Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated), page 436
After dinner they all listened to the news on the wireless, for they had a strong family interest in it. Bill’s Uncle Bob, his mother’s only brother, had been a distinguished airman in the War, and was now a great swell in civil aviation. He had made several record flights, and was at present attempting to fly alone to the Cape and back in a new type of light plane. So far he had done brilliantly. He had lowered the time for the outward journey by fourteen hours, and was already more than half-way home. He had left Kano in Northern Nigeria that morning, said the wireless, and was expected to reach the Mediterranean coast that evening. To-morrow he was due to arrive in England and preparations were being made to give him a public welcome. To Bill, who deeply admired his uncle, the news was the coping stone to a joyous day, and he went to bed in high spirits.
But alas! next morning came a different story. His mother appeared at breakfast with a white face and eyes that looked as if she had been crying. The papers had come, and there in large type it was written that Captain Robert Askew had not reached the coast. Bill’s father had already telephoned to London and found that the report was true. Uncle Bob and his plane had simply vanished. Twelve hours earlier he should have been in Algiers, but there was no sign of him. The French air posts had been warned, but the Sahara is a biggish area in which to look for a small plane, and Uncle Bob had no wireless attachment. The fear was that he had developed engine trouble somewhere among those inhospitable sands, and had been forced down. If he could not ascend again, he was lost — lost, maybe, for weeks — and would probably perish. The trouble was that he had not chosen to inform anyone about the exact course he meant to take, so he had left no data for a rescue party to work on.
Breakfast was a silent meal. Bill wept a little out of sympathy with his mother, and then went out into the garden to think.
The weather had grown mild again, the snow had disappeared, and the first aconites were showing below the trees in the rookery. But Bill had no eyes for the garden; he was seeing an infinite solitude of yellow desert with a small disconsolate object in the midst of it. He was very fond of Uncle Bob, and it was borne in on him that if he did not do something he might never see Uncle Bob again. This was a different kind of adventure from any he had engaged in before; it was desperately serious, since life was at stake, and because it was so serious he was afraid.
But he saw no other way. If he failed Uncle Bob in his peril he would be ashamed of himself all his life.... It would be a longish business, and he must make some excuse and get off for the day. Happily he was quit of Peter, who was in bed with a violent cold in his head; even in the garden the horns of elfland faintly blown announced that Peter was doing good work with a pocket handkerchief. Bill got the cook to cut him some sandwiches, and then sought out his mother and announced that he wanted to go for a long walk.
“That’s a wise child,” said his father. “The best cure for anxiety is to stretch your legs. Perhaps we may have better news when you get home.” His mother kissed the top of his head. She looked so pale and sad that Bill’s reluctant resolution kindled into a crusading zeal.
CHAPTER X. THE ADVENTURE OF UNCLE BOB — II
IN a glade of a wood about two miles from home, Bill twirled his stick and wished himself with his uncle...
He found himself in a place very unlike the foggy morning Midlands he had left. It was cold, colder than at home, the sky was the palest blue, and his own shadow was long on the little hills. Funny hummocky little hills they were, like sand ridges on the seashore shaped into fantastic patterns by the tide. On the top of one of them sat a man with his chin in his right hand, looking towards the east, where a great golden sun was climbing the heavens.
“Uncle Bob,” said Bill.
The man, who was dressed in rough overalls, did not turn his head.
“Uncle Bob,” said Bill again.
This time the head moved round and Bill saw a drawn white face with hollow eyes, very different from the robust Uncle Bob he remembered. Apparently the man’s eyes were less incredulous than his ears, for at the sight of Bill he jumped to his feet.
“Good God!” he cried, “this is serious. My eyes have gone.” He rubbed them and peered wildly at the small boy in front of him.
Bill was scared by his reception. “Uncle Bob,” he cried, “don’t look like that. It’s me. It’s really me.”
“Who are you?” The voice was as wild as the eyes. “Me! Bill! I’ve come to help you.”
The man groaned and dropped on the grass. “Lord,” he moaned, “this is the end of things. I’m clean off my head.”
