"AFRICA FLIGHT"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 January 1940, Page 10

"AFRICA FLIGHT"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

VAL GEILGUD.

(Author of “Announcer's Holiday,” “Beyond Dover,” Etc.

CHAPTER XIII. Continued.

Sothern dabbed at his forehead with a grimy handkerchief. With the angry bruise that stained his jaw, as the result of Larrimore’s blow, he seemed in Carol’s eyes extremely far removed from the excessively elegant young man she had known so well in London. He had become a different person: different, and even in a queer way formidable.

‘‘Oh, what’s the good of talking about it?” he muttered. ‘Why did you want to drag in the love business, Carol? Larrimore’s right enough there. I was jealous of him. I’m vilely jealous of him at this moment. I admit that, but actually it’s quite beside the point

“What is the point, Antony?” “Simply that all he’s out for is tc look after number one! That’s all he does! I know it. and so do all of you if you’re ever honest enough to face up to the truth. And I’m dashed if I’ll trust Carol’s life in the hands of a man like that as long as I can find ; mortal way to prevent it!” Carol went close up to Sothern, ano patted his cheek. Janet Manson confessed later to her husband that the movement reminded her of nothing so much as a leopard playing with its keeper, and that she herself expected the leopard to unsheate her claws and scratch his eyes out! “Thank you so much for taking care of me. Antony. ’’ she said sweetly, though her voice shook. “Thank you ever so much for dishing us all just so as to look after me! This is going to be a really charming three-handed and personally conducted tour! At the risk of your shooting me I propose to go and ask Rupert what would be the best clothes to''wear, and just what I’ve got to carry in the way of kit.” She walked past him, and after pausing uncertainly for a moment, Sothern followed her. Hubert Manson and his wife, left alone, exchanged rather helpless glances. Then Janet’s dry sense of humour got the better of her, and she laughed. ‘“You know, Hubert dear,” she said, “the young beat me altogether.’ Her husband patted her hand. “Nothing beats you, Janet, as far as I know.”

She swept him an old-fashioned curtsey and sat down again. Hubert watched her keenly.

“You’re not frightened, Janet, are you? Larrimore may be—exaggerating a little you know.” “Of course I’m frightened," was the decisive answer, "but that doesn't matter.”

“It maters to me. What is mattering to you, Janet?” Janet Manson bit her lip. “I may as well admit it,” she said, and she spoke unwillingly, as if the expression had to be dragged out of her. “Hubert, I don’t quite trust Rupert Larrimore." “My dear Janet!”

"I don’t Herbert. You know there was something a little fishy about that Hendon show. And you remember that night we all dined at the Budapest in London before the start. The amount he drank ” Hubert’s eyebrows shot up.

“My dear,” he protested, “he didn’t drink anything he couldn’t carry! Remember —we’re all a good deal on edge at the moment, what with nervous reaction after the crash, and all this lunatic nonsense of Tony’s. Larrimore deserves our loyalty, Janet. After all, George trusted him.” A glint appeared in Janet Manson’s eye.

“George," she retorted, “would trust Caesar Borgia, if doing so would benefit Associated Airways Limited —and you know it!" Hubert moved impatiently. “Carol and Larrimore are engaged, my dear. Surely it’s obvious enough that they’re in love with each other. And a man who's in love with a girl doesn't expose her to unnecessary risk.”

“That, Hubert, is just Tony Sothern’s point. I don’t know why I feel like this, but I feel in my bones that something’s going dreadfully wrong over all this."

At which point Larrimore re-entered the cabin, his arm through Carol’s, “I’m afraid there’s no doing anything with Sothern,” he said apologetically. “We must make the best of a bad job —unless of course you'd like me to try a rough and tumble, and get the guns from him. He shrugged his shoulders.

“I'm afraid in his present mood someone would be almost certain to get hurt. And if it happened to be me—" He broke off.

“Cowardly as ever, don't you think ro, Mrs Manson?" he added. Janet flushed, but did not reply. "If we’re lucky with the weather, and Sothern will step out. we've got a sporting chance.” Larrimore concluded. "And we're starling right away." added Carol. "Come and wave at us, will you?" "Of course,” said Hubert Manson, and kissing his niece affectionately before shaking hands with Larrimore. Larrimore was just holding out his hand to Janet Manson, when she remarked suddenly that she must say another word to Antony Sothern. She hurried out of the cabin, followed by her husband. Rupert Larrimore was left staring at the outstretched hand which Mrs Manson had succeeded in not seeing. “So that’s how it is." he muttered. Carol put a hand on his arm. "What is it Rupert?” “Don’t shirk an obvious fact, Carol. They begin to recognise the nature of the beast, and it's not a pretty nature! I told you it was all no good." For a moment the man’s self-confi-dence and vigour alike seemed to have

drained out of him. He looked some-how-withered, as if virtue had gone out of him; haggard, older, desperate. Carol clutched his arm against her breast, almost wildly. "It’s all the good in the world," she said, mustering up a laugh, and looking up into his face. Larrimore’s teeth gritted together. His eyes narrowed. His nostrils expanded. The recklessness came back into his face which Carol remembered from that day, weeks ago at Hendon, and which she had not seen since except for one evening in her father’s home.

