“… unless someone takes it from you,” Mohammed al-Biwati added.
Faisal couldn’t decide whether they were teasing them or bullying him. Living on the streets as long as he had, he had seen how quickly teasing could turn into bullying, and how bullying could turn into violence.
He looked at each man in turn. In as brave of a voice he could muster, he growled,
“If anyone tries to take this charm from me in my sleep, I’ll gouge his eyes out.”
The Bedouin all laughed again. Mohammed al-Biwati gave him a friendly slap on the back that nearly knocked him face first into the sand.
“Ah, a little fighter! I think maybe you are part Bedouin.”
After that the men turned the conversation to other things. Faisal stayed silent, watching the empty sand dunes around them and listening to the djinn hissing their strange language between the grains of sand. He clutched his charm.
Night came quickly. Almost as soon as the sun went below the horizon, the sky turned dark and was carpeted with a million stars. Faisal gaped at the sight, and for a time he forgot about the djinn and their hissing words. The Bedouin began to sing a low song about a man on a caravan far from his oasis home.
After a minute, Farouk cut off from singing, perking up and cocking his head to one side. He sniffed the air.
One by one, the others broke off and sniffed too.
Then Faisal smelled it.
It was a strange, sweet smell, heavy in the air and unlike anything he had smelled in the desert. It smelled familiar.
Then he remembered where he had smelled it before. He sometimes smelled it coming up from the Englishman’s house after the Englishman turned the lights off.
And now it was coming from the Englishman’s tent.
Faisal stood up. “I think his tent is on fire.”
Moustafa pulled him down. “Stay where you are.”
“But the Englishman might be in trouble!”
One of the Bedouin, a man named Abbas, said, “Oh, he’s not in trouble, and his tent is not on fire. What you’re smelling is—”
“Quiet!” Moustafa snapped.
Abbas merely shrugged and went back to stoking the fire.
The smell stopped after a time, and everyone bedded down. Faisal put his blankets next to where Moustafa lay. Moustafa grumbled and turned his back to him. Faisal didn’t like the Nubian much, but he’d protect him from the Bedouin if they tried to take his charm.
But if the charm didn’t work, who would protect him from the djinn?
The wind blew over the sand dunes, hissing as it went. The djinn blew with it and hissed as well. The hissing almost seemed to make words.
“Hssss. Hssss. Faissssal. We will take you to the City of Brassss.”
The fire died down, and the darkness pushed in closer and closer around the little camp. Faisal curled up under his blankets, gripping his charm.
He only fell asleep when exhaustion overtook him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next morning, Augustus felt sluggish. He had, as usual, smoked some opium before going to bed in order to ward off his nightmares. Back home that wasn’t a problem because he could sleep in, but here in the desert the Bedouin awoke before dawn, said their prayers, cooked and ate their breakfast, packed and saddled the camels, and were off before daybreak.
A perfectly reasonable way to enjoy comfortable temperatures for the first couple of hours of travel, but he felt like a lead weight in his saddle. All he wanted to do was lie down on the sand and take a nap.
It didn’t help that Faisal kept yawning.
“Do please stop that,” Augustus said after Faisal yawned for the tenth time.
“I’m tired,” Faisal said, scratching his armpit and yawning again. “Are we there yet?”
“We have nine more days.”
“Nine more days!” Faisal looked panicked.
“I told you it was a ten-day journey.”
“Oh. I forgot. Do I get my piastre for yesterday?”
“Of course.” Augustus reached into his pocket.
“Wait until we get to the oasis. There’s nothing to spend it on here,” Faisal lowered his voice, “and the Bedouin might take it.”
“Have they been bothering you?”
“They threatened to take my charm.”
“Good Lord. What charm?”
“Nothing,” Faisal mumbled.
Augustus decided not to pursue the matter. He was quite sure it wasn’t of the least importance.
After a minute’s blessed silence, Faisal piped up again.
“Is it true that you need to clean silver?”
“Yes. Why in the world are you asking me that?”
“How do you clean it?”
“There’s a special liquid called silver polish. Faisal, if you’re going to ask me a question, at least make it a useful one. It’s not like you need to take care of a silver table service.”
To his surprise, Faisal burst out laughing.
The hours stretched out. Their camels plodded along and Augustus was lulled by their regular motion and the empty sameness of the landscape. Once he jerked his head back as he almost nodded off.
“Careful,” Farouk called over to him. “Your mind can drift here. Keep focusing on different things, like the head of your camel and then the pack on the camel in front of you. If your eyes keep moving, your mind will stay awake. Otherwise you may fall off, and if we don’t see you fall, we might leave you behind.”
“It’s good advice, sir,” Moustafa agreed. “I should have told you before. I forgot you have never been on a journey like this before. You keep alert too, Faisal.”
“I am,” the boy piped up. “I’m on the lookout for djinn.”
“Bah!” Moustafa scoffed.
“Hssss,” one of the Bedouin whispered.
“Stop!” Faisal whined.
The Bedouin all laughed.
