Landel was using his periscope.
The viewer showed an even expanse.
Souped-up, they were hitting sixty.
Was it riskier to cross a mine at top speed? What would the explosion do, heel then over, crumble a tread, stove in the floor, belch out the walls? ... In the white walled house, the Arab, in the yellow-blue turban, was opening the shutters to his windows ... did he sell dates?
In Texas, while piloting his training tank, he had thought of the rags and litter on the ground as the bodies of men. Excellent imagination. Useless. Absurd. Such thinking had not hardened him. It was just another kind of fear. Another kind of folly. His hands were still trembling.
Nothing had prepared him for the first dead in Africa, that first week in Africa, when men got crushed underneath his treads: then it had seemed to him that he had crushed them himself, mashed then with his own weight. He had dreamed then, for many nights, of arms and hands struggling against pressure, faces blotted into nothingness. He had longed to climb out of his machine, kill himself, go, go somewhere.
And now?
Beramet appeared on the road ahead ... palm trees, white one-story buildings, olive trees, tamarisk.
Through radio transmission he knew that their tank forces were pincering: the town was to be grabbed by nightfall.
Light shimmered in front, misty pools of it, mirage water, the desert--port and starboard--was undulating with heat and light: heat, combining a scab of dust, wavered over Beramet: a single point, a blue minaret, broke through.