“You’re not. It’s really me, Bill!” He put out his hand and stroked his uncle’s arm.
The man caught him by the shoulder. “Am I mad or dreaming? No! By Jove, you feel real. You really are Bill.” He sniffed the sleeve of Bill’s jacket. “That’s Harris tweed. You must be real. Where, by all that is marvellous, have you come from?”
“From home.”
“But how?”
“It’s magic,” said Bill. “I can’t explain, but anyhow I’m here. I’ve come to help you. The papers this morning said that you might have crashed, so I came to help you.... Will you have a sandwich?”
Uncle Bob took a bite of one of Bill’s sandwiches and then sat down again with his head in his hands.
“Great Scott!” he cried. “The papers this morning! And that sandwich was cut less than an hour ago! Either I’m delirious or it’s a blessed miracle.”
He was on his feet again, pawing and kneading the boy’s shoulders as if afraid they would vanish into a mirage.
“You feel solid enough. And you look like Bill.... Miracle or no, you’re here at this moment beside me in this blighted desert. Come along and I’ll show you what has happened.”
He seized the boy’s arm and raced him across the sand dunes. Bill noticed that Uncle Bob was not very steady on his legs, like a man who was very stiff or very tired. They had not gone more than three hundred yards when they came on a little plane, the new Phantom Gnat which was the apple of Uncle Bob’s eye. It did not look like a wreck, for it sat as lightly in that sandy hollow as a mayfly on a stream.
“No, there was no crash,” Bill was told. “I made a fair landing, but just in time, for there’s bad mischief there. Nothing that a good mechanic with proper spares couldn’t put right in twenty minutes. Only, you see, I haven’t got the spares — that’s my infernal carelessness. As it is, the thing might be scrap-iron for all the use it is to me at present.... Man, I was twenty-seven hours ahead of the record when this dashed catastrophe happened.... As it is, I’m about twelve hours to the good, if I could get on. Only I -can’t. I’m absolutely and eternally dished. I might as well be down in the middle of the Atlantic.”
The sun was getting hotter and brighter, and the glory of quintessential light made every sandhill shine like polished gold.
“I’ve food and water enough for a couple of days,” Uncle Bob went on. “ After that I perish, for there’s not much chance of being picked up, and I’ll never reach Farakesh.” He seemed not to be talking to Bill, but communing with himself.
“Where’s Farakesh?” Bill asked.
Uncle Bob flung a wild arm towards the west.
“Somewhere out there.... I took my bearings when I landed, but the maps for this part of the world are no more use than a sick-headache. Farakesh might be fifty miles or it might be a hundred, and on a compass course I’m not likely to hit it off — let alone the chances against slogging the distance before my supplies gave out.... And what about you? I don’t know how you got here, but now you’re in the same boat as me, and we’re both for it.”
“That’s all right,” said Bill. “Don’t worry about me, Uncle Bob. Mother was so sad about you this morning (‘This morning!’ Uncle Bob wailed) — we all were except Peter — that I had to do something. What’s Farakesh?”
“It’s a French post... Spahis, I believe. I don’t think they’ve any planes there, but they’re sure to have Citroëns and mechanics. They could patch me up all right, but I might as well wish for the moon.”
Suddenly Bill felt very old, far older than his uncle.
“I want you to write a letter, please,” he said. “A letter to the French, saying what you want.”
“To be picked up by the postman on his rounds, I suppose?”
“No. By me,” said Bill. “Don’t ask questions, Uncle Bob, for I can’t explain, but please write the letter. There’s no time to waste, if you’re to beat the record.”
“I’m mad,” said Uncle Bob, “undoubtedly mad,” and he put his hands to his head. But he also ferreted about in the plane and produced a pencil and paper. First he wrote a message in English, explaining his whereabouts as well as he could and the nature of the help he wanted. Then below he wrote a French translation. Then he put it in an envelope and addressed it to the Commandant at Farakesh.
“This is like putting a request for help into a bottle and chucking it into the ocean just when you’re going to be washed off your raft,” he said. “Now, you amazing child, what do you propose to do?”