Augustus tried to stay alert and found it difficult. Concentrating when there was nothing to concentrate on required a serious act of will. He began recounting the reigns of pharaohs and adding up sums in his head. His mind grew tired of such pointless work and began to drift again. He shook his head. The tender skin under his mask was sweating and prickly from the heat. At least sitting atop a camel for hours on end rested his leg and allowed his wound to heal.
As their journey continued over the course of days, each one blurring into the next, Augustus began to look forward to stopping, not because he was tired of the journey, but just to have a change of pace. The Bedouin camped each day at about noon and sheltered in the shade of their lean-tos until about four to avoid the heat of the day. He took to pitching his tent, taking off his mask, and putting on some of that salve Dr. Wood had given him.
On the fifth day, he didn’t get the chance.
They had just made their midday camp. The caravan had unloaded the packs and hobbled the camels, and Augustus hadn’t had time to pitch his tent when a cry from Abbas made them all turn to the west, where he was pointing.
At first all he saw was a strange change on the horizon. Instead of shimmering in the desert heat, it had thickened, grown fuzzy.
“What’s that?” he asked. The wind began to pick up.
“Sandstorm!” Farouk said. “Grab a blanket and put it around yourself. It will protect you.”
They scrambled to get blankets from the packs. The camels lifted their heads, sniffed the air, and then lay down in a huddle, their backs to the wind.
By the time everyone got their blankets, the storm was almost upon them.
It had rushed up from the horizon with shocking speed, a great brown cloud taller than any building, with a core of impenetrable black. Faisal screamed.
“Sit down with your back to the wind and wrap the blanket around you. Over your head. You will be all right,” Farouk said.
Everyone sat.
“Stay close to me,” Augustus told Faisal. “My body will shelter you from the worst of the wind.”
�
��Thanks Englishman, but Moustafa is bigger,” Faisal said, running over to the Nubian.
“Get away, Little Infidel! I don’t want to catch fleas.”
“Stop moving, you’re letting the wind blow on me!”
That was the last Augustus heard of them, because just then the sandstorm hit with its full force.
Augustus covered himself with the blanket and got buffeted by the wind. The sand made a horrible rasping sound against the blanket, and he could feel it pushing on his back. He hoped Moustafa was making sufficient shelter for Faisal, otherwise the scrawny boy would probably blow away entirely.
He sat, in all-encompassing sound and darkness, and waited for the storm to pass.
It did not.
For hours the wind blew. Sand began to pile up behind him, his body creating a dune, and every now and then he had to push himself back and over it to get away from its weight, otherwise he knew the dune would grow big enough to engulf him. Every time he did so, grains of sand would swirl under his protection, getting in his mouth and eyes. He learned to keep his eyes shut. There was nothing to see but pitch blackness anyway.
A sound came to him from over the incessant hissing of the sand. It sounded like a scream. He sat, helpless, knowing there was nothing he could do.
Time lost all meaning. He began to count the number of times he had to shift to escape the sand dunes he was creating.
But even counting this movement did not help him keep track of time, for he had no idea of the number of minutes or hours between each time he had to move.
He sat, and endured.
His mind cast back to another time when he had sat and endured.
Those who had never been there always assumed that daytime was the worst time to be in a trench. It was then that most attacks occurred, after all, and most of the shelling happened during daylight hours as well. The vast majority of casualties happened during the day. It was also the time when most of the work got done, and there was always work to be done—shoring up trench walls, hauling duckboard and food and ammunition from the rear areas, using periscopes to draw detailed sketches of enemy positions … the officers foisted a thousand and one tasks on the exhausted men.
But that was what made the daytime tolerable. One worked, and worked, and the hours slipped by in an aching fog of fatigue.
At night, time seemed to stop. Unless one was subjected to the terror of a patrol in No Man’s Land, one sat in a dugout or on sentry duty, and waited.
Sleep wasn’t a refuge because it never lasted long. There was always someone clambering over you to get to their place in the dugout, or rats skittering up your legs, or the Germans throwing a few shells over just out of spite, or a comrade waking you up for your turn standing watch.
Being on sentry duty was even worse. You had to stand in the utter darkness, eyes and ears alert for any sign of the enemy. And you had to stand still, for there were men over on the other side looking for any sign of movement. Every now and then there would be a rattle of machine gun fire as the enemy traversed your line with bullets aimed just above ground level.
This led to a peculiar practice. The instinctive response to this random firing was to hunker down low, only showing your eyes and your helmet over the lip of the trench. That was the wrong thing to do. As the enemy machine guns made their traverses, their bullets spreading out along your line, if one hit you, it either banged off your helmet or got you right between the eyes. A concussion or instant death.
The wiser move was to stand on a box on the firing step so that half your body was exposed. That way when the enemy machine gun traversed, the bullet would get you in the gut, a painful but treatable wound that would earn you a few months back home.
The mental hurdle of actually exposing more of one’s body to machine gun fire when there was no officer egging you on was almost insurmountable. Many men new to the trenches hunkered down, and lost their lives to stray bullets as a result.
