Flashman on the March. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ gateway to Abyssinia, and at dusk it looks like the road to the Underworld. Beyond it lay range upon range of mighty peaks, rising ever higher as far as you could see.

      The Himalays and the Rockies, magnificent as they are, never made me feel as small and helpless as those hellish Abyssinian highlands; they had a power to overwhelm, to make you feel you were in an alien, dreadful world, a desert of peaks that someone likened to the legs of an overturned table, thrusting into a sky of burnished steel. I was seeing them for the first time that night at Koomaylee, and I remember thinking that while the Hindu Kush and the Sangre de Cristo may convince you that they’re the roof of the world, they don’t frighten. Abyssinia did.

      My only other memory of Koomaylee, where we bedded down with the Madras Sappers, is of the Norton pumps, like a row of gigantic hallstands, spouting a never-ending stream of wonderful ice-cold water, utterly unlike the stale condensed sludge of Zoola, into the hundred-foot wooden reservoirs. We sank it by the quart. ‘God bless America,’ says Henty, ‘for if they can work as well up-country we shan’t go thirsty at any rate.’

      Next day we traversed the Great Pass, mile after mile through that astonishing defile which narrows to as little as five yards in places, with eight hundred feet of solid granite either side and only a strip of sky far overhead to remind you that with luck you won’t meet Charon this trip. We rode single file, the Scindees full of oaths and wonder as we passed through pretty groves of mimosa and laurel, with brilliantly coloured birds fluttering overhead, and when the pass widened at last there were little meadows of wild flowers, splendid woodland of pine and fir on the lower slopes, stands of the magnificent candelabra cactus, pink and white and crimson, and the surrounding peaks changed in the sunlight from orange to silver that looked like snow but was in fact white lichen – and all this in a country which would presently turn from fairyland into a burning desert of barren mountain and bottomless ravine where your way might lie through boulder-filled gullies or along winding cliff paths, or across a plateau as level as a billiard table with a drop of a thousand feet to left and right, and similar flat-topped bluffs rising like islands all the way to the horizon.

      But I don’t purpose to write a tourist guide, and if you want a vade mecum from Zoola to Magdala you must turn to Henty or that Yankee blowhard Henry Stanley. They’ll tell you all about the scenery, and describe the army’s labours in making their slow way from the coast up-country, building every yard of their road as they went, blasting away rocks and pounding ’em flat to make a highway for the columns of bullock-carts and mule trains and elephants and camels who hindered us as we pushed on through Senafe, a great supply station which had been Napier’s headquarters before he’d advanced to Attegrat a couple of weeks before our arrival – Speedicut’s judgment of his whereabouts had not been far out. There were troops on the move all the way: I recognised the blue and silver of the 3rd Native Cavalry, the brown puggarees and cotton robes of the Punjabi Pioneers with their picks and shovels at the slope, and the celebrated coats of many colours of the motley crowd of border ruffians, Sikhs, Pathans, Punjabis, and the like, who composed the famous 10th Native Infantry. They looked as always like revellers at a fancy-dress ball, in red puggarees, green puggarees, violet caps, jackets and pantaloons of every shape and hue. A detachment of King’s Own, swinging along in sober khaki, showed altogether drab by comparison, and as Speedy observed, the Baluch in their green coats and black pants, with their band playing ‘Highland Laddie’, looked a sight more like British soldiers than our fellows did.

      Well, God help you, Theodore, if this lot catches up with you, thinks I, reflecting that Napier must have had the time of his life choosing such a fine variety. There were Dragoon Guards swapping rum and baccy for chapattis with Bengal Lancers, pigtailed Chinese railway gangers in plate hats giggling and waving to blackavised Cameronian sharpshooters who glowered in response as they filed grimly by, pieces at the trail, long lines of mules bearing the wheels and barrels of the 2,000-yard mountain artillery and the tubes and rockets of the Naval Brigade, escorted by bluejackets with their cutlasses slung – twelve thousand horse, foot, and guns bound for the heart of darkness at a cost of £333 a man (each of whom had recently received a rise in pay of tuppence per diem). And all to rescue a handful of Britons from a savage prison at the back of beyond. Aye, those were the days.

