The Burning Sky by David Donachie

Author:David Donachie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McBooks Press
Published: 2022-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jardine was searching ahead and up, sweeping his field glasses around to see if he could catch another sight of those two men. The hills seemed to fold in on each other, red earth, rocks, gnarled bushes and stunted trees blunting the outline, the larger ones rising, he guessed, to something well over a thousand feet, those lower down creating the defile which they would have to make their way through.

‘Fire a shot in the air.’

‘Why?’

‘Makes an interesting noise?’

‘And tells them we have spotted them.’

She did as he asked, the sound of the shot reverberating off the hills where he had seen the riders.

‘That’s a warning, because I don’t think we can avoid going through that track up ahead, which is where I would be if I wanted to rob a part of this caravan.’ He called over to Vince. ‘Did you see them?’

‘Just a flash and so did the old gent.’

Jardine moved to talk to Ras Kassa who was now sitting on his donkey with his machine pistol cradled in his lap. Having stopped the caravan, he too was peering at the hills ahead.

‘What I saw troubles me, Mr Jardine.’ There was no fear in the statement; in fact there was some doubt if it was an emotion to which he would be subject. ‘There are two tribes in this region, Afars and Issas, both nomadic animal herders and salt traders who would ride a donkey at best. It is unusual they made no attempt to make talk with us, which is also not common.’

‘Are the tribes to be trusted?’ Jardine asked.

‘The climate is harsh, the soil not good and the poor have their needs.’

It took no great genius to see that anyone trying to eke a living out of such a landscape would have to struggle to survive. Loaded camels were a tempting target and the problem was obvious. All you had to do was look at a string of camels nearly a mile in length and wonder, even with the amount of warriors available, how it was going to be defended from opportunistic raiders trying to cut out a couple. That was true now, out in the open; how much more was it the case on a winding valley track, where losing sight of parts of the caravan was a certainty?

Jardine suggested that when this route had been in full use, knowing the local tribes could turn to theft, the slavers, rather than travel with any more mouths to feed and carry more water than necessary, might have paid tribute to pass through freely.

‘That is very possible.’

The guarded response made Jardine wonder just how open the older man was being about a trade that had gone on for thousands of years and was not ended yet: he seemed to know this route well enough. Ethiopian emperors paid lip service to the notion of stopping the slave trade but they had not succeeded, and it was interesting to speculate how much they gained from it themselves. Such

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