The Doomed Oasis (30 page)

But my mind was on the practicalities. “That's all very well,” I said, glancing uneasily at the old man. “But Salim doesn't speak any English. And I don't know the country.” I looked about me quickly. Khalid's bodyguard was behind him, Sheikh Hassa right beside me. There was no escape. “Where am I supposed to go, anyway? Where is David?”

“You go to the Umm al Samim.”

Sheikh Hassa leaned his black beard forward, and his harsh voice repeated the words “Umm al Samim” on a note of surprise. And then he looked at me and rolled his eyes up into his head and laughed and made a strangling sound.

“What's he mean by that?” I demanded. “What's he trying to tell me?”

Khalid's hand gripped my arm. “The Umm al Samim is quicksands. But there is a way,” he added quickly, and I glanced at Hassa and knew that he'd been telling me that I was going to my death. “I tell you there is a way,” Khalid said fiercely. “Salim knows it as far as the first good ground. He will guide you as he guided us when we make original exploration two seasons past.”

“And what about the rest?”

“You will find by testing with a stick. Perhaps when you call, David or the Wahiba will hear you.” His grip on my arm tightened. “You will go?”

“Suppose I refuse?”

“Then I take you with me back to Saraifa.” He was looking me straight in the face. “This is what you want, isn't it correct—to find David? Now you find him.” And he added, staring at me hard: “Are you afraid to go?”

“No, I'm not afraid.” I saw him smile. He knew after that I'd hardly refuse. “All right, Khalid,” I said. “I'll go. But what do you want me to do? A boy hiding out in some quicksands isn't going to help you now.”

“He must help us—he and his father. We are at point of desperation now, and it is his fault.” He said it without rancour, a statement of fact, and he added: “It was a good plan, the way he visualize it—to go into hiding and, by making appearance he is dead, to draw attention to his survey. He think you will succeed to obtain the signature of Sir Gorde to a concession and that then per'aps we have oil, at least the support of the Company and so of your people. But instead all is turned to disaster. Because he is working on that border the raiders of Hadd are in our territory and the concession
Haj
Whitaker arrange is torn up. We have no Arab friends like the Emir has. We are alone, and everything is in conspiracy now to destroy us.”

His words, the intensity with which he spoke, showed me the tragedy of it—father and son working for the same ends, but against each other. “Yes, but what can he do?”

“He must ride to a meeting with his father. Salim has good camels. You and David together—you must persuade
Haj
Whitaker to stop drilling on the Hadd border and to go to Bahrain, to the Political Resident. If they don't send soldiers, then please to send us modern weapons and automatic guns so that we can fight.”

“Very well,” I said. “I'll do what you say. I only hope it works out.”

“Tell David also …” He hesitated. “Tell him it is possible I do not see him again. And if that is happening, then say to him that he is my brother, and the Emir Abdul-Zaid bin Sultan my enemy into death.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He will understand.”

“But you're not going to your death.”

“
Inshallah!
I do not know that.” His tone was fatalistic. “This is an old feud, Meester Grant. As old as Saraifa is old, or Hadd. It goes back many centuries to the days when all the
falajes
are running with water, a hundred channels making irrigation for the palms. Then Saraifa is a great garden extenuating many miles, and the dates go by camel north, to the sea and to India, across the mountains to the Batina coast, and south to the Hadhramaut—even, some say, to Mukalla and the olden port of Cana to be carried by dhow to the far places of the world. But we are always too much occupied with our gardens, and the people of Hadd are very much envying us for our riches. They are men of the hills, cruel and hard and altogether without goodness. So.” He gave a helpless little shrug. “So it is that we are always fighting for our date-gardens and one after another the
falaj
channels are being destroyed until Saraifa is as you see it now, open to the desert and soon to die if the
falajes
are not rebuilt. Do you know, Meester Grant, there is not one man who can tell me, even when I am a little boy—even by the hearsay of others, his father or his grandfather—what it is like when there are more than six
falajes
working. Always wars … always, until the British come a hundred years ago. And now—” he spread his hands in a little gesture of helplessness—” now another war perhaps, and if we do not have a victory, then it is finish and in a few months the
shamal
will have blown the sands of the Rub al Khali over our walls and our houses and we shall be like those old lost cities in India.… There will be nothing to show that we ever exist in this place.” He stopped there, a little breathless because he had put so much of himself and his emotions into foreign words. “You tell him that, please.” He turned then and spoke rapidly to Salim. The tattered figure moved towards me. “You go now,” Khalid said. “
Fi aman allah!
In the peace of God.”

