filled the
narrow street.
Dark menacing figures that pressed forward eagerly as she appeared in
the entrance of the hut, and a blood-crazed roar went up from the
crowd.
Her guards dragged her forward along the street, and the crowd swarmed
forward, keeping pace with her, and the roar of their voices was like
the sound of a winter storm.
Hands clutched at her, and her guards beat them away laughingly,
and hustled her onwards with her paralysed legs flopping weakly under
her. They carried her forward into the goods yards of the railways,
through the steel gate, past the mountainous pile of naked mutilated
corpses, all that remained of men whom she had helped to nurse.
The yard was lit by the smoky fluttering light of hundreds of torches,
and it was only when she was almost up to the warehouse veranda that
she recognized the figure that lolled indolently upon his cushions,
using the raised concrete ramp as a grandstand from which to direct and
watch the execution.
Vicky's terror came rushing back like a black icy flood, and she tried
desperately to twist herself free of the clutching hands, but they
