I said. As I got up from the table I noticed that his knife was not balanced there after all; he’d driven its short screwdriver right into the wood.
2
The Trans-Sahara Highway is a track that goes south, through In-Salah and Tam, to the Atlantic. But we were using another trans-Sahara highway; the lesser known route that runs parallel to it, and many miles to the west. This was the way to the least known parts of Africa. This was the way to Gao and to Bamako, the capital of landlocked Mali. This was the way to Timbuktu.
It was four fifteen the next morning when we left the hotel in Adrar. Mann and Percy were in the Land Rover. I followed in the VW bus with Johnny, an extra driver from ‘Dempsey’s Desert Tours’. We drove through the market-place in the gloom of desert night. It was damned cold, and the drivers wore scarves and woolly hats. The big trucks that cross the desert in convoy, loaded with dried fish and oranges, were nearly ready to move off. One of the drivers waved us past. Desert travellers have survival in common; never knowing when you might need a friend.
We turned south. I followed the rear lights of the Land Rover. The road was hard sand, and we maintained a good speed past the roughly painted signs that pointed to distant villages. In places, loose sand had drifted on to the track, and I braked each time the Land Rover rear lights bounced; but the drift had not yet built up into the humps that tear an axle in half.
The gun-metal sky lightened and glowed red along the horizon until, like a thermic lance, the sun tore a white-hot hole in it. This road skirted the edges of the Sahara’s largest sand-seas. To the west the horizon rolled like a storm-racked ocean, but to the east the land was flat and featureless, as grey and as hard as concrete. Sometimes we passed herds of moth-eaten camels, scratching for a bite of thorn-bush or a mouthful of scrub. The route south was marked by small cairns of stones. Often there was a solitary Arab riding astride some wretched beast, so small and bowed that the rider’s feet almost touched the ground. Once an Arab family were rearranging the burdens upon the saddles of their three camels. We saw no motor traffic.
We were three hours out of Adrar by the time we reached the end of the track. Six dented oil-drums blocked the way, and a sun-bleached wooden sign indicated that we should follow the tyre tracks in a diversion from the marked route.
The Land Rover bumped off the hard verge with a flurry of sand as the wheels slipped into a soft patch. My smooth tyres took hold and then followed slowly along the pattern of tracks. I kept close behind the others, lining up our vehicles to simplify the problems of winching, for there was little doubt that I would be the one who got stuck. Their four-wheel drive would get them out of this kind of sand.
The detour was marked each hundred metres or so by an old oil-drum. Some of them had been blown over, and rolled far away from their original positions. Two were almost buried in drifting sand. It was easier to watch the tyre tracks.
After about eight kilometres the Land Rover stopped. Mann got out and walked back to me. It was fully light now and even with sun-glasses I found myself squinting into the light reflecting from the sand. It was still early morning, but now that we’d stopped I felt the heat of the sun and smelt the warm rubber, evaporating fuel and Mann’s after-shave lotion.
‘How far was that last drum?’ asked Mann.
‘A couple of hundred metres.’
‘Right and I don’t see another ahead. You stay here. I’ll mosey around a little.’
‘What about these tyre tracks?’ I asked.
‘Famous last words,’ pronounced Mann. ‘Tracks like those can lead you out there into that sand-sea, and finally you get to the place where they turn around and head back again.’
‘Then why tracks?’
‘An old disused camp for oil prospectors, or a dump for road gangs.’ He kicked at one of the tyre marks.
‘These tracks look fresh,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Mann. He kicked one of the ridges of impacted sand. It was as hard as concrete. ‘So do the tank tracks you find in southern Libya – and they’ve been there since Rommel.’
I looked at my watch.
Mann said, ‘I hope the diversion is well marked on the highway to the south of here, or that Russian cat will come wheeling past us while we’re stuck out here in this egg-timer factory.’
It was then that Percy Dempsey got out of the Land Rover and limped back to join us. He was a curious figure in his floppy hat, cardigan, long baggy shorts and gaiters.
‘Jesus!’ said Mann. ‘Here comes Miss Marple.’
‘I say – old chap,’ said the old man. He had difficulty remembering our names. Perhaps that was because we changed them so often. ‘Mr Antony, I mean. Are you wondering about the road ahead?’
‘Yes,’ I said. My name was Antony; Frederick L. Antony, tourist.
Dempsey blinked. His face was soft and babyish as old men’s faces sometimes are. Now that he had taken off his sun-glasses, his blue eyes became watery.
Mann said, ‘Don’t get nervous, Auntie. We’ll dope it out.’
‘The oil-drum markers continue along this track,’ said the old man.
‘How do you know that?’ said Mann.
‘I can see them,’ said the old man.
‘Yeah!’ said Mann. ‘So how come I can’t see them, and my buddy here can’t see them?’
‘I used my binoculars,’ said the old man apologetically.
‘Why the hell didn’t you say you had binoculars?’ said Mann.
‘I offered them to you just outside Oran. You said you weren’t planning a trip to the opera.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Mann. ‘I want to make camp before the sun gets high. And we have to find a place where the Russkie can spot us from the main road.’
Dempsey’s Desert Tours VW bus was equipped with two tent sides that expanded to provide a large area of shade. There was also a nylon sheet stretched across the roof, and held taut above it, which prevented the direct sunlight striking the top of the bus and so making it into the kind of oven that metal car bodies became.
The bright orange panels could be seen for miles. The Russian spotted them easily. He had driven non-stop from some prospecting site along the river Niger east of Timbuktu. It was a gruelling journey over poor tracks and open country, and he’d ended it in the fierce heat of early afternoon.
The Russian was a hatchet-faced man in his early forties.
He was tall and slim with cropped black hair that showed no sign of greying. His dark suit was baggy and stained, its jacket slung over his brawny shoulder. His red check shirt was equally dirty, and the gold pencil clipped into its pocket was conspicuous because of that. Pale blue eyes were almost sealed by fine desert sand, and his face was lined and bore the curious bruise-like marks that come with exhaustion. His arms were muscular and his skin was tanned very dark.
Major Mann opened the nylon flap
