Hammond Innes - The Strange Land

‘Well, of course, I see your point,’ Ed said. ‘I’m pretty interested myself to know whether there’s still silver to be got out of it. But that isn’t the reason I’m here, as you know. The way I see it — ‘

‘Then what is the reason?’ Jan demanded.

‘Exactly what I told you.’ He sounded surprised. ‘I never knew there was a chance of finding silver — ‘ He checked himself. He was staring at Jan with a puzzled frown. ‘Didn’t you bother to read my letters?’

Jan’s eyes widened slightly with the shock of realising that he had nearly given himself away. It was Karen who covered up for him. ‘But I thought you were a prospector, Ed? When we stopped at Agdz on the way down I heard Capitaine Legard talking about you to Monsieur Bilvidic. He said you had been granted a mining concession.’

‘That’s right.’ Ed was grinning to himself like a boy. ‘It seemed the smart thing to say. I didn’t want people asking a lot of questions.’

‘But if you’re not a prospector,’ Julie said, ‘what are you?’

‘An archaeologist.’

‘But why ever didn’t you tell us?’

He shrugged his shoulders, still grinning. ‘Nobody bothered to ask me.’ And then he turned to Jan. ‘Anyway, you knew. I explained it all in that second letter. Or didn’t you get it?’

‘But I thought you were a construction engineer,’ Karen cut in. ‘You were telling me last night — ‘

‘Sure. That’s right. I am a construction engineer. But I got a bee in my bonnet about this place Kasbah Foum. Look,’ he said, facing the two girls. ‘Maybe I’d better explain. Archaeology is a sort of a hobby I picked up in college. Old cities and things; they fascinated me. Well, a friend of my father’s was a collector of books and he used to let me browse around in his library when I was a kid. There was an old manuscript there that particularly intrigued me; it was the diary of an Englishman who had turned Muslim and lived in North Africa as an Arab trader in the early fifteen hundreds. It was an incredible story — “of wars and love-making and long camel treks through the desert. In it, he described a great stone city built at the entrance to a gorge down here south of the Atlas. He had traded from that city for several years and he knew it well. And this is what interested me. He described a shaft or tunnel running into the cliff face at the entrance to the gorge. There were rooms cut back into the rock from the sides of this tunnel and these had been used partly as the city treasury and partly as an arsenal. He went to Mecca and on to Arabia, and some years later he came back to the same city. It had been sacked and was partly in ruins. And a great landslide had poured down the mountains, completely covering the entrance to the tunnel.’ He glanced round at us. ‘Well, two years back I got this job at Sidi Slimane air base and I came down here — just out of curiosity. And there were the ruins of the city and there was the slide he’d described.’ He had turned his head so that he could see the entrance to the gorge. ‘I just had to find out whether that shaft did exist and, if so, what was in it.’

‘But it’s fascinating,’ Julie said. ‘You might find all sorts of treasures there.’

‘Maybe,’ Ed said. ‘On the other hand, the people who sacked the city may have looted the treasury. But whatever I find, when it’s opened up, I shall be the first man to set foot in there for almost five centuries. That’s pretty exciting. At least to me.’ He turned and glanced at Jan. ‘That’s why my angle on this is different from yours. A few days one way or the other won’t make any difference to me. But if I open it up and there’s trouble — well, I don’t want a lot of ignorant natives getting in there and maybe busting up stuff that’s priceless. There could be things in there dating back to …’ He laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know — to the first nomadic infiltration from the desert.’

‘Not if it were originally the shaft of a silver mine,’ Jan said.

‘No. That’s right, I guess.’

A silence settled on the table. I was thinking how strange it was that these two — the Czech refugee and the American construction engineer — should be working together to open up this shaft for two such different reasons.

Jan suddenly got to his feet. ‘You do what you like,’ he said to Ed. ‘But I’m going straight on clearing the debris out.’ He turned to me. ‘Will you go down and see Moha about labour for me, Philip?’

‘Now wait a minute.’ Ed, too, had risen. ‘Get this straight, Wade. Our interests don’t conflict. But mine come first. Okay?’ He was much taller than Jan and he had moved towards him so that he towered over him. ‘If I decide that we wait until Legard returns and things have settled down — ‘

‘All right,’ Jan said. He was looking up at Ed and then his eyes shifted towards the gorge. ‘I understand your point. But suppose we have another rainstorm like we did last night? It could bring the whole mountainside down and cover the entrance again.’

‘Yeah. It could.’

‘The mine won’t run away any more than your antiques will, if they’re there. But if the mountain comes down …’ He stared up at Ed and then said, ‘I think we should push straight on with opening up the shaft.’

Ed stood there, considering it. His gaze, too, had shifted to the gorge. In the end he nodded. ‘Okay,’ he agreed. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

‘I’ll go and see Moha,’ I said. ‘How many men do you want?’

‘As many as he can let us have,’ Ed answered. Twenty at least.’

‘And how much are you prepared to pay them?’

‘Whatever he asks, within reason. I leave that to you.’

I had Julie drive me down in the bus to the point on the piste nearest the village, and then I entered the palmerie and crossed the irrigation ditch by the bridge of palm logs. Even here the water was strangely red, instead of its normal muddy colour. I knocked at the wooden door of the chief’s house and was admitted by one of his sons and taken to an upper room. Moha lay on a bed of cushions and rugs. There was little light in the room and it was very cold. The lines on his face were more deeply etched, the gash on his forehead a brown scab of dried blood. His wound, he said, did not worry him except that he could not sit and if he walked it started to bleed again. He lay there, watching me, and I had the feeling that I wasn’t welcome.

Briefly I explained the purpose of my visit. He didn’t answer for a moment, but just lay there, staring at me. At length he said, ‘The people are angry, sidi. They will not come to work for the man of machines who has destroyed the water.’ He raised himself up on one elbow. ‘My father and his father and his father’s father have lived here in this place. In all the time we have been here, the water has never been like it is now. The people are afraid to drink it. They are afraid that their trees will finally be destroyed.’

I tried to explain to him that it was only mineral discoloration, that it would soon pass, but he shook his head and murmured ‘Insh’ Allah.’ His people might need money, but nothing I could say would make him send them up to work at the mine. I offered them as much as five hundred francs a day — an unheard of figure — but he only shook his head. ‘The people are angry. They will not come.’

In the end I left him and walked back to the bus. I didn’t tell Julie what he had said. It had scared me badly, for in the south here water was the same as life, and, if they thought the water had been poisoned, anything could happen.

As we drove up to the camp we passed several villagers, sitting on the banks of the stream bed. They stared at us as we went by, their tough, lined faces expressionless, their eyes glinting in the sunlight. ‘Where did they come from?’ I asked her. ‘They weren’t there when we drove down.’