Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  They drank watery coffee together from paper cups and shared stories and descended into Bir Gifgafa airfield in the middle of a sandstorm which battered the aircraft around the sky like a pinball and they finally bounced down onto the landing strip in an explosion of golden dust.

  Everything in every direction was clouded yellow and from somewhere beyond it the sun burned with such ferocity that nothing in that place could live.

  Two runways ran parallel to each other and a gathering of outbuildings stood aside them, blanketed in dust, and for nearly fifty miles in every direction there existed nothing but sand. The Hercules sat still in that desert outpost like a hulking monolith and it was some time before the Egyptian control sent their staff to meet it. Though the runway was tarmacked and lit, it was covered in a blanket of gold that glimmered and blurred and circled wildly in the winds and seemed to stretch unrestrained into the desert itself. Sand had banked up against the old buildings as the Sinai had reclaimed what was its own. There were no other aircraft there, though at the far end of the compound a single helicopter was submerged under a dune, its rotary blades white and battered and the glass of its screen smashed so that even the inside was filled with sand.

  When the aircraft door was pulled open, a gust of sand and dust streamed into the aircraft and the men held their hands to their faces to protect themselves as they pushed against the wind to the metal stairs. A single Egyptian soldier stood waiting for them at the bottom wrapped in robes and scarves and wearing big black motorcycle goggles that shielded his face entirely and gave him the look of an unearthly insect.

  He beckoned them down onto the sandy tarmac and shouted against the storm that they should head for the old metal building to the north and the men ran with their heads down to the command post and kicked open the battered steel doors and nearly fell inside.

  Two more Egyptian guards were waiting inside dressed in desert gear and as the visitors righted themselves, one pulled the keffiyeh away from his face and asked them for their paperwork.

  “What the hell happened here?” the taller of the two young engineers asked as he pulled the folder of papers from his pack.

  The guard looked back at him and frowned and said nothing.

  “Is this place operational?”

  The guard read the papers in his hand and handed them back.

  “What is operational? The plane landed here, did it not?”

  The man shrugged.

  The guard read over the man’s paperwork and handed it back to him.

  “That is why you are here no?” the guard asked again to the engineer.

  The engineer looked to his colleague and then back at the guard.

  “I just expected the place to be a little more than this, that’s all”

  The guard smiled to him through narrow eyes.

  “I do not know what hospitality you have received in your friendly American hotel my friend, but we are fighting a war of survival here. And you are here to help are you not?”

  The engineer nodded.

  “Yes sir we are”

  The guard nodded and his colleague came over and spoke to the engineers and led them away to begin what mission they had been sent there to undertake.

  The kid took his papers from his pocket and handed them across to the guard and the guard flicked his eyes across them and looked back to the kid.

  “The British are giving taxi service to civilians now?”

  The kid cocked his head to the side and smiled softly.

  “I know people”

  The guard didn’t smile.

  “And where exactly do you intend to go from here?”

  The kid looked across to the window at the side of the room, blacked out by the sand built up outside it, pushing inwards on its old frame

  “I’m going north”

  The guard smiled and looked across to his colleague and smiled again but the other guards face was still covered by his keffiyeh and whatever his response was it was lost.

  The guard handed the papers back to the kid and he stuffed them into his back pocket.

  “You don’t have a bag?”

  The kid shook his head and the guard nodded and smiled again to himself.

  “I don’t have a bag and I don’t have a jacket and I don’t have a horse but I’m heading north to the coast and that’s all there is to know”

  The guard nodded and said he understood and he would see if there was something he could do to help for he admired the kid’s tenacity and his audacity.

  He showed the kid through to the main office where other Egyptian airmen were working at old computer terminals and fixing electrical equipment and talking quietly and they mostly ignored him when he walked in.

  “There is coffee through the door at the back, do not walk sand into my kitchen”

  Some time later an officer returned to the room and nodded to the kid who was sitting on the ground looking at the pictures in a weeks-old newspaper that he could not read a word of.

  “Are you an engineer?”

  The kid shook his head.

  “No, I think the engineers went off into the other side of the building, I haven’t seen them”

  The man shook his head.

  “I know they are engineers, are you engineer?”

  The kid said again that he wasn’t.

  “That is unfortunate for you as we may have a way of helping you avoid spending your remaining time on earth walking in the desert”

  The kid looked at him and cocked his head and smiled softly.

  “So try me”

  The man led the kid through a series of doors and, as they walked, the rooms grew darker behind the sandcovered windows and the ceiling lights flickered or were out entirely and the place was dusty and in disrepair.

  At the end of the hallway the white sunlight crept in under a broken doorframe. The door was held together with a steel bar.

  “Cover your face” the man said to him and pushed the bar and the wind caught the door and it swung out on its hinges and smashed backwards against the outside wall.