“I’m going to Farakesh,” said Bill. “Please don’t look round. I promise not to be long.”
Bill put a sandhill between himself and the plane and twisted his stick.... He found himself in a dusty hollow where a string of horses was exercising, with riders who appeared to be dressed in white nightgowns and nightcaps. There was a long, low, white building before him with a dome in the centre. There was also a group of short dusty palm trees, and a pool of dirty green water surrounded by a stone coping, and, on the high ground behind, a jungle of thorns intersected by sandy roads.
That was all that Bill’s eyes took in of Farakesh, for he had no time for the study of landscape. He marched up to the entrance where a sentry was on duty, a man in faded blue uniform whose rifle carried a queer thin kind of bayonet.
“Pour Monsieur le Commandant,” said Bill, drawing upon his exiguous store of the French tongue.
The sentry, confronted by a small boy in a tweed suit of knickerbockers, a tweed cap and muddy shoes, nearly had a fit. He brought down the butt of his rifle with a clang on the stone, and called upon the Virgin and the Saints. He cried shrilly for his colleagues, and soon Bill was surrounded by an excited group who plied him with questions in a French which he did not understand. Then an officer came along and the group stood to attention.
He was a very lean officer and he was scarcely less excited than the sentry. He, too, began a cross-examination, but Bill could not make anything of his rapid speech and decided that he had better not try. He only shook his head and smiled and pointed to the letter.
The officer took him by the hand and led him indoors through many whitewashed passages to a room where a little grizzled old man sat at a table covered with papers. The little old man, who Bill decided must be the Commandant, had two lines of medal ribbons on his breast.
Then followed a vivacious colloquy. Uncle Bob’s letter was opened and read, and more officers were summoned. “It is without doubt the Capitaine Robert Askew,” Bill made out that much of the conversation. “But how? But why?”
Bill found himself the object of the acutest interest, and he seemed to be referred to as an “enfant merveilleux.” He only smiled and nodded.
Maps were eagerly unrolled. They seemed to know where Uncle Bob was, and a spot was marked and calculations made. Bill heard the number “soixante-dix” repeated many times and joined to the word “kilometres.”
Then the conclave was suddenly broken up. He was taken to a large cool room full of long tables, and given food — a big glass of milk as thick as cream which had an odd lemony taste, the best dates he had ever eaten, and delicious little thin sugar cakes.
Then he was led out into the sunshine, where two long squat motor-cars were waiting, with very broad wheels. There was an officer and a man in each, and an assortment of ironmongery. Bill was packed into the first car, the Commandant to his disgust kissed him on both cheeks, and he was whirled into the glittering desert. But first an officer had twined a long gauzy white cloth round his head, a thing like a turban. Bill realised that a cap suited for an Oxfordshire winter was scarcely adequate in a Sahara noon.
Bill was to remember that journey because of its acute discomfort. Almost at once he felt sick, either because of the bumpy ground or the luncheon he had eaten. Also he was soon horribly afraid, for never man drove like that French driver. They invited jolts which would have smashed most axles, and they coasted gaily along the slopes of hills where nothing but the pace prevented the car from toppling sideways. Bill clutched at his wits and prayed that it would soon be over, and only the memory of Uncle Bob and a lingering scrap of prudence kept him from twisting his stick and vanishing.
By and by they came into deep sand and had to slow down, and Bill’s nausea diminished; and when at the end of four hours they saw a fire of dry scrub on a distant hillock, which Uncle Bob had lit for a mark, he felt his own master again. He was pleased that Uncle Bob had lit the fire, for it showed that he had some confidence in his nephew.
Then there were bowings and handshakings and a great deal of rapid French, and Uncle Bob and the mechanics were busy with the inside of the engine. A fire was made, a little anvil was set up, and for an hour in that blistering noontide men hammered and screwed and bored. Then the work was over. Uncle Bob climbed into the pilot’s seat, and taxied along the sand, and the engine proved to be working sweetly. He got out again and shook hands with the Frenchmen, and they all made him speeches.
