A Tree on Fire

Chapter Fourteen

A tree was burning on a hillside, a single tree in a waste of sand and ash. They knew it well, had used it as a landmark when counter-moving for the last three days to outwit a French motorised patrol from the west. The tree had been dead for a long time but clung to the red friable substance half-way between dry sand and bitter soil, scrubbed and bitten clean by passing camels, picked at by nomads for tea-fires after dusk. No one could say when it had last borne leaves.

Plane-jelly hit the ground nearby, jumped at the tree like a monster with bared teeth, spreading out to send a black-reddish pall of oil and eucalyptus into the air above. It was a lollipop in flames, expanding like an orange candy-floss fixed in the earth’s tight fist. It burned in a circle of fire, and the longer Frank watched, the more surprised he was that the tree should take so long to be consumed. From a plane it would be visible for dozens of miles, a stationary puff ball down on the grey brown earth. The peeled emaciated tree would not burn through, as if it were made of iron and waiting to melt, mocking the fire which clung to it for not being hot enough to do its job. Now and again, a tiff of wind thinned the smoke, and the white claws of its outer branches were seen, though many were missing because they had already dropped to the ground.

The bomb had struck earth like the bark of a dog. He’d heard the plane coming and lay dead in the cleft of sand. There’d been nothing for the pilot to see, and he hoped it was slung out to lighten his plane after being hit by gunfire further east, or that he was simply unloading from high spirits before going back to his aerodrome. The coppery flames of the tree cleared away much of the smoke, immolation so total that the reason why the plane dropped the bomb became unimportant, though it was necessary to know it in order to lay a guideline for the preservation of their group. Everything must be accurately deduced, so that they could rationalise and plan. Each day, half day, rest, thought, had to be set into the complexities of these shifting sands, clouds, winds. But the tree fixed his eyes, its scorching fire clearing out the caverns of his mind the short time he looked at it.

It seemed as if some hidden reserves of resinous sap were feeding the flames, sent them bristling high and forcefully, as if the only hope of the tree to keep its upright shape was to succour the fire that was sure to destroy it. When the quick of the tree was reached, the flame turned white, spilling pyrotechnic fire for a few seconds. Then the whole tree burned black and smoky once more, and two of the strongest branches fell into it.

It was only now that he noticed a man in the tree, having missed him in the confusion of the first shock. He was halfway up, astride the main branch forking left, arms held around the trunk and head pressed against it. The bomb was so close that the impact must have killed him. He supposed now that the pilot had seen him move, that the man heard the plane and ran up the tree for safety. For some, a chicken in every pot, for others a bomb on every human being to keep the chicken in every pot for themselves. It was a cruel blighting expense of spirit. As soon as people take to the hills or the wilderness, God pulls out of them. You’ve no business in the hills as far as God is concerned: if you aren’t prepared to stay in the valleys and suffer, He won’t look after you. He tried to spit, but the permanent condition of his choked throat spared no saliva to put out the vision of the burning man. What sins was he booked for, to end in such a way? The smoke plumed to vanishing point not too far up, a shaky impermanent stalagmite, the only movement of Nature for hundreds of miles, all that remained of a war between man-made chemicals and an earth-succoured tree. His binoculars showed the body falling into the base of the smoke.

When you light a match in such heat, the flame is invisible, and if you aren’t careful, you burn your fingers on it. With all smoke gone, a blue trunk appeared, air shimmering around it where the flame was active. They waited thirty minutes to give the plane time to come back and fly away again. New rules were conceived every day. They would not even talk, as if it might hear them with its complex spikes of homing and radar devices. In this life, there was no hope, no luck, only meticulous plotting and the certainty of what had already happened. Before survival had become an obsession they had foolishly thrown away half their force in a fight when the rest of them were lucky to have broken free, but now it had become a profession, a way of breathing, that had flattened them into the earth even before the plane was heard. He pressed hard into the grit and sand, though his body felt airless and light, fought to get deep into the earth as if to relieve the fever of thirst in him, and escape the danger clamped at his spine like a grappling-hook. If he could not cover himself in grit and dust, it was only because it wasn’t deep enough. Walking, walking, walking, you seemed to hold down firmly in your body all the incurable diseases of the world, and when you have to stop and stay flat, you imagine they have got you at last, each one disjointing and attacking the longer you lie there.

The tree was a black stump that had died long before the fire beat at it, whose white bones had given up through old age, only to suffer this cremation before being blown off the face of the earth by the crepitating slick winds of the Sahara that met in battle with all-battering gusts rolling down from the Atlas. But it seemed as if the stump would last, that the fire would not reach its marrow. He’d seen trees similarly blasted in a grove near Aflou, a meeting of milestone stumps gathered to discuss what to do now that they had lost the distance-marks on their faces. Yet, an anaemic green shoot always grew from part of the sheltered base. It was hard to understand why they were so bent on survival, though looking at them, it seemed that it was not in their power to ask such a question.

He had been frightened by Algeria before getting used to it. The excess of space had no limits, as much because he was unfamiliar with the geography, as that it was really vast. At dusk, the sun went down as if setting into a sea, with the far-off humps of camels drowning in it, or the shipwreck of some oasis foundering at an inexplicable low tide by a mirage of mountains. In dangerous areas, during the weeks of great walks they had done, they marched by night, following a pocket compass, sometimes an Arab guide. The silence made them afraid to talk, and after some hours, it seemed as if it had destroyed their voices, Frank being resigned to never talking again and thinking it wouldn’t be so hard an affliction as long as he could hear and see.

The fear narrowed him down, became part of growth and helped him to see his lonely stature against an enormous land-mass that was so big in fact and imagination (which fear welded together), that it also eliminated all idea of time. At first, he looked at his watch often during the day, but now it was constantly running down. Only Shelley had any check on what minutes passed from the first red spread in the east to the final blue and gold bath in the opposite direction. In the wilderness, the man who measured time was a god, until the mainspring of his watch finally packed in.

They burrowed against the scorching shale-troughs several times a day. The valley was a wide, long depression, running south-west to north-east, pointing like a javelin towards the Kabylie mountains where most of the fighting was going on, and where the guerrilla front of the FLN had friendly bridgeheads backing into the sea. From one of them, Shelley hoped to get on to an Egyptian arms ship one dark night and be floated out to Morocco or Alexandria. From Tangier again, or Libya, he would come back on the same run with another load of guns. As for Frank, here he was and here he would stay while the fighting lasted, looking on his commitment as the great oceanic end of the line for him, the wide spaces of the world that he must allow himself to be swallowed by if he was to do any good in it.

Their line of march was neither along the bed of the valley nor by one of the level crests on either side, but took the more difficult line that invisibly ran half-way up from the oued bottom, so that their brown garb, painfully threading the scorching rocks and thorn bushes of a never-varying contour-line, was least likely to be seen by any plane coming on them before its warning noise scraped out of the sky.

Keeping so still in the body-worn crevasse, where each grain of sand was a live ant pricking his skin, his joints froze, and arms and legs, so that at one point he felt panic turning over in his depths, ready to surface and drive him to madness. He held on, limbs dying one by one, knowing that if someone were to stick needles in him at this moment he would not feel it, that the points would go through dead flesh and his face would stay pressed against scorching rock without a tremor passing the mouth. To lie dead wasn’t always so difficult, but now under the dead eye of the furnaced midday sun spreading its diamond heat across the whole ashen and stony plateau, his sweat poured out like insects breaking from every surface and running over any space between skin and cloth, columns advancing and crisscrossing in all places inaccessible. He tried to pinpoint each fresh spring, but failed because there were so many. When a river of sweat flicked on to his neck, it seemed to have some mysterious signalling system that caused another to spring from the calf of his leg, as if all outbreaks and sweat-heads were working to a co-ordinated system too subtle and complex for the human brain to pick through. Yet there seemed no purpose in it except to drive him mad, so he gripped his teeth and eventually quietened himself by saying that to succeed in such a project as to send him mad was so minor an achievement for the spending of so much force and plotting that it was not worth succumbing to.

The tree burned, a black stump surrounded by air of fire, but there had been no man on it. His trunk existed only, in the warmth, as if all the moisture of his body had run but into the grit and sand of his refuge and he couldn’t understand why a wispy column of vapour wasn’t lifting from the hole he had made. The air sucked it up, and he was dry, tinderous, dismembered, separated by yards it seemed from his dead limbs. He was glad there had been no man on the tree, that it must have been a piece of trunk falling into intense, almost solid smoke, a vision of his bodyless eyes.

The noise of an aeroplane scraped out of the sky. It came low, low-winged and propelled, slow and straight. There was nothing it could see except smoke and emptiness, a stilled sea of lava and rock, and grey sand-patches frozen suddenly as earth. The pilot wasn’t air-conditioned either, as he must have yawned and looked, then swung back towards Tiaret, climbing as if to get nearer the sun where it would be cooler.

Out of the half-sleep of stupefying sun and exhaustion, his instinct was to rub his legs into life, but his hands wouldn’t move. They lacked food, water, but above all he craved salt, and in his walking visions the sea was a flat metallic shimmer stretching from north to south, a line never more than a few miles ahead, and he increased its reality by wading in it, pushing into the shallow watery salt and lifting it up and over his head like sheets of silk, and in this way he felt better and the false sea became less distinct. Yet any way he turned, the horizon remained, with slothful fishing-boats that had no one aboard lifting and falling a short way out.

By his side was a bag of ammunition and food, and a plastic container whose water tasted as if it had been run through iron filings in the factory, for the smell was almost the same as that which met him on going in each morning less than two years ago. The wells were deep and the water rotten, but his stomach had sealed itself against bacteria after the first crucifying bout in the Monts des Ksours. He rubbed his hands together, and the ache of life came back into his legs. Lifting his head, he saw Mokhtar and Idris standing in front, Ahmed and Shelley further down the slope, Mohamed behind. He’d been alone, flattening every second into an infinity of isolation, and he was almost surprised to see other people as he got up and swung his arms and lifted his legs to bring the dismembered pieces back to his torso.

‘It gets worse every time,’ Shelley said, lighting a pipeful of his precious tobacco to show how bad it was. He pushed his lower lip out with his tongue and tried to spit because it didn’t taste good in the thirst and heat. ‘Two hundred miles as the Mig flies and we’ll be in friendly territory. High mountains and running streams. Winter sports when it snows. We’ll freeze to death then, and see how we like it.’

‘It’s friendly enough here,’ Frank said, picking up his rifle. The lorry with the best guns and ammunition, bales of literature and maps, Chinese grenades known as ‘the rice harvest’, had been left in the Monts des Ksours, where the FLN was trying to tie down as many French brigades as possible to ease pressure on the Kabylie, keep a route open to Morocco, and threaten all roads from Colomb-Bechar. Nobody could say that they hadn’t done their bit with that load. The four FLN soldiers had orders to escort them to the Kabylie, and cause as much damage on the way without getting killed.

‘Nothing like spending summer in the mountains,’ Shelley went on. ‘Used to go to the Catskills with mother, where my old daddy had a big house for us, while he was walking out some dame in Boston. We kept the house after the divorce. Mother skinned him, pretty well.’

‘Nice tales for the camp-fire,’ Frank said. ‘All I want is a shave and a drink of water.’ Shelley seemed untouched by the trek, had a personality so strong that it would not adjust to the dominating sky and landscape, danger and lack of provisions. Every face had thinned to the bone, stubbled grey on Dawley, all eyes of whatever colour unable to shake themselves out of a fixed stare on long stages of the march. Frank felt the sky entering his bones. All extra flesh had vanished, leaving only aching muscle to carry him, as if he had turned into the big ants he sometimes saw; a desert insect when naked, thin and brown, strong and indefinitely living. They once stripped by a muddy pool, brown ants with shaggy heads, thin limbs and bellies firm, rushing into the magnesium filth. Ahmed missed a horned viper and, hoping anything else had fled, they went on bathing, men worn into ants, which was how Frank felt for much of the walking day. He was only a man on coming out of sleep in the morning, when he didn’t have to wonder for any time at all where exactly in the world he was.

They moved another ten miles before darkness, a line of ants, each fifty yards apart, Mokhtar, the tall intellectual Nubian-Moroccan, in front; Shelley, the ever-suspicious next in line. Frank Dawley was the last man, with a full view of them filing down to the scorching dull silver of a salt lake. There was no beauty in their route, only monotony and desolation, and though now and again such adjectives made him smile, they soon lost meaning, for it was land to cross, not question or define, and the endlessness of it emptied him of all response. You took the easy way by giving your total physical being to it, he thought, so that only the unusual was beautiful, something that shocked and pierced your heart, the purple and lugubrious cold dawn striking your eyes as soon as they dared to open at the mounting pressure of it, the great rose-hipped escarpment on emerging from a twisting and narrow cleft, the sight of a hyena suddenly setting into flight from its frozen position, so that you who were also unexpected may have been a form of beauty for it. He once thought beauty ended with the eyes, struck them and that was all before you turned away, but now it only began with the eyes, and your whole body and life responded to it so completely that often you could pass through a hundred similar beauties in a day and remain unmoved, on the surface, until you tried to close your eyes in the darkness, when the delayed-action shock of the day eventually drugged you into sleep. It was beauty, and not beauty, and only the shifting mind treated you to it at the moment of its choosing.

Purple and lugubrious dawn flattened into monotone day. The great rose-hipped escarpment turned grey, was climbed and left behind. Mokhar shot the hyena and roasted its flesh for supper. A land so big could hide you like jungle if you followed certain rules. There was no condition of life in which rules were not necessary. If there was, he had yet to find it. When the unexpected vanished, its beauty was gone, because you were totally drawn back into the flattened, staring eyes of the walk, of the oblivion of racked sleep.

Under this land there was water, oil, manganese, copper, bauxite — materials that one day would put roads and railways where they walked at fifteen or twenty miles between sunstroke and moonbeam. They wanted ice-factories and water-pumps, power stations and fish-pools, cotton-farms and air-conditioned mills, soil labs and canning-plants: then one might live here and think it beautiful if someone had written poems to tell you it was so, and you had the leisure and comfort to realise that they were right as you drove through it at forty miles an hour to meet its charms half-way.

They ambled like dead men, seeking refuge from the stony midday sun, no longer knowing that they walked. Land was like alcohol; he walked, and walking was like drinking. He drank it in on waking, and went all day from sundown to blackout wallowing in it until he dropped from exhaustion and total inebriation, happy and not caring if he ever woke again. Trudging all day over the flat stale beer of the stony plain, brandy of hills, mouth shut tight because it seeped in continually through eyes, ears, nose and anus, the drink of land and the never-ending gutterbout of topography, a blinding weekend of landbooze that went on for months. Such drink killed one with thirst, that was the only trouble, but it gave you the required lift, the lighting-up time of the brain in the flaring magnetic dayflash of the desert.

The valley widened, dry at the bottom, coming from nowhere, ending nowhere, all to no purpose, until Mokhtar fell flat on his belly, and Frank was about to do the same, thinking that his sharp ears registered a plane and that they were in for another half-hour’s insane steaming among the gravel and clinkers, when he saw him breaking lumps of grey crystal from the rock and pushing it in his mouth.

Frank filled his pockets for a taste later, when his craving for salt came back. ‘We might make the mountains in ten days,’ Shelley said, ‘running streams, a bit more to eat.’

Mokhtar was walking again. Conversation of a few mundane sentences could take a whole day to shake itself out. Shelley was an optimist of the hard-headed sort, cheerful from the deathbed of his blighted hopes. ‘Did you ever see a tree on fire before? I saw a whole forest burning once in the States,’ Shelley went on, ‘a million trees. But never one burned like this.’

Frank was engulfed by the memory of it, and for once the land lost its dominance. ‘What did you do?’

‘Got in my Lincoln and headed right away, back to the highway and town.’ Frank was silent. When a million burn, what can you save? When one burns you can only watch. The energy of your desire to help must coincide with the moral streak. He rubbed salt along his cracked lips as he walked, fifty paces behind Mokhtar, shaking the gravel from his sandals. He’d torn another piece from his blanket and wrapped it around his feet, but it had come loose and flapped when his legs moved forward. He bent down and tugged it right out, stuffing it in his shirt pocket. He had no real desire to get to the streams and mountains of the Kabylie, wanted to stay in the wide open wilderness, fight if there was a chance, play hide-and-seek at least, hunt if possible, and when at bay turn to break out or destroy, stay in this great outside flank of the prize being struggled for until such time as the French gave in and every member of the FLN joined the march on Algiers, which might not be long in coming, since the split between people and army was deep enough for plenty of premature and treacherous hope. But before then, there’d be negotiations, breakdown of talks. Then, more discussions, and a final betrayal when the country was handed over to the wrong men — or maybe the right ones. For himself, he didn’t mind if they stayed here for good. Whoever they met was friendly and helped them, though glad, of course, to see the back of them in case the French descended and began torturing in the hope of finding in which direction they had gone. North, east, south and west — that is the land which I like best. The ideal guerrilla can send an arm and a leg one way, and an arm and a leg the other, a limb for all four points of the compass, while the head levitates up in the air to make sure they reunite in a prearranged spot later, preferably when it is dark and behind the back of a paratrooper.

One pain did not kill another, they lived side by side, swapping sensations like goods in a free economy recently collapsed, and there was no limit to what the body and heart could take. They fed together in mutual support, becoming one monster that dominated the life you had chosen to lead, all the time trying to tell you how wrong it was, that the only life to follow was one in which you made no choices, avoided all suffering and turmoil, so that what agonies did strike at you would be acceptable to the world because they were chosen by fate and not by your own godless self. He hoped Myra understood what his mind had been incapable of formulating before he chose to leave her and help a country labouring under barbarous torments and oppression. It filtered through to him with often marvellous though fragmentary precision. He had seen enough to know he’d been right, but that all he could do and had done would not draw the final result nearer by one minute, yet he had been right to follow a positive and interior voice for the first time in his life that clarified its demands by reasons he understood and that could not be gainsaid by any cynicism he now and again dragged up to fight it with. Nothing had been escaped from, only entered into. The freedom of the wide-open wilderness had no meaning, was a myth, nonexistent, outdated, a paradise of false ideas. It pushed you deeper into the prison of yourself. In order to survive it, you were locked and barred and shackled, and accepted it utterly. You were stripped, hardened, tempered. The wilderness hammered the world into you like an iron rivet. Everything beyond your eyes — conical shale-sided hills bordering the gravel-valley they were threading — was clear in all its detail, perfectly understood, but you were the imprisoned man who could only master it by leaving it behind, crossing the same thing again, hiding in another bowl or valley, sleeping beyond a further horizon of the same landscape and pissing there when there was piss in you, the land that pushed you deep into yourself in order to give you the spiritual stamina for traversing the country from which you had come and to which you had still to go, while eventually, the prison of strength crumbled around you. He did not hope or expect to die there, but in his prison of sun and volcanic rock he felt strong, able to do safely what he had come for.

