Matthew wasn’t reasoning much about anything. The loss of Nadine stood across his mind. But somehow that was fuelling his determination to rescue the survivors. The physical shock to himself had not yet filtered through. He did not feel the pain in his hands or his arm. One of his feet was also bleeding where he had caught it climbing over masonry.
He and Jones and Lavalle, a Frenchman, now proceeded to lift a desk, which might have been the reception desk, but it was too heavy even for three of them. So Lavalle and he began with a pick and a hammer to break it up. Once it had been splintered they could lever pieces off it.
When this was done they could reach the rubble below. Jones went down first and began to shovel the stuff away, cautiously lest he should come upon someone buried in it. After a few minutes he stopped and knelt down.
‘I can hear a voice,’ he said. ‘A woman. I think she’s French.’
Matthew went over into a corner and vomited. He knew it was not his Frenchwoman and the thought turned his stomach.
A great red sun was rising over the mountains, lighting up the heavy clouds that still lingered. It was going to be another boiling hot day.
‘ça va?’ said Lavalle, coming up to him and putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘’Ow are you?’
‘ça va.’ Matthew returned to his task. Jones had gone another foot down and was pulling at a pile of bigger stones. As he got them away Matthew could hear a faint mewing cry, like a cat. They worked their way along in the direction of the call, and Matthew came on the wooden end of a bed. He reached under it and found a hand.
‘Sauvez-moi!’ said a frail voice. ‘Je me suis ensevelie.’
He pulled gently, but the hand could not come. ‘Wait!’ he called. ‘Lie still. We’ll help you.’ He turned round. ‘Have to get all this stuff off first.’
A few more people were about now: some ragged children, a group of native women.
Matthew stared up at some overhanging girders. ‘ Take care. This lot mustn’t fall. Is there another spade?’
A man whose name he didn’t know and who had been sitting with his arm round his wife got up and went over to the shattered pool, came back with a large children’s spade for use on the beach. Jones was about to reject it, but Matthew seized it. ‘It will do.’
They returned to the ruins. While Lavalle used the heavy shovel and Jones pulled at the masonry, Matthew used the small shovel to scrape and scratch at the loose stuff around the hand. Then on his knees he began to pull and scrape. A dark frizzy head. It was Vicky Reynard.
VI
Lee and Letty lay together in the dark on the same bed. Two legs of the bed were broken, and the mattress was aslant, so that they lay with their feet against the bottom board of the bed to stop the tendency to slip down. Four feet above their heads the great girder had jammed itself, protecting them from a massive accumulation of floorboards, furniture, coping stones, carpets, washbasins and other things waiting to fall. They had some space around them, narrow but just enough to move a foot here and there. The air was full of dust and no light came.
They had found the stump of a candle in one of the crushed drawers of the dressing table. All the hotel bedrooms were so provided in case of a normal electrical failure. But so far they had economized, for it would not burn more than two hours. They had tried knocking and whistling and shouting, but without result. Once they heard an explosion, and then a vessel hooting out at sea.
As they lay there Lee could feel the warm blood dripping on to his hand.
‘We’ve got to do something about that,’ he said, sitting up.
‘This is nothing. I am using a pad to stop it … What time is it?’
He flicked on Letty’s torch. ‘Just after three o’clock.’
While the torch was on he looked around for some level place where if necessary one could put the candle. There was a piece of the dressing table, just a projection. He slithered a foot or so, took the candle out of his pocket and lit it with one of his precious matches. The flame flickered and lost hope and then gained it again and lit up their prison. Letty was half lying, half standing on the mattress, holding a folded nightdress to her head. The nightdress was already heavy with blood.
‘Let me see.’
As the flame steadied he eased the nightdress away and stared at the wound. A big flap of hair and skin, about five inches long, had been part removed by a glancing blow which had left the skin loose and the wound raw. Blood was oozing.
His year in the Ambulance Brigade during the war had given him a fair experience of wounds, and he remembered that head wounds bled copiously to begin but dried fairly quickly. Dried if they were encouraged to dry. But she was losing too much blood. And who knew how long they might have to wait for rescue?
‘What is there in your bag?’
‘Oh. The usual things. See.’
He opened the bag, careful not to pull anything out lest it should roll away into some unreachable corner.
Hair clips. Make-up. Pen. Comb. Pocket mirror. Bottle of Chanel. Handkerchief. Nail scissors. Tweezers. Diary. Needle and thread. Purse. Passport. Travellers’ cheques.
Needle and thread. He took them out and looked at them. She looked up at him.
He said: ‘I guess I have to do something.’
She said: ‘It will stop soon.’
‘Maybe. But this air is bad, so dusty, and the wound is not clean …’
They thought it out while the candle guttered. He picked up the tweezers. They were small, but if you were deft enough …
‘I must try.’
‘… If you say so.’
It was white cotton thread and there were two needles, both of serviceable size. He wondered if they would bend. It would be so much easier with a curved needle. He tried one but it resisted his efforts with his fingers. A pair of pliers – which he lacked – might do it, or the needle might simply snap. He reached over and held the needle in the candle flame, then tried again, guarding his fingers against the heat of the needle with his handkerchief. It bent a bit. He tried again. A second small bend. It would have to do. Any further pressure might break it. He wiped the needle to get any carbon deposits off it.