“And you also,” I said. The skinny hand of my guide was on my arm, a steel grip propelling me down mud steps out into the shadowed cool of an alley. In a little open space beyond there were camels couched, and at his cries three tall beasts lumbered to their feet. They had provisions already loaded and dark skin bags bulging with water. A boy brought two more camels, and Salim chattered a gap-toothed protest as he realized that I didn't even know how to mount my beast. They brought it to its knees and put me on it, and at a word it hoisted me violently into the air. The old man put his foot on the lowered neck of the other and stepped lightly into the saddle, tucking his legs behind him.

We left Dhaid by a small gateway facing south, just the two of us and the three pack-beasts tied nose to tail. The boy ran beside us as far as the base of the limestone hill and then we were out on the gravel flat and travelling fast, a peculiar, swaying gait. It required all my concentration just to remain in the saddle. Perhaps it was as well, for it left me no time to consider my predicament. Our shadows lumbered beside us, for the sun was slanting towards the west, and Salim began to sing a high-pitched, monotonous song. It was a small sound in the solitude that surrounded us, but though I couldn't understand the words, I found it comforting.

The sun vanished before it reached the horizon, hazed and purple as a mulberry. We camped at dusk where the dusty green of new vegetation spattered the sand between ribs of limestone. The camels were let graze, and Salim built a fire of furze and cooked a mess of rice and meat. One of the pack-beasts was in milk, and we drank it warm from the same bowl. And when he'd looked to his ancient rifle, oiling it carefully, we mounted and went on again.

We travelled all that night without a break. The moon turned the desert to a bleak bone white, and in the early hours a mist came up and it was cold. By then I was too tired to care where I was going, and only the pain of the saddle chafing the insides of my thighs, the ache of unaccustomed muscles kept me awake. The dawn brought a searing wind that whipped the mist aside and flung a moving cloud of sand in our faces. Lightning flashed in the gloom behind us, but no rain fell—just the wind and the driving sand particles.

We stopped again for food, lukewarm and gritty with sand, and then on again until the heat and the moving sand drove us into camp. I laid my head on my briefcase, covering my face with my headcloth, and slept like the dead, only to be wakened again and told to mount. My nose and mouth were dry with sand, and we went on and on at a walking pace that was relentless in the demands it made on my endurance. Dawn broke and the sun lipped the mountains that poked their rugged tops above the horizon to the east. Salim didn't sing that, day, and as the wind died and the sand became still, the heat increased until my head reeled and dark specks swam before my eyes.

By midday we were walking our camels along the edge of a dead, flat world that stretched away into the west, to disappear without horizon in a blur of haze. There was no dune nor any outcrop of rock, no tree, no bush, nothing to break the flat monotony of it. Salim turned in his saddle. “Umm al Samim,” he said with a sweep of his hand, the palm held downward and quivering. I remembered the strangled sound Sheikh Hassa had made at the mention of that name, and yet it looked quite innocent: only that unnatural flatness and the dark discolouration of water seepage revealed the quagmire that lay concealed below the crust of wind-blown sand.

We followed the shore of the sands for about an hour whilst the sun beat down on us and the dull expanse shimmered with humidity. And then, by the gnarled remains of some camel thorn, we dismounted and started into the quicksands, leading our camels.

Close inshore there were patches of solid ground, but further out there was nothing that seemed to have any substance, the ground and air both quivering as we struggled forward. I can't remember any sense of fear. Fear is a luxury requiring energy, and I had none to spare. I can, however, remember every physical detail.