He had always seen himself as a strong man of the factory, able to handle huge machines, lug hub-boxes and iron castings from trolley to bench. But at the beginning of this voyage he had been as weak as if he’d penned all his life in an office. The unfamiliar landscape doubled each mile, and the heat became worse as they crawled over arid, unpopulated land, following the invisible line on Shelley’s worn-out map, numerous memorised zigzags between one sandmark and the next. His endurance was as good as the others, but not being in their minds, he imagined it bothered them less. Shelley seemed untouched by it, perhaps because he one day expected to reach the coast and get out of the country, which was only fair, since Frank had forced him into Algeria at the point of a gun. He had been silent, except to converse with the Algerians, his thin and rocky face piqued at the way things had turned out, though not openly hostile to Frank when he had all reason to be. Not satisfied with delivering arms, Frank wanted to go right in, and could only do so with Shelley, who knew the land and language. But, in any case, they were cut off from Morocco — Frank argued. ‘And you know it as well as I do.’ Shelley did, but would not reply, and from then on Frank was ready in case Shelley tried to kill him, but after so many days had burned out over them, he realised that Shelley did not at all mind the long march back, even though it would take months from his life. Under the abstracted look and grizzled half-grey hair was the brain of a nonchalant, easygoing man whose idealism and sense of purpose seemed so much nearer the bone than that which had impelled Frank to set out on this ideological adventure. Shelley resented nothing, not even his passport given up at the frontier village in Morocco — because he had four more in his pocket to be used when necessary. With his fluent Arabic, he had planned the hard route in detail with FLN Intelligence in the Monts des Ksours, and checked each day’s stage of it with Mokhtar before setting out on another inch over the map, not even a pencil line to show where they had come from in case they were taken and it fell into the hands of the French. His tall, thin figure walked ahead, caught by a set of ideas that had replaced a burned-out childhood; ideas that seemed to suit him far better than if he had retained the golden aura of some far off blissful infancy. In one sense, his ideals made up for a manhood he could never have attained, and gave him a far bigger personality than if he had.

Frank saw now how naive he had been to imagine that a man of intelligence and scholarship might not have the stamina for a trip like this; saw in fact, that accompanying him turned out to be a way of proving himself. It had taken the brawn from his middle height, and he hadn’t bothered to cut his hair since Tangier, in spite of the heat. His blue-grey eyes had sunk deeper, and his cheekbones were high and more prominent, yellowish under fair hair that carried on from the denser growth below. He didn’t want to know what he looked like, but felt that his face had been eaten away, that there were only eyes, mouth and nose which served the body as various instruments of a conningtower head. In the wilderness, you shared the consciousness of those with whom you happened to be, walked along with common nullities, sank to shallow levels of the same uniting thought, paradoxically joined by being alone. As the day went on, sun moving with micrometer slowness down white-blue sky, Frank veered from collective preoccupations nearer to his own geologic levels of introspection and escape, all-absorbed and zombie-like on his walk as he drew on deeper spiritual reserves to get his body over the last few miles, not able to propel himself even slowly on the joined enthusiasms that had set them going in the morning.

The slaghills of Nottinghamshire multiplied a thousand times as far as the eye could see, humps and pyramids of grey dust and shale covering the plain, not so geometrically pure and satisfying as those in the wayback of home but something to draw in the breath at and wonder if this was to be your last sight of earth. A small, sharp stone worked between his toes, and he knelt to extract it. He disliked the encumbrance of the rifle near the worn-out ending of the day, but it had to be carried, more as a burden of self-discipline than for the use to which it might some time be put in spitting out the unseen bullets of ambush, though the bomb-jelly of fire was likely to get him, he felt, before he could draw its clumsiness up to his shoulder and fire. It was good in attack, but would you ever have the chance to defend yourself with it? Mokhtar carried a revolver, Shelley a small machine-gun resembling a Sten. He walked on with it, quick to set his fifty paces from the man behind. A dogwind worried, swirling fine dust into clothes and faces, as if somewhere a giant egg-timer had been smashed and its contents were dispersing over this terrible extent of windswept land. His only impulse was to talk against the irritation of it, but he couldn’t walk with the man in front, or open his mouth in case it choked him. There was a thin, ululating piping of the wind, a weird demonic tune whose insistence beat on the eyes and brain to make you want to he down and sleep, a surface dust disturbing the earth without killing visibility. The sun could be seen, dimmed and ringed, able to stifle but not scorch, and those in front lost their clear desert definitions and became blurred, laboured figures bending forward, safe at least from patrols or planes. Grit stung his eyes, and his throat turned to rock, blocked by one of those shale hillocks that reminded him of Nottingham slagheaps. It was no use stopping, lying down to let it pass, because it spun in this dust-bowl and would bury you, never pass. You had to pass it, fight your way to sky and clear land. It was the worst day so far, a lingering torment of desolation. No conscripts fighting for a lost cause could undergo this. Mokhtar imparts faith to nomads and wanderers, talks to lop-eyed, underfed people of hamlets and encampments, tin-towns and cave-villages. They listen and agree, laugh and shake our hands, look longingly at the guns, take pamphlets even if they cannot read and hide them as soon as we have gone. Can you create a dust-commune in this unhallowed spot on which the unmerciful clappers of heaven have ceased to open? Yet there was water underneath it all, and if the peasants worked by the sweat of their breaking backs for another twenty years, maybe they could buy the machinery to extract it.

It became as deep as snow, black snow, hot snow, filling all the inlets of his sandals, grating on to the fingers that gripped his rifle, swirled in circles as if they were beating at last towards the centre of it, the blackest eye of the earthly death that was to draw them in and through. The sun was out of sight and they pulled close so as not to lose each other in obscurity. Shadowy black buffs were nearer on either side as if they had strayed into a sinister cul-de-sac, but Frank noticed that less dust was blowing. They climbed over drifts or waded it.

Shelley stumbled. The gap widened ahead. Beyond, milk-white cloud filled the sky. The only relief was change — either danger or speculation. The brain had died, perished in dust and the effort to choke through. Thought was coming back, but the thin whistle of the wind went on as if warning them of impending earthquake, and grit flew in ordinary contemptible rolls. They gathered under a rock, sheltered from the immediate dust-storm but baking in its oven.

Frank wondered how he looked, so observed them, and at the sight of each other they too wondered how close they were to dying of thirst, wandering destitute paupers of the desert supposed to be battleworthy guerrilla soldiers ready at a moment for ambush or stab-in-the-back. ‘Come on,’ Frank said to Shelley, ‘now that we’re really in a bad way, recite us the Communist Manifesto!’.

His boots were off, purple scabs and iodine feet. ‘Oh, you irrepressible bastard. Always ready with a joke when the sky falls in and the earth knocks you in the crotch.’

‘Recite it in Arabic,’ Frank said, ‘if you like. I’ll get the gist of it. We’re all brothers after all. This rest is killing me. I’ve got the strength to walk but not to uncork my bottle for a swig. Are you all right?’

‘The same as you.’

Ahmed took a handful of beans from his pack, passed them under each face before eating some himself. Frank took one, donkey-food, chewed through the sugary straw-like covering and sucked at the hard beans inside. His stomach gripped them with tigerish hunger.

‘They’ve sent us out as bait,’ Shelley said, ‘but we’ll surprise them by getting this long march over. Honourable bait, however. It’s all in the game and the book. Somebody’s got to do it, and I’d have accepted it out of my own will and wiles. They want to keep the wilderness alive — and they do. I don’t think we’re the first lot.’

‘You wouldn’t trust your own brother,’ Frank said.

‘Him least of all. I’d trust everyone else.’

‘If we’re bait it’s for the shite-hawks and dust. We got that French truck, but burst all the tyres with our own fire and smashed the steering. Then the planes nearly got us, or would have if we hadn’t rabbited south for two days and nights.’

‘The game is to trust them completely,’ Shelley said, ‘and to distrust them completely. It exercises the mind. I’m a realistic idealist. I do it with the FLN, and the French. We’ll never forgive each other when we all wake up.’

Three hours before dusk. How can the mind live when you must learn to walk without hoping to get anywhere, never a point or picture set at or beyond the horizon on which you can visualise and feed? Not even the shape of a hut or well, the outline of a tree-cleft or hillock, not a cloud that kept form and colour. It was easy. He would match it with what life had been like when he was in the factory where he’d worked twelve years, except that now the landmarks were unknown and unimaginable so that one could hope, whereas then they had been fitted into place by three generations of family which engendered nothing but despair. He’d grown old in that life, knew it all, with wife and two children and the whole mass of housing-estate inhabitants to smoke out his giant idealisms. He’d woken up, and the joy of it was in his head, thrust him young again so that the pain of it went only to his feet and half-starved body. The crossing of the frontier had been survived and, even better, surveyed. At first, he’d been like a manipulated dead man, forgetting ideals while obeying orders, marauding and killing when the rare possibility arose. He could not think, carried a brain blacked out except for cunning and the long control of his body lurking in ambush. At the time he seemed to observe everything from a plane of normal spiritual reflection, but he had been an ant-zombie in the transition from a life in which he had grown old to a new life in which he had not yet learned to live, needing the nimble rock-scrambling feet of a goat, the locked forgotten loins of a hermit, the narrowed barely-surviving guts of an ant, the heart and brain of a newborn man who now wanted to be on his own. And even this was given to him in the never-ending march.

A huge overhanging rock made a lean-to, and they formed a circle, while Ahmed and Idris drew a smoke fire and poured water into a kettle. The strong aroma of brittle mint revived them. Frank climbed a rock and looked at the vermilion earth as far as the horizon, where the sun had almost set. The whole sky was bruised and dark, as if the sun were slowly descending right on to them, seeping invisibly down into the earth they camped on. It grew redder as he looked, then fell black in the space of a few minutes, so pitch that an inexperienced man might not have found his way back to the camp.

A glass of scalding tea was put into his hands. The fire was out, last smoke drifting, mixing with the sweet smell of mint from each glass. They fed on a mess of chickpeas and rancid mutton, biscuits and dates. ‘It didn’t bother me to see the tree burn,’ Shelley said, ‘but it sure surprised me to find it there in the first place. Must be water not far under it.’

He’d forgotten the tree, and it burned again, blindingly over his eyes, flashing and sparking through the all-enveloping blanket of his exhaustion. He could hear it falling to pieces, cosmically destroyed now that no roaring bomb-spilling plane interfered with his pure vision of recollection. He took the bolt out of his rifle, spread the materials of a cleaning-tin at his feet — rag, pull-through, phial of oil, a mechanical action by which he hoped to shake off the white light of the tree. He didn’t know whether it made a good or bad memory. Wholly good, or wholly bad, it had not yet played itself out, but the nagging uncertainty of its portent palled on him. His hands and feet were cold, but the sheltering rock held off the worst raging bitterness of the night, now a few dozen degrees down on the fetid dustfire of the day. They were busy, making guns to slick in all parts as good as new, knowing that the first hour of the next march would blemish them once more. Ahmed, Idris and Mohamed had said their prayers towards Mecca. Mokhtar grinned, did not believe in it, and Frank was glad, since it took the insult out of his own grin. Shelley, having performed the ablutions on his gun, passed his flashlight over the map. One day maybe I’ll tell Myra what the Israelites felt on their way out of Egypt. They, too, had to fight a war before taking over the promised land.

‘Did you ever think you’d be a soldier,’ Shelley said, mocking the loving care he was showing his rifle, though he’d lavished even more consideration on his own.

‘I’m a communist first,’ Frank said. ‘It’s not the same thing as you mean.’

‘Tell that to the Mecca boys.’

‘Mokhtar’s a communist. You remember?’ A few weeks ago, Mokhtar had assembled the score or so people at a village along the route and lectured them on the coming liberation, throwing in some choice bait on land-reform and common ownership, according to the running translation Shelley made in Frank’s ear. One old man lifted a blunderbuss, which looked as if it would blast dangerously but not quite kill. Frank sprang and the gun fell without exploding. The man was covered by them, while Mokhtar went on with his talk, grinning and full of good nature. He agreed to forgive the man who had wanted to kill him, providing he repented before them and promised to work for the benefit of the revolution. The man, who looked to Frank as if he wasn’t fit to do much work for anything, agreed, glad to get off so easily. Mokhtar wasn’t satisfied, wanted the verdict of the whole village, which, after an hour’s discussion, considered that Mokhtar was just and good, and that his judgment should stand. Mokhtar was pleased. ‘In that case the man must accompany my soldiers to the next village, in order to show his faith in us.’ They set off before dusk, and two days later, Mokhtar killed him while he was asleep.

‘Are you as good as he is?’ said Shelley.

‘I am,’ said Frank. ‘And so are you, I suppose. The lion of Judah, he breaks every chain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t Mokhtar’s turn one day.’

‘One bark at a time,’ Shelley said. ‘That’s all every dog gets that has his day. Not that I’m an animal lover.’

‘If you don’t trust Mokhtar why don’t you peel off?’

Frank rolled his one cigarette of the day, hoping that the small bag of tobacco would last until more might come along. Shelley smoked a long shallow-bowled pipe. ‘My life depends on him. I wouldn’t survive for a week in this land on my own. I’d get my throat cut at the first village I stumbled into and crowed for a drop of water. It’s a thin lifeline we’ve got.’

‘You’ve got,’ said Frank. ‘You’re right not to light off.’ He kicked a stone, and it rolled down the slope, dragging several others with it, leaving silence but for their own soft speech.

‘All I remember about my childhood,’ said Shelley, ‘is snow. Long winters and snow. In the books about such days the writers tell us how warm it was, and how long the summer lasted.’

Frank pulled the blanket closer to his shoulders. ‘I can’t stand the tune of this bloody wind. It’s pulling like a knife at my tripes. I remember summers as well, though, because we had six weeks out of school. It was when I grew up that the snow fell. It was O.K. in the factory, where I was in with the right sort of blokes. But even when I was a kid I’d had ideas as to what the world should be like and how it should be run, and after so long I could stand it no longer, came up against a dead-end, a brick wall that I had to get through.’

‘And now you’re through it,’ Shelley said, ‘into the sandpit, gave up wife, kids and country because you were burning with a subconscious desire to help the world’s underdogs? Drop dead.’

Shelley’s pipe rattled against the stones. Being an expensive one, it didn’t break. Frank’s fist drew back from a real blow. By the time Mokhtar opened his eyes, Shelley had re-lit his pipe, stood up and walked into the darkness. He didn’t go far. ‘I was seeing how you’d react to the arguments I try to beat down my own spirit with. One hears often that no man is an island, and does not live by bread alone, and all that crap, but if that’s true, what the hell is there? All my life I’ve been trying to prove that I can live alone, without man and without God, and to make it easier for me I’ve dedicated myself to the cause of helping people towards the togetherness of socialism.’

Frank laughed. ‘Still, what you’re trying to do is the main thing. What makes you do it shouldn’t be much worry. There’s no world happening outside of this one. This is the world, the only one and I’m glad it is. I wouldn’t like another one moaning around, because this bugger we’re on takes all I’ve got.’

‘An individual can only exist if he’s lonely,’ Shelley said. ‘In a socialist society, with so much social activity, you can really be lonely. You can then become more completely an individual than ever.’

‘It only sounds convincing in the dark dust-storm of the night,’ Frank said. The raw cold and his own exhaustion fixed him tight so that he leaned back, using his arm for a pillow, his last sight that of Shelley’s thin light moving across a small area of the map, backwards and forwards over the route they were to take, before he split his consciousness between day and night and lost touch with the world he lived in.

Chapter Fifteen

The dome-shaped mud roofs were hard to pick out from more than a few hundred yards away. A grove of sickly palm-trees surrounding a mud-banked pond of clear water showed its existence to Frank’s binoculars. Veiled women looked at them as they entered, black hoods, black veils, eyes so black and rounded with expression that he saw brief pictures of the nearby bleak landscape in them. Hard earth divided the houses, blank walls whose livelier backs faced the water, and children played on those that had weakened and fallen in like eggshells. They seemed built to hide people rather than shelter them, and it seemed a strange way of living after so long from such inventions when the only shelter had been cave, or rock, or the occasional nomad’s tent.

He felt unsure of his legs on flat solid soil stamped down by the village. The remaining grey ash of the desert ate more fiercely into his sandals, scraping his feet as if there was sandpaper even inside the eyeholes of each buckle, down through the cloth to his skin which seemed suddenly weaker near to earth so free of gravel. Flies were bigger and fiercer, flew at his face and settled as if he didn’t have the habit of bashing them off. He did, they came back only to drop dead when he caught them, one so full that he had blood on his face for the first time, which he wiped away with a rag. These people, living in such poverty and dirt with no will nor ability nor hope, were enough to make him believe it was impossible to do anything about it, that it wasn’t worth fighting for, but he knew that what despair there was inside was only a wastepipe through which any uselessness that besets the mind is emptied. You can always crawl into your self-contained and tastefully furnished hole, he thought, and say what’s the use as you tuck into a big dinner. All we can do is fight to get the war over, and then see what can be done for this country and these people. Children stared at their single file of ragbags and scarecrows. The men of the village had clean robes on, patched but complete, not lousy and tattered as their clothes were. After weeks of cliffs and mountains, the solidity of terrain that took all strength before allowing you to pass through it, he felt he could push even the most solid houses down with one good shove. Sunlight lifted its guillotine blade of midday as they bent low and entered the poorest house of the village. The room was empty but for a blanket which Mokhtar, standing in the middle, was already peeling back and pointing to a hole they were to climb down. Frank followed in his turn, descended a swaying rope-ladder that he thought would unhinge and slither him into a fall of countless feet, though the rope might be attached to the supports of the house itself. His feet touched bottom, and once his eyes fully opened in the paraffin lamps he saw they were in a large hewn-out room, walls as smooth as the baked mud of the houses above. It was cool but airless, and he wanted to climb the ladder and get in the sun again. His clothes turned heavy, a layer of paste on his body. A faint song of morse came from the other end of the room, and was drowned now and again by a wind that moaned from ventilation chimneys. There were other people in the room, and Mokhtar was talking to a new voice nearby, a man who wore khaki trousers and a newly-washed shirt, had a broad forehead, short black hair, a prominent nose and a thick-lipped smile, smoked a cigarette, and wore a ring on his left hand with a large opal stone in the middle. There was a trestle-table but no chairs. Some men slept by another exit, leaning against piles of ammunition-boxes and a rack of machineguns. The table was thick with maps, and piled with sheets of yellow paper. He felt easy now that he could see. The youth working at the radio sat crosslegged on the floor, earphones on his knee, as if waiting for someone to replace them by a plate of food. Being in a human room and surrounded by houses made his stomach constrict as if he hadn’t eaten for days, but he fought it down, for to take in details of the room seemed more important than a passing hunger, as if to notice everything was to take possession of it. He did not know how long they would stay, and his interest was increased by a contempt for this comfortable secret headquarters which controlled — most of the time at least — thousands of square miles of mute and void land, the unalloyed mercury of the sun’s strength and a few scoops of muddy water never easy to find.

He sat on the floor with the others, regretted not having pushed a book into his pocket on leaving Tangier. So far he hadn’t felt this lack, because there’d been nothing to wait for, only to walk towards, and then the immediate descent into sleep at night straight after food. He walked to the table. The man in khaki was writing. ‘He wants us to stay a few days on his turf,’ Shelley said. ‘We’re close to the N1 road, all pretty and paved down to Ghardaia, and he thinks we might pull off a lorry. Won’t say what’s in it — if anything. Just to show our strength.’

‘As long as he’s not throwing us away, and I don’t suppose he is.’

‘It’s not that kind of war.’

Frank laughed. ‘Every war is that kind of war.’

‘We’ve got no say in this one,’ Shelley said. ‘But it’s organised, the old one-two: uproar in the east, strike in the west. Pull out of the west and get chased. Then the grand slam in the north. They’re so subtle it makes my nose itch.’

‘Are we the ones to get chased?’

‘We’re not, but get your mummy rags on: we’re going to be buried for two days. We’re the uproar in the east. But don’t get worried.’

