himself round with an effort, Soames looked backwards and down to where Deal Jimpo Landor had sat. There was no sign of him either.
He wondered how the pilot and the Birmingham man had fared, but there seemed no possible way of getting up to them in the forward compartment. As he stared rather dreamily upwards, the communicating door opened slightly and a head was poked into the cabin; it wore the flamboyant bushwacker hat the Birmingham man had deemed appropriate for the journey.
Soames was about to shout out to him when he recalled he did not know the man’s name (Duncan? Dobson? Hobson? Hobhouse?); again absurd inhibitions overcame him and silenced him. And now the head turned, allowing Soames a glimpse of gleaming teeth and a hairy shoulder.
Just for a startled second, horror invaded Soames. Was the Birmingham man a werewolf? Had the crash released lycanthropic tendencies in him?
Then a grinning chimpanzee, still wearing the bushwacker hat, launched itself into the cabin, swinging down from seat to seat with all the trained abandon of a Palladium act.
‘Shoo!’ Soames said with appropriate force.
Startled, the chimpanzee shed its headgear and beat a retreat back into the pilot’s compartment.
Thoroughly roused, Soames undid his safety belt and set about climbing out of the wrecked plane.
He swung down the seats in a clumsy imitation of the chimpanzee and reached the door, which had been broken open by the force of the crash. Looking out, he found himself some forty feet above ground level. The plane was standing on its tail against a giant tree whose damaged branches seemed to extend like broken tusks all round the fuselage, piercing it in some places.
Unexpected elation coursed through Soames. He was alive! He was romantically in the mysterious heart of Africa. Life was suddenly something worth a hearty cheer. He took a grateful breath of morning air, and found it smelt much like eggs and bacon.
There was no exit for him this way. He jumped down on to what had been the rear wall of the cabin and lowered himself through the door, now hanging open, into the rear of the plane.
Passing the little galley and toilets, he climbed down through another open door into the cargo hold. Here, all the crates containing the component parts of the Apostle Mk II looked still to be in position and unharmed; thanks to careful packing, they had not budged an inch. Working his way carefully down them, Soames reached the cargo hatch. It gaped open, and a steel ladder extended from it down some fifteen feet to the ground.
Descending the ladder, pushing through twigs and leaves, Soames could see that the crumpled expanse of tail plane acted as a pedestal for the wreck. He reached ground and there, a few feet away, Ted Timpleton, sleeves rolled up, was frying eggs and bacon over a stove.
Directly he saw Soames, he came running up, throwing out his arms and clutching Soames’ hands.
‘Oh, Soames,’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, how good it is to see you! Oh, what a ruddy relief; I quite thought you had had your lot. You’ve not a clue how terrible it felt here – the only white man …’
With Soames’ anger that this little man should have crept out of the plane without, apparently, attempting to help any of his fellows, went a detached interest in the sudden use of his own Christian name, with all the camaraderie in the face of danger it implied; then these sensations were banished by a more urgent one which rose conquering from the pit of the stomach.
‘Is breakfast ready?’ Soames asked.
In the frying pan, deliciously, joyously, six eggs sparkled and wallowed like suns in the lively fat; close by, waiting to welcome them when they were cooked, stood two plates already loaded with crisp bacon and gleaming rounds of potatoes. A groan escaped Soames’ lips.
Even as he wondered if Timpleton had been intending to eat all this glorious food himself, Soames caught sight of Deal Jimpo propped with his back against the bole of a tree a few feet away. The young negro was covered by a rug; his eyes were closed, he breathed heavily.
‘I had a dickens of a job getting His Highness out of the plane,’ Timpleton said. ‘Nearly broke my back. Of course, it was dark when I came to, and that didn’t make things any easier. He was already conscious and groaning like a boat. I got to him and brought him down here somehow. Then I fixed his leg up in splints. He’s broken it badly. Funny a big chap like that should get his leg smashed up and here’s these eggs with their shells not even cracked.’
‘You did jolly well, Ted,’ Soames said warmly.
‘I don’t know. I was in the Navy in the war.’ The word of praise embarrassed him. He gestured awkwardly at the sleeping man and said, ‘We’ll wake old Jimpo up now and give him a plate of grub. He’ll feel twice the man. I got some coffee out the galley, too.’
He squatted by the stove, slightly smiling, a little wiry Londoner turning grey above the ears, conscious of Soames’ eager looks. Producing a third plate he put the eggs, now done to a turn, two on each plate and shovelled bacon and potato beside them until the plates were equally loaded. He produced knives and forks from a box and handed a pair to Soames.
‘Eating irons coming up,’ he exclaimed. ‘Blast! Forgot the salt! We’ll have to rough it this time. I can’t climb back up there again till I’ve had my grub.’
‘Quite,’ agreed Soames, and before Timpleton could get over to the sleeping man he had begun the attack on his plate.
After coffee, all three of them felt much better. Jimpo, as both the white men had instinctively dropped into the habit of calling him, bore the pain in his leg stoically and assumed command of the party, to Soames’ secret relief.
For the first time, Soames had an inclination to look round. They were at the bottom of a thickly forested slope, among whose branches monkeys chattered. The open ground before them was churned by the crash landing and littered with small branches. Two hundred yards away, forlorn and innocent now, lay the culprit length of wing.
‘One of you must climb to the nose of the aeroplane and see if the two men there are alive,’ Jimpo said. ‘That is first essential.’
‘I will go,’ Soames offered, eager to show his readiness to do anything, for he wanted his two companions to realise as quickly as possible that he was a good chap.
It was not an especially hard climb. Soames took it stage by stage up through the aircraft and, with a final jerk that it would have done his old scoutmaster good to behold, hauled himself up into the pilot’s cabin.
The chimpanzee had vanished. Silence reigned here now. A mighty bough had crashed through the small compartment, shattering the instrument boards and pinning both the pilot and the Birmingham engineer, who had taken the spare second pilot’s seat, beneath it. The Birmingham man’s torso had completely caved in; he lay with his profile turned from Soames, glass frosting his hair. His tongue had been forced out of his mouth like a length of tie. When Soames pulled back the leafy branches, so incongruous in this little, man-made shell, it was to find that the pilot’s skull had been shattered. His face was indistinguishable; a few large blow-flies were inspecting the damage.
Sickened, Soames let the branches sweep back into position. He could do nothing here. Yet he stood there, silent, the air heavy with petrol fumes and sunlight coming in horizontally through the wound in the hull. He was regretting he had not been more genial with the Birmingham man while a chance for geniality existed.
Looking