It was a
sabkhat
on the grand scale, and beneath the hard-baked crust my feet touched slime. At times it was difficult to stand at all, at others I broke through to the black filth below, and at every step I could feel the quiver of the mud. The camels slithered, bellowing in their fear, in constant danger of losing their legs and falling straddled. We had to drag the wretched beasts, even beat them, to keep them moving. This and the need to be ready to give them some support when they slipped did much to keep my mind from the filthy death that threatened at every step. And whenever I had a moment to look ahead, there was the Umm al Samim stretched out pulsating in the humid glare, innocent-seeming under its crust of sand, yet deadly-looking because it was so flat and level—as level as a lake.

And it seemed to have no end. It was like the sea when visibility is cut by haze. But here there were no buoys, no markers that I could see, nothing from which Salim could get his bearings. Yet once I saw the old tracks of camels, the round holes half filled with sand, and whenever I broke through to the mud below, my feet found solid ground before I was in further than my knees; in some way that was not apparent to me Salim was following a rib of rock hidden below the surface of the sand.

Time had no meaning in the pitiless heat, and the sweat rolled dripping down my back. I had a moment of panic when I would have turned and run if it had been possible. But then a camel slipped, and a moment later Salim seized my arm and pointed ahead with his rifle. Little tufts of withered herbs lay limp in isolated clumps, and on the edge of visibility a gnarled thorn tree shimmered like a witch, its gaunt arms crooked and beckoning.

With the first of the withered herbs I felt the ground under my feet. It was hard and firm, and when I set my foot down nothing quaked, there was no gurgling sound, no sound of imminent breakup of the crust. Where the camel thorn stood there was naked rock, and I flung myself down, revelling in the scorched hardness of it.

We were on a little island, raised imperceptibly above the flat level of the quicksands, and it was as far as Salim had ever penetrated. I watched him as he searched for Khalid's tracks, stopping every now and then to call, a high-pitched, carrying sound made with his hands cupped round his mouth. But the steaming heat absorbed his cries like a damp blanket, and there was no answer.

In the end he gave it up and began prodding with his camel stick along the edge of the sands. Twice I had to pull him out, but finally he found firm ground beneath the crust, and, leaving the camels, we started forward again, moving a step at a time, watching the quiver of the crust and prodding with the stick.

Behind us our tracks vanished into nothing. The rock island vanished, too, the white glare swallowing even the bulk of our camels. We were alone then, just the old man and myself in a little circle of flat sand that quaked and gurgled and sucked at our feet.

I don't know how long we were feeling our way like that. Once we saw the faint outline of a camel's pad, but only once. And then suddenly thorn trees throbbed in the haze ahead, looking huge, but dwindling as we approached the firm ground on which they stood. They were no more than waist height, and, standing beside them, Salim cupped his hands and called again.

This time his cry was answered—a human voice calling to us, away to our left where the sands ran flat. I thought it was imagination, perhaps an unnatural echo of Salim's voice, for there was nothing there: an empty void throbbing in the heat, and the air so intensely pale it hurt the eyes.

And then suddenly the void was no longer empty. A man had materialized like a genie out of the heart of a furnace, his face burned black by the pitiless heat, his lips cracked, his ragged beard bleached by the sun, his hair, too, under the filthy headcloth.

He came forward and then stopped, suddenly suspicious, reaching for the gun slung at his shoulder.

“Salim!” Recognition brought a quick flash of teeth, white in the burnt dark face. “
Wellah! Salaam alaikum
.” He came forward and gripped Salim's wrist in a Bedou handclasp whilst the old man talked, his words coming fast and high-pitched with excitement. And then the man turned to stare at me, pale eyes widening in startled disbelief. It was only when he finally spoke my name that I realized this strange nomadic-looking figure was David Whitaker.

“It's a long time,” I said. “I didn't recognize you.”

He laughed and said: “Yes, a hell of a long time.” He reached out his hand, and his grip was hard on mine. Not content with that, he took hold of both my shoulders and held them as though overwhelmed by the need for physical human contact. “I can't believe it,” he said. And again: “I can't believe it.”