The Sleeping Mountain Read online

  Copyright & Information

  The Sleeping Mountain

  First published in 1958

  © Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1958-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755102223 9780755102228 Print

  0755127560 9780755127566 Mobi/Kindle

  0755127846 9780755127849 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Author’s Note

  Although no mountain by the name of Mont’ Amarea exists, nor a town by the name of Anapoli Porto, there is just such a mountain on another island, and there was just such a town.

  My thanks are due to the staffs of the Volcanological Department of the University of Naples, and the Geological Department of the University of Florence, who together with others helped me to transpose an actual event from this other island to Italy.

  Report from The Times

  ‘For the past three weeks the mountain had been vomiting clouds of smoke, but the smoke seemed to be produced so normally that it was permissible even for those inclined to look upon the dark side not to dread a catastrophe.’

  One

  Probably because he was engaged in nothing more than scratching with a conté crayon on the back of an old menu card, Tom Patch became aware of the sound and the movement from the earth long before anyone else.

  It started as a whisper and at first he thought it was just the wind getting up again for another freak storm like the one which had flung the tiles off the old houses round the Porto that morning, and sent a muddy swirl bubbling through the mountain-stream beds to the beach and out in a yellow-brown cloud across the water of the Tyrrhenian.

  He had come creeping out with the rest of the islanders as the rain had died away, pushing through the crowds in the dark alleys behind the harbour where the puddles picked up splinters of light, past the strings of washing, seeking the sunny corners where every open window was now draped with airing blankets and mattresses.

  He lifted his head, waiting for the gust that would rattle the menu card in his hands and whip up the scraps of paper into little spirals in the air. But it didn’t come and, relaxing again, he took out a cigarette. As he lit the match, though, and held it up, he saw the flame begin to dance and, remembering how many drinks he’d had, he wondered for a moment if his hand had finally become unsteady. Then he saw the waiter in the bar behind him cock his head and he realised that the sound was audible to others too, and he became more vividly aware of the scene in front of him – as though it were a film which had suddenly slowed down into separate pictures.

  The murmur came from way down – out of reach of the day’s glare. It emerged from hundreds of feet below the leaning buildings whose roof-levels of red and grey pantiles made a jagged backdrop to the harbour. It was blown out over the Tyrrhenian by the spring breeze that shrivelled the bare vineyards rising in terraces behind the town, in clear view to Patch as he sat in a trembling air he could sense rather than see. The bells of goats mingled with it as they came down the steep road between the last little villa on the outskirts of the town and the great white house dominating its eastern flank, more like a palace than a dwelling-house, with its turrets, its castellated walls, and its cypressed gardens.

  It pierced the high piping of the gulls along the sea wall and the sound of a mandolin on one of the fishing boats drawn up on the beach – even, in spite of its faintness, the raucous croak of an election car down by the harbour that had shattered the peace like an assassin’s bomb with its loudspeaker and for the fiftieth time that day made Patch feel like a displaced person, reminding him that, in spite of his rooms in the Porto, the fishermen’s district of crevasse-like streets and narrow-gutted buildings where politics were as natural as breathing, he was really no more a part of the island than the other foreigners who lived in the aloof little villas outside the town, residing on Anapoli for a variety of reasons that ranged from arthritis to straitened finance.

  Perhaps because of the noise about the town, none of them – apart from Patch – noticed the sound at first, for it came gently, hardly as a breath, in fact. For a time it went completely unheeded among the multiplicity of teeming streets and squares that made up Anapoli Porto, as they clung to the cliff above the beach of grey volcanic sand in an incredible kaleidoscope of light and shade.

  Even the people at the other side of the Piazza dei Martiri didn’t catch it in the long second when it was obscured by the loudspeaker and the voice of the man in the Via Garibaldi who was haranguing a few disinterested loafers from a soapbox dais decorated with an Italian flag. Beyond the ugly statue of Garibaldi which occupied the centre of the square, a bill-poster who was plastering the walls with Communist sheets went on filling in the spaces the party in office had left, so that the political protagonists seemed to be carrying out a wordy warfare in slogans, debating with each other, coming out with new posters to answer the accusations in the opposition’s reply to their own last one.

  He had plodded along the edge of the piazza, daubing the pillars of the ancient Museo with ‘Vote for Bosco’ and ‘Vote for the People’s Party’, placing his sheets carefully so as not to obscure the efforts of the wall-daubing fraternity who had been at work among the gaudy new posters and the fluttering ribbons of the old ones with whitewash and tar filched from the harbour. Finally, just as the murmur started, he’d found a space at ground level where the cycling enthusiasts of the island, untouched by the fevered finger of politics, had apparently lain flat on their faces to placard their adoration of their own particular hero with an ‘Evviva Coppi’ or two; and stepping back to discuss its position and its value wit
h the group of ragged small boys who were accompanying him, had spread another poster, ‘Vote for the People’s Friends’, as though it were an argument he had overlooked, the slap of his wet brush obscuring the first hint of the sound as it stole into the square.

