The Quest of Julian Day (54 page)

His right wing had missed us by a couple of miles half an hour before O'Kieff's arrival and, as he said, there was such a huge area to cover that it was most unlikely he would have come anything like so near us again in the succeeding days; but they had seen O'Kieff's 'plane and had watched it circle round and come down a couple of miles behind them and some way to their right. Knowing there was absolutely nothing in the desert to come down for, Harry had assumed that the people in the 'plane must have spotted us, so he had immediately turned his line of vehicles round and hurried back towards the place where the 'plane had disappeared behind the dunes.

If O'Kieff had not been so interested in the Persian remains, we should have been dead before Harry had reached us; as it was, when his own car had topped the dunes a little in advance of the others and unobserved by us, he had recognised Zakri and, realising our danger, backed twenty yards down the ridge halted the rest in the valley and hurriedly ordered the men to come up on foot with their rifles. It had been his shot which had nearly hit me but had saved us by routing O'Kieff's party almost at the last moment.

Unfortunately O'Kieff had made off with all our most valuable finds but Harry, Clarissa and our grinning Arabs were tremendously elated on discovering that in spite of our nearly fatal misadventure, we had at least discovered some of the Persian treasure. All our baggage was still dumped in our original camp and it was now too late in the day to go back and fetch it, but each vehicle carried its supply of emergency rations so we decided to remain where we were and sleep out under the stars that night.

As there were still a couple of hours of daylight to go after we had brought the vehicles over into the valley where Sylvia and I had crashed, and the men had righted our overturned car, and buried Zakri and Daoud, we started to dig again at once.

Many hands make light work is a true old saying and even the lorry-drivers, who ordinarily would not do a thing outside their job, were so excited by our discovery that they willingly lent us their assistance. By sundown we had tuned up over thirty ancient weapons, three of which were fine specimens,
and quite a pile of other junk; but we found nothing more of value that evening.

After a picnic meal we held a council. It was now the evening of the eighth day since we had started our hunt for the treasure, so if we adhered to our previous programme, we had now only two days left in which to dig before we must turn back. That was little enough when one considered that although we might turn up plenty of old iron and rotten leather, the ordinary Persian soldiers would have had little of value on them. We must find the remains of more people like the officer in the sedan-chair if we were to secure anything of real worth; and it might take many hours of digging before we came across another haul like our first.

If we left after our tenth day was up we should be allowing twelve days for our return journey whereas it had only taken us ten-and-a-bit on the way out; so we had a little margin there in addition to which we were just a bit in hand on our water-supply, so if we increased our two days' digging for the actual treasure, now we had found it, to four we still ought to be all right; but as a precaution against accidents we decided that we could cut down our water-ration by a third which would not cause us serious inconvenience and would leave us an emergency supply in hand for the journey back.

Next morning Harry set off with the lorries to collect our stores from the old camp, leaving Sylvia, Clarissa, Amin and myself with six of the men to dig. I went up the valley to prospect other likely spots and marked down five of them, while Sylvia directed the digging on our original site. When I got back within sight the girls hailed me with cries of joy, having just made a splendid find.

After clearing out the whole of the sedan-chair and removing the remains of the mummy, Sylvia had found an inlaid ivory casket of Egyptian workmanship, with several other objects, in a sort of cupboard under the chair's seat. As she had lifted the casket from its resting place one side of it had fallen out and a whole stream of bracelets, rings, necklaces and other ornaments had gushed from it on to the sand at her feet.

Over our picnic lunch we endeavoured to assess their value Some of them contained uncut precious stones of considerable size; in others the stones were of little actual worth but the
ornaments themselves would fetch high prices on account of their antiquity and the great beauty of their workmanship. Altogether there were fifty-six items and we reckoned that, by and large, they could not possibly be worth less than £25,000.

Among the other things under the seat of the Sedan-chair we found a considerable quantity of the paper-thin gold strips used for money, two fine drinking-cups of solid gold and an enormous quantity of coloured beads which originally had probably been sewn on to some sort of stuff to form a highly-decorated garment.

As far as we knew our natives were reasonably trustworthy but it would have been foolish to have tempted them by leaving the jewels about; so on Harry's return with our equipment, Sylvia, Clarissa, he and I divided them up between us and at my suggestion the girls set to work sewing our respective shares into the linings of some of our garments.

While the girls were busy and a new camp was being formed I took Harry aside to tell him a thing that had been worrying me the whole day; O'Kieff's statement to me that he had deliberately let us set off to find the site of the treasure with the intention of coming out to get it himself later on. When he did return it was clear that he would bring a considerable number of his henchmen with him, and he had spoken of digging over the whole valley, although to do that, the question of water-supply would make it necessary for him to come out to the place a number of times over a period of several weeks.

‘I don't think we need worry,' Harry shrugged optimistically. ‘We can't remain here for more than another three days now, ourselves. Today's only January the 19th so it's still quite early in the digging season and he's got to get his outfit together. It's hardly likely he'll come back again before we've gone.'

‘I agree about that,' I said. ‘But I think we ought to take precautions.'

‘What sort of precautions
can
we take?' he asked.

‘For one thing, we can have a man posted up on the ridge all the time we're digging to keep a look-out for his 'plane; and for another, we can dig a deep trench so as to be able to take cover in it if we're attacked.'

Accordingly it was decided that we should make the trench
on the following morning and in doing so we killed two birds with one stone. As a lot of sand had already been turned up from the spot a little way up the slope where we had unearthed the sedan-chair, we made this the centre of our trench and dug a big ditch, clearing the ground to either side of it.

