The Men Behind (13 page)

Armed with that information, Georgiades began to make covert inquiries among the older students, but so far without result.

At the end of a week Owen pulled the trackers out. The bones of the second boy and the fragments of the bomb appeared to have been lost forever beneath the shifting sands of the desert.

Hamada continued to niggle at him, however. He felt obscurely dissatisfied. Something told him that there was something important to be found out at Hamada. Whatever it was, he had not found it out. Somehow or other he would have to go back.

The opportunity came about ten days after he had left.

An urgent message came from Ali Osman Pasha: “
They have followed me down here. Come at once
.”

They were waiting for me,” said Ali Osman. “I saw them.”

“Where was this?”

“At Nag Balyana. It is across the river,” Ali Osman explained.

“In the sugar cane?”

“No, no. Beyond the cane fields. In the hills. I rode around some rocks and there they were.”

“How many were there?”

“Two.” Ali Osman looked at him soberly. “As usual.”

“You have been followed before?”

“In Cairo,” said Ali Osman. “Not here. Until now.”

“But were they following? Pardon me, but you said you came upon them.”

“The following time was past,” said Ali Osman. “Now they were waiting.”

“They were armed, I take it?”

“I saw their rifles.”

“And they were waiting?”

“Yes,” said Ali Osman. “They were waiting for me.”

Owen hesitated.

“Forgive me, Pasha,” he said, “but I need to ask these things. How do you know they were waiting for you? Might they not have been a group of ordinary villagers—?”

“Fellahin,” said Ali Osman, “do not carry rifles. Nor would they have been in the desert.”

“Camel-herders?”

“Camel-herders do not wear city clothes. Nor, before you ask me, do brigands. Not in Hamada they don’t.”

“City clothes,” said Owen. “That makes a difference.”

“It made a difference to
me
,” said Ali Osman. “I turned my horse and bolted.”

“You were on a horse?” Owen could not keep the surprise out of his voice.

“How else would I get to Nag Balyana?” asked Ali Osman rather tartly.

“Forgive me, Pasha. I had not thought of you as a desert man.”

“One has one’s roots,” said Ali Osman with dignity.

“Of course. It was just that, well, I wasn’t sure that you had recovered so completely from the bruising you received.”

“Battering,” said Ali Osman, “battering. At the hands of the mob.”

“I am glad to see you so recovered. May I ask what was taking you out to Nag Balyana?”

“Sport. Yes, sport. I was hunting hare.” Sensing that this sounded unlikely, Ali Osman modified his claim. “And duty. I was combining pleasure with duty. It is a part of the estate I seldom visit. Justifiably. There is nothing there,
mon cher
, absolutely nothing there. All the same, they should have an opportunity of seeing their Pasha. Occasionally, that is.
Very
occasionally,” said Ali Osman with emphasis.

“It was a kind of regal progress?”

“Exactly.” Ali Osman was pleased by the thought. “I am, after all, their king,” he said modestly.

“And while you were—showing yourself, so to speak, you came upon these men?”

“Afterwards. I couldn’t take too much of it, you know. The heat!” Ali Osman fanned himself at the mere thought. “In the fields it was terrific. After a while I had had enough. So I went hunting here.”

“Not unaccompanied, I trust?”

“Naturally I had a few servants with me. My retinue,” said Ali Osman, still enjoying the regal image.

“And they were with you when you came upon the men?”

“Of course. Though not for long. They departed from the spot even more quickly than I did.”

“Could you show me the spot?”

“They could. I see no reason to return personally to that detested place.” He clapped his hands and spoke to a servant. “They will be waiting for you outside. It will do them good to have to return to a spot they quit in so cowardly a fashion.”

The servants, however, when Owen questioned them on the way to Nag Balyana, were unabashed.

“They were bad men,” they said, shaking their heads vigorously, “oh, very bad men.”

“How do you know?”

“We could see at once.”

“They were not from these parts.”

“They were dressed like foreigners,” put in an older man.

“So they could not have been brigands?”

“Oh no.” The men were definite. “We know the brigands. They are friends of ours.”

“I see.”

“Besides, the brigands stay in the sugar cane.”

