McAuslan in the Rough. George Fraser MacDonald
fancies … a couple of tired sentries … my own Highland susceptibility to the fey. … I snapped “Tach!” impatiently in the fashion of my MacDonald granny, strode out of my office and showed Private Forbes how to take penalty kicks at the goal which the football enthusiasts had erected near the gate, missed four out of six, and retired grinning amidst ironic cheers, feeling much better.
But that evening, after supper, I found myself mounting the narrow stairway to the parapet where the sentries were just going on first stag. It was gloaming, and the desert was taking on that beautiful star-lit sheen under the purple African sky that is so incredibly lovely that it is rather like a coloured postcard in bad taste. The fires and lights were twinkling away down in the village, the last fawn-orange fringe of daylight was dwindling beyond the sand-hills, the last warm wind was touching the parapet, the night stillness was falling on the fort and the shadowy dunes, and Private Brown was humming “Ye do the hokey-cokey and ye turn aroond” as he clattered up the stairway to take his post, rifle in hand. Four sentries, one to each wall—and only my imagination could turn the silhouette of a bonneted Highlander into a helmeted Roman leaning on his hasta, or a burnoused mercenary out of Carthage, or a straight-nosed Greek dreaming of the olive groves under Delphi, or a long-haired savage from the North wrapping his cloak about him against the night air. They had all been here, and they were all long gone—perhaps. And if you smile at the perhaps, wait until you have stood on the wall of a Sahara fort at sundown, watching the shadows lengthen and the silence creep across the sand invisible in the twilight. Then smile.
I went down at last, played beggar-my-neighbour with Keith for half an hour, read an old copy of the Tripoli Ghibli for a little while longer, and then turned in. I didn’t drop off easily; I heard the midnight stag change over, and then the two o’clock, and then I must have dozed, for the next thing I remember is waking suddenly, for no good reason, and lying there, lathered in sweat that soaked the clean towel which was our normal night attire, listening. It took a moment to identify it: a cautious scraping noise, as of a giant rat, somewhere outside. It wasn’t any sound I knew, and I couldn’t locate it, but one thing was certain, it hadn’t any business to be going on.
I slid out and into my trousers and sandals, and stood listening. My door was open, and I went forward and listened again. There was no doubt of it; the sound was coming from the old stable, about twenty yards to my left, against the east wall. Irregular, but continuous, scrape-scrape. I glanced around; there were sentries visible in the dying moonlight on the catwalks to either side, and straight ahead on the gate-wall; plainly they were too far away to hear.
As silently as possible, but not furtively, for I didn’t want the sentries to mistake me, I turned right and walked softly in front of the office, and then cut across the corner of the parade. The sentry on the catwalk overhead stiffened as he caught sight of me, but I waved to him and went on, towards the guardroom. I was sweating as I entered, and I didn’t waste time.
“Get Sergeant Telfer, quietly. Tell him to come to the stable, not to make a sound. You three, come with me; you, McNab, up to the parapet, and tell the sentries on no account to fire until I give the word. Move.”
Thank God, you don’t have to tell Jocks much when there’s soldiering to do; within five minutes that stable was boxed as tight as a drum—four of us in front of it, in line, crouching down; two riflemen some yards behind, to back up, and two men with torches ready to snap on. The scraping sound was still going on in the stable, quite distinctly, and I thought I could hear someone gasping with exertion. I nodded to Telfer, and he and one of the Jocks crept forward to the stable door, one to each of the heavy leaves; I could see Telfer’s teeth, grinning, and then I snapped—“Now!”, the doors were hauled back, the torches went on—and there they were.
Three Arabs, glaring into the torch-light, two of them with shovels, a half-dug hole in the floor—and then they came hurtling out, and I went for the knees of the nearest, and suddenly remembered trying to tackle Jack Ramsay as he came weaving through our three-quarters at Old Anniesland, and how he’d dummied me. This wasn’t Ramsay, though, praise God; he came down with a yelp and a crash, and one of the Jocks completed his ruin by pinning him by the shoulders. I came up, in time to see Telfer and another Jock with a struggling Arab between them, and the third one, who hadn’t even got out of the stable, being submerged by a small knot of Highlanders, one of whom was triumphantly croaking “Bo Geesty!” No doubt of it, McAuslan had his uses when the panic was on.
We quieted the captives, after a moment or two, but there wasn’t a word to be got out of them, and nothing to be deduced from their appearance except that they weren’t genuine desert Buddoos, but more probably from the village or some place farther afield. Two of them were in shirts and trousers, and none of them was what you would call a stalwart savage; more like fellaheen, really. I consigned them to the guardroom, ordered a fifty per cent stand-to on the walls, and turned to examine the stable.
They had dug a shallow hole, no more, in the middle of the stable, and the reek was appalling. Camel stables are odorous at the best of times, and this one had been accommodating beasts, probably, since Scipio’s day. But we had to see what they’d been after, and since a good officer shouldn’t ask his men to do what he won’t do himself … I was eyeing one of the fallen shovels reluctantly when a voice spoke at my elbow.
“Jings!” it said. “Hi, sir, mebbe it’s treasure! Burried treasure!”
I wouldn’t have thought McAuslan’s deductive powers that fast, myself, but he explained that there had been treasure in Bo Geesty—“a jool, the Blue Watter, that Bo Geesty pinched aff his aunty, so he did.” From the glittering light in his eye I could see that his powers of identification would shortly lead him to the dream-stage where he was marrying Susan Hayward, so I indicated the shovel and asked him would he like to test his theory.
He began digging like a demented Nibelung, choking only occasionally as his shovel released noxious airs, exclaiming “Aw, jeez!” before falling to again with energy. His comrades stood aside as he hurled great lumps of the ordure of centuries from the hole—even for McAuslan, I decided this was too much, and offered to have him spelled, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He entertained us, in gasps as he dug, with a synopsis of the plot of Beau Geste, but I can’t say I paid much attention, for I was getting excited. Whatever the Arabs had been after, it must be something precious—and then his shovel rang, just like the best pirate stories, on something metallic.
We had it out in another five minutes, and my mounting hopes of earth-shaking archaeological discovery died as the torches revealed a twentieth-century metal box for mortar bombs—not British, but patently modern. I sent the others out, in case it was full of live ammo., and gingerly prised back the clasps and raised the lid. It was packed to bursting with papers, wedged almost into a solid mass, because the tin had not been proof against its surroundings, and it was with some difficulty that I worked one loose—it was green, and faded, but it was undoubtedly a bank-note. And so were all the rest.
They were, according to the Tripoli police inspector who came to examine them next day, pre-war Italian notes, and totally worthless. Which was a pity, since their total face value was well over a hundred million lire; I know, because I was one of the suffering members of the court of inquiry which had to count them, rank, congealed and stinking as they were. As the officer who had found them, I was an obvious candidate for membership of that unhappy court, when we got back to the battalion; I, a Tripoli police lieutenant, a major from the Pay Corps, and a subaltern from the Green Howards, who said that if he caught some contagious disease from this job he was going to sue the War Office. We counted very conscientiously for above five minutes, and then started computing in lumps; the Pay Corps man objected, and we told him to go to hell. He protested that our default of duty would be detected by higher authority, and the Green Howard said that if higher authority was game enough to catch him out by counting this lot note by note, then higher authority was a better man than he was. We settled on a figure of 100,246,718 lire, of which we estimated that 75,413,311 were too defaced to be accepted as currency, supposing the pre-war Italian government were still around to support them.
For the rest, the court concluded that the money had been buried by unknown persons from Yarhuna village, after having possibly been looted from