armoured forces. The six speedy machines, with their low rakish lines
and Aided turrets, intrigued him. Their speed over the roughest
ground, bouncing along on their spinning tracks, delighted him. They
made wonderful shooting-brakes, for nothing held them up,
and he conceived the master strategy of using them for game drives.
A squadron of light CV.3 tanks, in extended line abreast, could sweep a
thirty-mile swathe of desert, driving all game before them,
down to where the Count waited with the Mannlicher. It was the
greatest sport of his hunting career.
The scope of this activity was such that even in the limitless spaces
of the Danakil desert, it did not pass unnoticed.
Like their Ras, the Harari warriors were men of short patience.
Long inactivity bored them, and daily small groups of horsemen,
followed by their wives and pack donkeys, drifted away from the big
encampment at the foot of the gorge, and began the steep rocky ascent
to the cooler equable weather of the highlands, and the comforts and
business of home. Each of them assured the Ras before departure of a
speedy return as soon as they were needed but nevertheless it irked
the
Ras to see his army dwindling and dribbling away while his enemy sat
invulnerable and unchallenged upon the sacred soil of Ethiopia.
Tensions in the encampment were running with the strength and passion
of the groundswell of the ocean, when storms are building out beyond
the horizon.
Caught up in the suppressed violence, in the boiling pot of emotion,
were both Gareth and Jake. Each of them had used the lull to set his
own department in order.
Jake had gone out under cover of night behind a screen of
Ethiopian scouts to the deserted battlefield, where he had stripped the
carcass of the Hump. Working by the light of a hooded bull's-eye
lantern, and assisted by Gregorius, he had taken the big Bentley engine
to pieces, small enough for the donkey packs and lugged it all home to
the encampment below the camel-thorn trees. Using the replacements,
he had rebuilt the engine of Tenastefin ruined by the Ras in his first
flush of enthusiasm. Then he had stripped, overhauled and reassembled
the other two cars. The Ethiopian armoured forces were now a squadron
of three, all of them in as fine fettle as they had been for the past
twenty years.
Gareth, in the meantime, had selected and trained Harari crews for the
Vickers guns, and then exercised them with the infantry and cavalry,
teaching the gunners to lay down sheets of covering fire.
Foot soldiers were taught to advance or retreat in concert with the
Vickers.
Gareth had also found time to complete the survey of the retreat route
up the gorge, mark each of his defensive positions, and supervise the
digging of the machine-gun nests and support trenches in the steep
rocky sides of the gorge. An enemy advancing up the twisting hairpin
track would come under fire around each bend of the road, and would be
open to the steam-roller charge of the foot warriors from the concealed
trenches amongst the lichen-covered rocks above the track.
The track itself had been smoothed, and the gradients altered to allow
the escape of the armoured cars once the position on the plains was
forced by the overwhelming build-up of Italian forces. Now all of them
waited, as ready as they could be, and the slow passage of time eroded
all their nerves.
It was, then, with a certain relief that the scouts who were keeping
the Italian fortifications under day and night surveillance reported
back to the Ras's war council that a host of strange vehicles that
moved at great speed without the benefit of either legs or wheels had
arrived to swell the already formidable forces arrayed against them,
and that these vehicles were daily engaged in furious activity, from
sun-up to sun-down, racing in circles and aimless sweeps across the
vast empty spaces of the plains.
"Without wheels," mused Gareth, and cocked an eyebrow at Jake.
"You know what that sounds like, don't you, old son?"
"I'm afraid I
do." Jake nodded. "But we'd better go and take a look." Half a moon
in the sky gave enough light to show up clearly the deeply torn runners
of the steel tracks, like the spoor of gigantic centipedes in the soft
fluffy soil.
Jake squatted on his haunches, and regarded them broodingly. He knew
now that what he had dreaded was about to happen. He was going to have
to take his beloved cars and match them against tracked vehicles with
heavier armour, and revolving turrets, armed with big-bored,
quick-firing guns. Guns that could crash a missile into his frontal
armour, through the engine block, through the hull compartment and any
crew members in its path, then out through the rear armour with
sufficient velocity still on it to do the same again to the car
behind.
"Tanks," he muttered. "Bloody tanks."
"I say, an eagle scout in our midst," murmured Gareth, sitting
comfortably up in the turret of
Priscilla the Pig. "A tenderfoot might have thought those tracks were
made by a dinosaur but you can't fool old hawk-eye Barton, son of the
