The last burst of fire struck him, and the sword dropped from his hand;
he sank to his knees, but kept crawling now he had seen the Count and
his eyes fastened on the white man's face. He tried to shout
something, but the sound was drowned in a bright flooding gout of blood
that filled his open mouth. The crawling, mutilated figure reached the
hull of the stationary tank, and the Italian almost as though in awe of
the man's tenacity. guns fell silent
Laboriously, the dying warrior dragged his broken body up towards the
Count, watching him with a terrible dying anger, and the Count fumbled
nervously with the ivory butt of the Beretta, slipping a fresh clip of
cartridges into the recessed butt.
'Stop him, you fools,' he cried. 'Kill him! Don't let him get in.'
But the guns were silent.
With shaking hands, the Count slapped the magazine home and lifted the
pistol. At a range of six feet he sighted briefly into the crawling
Ethiopian.
He emptied the magazine of the Beretta in frantic haste, the shots
crashing out in rapid succession in the sudden silence that hung over
the field.
A bullet struck the warrior in the centre of his sweat-glazed forehead,
leaving a perfectly round black hole in the gleaming brown skin, and
the man slithered backwards and then rolled down the hull,
coming to rest at last upon his back, and he stared up at the swiftly
lightening sky with wide, unseeing eyes. Out between the slack lips
dropped a set of artificial teeth, and the old mouth collapsed and fell
inwards.
The Count was shaking still, but then quite unexpectedly a surging
emotion swept away the terrors that had gripped him. He felt a vast
proprietorial sense of emotional involvement with the man he had killed
he wanted to take some part of him, some trophy of his kill. He wanted
to scalp him, or take his head and have it cured so that he might
preserve this moment for ever, but before he could move, there was the
shrilling of whistles, and a bugle began urgently to sound the
advance.
On the slope ahead of them, only the dead lay in their piles and
mounds, while the last of those who had survived that crazy suicidal
charge were disappearing like wisps of smoke back among the rocks.
The road to Sardi was open, and like the hard professional he was,
Luigi Castelani seized the chance. As the bugle sang its brassy
command, the Italian infantry rose from the trenches, and the formation
of tanks rumbled forward.
The corpse of the ancient Harari warrior lay directly in the track of
the command tank, and the rumbling steel treads pressed it into the
rocky ground as it passed over, squashing it like the carcass of a
rabbit on a highway, as it bore Colonel Count Aldo Belli triumphantly
up the gorge to Sardi and the Dessie road.
At the wall of rock built right across the throat of the gorge, the
armoured column ground to a halt, blocked at the very lip of the
valley, and when the Italian infantry, who had moved under cover of the
