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Olympia Press

8A Hawthorn Road

London N8 7NA

This book is dedicated to

Christine Fisher

Traveller’s Tales

An Olympia Press Book

‘’When you wake on a

Mars, then at least you’ll know

you’ve come home, Germaine’’

Billie Strange

Contents

Mr G … Michelle LeVagne ….. 15

Russian Roulette … Frank Lauder ….. 41

Rain … Henry Maugham….. 79

These fine stories are brought to you in

The Travellers Companion Series’ of The Olympia Press, London.

Olympia Press London has a direct bloodline which it traces back to days with Maurice Girodias, the son of Olympia’s original founder after he opened Olympia’s first office in London in nineteen-seventy.

Olympia maintains a stable of fine writers, and these volumes, the forerunners of many others, will we hope introduce you to the new ideas, high literary merit, and straight-through quality authorship with which Olympia has become entirely synonymous.

Not for nothing was Olympia awarded the accolade by The New York Times

‘A literary enterprise which has profoundly influenced contemporary writing and culture’

Mr G

by

Michelle LeVagne

Mr G

The most striking thing about Mr. Gledhill, Sadie thought, was his unlikely abstemiousness.

Thus she thought as she mounted the stairs to the floor where all the rooms were marked with the addition of the letter 'a'.

That Monday, as she entered room 4a to clean it, she realized with surprise that not only was Gledhill standing there with his back to the door in the darkened room, but also that the room itself was tidy and well kept, requiring no cleaning at all.

Naturally, this came as a pleasant sensation, because most of her male lodgers were untidy, and worse, frequently dirty.

Dirt was the problem, as this would make it incumbent upon her in her function as landlady to sweep or wipe every little area in order to assure cleanliness.

After all, that is what ones lodgers would expect of one!

Upper Berkeley Street stands at the more salubrious end of Mayfair, close to the cross between the infamous Edgware Road and Marble Arch Corner.

So, surprisingly at that time, Upper Berkeley Street composed an oasis of relative quiet. respectability.

George Gledhill turned to her, tearing his glance away from the street outside. For a moment a sharp, hard, light seemed to gutter in his eyes, but it may well have been a quickly moving reflection from the mirror over the washstand.

Nothing more than that.

"Oh, Mr, Gledhill...."

Sadie opened her mouth to speak but suddenly forgot what she wished to say almost half a breath through the sentence. The only trace of disarrangement that Sadies' eyes detected as she faltered, were the few scattered empty yellow and gold packets, with their attractive delicate mirror foil wrappers; Will’s ‘Gold Flake’ cigarettes.

The air was thick with smoke, but such niceties of irritation were not catered for in her mind at that moment. Anyway, Sadie liked men who smoked pipes and Mr. Gledhill was a smoker, it was as simple as that; and that was not a bad point in a man.

No, what engaged her mind the very next second was his overall gentleness, perceptiveness. For he seemed to know what she had meant to think, then said:

"I gave the money to Mary. ....I paid for a month... I took the liberty because I knew that that would make things a lot easier for you."

"That’s very kind of you, Mr Gledhill", said Sadie, charmed though she would never admit it: "..Actually, what I had thought was that you might like a spot of din....”

A week later Sadie turned the knob of room 4a, and found that it resisted her. She struggled for a few moments, then heard an indistinct voice:

"I'm rather ill, Mrs. Caird, could you possibly...?"

"Of course, Mr. Gledhill...are you sick, I mean very sick?.. Is there anything I can do to help?"

There was no answer, and Sadie left it at that.

Later, she asked Mary what she thought that her mother should do:

"Oh, leave him to rest, mummy" -said Mary, "Look, I'll look in on him tomorrow and see how he is".

Mary twitched her nose, then rose and straightened her bouffant in the sitting room mirror. She thought for a moment to straighten the line of her nylons, and then realized that it would be ridiculous - after all she would not be seeing him until the morning.

Early next morning Mrs. Lauder, bearing a heavy load of shopping from Sells' shop, reached the second landing and puffed a little.

