BIGGLES - CHARTER PILOT

by Captain W. E. Johns

XV THE ADVENTURE OF THE GREEN HORSE (Pages 139 - 147)

“What with dugouts, trenches, funk-holes and air raid shelters, civilized people are in a fair way to become troglodytes,” remarked Henry Harcourt gloomily. Tug Carrington started. “What are they?” he questioned suspiciously. Henry replies “Troglodytes? People who live in holes in the ground”. When Henry says he thinks they are all dead and gone, Ginger tells him not to believe it. “On the contrary, they’re very much alive. I know. I’ve seen ‘em”. Ginger says he has seen them in the Hogger Mountains, “sometimes called the Roof of the Sahara”. Ginger explains that “Biggles, Algy, Dr. Buck and myself” (there is a typo here on page 139 in the first Oxford edition where Dr. Duck is referred to as Dr. Buck. By the time of the first reprint in 1946, it had been corrected) were looking for a green horse, but it’s a long story. “Spit it out, kid,” invited Tex O’Hara. Ginger laughed, and settling down in his chair, continued:

“A green horse would, you will agree, by a zoological curiosity, so it was hardly surprising that Dr. Donald was interested” says Ginger, adding that an Arab was found wandering in the Libyan Desert, near a place called Insalah and he talked about being followed by a green horse that caused his own horse to bolt. Some time later, a caravan crossing the desert north-east of “Timbuctu” was startled by the sudden appearance of a jade-green horse and about a hundred people saw it. Dr. Duck wanted to investigate. The caravan had noted that the footmarks of the house came from the direction of the Hogger Mountains where some of the peaks rise to 11,000 feet. Flying the Wanderer there “in search of the green gee-gee”, the first thing our heroes note is the incredible heat. Exploring, they find some horse tracks and they follow the tracks back to where they came from. They come across a pile of snail shells about fifty foot high. “It must have taken millions and millions of snails to make that stupendous pile” says Ginger. Dr. Duck suspects this is a refuse heap for a tribe of troglodytes who live in burrows higher up and just throw out their rubbish. Continuing to follow the trail it leads to a large cave. Inside the cave, the trail leads to another side cavity where they find petrified corpses that look like they have been cut out of jade. Green liquid seeps through the roof of the cave and Biggles sees the solution to the green horse. A horse has been made to stand under the green liquid alive, to be petrified, but it has somehow escaped. On turning to leave the cave, our heroes turn to find troglodytes. “Creeping towards us as silently as ghosts, with stone hatchets in their hands, were the most dreadful-looking people I have ever seen in my life. They were small, without hair or eyebrows, and as far as I could see, without teeth. Their little pink tongues kept flicking over their lips as if in anticipation of a tasty meal”. “Keep your heads,” said Biggles, quickly. “If we do the wrong thing there’s going to be a mess. We must avoid hostilities if we can. I fancy they’re as jumpy as we are; they don’t know whether to come on or go back. It’s touch and go either way”. Ginger has an idea and plays his mouth organ and this scares the troglodytes out of the small cave and into the main cave from which they then disappear into fissures in the rock. Our heroes rush back to their aircraft whilst the troglodytes roll rocks down from higher ledges. Eventually they reach the plane and fly north back to civilisation. Ginger stood up. “Well,” he said, “that was my one and only experience with troglodytes, and I hope it will be the last. If living underground makes people look like those poor little blighters looked, it will take more than air raids to turn me into a human rabbit. But here’s Biggles; let’s go in to dinner”.