‘I won’t. I just like to know.’ He didn’t know anything yet. It was impossible to know, because it might never take place, and plans could be changed to some different work. You could think, but need never worry, and all that your face might show was the accumulated bile of not taking part in anything that made sense until you became too numbed and exhausted to care. ‘You’d better let the others know.’

‘Mokhtar’s doing it.’ The wireless-operator disconnected batteries and aerial. Frank had seen him before, or a similar shadow far back in Lincolnshire, the visage of Handley’s mad brother who sprang up and levelled a sweating gun at him. The figure of this man he’d never really known blocked out the present cellar he’d dropped into, took on uncanny featureless power as it played his memory and suddenly overwhelmed him. The face smiled, huge and important, though not so close as to be intimidating, not so distinct as to be told off as either good or evil, but a peculiar memory to roll over the earth at such a time. Or had it only come to him because he was underground? ‘Don’t talk for a while,’ Shelley said. ‘The cats are upstairs.’

A scout car stopped in the village. Frank’s hunger came back. He disliked this tomb that was too deep to leap from and slip away unseen. Twenty people in it were petrified, as if ready for an archaeologist to break in with pick and flashlight and claim a great find. The FLN officer had given Shelley a tin of English tobacco, and he pressed in the steel tooth to cut away the foil covering. A pudding-sweet smell hissed out, and for some minutes he didn’t know why it stirred him so pleasantly. It touched off a memory of freedom and happiness, being more than ten years ago when he was full of youth and living a life forgotten but now recreated in every sense by this smell of newly-opened tobacco. He was puzzled, had a great yearning to be in that life, reverse the sun and moon, and live as part of it again. Yet he couldn’t remember when he’d ever been happy. With half-closed eyes he counted back ten years, to a time as he had considered it then of extreme discontent working as an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue at a job he hated because it fed the very roots of evil in a society he now wanted to destroy.

It irritated him that this unexpected whiff of desire for something lost should turn out to have been tutelage and desperation. Do you have to die before finding out what is real and what is not? he wondered, putting the cap back on the tin.

The truck left, and he woke Frank. ‘They’ll be feeding us soon.’ Mokhtar talked French so that both understood: ‘There’s a system in this area. If the troops in the scout car throw any weight or hurt people to get information, we send a signal, and in the ambush try to kill everyone on it. If it causes no damage, it runs unharmed through the ambush, which it cannot see. No one suffers. It’s an unwritten treaty we have with the French, because conscripts don’t want to die for what they don’t believe in. It’s a safe zone and we’re supposed to leave the road in peace, though our side will end that policy soon, because though it may be locally agreeable to the French, it’s not ruthless enough for us. We already have a new headquarters.’ They would open up the area to flame and spoil, sending a wave through all contiguous wilayets. Maybe the base zones in the Kabylie were crumbling, though the French would find it more expensive to move around this territory in force.

A veiled woman came with a large round tray, and he was given food in an earthenware dish, beans, mutton, mint tea and bread. The radio was tuned in again to the French Army. Apparently, the scout car had gone its way in peace. Salaam aleikum! He wanted to get out of this hole, but he ate slowly, chewing the stringy tasteless mutton and sipping tea through his bread. ‘What’s the possibility of sending an airmail letter to England,’ he asked Mokhtar, ‘or a postcard?’

He went to find out. Frank wanted Myra to hear that he was alive, though she might not be interested in knowing it. He remembered the promise in Tangier to come back in ten days, wait with her for the baby to be born and settle down in the never-never-land of love and loyalty with the undamped fire burning the marrow of his backbone to bitter ash. And to suffer so meant dragging the other in for company, the laws of love and disappointment meshing into a poisonous stranglehold. Myra hadn’t come with him, so she had nothing to reproach him for, and he could not reproach her, either, if he went back and found her ensconced in her English dream-house with two more kids and some other man.

He had come here to escape, he had come here to find, to escape what he had come to find, to find what he had come to escape, to do it unquestioningly, to move, shoot, blow the guts from his fellow-men, shift, make the break and mend the rift that had been in him from birth. Godless and beleaguered in a brown land that only lit up and changed colour according to the motion of sun and moon, he above all wanted to live at peace, but desired it so strongly that he could only achieve it on his own terms. To settle for less would be the game of half a man, a twisted fly-blown nothing-soul that was on the world only to one day die. It might be different if you believed in heaven, but there were no dreams in heaven and therefore no point in seeking it.

To kill meant to empty yourself of all that was good; to go into the desert meant emptying oneself of all that was bad in order that what should have been there in the first place could then enter. Life had so far trained him to deal with the world in simple and mechanical terms, as if his thought were based on a philosophical system thousands of years dead but that had entered into common use again at the time of his birth. Desert trek and loneliness brought reflection: all things to all men, it fitted tightly into aphorisms, often platitudes, wasn’t the reasoned essays of someone who had been used all his life to logical pondering before committing himself only to rational courses of action. And if the psychic shuffledown after such travelling left him in the same state as before he started then so much the better, because he hadn’t been after all evil, for if he had it would have been impossible to begin a search in the first place.

He was given a dish of dates and raisins, a smile under the veil as he thanked her in Arabic. When plagued by a question he could not answer, such as what was he doing in a cellar under a house in the middle of the wilderness, he could only reply that it was his fate or destiny. So much was unanswerable because one didn’t at the moment understand one’s purpose in life. Having entered into it in response to an ideal of helping oppressed people (which seemed now to have meant walking into the unknown), he had at the same time become far too complex to accept that as a satisfactory answer to his question. Three months ago it might have appeared convincing enough for the question to leave him alone, but now his total preoccupation with it caused it, by fading into the background, to take him over completely.

Mokhtar returned: ‘They’ll try and get your letter off in a week by courier over the Tunisian border, but at the moment our postal arrangements are erratic!’ He added that they were to leave at darkness on the first twenty miles north, towards a five-day rendezvous ending in the south-east. They bedded down to snatch a few hours oblivion beforehand. At five o’clock, a plane flew low and dropped all its bombs. Half fell on the village. Still asleep, the earth was pulled from under him like a blanket, and he jumped up, head into clouds of fire. Flame shook its blue and yellow wings, bloody and shot through with dust. Two paraffin lamps had spread over the ammunition boxes, and they were trying to drag them out of the flame. Rubble was pouring from a crack in the wall and a wooden support had split. He cursed at the bad dream, hoping to fall back into peaceful sleep. Paraffin smells choked him. The room felt as if it were sinking deeper into the earth, gently and hardly noticed, as if like a crippled submarine they would never be able to surface from it. It was this feeling that stopped him rushing in panic towards the ladder on a desperate scramble to find air and daylight. The ice of hopelessness made him look around to see what he could do. A chain was formed to get the wireless operator and his equipment through the debris.

He gripped the burning handle of an ammunition box and dug his heels in to heave it clear. He knew nothing else except wanting to let go, pull away and nurse the seared flesh that made him grit his teeth to stop the tears blinding him. During the worst of it, he rehearsed his run to the clear painless air of freedom with such vividness that the box had moved a yard before unquenchable reality burned itself back. But others were helping. He ripped his hand free and flattened himself on the box, clothes rolling out the fire. Shelley threw a blanket, and they pressed on it, the room still sinking, a pressure on the head, soil and air weighing Frank down. As he worked he waited for the last enormous explosion to shatter them all. It never left his mind, the thump that would blow his eardrums out and let in the fishes. His father as a younger man than he had been trapped in a coal-mine explosion, flattened in a cavity for twenty hours, expecting the roof to crush down before his mates could get through and pull him out. ‘But you know what I did, Frank? You know what I did? You won’t believe it. I lay there and did nothing. Not a bloody thing. And because I did nothing, I thought nothing. I just lay there with my eyes open doing nothing and thinking nothing. They expected to find me either dead or raving mad. But when the lads dragged me clear, I stood up, brushed myself down and wobbled home. The twenty hours didn’t go too badly, and I had to pull myself up sharp a time or two. But I didn’t think at all — no pictures in my mind, a sort of sleeping while I was wide awake. It was a very funny do. But I’ll never forget it. Not as long as I live.’ He’d heard the story till he was bored to death with it, but the memory filled his mind now. That feeling of the room sinking was suffocation. He moved, electrifying himself, beating out other flames, until they were all stamped out. They ripped off the lids.

The air was easier. Paraffin gas, and burned paint smells had thinned. Most of the men had climbed out. The room had stopped sinking. Frank thought there would still be a climb of a hundred feet to get free, but a few rungs up the ladder he saw daylight, a crazy paving of pure jagged glass through earthen slabs, bricks and pieces of wood. He forced open his scorched hand. ‘Help me,’ he said to Shelley. ‘Hold it there, for God’s sake, and keep it flat.’ There’s no point in going into the desert unless you intend coming out of it. Some of those born in it were pulled from collapsed houses and laid on clear ground. White flags were spread on the rubble. An old man dipped a fist into the open belly of a donkey and smeared a broad red cross on a sheet. The animal’s legs still kicked. Tears had mixed with dust and made a paste over Frank’s face. ‘Let go, now,’ he said. ‘I’ll get some rag on it.’

Machine-guns were set among the houses in case the plane came back. ‘They ain’t got an unofficial treaty any-more,’ Shelley said. ‘On jobs like this they send one plane, saying he unloaded his bombs because he didn’t have enough gas to carry him home. It was an accident. Two planes would be a deliberate raid, but there aren’t any accidents in a war like this. We’ll get them, though.’

Beyond the houses falling dust was turning the water grey. People lined it, dipping pots to bring comfort to the wounded. A child was led by with a crushed arm. They put up with this, he thought, didn’t lynch us for it, didn’t choke the lot of us. They tore with hands at a heap of bricks, and a young woman crawled out, naked to the waist, holding a baby. She slapped the face and its eyes opened. He expected her to smile, but she laid it on the ground and clawed at the rubble, pulling out an elaborate, dented teapot. Holding that and the baby, she ran screaming towards the water. ‘If that plane comes back,’ Shelley said, ‘we’ll be finished off, no matter how many machine-guns go at him.’

He opened the breach of his rifle and a cartridge jumped out. ‘I know why I’m here. I was asking questions a couple of hours ago, but I know one big answer to keep me going. I knew then, but I know more now. They can’t do this all the time and get away with it.’ He wiped the cartridge on his shirt, and slid it back, setting the safety-catch.

‘When a patrol is ambushed,’ Shelley said, ‘and somebody killed, they do this as a sort of punishment. It’s normal. Everything’s normal.’

‘I know,’ Frank said, but he felt responsible and melancholy. The trap closed around your neck, the bag over your head, and you had to battle a way out of it, get free by more skill and fighting, fire your gun at the crucial moment when all patience is eaten out of you in order to avenge this, and then the need for vengeance comes again on one side or the other, except that you, yourself, must keep on calling it war, war of liberation, for the victory of socialism, for justice, for freedom of the people. You worked with those at the bottom in order to be reborn, Bill Posters coming secretly into their country (Bill Posters who’d never allow himself to be prosecuted or persecuted), to fight for them and help them, but making them suffer the more he fought so that they would be with him and you right from whatever depths of themselves they had been able to keep a hold on. You put self-respect on their shoulders, and they staggered bloody and shattered under it, but did not throw it off.

A pall of dust and flies lifted above the rubble when bricks from the street were thrown on to it. To know is to love, he told himself. You don’t love until you know everybody, everything. It was cool, but they would bury the dead in the morning. The people had been persuaded to stay in the village in the belief that they would not be stricken again. The wounded were hidden in the cool of the houses, away from preparations for burial and the shrillness of the mourners. A man had been trained in France as a doctor, and with two women as nurses, he saved what he could. A few small planes in the public service could make this village fit to live in, but at the moment, there was nothing. He felt helpless, and would be glad to get out of it. Disinfectant, fertilisers, medicines, radio-sets, ropes, ladders, spades — to want this was nothing. Concealed in a camouflaged shelter, on the edge of the village and untouched in the raid, was a Peugeot station-wagon, fully primed and ready to go, in which a receiver-transmitter set was installed, loaded with food, water, medicines, Very pistols, guns and ammunition, in case the secret headquarters should need to move quickly, a possession that they tapped and looked on with pride, so that even in their terrible destitution, they were not without hope.

They walked north, close together, a quarter-moon giving out light. The riverbed was dry stones, loose and slippy under weights that seemed heavier and more onerous than yesterday, after the meal and daytime rest. He opened and closed: his hand, splitting burned flesh under the bandages, swinging his arm when the pain was too great to bear. Where do you come from, Dawley? I don’t know. Where do you? Nottingham, the same as you. But that’s the past, and the only good thing about the past is that it’s finished with. Why did you ask? Just to make sure. Where do you think we’re going? North. That’s down, or is it up? My hand’s giving me gippo. Forget it. The only way to do that is for you to shut your claptrap desert mouth. I can’t. I like talking. Where else in the wide world would you like to be now? On my own two feet, which means just here. I’d be a real two-timing split personality if I wanted to be other than where I was. That’s a fair Way of putting it. You’re going to get your head shot off. It’ll cure this hand then, like nothing else will. There are more important things to think about than death. That moon up there — will tell you that. Or ought to. It was never my idea to come all this way to let death worry me. You won’t say that when God puts in the boot. Drop dead, He wears sandals. Don’t get excited. I’m not. It’s always possible, isn’t it, that you are? So was being born. Just get back to your gammy hand. The same to you.

The oued ran roughly north, and Mokhtar had a large-scale map as well as the guide — which meant that serious planning had taken place. He picked out the Pole Star, almost overhead. The rattle of feet and gun-slings seemed to fill every crevice of the hills. The ululations of a hyena had followed them from the village. Its voice was of a deliberate luring melancholy, crying out for them to stop and wait, to take it with them wherever they were going instead of heartlessly leaving it to spend a Lifetime pitching its voice in competition with that of the continual wind which was bound to outlive it. They climbed a slope, zigzagging so as not to slip back, a groaning of collective heavy breath as they crawled to the crescent-shaped skyline of the col.

Across the plain, they saw an orange pinhead of fire. The horizon beyond was in darkness. He lay on the stones, plans winding like cold rivulets through his head. At such time, while waiting to move, expose oneself to bullets and flame, he lay as still as if already killed by them, except for the intense eyes trying to drag detail closer from the darkness or distance, flat and quiet and nevertheless expecting the world to open its arms in welcoming approval, lay as if all his senses were coming firmly and surely back at last after a long illness, the malady of the trek draining away and leaving him a clear smile at the cunning ideas of action pitted into the common ring. Fire would combust on the hillside and attract the patrol. Then, in utter stealth, making a half-circle towards the camp from which it had departed, they would attack those remaining there. When they had been finished off, they would meet the returning other half of the patrol coming back in haste to see what was the matter — and finish that off, also.

It seemed infallible and classic. Afterwards, they would retreat the way they had come, but veer south-east to avoid the village bombed over them in the afternoon. ‘They won’t spill out,’ said Shelley, ‘not for night fighting.’

‘They might.’ Frank laid down his rifle to look for wood.

‘My old man boasted all his life about a night attack in the Argonne Wood in 1918. He lost his whole battalion capturing four shell-holes, and got a string of medals for it. He’s retired from the Army now, after a lifetime of service. Always wanted me to go in the Army, but they threw me out of military college, which broke the old man’s heart, as my family said, and I never thought it’d be so easy, because that had always been my sole aim in life. They play right into your hands, parents.’

‘That way they really cut you up,’ Frank said, ripping at a tinderous bush with hand and boot. ‘Best to keep away from them, then there’ll always be a bit of love left between you. You should start a guerrilla war in the Deep South, and if the Yanks send the Army to put it down, you might get a chance of shooting your old man between the eyes — if it means that much.’

Shelley spat. ‘You’re a real barrack-room lawyer. I liked it better when you were a taciturn Limey who didn’t know his own mind.’

‘When was that? There never was such a time. I’ll bet we get them out of that post. They’ll think it’s a group of nomads over here, and come to check up.’

Fires were lit below the col, on the blind side from the camp, so that only smoke and a glow would be visible to their observant eyes. They would imagine that whoever it was hadn’t yet seen them, and would come out to make a surprise round-up of the fires.

‘It’s a tightrope,’ Shelley said. ‘There are six of us, seven with the guide, which is too few to pull it off. Mokhtar’s forgetting the basic principles, and I don’t like it one flat bit.’

So as to move quickly in the dark and not lose contact they tied a length of string from hand to hand. The moon had flowed behind the hills. Even if they don’t fall for it, we can make a surprise raid and vanish, and if they don’t check on the fires, they won’t come out and pursue us. If they do come for the fires, it means we’re not outnumbered, since we’ve split them. Divide the mind, a decision one side that you could never make, and on the other something that went fatally wrong, because it was too easy. That way was madness and defeat. When you sharpened the mind to its perfect logic, it was always too late to withdraw from plans whose contemplation made them perfect and so could not be abandoned to the anarchy of futile speculation. Three fires cracked into flame, sere branches bunching and falling apart, then shooting up again, sparking and bursting around their faces. They stood a few minutes among swirling smoke, then drew back as upshooting flames strangled it.

They descended the slope, convicts chained by the dark string of an idea that could only snap through panic or disaster. Voices were curbed, even thoughts, as they slid through the darkness and flanked away from the treacherous pull of the heart which would have led to a premature clash with any group snared towards the smoke. The situation was spun out of nothing, a needle of fire, a shadowy trick, and as far as Frank could see, it might be only a nomad camp they were approaching to blow the middle out of.

They paused, still visible to each other. He loathed silence, the dangerous voiceless steppe over which all the stars of the universe were poised like a planetarium, the white blood of the Milky Way fixed in that atrophied spurt towards the ultimate back-end of creation. Each star was a spyhole through a great black wall laid over the sky; above, it was all dazzling phosphorescent light that shone through these pinpricks. The cool wind blew at his shirt and shook his matted hair. With relief, he heard the jackal blowing its heartbreak back in the hills. If it was a nomad camp there’d be a place at the fire, a dish of beans, and tea. Then more walking, machinery, marching, counter-marching, involved trigonometrical exercises through the Djebel Amour, the barren mountains of love parsimoniously decked with alfa and shrubs that hardly sustained the life in your boots. Myra must be back in England, and he pictured her in bed with a baby in its nearby cot, breathing through the hours of similar silence wherein he went over the rocks and stones in darkness. Sensing danger, he felt alone, not belonging to the other six as they belonged to him and to each other, but a man trapped by extreme isolation, caught under the stars and fixed like a fly on the steppe which seemed of absolute immensity now that they’d been an hour on it. They were descending slightly, and he wondered if ever peace would come so that he could see the hills with the good eyes of someone who is not hunted. They were a band of men marked down, and since they were in a land where other groups roamed, they had not yet been identified and cordoned off. They struck, grabbed, ran, hid, sweating and starving in the lonely darkness, but so far, the precise military tactics of the French had not pinned them down and scorched their rage and rags off the face of the earth. Napalm and flamethrower, the cruel and wicked kiss of the sun-god was out to get them, but this great land gave them cover, and the people of similar faith somehow found them food. Such hard living settled his regard for Myra and brought on a greater longing to see his child, because it seemed that they’d probably given him up for ever — whether or not he might one day go back again. This comfortless, stark knowledge had strengthened him at the time of his greatest despair when traversing the sandwaste and pure dust of the blinding dunes, a week after crossing from Morocco. With little water and no food they staggered for days over the blinding sand and grit of Satan’s earth, scorched and bleeding from mouth and rectum, scabbed and tortured as they held on to rifles and submachine-guns, insane and sick, followed by huge birds waiting for them to finally drop. It was the only way to survive the hedgehog fort-zone of Colomb-Bechar, throw themselves into the worst land of the earth. Remembering it made this stony, mountainous, scrub-wilderness seem like paradise.

