Flashman on the March. George Fraser MacDonald
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brave, and clever, and love to laugh, and they’re so dam’ contradictory!’ He pointed to a herd of bullocks that were being driven into a corral by Ab cow-whackers. ‘Those fellows are so sharp they’ll get the better of our commissaries at a bargain, bamboozle ’em with figures – and yet they can’t write, and believe that we’re buying the bullocks as food for the elephants! And that’s the God’s truth.’ He paused, and laughed again. ‘But I guess my best reason for liking Habesh – that’s Arabic for Abyssinia – is that they like us. We treat ’em fair, and unlike the rest of Africa they’re smart enough to admire us, and know they can learn from us, from our engineers and scientists, aye, and our military. You know what they call us? The Sons of Shaitan – and it’s a compliment!’
‘And Theodore? You must know him better than anyone else.’
‘I don’t know him at all. No one does.’ He took off his specs and polished them carefully. ‘He’s not just one man, he’s many – and they’re all dam’ dangerous. You’re going to ask me what he’s liable to do, will he fight, will he run, will he hold the captives to ransom, will he murder them – and I haven’t the foggiest notion. So I’ll not try to answer. Better to let Napier tell you.’
And that, I may tell you, sent a shiver down my spine for it prompted the question why Napier should want to tell me anything at all. I was pondering this when Speedy added:
‘As to why I left Theodore, ’twas because he’d been listening to lies about me, and I’d no wish to wake up some morning face down on a bed of spear-points. So I asked for my back pay and a clear road. “Suppose I’ll not let you leave?” says he.
‘“Then I’ll fight,” says I, “and you know I’m not an infant.”
‘“I can have you killed,” says he.
‘“Ah, but how quickly?” says I, and laid my hand on my hilt. He had no fear, but he paused, and then smiled and embraced me and said I should have my money, a horse, and a spear, and God be with me.’ He chucked his reins. ‘Let’s raise the pace, shall we?’
From Zoola the barren scrub-land rises slowly to the base of the hills, and it took us five hours’ uncomfortable riding across stone-choked dry river beds and little slithering screes before we came to the plateau from which you could look back at the huge panorama of the distant camp like a sand-table model, and Annesley Bay with its forest of shipping, and the Red Sea beyond. Ahead of us lay the way station of Koomaylee, in a broad basin with sheer cliffs towering on either hand and a massive rampart of stone before us, crimson in the sunset save for the gloomy mouth of the Great Pass which splits it in two as though some god had gashed it with a cleaver. That’s the real 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