At that moment she noticed Mr. Gledhill leaning against the doorframe of his half-open door and looking deathly pale. Next, she noticed that he clutched his arm.

"What’s wrong?" said Mrs. Lauder, not knowing what Sadie had experienced the day before.

"Oh, I'm a little ill", said Mr. Gledhill, with a pale smile, and then sagged back into his room.

It did not take long for Mrs. Lauder, a trained nurse in her other life, to discover that Mr. Gledhill nursed a cut and abraded arm upon which the skin was crazed and suppurating and almost green grey and purple in parts. Knowing well what she saw, at once she got some bandages from Thomas Wallace, the large pharmacy just around the corner, and quickly dressed, washed and bandaged the unpleasant wound.

Gledhill lay in the half-dark of his room for a week or more before he received the care of a doctor, including the application of appropriate drugs.

Even after all this care, and the persistent nursing of Mrs. Lauder, who was busy enough with her children and her work, Gledhill still found himself in cold clammy sweat at unpleasant, irregular intervals, for many days.

"Were it not for you" he said to Mrs. Lauder as she cared for his arm one day, "I think I would have died".

"Well perhaps," said Mrs. Lauder in her stoical way, "but now you're on the mend - don't let yourself get tired".

One rainy afternoon Mr. Gledhill found himself sitting in the tiny sitting room of his landlady and her daughter, children playing around him on the floor. He was feeling distinctly stronger. "Bang Bang!" said one of the children "Bang", returned Gledhill, using his now almost healed hand like a pistol.

The hand unexpectedly froze, as the muscles seemed to enter spasm; Gledhill blenched with the sudden pain. He looked up. Mary sat near to him and smiled.

"Tell me what happened, George"

"Oh, I'm with the Gas Board. ..and I got hurt by a big gas meter.. fell on me.....that’s all… simple"

Gledhill's voice suddenly flicked on and off, a trace of Cockney or some accent, differing from his normal, rather clipped, English.

"You never said a thing about it"

"It didn't seem that important at the time"

"Don't the Gas Board look after you, then?"

"Oh, yes...I've got leave, you see"

No-one asked more, though more could have been asked.

A couple of weeks later, one night one of the tenants, unable to sleep for some reason, heard a scuffling on the second floor landing and a soft ‘damn' as someone dropped something on the carpet. But the stair light did not come on.

Later, while vacuuming the threadbare stairs, Sadie found her daughter's diary.

"How did that get there?" she asked Mrs. Lauder, who was passing. Mrs. Lauder did not know.

Neither did Mary know, when she came in later, though she was pleased to see her diary again. Who knows what secrets are contained in a young woman’s diary.

That night Mr. Gledhill invited Mary to the Gaumont to see the film 'Run for Cover', and she accepted.

'What a fine pair they make', thought Sadie as she looked through the money that she kept in a shoebox under the cellar steps. She counted it and was surprised how many big green notes she had gathered.

'At least five hundred pounds'. Then:'Yes, they do make a fine pair... and Mr. Gledhill is such a fine...'

“Sensitive..." it was later, and Mrs. Lauder was speaking to Sadie as they sat drinking a cup of tea in the basement flat and watching the gas flames bobble in the ceramic shapes

"...Kind of man... so polite"

"Oh, and rather good looking, nice, and tall.." replied Sadie to the thought, and then continued..."..and so proper, and honest...! I do hope he and Mary will hit it off... so, well, moral!”

Mrs. Lauder kept silent at this, staring into the fire as if thinking.

"Umm..."

"I always think that romance..."

"Romance?"

"...Can be so nice!" Mrs. Lauder, who was very friendly with Sadie’s daughter, sometimes had her misgivings. After all, it was better to be silent when one knew little.

A few days later the object of their discussion unexpectedly appeared in Sadie’s rooms:

"Mrs. Caird?"

"Oh, hullo, Mr. Gledhill, I heard that you've been stepping out with my daughter"

"If I may say so she's a lovely daughter, Mrs. Caird" said Gledhill, "A real credit to her mother".