  As it increased in strength, the man two tables away from Patch lifted his head and looked at the sky.

  He had arrived ten minutes before in a taxi, his uniform jacket and felt hat indicating immediately to Patch that he was from the ship which had arrived a day or two earlier to take away a cargo of the island sulphur. She was moored to the Molo del Porto, small, elderly and not very smart, leaning against the black basalt blocks as though she were holding the hillside up, her appearance belying the impressive name painted across her counter. Great Watling Street, it said in square white letters. Great Watling Street, London.

  He had stood on the shadow-striped cobbles under Garibaldi’s upraised arm, arguing over the fare with the driver, obviously grimly enjoying himself in a private and execrable brand of Italian, and it was as he seated himself, clearly satisfied with his linguistic acrobatics, that the sound began to swell into a growl.

  As it increased to a rolling echo, Patch pushed back the straw hat he wore, frayed round the brim like an ill-tended hedge, listening, his eyes on the spot where the transparent ultramarine of the sea touched the cobalt of the sky. His breath seemed to halt for a moment in his chest and he found himself noticing how the sunshine picked out the ochre, black and sienna tints of the ruined Aragonese castle which jutted out behind the houses, sharp in the glass-clear air, and caught the sides of the coastguard station among the palms.

  Then as more people moving across the square lifted their heads, he realised the sound was making itself heard to everybody, spreading, it seemed, across the purple sheet of the sea and through the emptiness of the heavens which were crossed by fanning streaks of cloud from behind Mont’ Amarea as it towered behind him up to the crater where a wisp of vapour, like a grey-white feather, streamed over its slaty sides.

  He saw the taxi-driver motionless alongside his taxi, the bill-poster with one frozen hand outstretched across another gaudy sheet, and a group of loafers in the shadow of the Museo, their eyes switched sideways as they tried to see two ways at once.

  Around them, above them and beneath them, they could all hear it now – a rumbling sound like a cart passing over the cobbles of the Porto. It seemed to hang in the air like thunder, quivering in the silence, then a tile crashed and the windows all round the square started to rattle violently as though someone were behind them beating them with a heavy fist, and a flock of pigeons exploded noisily into the air beyond the Museo.

  Without any assistance from the driver, the door of the taxi shut with a bang. A girl in a tight skirt, crossing the piazza on a bicycle with a long packet of spaghetti under her arm, had dismounted and was staring at the bell as it tinkled on the handlebars without any effort on her part. A priest, heading round the back of the Church of Sant’ Agata, halted in the doorway as a shower of dusty plaster fell nearby, glanced quickly at Mont’ Amarea, and folded his hands and waited, muttering Hail Marys. The loudspeaker car and the soapbox politician shouting in the Via Garibaldi had suddenly become quiet so that they could all hear across the evening silence that lay over the whole of the Porto.

  Patch’s glass was drumming heavily now against the metal of the table and the spoon was tinkling with lunatic frenzy in the saucer of his coffee cup. The two early carnations, wilting wretchedly in the centre of the table, were shaking frantically and he noticed without alarm that the dust was dancing in little puffs between the cobblestones at his feet.

  Then the quivering died away as suddenly as it had come, and everything became still again.

  Two

  For a moment, as the murmur and the movement died away, the piazza was still, as though the film had stopped and everyone had become petrified.

  They were waiting for the next murmur and the next movement, then, as none arrived, they all came to life again, as if someone had started the film moving once more. The man from the ship cocked his head upwards, looking like a dog which has heard a noise in the night. Then he turned quickly towards the Via Garibaldi where you could see the topmasts of his ship between the houses that split the glare in a wedge of shadow, like an axe-stroke across the sunshine. He was obviously concerned for her safety, but she was still there, still resting her fat bottom gently on the grey sand of the low tide, gathering weeds and garlanded by her own refuse.

  Emiliano, who owned the bar where Patch sat, came to the door and stared upwards at its bizarre façade and tower with bulging mild brown eyes. He had built it with his own broad back before the war and in his enthusiasm to make it impressive had painted pillars on it, a bellicose fresco and an artificial window complete with shutters and even curtains, and finally, lower down on the blue-washed walls, a picture of the Virgin Mary with the words, O Maria, Tutta Bella Lei, O, Gloria, O, Onoria, O, Amore, to make up for his repeated absences from Mass.

