the Lij climbed in through the rear doors, and she pulled away again up
the steep track followed by a squadron of the Prince's bodyguard
looking like a gang of cut-throats on their shaggy mountain ponies,
festooned with bandoliers of ammunition and hung with rifles and
swords. They clattered away after the car, and Jake watched them out
of sight. He felt a sense of deep unease that the girl should be up
there in the mountains beyond any help that he could give her. He was
staring after the car.
"Put your mind back in your pants," Gareth advised him cynically.
"You're gain" to need it for the Eyeties, now." from the foot of the
gorge to the lip of the bowl of land in which stood the town of Sardi
was a few dozen miles across the ground, but the track climbed five
thousand feet and it took six hours of hard driving for Vicky to reach
it.
The Prince's labour gangs were working upon the track still, groups of
dark men in mud-stained shairmias, hacking away at the steep banks and
piles of boulders that blocked the narrow places. Twice these men had
to rope up the car to drag and shove it over a particularly treacherous
stretch with the torrent roaring in its bed a hundred feet below and
the wheels of the car inches from the crumbling edge of the
precipice.
In the middle of the afternoon the sun passed behind the towering
ramparts of stone leaving the gut of the gorge in deep shadow, and a
clammy chill made Vicky shiver even as she wrestled with the controls
of the heavy vehicle. The engine was running very unevenly, and
back-firing explosively at the change of atmospheric pressure as they
toiled upwards. Also Sara's condition seemed to be worsening rapidly.
When Vicky stopped briefly to rest her aching arms and back muscles she
found that Sara was running a raging fever, her skin was dry and baking
hot and her dark eyes were glittering strangely. She cut short her
rest and took the wheel again.
The gorge narrowed dramatically, so the sky was a narrow ribbon of blue
high above and the cliffs seemed almost to close jaws of granite upon
the labouring car. Although it seemed impossible, the track turned
even more steeply upwards so that the big back wheels spun and skidded,
throwing out fist-sized stones like cannon balls and scattering the
escort who followed closely.
Then abruptly Vicky drove the car over the crest and came out through
rocky portals into a wide, gently inclined bowl of open ground hemmed
in completely by the mountain walls. Perhaps twenty miles across, the
bowl was cultivated in patches, and scattered with groups of the round
tukuL-, the thatch and daub huts of the peasant farmers.
Domestic animals, goats and a few milk cows grazed along the course of
the Sardi River where the grass was green and lush and thick forests of
cedar trees found a precarious purchase along the rocky banks.
The town itself was a gathering of brick-built and white, plastered
buildings, whose roofs of galvanized corrugated iron caught the last
probing rays of the sun as it came through the western pass.
Here in the west, the mountains fell back, allowing a broad gentle
incline to rise the last two thousand feet to the level of the plateau
of the highlands. Down this slope, the narrow-gauge railway looped in
a tight series of hairpins until it entered the town and ended in a
huddle of sheds and stock pens.
The Catholic mission station was situated beyond the town on the slopes
of the western rise. It was a sadly dilapidated cluster of tin-roofed
daub buildings, grouped around a church built of the same materials.
The church was the only building that was freshly whitewashed. As they
drove past the open doors, Vicky saw that the rows of rickety pews were
empty, but that lighted candles burned upon the altar and there were
fresh flowers in the vases.
The church's emptiness and the sorry state of the buildings were a
reflection of the massive power of the Coptic Church over this land and
its people. There was very little encouragement given to the
missionaries of any other faith, but this did not prevent the local
inhabitants from taking advantage of the medical facilities offered by
the mission.
Almost fifty patients squatted along the length of the veranda that ran
the full length of the clinic, and they looked up with minimal interest
as Vicky parked the armoured car below them.
The doctor was a heavily built man, with short bowed legs and a thick
neck. His hair was cropped close to the round skull and was silvery
white, and his eyes were a pale blue. He spoke no English, and he
acknowledged Vicky with a glance and a grunt, transferring all his
attention to Sara. When two of his assistants rolled her carefully on
to a stretcher and carried her up on to the veranda, Vicky would have
followed but the Lij restrained her.
"She is in the best hands and we have work to do." The telegraph
office at the railway station was closed and locked, but in answer to
the Prince's shouts the station master came hurrying anxiously down the
track. He recognized Mikhael immediately.