Both fires were visible, a dying glow from their own, the other constant as if continually built on. At the half-way point they moved in silence and slow motion, the guide covering them a few yards to the left and keeping a sharp watch to avoid any investigating party. The night was as big as the land, endless, and it needed to be, he thought, for all they had to do. At a signal, they lay flat, no stone disturbed. The noise of boots came so close that Frank thought they would be walked on, used like stepping-stones across some shallow stream. His ear to the ground, he heard their weight, heavily built and laden, not too extended, fearing nothing because they were being as cautious as they knew how, though grunting and baulking over the unexpected distance.

Mokhtar stood up. Frank walked slow, quiet, hunched. Several universes had passed over their heads but nothing had altered. Space, stars, apprehensions were the same. They quickened, keeping a single file. A Very light went over the hills from the outgoing party, a thin luminous snake vanishing into some black window of the sky as if to do its worst on the inhabitants within. A reply shell curved from the point they were approaching. Mokhtar must be happy, he thought, sensing his smile of satisfaction, forehead creased with anxiety at evidence that his plan of vengeance was half-way coming to pass.

The fire on the hills was out, and no doubt the soldiers imagined they’d been sighted and so were extending their line for the round-up. Pitch night seemed like day to Mokhtar, for he had fixed the now darkened camp in his deepset eyes for so long that he knew exactly where it was. They closed up and followed him like cats to the leeward side from which a raid would be least expected, and which was also the best direction for a retreat, since another line of broken hills sloped up out of the plain a few miles away. The pinpricked skullcap of the sky held darkness firmly over them, and with sensibility and care they picked a way bund to the far flank of the entrenchment.

A stone rampart had been thrown round a low rise of ground. Mokhtar went forward on his belly like an alligator, loaded with grenades. The others spread a few yards apart, flattened, waiting. He considered that you hadn’t really experienced the wilderness unless you’d been completely alone it it, hunting and hunted in the dark middle of the night, full of uncertainty about your own self but clear on the universal laws that sent you there. The wind searched out your marrow to blow it dry and empty. He pushed forward the safety-catch, no more safety from this second on, the mechanism easy and silent, William Posters strikes again, black heart and white heart, blue brain and red, roulette-wheel spinning behind those bleeding milksop stars.

A line of sound rumbled from the hills, then a ripple of ammunition paying its own way as battle was joined with jackals and phantoms. The humping burst of a grenade carried back, and all attention in the camp was on that side. A flare issued from the hills, momentarily hung like a grey jellyfish, an unwanted diminishing moon bursting into a dazzling chandelier as if a state reception were to be held beneath it. It threw a faint light over them, and he made out the dim shadows of Shelley and Mokhtar. When the flare died and scattered its ash the night was so intense that Mokhtar, not at the closest range for throwing bombs, stood up to full height and urged them to get nearer, looking as if he would walk into the camp and shake hands with the first man he met. The Lion of Judah, he breaks every chain. Once it used to be: Kiss the hand you cannot sever.

Men were bending over the fire, some slept, and four sentries were outlined faintly in a renewed glimmer of starlight. The pain raged in his hand as if all blood were rushing there in the final tensed wait, and only the rifle lying heavily on the open palm stopped it actually jumping.

A ribbon of machine-gun fire came from the hills and, using this as a signal, Mokhtar stood again. Five of them windmilled two bombs each to the middle of the camp and fell flat before the collective roar. Frank lifted his head after the earth cracked, and while stones and gravel and death-screams raged in the chaos, he joined the rapid fire into the smoking ruin of the camp on which three rifles and three light machine-guns now played. Shelley sent a magazine bursting at the antennae, hoping to wreck the signals unit. There was an impression around Frank as he knelt for better aim at the stunned, slow-moving figures, that bees were being thrown through the air at fantastic speed. His ear burned, then turned cold as he loaded, fired, and reloaded and slotted in another clip. ‘They’ve got me,’ he thought, still firing and in plain view. Sweat and a more copious liquid dropped on to his shirt at the shoulder. Shelley’s gun leapt free, and he fell back into cover. Frank steeled himself to run forward, but wanted a general rush. He smiled at such impotence. It’s all at once, or none at all, for no one man can clean up that butcher’s shop. He flattened, worked towards the left: ‘You all right?’

‘My hand’s gone. It’s knocked right out.’ A stone splinter caught his cheek. Steel hooks were pulling up the ground from left to right. The Lion of Judah launched his last grenade and the machine-gun stopped its multiple biting. Ahmed lay still. Dust in his mouth tasted like iron shavings and, thrown by some explosion in himself, he ran towards the parapet. Flames crawled up the tent, and his course was fixed on it, insects biting the air around him. He took cover, and Mokhtar crashed by his side: ‘Allons y!’

They moved back through shattering stones, while Idris and Mohamed covered them from the front. I hope they think there are more than six of us, that we’re holding off in the hope that they’ll show the white clout. But we’re finished, the ragtags of the wide open spaces: Ahmed killed, Shelley’s hand paralysed, my face bloody and fit only to show its paint-side to the moon: and the guide is unarmed, which leaves four of us to make for those lovely, endearing blister-hills.

He carried Shelley’s gun. ‘Bury me with it,’ he said, ‘so that I can shoot the jackals when they come in to rip my meat, if there’s anything left on my bones by then. I’ll never see the deep, blue sea from the highest pass of the Kabylie mountains — after the fashion of Xenophon and his ten thousand nits.’

‘We did damage,’ Frank said. ‘Or Mokhtar did.’ Out of the fire, there were no more boiling bullets to sneak up your backbone, or go ping at the neck. They ran, shots following.

‘It lasted ten blind minutes,’ Shelley said, tearfully.

‘Twenty,’ Frank insisted, his breath rasping. ‘Your watch stopped. It’s one o’clock.’

‘We’ve got four hours then to get into the hills and bury ourselves, if tomorrow isn’t going to be our last day on this earth that we hoped to make so bright and marvellous.’

‘They’ll pick up our tracks.’

‘They might on God’s earth, but this is the devil’s.’ They stopped to swallow water. A heavy lorry roared, blazing headlights set for the camp. ‘Helicopters in the morning.’

‘Let them come,’ Frank said bitterly. ‘It’ll be a relief.’

They ran, and in three hours were stumbling over the rocks of a defile. The guide was an old man, brown cloth turned round his head, the gentle, half-idiotic, smiling face of one who had grazed goats and camels all his life on these slopes and knew every curve and twist of the range. They came to a valley and crossed it at right angles, crawled and cursed at the boulders.

He walked asleep, senses anywhere but where his body was. It felt as if the grazing bullet had left him bald, the wind flickering across to restart the fires of pain. There was nothing to his body but lungs and legs, engines and wheels, hands for rudders, eyes for a compass, a machine made only to transport the body without which his senses would vanish into a grave of blackness. All it could do was show him the charnel-houses of the moon and the sherbet-gardens of the sun. His body was the four-pronged cogwheel of his retreat, out of the desert, into the desert, a retreat and at the same time an orderly advance given importance by the visions which his body carried, exuded from the pores of his sweating tormented skin.

A depression in the earth held a lake of sand which they waded through, ankle-deep, waist-deep, salt and grit blowing against all wounds and eyes. The rhythm of his legs pushed it back into the machine which he could ignore. He was climbing a great tree with many convenient branches, clothed with numerous twigs of small green leaves. It reached high, and his legs and arms took him up with the speed and ease of an orang-utan that had been born and bred in that particular tree. The wind blew cool and leaves rustled. Soon he was a few branches above the surrounding trees and able to look out of his own tree-angle at the forest ceiling that went on for ever. There was nothing to see but this gentle green undulating ocean of giant treetops, a vast extent of emerald as if, were he to launch himself surreptitiously from the end of the branch and start walking, he would find them solid enough to support him, a new earth made from the tops of massed trees. But where and in what direction would he go? It was the same wherever he looked, so he climbed higher, hoping to reach the highest branch and twig, as if this would give him a different view, some clue at least concerning the direction he should go in. Arms and legs carried him upwards pleasantly enough, so that he could imagine no better way of using his life’s strength. Once he thought of going down again to the undergrowth of the forest, but the idea almost brought the vomit into his mouth, in a way that alarmed him. After years he reached the top, wiped sweat from his forehead and looked at the perfectly flat green sea of treetops hundreds of feet below. He saw himself flying, arms outstretched as he drifted down and over it, but arms not moving and head held back, legs together, gliding perfectly in a wide arc between the sun in a blue sky and the plain of tree-tops. The thought made him dizzy, but he felt great pleasure even at contemplating such a flight, and when it beckoned him he spread his arms and took a long breath of the cool air to give strength and force back the vomit and flex his heels for the leap.

Mokhtar gripped his forearm. ‘You were about to fall.’ They had reached the summit, sky faintly blue to the east, and for a moment stood grunting and still, bent over like apes, faces and clothes as grey as the rock. The old man led them down and when almost at the bottom of the narrow valley turned into a cleft concealed by a huge boulder. They passed, one at a time, squeezing their bodies between smooth slabs of rock only a foot apart. It led through a damp, narrow corridor that opened slightly to a ledge with enough space for them to lie on. From a rock water trickled, clear and icy, and Mokhtar unhooked a mug and set it underneath so that it filled in a few minutes.

He lay flat, eyes pinned open by stars in a sky that was turning grey. They had made it. I understand you, he said, fixing them in his stare, and they became flatter, closer, lost the mystic phosphorescence in the dawn. They needed the night to flower in, to bleed themselves white for. The dawn flattened them into a sheet of paper so that the sun could burn them up. He lay calm, wide awake while the others slept, looking at the softening stars as if he’d never seen them before, or as if he’d just been born. Three months in the desert and he’d lost his identity. Killing didn’t give him one, and neither did being hunted. They were part of it though, joined by this long cool examination of the stars fading above the parallel cliffs as if they would never come back. The clarity of the grey rock and the stars made him feel as if he were dying, the sky turning blue and powdery the more his eyes tried to penetrate it. He was afraid of dying, but only when he thought of going to sleep. The blank exhaustion left him heavy and boneless, yet without the need of immediate rest and like watching the minute-hand of a clock move he pressed the sky across its colour from black of night to the day’s pale blue. He belonged nowhere, basked in the disembodied serenity that comes only after driving the mind and body to their limits. But the body and mind had, after all, driven you, driven themselves which were you, completed you by their movement. He belonged here, emptied even of ideas that had sent him to this particular hiding-spot in the mountains of love and desolation, and being emptied of them at such a time meant that he was fulfilling them. A man of extremes loses his identity, but a man of the middle way is referred to by the two extremes which hedge him in. Starving, riddled with exhaustion like a disease, he belonged nowhere except where he was, and saw no limit to the world that he lived in. Down in the hidden basin of the hills he could see nowhere except upwards. ‘Flesh into heaven, and bones into hell. The soul falls apart.’ He wrote the words across the patch of sky as if to send them somewhere as a telegram. People who feel that the full life is not sufficient end up in the desert, if they fight hard enough to get there. The greater the fight to reach it, the more bitterly scorched is the earth that you left behind. It forces you to search the bottom of the heart, where you reach sand, stones, rock and slate, the geologic ages of your own private earth — scorched earth and sun, frost and scorpions, salt water and bitter thorns that fester your hands at a single touch. Once in the desert you have to cross it, forget what sent you there and for what spiritual loot and lot, or what you might find on the other side, but survive in it, live in it, and move over it. The salt of the earth comes out of the desert. The great spirit rests in the wilderness — Sinai, Sahara, Takla Makan. You choose the desert, or reject it, but you reject it before you get to the point of choosing it. If chosen it is because there is no other way, because the longer way would be through death, and no one would choose that when there is no chance of resurrection, so you take the short-cut through the desert because a chance of survival is easier to believe in than the possibility of salvation.

A huge black-winged bird skimmed over the blue corridor of sky, and flew away as if falling to earth. Water was dripping into a cup. He reached and drank some, then replaced it. Falling drops of water were the only sound. There is no greater silence than that which opens around you when you are exhausted, worn to the bone. I must live, he said, I must live, and the regular fall of the waterdrops smoothed his consciousness away.

Chapter Sixteen

Heavy rotor-blades thumped, as if the helicopter were descending because the clear blue burning air no longer had the density to support it. They lay, hidden under ledges of rock, like loaves thrown at random into an oven. He felt fresh after some sleep and food, and all the good water he could drink, and wondered why the four who were there didn’t open fire at the huge precise monster, force it to burst and crumble onto the rocky land, so that those inside who wanted to bomb and spray them with fire as if they were animals would instead be pinned on the bloody end of wrath as they tried to escape from metal and burning fabric. But the consensus was that they should sweat in their hideout till the pimping angel of Satan passed over without claiming them. But if by some fluke it suspected their presence and landed to look, they would be killed before they could scramble clear.

Shelley denied this: ‘They have to get in here first, and our good shepherd knows a way out. Take ’em a year and twenty thousand men to throw a trapnet over the whole range. Even then they might not get us in the end. As long as we don’t move during the day, and go quietly by night.’

A shadow passed under the sun, darkened the glaring slate. ‘I’d like to look at it. I don’t believe in anything I can’t see.’

‘They’ve got machine-gunners on board. Poke your head up and we’ll sell you to a circus, if we can keep you alive: the man without head, hands or feet.’

‘Drop dead yourself.’

‘Willingly. It’s a flying platform. In some places they carry Alsatian dogs. When the helicopter lands twenty rush out, and God doesn’t help those who get in their way: children, women, people in the fields, even a man with a gun — when he’s not right out of it. Hard to get the dogs back, in spite of good training. They seem to vanish, go black in the night. There are no unmixed blessings, no secret weapons, just a nightmare humiliating grind. It’ll be the same scuffle when it’s finished, though you can’t let that blunt your finer feelings while it’s still on, otherwise you are not a man, and will never become a saint or commissar.’

Engine-sound weakened far out along the valley. Safe for a while. He saw nothing, suspected nothing. Heavy machine-gun fire thumped back, a man and goats being spread all over the rocks. Its chatter and the damage it did seemed utterly insignificant in such great spaces. It ceased far away, the motor noise squashed like a fly against the hot wall of the sun. The raw, tender graze along his temple no longer throbbed to the beat of pistons or gunfire. He winked at the sky — grey edges and pale blue middle. Their refuge was an oasis never to be forgotten while they were in it.

Shelley blew a trail of ants from his shattered hand. Tonight, so the promise went, they would enter a village where an Italian doctor lived, who helped the FLN and asked no questions. Flesh had been honed from Shelley’s face, turned grey since yesterday and left his eyes helpless and bitter, a new phase for him. He read his holiest of bibles, Mao Tse Tung’s treatise on protracted warfare, drew maps of imaginary tracts of land on the endpapers with his fountain pen, and with pencil and rubber carried out intricate exercises to make plainer precepts of the great man that he had read many times. His best hand was shattered, a finger smashed and the back a blue hump of broken veins and bone, a map left in the rain whose river delta ran its colours into the mangrove of uncontrollable terrain. He sat in one place, and Frank took water and food to him. ‘At least I’ve still got my legs and eyes,’ Shelley said.

‘And one arm,’ said Frank. ‘We’ll get you seen to.’

Frank left, and Shelley flipped through the book on his knee, print which anthologised the intellectual passion of his mind: when forced into a passive disposition through some false march, a guerrilla unit must try to get itself out — quickly. How this is done depends on the circumstances, but the ability to move away must always be given first consideration. Those who learn to retreat and not flee, move and not be seen, secretly join other groups to attack in force when the enemy is weak, retreat and not scatter after having defeated him so as to avoid giving battle to reinforcements which will nearly always outnumber you, disperse unseen after memorising complex arrangements to meet again, will become invincible and survive continual attacks. But to retreat and not flee you must be aware of the point you are heading for, otherwise you lay yourself open to defeat. Since there is no God in heaven to watch over you or to destroy you, you must take care of yourself and make cause together for the common good. In retreat know where you are retreating to, then the advantage lies with you and the initiative is but one step away. Make sure everyone is assigned clearly defined tasks, topographical limits of manoeuvre, times and places for re-assembly, foolproof means of communication. Rigidity, inertia, self-satisfaction, temptation to sloth, lead to passivity, panic, loss, either the living death of shame and slavery or complete annihilation. Those whose conditions of life you are trying to change will help you and suffer with you if you have a passionate and convincing answer to everything. You must be known to be everywhere by the enemy when he is not there or is weak; and nowhere when he is there and is strong. His weakness is your strength. His strength is your opportunity to weaken him and thereby grow strong yourself. If he is well supplied, then you must live off him and pull him down. Unless the strong can be made to fall, the world will stagnate, people will wither in the spirit and succumb entirely to the unchanging forces of nature. Evil is no mystifying concept. It is the inability to change for the good. It is being slothful among bad conditions of life, and preaching that the acceptance of present suffering makes the adventure of change unnecessary, thereby implying that suffering is sufficient adventure for the soul. One must prove that it is not — by making it possible for the weak to inherit the earth and become strong, and to use their newly-won strength in order to help those still weak in the world, which is no less than the fight for eternal justice, a uniting of mankind to give everyone equality and food and dignity that will enable them to become individuals in a universal sense. The tree must purify and burn, shed its leaves in the fires of insurrection. Trees catch fire, incendiarised by napalm. Those who look on it as an antidote to the upsurging ant-spilling poor of the world can brew it to their heart’s content, but wherever it falls another tree goes up in flames and spreads its light for the so-far unconvinced to witness, to stop wavering and join. Whoever makes it, distributes it, drops it, is destroying his own soul. The art of retreat is foreign to them, skill and cunning far away. Their intelligence is sealed off, the limits of their humanity inexorably narrow, and the seeds of their own annihilation gradually emerge from the vile fungus of reaction into which they sank when faced with newly-moving forces of the earth.

In order to mislead, decoy and confuse the enemy there should be continual use of stratagems, such as making a ploy in the east but attacking from the west, appearing now in the south and now in the north, hit-and-run attacks, and night actions in which the attackers, though weaker, must always gain because the ways of retreat are infinite and cover is perfect even over open ground. And yet such infallible-sounding advice is nothing until applied by the malleability of the mind and the courage of the human body. One may lecture and discuss, but the endurance of those who fire the gun and run in the night is what counts.

Frank had climbed up and out of their hiding-place, and the grey edges to the sky disappeared when he reached the highest point of the rock-wall. It was fiery blue, butane gas burning from the holy pivot of the sun. The flat of the valley was small in area, enclosed by jagged sides down which the helicopter hadn’t descended low enough to pick out their hiding-place. Machine-gun fire riveted the western end, as if a real fight were going on. It was rumoured that Boumedienne, the military brains behind the FLN, had come into the area to enliven it. Mokhtar might know what their part was to be, or he might not.

Nothing ever came of going into the desert to avoid your fellow-men. You go there to find them, find yourself, by seeking one to find many. Revolutions are initiated by those who, in order to inspire themselves, have to prove to the wretched of the earth that they, too, can be inspired. It is a search by those who want to prove to themselves and the world that they are not spiritually dead, but such effort changes everything. In their crude simplicity they may not see themselves as the makers of a new world, because such striving begins without philosophy, and there is no name in the beginning for what is to become a prime mover of people. Some may give it a name in order to control it, but this is necessary if the wretched of the earth are to become collectively strong and not be defeated by genocidal maniacs.