Hell. What to do next? How achieve any sort of asepsis. Better to leave ill alone? By morning they might be rescued.
But do a bit to begin. He took her nail scissors – which were bent, as the needle ought to have been – and began to cut away her luxuriant hair around the wound. ‘Jennie of the Light Brown Hair’. Much of it was rust-coloured or crimson. She winced, and he said: ‘Christ, I don’t know whether to do this or not.’
At the ends of the wound the skin was ragged, and he trimmed a few pieces back.
‘Cry out if you want,’ he said.
She said: ‘Perhaps that way I shall attract the rescuers.’
If there are any, he thought to himself. He could hear nothing. Were they perhaps the only ones left alive?
The bottle of Chanel was nearly full. He unstoppered it and immersed the needle in it, then the scissors: it would be a sort of antiseptic. Seeing what he was doing, she said: ‘ Lucky you bought me that in Paris.’
He cut more of her hair away until it was no more than half an inch long at the edges of the wound. Then he tried to thread the needle, but his hands were fumbling and unsteady.
‘Let me,’ she said.
In a moment she had sucked the end of the cotton and threaded it. ‘Use the darning stitch,’ she said.
‘Christ, I wish you could do it.’
‘It is no matter. It will soon be over.’
‘I can’t bear to hurt you.’
‘Oh, hurt. That is not important.’
As he had been trained – though it had been mainly watching others – he began in the middle, so that the skin tissue should not be drawn off centre. For a few seconds after putting in the needle he thought he couldn’t go on; but then his hand steadied. Once he had drawn the skin together over the oozing wound and secured it with what she called the darning sti
tch and cut the thread and seen that his clumsy stitch was holding, he gained confidence and went on. Sometimes she winced but she made no sound. Only by the sudden clutching of her hands could he tell when he hurt her most. Six stitches were done on one side. A surgeon would have used many more, but at least it sufficed to bring the torn flap of scalp back onto its proper place. Then he began working away from the middle again. In ten minutes more it was done. The thread had almost run out and looked as bloody as his hands.
‘Is there cotton in your bag?’
‘A little. I think. A moment.’
She fumbled and produced a small wad of cotton wool. He pulled off a piece, took out a match and rolled the wool round the blank end of the match. Once it was quite secure he plunged it into the Chanel bottle, shook off the extra scent and began to dab at each of the stitches he had put in. She took a sharp breath at each touch, the alcohol in the perfume acting as an antiseptic but burning like iodine.
He lay back on the bed, as exhausted as she was.
Minutes passed, perhaps five. The shock and the tension had left him inert. With a great effort he stirred himself again.
‘I’ll tear a sheet,’ he said. ‘Make a bandage.’
‘No. A wound like this should not need it.’
‘But the dust and the dirt floating …’
‘I’ll put my scarf over it. Something light like that will be better.’
‘Did I hurt you a lot?’
‘Yes. But it is over.’
‘It will hurt now, of course.’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Letty, I hope it will ease soon. I guess we can only lie and wait.’
‘Put out the candle,’ she said. ‘ We may need it later.’
He did as she suggested and now they were lying in the dark. He put out a hand and found hers and they lay together as in the darkness of a burial ground.
Chapter Twelve
I
Matthew and Jonathan Jones drew at Vicky Reynard. At first it was inch by inch, grudgingly, fearfully, for risk of injuring her further; but suddenly she came quite all of a piece, leaving a rattle of rubble and squeak of springs behind her. She was still wearing the dress in which she had been to the Casino. She was smothered in white plaster, and in pain, but after half an hour it seemed that most of the pain had been caused by cramp and a few nasty bruises. With no medical man to examine her, she presently sat up and then crouched, then stood up, rubbing her legs in agony, and swearing in soft French.
In the night the manager had been able to find coffee and a coffee pot and a few mugs and a Primus, so the rescue party stood around for a few minutes sipping at the hot unsweetened brew. The wife of the man who had brought the spade sat beside Vicky and helped her hold a mug to her lips.
‘Where are your friends?’ Matthew asked her.
Great tears began to blob out of her eyes, mixing with the mascara and the dust. ‘In there,’ she whimpered.
Daylight was now fully come, and just then four French marines arrived in a jeep and disembarked, picking their way among the fallen umbrella pines and the cracked Tarmac of what had yesterday been the drive.
They consulted with M. Gaviscon and two of them came over and spoke to Lavalle and then to Jonathan and Matthew. Directed by them, the marines went to that part of the ruin from which Vicky had just been salvaged.
Before settling to his task the elder of the soldiers, a corporal, stood for a moment with his hands on his hips and looked around him.
‘Mon Dieu,’ he said. ‘I have been here one hour only and I am suffering from shock – I who in the war was twice blown up and have seen many devastated towns before. Agadir is – a desert. Whole districts have gone. Someone said – some press person – that there might be two thousand dead. What nonsense! He is insane! It will be ten thousand or more. The buildings have fallen into dust. Death is everywhere. Mon Dieu, what will it be like when the heat comes!’
