fell heavily and the bowls -till and tei flasks crashed to the floor and
shattered. Instantly the men at the front door put their shoulders to
it, tearing it off its hinges. They burst into the house, shouting and
breaking furniture, torches flashing as they searched the front rooms.
There was a confused babble of alarm as the headman and his family
struggled awake, and then the sound of heavy blows with club and rifle
butt, followed by shrieks of pain and terror.
Tessay reached the back door and struggled to open it.
The sound of strange men rampaging through the house made her fingers
clumsy. She struggled with the lock. All the while she could hear other.
men outside running through the yard to surround the house completely.
At last she got the door open. It was dark and the area was unfamiliar
so she did not know in which direction to run, but she heard the river
close by in the night.
'If I can only reach the bank,' she thought, and started across the
yard.
As she did so the beam of an electric torch blinded her, and a coarse
voice bellowed, 'There she is!'
Any doubt that she was the prey was instantly dispelled, and she fled
like a startled hare in the beam of the light. They bayed behind her
like a pack of hounds. She reached the bank of the river and spun off to
the right, downstream. A pistol cracked out behind her and she ducked as
a shot fluted past her head.
'Don't shoot, you baboons!' a voice roared in commanding tones. 'We want
her for questioning.'
In the torch beam her white shamnw flashed like the wings of a moth
flitting around the candle flame.
'Stop her!' shouted the officer behind her. 'Don't let her get away.'
But she was fleet as a gazelle, and her lightly sandalled feet flew
across the rough terrain while the heavily equipped soldiers blundered
along behind her. Her spirits soared as she realized that she was
pulling away from them.
The sound of the pursuit dwindled behind her and she had reached the
limit of the effective range of the torch beam when she ran into a fence
of rusty barbed wire. Three wire strands whipped across her lower body,
at the level of her knees, her hips and her diaphragm. The top strand
drove the breath from her lungs, and the barbs tore through the wool of
her clothing and into her flesh. They snagged her like a fish in the
mesh of a net, and she hung there struggling helplessly. Rough hands
seized her and dragged her off the wire, and she sobbed with despair and
with the pain of the sharp wire spurs tearing her skin. One of the
soldiers grabbed her wrist and twisted it up between her
shoulder-blades, laughing with sadistic relish when she cried out at the
pain.
The officer came up panting over the rough ground.
He was overweight, and even in the cold night air he was sweating
heavily. It greased his fat cheeks and glistened in the light of the
torch.
'Do not hurt her, you oaf,' he gasped. 'She is not a criminal. She is a