It wasn't an easy business as the sand filtered back in a most infuriating manner, nullifying our work as soon as we got a little way down; but we managed to make quite a good job of it in the end by riveting the sides of our ditch with some of the packing-cases which held our stores and the water-containers which we had already emptied.

As we got further away from the sedan-chair even the objects of minor interest we were turning up became less frequent, so in the afternoon we tackled two of the other sites that I had marked down. One of them produced a fine suit of armour and a handsome metal helmet which must have made a gallant figure of some officer who had lived and loved and fought in the dim long ago. But although we worked like heavers for many hours on the two sites we did not succeed in finding anything that really counted.

Having now only two days to go we made a very early start the following morning and attacked the other three sites I had selected just as dawn was breaking. Two of them proved unfruitful except for spearheads and javelins which we now had by the score; but in the third we found the remains of a chariot, three more helmets, two bronze shields, several small idols, a ring, a heavy bracelet set with semi-precious stones and four small bars of gold that weighed about ten ounces each.

Rather reluctantly we knocked off for lunch and were hurrying through our meal in order to get back to this promising dig as soon as possible, when our watchman up on the ridge let out a shout and, jumping up, pointed to the sky towards the west.

From our camp in the bottom of the valley we could see nothing, but in that great desolation inhabited neither by man nor beast nor bird, we knew that the alarm could only mean one thing. O'Kieff was descending on us and, next moment, we saw his plane.

The men were having their meal on the far side of our camp and were a good three hundred yards further from the trench than we were. I shouted to them to get their rifles and we began to run.

The 'plane was a much bigger machine than the one in which O'Kieff had arrived three days before; a great twin-engined monster capable of carrying twenty people. It was flying at only about two thousand feet. As we dashed up the slope it dived and came straight down at us.

Harry and I had grabbed up our rifles but the men were still getting theirs from the lorries when a sharp
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat
rang out through the valley. The great 'plane was armed with machine-guns. That was worse than anything I had bargained for and, sick with apprehension, I pulled Sylvia away from a line of little puffs where the bullets were spraying up the sand within ten feet of us.

We four reached the trench in safety and jumped down into it at the same moment as our sentry, a porter named Kait who had come charging down the hill; but the rest of the men were a long way behind. The 'plane zoomed right down over our heads, blacking out the bright sunlight on the sand around us for a second with its huge shadow. Its arc of fire had passed a little to the left of our entrenchment but it impinged direct on the camp a hundred yards away. How many machine guns were in operation I could not tell but we heard the bullets smack like a storm of huge hailstones into the tents and lorries. I saw two of our men fall hit and one of them began to scream as he writhed in torture on the ground.

The first attack was over before we had got our breath. Harry and I barely had time to send a shot apiece from our rifles winging after the plane as it flashed over the opposite
ridge and was momentarily lost to sight. A second later we saw it again climbing steeply.

The men had taken refuge under the lorries but I knew that our only hope of defeating the enemy was by concentrated fire which might bring the plane down when next it flew low overhead. I yelled at the top of my voice for them to leave their temporary shelter and hurry to us while the coast was clear. To my horror that order proved our undoing.

It was not altogether my fault, as if they had come at once they could have covered the open ground in safety; as it was they were naturally scared half out of their wits and Harry and I had to shout ourselves hoarse for the best part of two minutes before we could get them to make a move. Only Amin and Mussa, the more intelligent of our two servants, started towards us without delay and the two of them reached the trench, breathless but safe. The other nine who remained unwounded hesitated and then began to run up the slope in a ragged bunch.

The 'plane had made a wide half-circle, veering off towards the south, but with quick dismay I saw that instead of completing the circle and coming at us from over the hill again, it had descended into our valley and was heading straight for the camp, flying very low. It had entered the valley about two miles away and came streaking up with its machine-guns blazing. Our wretched men were caught half way between the camp and us. In the next ten seconds there was the most appalling massacre. Shrieking, cursing, stumbling, they were mown down by that devastating fire.

We were too horrified even to shoot at the 'plane ourselves as it flashed past us. Where there had been a group of running natives only a moment before, there was now a writhing heap of twisted, moaning bodies. Out of the whole nine only one of them a driver named Hamid, remained unhit and he had dropped his rifle. His eyes were staring out of his black face with terror as he cast himself headlong down into the trench among us.

Some of the men who had been mown down were only wounded and I knew that we must get them in if possible. Harry, having the same thought, had begun to climb out of the trench but I pulled him back again.

‘One of us must stay with the girls,' I said. ‘I'll go out and do what I can.'

With flying feet I dashed down the slope but when I reached the group of dead and dying I hardly knew which to aid first. Two of them were already dead, three others were clearly past help; the rest had leg wounds and I grabbed the nearest by the arm to pull him up and help him up the slope. His ankle was shattered and he fell again. At that moment there came a cry of warning from Sylvia. Repeating its previous tactics the 'plane had circled and was rushing up the valley once more.

I flung myself flat beside the wounded man as the machine-guns opened. On my other side was Abdulla, our cook, stone-dead from a bullet through his heart. With lightning speed I grabbed his body to me and rolled over with it so that it was between me and the approaching 'plane. The bullets hummed, whined and spattered to right and left of me; the cries of the natives who were still living rose in a crescendo of fear and pain.

When I dared crawl out from underneath Abdulla's body I found that three more of the men were now dead including the poor fellow whom I had tried to help. One, mad with fear, was staggering back to the camp dragging a wounded foot that left a trail of blood in the sand; and the other two were rolling about clutching their stomachs with wounds that I knew were fatal.

My own escape was miraculous, even with Abdulla's body on top of me which had saved me from two bullets in the groin as I saw by his freshly-shattered head and shoulder. There was nothing more that I could do there.