The Xanadu Talisman by O'Donnell Peter

Author:O'Donnell, Peter [O'Donnell, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller, Mystery, Adventure, Suspense
ISBN: 9781459643642
Google: hy6yNAEACAAJ
Amazon: 145964364X
Goodreads: 59240
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant
Published: 1981-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Modesty touched his arm and said, “We turn off soon, Willie. About another mile, I think.”

He nodded, and took a hand from the wheel of the Range Rover to wipe a sweating palm on his trousers. If she said about a mile, he reflected, it would be just that, even though it was perhaps fifteen years since she had been here. Her gift for orientation was magical, and was equalled by her memory of terrain.

It was ten days since they had left Corsica, for they had come the long way round to throw off any surveillance. If you travelled by air you posed few problems for anyone with an organisation who wanted to keep tabs on you, for you moved along fixed lines and emerged at fixed points. They had driven across Spain to Lisbon and then been picked up by boat one night from a beach east of Cascais. Four days later they had landed at Essaouira, where the Range Rover awaited them, fully equipped for the task ahead. Painted on the side in neat lettering was the inscription Pascale et Cie (Arpenteurs). A theodolite and other surveying equipment could be seen in the back of the truck. Moulay was a skilled and experienced organiser.

They had passed through Marrakesh by night, crossing the High Atlas by the Tizi n’Tichka pass and dropping down to the Dades valley to follow the long east-west road between the two great ranges. To the north, the mountains were riven by gorges, dry now, but scoured by ferocious torrents in the season of rains. Between the occasional tiny walled villages lay an emptiness of stony desert relieved only by camel-thorn, Barbary fig cactus, and the strongly multicoloured rock, full of reds and blacks, yellow, purple, brown and sombre green.

Modesty said, “Here it is,” and Willie took the broad rough trail which forked slightly north off the main Ksar es Souk road. It rose slowly for half a mile, then began to drop again. Here another track branched off directly north. Modesty said, “That’s new. I mean, new since I was here.”

Willie braked to a halt. It looked like a track which had once been heavily used, for where it emerged from the cutting the rock wall on both sides was scored and chipped as if by heavy vehicles. Incongruously, there was an international sign indicating No Through Road.

Modesty said, “Xanadu.”

Willie nodded. When Prince Rahim Mohajeri Azhari built Xanadu, a service road had been cut through the mountains for delivery of materials. Modesty knew a French journalist who had researched the subject and written a piece about it for Paris Match. She had rung him from Marseilles to learn that Xanadu lay eight miles into the mountains from the main Ksar es Souk road, east of the Todra Gorge. It had taken six months to cut a road for access, even though the road followed an ancient mule track for a good part of the way. At a point two miles from the palace, this road left the track to cross a ravine.

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