disruption of air swept over them with a force that made them stagger.
It clapped painfully in their skulls and threatened to implode the
delicate membranes of their eardrums. Then the main force of the blast
swept over them, not a single blast but a long, rolling detonation like
thunder breaking directly overhead. It stunned and battered them so that
they reeled into each other and lost the direction of their flight.
Nicholas seized her in a steadying embrace, and looked back. He saw a
series of explosions leap from the crest of the cliff. Tall, dancing
fountains of dirt and dust and rubble, pirouetting one after the other
in strict choreography, like a chorus-line of hellish ballerinas.
Even in the terror of the moment he could appreciate the expertise with
which the gelignite had been laid. This was a master bomber at work. The
leaping columns of rubble subsided upon themselves, leaving the fine,
tawny mist of dust drifting and spiralling against the clear blue of the
sky, and for a moment longer it seemed that the destruction was
complete. Then the silhouette of the cliff began to alter.
Slowly at first the wall of rock started to lean outwards.
He saw great cracks appear in the face, opening like leering mouths.
Sheets of rock collapsed and in slow motion slithered down upon
themselves like the silken skirts of a curtseying giantess. The rock
groaned and crackled and rumbled as the entire cliff began to fall into
the river far below.
Nicholas was mesmerized by the awful sight, and his brain seemed to have
been numbed by the explosion. It took a huge effort to force himself to
think and to act. He saw that the centre of the explosion had occurred
further down the trail, near the head of the mule caravan. Tamre was up
there, beside Aly. He and Royan were at the tail of the caravan. The
bomber up on the cliff had obviously been waiting for them to come
directly into the epicentre of his explosive trap, but had been forced
to trigger it when he saw them running back down the trail and realized
that they had been alerted and were about to escape.
Yet they were not clear - they were about to catch the peripheral force
of the landslide that was developing above them. Still holding Royan,
Nicholas stared up the falling cliff face and made a desperate
calculation.
He watched in petrified fascination as the vast tide of falling rock
swept over the trail ahead of him, picking up men and mules and carrying
them with it over the edge and down into the river bed. It swallowed
them, lapping them up like the tongue of some fearsome monster and
chewing them to pulp with razor fangs of red rock. Even above the
rumbling roar of the rock tide he heard the terrified screams of men and
animals as they were ploughed under.
The wave of destruction spread towards where he and Royan stood upon the
trail. If they had been directly under the explosion they would have
stood as little chance as those others, but as it ran down the cliff its
destructive momentum was dissipating. On the other hand, Nicholas
realized that there was no hope that they would be able to outrun it,
and what was about to fall upon them would still be devastating.
There was no time to explain to Royan what they had to do - he had only
seconds left in which to act. Sweeping her up in his arms, he leaped
