Лорд Дансейни - Guerrilla

And next day Sophia and her aunts started south in another Sunderland. Again they followed the Nile, and, stranger than a strip of carpet from a house–door across a London pavement, stranger than one strip of carpet going the whole way through a great city, went the green strip of cultivation beside the Nile, sheer through the desert for hundreds and hundreds of miles; till they lost sight of the Nile and crossed wild desert, where mountains were, with streams in all their valleys, widening as they went downwards, and meeting tributaries on their way, golden streams only of sand, such as Death might drink at a banquet given at noon in that land to the powers that hated man.

They came to the Nile again, and saw upon the Nile's right bank the four great images guarding the door into the hill that was hollowed to make a temple, when dawn was a little south of where it is now. Green palms appeared and they came to Wady Halfa, and rested there that night, and went on at dawn over that tremendous desert, and crossed the Nile on the way and found it again at Khartoum, flying low enough, where the Blue and the White Nile meet, to see the colours of the two rivers.

Two hundred miles more of desert, and life began to appear, scanty and sere at first, as though awed by the nearness of Death in his vast realm of Sahara. They passed by Abyssinia on their left, undisturbed by any enemy, for the Italian empire in Africa was at that time crumbling away. They came to Malakal, and there a deadlier enemy than Italy lurked, the Yellow Fever, but it did not harm them. Next day they came to Uganda. There was no memory of any desert there, and grasses in the marshes of the Nile grew tall enough to hide elephants.

And then the herds of animals appeared, that still roam Africa, though every year the frontier of their wild lands recedes further; warthogs with tails straight up galloped through grasses, and herds of elephants stood with their great ears stretched to listen, and their tusks shining; and crocodiles lay motionless on the mud of the river with their upper jaws lifted up, while hundreds of hippopotamuses made life one endless bath. None of these animals had ever been seen before by any of the three ladies, and one of the officers of the Sunderland, who knew something of their language, wondered what they would make of so strange a scene.

"You wouldn't stand much chance down there," he said to Isabella, pointing down to the elephants, and to a pair of rhinoceroses that had just come out from the reeds where the crocodiles lay.

"I expect I could manage," said Isabella. "I have lived amongst Prussians."

They saw the Nile foam over the Murchison Falls. They saw their shadow trailing across Africa, sometimes upon the earth and sometimes on clouds, surrounded by a rainbow; but it always came with them. They came down on the Great Lake among blue water–lilies, and crossed it and rested at Kisumu among frangipani trees, and went next day over Kenya at fifteen thousand feet, where mountains give to the air some of their rugged quality, so that their way lay over invisible obstacles. They saw at a long distance the great head of Kilimanjaro, which appeared a black head streaked with grey, for the mass of snow that crowns him was somehow lost in the sky. They came down out of the cold, suddenly into great heat, and were at Mombasa. Thence they crossed Zanzibar and came to Dar–es–Salaam, and walked in its tree–lined streets and went on again, and flew low across the Rufigi river; and in the river lay like a dead monster the German cruiser, the Koenigsberg . The officer that knew the language of Sophia and her aunts said nothing, and none of the others even pointed; they merely flew the Sunderland low, and the three ladies, exiled from their Land by the vast might of Germany, could see the great ship with shell–holes in her side, lying there lost in Africa.

At Lindi they came down again among blue water–lilies, and rose and crossed the Ruvuma, and so left the British Empire and came to Mozambique. Next day they crossed the country of Mozambique and were in the Empire again, sailing over Zululand. For the last thousand miles and more they had moved over forest, with small round clearings in it, and in the clearings groups of little thatched huts.

And so they came to Durban, a city of splendid trees, planted in orderly rows along its streets, and wild patches of African forest still preserved, which were there long before the oldest house in the city; and behind it to the west its suburbs rising, garden by garden, over all the hills.

And here they waited, and are waiting yet, for the storm to abate which has driven Liberty so far from what to them is her natural home. And their waiting is cheered, and their exile mitigated, by the hospitality of Natal. And yet they live for only one thing; and no grandeur of scenery or beauty of flowers that Natal has to show can ever draw them away from the news at the hour at which they are accustomed to listen. And as great birds in this very Africa wait, motionless in their patience, for the death of some large beast of prey, so Isabella and Angelica wait for the end of Hitler; and of late they see many signs that that is near, and with these signs they comfort Sophia.

Meanwhile Srebnitz with Hlaka in the Blue Mountains, and men of an army far better equipped than the one that he first joined, lives in a great cave, of which there is a tradition passed down from man to man, like traditions we have of old houses in England, saying that Queen Elizabeth slept there; but this is an older Land, and tells not of a queen but a god, and says that therein lived Pan. And there Iskander sings to Marya a hundred miles away, since love can use new inventions as well as dream old dreams. For Malone has kept his promise and sent a transmitting–set to Hlaka, and a message has been sent to Marya to tell her when to listen.

Against these mountains the Germans can make no headway. Sometimes they send Bulgarians and Italians to try their hands, but they do no better; the mountains are too steep, and Hlaka's marksmen grow better as the months go by, until he has let them fire at over two hundred yards. And remnants of English and New Zealand regiments that are still up there sum up the situation, when they say of the Germans: "They haven't a dog's chance." And some of them try to translate that into French, believing it to be nearer to Hlaka's language than their own.

There they wait with the past behind them, safe with all its glories in the great cave of Pan, and before them the future, lit by the wings of victory flashing in each man's dreams, or, in visions that hope often brings them, spreading like golden meteors across the sky of The Land.