Flyaway

around, then said, 'How did Konti get close enough to throw a knife? There's no cover.'

'You ain't seen the knife,' said Byrne. 'After it hit Bailly it buried itself in the sand. Konti picked it up before he called us.'

He said something to Konti and held out his hand. Konti fumbled about his person and produced the knife, which was like no knife I'd ever seen before. It was about eighteen inches long and made out of a single piece of flat steel an eighth of an inch thick. The handle was a foot long but the rest of it is hard to describe. It curved in a half-circle and two other blades projected at right-angles with hooks on the end. There seemed to be a multiplicity of cutting edges, each as sharp as a razor. It was very rusty.

'That's a mouzeri,' said Byrne. 'The Teda throwing knife. It's thrown horizontally from below waist level and it'll stop a horse going at full gallop. It's used for hunting addax and oryx but it'll also chop a man off at the ankles at sixty yards. Bailly didn't know what hit him, but Konti says it damn near took his left foot right off and badly injured his right ankle.'

I looked at the rusty blades. 'If he doesn't die of loss of blood it'll be by blood-poisoning,' I observed. What this thing had done to Bailly was enough to make anyone scream.

'I hope so,' said Byrne harshly. He took the queer-shaped knife and gave it back to Konti, who grinned cheerfully. 'Konti says it's the same knife he used to kill his enemy with in the Tibesti.' He looked down at the blood on the sand and shrugged. 'Let's go see what the damage is.'

The damage was bad. Three tyres shot to pieces and only two spares. But that wasn't the worst, because the petrol tank had a hole in it. We had refilled from the jerricans not long before the shooting and there wasn't nearly enough petrol to take us to Bilma even if we had good tyres.

I said, 'Well, we've got plenty water and food. All we have to do is to sit tight until Mokhtar comes along, then we can hitch a ride on a camel.'

'Yeah,' said Byrne. 'Good thinking – but for one thing. He ain't coming this way.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Billson had still not got over his fit of the quivers. I couldn't say that I blamed him; being shot at takes different men in different ways, and Paul had not been the most stable man to begin with. And there was something else that Paul had to contend with which did not obtain under war conditions. He lived with the knowledge that he was being hunted personally, that someone malevolent was pursuing him with intent to kill. Every bullet that came our way had Paul's name engraved upon it And so he was in no shape to take an immediate part in the discussion. Konti, while being wise in desert ways, knew little about the Tenere; it was not his stamping ground. The same applied to me except the bit about desert ways, and so most of the decisions were made by Byrne.

After the flat statement that Mokhtar was not coming our way I merely said, 'Oh!' and waited for what he'd say next.

What he did say was: That djerba is going to come in useful. We're going to walk a piece.'

'How far?'

He said, 'I came this way because it's a short cut and okay for the truck. The camel trail is fifteen miles to the south.'

After leaving Fachi I would have sworn that Byrne had navigated from camel skeleton to camel skeleton but I had seen none in the last few miles. And he had just given the reason why. 'Fifteen miles,' I said, feeling relieved. 'That's not far.'

Byrne said, 'We'll need to take water – as much as we can carry.'

To walk fifteen miles?'

Byrne took me by the elbow and walked me out of Paul's hearing. He said, 'It'll take us the rest of today and all day tomorrow. You ever walked in soft sand?'

'Not far.' I looked up the valley. 'But it doesn't seem too difficult.'

He followed my glance. The camel trail to Bilma is successful because it follows the grain of the country. You can go up the long valleys between the dunes. We'll be walking against the grain; you'll be going up and down dunes until you're dizzy. It's fifteen miles across country plus five miles of climbing up and another five miles going down. And there are other things to keep in mind.'

'Such as?'

He shook his head. 'I'll tell you if it's necessary. No point in you worrying about what may not happen. Let me do the worrying.'

He only succeeded in making me uneasy.

The first thing we did was to fill the djerba with water from a jerrican, then Byrne looked me up and down. 'How much weight do you reckon you can carry?'

I remembered army route marches which were not so much for use in these mechanized days as to toughen the men. Officers were supposed to do better than the men. I picked a figure, then hastily revised it downwards as I thought of climbing interminably in soft sand. 'Forty pounds.'

Byrne shook his head. 'Too much. A jerri can half-full for you and Paul; that's about thirty pounds each. Konti can take his djerba; he's used to it.'

We took a full jerrican and split it between two, then made slings so the jerricans could be back-packed, taking care to put in plenty of padding to avoid chafe. Byrne made us take the djellabas. 'It gets cold at night.' I noted that the jerrican he picked to carry himself was full. That would be a killing load for a man on the wrong side of sixty if what he had said about our journey was true, but I said nothing about it. He knew what he was doing.

We then ate and stuffed what was left of the bread and cheese and a few scraps of meat into the breast pockets of our gandouras. 'Drink hearty,' advised Byrne. 'Water is better in you than out. Any camel knows that.'

When Byrne had spoken of water in the past he had referred to litres or gallons interchangeably, but his gallons were American. I estimated that we moved away carrying eight and a half imperial gallons in jerricans plus what was in the djerba which was difficult to estimate – say, nearly twelve gallons in all. It seemed a lot of water to take for a fifteen-mile hike and I wondered what possibilities were lurking in Byrne's mind.

My memories of the journey I seldom care to reflect upon. The most insistent thing that comes to mind is the soft, yet gritty, sand. A building contractor would have delighted in it because it would be ideal for making high- quality cement and concrete and, no doubt, some sharp entrepreneur will find some way of shipping it out and making a profit. God knows, there's enough of it. But I can never now look upon an expanse of sand without feeling, in imagination, the cruel tug of that damned jerrican on my back. We passed the place where Konti had hamstrung Bailly, crossed the valley and climbed another of the dunes which, in that place, were running from sixty to a hundred feet high. I suppose we were lucky in a way because the forward slopes which we had to climb were not as steep as the reverse slopes. Had we been going north instead of south it would have been much worse.

I watched Byrne going ahead of me across a valley floor and it came to me that there was some significance to that languid, gliding walk of the Tuareg – it came from much walking in sand, using the most economical means possible. I tried to imitate it without much success; you had to have been born with it or trained by the years like Byrne. My feet were more accustomed to city pavements.

We climbed another dune, feet digging into the sand against insistent pull of the back packs, and sometimes slipping backwards. On the crest I paused for breath and looked around. Byrne had well described an erg as a sea of sand. The Tenere was like a still picture of a storm at sea, the waves frozen in mid-heave. But these waves were bigger than any wave of water and stretched interminably as far as I could see.

The sun was setting, casting long shadows into the troughs, and the crest of the dune on which I was standing wound sinuously for many miles until it dipped out of sight. The dunes themselves were soft and smooth, sculptured by the wind, unmarked by footprint, whether of man or animal.

Byrne gestured impatiently and we went slipping and sliding down the other and steeper side. Many times during that awful journey I lost control during these descents. The jerrican on my back would seem to push and I would lose my balance and fall headlong. Luckily the sand was soft and cushiony, but not so soft in individual grains that it wasn't also abrasive, and the skin of my hands became tender.

If I was suffering like that, what of Billson? I had lived a sedentary city life but had tried to temper myself and