Australian, New Zealand or South African, "Are you
Lij Mikhael?" The Prince shook hands briefly with Vicky before jumping
down. With his sham ma fluttering wildly in the slipstream from the
propeller, he hurried to the aircraft and climbed into the tiny
cabin.
The pilot was watching Vicky with a lively interest through the side
window and when she caught his eye he pursed his lips and made a circle
with thumb and forefinger in the universal sign of approval.
His grin was so frank and boyishly open that Vicky had to grin back.
"Room for one more!" he shouted, and she laughed and shouted back,
"Next time, perhaps."
"it will be a pleasure, lady," and he gunned the motor and swung away
lining up on the short rough-surfaced runway.
Vicky watched the Puss Moth climb laboriously up towards the mountain
crests. As the busy buzzing of its engine faded, a feeling of terrible
aloneness fell over her and she glanced around apprehensively at the
hordes of swarthy horsemen who surrounded the armoured car. Suddenly
she realized that not one of all these men could speak her language,
and that now there was a small cold cramp of fear at the base of her
belly to go with the aloneness.
Almost desperately, she longed for some contact with the world which
she knew, rather than these savage horsemen in this land of wild
mountains. For an instant she thought of checking the telegraph office
for a reply to her despatch, but dismissed the idea immediately. There
was no chance that her editor would yet have received, let alone
replied to her communication. Now she looked around her and identified
the knot of men and horses that comprised Lij Mikhael's bodyguard, but
they seemed very little different from the greater mass of Gallas.
Little comfort there, and she climbed quickly down into the driver's
hatch of the car and engaged the low gear.
She bumped over the rough ground and found the track that led down
along the river towards the tall grey stone portals of the gorge. She
was aware of the long untidy column Of Mounted men that followed her
closely, but her t mind leapt ahead to her arrival at the foot of the
gorge, to her reunion with Jake and Gareth. Suddenly those two were
the most important persons in her whole existence and she longed for
them, both or either of them, with a strength that showed in the white
knuckles of her hands as she gripped the steering-wheel.
The descent of the gorge was a more terrifying experience than the
ascent. The steeper stretches fell away before Vicky with the
gut-swooping feel of a ski-run, and once the heavy cumbersome car was
committed to it, its own weight took charge and it went down bucking
and skidding. Even with the brakes locking all four wheels, it kept
plunging downwards, with very little steering control transmitted to
the front wheels.
A little after noon, Vicky had come more than halfway down the gorge,
and she remembered that this final pitch was the truly terrifying part,
where the track clung to the precipice high above the roaring river in
its rocky bed. Her arms and back were painfully cramped with the
effort of fighting the kicking wheel, and-sweat had drenched the hair
at her temples and stung her eyes. She wiped it away with her forearm,
and went at the slope, braking hard the moment that the car began
rolling down the thirty-degree incline.
With rock and loose earth kicking and spewing out from under the big
wheels, they descended in a heavy lumbering rush, and halfway down
Vicky realized that she had no control and that the vehicle was
gradually slewing sideways and swinging its tail out towards the edge
of the cliff.
She felt the first lurch as one rear wheel dropped slightly,
riding out over the hundred-foot drop, and instinctively she knew that
in this instant of its headlong career, the car was critically hanging
at the extreme edge of its balance. In a hundredth of a second, it
would go beyond the point of recovery, and she made without conscious
thought a last instinctive grasp at survival. She jumped her foot from
the brake pedal, swung the wheel into the line of skid and thrust her
other foot down hard on the throttle. One wheel hung over the cliff,
the other caught with a vicious jerk as the engine roared at full
power, and the huge steel hull jumped like a startled gazelle, and
hurled itself away from the cliff edge, struck the far bank of earth
and rocky scree and was flung back, miraculously, into its original
line of track.
At the bottom of the pitch, the slope eased. Vicky fought the car to a
standstill there and dragged herself out of the driver's hatch.
She found that she was shaking uncontrollably, and that she had to get
to a private place off the track, for in reaction she was close to
vomiting and her control of her other bodily functions was shaken by
that terrible sliding, bucking ride.
She had left the column of horsemen far behind, and could only faintly
hear their voices and the clatter of hooves on the rocky track as she
scrambled and clawed her way up the side of the gorge to a thicket of
