High Road to China by Jon Cleary

Author:Jon Cleary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

1

Extract from the William Bede O’Malley manuscript:

Two days passed and nothing presented itself that offered any hope of escape. I would look at the surrounding hills and mountains, remember Kipling’s stories of the British officers and their trusty sepoys coming to the rescue: but where was the Empire now when we needed it? Playing polo, no doubt, and sticking bloody pigs down around Poona. I would think of my father out in Tanganyika, sitting there in his stiff collar and ever stiffer prejudices, sure that he was making the world safe for Englishmen and, just incidentally, the natives.

I would look up at the sky, hoping for a sight of an RAF patrol, the aeroplanes that Durant had told us were always being shot down by the Waziri: but all I saw were the cruising kites dropping bird-lime on our machines. Optimism ran out of me with my sweat and each time we passed the mound of skulls outside the town I began to get light-headed, as if my own skull was being cleaned and scoured ready to be added to the heap.

God knows how many bony heads were there in that macabre monument. A thousand, two thousand? I wouldn’t know. I can never guess at the size of a crowd when it’s alive and its heads are shouting and moving around. Or even in a church, just nodding off to sleep. I couldn’t see at least half the skulls: they were piled high in a great pyramid of sightless eyes and mirthless smiles. They grinned at us morning and evening as we rode past and I noticed that the tribesmen who accompanied us always kept their eyes averted. I began to wonder who had been the real victors. But I didn’t want my skull grinning out at Suleiman and his followers. If that was victory, I’d rather be a loser.

‘Thank God we are civilized in Europe,’ said Kern.

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of all those young men dying as they walked up the hill on that July morning four years ago. ‘At least we bury our skeletons.’

Eve and Sun Nan were kept in the town, but Kern was allowed to accompany me down to the machines. Suleiman accepted my word that I needed Kern, an expert mechanic, to help me. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king … So it is in the country of the non-expert. Suleiman had men who could fashion rough works of art in silver, forge swords and knives that Sheffield wouldn’t have been ashamed of, make copies of guns that could kill just as effectively as the originals. But none of them knew anything about Rolls-Royce Falcon aero engines. And even if he had never so much as changed a spark plug, Kern could fly an aeroplane and that, I reckoned, would suggest to these tribesmen a certain expertise. After all, entire nations have elected as their presidents men whose only expertise was in their gall. The United States was about to do so that coming November, though none of us knew it just then.

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