He lay watching for an hour before seeing a figure descend the opposite slope and walk directly across the dry riverbed towards him. In all the time there had been no shepherd nor nomad, not a friend nor enemy, and no animal life but the noise of insects and the flurry of an escaping scorpion, the sliding flight of a bird. The dry day seemed to eat up all life in its eternal oven. He sweated and stayed flat, binoculars trained, gun ready.

It was a young man wearing a blue silk shirt and khaki trousers, open jacket and brown laced shoes. He smiled, as if out for a walk on the edge of the town. Frank showed himself when he was twenty yards off, but the man, thin, of medium height, gold teeth flashing, walked on with no surprise. Leaflets flapped from his pockets. A row of pens and biros were spread like medals along his chest, and he lifted his hand in greeting. ‘I have information,’ he said in French.

He came sweating down the slope, and his jaundiced face was both freckled and rashed where smallpox had eaten over it. Frank picked a leaflet about to fall from his pocket, holding the gun level with the other hand towards the centre of his back. The man slid down over loose stones towards the waiting gun of Idris, who greeted him Moselm fashion and led the way into the hideout. Frank stayed on watch. A lizard warmed itself among the quiet rocks. Others came out as he lay still. One went over his wrist. A scorpion ran, and a horned viper curled itself up some feet away, as if after a long journey, and he stoned it to death. In the rocks he became a rock himself, because movement would betray as much as shade or colour. You must outdo a lizard in patience for a war like this. Who knows how it will turn out, in spite of such extremist patience? — ‘extremist’ being what you are labelled by those incapable of changing their ways of life, or of believing that people can change the world instead of the world changing them. He cannot expect his extremism not to be tempered later by those whom he helps to power. It is no use snivelling that a god has failed when a few of those who were weak turn into rats after you have made them strong. You move on to help others but do not lose faith. A god only fails you if you are less than a god. Strength in yourself takes time to grow. Tame the wild grit and put it to work. If you learn how to suffer, thank the earth and those who walk over it for teaching you.

The string signalled at his ankle and he went down, found them listening to the young man who had walked in from nowhere. Shelley pressed his teeth together to stop the noise that shook his whole face to tears. He held a loaded revolver high in his left hand for practice, but the, bad had already infected the good with its pain and weakness and he dropped it in despair. Mokhtar was talking to the young man and the guide, moving his thick finger on the French military map. The leaflet crinkled in Frank’s pocket, and he held it up to read. Shelley put down his gun and went to the water store. ‘You should see this!’ Frank called, laughing without wondering first whether it would be safe to do so. The leaflet told of some café-brothel of Laghouat and was meant for the eyes of French soldiers, complete with prices for the various levels of delight — clean, well-reglemented and safe. The young man handed them to passing convoys and incoming drafts, patrols returning from a hard slog to this staging post of rest and culture.

Shelley read it. ‘Yeh, it’s bad news. A sweet chick of Nubia heard it from the lips of an orgiastic poilu. Two brigades left this morning to clean up the area. One is spreading from the Laghouat-Aflou road, and the other’s fanning out from the Géryville area. A nice little trap, complete with planes, guns and bunsen-burners. There are a few of us in the bag. We were supposed to be massing for a raid on Laghouat — though I don’t think they knew it. So we break out to the south and gather somewhere else, east of Laghouat maybe, to go in as soon as that brigade leaves, which means we might filter through the thick of them at night, and hit them in the rear if they scoot back to relieve Laghouat. The permutations are endless, but not so that you can’t sort them out if you have half a brain.’

‘How’s your hand?’

‘Improving. I don’t feel the ants any more. I want to find a doctor. I’ll leave you for a sweet while. When it’s fixed, I’ll hit the trail again.’

‘It might be safer to stick with us. Have it fixed and drag along. We don’t want the French to nick you. Got to pull you out in one piece.’

Shelley smiled, his eyes feverish, and teeth set. ‘Don’t worry. I’m an American journalist come over the Tunisian frontier to report on the situation. Working for the magazine New People. All my papers are in order. Take no chances. They won’t like it, a left-wing mag, but at least they won’t stand me up against a wall, or roast me over a slow fire.’

‘I’m glad you’re organised.’

‘You’re no good dead. Not that I’m wailing over a smack on the hand by a bullet, or cringing for the Purple Heart. Just a brief statement of principles.’

‘They won’t leave you behind,’ Frank said, wryly. ‘And we’ll mend your hand. How do we get out, though?’

Shelley picked up the revolver again and levelled it shakily at the rockface. ‘We climb to six thousand feet, then go north-east, up and down peaks till we cross the Laghouat-Aflou road. We start in half an hour. We’ll meet no tanks so high up, but we’ll have to crawl on our bellies because of planes and helicopters. The French must think there are thousands of us in this area, but I’d be surprised if there are more than a hundred.’

Chapter Seventeen

From a distance the grey and orange flank of the mountain looked unassailable except with the gear of an alpine expedition. They took the hard route out, the long march, the half-possible. To look down made him dizzy, to look up promised a premature death by exhaustion — which was better, he thought, scrambling up a few more feet, than a bullet up your arse or the red cock on your shoulders. Tilt your head back and the wall moves towards your eyes. The wall went into the sky and would swing down unless you threw yourself off to avoid it. So you kept them fixed in front, and since you couldn’t hold back the machine of your legs, you kept your senses locked where they could not distract or destroy you.

Below the eastern drop of the land lay a cloud of dust and smoke. It looked flat and low from where they were, with a noise as if a forest were hidden beneath, and all trees in it were falling down to the crack of their rending trunks and the dull brush of enormous treetops. ‘Bazookas,’ Shelley said. ‘Grenade rifles. It’s a privilege to fight such a well-equipped army.’

‘I’m not proud,’ said Frank. ‘I’d rather be hounded by thugs with sticks and us have the rifles. When do we get to that six-thousand-foot mark? I’ve forgotten my barometer. On a useless stunt like this, I begin to forget who my friends are.’

‘Delirium,’ Shelley said.

‘I let it have free rein. Then it goes away. I’d like to roam the world in a freebooting tank, guns firing in all directions — at friends who try to help me and enemies who try to destroy me — because there doesn’t seem much difference at a time like this.’

They lay on the rocks for a short rest out of the hour. ‘The trouble with you is that you’re irrevocably unavoidably rotten. Maybe it’s because you’re English, I don’t know. I love you like a brother, but I can’t honestly see you getting a job in the cabinet when they form the Free Government of Reconstruction!’

‘I know,’ Frank said. ‘It makes me sad. I cry myself to sleep about it every night. Maybe I’m rotten, but I’m burning it out of me. A few charred corners are left, that’s all.’

The file moved, seven now that the young man joined them rather than risk walking alone through the French brigades. Shelley talked to him. He’d polished shoes, run errands, carried kit and luggage, lost a bus-conductor’s job because he hadn’t kept his hands out of the fare-bag. The café work was all right. He lived, was wiry and surprisingly strong, useful in a hundred ways. The Frenchwoman who owned it couldn’t know what accurate information he dispensed to those in the street who saw that it reached the relevant people. Often he passed it on himself, trekking the hills with pockets of nuts and figs. He could read French, write his name, recognise the different tanks and aeroplanes, the various guns and weapons, explained to him boastfully by French soldiers who thought they had stumbled on a queer idiot who played up to their cause. In a world of enemies, you can make friends easily, and do much damage before being caught. His smile was too frank and continuous to be quite sane. The brothelised obscenities mouthed out of loyalty to his job and the mistress of the house, the leaflets thrown at great risk onto the backs of speeding trucks, made him known all over this part of the country. When he appeared in the midst of a battalion about to embark on a fisherman’s hunt, a bundle of newspapers under his arm recording successful encounters with the FLN, and predicting a final sure end to the rebellion, they drove him away or, goodnaturedly, advised him to go home. Some would even buy his papers, and then he would walk off with a sulphurous, appealing grin, running a little, jumping, then a quick stroll until he came across a friendly shepherd who would fork up the nearest outflanking ranges to spread verbal messages over the cordoned area, to warn any who did not already know what was coming. He couldn’t think back to how such work began. Nothing definite had pulled him in. Even his loathing, being intermittent, formed no basis for his consistent and intelligent action. Yet he was an easygoing rebel rather than a zealous revolutionary, and perhaps for this reason was able to make a surer contribution to the common war, since his personality fitted him perfectly for this part.

Shelley retailed it to Frank. ‘He’ll vanish in the night, or some time when we’re through the thick of it.’

From the height of the mountain they saw into an adjacent valley. Two trucks were set across the end of it like a barricade. Ants moved out, filtering between brushwood. Shelley adjusted the centre-wheel: ‘They’ll need alpine troops to flush us from this. They used them in the Kabylie, but lost too many. We set up the avalanche, and rolled ’em down again. They pulled ’em out quick. There will be trucks in the next valley as well. We’ll go all night and lie flat tomorrow. I’ve got to get this hand fixed.’

His eyes were points of grey light, ready for the uncontrollable madness of pain. Frank wondered how he could stand it. The hand was blue, swollen enormously, and part of it turned pink and was beginning to split. ‘We’ll tell Mokhtar.’

‘What can he do? In a few days, we’ll find someone to hack it off. That’s all I want.’

‘Let’s go down to the French. I’ll take you. We’ll make up a good story,’ Frank said. He put a hand on Shelley’s arm. ‘Even a field-dressing would help.’ They had nothing except food, water, guns and ammunition.

‘Forget it,’ Shelley said. ‘What’s gangrene between friends? The devil’s bite.’

Pain was contagious, his jovial madness catching, the violent shaking of his good hand unnerving. Feeling sorry didn’t help, so he tried not to. This was impossible, for it burned into him also. To share it was only to double it, not halve it, but he shared it nevertheless. It would neither help nor cure, as if sympathy were only a way of bearing other people’s troubles without lessening their pain.

An enchanting fairyland of mountains lay all around them at dusk, under a few bars of purple cloud, the javelins of insurrection subtly out of reach except for those who climbed such heights. They were suspended, self-assured, outstanding, turning blue and pale against the whitening sky around and above, for there was no land higher. A cool breeze ran gently against them, the javelins thickening and growing into iron-purple. The mountain rock-tables were unevenly spread, reddening, a mad abandoned stone-age restaurant that a tribe of giants had fled from after a last vast angry supper. The cliffs were precipitous, so that he could not understand how they had humped their bodies up to the summit they stood on. Ravines and gullies divided them to the north-east, and the sloping sun beamed itself on the trackless direction they still had to take. The tables looked flat, but they were spread with boulders, indentations, cover, declivities. They found a pool among stunted bushes. He pulled out his hand, and it was covered with leeches, festoons of abundance drawing hungrily on the rich bonanza of his blood. With the free hand he found a cigarette and lit it from Shelley’s pipe. ‘You’d better make haste,’ Shelley said, ‘or there’ll be nothing left of you. It’s the first time they’ve fed on good rich yeoman blood coursing with the loam and foam of England.’

‘There’s little of that left.’ They dropped off, or burst. ‘Dip your hand in. They cure everything, as well as the fits and miseries. Take the black blood out of your soul, and the life out of your heart. Nature’s remedy for life, meaning death.’ The old man filled his goatskin, scooping water into a mug and straining it through a rag, now and again throwing aside a mash of leeches to make their way back to the source of life.

‘I’m not drinking that,’ Frank said. Whether sweet, pure, magnesium or brackish, the water never lost its fulsome taste of the old goat in whose skin it was carried. He’d suffered the pains of dysentery and the blisters of desert-mouth, and unknown ailments that merely nagged at the stomach till he had spots and freckles in front of his eyes so that when he slept he seemed to have lost half his weight and when he walked he swore he’d doubled it.

The fairyland blackened, became a province of coal while the sky kept its pale blue. Ebony tables and cuttings flowed away, showing outcrops that weren’t noticed when the sun was higher. ‘I wish they were padded with two feet of snow,’ Shelley said. ‘We’d freeze to death, but what else could anyone wish for? I dream of it while I’m walking. I’m up to my waist in snow. If I concentrate I can smell it, blue and bitter, menthol and juniper berries, New England snow, toboggan-sledding in the Hampshires. What do you fix your mind on, Frank?’

‘Whatever’s in front of my eyes. If I can’t stand that, there’s a black wall I can conjure up. Or I see Myra and her house in England, but that means I’ve got my tenth wind and am travelling well. Or I theorise on where we’re going and what we’re part of, making up tactical exercises that are so optimistic they make me laugh. I dream of having a book to read when we stop. I’m print-starved. When I get somewhere where there’s print I’ll read anything, though maybe I’ll be so choosy by then, I’ll read very little. I wish that youth had brought some of his newspapers, at least. Still, I think of the books I’ve read, make them up again and watch words passing in front of my eyes on an endless tape.’

They went on, through deep snow for Shelley, blank walls of the crowding night for Frank. They grumbled, grunted, staggered, no rest because every inch of distance had to be put behind them while it was dark. The half-moon rose and gave them a few hours of shadow, each figure with a mocking, moving twin imitating every slide and footstep, weaving clowns vitiating the bile he wanted to spit at them, but which always stuck in his throat. An icy wind blew against the graze on his head, so that it itched and chafed, as if healing from what salt was in the air. When he once pressed it the burn was like pulp and he drew back his hand, vowing to leave it alone.

When they stoppped, they shivered, were glad to stand and move on. A wild dog of the mountains took up its night noise and filled the sky with a long undulating never-broken wail, the binding sound a dog in the wilderness could make yet would never help you to find it. You’d need a whole nation of soldiers to catch a few hundred dogs if they were dispersed, not ten to one, but a thousand to one. It spoke on the wind as if it were a microphone, and he thought it might be the same dog heard every night from the Moroccan frontier, a huge, wild, soulful dog following their stench and footsteps. He’d never so much as seen its silhouette, Anubis of the sand and stone, mountains and saltmarsh, a unique tree-climbing dog that, at the smell of an aeroplane in the wind, leapt down and ran, its four long legs rattling over rock and gravel before the flame-bomb exploded in the tree and an oily uprushing fire sent its death-breath after him.

What’s it got to do with me? Its refugee howl runs up my back like danger and flame, but all the same it makes comforting company on the long marches of the night in which you need a soul of stone, a moonstone lit enough to show the way, to lead and beckon you, push and guide. If I saw that dog I’d want to take aim and get its hot flea-blown carcase hugging the dust, but in this sort of day and night I’d bring a thousand bullets down on us. But if I give a second thought, always worth more than the first, I wouldn’t want to floor its anarchy and freedom even though I’m half-way frightened at its soulful howl from the dog-Posters world tracking me into this great self-induced desert of death. I can talk to myself, I can talk, talk myself into the grave of survival, yet that dog tells me that survival is no grave but a state of blessedness to travel for instead of staying behind and howling alone like him.

He walked easily, no effort to get him forward at the quick goat-like progress dictated by Mokhtar and the guide, who travelled together like four shadows ahead. He let the baying of the dog lull him, turned its noise into music and speech as he watched his own shadow continually in motion before the moon’s suffering light. They traversed the long hog’s back of the range, slowly descending. The guide suddenly led them on a roundabout way down the steep northern slope, so that they could cross where the valley was narrow and danger least.

Before leaving the heights, they gathered fuel and crushed it almost solid, making a high mound of it. Then rocks were piled on top till the wood was covered in the shape of a huge beehive. They left a small space at the bottom in which to place a slip of paper and so ignite the inside bracken. Frank struck the match; it would burn all night and much of the next day, smoke escaping through the interstices of the loosely joined stones, a smouldering beacon to draw French troops to a vacated area.

They went down unobserved. In the valley there was no moon. They heard the first explosions of the night, saw humps of blue light opening and closing further down the range, several kilometres away. ‘They’re approaching this cutting so as to close it by morning,’ Mokhtar said. But unfortunately for them as an army the hob-nailed boots of their guns and mortars were heard from far away, giving the moonstruck phantoms or false reports time to disappear. An idle stone rolling by chance down the slope and gathering a few more on the way was enough to establish an ambush or night attack for which the FLN irregulars were both dreaded and famous. Frank couldn’t understand why the French conscripts put up with this sort of war, though there’d been plenty of desertions in the Kabylie to have the army worried. Men and sometimes officers had come over to the FLN with arms, information, and even a will to help in the fight. Mokhtar had boasted about it one night in a rare mood of speech. ‘As it is,’ he speculated, ‘they’ll waste enough bombs on that smoke we left behind to raise Paris, and send at least a company to clear the emptiness around it.’

They climbed up another flank of a thousand metres. When the sky was blue but the sun had not yet risen, a great shadow lay to the north, as if from clouds when the sun was overhead. It was the sparsely-treed area covering the hills near Aflou which, in the dim light, seemed cooler and more thickly forested than it was, a good place of refuge.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Shelley said.

‘You’re wrong. It’s so ideal it’s a death-trap.’

‘You say and do the right things. What does it feel like, coming from the purest bastard race on earth?’

‘It’ll be light soon,’ Frank said. ‘A big fat sun scorching our noses and elbows for the next fifteen hours.’

‘It’s not that,’ Shelley said, ‘but it’s this pain I don’t like. Thirty-six hours I’ve felt it, which feels like all my life. I reckon we’re all full of pain ready to be tapped. Just needs a bullet or a knife to spark it off.’

Frank spat out a mouthful of goatwater. ‘What have you got against pure bastard races like the English? Sometimes, I think you’re just one of those white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans fighting for the freedom of subject races — as long as they’re reasonably pure. I don’t understand it, you White Anglo-Saxon Freedom Fighter. You’re a WASFF — a WASP with no roof to his mouth. I’ve read all that Jack London-Hemingway crap, and spewed over it.’

‘So have I. Leave me to it and let’s get on.’ He looked back at him, but could find no confirmation in Frank’s straight-looking eyes that he was dying. Frank knew he couldn’t, would not give him this leap of satisfaction, found it better to control the outward expressions of his heart when he did not want what his eyes saw to overwhelm it.

A track ran along the dry, flat bed of the valley. While holes were dug among the rocks on either side, the newspaper-seller pulled down a bush and smoothed all trace of them out of the dust, then put the finishing touches to their burials. They lay under the rocks, loopholes opening towards the track, sweating, choking, killing scorpions that came in dozens to disturb their agony. The youth found a hiding-place, and by full daylight this part of the valley seemed as deserted and empty as the rest.

His mind reached its limits. They had nailed up the coffin but he stayed alive. Childhood and adolescent horrors came back, as they should at a time like this, otherwise how could you trust them? And how could they be of any use to you? They can’t all have been for nothing, meaningless, those parts you suffered and those you loved. Every man was a coffin until his rifle or machine-gun joined the chorus of others, the new gunchurch of the revolution spitting out their cleansing hymns. He counted six helicopters, man-made tin-plated dragonflies spluttering a hundred feet up, prayed for one to land before their guns so that they could kill the dozen troops on board before they began to disembark, run out like spiders and pull it to pieces. Mokhtar had drawn diagrams showing petrol-tanks and vital parts, and Frank was as familiar with ways of destroying helicopters as he had one time known how to preserve and lengthen the life of his own motor-car when he worked in the factory. He also found it necessary to believe and ponder on the fact that the art of camouflage meant not only to melt against the sheltering land, but equally to withdraw your consciousness out of the atmosphere. If an approaching patrol has no visual hope of seeing you, some member of it will, nevertheless, sense that you are there. Your psyche is as tangible as your body, your ego as plain as iron, and unless you can master these, then the most skilful disguise can betray you. Perfect camouflage is an exercise in self-negation, an utter wiping-out of yourself, a withdrawl into non-existence, so that you can’t in any way be alive to others. The only light to be kept alert is that of the eyes, so that when the ring of your ambush is perfect, the united trigger can be drawn with unexpected and shattering effect. From a state of sublime withdrawal you must leap to a state of active egotism, which means death to all who face the ray of it. Thus the span of spiritual experience is in this way wider, before the final limit chops you off in death.

