While they were discussing the perplexing situation in which they found themselves, George’s eyes lighted on the ruined buildings perched on the heights about half a mile in their rear.
“If there are any planks left whole in those buildings,” he said to Maurice, “there is a chance for us. We could lay them on the mud and form a track. It would be slow work getting across even then, but quicker than going miles round.”
Maurice explained the suggestion to Giulika. He at once sent half a dozen men back to the village to see if the fire had spared enough timber to serve the purpose. The Englishmen gazed with admiration as the lithe young men hastened up the slope, as nimbly as goats. In an extraordinarily short time they were seen returning, each carrying one or more long, rough, blackened planks, ripped from a half-demolished barn. They brought news as well. They had caught a glimpse of horsemen approaching through a defile in the hills behind.
“How far away?” asked Maurice anxiously.
Their answers left him very much in the dark. Time and distance are alike vague to the people of Albania. One said an hour’s march, another declared that it was less; all were agreed that if the swamp were dry ground, the pursuers would overtake them before they had reached the other side, and from this Maurice inferred that the distance between the two parties was even less than the mountaineers supposed.
Without the loss of a moment he instructed them how to lay the planks. The first having been thrown down upon the mud, a man carried a second along it and placed them end to end, and so on, until there was a kind of pier, sixty or seventy feet long, extending into the swamp. George then mounted into the car to steer it, and it was pushed from behind until it reached the furthermost plank. At times the planks sank until they disappeared below the surface; but then, although the wheels were running in several inches of ooze, the boards beneath them afforded a sufficiently firm foundation. Each plank was held by a man at the nearer end as the car ran over it, so that it should not swerve, George well knowing that the slightest deviation to right or left must precipitate the vehicle into the morass.
Behind the car marched the whole of the party in single file. The last man, on gaining the second plank, lifted the first and handed it to his comrade in front. Thus each board was raised in turn. When the car arrived at the end of the pier, and came to an enforced standstill, a man passed through it and laid a plank beyond, and the pier was reconstructed as before. Then the advance was carried for another sixty feet, and the operation was once more gone through.
“Upon my word, I’d rather face the precipices,” said George to Maurice, as the car reached the end of the third section. “They were not half so trying to the nerves as this slow crawl.”
“Have patience, my dear fellow,” replied his brother. “It was an uncommonly happy thought of yours. We’ve the consolation of knowing that, as we take up our path behind us, Slavianski can’t follow, and will have to go the roundabout way that we have escaped.”
“Do you see any sign of the fellow?”