"That’s very kind of you... and I hope you two will be very happy", said Sadie, immediately thinking that perhaps the hint was a little strong at such an early moment. However.

"Oh, one thing" said Gledhill

"Yes?"

"Would you mind if I changed rooms? - I noticed that the large room on the first floor is empty now"

"Well," said Sadie, delaying the thought a moment because she had visualized a couple taking the room, "I suppose that I could arrange for you to do that...." She stopped and tried to find space for thought, but finally submitted. After all, Mr. Gledhill was such a nice, neat, personable man

.And Mary?

"You can move tomorrow morning if you like" Gledhill's pale eyes seemed to light up.

"Oh, thank you, Mrs. Caird", he said with feeling. Sadie liked being spoken to in such a sympathetic way, and all of a sudden she felt warm all over.

Returning to his room, somehow Gledhill passed Mrs. Lauder’s doorway.

"Hullo!" He said. They chatted for a minute, and she invited him to have a cup of tea. They sat at the table. There was a delicate sympathy between them.

Some minutes later Mary breezed in.

"Hullo Guen", she said through the blind angle of the door, "I have your money here". She proffered the money, stepped forward then stopped, seeing Gledhill.

"Oh, Hullo d- George" She sat down.

Mrs. Lauder took the money from the table and placed it in the box she used for such things, shielding its hiding place in the process from the others.

"Oh", said Mr. Gledhill, laughing, as he held Mary for a moment in his glance, "You don't have to do that Mrs. Lauder, I would never dream of stealing anything from you...after all I actually owe you my life..!"

"Don't be so theatrical", said Mary, irritated "You weren't that sick!"

"You'll never know, my sweet" said Gledhill.

There was a sudden coldness in his eyes.

Winter mornings can have clear, blue skies, though sometimes they are overcast and wet; that is apart from the snow, if such occurs.

One winter morning then, a series of sharp knocks on the bright scarlet door of number twenty six.

Cold, wet, boots on the stairway up to the large room on the first floor.

Much laughter and discussion.

The very next week, George Gledhill gave a party in his room on the first floor. Everyone in the house was invited, and his newly-arrived friend, sporting a broad Antipodean accent, was of course there too.

“Took an immediate liking to our George!” said the stranger.

Later, Gledhill would tell Mrs. Lauder that his friend was a sheep farmer, who had invited him to Australia, and had even gone so far as to pay his passage, and give him three hundred pounds with which to buy himself some new kit.

He had the notes all there, crisp and blue.

In the meantime, however, the party Waxed. Music was heard at top volume, which woke people sleeping on the next block. Still, no-body cared, as George was such a nice man.

Everyone drank too much; and alcohol being so expensive, no-body was willing to ask themselves where on earth it had all come from. Sheep Farmers are obviously rich, if they're Australians!

The party had become so expansive, fuelled by not a few of the working girls from the houses opposite and also containing a selection of the cabaret dancers from number 24, that the full-flounced skirts of those guest’s dresses made the battered stairway look as if some of its former glories were to be re-visited upon it.

Colourful flounces they were at that time, reds and blues, yards of net in the skirts to lift them and fill them. Where did the material come from?

At times like those, such luxuries were truly rare. Everyone seemed so well dressed!

At one point the heat in the room became so great that the French windows were thrown open, and people spilled out onto the small twin balconies, laughing in the dark night air.

Gledhill and Mary had quietly disappeared. But that was normal, wasn't it? Well, you know.

The floor bounced with movement. Everyone was having fun.

Everybody was ever so gay.

There were a few hangovers the next morning, but everyone was very jolly. Parties were rare in Sadie’s life, though Mary seemed to take them in her stride.

Gledhill appeared later, at Sadie’s door.

"Hullo, George!"

"Good Morning Mrs. Caird... have you seen Mary.?...I'd' like to have a word with her..."

"Is it important?"

