BIGGLES
FLIES SOUTH
by Captain W.
E. Johns
XI. WHAT
HAPPENED TO ALGY (Pages
145 – 158)
After watching Biggles and the others depart,
Algy had cleaned his rifle to kill time but the time passed slowly. Once a distant echo reached his ears but it
was so faint he could not make it out (presumably this was the three shots fired by
Biggles). When the sun sinks, Algy’s
anxiety turns to alarm. He climbs the
nearest hill and shouts for them but to no avail. Hours pass.
Eventually, he hears a sound and grabbing his rifle, Algy goes off to
investigate. He sees, two or three miles
away, a long line of camels, a caravan!
Algy is in a dilemma. Should he
try to contact the caravan or let an opportunity pass that may not be
repeated? What if they are hostile
Tuareg? He decides on a compromise,
following the caravan until he can find out who the riders are. It is while he is creeping round a buttress
of rocks that he finds a lance. It is
buried deeply, with sand silted up around it and little more than the point
protruding. “He did not know, of course,
that the weapon he was feeling had once belonged to Mazeus, son of Hystomannus;
or that his was the first hand to touch it since that fatal night, more than
two thousand five hundred years before, when the haboob had overtaken Cambyses’
army. But he remembered vaguely what
Kadar had said about a lance, and realized that by an amazing chance he had
stumbled on the same weapon”. Leaving it
behind, Algy follows the caravan and is able to get close. He sees the night riders are Tuareg. The camels are heavily loaded and one has a
distinctive white stocking on a near foreleg that Algy recalls seeing when
Kadar had bought camels for his caravan.
These Tuareg must be the ones who attacked their caravan and killed
everybody, making off with their stores.
“What ought he to do? What would
Biggles do in such circumstances?” Algy
follows them for “hour after hour” until they make camp. Algy watches with astonishment as one Arab
picks up a two-gallon petrol can and drinks from it. “Incredible though it appeared, the ignorant
savages were actually drinking petrol” (a footnote adds that “drinking petrol is a very common practice
with native races in many parts of the world”). Algy recognises Zarwan and Algy then sets off
at a trot back to the aircraft in the hope that Biggles in there and he can
inform him. “They were not there. They were, it will be recalled, just bursting
out of the tombs of the dead, pursued by the bats, but, of course, he knew
nothing about that”. Exhausted, Algy
“flung himself down to rest, and to think”.