CHAPTER 17

We left Kodowa again.

We went north-west this time, descending from the scrubland to the rainforest country of the lower plains, the same sort of terrain that we'd moved through on our journey northwards. The people in the little villages we passed through came out to see us but they weren't laughing this time. They gazed at the great rig and the strange load it carried and their faces were troubled. Even the children were subdued, catching the uneasiness of their elders.

The rig's passengers varied. Some improved and were allowed to ride in one of the trucks, others collapsed and were given a place on the bedding. Two women gave birth on the rig, and Dr Kat removed a swollen appendix from a ten-year-old boy. The medical supplies dwindled steadily.

At each village Sadiq sent his men out to forage. A couple of beat-up trucks were added to the convoy as well as provisions. Occasionally they found petrol and it was added to our store. Our own food became more basic and the beer had long since run out. But we managed.

In one village we found a small cache of clothing and bartered food for it, and it did feel wonderful to be wearing something clean for a while. The men were beginning to look shaggy as beards sprouted.

With each few hours the make-up of the flock of Nyalans that trailed along after us subtly altered. The convoy was behaving much like a comet in space, picking up and losing bits of its tail as it went along. Groups of Nyalans would arrive at some village where they had kin or were too weary to walk further, and would leave us there. Others would follow along. There may have been several hundred in our wake, and there was something of a ritual, almost mystic, quality in their behaviour. Often one or more would approach the rig and reach up to touch it wonderingly before dropping behind again.

It was Dan Atheridge who explained it to me. He'd lived here for many years, and spoke a little Nyalan. His arm troubled him and he had to be restrained from doing too much; but I knew that he was deliberately driving himself into exhaustion in an attempt to numb the pain and horror of leaving his wife Susie somewhere behind him in the hills beyond Kanja. He had begged to be allowed to go off and try to find her, but had finally been persuaded not to.

I asked him about the Nyalans.

'Your rig's turning into a juggernaut, Neil,' he said.

'That's an Indian thing, isn't it? A sort of God-mobile?'

That got a smile from him. 'You could put it that way. Actually it's one of the names of the god Krishna. It became applied to a huge idol that's dragged through the streets in a town in India annually in his honour. In the olden days sacrificial victims were thrown under it to be crushed to death. A rather bloodthirsty deity, I fear.'

'It isn't inappropriate,' I said. 'Except that nobody's been run down by the rig yet, which God forbid.'

'It's followed in procession by thousands of devotees, who regard it as a sacred symbol of their wellbeing. That's the similarity, Neil. This rig of yours has become a fetish to the Nyalans. You're leading them to the promised land, wherever that is. Out of danger anyway.'

'I hope that's true, Dan. Still, I guess they have to believe in something.'

I mentioned the parallel with the Pied Piper and he smiled again. 'I hope you think of them as children rather than as rats, Neil.'

I got precisely the other viewpoint from Russ Burns some time later that day, when we stopped at last, more than halfway to Makara.

Several of us were waiting for whatever Brad Bishop could offer as an evening meal. Making idle conversation, I mentioned Atheridge's theory about the new role of the rig as a fetish, and Wingstead was fascinated. I could see him formulating an article for some truckers' magazine. Burns' attitude was very different and typical of him.

'More like rats,' he said when I invoked the Pied Piper image. 'Little brown bastards, eating up everything that isn't nailed down. Probably carrying disease too.' I felt a strong desire to hit him. Wingstead got up and walked away.

After a strained silence Burns spoke again. 'How come you work for a limey outfit?' He seemed to enjoy baiting me.

'Good pay,' I said briefly.

He snorted. 'For pushing this thing along?'

'Good enough,' I said. He seemed to have got the notion that I was a transport man and I didn't bother to disillusion him. It wasn't worth the trouble, and in any case right now it was nearer the truth than otherwise.

'What do you do with Lat-Am?' I asked him.

'I'm a tool pusher. Harry here's a shooter.'

'Come again? I don't know oil jargon.'

Zimmerman laughed. 'Russ is a drilling superintendent. Me, I make loud bangs in oil wells. Blasting.'

'Been in Nyala long?' I didn't take to Burns but Zimmerman was a much more likeable man. They made an odd pair.

'A while. Six months or so. We were based in Bir Oassa but we went down to the coast to take a look. The desert country's better. We should have stayed up there.'

'You can say that again,' Burns said, 'then we'd be out of this crummy mess.'

'I was up in Bir Oassa earlier this month,' I said. 'Didn't have much time to look at the oilfields, though. How you doing there?'

'We brought in three,' Zimmerman said. 'Good sweet oil, low sulphur; needs no doctor at all. Lat-Am isn't doing badly on this one.'

'What about the war, though?'

Burns shrugged. That's no skin off Lat-Am's ass. We'll stop pumping, that's all. The oil's still in the ground and we've got the concession. Whoever wins the war will need us.'

It was a point of view, I suppose.

They talked then between themselves for a while, using oilfield jargon which I understood better than I'd let on. Burns appealed to me less and less; he was a guy for whom the word chauvinist might have been invented. Texas was Paradise and the Alamo was the navel of the earth; he might grudgingly concede that California wasn't bad, but the East Coast was full of goddamn liberals and Jews and longhaired hippies. You might as well be in Europe, where everyone was effete and decadent. Still, the easterners were at least American and he could get along with them if he had to. The rest of the world was divided between commies, niggers, Ayrabs and gooks, and fit only for plundering for oil.

The next day we arrived at Makara. It was no bigger than other villages we'd passed through, but it earned its place on the map because of the bridge which spanned the river there. Further west, near Lake Pirie where the river joined the huge Katali there was a delta, and building a bridge would not have been possible. Our first concern was to find out whether the river was passable, and Sadiq, Kemp and I went ahead of the convoy to take a look. To our relief the bridge stood firm and was fit for crossing.

We halted outside the village and sent off another scouting party to investigate the cotton warehouses. Word came back that they were intact, empty and serviceable as a hospital, and so we moved to the cotton factory and camped there. Apart from the grave faces of the local people there was no sign of trouble anywhere.

That was the last good thing that happened that day.

Dr Katabisirua came to look at the warehouses and arranged for some Nyalan women to give the largest a clean through before bringing in the patients, which he wouldn't do until the next day. 'My nurses are tired from the journey,' he said, 'and that is when mistakes are made.'

He was very despondent. Two more burn patients had died and he feared for one of the new born babies. Some of the wounded were not improving as he would wish. 'And now Sister Ursula tells me we have no more Ringer's lactate.'

'What's that?'

'A replacement for lost plasma. We have no substitute.' There was no hospital closer than Lasulu, and that was as far away as the moon. He also fretted about Sister Mary who was sinking into frail senility under the stress.