They waited five hours. Shelley did not know how long he was groaning. Frank was awake, staring at the road and willing a car, lorry, tank to come along, anything with engine and wheels on which they could take Shelley to a doctor. He’d seen it before, his grandfather die, and a man at work die after being struck by falling girders, remembered the look of utter and painful consciousness on both before the breathing diminished and stopped. He’d imagined that people died quickly, or went slowly but surely under the sleep of drugs, but this state of know-all consciousness both of the world they loved and the blackness they were going to was the most disturbing thing he’d seen, and signs of it were already in Shelley’s eyes. Mokhtar knew it too, and for once the demands of war and survival coincided with the need for mercy towards one of their wounded. Frank had under-estimated Mokhtar, had kept his eyes open and gun ready in case he should think to make a quick finish of Shelley if he dragged too much on their progress. But Shelley had shown such great and undeniable courage by keeping up with their race, that the Lion of Judah had decided on the way of compassion.

They felt a signal, and heard the engine. The young man would make no sign if more than one vehicle appeared, for they could not take on a convoy. Handbills still flapping from his pocket, he ran into the middle of the track, waving his arms. It was a desert jeep, with three soldiers in it. The driver dropped gear, its noise change roaring along the flanks of the valley, shouting at him to get out of the way. He stood firm, flapping his papers with an idiot grin of welcome. The driver braked and skidded, and the man was knocked slightly as he stepped aside and fell flat into the dust to save his life, which was immediately extinguished by the only burst of bullets that one soldier of the jeep had time and inclination to fire. Mokhtar, Idris, Mohamed and Frank, two on either side, pressed their triggers at the same time.

They dragged the bodies behind the rocks, and swept dust over the tracks and pools of blood. Frank put on a soldier’s jacket and cap, and did the same for Shelley. He turned from the dead young men, his heart bursting. He was familiar with the dead, but the more he saw, the more depressed he was. He supposed the war would go on until one side or another lost heart, felt the shadow only of so much useless death, instead of pure energy-giving rage at the stony manifestation of another row of corpses. Slogans, ideals and beliefs weakened when you pulled the warm bodies towards the holes you had lain in while waiting to kill them, with their tortured human faces and limbs still jumping. He took all field-dressings from their packs before heaping on the stones.

They squeezed in, and Frank turned the jeep around and drove back the way it had come. The guide directed him towards a gap between two mountains. A plane flew high over the loose stones, a bird with an engine stuck in its craw that would not molest them because they were no longer bandits on the run from the great clean-up, but part of it, as the pennant flapping on the car plainly showed. This was treachery, if you like, though Frank could not revel in the moral satisfaction he would have got from it because of Shelley’s ash-coloured face in the mirror.

‘We’ll be out of it tonight,’ he called.

‘Out of what?’ Shelley’s lips moved, his eyes shone, but from a face immobilised in every pore by the unyielding grip of pain. Frank smiled as if they were on an excursion looking for a beach or oasis pool where they might drink cool beer and swim.

‘If I sleep more than eight hours,’ — Shelley’s thin face magically threw off all sign of the blackening blood beating like a drum in his mangled hand — ‘my stomach begins to ache.’

They laughed. Unreality. ‘That’s hunger,’ Frank said.

‘Or conscience. I don’t think I was born to sleep.’ On second thoughts, he added: ‘Not yet, anyway,’ — which saved Frank the hypocrisy of deciding not to contradict him.

Chapter Eighteen

They went forward all day, met the sun head-on in the morning, had it pushing them from behind in the afternoon towards another great door of darkness. Ahmed had been killed, the newspaper-seller had died, and the guide had returned to his village because he was no longer familiar with the territory they were in. They were five: Mokhtar, Frank, Mohamed, Idris and Shelley, and it did not occur to Frank how lucky they had so far been in escaping all interception.

The hills covered with scrub and trees, marked as forest on the map, closed over them at the end of the day. A thicker patch concealed them, and they laid branches over the truck. A stream had water running along its bed, and he could not believe it, until the taste went down his throat. Some rations had been taken from the truck, tins of paté, sardines and chocolate. Shelley could not eat. After a mouthful, he vomited. They hoped to find morphine in the cab, but there was none. He was unrecognisable, mouth black and torn from the grind of teeth, eyes unable to open. He felt them to be a great distance from him, a horseshoe of shadows, each a thousand needle-points trying to force his eyes open and prick them, collectively to push him so that he lost balance and sat down.

Frank lifted him. He was saturated, as if he’d been taken from a bath of scalding water. Shelley roared. There was more pain in his legs than the injured arm.

‘Put him down,’ Mokhtar said.

Frank wanted to drive full pelt to the nearest town, find an army doctor, any doctor, even if it meant getting captured, then shot or twenty years in prison. ‘Give me some help with him.’

Shelley didn’t want to go, and staggered to his feet. ‘Leave me alone.’

Frank held him nevertheless, knowing he’d no right to make such decisions of life and death for him. If he wanted to die rather than become a prisoner, then he must be respected. Fortunately, it was easy to know what his true wish was.

‘When we left Ahmed,’ Mokhtar said, ‘he was wounded, not dead. I could have saved him, but I had to save all of us. I saw him badly wounded, but not dead. If we get a doctor for Shelley, we are all caught.’

‘Isn’t there an FLN doctor?’

‘Not near. We can reach one tomorrow, beyond the road, if we travel all night.’ It meant the big risk of headlights until they ran out of petrol. Frank broke up French cigarettes and packed the tobacco into Shelley’s pipe, but he couldn’t hold it in his teeth. He drove, not yet in the darkest stomach of the night, straight as he could in a north-easterly direction between the trees, torment for Shelley who cried out continually for them to stop. He drove quickly along a smooth track for ten kilometres before turning off, then went back to lights in crossing rocky, thinly-forested country.

When the moon came up, they travelled by it, eyes aching at the shapes they tried to see, at the boulders missed and flanking by. Part of the forest had been hit by bombs. This war was vicious to trees and men. It was like a ruined tree-city in the moonlight, blasted by lightning and as if already blackened by time, the arboreal remains of a vanished civilisation whose houses had been in the trees. Thinning trunks had been weighed and broken by the heavy fire of their top branches which had laid a thin waste of grey moonshone ash over the ground between. Maybe it was a gallows city blasted by the righteous sun. A soft wind blew ash towards him. It eddied and circled. It was warm, and when he walked a few steps, it burned his feet. Not all the trees had been destroyed. Brown and green streaks still patched some of the black boles. At one a red eye of fire smouldered. It took weeks for flame to retreat from a tree, yet it never totally destroyed it, either. Such wilderness trees always grew again, unless their roots had been absolutely blasted from the earth. It was weird, this scorched wood, reminded him of a ruined city that the inhabitants would one day come back to. Where the moon shone, the birds would return. Its leaves would grow greener than before, trunks less beautiful, but branches stronger.

He climbed back, and drove on. Why had the wood been napalmed? Perhaps if he had looked closer he would have seen blackened corpses, the flesh still red within, but undeniably dead forever. He had, as they say, blood on his own hands, but he didn’t wish it away, though it seemed to widen the haunting nightmare moonshot visage of the wood he was not glad to have left behind. He couldn’t regret what had taken so many years to bring about. He disliked the idea of destiny yet sometimes found it a useful word. There were too many burning trees for it not to lift up from the pool of his mind. Why was he in Algeria? Was it not destiny, that he had rationalised and decided on before taking the deliberate step? What had come first: a desire to help Algeria, or a desire to liberate himself? He could no longer blame these questions on a false sensibility whose only purpose was to break his resolution. Since they came, they were real. He asked so few questions that he was bound to respect them. He was almost grateful to them, though saw the danger of them becoming ends in themselves, questions that needed no answering, as if they were friends whose presence alone was comforting enough. His love for people was causing the death of people, but he could not look on himself as a murderer, because he was no pacifist. As soon as he stepped into Algeria, it was a matter of kill or be killed, and he could not stand idly by. He had been offered money for bringing in the guns and ammunition, but had not taken it. He had wanted to fight so that those considered the exploited and downtrodden could stand up to the so-called master races of Europe. But now it had become a fight for survival — such was their feeling as they ran from trap to trap, killing nevertheless, but fleeing undeniably. He had imagined something more deadly, more numerous, more dangerous, yet he wasn’t a man to let his imagination hold him up to the ransom of disappointment. That would have been a blow at his pride, and foolish anyway. Perhaps a dozen groups such as theirs had caused the three brigades to be launched into these mountains, and so were drawn from the Kabylie where the main front was said to be in danger. The French had half a million men deployed in Algeria, which was one good reason for him to be here.

They crossed the main road at midnight. He changed into low gear and, lights full on, climbed the bank. It was wide, and he had an impulse to swing the jeep and go roaring at full speed down the length to get help for Shelley. The lights of a convoy flickered in the distance. Scout cars would reach their crossing-point in a few minutes, and in any case, if he turned along the road, even in the direction where it was dark, he knew that Mokhtar’s revolver would press into the back of his neck. He dipped his lights, and went gently down the opposite slope. Shelley was moaning continually in his unconsciousness.

He drove by the moon again, met a regular track to the doctor’s village and worked by patient navigation along its faint continual curves. They reached the outskirts just before dawn, and at the same time ran out of petrol.

Mokhtar and Idris went to make sure that no French were in the village, leaving them to darkness and the quiet of the night.

‘Listen,’ Shelley said, ‘use the material in the haversack. You’ll need it. And the money, everything.’

It was impossible to clap him on the shoulder and laugh. He sat in the back with him, and it was like being close to a fire. His head was a live coal. ‘We’ll get a doctor now. We’re here. It’s all right, at long bloody last.’

‘Are there any lights?’

He put his arm around him: ‘Hang on. Hang on.’ Burning sweat went right through to his skin. He was a man dying of pneumonia. There’d be nothing in this village, and Shelley must have known it, too.

‘The sea.’

Frank leaned close. ‘What?’

‘The sea. I shan’t see it.’

‘Ah! We’ll all see it one day, I’m sure of that.’

‘Maricarmen. Write to say I’m O.K.’

He’d talked of her; his anarchist girl-friend in Barcelona, last heard of in prison. ‘We want a doctor, first. They’re taking a hell of a time getting him. It’ll be light soon.’ The cold dawn wind shelled the soul of its husks, howled around the high plain, the meeting place of south and north winds, sand and gravel, drowning even the wolfish moaning of village dogs, impatient for the warmth of the sun. Blue above the peaks changed to orange, a faint line, and no one to strike it down, nothing to do but welcome it wryly, then turn your back on it while it bled itself to death and rose up white to the top of the sky, to work out its day-long revenge.

Shadows crowded after Mokhtar. They could go forward. Frank let off the brake, and twenty men pushed the car into the village. The sea was in the light of the dawn. Shelley looked beyond to the prison of outside that forced him back into a prison of pain which seemed to be the underground dungeon in which he really lived, a deep prison with a small window through which he could visualise the fawn sea, with a long, high, single mountainous wave of fawn that would never break. Something had frozen it, fixed it against that sky, had looked down from a sky of ice and snow and pinned that high wave on the fawn sea in a never-breaking position. He felt that when this ruthless, impossible pain stopped, he would melt it, turn it to liquid fire that would only flow over himself. Someone dropped a black cloth over him, and he fought free to look again on the fawn sea and the unbreakable wave. The water should shine and move, and he considered he had a right to expect it, but not at this moment to get it. The pain played tricks on him, so it was natural that the world should, too. If the wave broke, he would drown. It became olive-green, white cloud at the top. The black cloth fell over him again, and he saw no more sea. It drew back from the light of the dawn and turned into day.

When the car stuck, they pulled stones away, and when a rut was too deep, they filled the hole in, until it was surrounded by low mud houses, and a few score curious people. When Shelley was laid flat and comfortable inside, they took the car to pieces.

An old man, hale and strong, came out of a house and walked through the crowd with a bundle under his arm. When he looked at them, they drew back. Mokhtar grinned, and watched. It was daylight, and the dogs could sleep. The old man sat cross-legged by the jeep and unfolded the leaves of old sacking. Inside was a long hacksaw and a pack of blades, greased and shining. Four men jacked up the car and took off the wheels, one by one, propping the chassis with stones. The old man sawed through steel posts that held on the hood and top, while other carefully designated demolishers unscrewed everything that it was possible to unscrew. They took out the battery, removed lamps, disconnected bumpers, doors, seats. A human chain stored and hid the priceless material. Tyres were taken from the wheels and cut into four pieces. The old man sawed indefatigably. The divided tools did their work, passed around so that the whole village contributed.

Shelley lay on the bare floor, wracked and worn with pain that had long since turned into a fight against death. He struggled, eyes closed, arms and legs paralysed. ‘I got you into this,’ Frank said. ‘I made you come at the point of a gun. All you wanted was to go back to Tangier and organise another shipment. That would have done more good for the cause.’ One sharp beam of daylight penetrated from the back of the room, enough, too much. They’d been wrong. There was no doctor here. He’d been taken by the French two days ago. In any case, it was too late. The world had its black side, set up obstacles, sheer walls in the night that you could not see. You moved. They moved with you, around you, dodged you. When you couldn’t get away, you dug a grave, the only escape being into a more permanent and impenetrable blackness. Shelley had found it.

A younger man spread the canvas top on the ground. Others stood back from the main audience and called out advice. Put one sheet on another and roll it all up together. This was obviously what he should do, but now he didn’t want to do it. He stopped smiling, folded each piece into quarters like a sheet of paper, placed one on top of the other, and carried them away under his arms.

The truck had been disembowelled: engine set apart from the chassis, surrounded by nuts and bolts freed with spanners from the tool-kit. A stain of oil spread on the hard earth. Most had been drained still warm into a large tin which had once held brine and olives. Frank watched them take it to pieces, trying to escape his tears. It was a slaughter-house: they cut, sawed, chopped, pulled and nothing cried out, because, though beautifully made and capable of great power, it had never been alive. Yet you had to feel sorry for it, this machine that man had made. It would have been a laughable scene at any other time, vandals tearing to pieces something they could never make — especially in a country like England where they were made — in some quiet side-street on a Sunday afternoon. But it was serious here and necessary. War was wasteful and provided loot for the indigent who had nothing. Tinsmiths, blacksmiths and cobblers craved material, and one wrecked car or lorry provided them with it. Each village and oasis had its turn. A crashed twin-engined transport plane by the highway vanished in the night. Vast territorial departments of Southern Algeria were shod on tyres. Nuts, bolts, wire, strips of aluminium, hinges, rubber, screws, found their way by camelback to the distant souks of Siwa, Timbuctou, Fort Lamy and Tamanrasset. War had burned and crashed around for so long that there was no shortage of certain things, though little came their way on which to build up permanent stability.

He bent down and saw that he was dead.

A few spare limbs and scattered gobbets of the engine remained to be cleared away, sand and gravel sprinkled over the ground to conceal oilstains and metal-dust. It was a time of rejoicing, as if they’d killed the dragon, or drawn in a bumper harvest of scorpion flowers. Planes flew over, but no one was afraid, for the area had been ‘pacified’ a month ago, meaning that the FLN were free to come back, which the enemy believed impossible since the terrorised inhabitants would not dare to let them. So the planes new mercifully to the south-west, to smoulder and machine-gun, rocket and carpet-bomb the area they had just vacated.

He lay on the floor inside and let the tears come from him, a pouring out of sorrow and loneliness, heartache and despair. Shelley had known Myra. He was his last link with the world, perhaps with himself. His grief was total and inexpressible. ‘He was a brave man,’ Mokhtar said. ‘A Lion of Judah. I never saw one so brave or skilful. He was wise, a man of books, an American. We’ve lost him when we needed him most.’ Frank stood up. He’s lost a machine, a piece of machinery that fearlessly sights and fires a gun, reads a map, marches, and understands that raving brainchild, that fool-proof invention of Marxism and Algerian nationalism. As long as Mokhtar realises what’s been lost — that’s all Shelley would want.

A woman washed him and he was carried on a litter to a hole that had been dug by a path leading to their own cemetery. They left a pile of stones on top so that dogs could not drag his flesh out. Those who die are in heaven or in hell, Frank thought, only as long as you remember them. It’s a small place they go to for a while, a lodgement in your memory. After that, if there is any afterwards, they are finished forever. A million worms can’t keep together the body and soul that the person once had, even though the body might be said to live on in those million worms. In any case, for the one who dies it is total blackness. We all know that, or ought to. Who would want his soul distributed among a million worms? It doesn’t give each of those worms a soul, unless the soul was built in a million segments that had each been a worm before they became your soul.

He could not feel alive, craved oblivion, did not want to be finally left behind by his friend. He looked through what remained of him; an address-book, three passports (the American one was made out in his own name of Shelley Jones, the French for Jean-Jacques Goulet, and one British for John Rowland Hill), a wallet with five one-hundred-dollar bills in the back, a photo of Maricarmen feeding the pigeons in the Plaza de Cataluña in Barcelona, a photo of his mother, and some address-cards. There were two pipes, a copy of Mao Tse Tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare, a map of Algeria and a few pencils. He made a bundle and put them into his own bag. Then he fell asleep for the last few hours of daylight, and shed tears in dreams that, when he woke, he could not remember.

Chapter Nineteen

Three French brigades were busy in the Djebel trying to destroy those bands that continually attacked and vanished, harassed and withdrew, but who mostly in the end slipped through their cordons towards the desert. They regrouped outside, marched for the main-base, and moved only at night, lying miraculously concealed during the day in undisturbed hills where no one thought they could possibly be. As they approached the weakened base, revolutionary co-ordination began to work. Mokhtar’s group had become twenty and made contact with other bands to left and right. After dark, an hour was spent rubbing away all trace of the daylight hideouts; two hours before dawn were taken by preparing holes and camouflage for the next day’s conceal ment — thus giving only six hours’ march out of the twenty-four, and those during darkness. Daytime helicopter patrols saw nothing. Land reconnaissances passed close, but the FLN refrained from ambush, unwilling to betray themselves and upset the delicate mechanism of their attack. To the French, the area was dead. It was pacified. The few indigenous inhabitants knew what was happening and kept silent.

Frank walked along, part of the gathering mass, a man in a dream, with nothing to justify his shape as a human being except the tangled thoughts in his head. He ate little, drank little, knew when it was time to scramble from his tomb and time to get down and dig another. He felt that sooner or later during a long journey there comes a point when the questions that assail you like hailstones have to be answered. The outside world that he had lived in could no longer answer them, which was the one good reason why he had left it. He stood alone, and though many answers came, he found none of them convincing, neither from the left hand nor the right hand. They merely served to block the question-holes inside you, instead of healing them up forever — so that others could grow in their place. In this country, question-holes turned into bullet-holes. Though he did not want perfection, and knew that everything would end up being ‘more or less’, the answers stopped coming. They had come to Shelley who, seeming more intelligent and complex, was able to accept the rough answers because that was the only way he could go on living. But my brain is clumsy and more simple, he thought, so I can’t adapt myself to what isn’t perfect and precise and what, therefore, isn’t necessarily more true, because I don’t have the subtlety to accept something rough-hewn and make it complex out of my own reasoning. I’d be happier if I did, and there’d be far more answers to the few questions I ask, so many that I’d even be able to pick and choose!

