e fallen clan chief and put him into the back of the
hover-lorry, ignoring the crowd.

Homer Crawford came up and said in English, "All right, let's get out of
here. Don't hurry, but on the other hand don't let's prolong it. One of
those Ouled Touameur might collect himself to the point of deciding he
ought to rescue his leader."

Abe looked at him disgustedly. "Like, where'd you learn that little
party trick, man?"

Crawford yawned. "I said I didn't know anything about swords. You didn't
ask me about judo. I once taught judo in the Marines."

"Well, why didn't you take him sooner? He like to cut your head off with
that cheese knife before you landed on him."

"I couldn't do it sooner. Not until he knocked the sword out of my hand.
Until then it was a sword fight. But as soon as I had no sword then in
the eyes of every Chaambra present, I had the right to use any method
possible to save myself."

Bey-ag-Akhamouk looked up at the sun to check the time. "We better speed
it up if we want to get this man to Columb-Bechar and then get on down
over the desert to Timbuktu and that meeting."

"Let's go," Homer said. The second hovercraft joined them, driven by
Elmer Allen, and they made their way through the staring, but
motionless, crowds of Chaambra.

IV

Once the city of Timbuktu was more important in population, in commerce,
in learning than the London, the Paris or the Rome of the time. It was
the crossroads where African traffic, east and west, met African
traffic, north and south; Timbuktu dominated all. In its commercial
houses accumulated the wealth of Africa; in its universities and mosques
the wisdom of Greece, Rome, Byzantium and the Near East--at a time when
such learning was being destroyed in Dark Ages beset Europe.

Timbuktu's day lasted but two or three hundred years at most. By the
middle of the Twentieth Century it had deteriorated into what looked
nothing so much as a New Mexico ghost town, built largely of adobe. Its
palaces and markets has melted away to caricatures of their former
selves, its universities were a memory of yesteryear, its population
fallen off to a few thousands. Not until the Niger Projects, the dams
and irrigation projects, of the latter part of the Twentieth Century did
the city begin to regain a semblance of its old importance.

Homer Crawford's team had come down over the Tanezrouft route, Reggan,
Bidon Cinq and Tessalit; that of Isobel Cunningham, Jacob Armstrong