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“Come on,” Ben told Firedrake, putting the backpacks over his shoulders.
But the dragon did not move. “Shouldn’t we wait for you, Sorrel?” he called anxiously “Suppose the humans turn up?”
“Well, even if they do come this way, I’ll hear them from a long way off!” replied Sorrel. “Go on, do get out of here.”
Firedrake sighed. “Very well, but hurry up.”
“Brownie’s honor,” promised Sorrel. She looked around, pleased. The tracks on the slope and in the riverbed were already gone. “If you happen to pass any mushrooms think of me!”
“We will,” said Ben, and he followed the dragon.
They found Firedrake a hiding place, a cavern among the rocky foothills, half-hidden by tangled thornbushes and at a safe distance from the human camp. There were carvings of ugly faces in the rock around the entrance, and in one place the stone was covered by strange writing. In fact, the place looked rather eerie. But the coarse, prickly grass around it grew tall, and no path had been trodden through the thick undergrowth. To Ben’s relief, it looked very much as if the archaeologists weren’t interested in this cavern.
“I’ll go and see what’s keeping Sorrel,” he said after Firedrake had made himself comfortable in the cool cave. “I’ll leave the backpacks here.”
“See you later,” murmured Firedrake, already half-asleep.
Ben unfolded the rat’s map as well as he could, weighted it with small stones, and left it to dry in the sun. Then he ran back to join Sorrel as fast as possible. On the way he obliterated Firedrake’s tracks. His own human footprints weren’t likely to arouse much suspicion, but where he could he walked over the stones and remains of walls that rose from the sand everywhere. The sun wasn’t very high yet, but it was extremely bright as it blazed down from the sky. Wet with perspiration and breathless, Ben reached the dry riverbed. It was cooler here under the palms. He looked around.
Sorrel was nowhere to be seen. Ben raced down the slope, crossed the riverbed, and ran to the place on the beach where Firedrake had landed. But there was no sign of Sorrel there, either, only the dragon’s tracks. His huge paws had sunk deep into the sand, and the long mark left by his tail dragging behind him was clearly visible, too. Why hadn’t Sorrel finished getting rid of all those tracks?
Ben looked around anxiously. Where was Sorrel?
The camp was swarming with people now. Vehicles were driving in and out, and there were men digging in the hot sand among the ruins.
Ben went over to the spot where Firedrake’s tracks appeared as if out of nowhere. Sorrel had clearly only got this far. Ben crouched down to look at the sand. It was all churned up as if a great many feet had been scuffling in it. He could hardly make out Sorrel’s paw prints among the tracks of all the human boots that had trampled around in the sand. His heart thudding, Ben straightened up again. There’d been a vehicle standing not far off, and the prints of the boots led to it. But Sorrel’s paw prints didn’t show up again anywhere.
“They took her with them,” muttered Ben. “Those horrible people just took her away with them.”
The tire tracks led straight to the camp. Ben set off for it at a run.
12. Captured
There was hardly anyone in or around the big tents when Ben slipped into the camp. Most of the people staying there were out in the ruins, freeing ancient walls from the sand in the morning heat and dreaming of secret burial chambers where mummies slept. Ben looked longingly past the tents to the place marked out by ropes where the excavation site lay. It must be thrilling to climb down the ruined stairways where the archaeologists were scraping desert sand off the steps.
The sound of excited voices brought Ben out of his dreams. Cautiously he followed the noise, creeping along the narrow alleys between the tents, until he suddenly came to an open space. Men in long, billowing robes, and a few others wearing pith helmets, were crowding around something that stood in the middle of this space in the shade of a large date palm. Some of them were waving their arms around; others seemed to have been struck dumb. Ben thrust his way through the crowd until he could see what they were so excited about. Several cages, both large and small, stood under the palm tree. There were chickens in some of them, and another held an unhappy-looking monkey. But the largest cage contained Sorrel. She had turned her back on the gaping humans, but Ben recognized her at once.
The men around him were speaking a variety of different languages — Arabic, French, English, German — but Ben could pick up a phrase here and there that he understood.
“In my opinion it’s a mutant monkey,” said a man with a big nose and a receding chin. “No one can doubt it.”
“I do doubt it, though, Professor Rosenberg,” said a tall, thin man standing not far from Ben.
Professor Rosenberg groaned and raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, please! Don’t start on about those fabulous creatures of yours again, Greenbloom.”
But Professor Greenbloom only smiled. “What you have there, my dear colleague,” he said quietly, “is a brownie. A Spotted Forest Brownie, to be precise — which is distinctly surprising, since the species occurs chiefly in the highlands of Scotland.”
Ben looked at him in surprise. How could the man know that? Sorrel was obviously listening to the conversation, too, for Ben saw her prick up her ears. However, Professor Rosenberg just shook his head pityingly.
“I don’t know how you can keep making such a fool of yourself, Greenbloom!” he said. “I mean, you’re a scholar. A professor of archaeology, a doctor of history and ancient languages and I don’t know what else besides. Yet you insist on putting forward these ridiculous theories!”
“In my view it’s the rest of you who are making fools of yourselves,” replied Professor Greenbloom. “A monkey! Oh, come on! Did you ever see a monkey like that?”
Sorrel turned to look angrily at the pair of them. “Fly agarics!” she spat. “Death caps, yellow stainers, destroying angels!”
Professor Rosenberg retreated in alarm. “Good heavens! What extraordinary sounds it’s making!”
“It’s calling you names, didn’t you hear it?” Professor Greenbloom smiled. “It’s calling you mushroom names, and it seems to know a good deal about fungi! Fly agaric, death cap, yellow stainer, destroying angel — those are all poisonous species that make you feel sick, and I expect we’re making this brownie feel pretty sick ourselves. What terrible human presumption it is to catch other living creatures and hold them captive!”