A true answer should contain within it a decision and the seeds of action. One such answer — whether true or false — had brought him here, and it had turned out good because, while acknowledging the unalterable and universal principles of the situation, it would also lead to a further spiritual leap into the depths of his life. This he felt strongly enough for it to be true. One answer usually leads to other answers. You could go through life leapfrogging over questions until your death, and the question you might then be moved to ask would not matter — assuming you had time to ask it. It was a case of whether the question was more important, or the answer. Was anyone ever so naive as to imagine you could have both, that questions could contain their own answers, or answers their own questions? Some people had a knack of striding rough-shod from one answer to another, never mind the bloody question, but others took years working towards the perfect question whose answer would solve all their problems, before discovering, in a flash of destructive inspiration, that there could be no complete and final answer. So they left off questions altogether and spiritually died.

After going on for so long with the nagging of half-buried questions you suddenly realise that you have had the answers for a long time. Then, after a while, you find they are not the answers you want and that you did wrong in accepting them so glibly. They are false, in spite of the struggle you went through to obtain them. So you have to set out once more on the long march and the deep search. And that’s where matters stand, whether you like it or not.

A march of four nights brought them north of the base. Planes landed and took off from the airfield on a north-south axis, lifting over their heads. Two glittering lines of runway headlights channelled traffic in and out. From the point of view of retreat it would have been sensible to attack from the south-west, since they could then have spread into uninhabited country that, nevertheless, possessed a scattering of wells and water-holes. But they would have forfeited the advantage of attacking from high ground. This problem had been foreseen, and in order to help them in their imperfect line of retreat several neighbouring villages would, on the night of the attack, pass into the hands of the FLN and so keep open a route to the south-east, which led to equally wide-open spaces and a similar number of water-wells. Food-stores and hiding-places had been organised in that direction. All this presupposed that they would not capture the base. At this elated stage they thought there was a good chance of doing so. This would not only bring back the three brigades from the Djebel in a hurry but would also cause troops to be pulled out of the Grandes Kabylies. At the same time, negotiations concerning the future of Algeria were taking place, and this attack, timed to begin after dusk, might speed them on to the advantage of the Algerian Provisional Government. Main and subsidiary roads leading from the town and oasis were blocked by mines, and traffic using these routes, either to get out or to counter-attack, would be ambushed and dispersed. Reinforcements for the base would, likewise, incur losses. If the garrison wanted to move out, it could only do so to the south, and certain groups were waiting there to harass them. If they did break through, they would find no succour in that direction.

To comprehend perfectly all details of a complex plan, and at the same time to know that he was taking part in it, filled him with a transcendental joy and gave meaning to his existence. He was again united with the only part of the world that mattered. It was a similar experience, certainly as real and perhaps more valuable, to when he was first set on a machine in the factory fifteen years ago. The great lathe was fixed before him, and when the tool-setter showed the blueprint of what was to be made on it and then produced one as an example, he understood the plan, the object, and its purpose in the lorry-engine for which it was due. He was making something useful, and there was no deeper satisfaction, until he chafed at the fact that there was an even greater pattern to strive for and fit his life into.

He lay apart from the others, looking at the sparkling star-carpets overhead, smoking cigarettes plundered from the truck they had taken in an effort to get Shelley to a doctor. I am for progress, progress at any price, but when the world is socialist — then what? Yet I can’t say: ‘Then what?’ until all the world is socialist or socialised. And since it will probably take more than my life and lifetime, what’s the point of asking: ‘Then what?’ Perhaps there is a point, and that when socialism is achieved (if that’s the word), we’ll be free in our spare time to indulge in private mysticism: Zen masters, Zen commissars, Zen Stakhanovites. Even collective mysticism. When the state has withered away we can be mystical for part of the day, and material the other — of the world yet not in it; in the world yet not of it. East and West meet in the east and meet in the west. Unless you want to know what you will feel like after what you are fighting for has come about, you won’t begin to fight for it.

The present drew him back, words for Myra, lines of poetry and rigmarole about her and the child, what his love for them meant and ought to mean, words repeated continually in his mind as he walked along, until what had been clear and perfect phrases became garbled by too much repetition, the order even of words uncertain, so that the message he strove to get into his own mind no longer existed, and his body and soul were locked in the effort of climbing and descending, a weird wild pulsing at the heart which blotted out everything, and only the stars were clear when he managed to look up, as if they would give breath to help the receding vision come back to him.

Mokhtar’s group moved towards the scintillating edge of the aerodrome. Hand-grenades were given out. A large transport-plane rumbled low as they descended from stone to stone. The cold of the hills left him. He did not even sweat, felt dry and warm, wide awake, careful and half-afraid. He was coming back to life, and when he turned to look for Shelley, realised with pain that he wasn’t there, had been drawn away from the world, was out of sight and reach and rotting under stony earth. The mass thinned into a line, guided perfectly into place by the perimeter and approach lights, and men set as markers, standing up from the holes in which they had been hidden to beckon and point. Mokhtar had an accurate map of guard-posts and pickets, all details vouched for by Algerians who worked at the base. By giving away such secrets, they needn’t fear for their jobs, for there would be more work when the attack was over.

Hundreds of men, some in uniform, some in Moslem dress, a few in European clothes, picked their way between the stones in silence, the smell of spice and cleanliness flowing in the wind. The night blackened, no moon. The commonplace bothered him, gravel in his sandals, ants and lice biting. He never bargained for a mass attack. Was it a raid merely, or a Dien Bien Phu?

They flattened for cover and went forward, a thousand deadly lizards closing towards the northern edge of the airfield. They passed under the tall posts of the approach lights, half sawn through, whose bulbs glowed steadily, as if to say that beyond this point lay the darkness of the heart, and that all who went there must leave the passport of their soul, and if there was a quick retreat, there would be no collecting it on your way out.

Clandestine wire-cutters had cleared gaps, through which ferka after ferka found a way. As guerrillas, they had gradually amalgamated into an army whose discipline was pooled like a spiritual experience. He watched and felt it. There had been no drill practice to make cohesion instinctive. A movement of social intelligence went through all of them, and he hoped such a valuable lesson was not only possible in preparation for an act of war. Beyond their darkness the sky was blue with light. East of the aerodrome spread the European quarter and the oasis. In the confines people were still walking, the curfew not yet down. Frank felt himself at the end of an enormously wide tunnel, along which he had staggered for hundreds of miles. An outlet into the land of dreams at last lay in front, which was about to be destroyed — or some of it, or none of it. The glow on the sky was a sheltering roof that lured them on. It was the first time he’d been waiting to attack with so many others, with a feeling of being an empty shell whose weight he could not carry, of having nothing to lose but wanting even less than ever to lose it.

Huge explosions came from villages east of the main agglomeration, shaking the ground under them. While all attention and, it was hoped, some reinforcements began moving in that direction and towards skirmishing in the south, the main force went in from the north. Openings were still being laid in the barbed wire. Heavy machine-gun bursts came from the outskirts of the town. The line spread beyond the wire, and he seemed to be on his own. Dust was blown by a strengthening wind, and grenades weighed him down. A hundred yards on was a sandbagged post and wireless hut, and beyond planes were silhouetted in their dispersal points by the airfield lights, which for some reason had not been shut off. The ground vibrated from exploding shells or bombs, he could not tell which, but he was running, now in a group, too close, too close, the gap in them elsewhere, choking from dust. Someone fell, and he went against the continual buzzing as if his head were jerking at invisible telegraph wires. He was alone again, running diagonally between two defence posts. He was not alone: bodies flattened by the wire were busy at it, as if that were all they would have to contend with. It seemed dreamily slow. He worked his way along and ran back towards one of the posts from the rear, unhooked a grenade, took out the loop, and fell flat to do the counting. Above the gunfire someone was sobbing. He was impatient to get through the wire, but hugged the bomb. He had no desire to stand up and let go, wanted to lay his head on it like a pillow and fall asleep. The world inside would splinter and come to rest. He would be in the desert, and out of it forever.

He leapt up and threw, no time to drop before the crack of dawn and dusk, daylight and night, and blue-orange flashes bumping over him. Stones and dust shivered and fell, and he ran on all fours, then bent low and stumbling over bodies that gave to his weight. Alone once more, he saw how organisation bred chaos and loneliness. He stood up, almost bursting from his own sobs. He was full of fear at suddenly not knowing what to do. It lasted a moment. Smoke and danger spilled out of the sky. You could smell it in the dust, and in the resin of shattered posts. Shadows filled a gap in the wire, and firing from the rear diminished. The airfield was lit in every detail.

A hand of great strength pulled at both legs, threw him with a crash onto the stones. The air was on fire, and he covered his head with folded arms. There was no sky left, nor light. He did not know how long he lay there, but similar earthquakes erupted all around, and he was riding a sea of stones, explosions punctuating the continuous wind and wirehowl that lay at the root of his bruised ears. He seemed to have been down for hours, then staggered towards the ineradicable noise. The group he had been with was nowhere to be seen.

At the twin-engined plane he unhooked two grenades and planted one to explode at each huge wheel. He ran to another and did the same. Blinding light opened in a split second as fighter-planes further on the airfield fell like collapsing beds into a heap of fire and dust, then burst into flames. His own planes exploded, one an old Dakota so full of petrol that a column of smoke roped over it, and he ran back towards the wire, screaming at the shock of heat.

To see such priceless and beautiful machinery burning brought a feeling of shame. It was obscene to destroy engines by these shorthand sadistic explosions after so much effort and precision went into making them. To pulverise machinery would have been a pain to his manhood, except that these planes were used to hunt and burn them out. His hair was singed, face blackened by smoke. There was time to smile at his reflections, sentimental mixed feelings that never lead to vacillation because what you wanted to do was always stronger than what you felt about it. Through the smoke there was one last plane intact, and he ran towards it. He tied a length of string to his unpinned grenade and threw it up and over the cockpit, where it hung, and he unwound the string and laid a heavy stone on it, so that the bomb would stay high and do the work of two.

A black cloud lifted, gave a great push as he ran between burning huts. Others were turning back to the wire, shadows in the distance emerging from the smoke. Exploding bombs forced them to the ground. Frank ran on. There weren’t enough to meet the counter-attack. Some were trying, bullets spitting around him. He waited for them to come through the gap in the wire. Mokhtar ordered a halt to their firing. The approach lights of the airfield had been destroyed, leaving patches of light and darkness according to how far they were from the fires. A huge transport-plane overhead that had been trying to land now turned south when rifle-fire struck it from the hills. Houses were burning in the European district. A great roll of wire burst into the air.

Retreating shadows melted into the cover of smoke and flames, some showing their backs, while the better-trained flattened and moved only when the wish rather than necessity took them. Mokhtar saw him and came over. ‘We leave,’ he said. ‘Too many counter-attacks. We can’t hold them.’ Bombs from their own mortars fell in front.

They ran over the fallen posts, split and flayed by dynamite, wire and glass underfoot. ‘Where are they?’

‘They’ve gone back,’ said Mokhtar. They lay behind rocks. Frank emptied a magazine at encroaching figures who, he thought, might be Germans from the Foreign Legion, so sent off another clip for Stalingrad. They rushed across an open space and sun-fires behind made them hard targets, but several fell and they drifted away. Mokhtar gathered survivors and drove them through the safe ground of a gully. Frank caught a final view of the airfield burning, burning planes, light-beams, threading smoke, corpses and wasted wire.

They climbed. Frank was lighter of ammunition and grenades, but felt like a lead man going up, impossible to lift himself. Shells exploded from the town, and small arms fire rippled overhead.

‘Are we the last out?’

‘Absolutely. Except the wounded,’ — who were still shooting or being slaughtered. ‘Both,’ Mokhtar said. ‘And the dead are being killed again.’ Planes had taken off to drop flares over the hills in front.

Chapter Twenty

The horizon of obvious retreat was lit up green and blue. Night no longer existed. They turned east instead of north, the burning town in view all night. Bonfires had been started on the hillsides and peaks while the attack was still going on, and now they became white and orange under the flares, a warning to keep away from the direction they burned in. Helicopters were machine-gunning around their flames. A tongue of napalm licked up a mountainside, a sudden pictorial manifestation that made him shiver with horror. From white, it turned red, rose into a column of deep orange, shooting a smoke-pillar through the greenish light of the flare that preceded it. Handley should be here to paint this, Frank thought, though maybe it would be better for him and all concerned if he imagined it, otherwise such confrontation might burn out the spirit of his genius. It’s enough to destroy any painter, though I’d like Handley to see it, because he’s the only one I can think of whom it might not ruin.

They joined others, walking as quickly along the ravine as they dared without slipping twenty feet into the dried river-bed below. Most had guns, but no ammunition. A few had unused grenades swinging from their belts. Frank had a clip of thirty rounds. Mokhtar, who carried a revolver and a long sheathed knife, grunted and hounded, pushed them along, threatening to kill any who dropped behind, and Frank preferred being on his own in the belief that he would have a better chance of getting clear. The effort of each step was too intense, and for the first time he felt no automatic urge to go on and on and increase the rate of his advance. His only desire was to slow it and stop, drag behind and separate from the others. But he kept on because safety still lay with numbers. Four months had taken the guts out of him. Perhaps tonight would be the worst, and all would be well if he could pull himself along by the light of each star, drag into the fire of another day. Fortunately, there was the insistent sparkling cold to beat at night that tried to get a grip on you, pierce through despair and sharpen your marrowless bones. The mixture of sensations — climate, terrain and the terrors of your own soul — made you walk. Mountainous shapes ahead, shadows, noise of planes passing that could not see them, frightened him. When they stopped he shivered. A sliding stone caused his hands to shake, made him wish for brandy and cigarettes, tea and food. But there was nothing — from now on walking through emptiness and touching the last emptiness in yourself. How long, how long? There was no sense in hoping to get out, looking beyond it to another state, because this was life, all there was, the vast dark area of the end that wanted you to die before letting you free from it. It encircled him, and to be encircled was to be blind.

By day they hid. He crawled along the rancid rocky oven of the earth. The sun festered on to his grey hair and blackening skin. He spent days on his belly. He was a snake. He lost his mind. The file of soldiers made a feeler from the laager of lorries, and winding up the hill passed a dozen yards away, noise and stone chips dancing around. One of the others, farther up the slope, stood and fired. He was shot dead, and the patrol carried two of their own wounded down the hill. He lay still, nursing himself on the rockbed of his cunning. In the darkness of the night he saw mirages of the day, visions of snow-mountains that Shelley had passed on to him. Glacier peaks were forested with pine and spruce, and there were green fields on the lower slopes, huts and scattered houses, cattle, camels and mud dwellings, lower and lower, descending to scorching saltflat and sand and the immense grey stone of the wilderness, and finally to the endless ocean of sand-dunes. He ate live scorpions, scooped mud, went back to the beginning of creation. By the seashore of the desert, in sand-cliffs, were tunnels that he lived in, tunnels lined with white bricks, and he walked among them. An explosion would come, because Algerians wandering by the surf mimed out a warning. In one of the cool corridors he waited, wondering if the tunnels would collapse and bring eggtimer sand pouring down on him to suffocation. He stood up and listened, waited. From the bowels of these brick-lined tunnels came a muffled roar, and the walls he looked at shook, but stayed intact and safe. Somewhere below, that he would never reach or visualise, the air had grown into combustible gas and had exploded, shaken the deepest foundations of his life and vision, opened the hiding-places of himself and all that his heart had never thought of to desire, and all that he had always been too terrified to face or wish for.

There was no jungle in this universe. Above the sand was flinty wilderness, and higher still the meadows began. Then out of the forest spread the land of eternal snow, up to the final great peaks, the land of the abominable Wendigo, the primal layers from his underground Alhambra to the mountains of the sky and snow where the soul could sometimes go now that the galleries had reverberated to this deep-set mysterious explosion that spoke to him from all the sounding places of the walls. He stood, waiting for the sand to burst through the small white bricks, stayed calm and terrified as if he were in a dream, while the grey blades of outside sunlight moved like a windmill round and round over his eyes. The only sound was the hiss of the sea, the metallic surf lazily striking the brilliant sand. Between him and the beach a tree was burning, and while he stood in the same position he saw white flames rolling over it, shaking out smells of bay-leaf and juniper, lemon and rosemary. White phosphorous was burning on its foliage, and he was pleased because the spectacle seemed to wear off his fear and awe of the explosion far underground. The tree burned but did not die, glowed and lit up the sea-beach when the sun fell.

He stayed buried, paralysed, unable to look up at the burning sun. There was no urine left in him, and he pulled roots from the earth to stop the flesh of his two jaws meeting. I’m going to die, he thought. I can’t go on. He was alone, forgot when he had parted from or lost the others, stood at the entrance to his brick-lined burrow, and no one came in nor even near it. The sea was an ugly steel-flat torment edging the yellow sand and reflecting the sun’s heat at him with bleak ferocity.

When he sensed that the world beyond his closed lids had turned black, and felt the night air chafing him, he stood up again. To save rummaging into his haversack for a compass he selected the Pointers of Ursa Minor and kept the dim North Star to his left. Eyes opened and accustomed to the dark, he was at the head of a wide valley, low hills on either side. Smokeless, and without lights or fire. In the clarity of his mind he speculated on how many sins one had to commit before reaching the kingdom of heaven, how many good people abandon who had come to lean on you more heavily for support than you realised in your malformed desire to be free of them. Your life depended on people who needed you. Nancy and the children, Myra and their child, Shelley and the girl he had left in Barcelona prison — he had abandoned them to help people whom he wanted to need him, but who, in reality, had learned well enough how to help themselves, a break with settled fate in order to control the circumstances of his own life.

He walked, feeling only the rub at his feet of grit and dust. Even the ubiquitous dog-jackal no longer broke its heart in the interstellar spaces of the night. He plodded through an unlit silence, in no hurry any more to do fifteen or twenty miles before rest. No one was on the road, no stragglers from the attack. He seemed too far north, according to Mokhtar, but remembering many glimpses of Shelley’s map (more clear and familiar now than the cycling map he had used as a youth around Nottingham), he kept his track parallel to the mountains, and in a few days he would go up and over them till sooner or later he reached the Kabylie mountains which backed on to the Algerian coast. He was on his own, in no man’s land and no man’s army, felt clear-brained and energetic, and as he walked he did not think of fighting again except to decide that he was armed against friend or foe, which thought gave him not only freedom (to say it aloud) but also an affirmation of life that he was determined to hold on to. Without Mokhtar’s group, he was exposed to friend and enemy alike, though if he weren’t knifed or shot by unsuspecting friends he could always show the FLN identity card given him in the Monts des Ksours. Three weeks east-north-east would get him into Tunisia, and he was tempted to go there, but he wasn’t in that sort of mood yet, still wanted to try his arm in the area of main fighting to the north. The purpose that had led him here raged more clearly under his vacillations of selfish desire. The tree had burned off its foliage, but the tree was even hardier, and ready to grow again. By Tunis he could reach London in a month, but he was not yet drawn to that other section of his heart. As much as to see Myra and the child, he craved in the bursting heat of the day to go back to Nottingham and visit his children. The catastrophic act of leaving them struck full force, and he wept in the night, saying not yet to himself, not yet.