  The storm streamed across the open doorway and the man pulled his keffiyeh across his face and the kid held his hands over his eyes and nose and mouth and they ventured out together into the heat.

  The two of them ran with their heads ducked across the open space of the airstrip as the wind tore in from the west and they ran until they reached a small stone outbuilding under a smooth ramp of sand. On the sheltered side of the building the man crouched and flicked open a catch and pulled the steel door open from the sand and the two of them ducked inside and the man pulled it close behind them as best he could. The sound of the wind whistled through the cracks in the stonework.

  Inside, the place had once housed service vehicles and the metal shelves along the walls were lined with tools and boxes and spools of cable and a stepladder and cans of oil and tools of all trades. A single bulb swung from its fixing in the centre of the room like an old man’s toolshed.

  “You guys are state of the art” the kid mumbled to himself and, though the man could hear him, he said nothing.

  “Here” the man said, “if you can fix it you can take it”

  At the back of the room an old Norton motorcycle sat under an inch of dust. Every part of the metalwork had rusted and the tyres were both completely flat.

  “I am to believe this was brought here by your people many many years ago. You can take it back now”

  The kid walked over to it.

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  The man shrugged.

  “I do not know. It has not been ridden in twenty years. The key is in the ignition”

  The man nodded to him and pulled open the door and ducked outside again into the storm.

  The kid turned the key. Nothing happened.

  He had ridden through Namibia for three weeks some years earlier on something of Chinese manufacture with a 150cc engine, or so he thought, but he hadn’t done anything more than standard upk
eep on the bike and regardless, that bike wasn’t broken. The one he was looking at there most certainly was and he was certainly no mechanic.

  He turned the key again and still there was no sound other than the whistling of the wind and the sand around the building.

  He moved the surrounding boxes and heaved the front wheel of the bike from the floor and pulled it forward into the space so that he could see all the way around it and stood back and looked at it standing there, battered and rusted.

  He went to the shelving along the side of the garage and found an old cloth and dusted the bike down so that the he could better see the parts and when the metalwork had been cleaned there was just the faintest hint of green paintwork and the word Norton still visible along the side in white. He found a bottle of oil of some kind and soaked the chain and the forks and the working parts and polished away at them, cleaning the sand from the cracks until his arms hurt.

  The rims and the spokes were rusted but it seemed superficial and the integrity of the metalwork seemed sound and he rubbed rust from them and inflated the tyres and they both held air and he prayed they would stay that way and that the old machine would not break on him in the desert.

  With the metalwork cleaned as best he could manage and the sand mostly flushed away and oil dripping all over the sandy floor, he wiped his hands and threw the cloth onto the shelf and opened the metal door to the garage.

  He ducked as he ran back across the airstrip to the command building and when he reached the door he had exited through it was locked from the inside and he hugged the exterior wall as he rounded the building to the front main door.

  He went back into the room where the men were working and went to the back to the small kitchen and poured himself a cup of the old coffee. An older Egyptian officer was inside cleaning a plate in the small sink.

  The kid smiled to him softly and nodded and the man nodded back.

  “Hi” the kid said to him, “can I ask you something?”

  The officer put the plate down onto the side and turned to him. He was a huge man with a big moustache covering most of his face and friendly eyes and he smiled at the kid again and wrinkles spread across his face.

  “I’m trying to fix an old motorbike here and I need to jump the engine, do you have leads and a working engine I can use?”

  The man frowned.

  “Sorry, slow. What?”

  The kid apologised.

  “I am fixing a motorbike”

  “Here?” the man asked, pointing to the floor.

  “Yes, in the garage out there”

  The man cocked his chin. He was unsure who the kid was and what was occurring there and he glanced out of the door quickly as though assuring himself somehow of his place.

  He nodded slowly.

  “The battery is dead” the kid said, “I need to find a vehicle to start it again”

  The man lifted his head.

  “Ahhh” he said and repeated the kids request in Arabic to confirm it only to himself, “you want to start the engine with the, er”

  He moved his hands together and apart a few times signalling his understanding of the kid’s request.

  The kid smiled and nodded.

  The man showed him through the room and he called a colleague over and the two men spoke in Arabic and the other man nodded and told the kid to follow him.

  He took him out of the main building and back into the sandstorm and opened a side door to a small hanger housing a group of 4x4s and two fuel trucks. He went into the small office inside and opened the cabinet on the wall and took out a key and opened up one of the cars and took from the rear a black canvas bag containing the jump cables. He handed it to the kid and locked the car again.

  “You can not leave with this, you understand?” he said and the kid nodded and promised him he wouldn’t.

  The man started to leave the hangar.

  The kid called him back

  “I will need to use one of these cars too if I can”

  The man looked at him.