Bill, foreseeing the end of his duties, had climbed to the top of one of the dunes. “Goodbye, Uncle Bob, and good luck,” he cried, when he saw that all was well.
Uncle Bob, reawakened to his nephew’s presence, exclaimed and began to run towards him. So did the Frenchmen. “Bill!” he called. “Come here, Bill!” and the others shouted about a miraculous child.
But Bill felt that further intercourse would be embarrassing. He nipped down the far side of the dune and twirled his stick....
He was standing in Elder’s Spinney on sodden turf, while a fine rain was filtering through the beeches. The sand of the Sahara was in the crinkles of his shoes and knickerbockers and in the corners of his eyes. When he had gone half a mile he suddenly remembered that he was still wearing the turban which had been given him at Farakesh. This he removed and stuffed into a rabbit hole.
That evening at tea he told the family that there was a rumour in the village that Uncle Bob was all right, but he was not believed till the wireless confirmed the news. Next morning a late edition of an enterprising penny paper announced the safe arrival of Captain Askew at Croydon, and his reception by the Under-Secretary for Air. He had broken the record by eight hours.
CHAPTER XI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE IVORY VALLEY — I.
THE news of Uncle Bob’s success put Bill into a state of high exaltation. He felt proud of himself, for, though he owed his achievement to the magic stick, he had surely shown boldness in his use of it.
It was one of those hopeless days which midwinter brings to the English Midlands. Rain fell with a dull persistency, and an east wind swirled round the manor gables, coming through the gap between the rookery and the tithe barn. Bill did not suffer much from cold, but he loved bright weather, and he felt himself homesick for yesterday’s riot of sunlight. Also he hungered for more of Africa. He had been in the Solomon Islands, and had seen there one of the countries of his dreams. He had smelt the hot drought of the Sahara and looked over its yellow distances. What he wanted now to round off his experiences was a tropical forest.
Peter was bed-ridden with his cold, and after breakfast Bill sat himself by the library fire. He had the day before him, and, since it was his family’s habit to disregard weather, he would be allowed to go off with sandwiches in his pocket to try for snipe on the fringes of Alemoor. But Alemoor was not for him. He wanted colour and light and mystery.
He was a great devourer of travel books, and could have reeled off the names of many outlandish places. Central Africa had always been one of his fancies, partly because his father as a young man had gone there after big game. Bill remembered his father’s tales — how he had looked at the summit of the Mountains of the Moon from a hundred miles off and thought it a thunder-cloud — how he had first seen the silver cone of Kilimanjaro while lost in the waterless bush — how he had pushed inside the fringes of the dark Congo forest. Certain names — Ruwenzori, Tanganyika, Ruanda — sang in Bill’s head like tunes.
But especially he remembered one of his father’s tales which an old hunter had told him in Mozambique. He was a grizzled old man called Stubber, and he had a withered leg which a lion had once chawed. He had been a famous elephant-hunter in his day, and this was his story.
Somewhere in the mountains was a valley where the elephants went when they felt death approaching. They had done this for thousands of years, and the place was full of ivory — such tusks as no hunter had ever looked on. The way to it was hard to find, and Stubber had never been there himself, though he had often tried to reach it. One or two men had looked at the valley from the neighbouring ridges, but had not been able to make their way back to it.
But let a bold man go there, said Stubber, and let him blaze a trail for transport, and he had in his hand the fortune of kings. For, said he, diamonds are going down in price, and gold isn’t what it was, but fine ivory will have its market till the crack of doom.
Bill had no commercial ambitions. Bands would not allow that. He got out the big atlas and pored over a map of equatorial Africa. His father had not been very clear which mountains Stubber had meant, for the old fellow had been so drunk for a week after the tale that he could get no more out of him. There seemed to be a good many mountain ranges — Rudolf, Kenya, Kilimanjaro, Ruwenzori, and a lot of volcanoes. His father had said that if he had had more time during his hunting trip, he would have had a shot at finding the Ivory Valley. Why, Bill asked himself, should he not take on the job? Stubber had been vague, but the magic staff would know all about it.