"Not really, Mrs. Caird"

"Oh, just one other thing, George"

"Actually, I gave the rent money to Mary!" Sadie was always surprised by his amazing ability to outpace her thoughts. He seemed always to be one step ahead.

"Oh, the naughty girl! But thank you anyway, George."

Gledhill then returned upstairs.

Sadie imagined him resuming his normal position in the half-dark, clinically tidy, room and lighting another Gold Leaf.

Just what was it that George thought? …His mind was a matter of mystery to her. Though he was still very nice.

Later, and Mary walked down the stairs slowly because her eyes were welling with tears. She wiped them and managed to make her face resemble its normal self before her mother Sadie looked in.

Gledhill had told her that he meant to go to Australia with his friend, recently arrived in London. He said that he was awfully sorry, but a man must do what a man must do.... He had omitted to mention her place in his plans.

Two days later, Mrs. Lauder noticed that Mr. Gledhill’s door was open, and that the room seemed full of neatly packed bags and cases. On her way to the front door she came across Mary:

"Is Mr. Gledhill leaving today?"

"No, not today", said Mary, "No, he's leaving from the docks tomorrow - in fact we're sort of having a send-off for him later"

"I shall be working this evening", said Mrs. Lauder, "Please give him my best wishes."

"Yes", said Mary as she made her way down the steps so as to hide her tears. That evening Mary came in from work early, to meet Gledhill for their last evening together and instead found the place in an awful mess.

She called the police, and they in their turn found that most of the house had been ransacked; and all the rooms; even her mother’s hidden cache of cash was missing. Drawers sagging out onto floors, shelves cleared with one sweep of a strong, healed arm.

They found Gledhill's room quite empty, and absolutely clean and tidy, as usual, you could say.

Likewise Mrs. Lauder’s room, with the cracked cream and brown plastic radio still in pride of place on the chest of drawers, in-between the twin windows.

But no sign of Gledhill - or George - as she had come to know him, nor of course, of her money.

Later, Mrs. Lauder returned from work looking tired: but of course it would have been impossible that she could have turned the entire house over so thoroughly. So it couldn’t have been her, could it?

"No," said the anxious Detective Inspector, "This was the work of a professional!"

So they all trouped-off to Scotland Yard to look through huge tomes of pictures: and there, sure enough, was Gledhill, in black and white, rather flushed and stiff and formal, numbers on a board in front of his chest.

"George.!..Oh! George!" said Mary while tears rolled down her cheeks.

"But that's George Gledhill.!" said Sadie in shock, as if it really were,.. "and he still owes me three months rent for the d-..!"

Finally then.

"And what was more," said the Inspector to an anonymous-faced typist as she scribbled away furiously... "Para,"

"No, that's wrong", said the secretary, wishing that she could repair to the ladies and straighten her straps.

"Sorry", said the Inspector, "I meant... well, to carry on... ahem... Denham, after the nearly fatal accident which had occurred whilst he was attempting to remove a stolen safe from the Harrods depository (at that time apparently masquerading under the name Gledhill), also stole Mrs. Caird’s cash, estimated at some three hundred pounds, and some jewellery, as well as her daughter’s honour… and I suppose everything else he could lay his hands on – but nothing from Mrs. Lauder.

Extraordinary!” He was thinking aloud.

"What?" said the secretary, fresh from a Civil Service pool and well short on the niceties of social behaviour.

"I said…" said the Inspector, trying to maintain an even voice.

"That's wrong", said the secretary affirmatively.

"Is it – I mean, is it?" said the Inspector.

"I meant, not right", said the secretary, warming to her theme.

"Why not?" said the Inspector, warming to his. "Why not indeed!"

Russian Roulette

Frank Lauder

Russian Roulette

The vast places known as The Great Oriental Ouerg and its companion Sea, the Great Western Ouerg, are sufficiently curved and undistinct at their innermost edges for their names to haze into insignificance when one stands in the huge Sahara a few hundreds of kilometres east of Tammanrasset.