  “The cables won’t work unless they’re connected to something live on the other end”

  The man thought about this for a moment and scratched his head and sighed.

  The kid knew he was becoming a pain to those men and he knew that in past times he would have possibly been too decent to expect so much of a group of people whom he did not know and who had helped him so much already, but he knew that theirs was now a cutthroat existence where people perished at every turn if they could not fight and he was on his own and the only way to survive was to take what he could when he had the chance.

  “Thank you” he said.

  The man opened up the hangar door and climbed into the 4x4 and the kid hopped in too and the man drove sideways to the wind and parked it by the small sandcovered garage.

  “There are insurgents across the Sinai” the man said to the kid dryly and the kid nodded, “Ansar Jerusalem, Takfiri warriors, the Bedouins. You should hope that bike carries you well for you can not stop once you begin your journey”

  The kid nodded and said that he knew that.

  They pulled up alongside the garage.

  “Be quick or the sand will damage this vehicle, that is why it was locked away”

  The kid jumped out and quickly pulled open the garage door and wheeled the motorcycle forward and took the jumpleads from the black bag and the man turned the engine off and the kid connected the cables.

  “OK” he shouted and the man turned the 4x4 over and revved the engine and the kid turned the motorcycle ignition key.

  The engine didn’t make a sound but he saw the dial flicker slightly.

  He let it rest for a moment and did it again.

  The needle on the petrol gauge flicked up slightly and fell again.

  He let it rest.

  “Come on” the man called from the door.

  The sand was beating against him in the open front of the car.

  The kid looked up and frowned at him and shrugged his shoulders once and looked down again.

  He turned the key and the motor coughed and made a scraping sound and he turned the throttle and held it and it scratched and squeaked and he turned it more and then, in an eruption of sound and smoke, the engine cackled into life and filled the tiny garage with a tremendous roar.

  They disconnected the cables and the kid thanked him again and the man quickly spun the 4x4 round in the sand and drove it back to the hangar as fast as he could.

  The kid stood in the front reception of the command building looking out through the little square pane of glass in the door. The sun was low in the sky and the storm had calmed. Great dunes of golden desert sloped up against every building on the airfield and glowed pink and red in the dying glow.

  He knew he could reach Ismailia in less than two hours if the road was passable and the bike didn’t fail but he knew he could not guarantee either of those things and he wondered how cold it got in that place at night and he thought that the cold was the least of his worries should he become stranded there.

  He thanked the officers and the airmen who had helped him and he said farewell to the two engineers from his flight and they wished him luck and called him crazy.

  The officers had given him a thawb of brown cotton to protect him from the sand and a keffiyeh of green and black wool which was wrapped around his head and hung down across his brow and a flask of coffee and some nuts. They had allowed him to fill the Norton with fuel from their tank

  He stepped outside and regarded the desert ahead of him.

  The dimming sun bounced shadows across the airstrip and glistened off the top of the Hercules, still standing on the sandcovered tarmac. It had barely been able to land that day and the pilot did not want to risk taking off again until the storm had truly passed.

  He pulled the keffiyeh up across his mouth and nose and tightened it at the side and walked across the sand to the garage and opened the steel door.

  The old Norton rumbled out across
the airstrip and skidded on the sandy tarmac and he righted it and found the driveway out to the west and followed it to the main road through the Sinai.

  There was a cooling breeze blowing across the open wilderness as the old motorbike rattled along the road and, though the wind carried with it the sand and dust of the desert floor, the kid welcomed its chill.

  The road bore west through the ghosttown at Al Hasnah where the desert had overcome the buildings and there was no sign of life at all and everything had been abandoned long ago to the carpet of sand that covered it like items stored under sheets in an ancient cellar.

  The saffron sun sank slowly lower to the dark and flat and endless horizon and the road ran straight into the sun like it was leading the kid into the heart of the fire itself and he squinted at the glare as the shadow behind the bike trailed further and further into the distance and all that could be seen was desert and that only.

  For mile after mile as darkness descended there was nothing more to see than the bike and the road and he spent that time in thought about all that he knew and he wondered how the American had fared out in the deserts to the south, although the Dutchman’s tone at their farewell filled his head and his heart with a discomfort that he may not have fared well at all.

  He watched keenly to the horizons for signs of trouble.

  From time to time there were hints, though nothing more, that buildings had once stood at the roadside but they were long forgotten and should he have looked away for a moment he would have missed them.

  The dials on the bike’s dashboard were not working properly and, though he knew he had enough fuel for the journey, he couldn’t be sure of other factors such as the engine temperature or the oil level and just as the sun dropped beyond the open plain, he made the decision to stop.

  He pulled from the road to where a building had once been and steered the bike inside and let it cool behind the fallen stonework and drank from the flask and ate the nuts and stared blankly into the endless flatland extending to every corner of the world around him.