Ahead of them Owen suddenly caught sight of the river. It was about half a mile wide at this point, blue and glinting in the sun.

They walked the horses down to the water’s edge and stood waiting for a boat. One or two of the men dismounted and splashed water over their heads. The rest stayed on their horses enjoying the cool river breeze.

The boat when it came was a small one and could take only two horses at a time. Owen crossed first with the oldest servant and had a long wait on the other side. They let their horses nibble at the sparse grass on the river bank and squatted down on the baked earth.

“It always takes a long time,” said the servant, watching the boat tacking back through the sandbanks, “especially when there are a lot of you. When we are with the Pasha, it takes forever.”

“It is fortunate that you don’t have to do it often,” said Owen, commiserating.

“Often enough lately,” said the servant. “Since the Pasha came down we have been going almost every day.”

“Every day?” said Owen, surprised. “Not with the Pasha, surely?”

“Oh yes. It surprised us. He wasn’t so fond of riding when he was here before.”

“There can’t be that many villages on this side.”

“There aren’t any. Well, there’s one further up the river. You see, the cultivation on this side of the river is fairly recent. In the old Pasha’s time there wasn’t any. It’s only in the last twenty years that they’re starting growing over here. The villages are all on the other side, where the house is. People come over here to work.”

“What’s the Pasha doing over here, then?”

“There’s a holy shrine on the slopes of the jebel. He goes to that.”

“Every day?”

The servant shrugged. “He’s become very holy all of a sudden.”

“It’s a bit out of the way, isn’t it?”

“That makes the shrine more powerful, of course. Perhaps the Pasha needs a powerful saint to intercede for him.”

“He doesn’t come over here to hunt for hare?”

“Hare?” The servant looked at him as if he had gone off his head.

When at last the party was all across they mounted their horses again and rode on through the sugar cane. On this side the cane grew more thickly. Even on horseback they were not high enough to see over it. It was like riding through a tunnel.

Owen was glad when he saw the desert ahead of him. The horses were glad too and perked up. When they emerged into the open they burst of their own accord into a little gallop.

Ahead of him, some way off across the sand, Owen could see the rocky outline of the jebel, rising like a tooth out of the flatness of the desert.

The jebel was further off than it looked and the horses soon slowed to a walk. There was a slight but firm desert wind which blew all the time. At first, after the enclosed heat of the sugar cane, they found it very pleasant. Soon, however, the servants and the trackers wrapped a fold of their galabeahs across their faces.

Owen wished he could do the same. When he had ridden patrol in the north he had worn the same headdress as the other men and he wished he could do that now. Although the wind was slight, there was the perpetual small sting of particles on his skin, and he had virtually to close his eyes against both the sand and the sun.

He was carried back to his early days in Egypt, when he had just transferred from India and was exhilarated by the space and emptiness of the desert after the dense, close-packed humanity of the Indian coastal towns.

Very soon, however, he was being reminded uncomfortably that it was some time since he had last done much riding. He wondered how Ali Osman had found it.

Why all the story about showing himself to the villagers and hunting hare? The Pasha was obviously a fantasist. Perhaps he had invented it all to compensate for the comparative austerity of provincial life. Or perhaps beneath the hedonism was buried a remnant of the traditional harshness and sparseness of the desert.

Perhaps the Pasha was going out into the desert like some modern Elijah or Elisha to commune alone in the hope of spiritual renewal.

Or perhaps that was how he saw himself. That was more likely. Another expression of his fantasy. Extruded from the great city which was his natural element, perhaps the only way in which he could come to terms with a place like Hamada was by adopting a role which translated the exile into a great personal drama.

Somehow Owen could not quite see Ali Osman as a spiritual explorer. What he could see him as was someone playing at being a spiritual explorer.

Provided that this did not involve too great an affront to the flesh. The journey to Nag Balyana was just about right: sufficiently far and sufficiently uncomfortable for Ali Osman to be able to persuade himself that he was donning a spiritual hair shirt, not so far that he could not return at night to the comforts of his cushions and his people and the coolness of his house.

For a long time the jebel did not seem to come any nearer at all and Owen slumped into the daze which seemed an inherent part of any lengthy desert expedition. But then he emerged from the daze to find the rock looming up in front of him.

