'Do you think I'm a damned fool?' I demanded. 'You've come out here to find your father's aeroplane.'
His jaw dropped. 'How do you know that? You couldn't… no one could.'
'Jesus, Paul; you're as transparent as a window-pane. You read that article by Michael English in the Sunday supplement and it sent you off your rocker. I talked to English and he told me what happened in the editor's office.'
'You've seen English?' He dropped the sand and dusted off his hands. 'Why have you been following me? Why come out here?'
It was a good question. My original idea had just been to ask a few questions in Algiers and let it go at that. I certainly hadn't expected to be on my way to Niger in the company of one Targui, one pseudo-Targui and one man who was. half-way round the bend. It had been a chain of circumstances, each link not very important in itself, excepting perhaps when we found Billson half dead.
I said wearily, 'Let's say it's for Alix and leave it at that, shall we?' It was the truth, perhaps, but only a fraction of it 'She worries about you, and I'm damned if you deserve it.'
'If I hadn't been shot I'd have found it,' he said. The plane, I mean. I was within a few miles of it.' He drove his fist into the sand. 'And now I'm going in the opposite direction,' he said exasperatedly.
'You're wrong,' I said flatly. That crashed aircraft in Koudia is French. Byrne knows all about it. Ask him. You went at that in the way you go about everything – at half-cock. Will you, for once in your life, for God's sake, stop and think before you take action? You've been nothing but a packet of trouble ever since you left Franklin.'
I didn't wait for an answer but got up and left him and, for once, I didn't confide my findings to Byrne. This bit really had nothing to do with him; he knew nothing of England or of London and could contribute nothing.
I walked out of camp a couple of hundred yards and sat down to think about it. I believed Billson – that was the devil of it. I had told him that he was as transparent as glass, and it was true. Which brought me to McGovern.
I thought about that pillar of British industry for a long time and got precisely nowhere.
And so we travelled south.
At the Algerian border post Mokhtar guided Billson on foot around it while Byrne and I went through. There were more fiches to fill in – in triplicate, but we didn't get the full treatment we had had at the police post outside Tammanrasset. We went on and waited for Billson in the no-man's-land between the Algerian post and Fort Flatters in Niger, then it was my turn to walk, and Mokhtar took me on a long and circuitous route around the fort. If the two border posts compared notes, which Byrne doubted they would, then two men would have gone through both.
When Mokhtar and I rejoined the truck beyond Fort Flatters Byrne seemed considerably more cheerful. I was footsore and leg-stretched and was glad to ease myself down creakily into the seat next to him. As he let out the clutch he said gaily, 'Nice to be home.'
We were eighty miles into Niger when we camped that night and the country hadn't changed enough to justify Byrne's cheeriness, but thereafter it became better. There was more vegetation – thorn trees, it's true – but there was also more grass as we penetrated the mountains, and I saw my first running water, a brook about a foot across. According to Byrne, we had left the desert but, as I have said, these things are relative and this was still a wilderness to the untutored eye.
The Air is an intrusion of the Sahel into the desert,' said Byrne.
'You've lost me,' I said. 'What's the Sahel?' 'The savannah land between the desert and the forest in the south. It's a geographer's word. Once they called it the Sudan but when the British pulled out they left a state called the Sudan so the geographers had to find another word because they didn't want to mix geography and politics. They came up with Sahel.'
'Doesn't look much different from desert.'
'It's different,' said Byrne positively. These uplands get as much as six inches of rain a year.'
That's a lot?'
'A hell of a lot more than Tarn,' he said. There've been periods of up to ten years when it hasn't rained there at all'
We stopped at a small village called Iferouane which must have been important in the Air because it had an airstrip. Although the people here were Tuareg there was a more settled look about them. 'Still nomadic,' said Byrne. 'But there's more feed around here, so they don't have to move as far or as often.'
There were more animals to be seen, herds of camels, sheep and goats, with a few hump-backed cattle. The Tuareg seemed to be less formal here than in the north and some of the faces I saw were decidedly Negroid. I mentioned that to Byrne, and he shook his head. 'Those people are either Haratin or slaves.'
'Slaves!'
'Sure. The Tuareg used to go raiding across the Niger Bend to bring back slaves.'
'Is there still slavery?'