One also had to keep completely still, for an occasional flare would rise up from one side or the other. In the wavering light, a half exposed man who didn’t move looked like a burned-out tree or a blasted bit of equipment, and might escape danger. Once again the natural instinct was to duck down when the night suddenly lit up, but the enemy would be waiting for any such movement and would concentrate their fire on it.
The flares and bursts of random fire happened several times a night, but were only terrifying interludes between the endless aching hours of suspense. You stood, and you waited. You stared into the darkness and listened for even the softest sound as evidence that someone was creeping up to kill you.
The hardest part wasn’t actually the fear or the weariness. It was trying to maintain a mental focus. The mind in such a situation will naturally turn to nicer things—home, a fondly remembered cricket match, or simple fantasies of returning to one’s dugout and getting a good night’s sleep.
But letting the mind wander when stationed at the front could easily be fatal. One had to focus on the danger and the fatigue and shadows that always seemed ready to turn into enemy soldiers. One had to face the terrible truth in order to survive it.
So that’s what Augustus did, all through that long storm. He did not let his mind wander. He did not let himself nod off. Instead he listened to the hiss of the sand against his blanket, felt the wind buffeting the fabric and the grittiness of the grains that filtered through, smelled the dead scent of the desert, suffered the ache of his back and legs as they maintained the same position for hours on end, and tried to measure the ever increasing weight of the dune forming at his back before shifting position to escape it.
But despite all this his mind lulled into dreary half sleep. Images flickered in his imagination—dead comrades, scenes from schooldays, and once, all too clear, the face of a woman he had once thought would become his wife.
She had been the daughter of an Oxford don. They had met at a professor’s tea party—he the successful former student, she the quiet and somewhat reserved belle of the party. Everyone had been touched by her beauty, and her mother and father beamed with pride at how she quickly became the center of attention. Chaucer and Thucydides were quickly forgotten as the students began to talk to her of lighter things. She, to their surprise and her credit, replied in perfect Latin and began to hold forth on Cato the Younger.
A beautiful young woman countering male flattery with a discussion of Stoicism was a sure way to win Augustus’s respect. His heart was won over shortly thereafter. One tea party led to another, and then walks in Christ Church meadow and by the river. The don approved of their friendship and gave them as much freedom as propriety would allow.
Then war came, and promises were made. For the first three years they were kept. Letters went back and forth across the English Channel, and his brief furloughs were spent in Oxford seeing her.
And then a German shell blasted all that apart. He could not remember all the excuses she gave for breaking off their engagement. All he remembered was how hollow and obviously false they sounded.
And he had ended up alone.
Augustus jerked out of his half-sleep, his war-trained ears alerting him that something had changed around him, and change was dangerous.
The wind was dying down. The pressure on his back weakened.
And then, as quickly as it had started, the sandstorm stopped.
Augustus paused a moment, listening and hearing nothing.
Carefully, Augustus shook his blanket, releasing a cascade of sand, and looked around.
He cried out in shock.
He was alone amid the dunes.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A startled cry shook Moustafa out of his doze. He realized the wind had stopped and peeked out from under his blanket …
… and gaped.
He was alone!
A moment later he saw Mr. Wall sitting to his right, half buried in sand. Then he picked out the others, each covered by a blanket, the blankets covered with sand to make them look
like little dunes. The camels, already the color of the desert, were all but invisible where they placidly sat. To the east, the sandstorm receded, a boiling mass of wind and darkness.
“It’s good to see your face, Moustafa,” Mr. Wall said. “For a moment there I thought you had all disappeared.”
“For a moment I thought so too, boss.”
One by one the Bedouin got up and shook themselves. Moustafa noted the sun was getting low in the west. The sandstorm had been a short one, only about six hours, although it had been fierce and seemed much longer.
“Where’s Faisal?” Mr. Wall asked.
A low hump in the sand shifted and rose.
“Here I am, Englishman,” said a very sandy Faisal.
“And dirtier than usual, I see,” Mr. Wall said with a smile.
Everyone took a minute to shake out their clothes. The Bedouin casually went over to check the camels, who looked as indifferent as they had just before the sandstorm hit.
Mr. Wall cursed, and started searching around him.
“What’s the matter, boss?”
“One of my bags is missing. I had just unpacked it when the sandstorm hit. It must have gotten buried.”
He began to dig all around, pushing his hands into the sand.
Then Moustafa realized that all of their bags and equipment were buried. Most lay in a large heap near the camels. He cleared that off and found all the bedding and water skins and food. After a while he found Mr. Wall’s tent and the guns as well.
“The guns are covered in sand, boss. We’ll have to strip and oil them.”
“Never mind those, where the devil is my bag?”
“What does it look like, Englishman?” Faisal said, walking over.
“It’s a small bag that went in this case here,” he said, pointing to a larger portmanteau. “I had just taken it out. I could have sworn I put it right here.”
Mr. Wall kept digging around. Faisal helped too.
Farouk came up beside Moustafa. “Did he lose his money?”
“No,” Moustafa said. From the desperation with which his boss was searching, he had an idea what it might be.
The Case of the Golden Greeks Page 12