Lawrence Durrell - White Eagles Over Serbia

A wounded man came crawling back out of the smoke crying something which he could not hear above the roaring of the fusillade. Methuen dragged him to the nearest cover and laid him down beside the path. Then he raced back to the central amphitheatre where the greater part of the mules were. Here confusion reigned. The wounded were lying everywhere groaning and cursing, and the skeleton team of muleteers divided its attention between attempts to quieten the animals and vain attempts to help those who had been hurt. A wave of yellow smoke filled the cave entrance through which occasional figures darted or lurched but it was impossible to know how the battle was going. They were like the comrades of entombed miners waiting at a pit entrance after a heavy fall of rock, thought Methuen grimly; and in the general confusion he shed his bandoliers and coin-coat unnoticed, hoping to retreat down the path and make his way out.

But he had hardly started down the path when a new outbreak of firing from the opposite direction set his pulse racing. Were there troops behind them as well as in front? Once more there came the violent scramble of men running for their lives, and stopping to fire short snarling bursts with their tommy-guns before resuming their flight. “We are cut off,” said Methuen, and sat down despairingly on a pack-saddle. A panic was about to start when suddenly a majestic figure was seen to materialize from the smoke which blocked the first entrance. A shout went up for it was Black Peter. He walked slowly — with the calculated slowness of a drunkard who knows he is drunk and is elaborately anxious to seem sober. He walked with tremendous circumspection, holding his shoulder with his hand. His face was white and his eyes staring. Methuen jumped forward with a cry of “Black Peter!” but the figure advanced at the same slow speed, giving no sign of having heard.

Black Peter walked towards the group of muleteers like a somnambulist. He drew his whistle from his pocket and slowly put it to his lips to blow a long shrill blast. Once, twice, three times he sounded and a hoarse cry went up for this was the pre-arranged signal which told them that the battle was lost. “Destroy the treasure!” he shouted once, weakly, but his voice was lost in the rattle of firing.

Now Methuen was swept aside by the press of mules which were driven to the edge of the path and pushed screaming into space. This was by no means an easy operation as the poor animals, already half-crazed by the din, were terrified to see the immense drop before them and fought madly to escape, snorting and screaming. Some had to be shot and some clubbed, and Methuen’s gorge rose as he saw them plunging into space.

Black Peter had fallen to his knees and Methuen caught hold of the young giant and dragged him away from the mêlée. It was clear that he was dying. His eyes were rapidly glassing and his breath came in harsh gulps. “Black Peter,” whispered Methuen as he propped the wounded man’s head with a rolled-up coat, “is the action really finished?” But there was not a shadow of response in those dark eyes.

The firing had become thinner and more spasmodic now, though it sounded nearer, and was definitely coming from two opposite quarters. The muleteers were working like fiends, throwing their bandoliers and coats into the Black Lake, and urging the screaming and reluctant animals forward to their deaths with wild yells. But even in the confusion Methuen could not help noticing the methodical way they worked. Each mule was led to the edge; its front legs were worked over the precipice and while one man held it another cut the girth and the ropes binding the treasure with a knife. Then the animal was pushed over, or if it showed reluctance was clubbed.

For his own part Methuen was filled with a sort of blank indecision. What should he do, since the enemy was both before and behind? As always in moments like these when there seemed to be no way out of a dilemma he was careful not to panic, not to start running — but to wait upon events. They alone could show him a way out, if way there was to be. Accordingly he busied himself by making Black Peter as comfortable as he could. He took back his cherished pistol from the leather sling at Peter’s hip, and refilled a clip of cartridges. From a discarded parcel of food lying on the path he took a piece of bread and some cheese. Then he started off down the path in the direction from which they had been marching when the attack started. He had gone perhaps twenty yards along the path, picking his way over the bodies of men and mules, discarded ammunition boxes and derelict saddles, when he reached a point where the path made a steep turn and here he could see the tell-tale cloud of smoke which indicated that the rear guard was still putting up a fight. Methuen halted in indecision for it was clear that he would never find a way both through his own men and through the ranks of the Communists.

Then it was that his luck changed abruptly for the better. A dead mule lay wedged between two rocks at the very edge of the precipice with the body of its muleteer lying dead across it. The man had been killed as he was trying to urge the mule over the edge. From the high wooden saddle Methuen saw a long coil of rope which had untied itself and hung dangling over the edge, and all of a sudden an idea occurred to him. Would it be possible to find a way of climbing out of his present predicament by lowering himself down the cliff a good way?

In a second he was lying beside the mule staring down into the gulf, his eyes hunting keenly for some vestiges of a path, or a fault in the rock-face which might give him a foothold. He could not resist a sharp cry of joy, for there, forty feet below, was a narrow path running parallel to the one upon which he now was, a path graven in the side of the cliff face. It is true that it was narrow — a mere shelf of rock above the gulf. But Methuen was by now desperate and prepared to follow his luck wherever it led.

He tested the rope after giving it an extra turn or two round the wooden saddle-frame and then, to make it even more secure, he passed it round a smooth rock projection. It bore him easily: and with a final glance around him he lowered himself gingerly into the gulf with a prayer on his lips, not daring to look down into the depths of the Black Lake below.

In his younger days he had been a rock-climber of promise and this experience stood him in good stead now, for he reached the rocky ledge below in a matter of moments and saw with relief that it did indeed continue along the side of the mountain, though here and there it was blocked by a projecting shrub or a fault. Above him he could still hear the unearthly racket of the battle and from time to time a shower of boulders or a grotesque dummy-like figure of man or mule fell slowly past him and produced a dull thick splash in the lake below. It was strange to see how slowly objects seem to fall as they reached the level of the ledge upon which he stood, turning over and over and giving the impression of trying to unfold in space as they travelled towards the dark water below. The noise of the firing too, seemed to change into a number of different variations of the same sound; one set of guns sounded like woodpeckers, another crisp as whip-strokes, while from above him where the rear guard was still fighting, the firing sounded like a series of dull cracks and hisses — as of a red-hot poker thrust into water.

He was bathed in sweat and trembling with fatigue in every limb, yet he set off at a good pace towards the eastern end of the massif. At times he had to travel with his back pressed to the rock, so narrow did the path become; and at others he was forced to climb out of his way in places where the path abruptly ceased. Once he was forced to take the risk of swinging across a gap on a shrub.