|
the maneuver made the lorry an almost perfect target. a mere
handful of dorje's men, instead of following the others across
the sand and being shot down, had climbed to the higher courses
and now kept up a determined, long-range fire with their revolvers
in the hope of putting the searchlight out of action; they could
have escaped then pretty easily toward the nile, where they would
at least have had a slim chance, although there was undoubtedly
a whole flotilla of boats on the watch. they were clever; they
never fired twice from the same spot, and it is not easy to aim
upward; they had acres of irregularly broken masonry in which
to hide, and they only needed one lucky hit to smash the searchlight
or put the power-plant out of business. |
| he suddenly switched the searchlight off, as
if it had been smashed, and the din the engine made before they
throttled it helped out the illusion. even above that din we heard
one man shout to the others from higher up. i told allison where bertolini's beast was standing tied
to a lump of broken granite; it was a fine white muscat mare as
capable of speed as any animal of that size can be; to the
imagination of a desperate fugitive, particularly if he happened
to be wounded, it probably seemed like lightning on four feet. |
i had signed the donkey's death warrant, but she never knew what
hit her and she had company into the next world, if that was
consolation.
pausing, directing the searchlight, counting seconds,
calculating how long it would take those men to scramble down
the courses, allison suddenly switched the light on. five men and the donkey
went away from this world with the suddenness of shadows caught
by sunlight--only that these left their shadows in a graceless
heap behind them. |
the searchlight, swerving upward, caught him and
reduced his size as if he had been re-focussed. mcgowan stayed in charge of the
lorry; he spared me one man and i went to see if there were any
wounded among the machine-gun's victims. i found three, of whom
one was almost dead. the second one we came on--he was lying on
the second--lowest course of masonry--struck upward at me with a
wave-edged dagger and had to be held down by the rifleman while
i improvised a tourniquet to prevent him from bleeding to death. |
|
the third man fired his last shot as we drew near; it clipped
about a third of an inch of skin and hair from the side of my
head but did no other damage. he had a smashed leg--it was almost
shot off--but he tried to hide himself among the shadows, and
when we did what we could for him he bit the soldier through the hand.
we had to return and get help, and even so the utmost we could
do was to carry those three wounded men and lay them on the sand
where they could be found by an ambulance crew later on. we had
water for them, from the riflemen's bottles, and there was a
first-aid outfit on the lorry that provided temporary bandages;
beyond that and a few cigarettes they had to take their chances,
which were nothing to feel cock-a-hoop about. |
| we had no time to
search them or the dead for clues about dorje just then.
up went the searchlight skyward and described a circle three times,
then descended and was switched off. almost exactly together the advancing
searchlights were switched off, one only, away to the rear,
continuing to send a long pencil of light toward the sky. it
was possible then to see the troops behind the searchlights;
companies and squadrons had closed in on one another until they
looked like one sickle-shaped brush-stroke painted rather deeper
than the midnight gloom around them. |
|
mcgowan left two men in charge of prisoners and wounded. jeff
climbed into the lorry and demanded antiseptic for the bites in
his arm, so my attention was again occupied, but i did not miss
much. we jolted forward slowly without running lights, skirting
the second and third pyramids and narrowly avoiding open tombs
that were hard to distinguish from shadows. if dorje's cache is we think, they might have
got through to with dingbats to the city. i should say we've one chance in . "the politicals
want cairo cooled off, if should leak out that 's a
of these thunderbolt things in desert.. .. |