The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [233]
‘No!’ cried Anjuli. ‘No – I must go to Shushila.’
She wrenched at the reins in an attempt to check the frantic animal, and Ash cut her across the wrists with his whip and called savagely: ‘Don't be a fool. Mulraj will look after her' – and brought the whip down again, this time on Baj Raj, though the horse needed no urging, for the towering, boiling darkness that was sweeping down on them was something he had never seen before, and he desired to escape from it every bit as urgently as Ash did.
The mare too was galloping at full stretch, and it is doubtful if anyone could have turned her; but Anjuli made no further effort to do so, because she had realized even as he spoke that Ashok was right and that what she had meant to do would have been an act of madness. Once caught in the heart of such a storm she could have seen nothing and helped no one; and Mulraj was with Shu-shu. He and the others could be counted upon to see that no harm came to her, and in all probability they had seen the approaching storm long ago and ridden straight back to camp, and were safe by now. But she and Ashok…
Anjuli had never seen a dust-storm either, but she did not need to be told that it was not a thing to be caught in out in the open, and she settled down to ride as she had never ridden before, crouching over the saddle-horn with her weight thrown forward to help the labouring animal, and without any idea where they were going, for she was half blinded by her own hair blowing about her face in wild, black confusion.
Ash was making for a cave that he had noticed earlier that evening in the brief moment before the shadow of the far hills reached it. He would not have seen it if the sun had not been on it, for at the time it had been a good half mile ahead, and though they had been moving slowly towards it they had barely covered more than half that distance. But Ash had been trained among the Frontier hills, and in the sunlight there was a sharp difference between the work of nature and that of man…
Even at that range it had been possible to see that below a jutting overhang of rock someone, at some time, had closed in the front of a large cave with mud bricks, leaving an entrance large enough to admit a man or a cow. It was the shape of that doorway – a black, straight-sided oblong – and the bleached colour of the mud that did not quite match the surrounding hillside, that had caught Ash's attention and made him narrow his eyes and stare at it to make sure that the cave behind it was not occupied. But nothing had moved in the valley or on the hillsides, and he knew that if there had been any men about, there would have been smoke, for it was the time of the evening meal. The sunlight had retreated and the cave had been lost among the advancing shadows, and Ash had turned to look at Juli, and forgotten it: only to remember it again in the instant that he had realized the significance of that ominous pall of darkness.
There were other and nearer caves, but it was difficult to judge how deep they were, and a shallow one would offer no protection against such a storm as this. But one that had been worth blocking in with a mud wall was likely to run far back into the hillside, and that narrow doorway would keep out the worst of the dust – if only they could reach it in time, for Ash was sharply aware that if the storm overtook them before they did so they would never find their way to it, the air already being so thick with dust and flying fragments of dry grass and leaves that they seemed to be riding through a fog.
Had the ground been less level they might never have reached it; boulders would certainly have brought one or both of their horses down, and bushes would have slowed them, but mercifully there were neither, and the only difficulty had been preventing their horses from racing past it and on up the valley. But Ash, who was in the lead, reined in with a violence that forced