“You’re marvellous!” he burst out. “Right! We’ll have a run for our money—if it is to the back of Hades and beyond! And when shall we three meet again, I wonder?” He kissed Carol savagely, swung his water-bottles across his shoulder, and led the way into the sunshine. Outside the tent all the party was grouped, looking very trivial and tiny against the vast expanse of sand, and the sprawled bulk of the aeroplane. Only Nigel Kerr was missing—Kerr, who was sleeping peacefully inside the tent, and enjoying in his dreams all the pleasures of the West End of London. A little apart from the others Antony Sothern stood, pistol in hand, the perfect Hollywood prototype of the shopgirl’s desert dream. Larrimore said nothing more except to check up with Saunders who had undertaken the filling of the water bottles. Then he kneeled over his map, compass in hand, for a couple of minutes, before rising abruptly, nodding to Carol, and setting off with a long loping stride. CHAPTER XIV. The three figures, with every pace looking more like absurd marionettes jerked along by invisible wires, grew smaller and smaller. Hubert Manson put his arm round his wife’s shoulders. Flesch stooped over his camera. Saunders cleared his throat, and spat emotionally into the sand. And inimitably high overhead, the tiniest of tiny specks against the burning blue of the sky, three vultures soared effortless on vast leathery creaking wings—soared, and watched, and waited. And the swift tropical dusk swallowed alike those who watched, and those who marched.

A desert journey is very nearly an indescribable thing to those who have never had the experience in their own persons. Most of all it approximates to Arctic or Antarctic travelling. There is the same utter desolation and friendlessness of the environment; the same monotony of acute, and occasionally violent discomfort; the same absence of variety of landscape or landmarks. And gradually only three things emerge into the foreground of the picture; emerge, lose all proportion, swell into hideous caricatures. Your boots, the water-bottes, and the sun . . .

What Larrimore thought during the first two days of that journey to El Fayoum, it is impossible to say. Certainly he never spoke of it. He merely led the way, his shoulders a little stooped his jaw a trifle out-thrust, his length of stride never altering. During those forty-eight hours, he was so wrapped up in the practical problem of assuring himself of the accuracy of the course, of giving Carol a lead without exploiting her gallantry in following to breaking-point, that he thought of nothing but the job in hand.

Carol, for her part, thought of nothing but Larrimore. She walked steadily at his elbow for mile after mile, hardly speaking, but always ready with the suspicion of a smile when he needed it. And more than at any time since she had known him, she realised that she loved Larrimore; the hard, sweat-streaked jaw; the keen peering eyes; the steady piston-like drive of his legs, which drove her forward almost as definitely as it drove him, by sheer magnet-like example; the hair curling a little at the base of his neck; the worn khaki breeches; the open shirt. She felt that, rather than appear inadequate in the eyes of this man so obviously here in his element, she could die on her feet, without so much as a whimpering.

And though her feet grew sore and swollen, and her eyes raw and gummy, and the straps of her water-bottles cut into her shoulders, and her breeches chafed, and a three-hourly mouthful of water seemed no more than a mockery to her dried tongue and dust-par-ched throat, she marched so well that Larrimore found her endurance as hard to believe, as he would have flatly disbelieved the truth—that only for love of him could the girl ever have done it.

And Antony Sothern? That fine (lower of elegant civilisation was rapidly and frankly in a pretty bad way. He was learning, like other and better men before him, that it is easier to pose as a man of action than to act; to level a pistol than to fire it; to talk of a desert march than to carry it out. Sothern was not really in condition. He refused to accept Larrimore’s parole, and as a consequence was not only burdened with his normal share of water and equipment, but also with two pistols, and a bandolier filled with ammunition.

As a matter of course he brought up the rear of the marching party. Completely incapable as he was of appreciating Larrimore’s strickly realist attitude. Sothern still thought of the situation in terms of “playing al soldiers." That was why he started the march some ten yards behind Caro] and Larrimore;’why. for the first four or five miles he added vastly to his own discomfort by keeping a hand

on the butt of one of his pistols. He persisted in seeing himself, as it were, in tactical control of the situation.

Such an attitude was comparatively unimportant. Sothern, after all, was no fool. He was merely young and jealous and vain. But when he was forced to realise that his isolation from the other two was practically unnecessary, he also realised, with a mixture of horror and despair, that, even if he would, he could not make their pace. He toiled and sweated in their rear, his walk tending more and more to become a lurch, futile oaths dying, in whispers on his cracked lips, and everything in the world forgotten but the molten vastness of the sun, anJ the damnable slithering sag of the sand under his feet, and his thirst. Tn the average European, thirst is just something that makes beer fizzle deliciously in the gullet: that turns water to Olympian nectar: that proves that one’s game of golf or tennis was properly hard-fought. Thirst —real thirst that deserves the initial capital letter —is a very different thing. It withers the heart and cracks the tongue. It dries, and bewilders, and ultimately torments. It is one of the first things that civilisation has set out to abolish.

Which is why Sothern, an essentially civilised man. was in no case to withstand it. You must imagine him. a little light-headed, cruelly bruised about the feet, his lips cracking, and his tongue swollen so that it felt like mushy rubber in his mouth, ploughing desperately across those leagues of sand towards an objective almost unimaginable—and with the weight of four heavy water bottles thudding against his thighs as he went (To be Continued.)