Away we galloped—bump, bump, bump. Then, without warning, there came a tremendous crack, and, lo and behold! there we were, sitting in our carriage, whilst the horses and Peppino continued with the wheels! It was, of course, a terrible dilemma, but again I had to laugh; it was really too funny.
My husband and Peppino carried me and the children and perched each of us on a stone, where I stood on one leg and cawed like a crow. “One should always take misfortunes gaily,” I said. That was the last straw; my better half had to laugh, but the smile was rather sickly. Then we held a council of war.
Peppino, good man, saved the situation. “I will go back with the horses and fetch the carriage we saw abandoned at the side of the road,” he said. “I know the owner, and will take the responsibility for borrowing it on my own shoulders.”
So off he went, whilst we cawed to one another from stone to stone and ate snow, there being nothing else to do. Before long Peppino returned triumphantly with the borrowed carriage, the luggage was transferred, and we started off again, leaving our first equipage standing disconsolately in the snow.
All went well until eight o’clock, although my husband and Peppino had constantly to push at the wheels. They both looked ten years older than at the start, so lined and weary were their faces. At about eight we came to a narrow track, a real road winding round the mountain above a fathomless precipice. On each side the snow lay in drifts of five and six feet deep, and the centre track showed no sign of previous passage.
We had not gone fifty yards along this road when the horses stopped and the wheels disappeared in a drift. Yelling, pushing, and pulling had no effect whatever. The horses were then harnessed to the splash-board, but their strenuous efforts only resulted in tearing it from the body of the carriage.
All this time I was sitting in the snow trying to keep the little one warm, and hopefully encouraging the two elder ones, Charlie and Renée. From the mountain top came the discordant howling and barking of jackals; from the blackness below arose the sad wailing of a hyena. I very nearly became tearful.
Peppino again offered his services, and proposed riding off to fetch help at a sheikh’s some ten miles away.
“Get into the carriage, wrap yourselves up warmly with everything available, and wait,” he said. “In five or six hours I will bring assistance.”
There was nothing else to be done, so we made the best of a bad job, packed ourselves up, and tried to sleep. The children, of course, succeeded at once, as did my husband, worn out with the efforts of the day, but I could not. My hunger was great, and I do not think I have ever before or since imagined such cold. Talk of African heat; African cold has the first place in my memory.