laughter her bosom jumped and bounced.
Sebastian leaned forward with the laughter drying in his throat and cupped them in his hands.
Instantly her own laughter ceased, she looked at him a moment, then suddenly her face hardened and she struck his hands away.
'No!' she hissed at him, and jumping to her feet she waded to where her clothing lay on the bank. Swiftly she covered her femininity, and as she strapped the heavy bandolier of ammunition around her body the last soft memory of their loving was gone from her face.
It was that stinking Rufiji water, Herman Fleischer decided, and moved painfully in his maschille as another cramp took him.
The hot hand of dysentery that closed on his stomach added to his mood of dark resentment. His present discomfort was directly linked to the arrival of Blitcher in his territory, the indignities he had experienced at the hands of her captain, the danger he had run into in his brush with the English bandits at the start of this expedition, and since then the constant gruelling work and ever-present fear of another attack, the nagging of the engineer whom von Kleine had placed over him he hated everything to do with that cursed warship, he hated every man aboard her.
The jogging motion of the maschille bearers stirred the contents of his belly, making it gurgle and squeak. he would have to stop again, and he looked ahead for a suitable place in which to find privacy.
Ahead of him the caravan of porters was toiling along the shallow bottom of a valley between two sparsely wooded ridges of shale and broken rock.
The column was spread out in an untidy straggle half a mile long, for it comprised just under a thousand men.
In the van a hundred of them, stripped to loin-cloths were wielding their long pari gas on and shiny with sweat, the scrub. The blades glinting as they rose and fell, the thudding of the blows muted in the lazy heat of afternoon.
Working under the supervision of Gunther Raube, the young engineering officer from Blitcher, they were cutting out the narrow track, widening it for the passage of the bulky objects that followed.
Dwarfing the men that swarmed around them, these four objects rolled slowly along, rocking and swaying over patches of uneven ground.
Now and then halting as they came up against a tree stump or an outcrop of rock, before the animal exertions of two hundred black men could get them rolling again.
Three weeks previously they had beached the freighter Rheinlander in Dares Salaam harbour and dismantled eight slabs of her plating. Then from the metal frames of her hull, Raube had shaped eight enormous wheel rims, fourteen feet in diameter; into each of these he had welded a sheet of -inch plating ten foot square. Using the freighter's bollards as axles, he had linked these eight discs in four pairs. Thus each of these contraptions looked like the wheel and axle assembly of a gigantic Roman chariot.
Herman Fleischer had made a swift recruitment tour, and secured nine hundred able-bodied Volunteers from the town of Dares Salaam and its outlying villages. These nine hundred were now engaged in trundling the four sets of wheels southward towards the RLIfiji delta. While they worked, Herman's Askari stood by with loaded Mousers to discourage any of the volunteers from Succumbing to an attack of homesickness; a malady which was fast reaching epidemic proportions, aggravated as it was by shoulders rubbed raw by contact with harsh sun-heated metal, and by palms whose outer layers of skin had been smeared away on the rough hemp ropes. They had been two weeks at their labours and they were still thirty torturous miles from the river.
Herman Fleischer squirmed again in his maschille as the amoebic dysentery gnawed at his guts.
'Mother of a pig!' he moaned, and then shouted at the bearers, 'Quickly, take me to those trees.' He pointed to a clump of wild ebony that smothered one of the side draws of the valley.
With alacrity, the maschille bearers swung off the path and trotted up the draw. Within the screen of wild ebony they paused while the Commissioner alighted from the hammock and hurried into the deepest recess of the bush to be alone. Then they drew themselves down with a communal sigh and gave themselves up to a session of African callisthenics.
When the Commissioner came out of retreat he was hungry. It was cool and restful in the shade, an ideal place to take his midafternoon snack. Raube would have to fend for himself for an hour or so. Herman nodded to his personal servant to set up the camp table and open the food box. His mouth was fulll of sausage when the first rifle shot clapped dully in the dusty dry air.