The Wadi and its namesake, the town of Tammanrasset, themselves lie effectively at the crossroads of this Sahara, in the Kingdom of the Tanezruft, and sprawl, as spare, strangled and dusty as their inhabitants, on the soft sand boundary edge of the territory of those tattooed masked men, and powerful women, the Touareg.

Other natives of this area of the Sahara regard the Touareg with a respect based upon dread, and call this forbidden territory simply 'Le Sud', or in the tongue, the language of those who toy with the idea of travel for it’s own sake, 'La Sud’.

This ‘South’, and it’s focused looming distance, is as distinct from the general run of deep red sand as the Rockies are from the plains: characterized by bizarre, often threatening crags, which tower above this secret wasteland as if in witness of some frightful ancient fascination.

But who can say what has happened in such an enormous, lost area, never visited by strangers, its floor only rarely disturbed by the feet of men or camels.

Even the half-buried oases and the Green guttering tops of almost drowned palm trees are rare in this South. That is, rare to the eye.

In March Nineteen Twenty-Six an elegant, silver-skinned, single-engined high winged monoplane of the very latest type, left Tucson in Arizona a world away, taking off from an isolated piece of waste land and logged to fly first west, and then due south, ostensibly carrying mails to Mexico City.

In reality the mails were jettisoned, to be found, intact but aged, late the following year by a cowboy, out mending cattle fences; and of course long after the monoplane flown, not in fact to Mexico, but in reality to Honduras, where it disappeared into thin air, was winched, with its true cargo, aboard a ship near an obscure farm airstrip, lifted separately and heavily into the ship’s hold, its fuselage and wings likewise crated.

Now there was a silence in time; for next the monoplane appeared, eighteen months later, at Alexandria, a little known but busy main transshipping point in the British Levant, where it was winched ashore then assembled, tested, and finally flown almost due south west.

Some time later a man known as Davidson, the new pilot, cut the fuel cocks, and the propeller clacked to a standstill.

Davidson stood five foot seven inches in his socks, was not handsome but strikingly good-looking, well educated, quick of wit: a person of rather foolhardy courage and charm.

His weakness was boyish 'Adventure', the sort that you read about in comic books, stories and cheap prints of Kit Carson, or newsprint fripperies about the Gold rush, a weakness which had prompted him to leave his job as a junior manager in a hardware company in Abilene Texas, and to follow his sense of danger.

But this was real adventure, and he’d been rehearsing the stories he’d tell around the bar one day in Abilene. Would anyone believe him?

Anyway the thought sent a chill down his spine despite the intense heat.

At first the stillness was frightening in its totality, then enticing in its apparent peace.

Now, Davidson stood, a few feet from the top of a dune, and sought he knew not what, with his eyes. After all, dunes were perfect camouflage for his aircraft, nobody would see it unless they flew within a very close circuit. Davidson knew that.

There had been no aircraft here in the whole span of history.

Davidson also knew that, this time with a certain sort of secret pride.

On his hip, as a sort of promotional attraction, he rather jauntily wore a revolver, a Colt.32, a small, quite powerful weapon, still sticky with packing-grease.

It was unloaded and empty, he did not trust these people.

All the Colts and Mausers in the shipment were empty: that way they would be safer.

Instead, in his pocket he carried the six Winchester rimmed .32 cartridges. Just in case he needed them.

He waited in the dark shade cast by a wing, in his mind smoothing the back of his hand along the crotch and the soft inner sides of the thighs of his girlfriend; he could imagine her growing moist with the anticipation.

Davidson had been waiting all day. Perhaps prompted by the enormous dryness of the desert, he remembered the smooth dampness of her skin after they had made love - she was, after all, such a good lover.

He turned back and watched the brass disc of the Sun begin to relinquish its zenith, shadows moved almost noticeably here.

This place had waited for strangers for a thousand years. A thousand years of days, the Sun only unnoticeably diminishing its zeal.

Each day would be the same.

So knew Davidson.

The monoplane had been heavily loaded, and he waited for his meeting with impatience.

