from Asmara in a mood of bile and thunder. The interview with
General
De Bono had been one of the low points in the Count's entire life. He
had not believed that the General was serious in his threat to remove
him from his command and pack him off ignobly back to Rome until the
General had actually begun dictating the order to his smirking aide
de-camp, Captain Crespi.
The threat still hung over the Count's handsome curly head. He had
just twelve hours to reach and secure the Wells of Chaldi or a
second-class cabin on the troopship GaribaLdi, sailing five days later
from Massawa for Napoli, had been reserved for him by the General.
Count Aldo Belli had sent a long and eloquent cable to Benito
Mussolini, describing the General's atrocious behaviour, and had
returned in high pique to his battalion completely unaware that the
General had anticipated his cable, intercepted it and quietly
suppressed it.
Major Castelani did not take the order to advance seriously,
expecting at any moment the counter-order to be given, so it was with a
sense of disbelief and rising jubilation that he found himself actually
aboard the leading truck, grinding the last dusty miles through rolling
landscape towards the setting sun and the Wells of Chaldi.
The heavy rainfall precipitated by the bulk of the Ethiopian massif was
shed from the high ground by millions of cascades and runners,
pouring down into the valleys and the lowlands. The greater bulk of
this surface water found its devious way at last into the great
drainage system of the Sud marshes and from there into the Nile
River,
flowing northwards into Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.
A smaller portion of the water found its way into blind rivers like the
Awash, or simply streamed down and sank Without trace in the soft sandy
soils of the savannah and desert.
One set of exceptional geological circumstances that altered this
general rule was the impervious sheet of schist that stretched out from
the foot of the mountains and ran in a shallow saucer below the red
earth of the plain. Runoff water from the highlands was contained and
channelled by this layer, and formed a long narrow underground
reservoir stretching out like a finger from the base of the Sardi
Gorge, sixty miles into the dry hot savannah.
Closer to the mountains, the water ran deep, hundreds of feet below the
earth's surface, but farther out, the slope of the land combined with
the raised lip of the schist layer forced the water up to within
forty-five feet of the surface.
Thousands of years ago the area had been the grazing grounds of large
concentrations of wild elephant. These indefatigable borers for water
had detected the presence of this subterranean lake. With tusk and
hoof they had dug down and reached the surface of the water.
Hunters had long since exterminated the elephant herds, but their wells
had been kept open by other animals, wild ass, oryx, camel, and, of
course, by man who had annihilated the elephant.