With two more strong men to help they made quicker progress, but they did not dare hurry. Like archaeologists excavating an ancient city, something could be easily broken or spoiled; and in this case it was buried people.
What was left of the town was beginning to come alive again now. A few cars tried to manoeuvre along the broken streets and among the fallen trees. Mostly they were piled high with people and their belongings, anxious to get out of the place while they were still alive. Someone was broadcasting a message in French and Arabic by megaphone, but it was too far away to hear what was being said. A portable radio crackled. A helicopter flew overhead, and then a small two-seater biplane. Most of the ships in the harbour seemed to have ridden out the tidal wave, though all the port cranes had been toppled and there was a range of new and massive boulders further along the beach. And the Kasbah on the hill had quite gone, as if it had never been. The preacher, El Ufrani, had perished with the flock he had warned and condemned.
A Frenchman, one of the guests, came excitedly past. ‘They’re bringing help! It says so on the radio. They are to use the airport as a hospital! Ambulance teams and doctors and nurses and tents. King Mohammed is on his way and Prince Hassan. They’re bringing troops from Casablanca!’
But so what? There was nothing here yet to help the people still buried, and very little help that could be brought except relays of workers. No mechanical excavator could possibly be used.
By nine the two other soldiers, with the help of a few surviving village boys, had taken out fourteen corpses, and two others still alive but seriously injured. Matthew knew none of them. A French doctor turned up, and most of the injured were taken away in his jeep. He said before he left that the ruins would soon have to be sprayed with quicklime to prevent disease spreading.
Soon after nine Matthew and the team he was working with excavated the second of the French tarts, Françoise Grasset, but she was dead. Vicky, who had refused to leave the scene, let out a great wail at the sight of her friend.
Beyond the excavation that had brought Françoise Grasset’s body to light the mangled remains of the hotel reached to its maximum height, like the head of a mountain range. The prospect of anyone else being alive in that sloping pile was remote, and there was danger if one picked at it of creating a landslide.
About this time Matthew began to feel lightheaded and to shiver. He had lost an amount of blood from his arm before, sometime during the night, a friendly Moroccan bound it up, and he had been on the go for nine hours, with only a pause for the coffee, and later a biscuit and a hunk of bread. But it was he who took the lead in attacking the dangerous rubble that almost overhung where the Frenchwoman’s body had been found. Twice he had to jump clear as debris slithered down.
A small ambulance had arrived at the entrance to the hotel, and two nurses and a driver got out and began to look over the survivors, picking out those most seriously hurt and helping or carrying them back to the ambulance. It was going to be another stifling day, and there was virtually no protection from the sun, as the palm trees lay about like scattered and broken matchsticks all over the muddy gardens. One old stone-built cabin had survived, but this was already half-full of corpses, where they had been carried to store them until they could be taken away. Already two rats had been shot escaping from the broken sewers.
Matthew staggered and Lavalle grasped his arm. ‘You have had enough, my friend. You must rest. Or go with the ambulance.’
‘No. I’m – well enough.’ Matthew was obsessed with the need to recover Nadine’s body and have it laid decently to rest. He hadn’t been reasoning coherently for some time, and later he was to wonder what had so driven him on. It was not as if he had any hope of finding her alive. But loss of blood, mild concussion and delayed shock were producing their own twisted logic.
All the same, his persistent attack on the great mound produced some good results. This time it was Jonathan Jones who heard the first cry. Gently, laboriously, they unearthed another woman. She was conscious, breathing and, when they finally got her out, able to sit up
. It was Laura Legrand, the third French lady.
The first word she uttered was ‘Merde!’
II
By noon the King was in Agadir. Twice he had flown over the ravaged town. This time he had come to Inezgane, a couple of miles out, where the Crown Prince Moulay Hassan was in charge of all the rescue work and the maintenance of law and order. Agadir airport was little damaged, and helicopters were ferrying the wounded, the sick and the dying from the centre of the town. A forest of tents had been set up at one end of the airport to accommodate them, but there were far more people than could be taken in, and many of the less seriously injured lay out in the open, shielding themselves as best they could from the sun. The Fahrenheit shade temperature at noon in the airport was 104 .
Everything was still in short supply: clean drinking water was needed as much as blood plasma, and indeed a little food, not only for the survivors but for the soldiers, marines and sailors who had flooded in. As they came in, the inhabitants, those who had survived, were flooding out. Crossing with the ingoing rescue workers were trails of Moroccans, some in old cars, others walking, many on mule and donkey, carrying a few belongings, all seeking the safety of the countryside for fear of another earth tremor. Many were camping under the argan trees, still within sight of the smouldering city.
Radios were crackling everywhere now, issuing instructions, words of hope and comfort, promises of all possible speedy help. The King had already announced that the old Agadir had ceased to exist, and that a new Agadir would be at once inaugurated. Prince Moulay Hassan added that it should all be rebuilt within a year, and that on the 2nd of March, 1961, the anniversary of Morocco’s Independence, the new city would be opened.