The fat tyres sat lower in the sand after these long hours, and the oil on the cylinders had become rimed with fine windborne grime; red, like rouge. Takeoff could be tricky, but was still possible, and explosives and arms were dangerous and heavy cargoes.

Davidson never left that nameless place.

Neither did the silver monoplane.

Horsemen cannot ride aircraft, even if they know how to ream cylinders with pullthroughs, check and clean fuel-lines and spin propellers that have no self-starters.

The monoplane remained there, and Davidson’s body disappeared into the sand.

Time changed.

Time changed, and the seas shifted, changed out of all proportion and filled, flooded.

Eddies of sand entered the cabin of the monoplane and the hard disc of the Sun cast shadows as it traversed the sky.

Again and again.

The monoplane had all but vanished beneath the sea. Only the tip of the propeller still evaded the dunes.

There was ho haste in their actions, but the traders who had taken the cargo of the monoplane had strewn unneeded materiel on the sand. Left it untidily behind them.

That, and a few overlooked items, for example a military compass, made of fine silver-imbued brass, one or two spilt rounds of ammunition from one box, which had been forced quickly in order to ascertain its contents, Davidson’s revolver, still in a fine fur of sand which perfectly concealed it from searching eyes.

Blinding Sun.

Forgetfulness.

Now the dune had become just another of those thousand nameless cohorts, stacked-up like untidy waves clear to each horizon.

More time.

Sands moving; the tops of palms grazed by a few wild Dromedaires forming a deep hollow only a kilometer away.

The trace of water and a small, incredibly clear pool, from which creatures scavenged the precious water.

Morning; sunrise on one more numberless, uncounted morning. After the stillness and cold of the early hours, the absolute blackness of night; the first colours of dawn in the sky.

Two hundred miles away due west the gutteral crackle of a lonely muzzein, decaying swiftly into the perfectly dead acoustics of the sand

The sand shifted as the camels slid down the treacherous dune.

Eugene Lestocq had taken a sight of the palmtops, and decided to make directly for them.

Though it was still early and thus quite cool, there was no point in being particularly careful.

There was nothing out here, and this way they could find shelter before the heat found them, soon.

Half way down the dune Lestocq made as if to stop. Only impelled by inertia, he slid down and down until one foot contacted the invisible, metallic silver sliver of wing which banked invisibly beneath and now out, of the sand.

His mouth fell open in wonder; he had heard of this sort of thing before, but never believed that it could really happen.

Two hours later Lestocq, having hobbled the camels and put them to graze amidst the palms, had returned alone, and now had found the escape hatch door above the pilot’s seat, clearing the sand away with gloved hands.

To his relief the cabin was quite empty, save for a sliver of sand, and he dropped onto the cabin floor, clipping the hatch shut.

The cabin was pristine, perfectly entombed and sheltered by the sand; even cool. Half the world so it seemed to him, was after him, and perhaps this would allow him a bolt-hole where no-one would be able to find him.

That was his first thought. To his surprise there were a few musty tins in the rear of the cabin, and a dried and shrivelled rubber liferaft, some old rounds of ammunition, and a long curved and inlaid knife, begrimed with ancient colour. That was all.

That seemed to Lestocq to make this an ideal place to use for his trade. He sat back in the leather bucket seat, surveyed the horizon of darkness, to think.

This place was so unlikely that nobody need ever know it, except him. After years in the desert he knew his bearings as another man would find his way round a city block.

He scrabbled around, found an old notebook under the seat, turned it over and spied the pencilled heading to an incomplete manifest, dated Nineteen Twenty-Seven.

Thirty years!

On the way out of the cabin, Lestocq saw a glint in the disturbed bed of sand, bent to find it, and picked up the brass compass, now burnished by the constant restless movement of the dunes. Motivated by his find he sought around in the sand with his fingers, and at length, [after all, he had all the days to himself] his fingers found the pistol that Davidson had briefly worn. Unloaded, useful, though slightly pitted with the acidic action of Sun and sand.