      We’d been three nights on the road and two days in the saddle when we reached Attegrat and learned that Napier was still up ahead awaiting the King of Tigre, who was said to have overcome his fears and was expected any day. This news had Speedy and Henty off at the gallop, one to do his diplomatic duty, t’other athirst for ‘copy’. I was left to see the silver delivered to the paymaster, and to follow at my leisure. Another day a-horseback in the heat, but since no one knew if or when Napier would return to Attegrat, there was nothing else for it.

      Attegrat’s a shallow valley two miles across, and the tents of our main force, four to five thousand British and Indian troops, were strung out along the valley side, all mighty klim-blim and orderly compared to the Frog’s knapsack of Zoola. Trust Napier; he’d always had an eye like a gimlet and a knack of being into everything. Not that he was a martinet, but it all had to be just so for him.

      Being off station, he could hardly be blamed for the piece of disciplinary folly I saw on my way to the paymaster’s tent. A native driver, bare to the waist and tied to a gun-wheel, was being flogged in a half-hearted way, and for once the off-duty loafers who’d assembled to watch the sport were encouraging the flogger to go easy and voicing sympathy for the floggee. It transpired that the unfortunate nigger had dared to shoot and wound an Ab robber who’d been trying to despoil him at pistol-point – and for this he’d been awarded a dozen lashes! Well, I’m all for a hearty flogging myself, but this seemed to be a poor excuse, and I learned from a disgusted paymaster that it had been ordered only because Krapf, an idiot clergyman who’d attached himself to the expedition as an expert,²³ had convinced the Provost-Marshal, another idiot, that there would be a native uprising if the Abs weren’t placated by having the driver whipped.

      ‘Wait until the chief hears about this!’ fumes my informant. ‘We’re far too soft with these blasted savages, givin’ in to the bastards every time, and a wretched sidi is thrashed for nothing! Well, I just hope that next time he lets himself be robbed, and bills that clown Krapf for the loss! Depend upon it, these damned people despise us as weaklings, and they’ll become insolent to the point of fightin’ us if we don’t show who’s master!’

      I was glad to be shot of the silver, an uncomfortable responsibility when it was being carried by that troop of thieving blackguards; their reluctance to part with their saddlebags was pitiful to see. In all modesty, I believe that their respect for ‘Bloody Lance’ was what had stopped the villains from trying to filch the odd dollar. It was all tallied out on the paymaster’s table, and since he’d been informed by signal that the rest was coming up, he made out a receipt to be handed over on its arrival. I haven’t had it yet.

      Napier was to meet his princely savage at a place called Mai Dehar, a short day’s ride ahead, so with the Scindees as escort I set off after tiffin across the valley and past the collection of huts that makes up Attegrat village. There’s a church and a ruined palace, but what takes the eye is the veritable Bluebeard’s castle perched on an eminence high above the valley, a massive keep with four great turrets at each corner. A sinister sight even in broad day, grim and forbidding behind its curtain wall.

      Our way wound through the hills into a desolation where we began to see all the signs of civil war and spoiling, with villages ruined and abandoned, burned huts, fallow fields, and hardly a living creature except at a distance. The villages still inhabited were all on rising ground, stoutly walled, and on every peak there was a stark adobe tower after the style of the one at Attegrat; some were a good fifty feet high and of five or six storeys, built on the lips of precipices, crouched like vultures over the valleys below. A proper simile, for my havildar explained that these were the holds of robber barons who preyed on the countryside, and between them and the slave-raiding Gallas from the south the peasantry had a deuced thin time – it reminded him, he said cheerfully, СКАЧАТЬ