'Where is he?' He must be here. The scouts said he was here. Can you see him?' Rosa Oldsmith spoke through lips that were chapped dry by sun and wind, white flakes of skin had -come loose from the raw red patches of sunburn on her nose, and her eyes were bloodshot from the dust and the glare.
She lay on her stomach behind a bank of shale and coarse grass with the Mauser probing out in front of her.
'Can you see him?' she demanded again impatiently, turning her head towards her father.
Flynn grunted noncommittally, holding the binoculars to his eyes, panning them slowly down the length of the valley then back again to the head of the strange caravan.
There is a white man there, he said.
'Is it Fleischer, is it?
'No,' doubtfully Flynn gave the negative. 'No, I don't think so.' 'Look for him. He must be there somewhere.'
'I wonder what the hell those things are.' Flynn concentrated on the four huge sets of wheels. The lens of the binoculars magnified the heat distortion through the still air, making them change shape and size so that one second they were insignificant and the next they were monstrous.
'Look for Fleischer. Damn those things, look for Fleischer!' Rosa snapped at him.
'He's not with them.'
'He must be. He must be there.' Rosa rolled on her side and reached out to snatch the binoculars from Flynn's hands. Eagerly she scanned the long column that moved slowly towards them up the valley.
'He must be there. Please God, he must be there,' she whispered her hatred through cracked dry lips.
'We will have to attack soon. They are nearly in position now.' 'We must find Fleischer.' Desperately Rosa searched, her knuckles showing white through sun-brown skin as she clutched the binoculars.
'We can't let it go much longer. Sebastian is in position, he will be expecting my signal.'
'Wait! You must wait.'
'No. We can't let them get closer.' Flynn half lifted his body, and called softly.
'Mohammed! Are you ready?'
'We are ready.' The reply came from farther down the slope where the line of riflemen lay.
'Remember my words, oh, thou chosen -of Allah. Kill the Askari first and the others will run.'
'Your words ring in my ears with the brightness and the beauty of golden bells,' Mohammed replied.
'Up yours!' said Flynn and unbuttoned the pocket flap of his tunic. He fumbled out the hand-mirror and held it slanted to catch the sun, deflecting a bright splinter of light towards the far slope of the valley. From the jumble of rock and bush there was an immediate answering flash as Sebastian acknowledged the signal.
'Ah!' Flynn breathed theatrical relief, 'I was afraid our Bassie might have fallen asleep over there.' And he picked up the Mauser from the rock in front of him.
'Wait,' pleaded Rosa. 'Please wait.'
'We can't. You know we can't if Fleischer is down there then we'll get him. If he isn't, then waiting any longer isn't going to help us.'
'You don't care,' she accused. 'You have forgotten about Maria already.'
'No,' said Flynn. 'No, I haven't forgotten,' and he cuddled the Mauser into his shoulder.
There was an Askari he had been watching. A big man who moved ahead of the column. Even at this range Flynn sensed that this man was dangerous. He moved with aleopard's slouching awareness, head cocked and alert.
Flynn picked him up in the notch of the rear sight and rode the pip down his body, aiming low to compensate for the downhill shot, taking him in the belly. He gathered the slack in the trigger, squeezing it up gently. The Mauser cracked viciously and the recoil jumped back into his shoulder.
Incredulously Flynn saw the bullet throw a jump of dust from the slope below the Askari. A clean miss at four hundred yards from a carefully aimed shot By Christ, he was getting old.
Frantically he worked the bolt of the rifle, but already the Askari had ducked for cover, unslinging his rifle as he disappeared into, a bank of grey thorn bush, and Flynn's next shot ripped ineffectively into the coarse dry vegetation.
'Damn it to hell!' howled Flynn, and his voice was small in the storm of gun-fire that blew around him. From both slopes all his riflemen were shooting down into the solid pack of humanity that clogged the valley floor.
For startled seconds the mass of native bearers stood quiescent under the lash of the Mousers, each man frozen in the attitude in which the attack had caught him; bent to the giant wheels, leaning forward against the ropes, pari ga raised to strike at a branch, or