  ‘O, Mary, all that is beautiful, O, Glory, O, Honour, O, Love,’ ought to be enough, he had fervently hoped, to offer some measure of protection to his property in times of trouble.

  He studied the plaster for cracks, as he always did after a rumble from Mont’ Amarea, his flabby cheeks blue with a two-day old beard, his great paunch covered by a voluminous white apron that was spotted with wine and coffee and marked in a brown smear where the arc of his stomach rubbed constantly against the polished counter, then he disappeared again behind the great engine of the Espresso machine, talking with his hands to his customers.

  ‘Uno scoppio,’ Patch heard him say. ‘An explosion.’

  The taxi-driver had opened the door of his taxi and, as Patch watched, he slammed it shut again, staring at it with a bewildered expression on his face. The bill-poster completed the hanging of the sheet of paper, shouting over his shoulder to the girl with the bicycle and to the two or three men who had run to the point where the Via Garibaldi joined the piazza so they could stare at the mountain. Then he left it, ‘Vote for the People’s Friends’, hanging a little lop-sidedly, as he slammed his brush back into his bucket and hurried away, still shouting and gesturing with his free hand, to pick up the posters of the opposition and hang them too. The girl with the bicycle smiled nervously as he called to her, then she remounted and rode off into the Via Garibaldi, blushing as the men on the corner stopped chattering to themselves and stared approvingly at her legs as she passed. The small boys who had been watching the bill-poster were screaming in a group that had been joined by several women and became attached eventually to the men on the corner of the Via Garibaldi.

  The priest was disappearing inside the church. The loud speaker car by the harbour and the politician in the Via Garibaldi, taking advantage of the arrival of more people from their houses and shops, had opened up again and were trying to shout each other down once more. Then Emiliano and a couple of his customers returned to the door of the bar to stare at the mountain and the feather of vapour that drifted away from the summit, then they too joined the group on the corner, arguing noisily. A few windows had been flung open and people had begun to appear on balconies, pushing out the crooked shutters which were still closed on the higher floors where the sun had penetrated a few minutes before.

  The man from the ship was staring upwards again, as though he half expected the sky to drop in on him at any moment, his mouth open, his eyes blank and questioning. Patch grinned and called out to him.

  ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘It’s as normal here as a baby’s breathing.’

  The other stared curiously back at Patch’s lean face and black hair and the thin prominent nose that gave him the look of a handsome eagle.

  He was still busy drawing, a lean colourful figure in a paint-daubed shirt and faded cotton trousers that hung off his hips, his face half hidden under the frayed fringe of the battered straw hat.

  ‘You English, Mister?’ the sailor asked. Patc
h looked up and grinned again.

  ‘Sure. Name’s Patch. Tom Patch. You off the ship?’

  ‘That’s right.’ There was a vague relief in the little man’s voice – as though it were a comfort just then to find a fellow countryman – and he moved across and sat by Patch. ‘Fred Hannay’s the name,’ he said. ‘I’m master. Just come on this run. Toulon, Balearics and Naples and here. Back’ards and forrards like an overwrought squirrel.’ He spoke with a thick North Country burr, clipped, broad and ugly. ‘Listen–’ he paused, his eyes still troubled ‘–what was that just then? It felt as though something damn’ big just broke wind.’

  ‘It did. It was the mountain.’ Patch indicated the massive bulk behind him with his crayon, then bent over the menu card again, glancing up occasionally at Hannay with shrewd black eyes that made the little man feel uncomfortable. He took the cigarette Patch pushed across between pencil strokes, a startled look on his face.

  ‘You mean it’s going to erupt or something?’ he asked.

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ Patch reassured him with a smile. ‘A touch of flatulence, I should say.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Hannay glanced again at the mountain, then he gestured at the piazza.

  The bill-poster was just disappearing into the Via Garibaldi. The girl on the bicycle and the priest had already vanished. The loudspeaker and the politicians were giving it all they’d got again, appealing to the people who now lined the fringes of the piazza – the loafers, the shopkeepers, Emiliano, the man who kept the hairdresser’s, one of his customers, still swathed in linen, the bent little creature who sold coral rings in the cavernous shop next to the Museo, the fruit-sellers from the steps of the church, a man who had appeared with a plate of spaghetti in his hand, the beggar who had been asleep in the sun, still and silent as a bundle of old rags until a moment ago, his barrel organ stuffed into a corner, out of the traffic. The taxi-driver was standing by his taxi with Emiliano’s waiter, demonstrating the extraordinary behaviour of the car door. He had it open again and Hannay saw him close it with his foot, his hands held high in the air. ‘Look,’ he was saying. ‘Just like that!’ The piazza, dormant a moment before, was suddenly alive and noisy, with more people coming out of doors every minute.