Lestocq walked away from the monoplane, in a measured straight line up the dune, turned, and made a mental note of its position in relation to the set of the distant castellations of the shattered peaks of the Ahaggar and the tops of the palms a kilometer away.

Eugene Lestocq was not alone, much as he would be surprised to learn, in this area of the world.

There were others who prized this central desert as a crossing point and a perfect means of communication. Added to this, his success and the illegality of his various projects not only made him a wanted man, but also one required for means of trade. He had become wealthy on the proceeds of his business, and the large amount of money so mustered was now securely 'laundered' and invested in London, New York and of course, Frankfurt.

Some months later Lestocq re-crossed this part of the Sahara, this time leaving some jewellery in the cabin of the monoplane. He had traded the stolen jewellery for the new explosive plastique only at that time in development. Actually, plastique, gave him a shiver down his spine when he saw how it sweated so, as soon as the temperature rose. He did not know whether it was unstable, but he knew its explosive potential and it worried him a little. At any rate, business being business, he traded the explosive to some local tribesmen, took the jewellery, and breathed a little easier.

Lestocq pushed east, taking a couple of camels and beginning to imagine what he would do, soon, when he managed to retire. This would be his last trip; he would return to his flat in Kensington and re-assume his other identity. He had made sure of the double-cut-out which he had designed so well, years ago; he could now comfortably disappear.

Lestocq walked three hundred kilometers in the next few weeks, passing Marraba, Mabrus, Tummo, Lebo and other isolated oases - seeking his final coup; the lodestone that had always so attracted his mind: the final kill, The Big One.

Now he was walking directly west, dead upon the Tropic of Cancer. The Mannlicher weighed heavily upon his shoulder and when he found and then passed a group of black flapping Touareg tents he sold it for a piece of rancid goat’s cheese, and a new camel for the old one.

He stopped only to pick up water: his eyes were hazed by the glare and the immense heat and the bitter cold of the night. He hardly resembled the Alsatian that he once was, any more. His footsteps wavered.

There was a story that he had heard, a traveller’s tale about a place in the Soudan, a group of ancient step-pyramids worn almost to the surface of the desert by age: he had heard that there a man had found a vast fortune thirty metres beneath the harsh, stony ground. Vast, forgotten storehouses beneath the seventy steps, traversed along a broken corridor in total darkness. The last resting place of Prester John, perhaps?

He turned his burnt face east once more, traced the dashed line of Cancer and made a mental adjustment.

By night he took a star sight: the brass marching compass was not merely good looking.

He sat on the ground: 24 degrees West. The sand had lost its familiar red and was now dusky light beige; almost like a beach in Jutland he had once found himself on as a boy.

Thoughts like this ran through his mind, day on day, worn and ageless and now as undulating as the desert floor itself, kept him running, like fuel.

He had used up all the food and there was no longer a horizon in this desert.

There was nowhere to run to any more.

Lestocq choked and laughed in the dead lands where winds never blow, where nothing has changed for ten thousand years, in the sands between the lost kingdoms of Unianga and Erdi.

His footprints echoed across a frozen plateau and shared the dust with a myriad crisscross of other ancient prints; a thousand eerie years of journeys out beyond the gates of any Eden.

Lestocq did he but know it, was suffering the hallucinations of exhaustion and heat, known as ‘Cafard’- desert fever.

A bewitchment as old as the metallic rocks that echoed close beneath the sandy floor with perfect acoustical clarity.

Lestocq was now veering from his course, or perhaps had aimed himself for the so called Blue Nile, at its source, for now he had turned rather south, turned towards the deadly Sun.

On the thirtieth day of walking, Lestocq’s foot caught the crude metallic pineapple-like outline of a powerful anti-personnel percussion grenade-cum-mine designed by the Russian Imperial Armourer to avoid the International Explosives Agreement of 1898, it had been produced in Dijon in 1910, released of its pin the still bright copper of the trembler had hardly moved in all these years.

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