The bottle was full, warm and slightly salt, and he sat down to uncork it. He smoked a cigarette, carefully lit and hooded in the middle of the night, took off his sandals and rubbed his feet free of grit. They were tough, and he wasn’t bothered by soreness, saw himself walking barefoot, for when these sandals were gone he might not find more. He had no fear of the wilderness. There was food in his pack, and he could last a few days even without. He had Algerian money, mostly coin, which might help if he met nomads, or got into an oasis one night. But there was no need to set himself spiralling on the course of desperation. He wanted no plans, especially those that might lead him astray or to disaster. He would respect patience and instinct and so be helped by them.

During the walk he enumerated the contents of his knapsack. There were biscuits and chickpeas, chocolate and sardines, dried figs and a mush of lentils. There was a map which Shelley had taken from the back pocket of a guidebook, and annotated against other maps, as well as a compass, binoculars, pencils and notebook. The watch was in his pocket because the strap had rotted some weeks ago. He had fifty cigarettes, matches, and an unworn shirt for use when the one on his back fell off in shreds. There was a three-pronged clasp-knife, an oil-soaked rag and pull-through, and a small screwdriver. This traveller’s bric-a-brac took little enough space, but to it was added a water-bottle, a light machine-gun, and one thirty-round clip of ammunition. Of the three passports, he had kept only the British one, in order to back up his story if he were captured.

Walking alone at midnight hammered schemes into the head, inebriation of hope that softened the brain and bled even the blood-poison out of you, that acid protection of borderline health that kept you alert and visionary under the stars, and cool under the sun. There’s two of us, he muttered. There’s Frank and there’s Dawley, and we’ll look after each other, so that neither of us will come to harm. The left hand must look to what the right hand does, and both can lash out for the benefit of each other, all for one and one for all. You’re a one-man circus, but whatever you do you can’t retrace your steps or go back into the imperative-negative blackout of the past for reasons of ease and sentimentality. Walking backwards is as evil as writing your name backwards, an exercise in weak-minded satanic self-destruction. He felt the black web of the blackest spider shaking before him, its fabric beckoning when he turned towards it, as if death were really and readily stalking and had taken the place of his own backward glance. He had never felt the weight of evil so close, and this at a time when he considered himself on a great mission of good.

He turned again, but whatever lurked in his wake was there no longer. It fitted too well perhaps to the tune of his own footsteps and the midnight rock-shadows shifting across his eyes, and he became confused and blinded on swinging quickly to try and catch a glimpse of him or it. The wilderness is full of ghosts. Everyone comes here when they die, or when life has ripped the bowels out of them. If an atom-bomb drops the shadows will rush in million upon million to choke the living, suffocate those who elected to come here.

Whoever pursued him (or dogged him, for there could be no purpose in ever catching up) wandered through the dream-Arabian deserts of his own mind, in those villages where he sketched the depraved inhabitants of his secret landscapes. All houses were crumbling and all people old, or eaten by the vices of their ancestors which kept the pretty mouths of their daughters half-open and their eyes large. Even the hills on which their villages stood were falling to sand and ruin. This pilgrim who sketched his own world and followed him through black night and bright day played a mouth organ, and his best drawing was an auto-portrait of a lonely, thin, long-haired, half-young, pain-racked figure with a meagre wallet on his back, and a vine-stick in hand, making his way across a plain, the eternal pilgrim, poet-painter, still endeavouring to escape the packed tormenting dissidence within himself, to find another pilgrim with the symptoms of the same disease and totally infect him.

You could not hide among the rocks and wait in ambush for him, because he was as cunning as you would ever be. In any case, you do not meet your pursuer when hundreds of miles of wilderness are spread around. And if during the day he caught you up while you slept, then he could do you no harm, for anyone was entitled to share your dreams and get what they could out of them, and put what they could into them. No matter how long he follows me, he thought, and I expect he’ll stick close behind for a while, he’ll get little enough to eat or drink on this thin leg of the trip.

He walked beyond dawn. Pokers were laid over the shoulders of the mountains as if the sun were handing out knighthoods that would last only one day. They were pale orange, about to merge with each other as the bloody middle pulled itself up among them. He crawled across the map at half an inch a day, soon to turn north and head for the mountains. In a pool of water he saw his walnut face, and the sun burned as if to draw a deeper hue out before finally releasing him.

His legs would not stop walking, and he let them have their way. They would run his soul into the ground. There were no shadows in the daytime except his own, the two of them going along pleasantly together. The sky was empty except for a few birds wheeling some way ahead, but he went on in a state of total alertness, looking for any movement in the flanking hills, and listening for the first cat-purr of aircraft or lorry-engines.

The valley widened, hills far away. In the middle of the plain a few birds gyrated above a black mound, angrily trying to make a foothold among the mass of birds already there. He threw stones, and a score of humpbacked hawks rushed into the sky, so huge and many that he thought they might attack him. One by one they swooped down again at the camel carcass, wings wide but perfectly still before the feet touched down. He stood some yards away and watched, fascinated at this manifestation of natural activity. They tore and scraped deep into the open flank of the dead animal, with many sharp swipes exchanged among themselves as they fought to close in on more tender regions. He walked near and they ignored him, as if no danger could threaten the ranks of their hunched backs set against him. Triumphant and all-conquering, they indulged in a rite peculiar to themselves rather than a common and horrible meal. They fed as if, after a great and valiant effort, they had dragged the camel from the track while it still walked. He threw another stone, but when they did not move, he passed and walked on, hoping that soon he would catch up the people and the caravan to which the dead animal had belonged.

He found a sheltering rock where the valley narrowed, rested where there was shade. He never completely slept, haunted by the thought of fire, the dread of a sudden-opening bomb that would come on like a furnace and burn him into the rocks where he lay. There was nowhere for him to run, but he hoped to hear the warning of the engine and get one last look at life before it happened or, if there was still time, roll into a position where he would not be seen. Dawn was the hour to look for a hiding-place, but he had for once ignored this necessary caution. He didn’t know why. There was no hurry, and it was unwise to let exultance carry you beyond the pitch of mere tiredness, to the insomnia of exhaustion when the shallow sleep hardly brought back your energy. In rest you withdrew from the world, closed your eyes, in sleep but not of it, bound by innumerable steel threads to the stones that ultimately refreshed you enough for another long span of the wilderness.

It was impossible to edge right out of the sun, and his legs and feet seemed too close to a fire. He slept with head covered by his arms, locked in a fever of sweat and darkness.

A cool breeze opened over his legs, shadow and wind, as if he lay under a tree and the leaves rustled. A bayonet scratched the length of his clothes, grazing his skin, tugged as if to pull him from the rock. The shade had gone. He dreaded to see on opening his eyes that he had been caught. His senses swam in an ocean of darkness, then gathered together, separated and became suddenly clear. Reaching to the gun, he was surprised at the steel touch, gripped it hard and opened the safety-catch. Hearing no voice, he expected the bayonet or knife to go right into him. They were not standing close by, but perhaps lying flat a few feet away, watching, waiting for the moment of his greatest hope before striking so as to get the most amusement out of his death. The shadow came again, a rustling of palm-leaves. They were playing with him. He heard a soft noise, like an arm coming to rest.

Opening his eyes, a huge black vulture sat a yard away, hooded, unmoving, yellow and black eyes beamed on him. It seemed all set to sit there for months, though patience could not describe the fixed gaze. Its eyes were as inhuman as its feet, head, drawn-back wings, part of the expressionless whole, two coloured stones someone had thrown at it that had stuck right in and been used from then on as eyes, when instinct would have done just as well, because it looked as if it had no need to see.

He moved his leg, horrified but not frightened, wanting to kill the bird. The blue-black, glossy feathers were unreal, shining in the sun as if they were wet. When he stood up, a ripple went across one of its eyes, and he stared into them as if they were daring him to push down their impossible wall that blocked him from a world he should know about, to horizons of heaven and hell beyond the scattered horrors of the plain that he was already familiar with and only wanted to defeat and forget.

It was the middle of the afternoon and he had slept a few hours out of the day. The buzzard must have lost its glut from the camel, and set off through the scorching bileless sky to find more flesh. A line of others sat along the bottom of the valley like blackened tree-stumps that had burned down years ago, whose ash had been utterly blown away. The one nearest lessened in size, and he levelled his gun. To shoot that head would show nothing beyond the wall of merciless unfathomable eye. Within the eye was a desert brain that craved food from a desert that had none. Its life was a miracle, and if it hated anything it was only the earth from which it could get so little food, and this hatred was a javelin for nosing out the dying, whose digested flesh would let them fly eternally through this hell-sky and sometimes perch on the baking land. If he shot it, would they tear the dead bird to pieces? Or will they gang up on me? They lived on the mountains to the north and roamed over thin forests and wilderness, hunting and haunting all flesh and blood from their endless province of space between sky and earth.

He walked slowly, gun levelled, not wanting to waste a bullet, or send the noise of its death far enough to bring worse depredators on him. It was a pity; plucked and roasted it would make good food, tough but filling, though the smoke of cooking might also give him away. It was well-protected, he thought, by the hard laws of the world — passing out of its gaze and continuing his journey.

From a range of higher ground he saw the buzzards squatting where he had slept, as if still waiting for the last crack of life to leave him before coming on to where he was now. Their numbers had increased, holding a meeting perhaps on why they had permitted him to escape, discussing bad tactics and better measures for next time. Two people were walking through them, and a cloud went into the air like large flakes of burnt paper. He was disturbed at being followed, when all he wanted was to climb away from the track and rest, instead of walking on through the wide open day. The sharp beak had torn skin from his arm, and gave an intense ache. He poured water on, which burned as if it were acid. Then he drained the bottle, which did not filter through to his thirst.

When the first breeze of dusk wakened against him he saw a well in the distance surrounded by tents and camels. He hoped he had left his pursuers far enough behind to stop and get water for his bottle. The heat of his shirt, which did not normally bother him, now began to torment as if it were actually on fire, afflicting his whole body with an intolerable fever.

A thin drum-rhythm sounded. There were trees by the well, the shadows of their branches marked on tent roofs. Faint ropes of smoke curled towards clear sky, and the crazy fluting notes of a raita chipped the air and mixed with the pattering voice of the drum. The enchanted sound of alert and graceful music in the middle of war and wilderness emphasised how isolated and alone he was, and that he no longer felt any emotion or loss when he speculated on people who formed a great part of his life. The rope that held him to them was burned free. He could not remember how many weeks and months he’d been away. All disturbing memories had withdrawn beyond some horizon he’d left far behind or passed unnoticed in the night. Each broad day was an island that he crossed, and so was each night, and he felt that without injury from war or nature, the desert was a healthy place for one to live in, with a little food and water now and again. Optimism was arrowed into his veins, a love of life in the continuous beauty of light and air, and emptiness that was quiet enough for thought and sufficiently wide to suck out all weariness.

Children came to watch him: a boy in a ragged robe, and a mèche of hair sprouting from a shaved head that made the skull seem too big. He stared, while the girl smiled. The men and women from the crumbling wall of the well were looking at three ragged performers between the tents. He unclipped his bottle, and stood to watch, all of them now silently waiting. The music came faster. An old man played the raita, scarred and bitten legs coming below his rags, feet slightly moving to the sound of his own music. A clout had been twisted around his skull, and he was staring into the sky but away from the sun, with a smile of tenderness that hoped for some sort of reward. Frank thought he was blind.

Camels tied to the trees were searching the length of their tethers for roots. A boy threw stones to drive them back into the shade. They nuzzled and pawed the ground. The music caught his blood and he forgot his thirst and fever. The second performer wore a long, patched robe, had a white face and reddish or hennaed hair. He did nothing except move his head from side to side and look scornfully at those gathered to watch, presenting a demonic aspect of thin wide lips and a long chin covered with a grey beard, and a scanty moustache with a gap under his nose where it would not grow. At his feet lay a damp sackbag, something moving inside as if striving to shift with the music.

No one spoke. They watched glumly. The third member was a lugubrious young man who played the drum. Black curly hair came from under his embroidered skull-cap, and his dress was a long dark robe with odd buttons down the front. He played his single stick as if disliking the inspired rhythm it produced, his intelligent face made sensitive because of his distaste for the job he was doing, as if between sessions or on the move he escaped such a life by dreaming over some tattered but unimportant book.

Drum and raita dominated the silence and finally deepened it, each tap-note soaring sharply. Frank gained strength from their fluency, forgot his fever till the whole world he saw pressed close and gentle against his eyes. The white-faced, red-haired man softened his scornful look for a moment, then reinforced it and stared towards the mountains as if his eyes would cut a way through while the music, in spite of its faster beat, never lost the fluid racing lines of its rhythm. Yet it remained graceful and weak, pipe and drum trying their uttermost to become powerful rather than merely hypnotic. The old man’s body curved, but the youth with the drum stood with hunched shoulders and tapped out quicker rhythms with just as much ease as at the slower beats of the beginning, his look of impotence growing, as if his performance had gone on long enough and the time had come to end it. Yet the speed increased, when Frank thought it impossible. The audience seemed to be waiting for a revelation. To Frank all those in the desert looked haggard and exhausted, worn-out and noble, as if about to wake from sleep. Whether working or resting, this common quality linked every face and lost itself deep beneath the skin, shaping the bones, steeping their eyes in it and giving them the pathetic dignity of people struggling to visualise their place in a world of food and water which was continually denied them.

Palm branches flipped and rustled in the wind, grit whirling around their feet and faces. Drum and pipe notes jumped on every grain and dragged it to earth, because no one was disturbed by it. The white-faced man of the three resumed his look of disgust, his lips curling, as if ready to: give them up as lost and vanish forever into the orange-tinted hills. As if on second thoughts he bent down to the filthy sack at his feet and moved his hand around inside, a look of green, glistening fear on his face. The old man with the flute weaved more violently, veins humped on his tobacco-coloured temples, as if about to faint or fall to the ground and still go on with his thin, wild music. The man bending down at the sack suddenly sprang up, holding a live snake.

The crowd drew back in fear from this man possessed of power and talents beyond the limits of their lives, holding, a weapon that could strike them but not him. Perhaps they hoped he’d lose sight of them, so they stood still, and from his expression of phosphorous rage he certainly saw no one, the pupils of his small eyes shifting in bile, mouth open and moving to insensate music. The snake held them, spade-head and fangs fixed by the neck as it coiled round his arm to fight the demonic grip. But it was impotent against such strength and he smiled in a way that set the audience laughing — which he took as a signal for the real battle to begin.

He roared from his wide-open mouth, long and grating, as if he would destroy his own throat. A shade of fear passed over him. The strong snake lashed around the sinews of his bare arm, a loathsome scene that Frank stayed and stared at and felt the deep blackness opening below all sense and thought, his whole world collapsing as if he were about to drop into the cold black water, back into primeval slime that lay beyond the coast of horror. The real island was the truthful inner night that only truth could show you, and only truth lead you safely away from. His bowels turned to water, his brain to ice.

Palm branches swayed. Nothing obtruded. He stared at the madman turned savage who held up the snake and fought, mocking it to do its worst, bringing it closer to his open mouth as if to spit on it, then spun it round, stunning it against the air. In such an elemental contest, he could not sympathise either with man or snake. Its force pierced all stomachs and pinned them into awe. Both knew absolutely what they were involved in, a common image proclaimed under a life-and-death struggle. Frank felt a desire to empty his gun at the three men and end their show. Yet looking at it had cured his fever, left no pain from his scrapes and scratches. His blood flowed marvellously free in its proper circuits, so he let go of his gun, thinking to save his rage and ammunition for the purpose first rationally intended.

The snake’s head, dazzlingly coloured, a large desert asp, worked further from the grip of his manic fist, turned to plant its scorching fangs in the soft armflesh. Perhaps he was immune to its poison, Frank thought, a man of so much snaky bile bursting to mingle with the sweet venom of the snake, so that if the snake bit him it had an equal chance of dying. They became one animal, set on introvert destruction, the reptile an arm of his arm trying to kill the rest of the body even if it died itself. It turned the man into a monster, and as the fight went on between the man determined not to be bitten and the snake not to be strangled, it became a fight for sanity among the scattering notes of insane music, the man and the snake one normal sane creature locked in a dream-battle of reality that by some dread fluke the world had at last given him to watch, as if looking at himself in some great mirror that stretched from earth to sky, across beautifully painted scenery, and showing a reflection of himself set there by his own eyes.

He forgot everything. The snake relaxed, its life almost squeezed out. The skin on the man’s face was yellow, bones stretching as if he and the snake might after all die together. Their scene was a door, an exit and entrance, but Frank longed for it to be over, for he and all people to be released and set back to normal life — if such a thing were ever possible while this day that had been unlike any other lasted.

The snake revived, but the man was quicker, used his other hand to grip it half-way along the body while the thin whip of its tail caressed his wrist. He had mastered it at last, and Frank felt a wave of joy, shared the feelings of those around who grunted and smiled at the man’s feat. He felt thirsty again, thinking the show was finished. But the music weaved with more intensity, as if something else was yet to come. The victory had seemed too easy, carried the disappointment of a false dawn while the real day had still to be witnessed.

The raita fledged up its notes as if scattering feathers into the air, followed by drumbeats set on the impossible job of chasing them, and dragging them back to earth. The white-faced man held the snake, limp and pliable, not yet dead, gripped it with two hands near the neck.

A groan broke from everyone. With eyes closed, he was biting the snake at the neck, ripping into its flesh. The music stopped, the youth turned away, but the old man looked on, shaking as if ready to fall, but his face gentle and smiling at the victory helped by the exertions of his music. The snake-head was in his mouth, its body thrashing helplessly while his knife-teeth tore at it. As he bit on the snake the wound in Frank’s arm burst into excruciating pain, the same ache as before only increased to such a pitch that he roared out. The wound burned, the air grew black, but he fought for consciousness. At his cry, other men shouted as if they too had old wounds that came back to life at the sight of the snake eaten in its final convulsions of life.

He forced himself to the horror, dying with the snake yet killing it himself, legs shaking, jaws locked. The man was swallowing pieces of the snake, eating it alive. Where had they come from, this sect from the bowels of the white and livid earth? His eyes were closed, stomach expanding under his rags, falling in, pushing out again, an unleashed madness devouring the earth’s own snakes.

There was a movement behind, two newcomers approaching the outer fringe of the audience. They had been watching for some time, and one of them broke through with a revolver lifted, and Frank saw Mokhtar fire shot after shot into the body of the man who was eating the snake. He fell, writhing and spitting, flesh and blood pouring from his mouth and wounds. Mokhtar shouted at the others, a wild rational rage in his words, and they began to move. The dusk was blood red, colouring the wilderness all around as they attended to water and fires. The air before Frank went black. His eyes were pressed into his head, and he fell to the earth, raving in his fever that had returned with devastating fire.

Soil closed around him. The sun vanished, taking away consciousness, and all pictures out of his mind. He burned in the grey ash-bed of the night, he crawled towards water to escape the cares of the world, using the last remnants of mole-like strength after he fell. Mokhtar and Idris dragged him to a tent. Opening his eyes, he saw nothing. They closed, driven by fear into beneficient blackness.

He was moved with the caravan to the nearest village, the turbulent camelback journey distorting his black sleep. Lemon-rind was rubbed round his mouth, and he fought eyeless against water dripping over his teeth. He was tied on, a blanket over him, where he would drink his own sweat, rave and freeze. The village was by a spring in the mountains, with tree groves nearby, and a wall of cliff banking him off against the north.