The ground had become stonier and they were riding now over just buried rock. The hooves of the horses tapped sharply on the hard ground.

The rocks began to break through the surface and the horses had to wind their way through them. Ahead the jebel rose steep and sheer.

It was a ridge of low, rocky hills which ran across in front of them for not much more than a mile. At first the line of the rock seemed unbroken but as they drew closer they could see gaps and recesses, outcrops which they had to skirt and which could easily conceal someone.

Owen began to understand how it was that Ali Osman had come so suddenly on his pursuers.

If, indeed, they had been pursuing him. Owen would have dismissed the whole thing long ago as another figment of Ali Osman’s fantasizing had it not been for one thing: the fact that the men had been dressed in city clothes.

They were riding parallel to the face of the jebel now. The horses instinctively took the easiest way through the rocks. In the sand Owen could see marks that other horses had traveled that way before.

Or perhaps the same horses. The trackers weren’t interested.

They came around an outcrop and then the leading servant pointed. Unnecessarily; the trackers had already seen.

They slipped from their horses and walked in towards the main face of the rock. A few yards short of it some large slabs lay in an extended curve around the foot of the cliff, bending back into a rift. The trackers stopped at the sharpest point of the bend and stood looking at the ground.

Owen walked across to join them. The sand was chewed up by the feet of several camels and to Owen it seemed that all individual tracks had been obliterated.

“Six camels,” said the leading tracker, “two of them baggage camels being led. I think the foreigners would have been on these camels.” He showed Owen some indistinct sets of pad prints. “They stopped here and then they turned and went back.”

“How long ago?” asked Owen.

“Three days,” said the tracker.

One of the trackers started following the tracks around into the rift.

Was it worth following the trail? Owen could not make up his mind. In three days the men could be a long way away, halfway down the Thieves’ Road. There must be at least four of them. The three trackers were all armed. Owen, as usual, wasn’t. The Pasha’s servants certainly weren’t and were keeping well back.

The men were probably simple camel thieves and the threat to the Pasha a product of his own easily alarmable imagination. Owen couldn’t afford to spend a long time away from the city. Perhaps he should leave it at that.

He would have but for one thing.

“Can you tell from the tracks whether any of them were city men?” he asked the trackers.

“Oh yes. This one and this one,” said the trackers, pointing to the pad prints again.

“How do you know?”

The tracker found it hard to put into words.

“It is the way they ride,” he said. “You can see that they have backed up into the rocks here, which is a silly way to ride. And then they are not sitting properly.” He thought hard and then spread his hands helplessly. “You can just
see
that they were not brought up with camels.”

“Very well,” said Owen. “We will go after them. A little,” he amended.

They went back for their horses and then rode on round the face of the jebel.

High up in the rocks there was the flash of something white.

“What’s that?”

“A shrine,” said one of the trackers indifferently.

“It is the shrine of the Haji Abbas,” said one of the servants.

“Where the Pasha goes?”

“Yes. There is a path up from the rift.”

“Have you been with him?”

“Yes. We waited outside while the Pasha prayed.”

The ground now was covered with boulders and the horses picked their way with difficulty. There had been a heavy fall from the cliff above.

“How far are you going, effendi?” asked the servant. “If you don’t turn soon you won’t be at the river before it gets dark.”

Owen was wondering that too.

They came to the edge of a fall of scree. The horses hesitated and then plunged across it, their feet sliding and slipping on the loose stones.

The servants stopped.

“We will go back now, effendi,” they said.

“Very well. Only lend me your headdress,” Owen said to one of them. “It will be evening soon and you will not need it.”

“All I have is yours,” the man responded automatically and swept his headdress off. Owen sensed, however, a slight discomfort. No Arab felt at ease if he was bareheaded for long.

“And in exchange, take mine,” he said.

The man beamed, took Owen’s hat, and rode off rejoicing.

“Bring it to me tomorrow!” Owen called after him.

On the other side of the scree the ground sloped away sharply down into an enormous hollow. It was like riding down the slope of a dune.

One of the trackers muttered something. All three suddenly seemed to have found something ahead which interested them.

On the other side of the hollow was another set of tracks. It came over the sand and joined the trail they were following at right angles. The tracks blended together.