Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish

by Dorothy Gilman

"Twelve or thirteen," Max told her, extending a hand to help her.

  She did her arithmetic: from Zagora they had driven five miles to the house of Ahmad's aunt and uncle, and this truck had carried them twelve miles further; the numbers were not entirely satisfying but certainly they were an improvement, for they were now halfway to Rouida and Khaddour Nasiri. She watched Ahmad jump down from the truck; Sidi Tahar rose stiffly and was helped out; she herself gingerly climbed over the side panel and allowed herself to drop into Max's arms. She discovered that she could still stand upright and still walk, which she felt was a very real blessing, and a definite surprise to her as well. Once on solid ground again they stood and watched as Rashid maneuvered the truck between the two massive rocks; he backed it into the crevice with alarming abandon, turned off the engine and triumphantly saluted them. After an exchange of words with Max and Sidi Tahar he strode off in the direction from which they'd come; there was a long walk ahead of him but obviously it was made endurable by the thought of returning in a few weeks to claim and own the truck.

  "He says we're well past the checkpoint on the road below us," explained Max. "We could take to the road but I think it's safer up here, don't you?"

  "Unfortunately yes," she said, and looked down into the valley on their left that stretched for dark miles across a flat plain until it bumped into a line of mesas so uniformly flat they looked as if their tops had been sliced off by a sharp knife. Miles away she saw a solitary light shining in the great expanse of waste. It shone mysteriously, like a star. She turned and looked ahead of them, and in the moonlight saw a hill of rocks.

  Noticing the expression on her face Max said reassuringly, "Rashid tells me that after another mile or two the hills slant down to meet the desert ahead—but unfortunately there are rocks."

  "Yes," said Mrs. Pollifax, eying them with hostility.

  "So let's go," said Max.

  "Bismallah," said Sidi Tahar.

  "Bismallah," echoed Ahmad, beaming at them all.

  And so they began their walk as the moon rose higher in the sky and the chill of night deepened, and for the first several miles it was like walking through a forest of stone. Strange surreal objects rose all around them, the variety of their shapes astonishing: rocks in phallic columns, rocks like enormous loaves of dark bread, and some—but this betrayed her growing hunger—like round flat pancakes. A few stood twenty feet high, with space just wide enough for them to squeeze between, others rose like walls that had to be circumnavigated, the smaller ones they climbed over on hands and knees.

  Gradually the rocks grew less formidable, no longer walling them in, becoming lower in height, more accessible for climbing over. In the cold light of the moon Mrs. Pollifax thought they might even be following a path now that had been made by goat-herders or shepherds, or possibly—this thought was not kind—by other refugees from the law like themselves. It occurred to her as she followed along behind Ahmad that she didn't have the faintest idea what day of the week was about to dawn in a few hours, it felt an aeon since she'd left home and it came as a shock to realize that she'd not been in Morocco a week yet. She dismissed her confusion because she was too tired to count days and places on her fingers, which in any case were numb with cold. Vaguely she wondered where Cyrus was, and what he was doing—sleeping, probably—but it was kinder not to think of Cyrus or of sleep, either, or of how hungry she was and how cold.

  Concentrating on Ahmad ahead of her, watching him manage the rocks with envied agility, she thought of the village they'd just left, and of how Mahfoud had talked as if Ahmad's father might never come to claim his son and she wondered again what he suspected and what he feared. His attitude had disturbed her at the time, hearing of it, and it disturbed her now. We have saved a few lives, she thought, not many, not the lije oj Hamid ou Azu in Fez, and perhaps not the imprisoned Ibrahim in Er-Rachidia, but the young waiter in Erfoud was warned in time, and in Tinehir we saw Omar and his daughter safely off to the desert. They had so far preserved Sidi Tahar's life and he had sworn to his silence concerning the informant ahead of them in Rouida so there was hope there . . , was it enough, what they'd done?

  There was no answer to this because what had to be found now was a way to save themselves.

  They had walked for nearly two hours when Max abruptly held up a hand to stop them. "Listen," he called sharply.

  They halted, listening, and heard it too: the slow, steady drone of a machine tearing apart the silence of the night and moving toward them. "In the sky," Max said. "It sounds like a helicopter—at low altitude, too."

  She said incredulously, "But surely they can't see us in the dark?"

  "It's possible, yes. Oh God yes it's possible if they've night-vision goggles—and they'll have searchlights, too."

  His words stunned her. "Hide!" gasped Mrs. Pollifax, and glancing frantically around her she pointed to a massive loaf-of-bread rock where erosion had carved away a hole at its base and left a shallow overhang. They raced toward it, rock-jumping to reach it in time, and crammed themselves into the narrow space just as the sound of the helicopter turned into a roar. She said with a shiver, "It must be very low."

  The searchlight reached them first, an obscene and garish finger of light hunting for them among the rocks, probing, searching, almost human as it illuminated rock after rock—as if beating the bushes for game, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and the four of them the game it sought, to be flushed out and caught— while accompanying the light was the dreadful noise of this monster that hovered unseen above them. It was so near and so low that its blades whipped the air around them and stirred the tufts of grass growing in the niches of the rocks.

  Both noise and light were terrifying; time stood still as they waited, listening, and she found herself holding her breath as if this would render them even more invisible, and then abruptly the monstrous machine moved on. Slowly the air and the grasses stilled, and the noise of the whirling blades diminished.

  They had not been seen, not yet at least.

  "They were after us?" asked Ahmad in a scared little voice.

  Max said grimly, "Yes and they'll be back."

  She didn't like the sound of his voice; she said quickly, firmly, "Yes but we have to keep walking, regardless. We have to reach Khaddour Nasiri and warn him."

  "Unless he's already dead or in prison," said Max gloomily.

  "Max," she said softly, "don't give out now, we need you."

  He crawled out from under the rock and looked at her with exasperation. "You're bloody cheerful but you're right, of course, damn it. Okay let's go."

  They left their refuge, moving more cautiously now, every sense alert, ears listening for sounds of pursuit, their eyes constantly searching among the rocks ahead for a new hiding place should they need it. It was half an hour before they heard the helicopter again, but this time it was in the distance. Taking cover they saw its searchlight pierce the sky some miles away: silhouetted briefly against the moon the machine looked like a macabre praying mantis with swollen belly and great wingspan. They watched it disappear, returning from where it had come, and left their hiding place to walk again.

  Later, in the thin gray light between darkness and first dawn, they stopped to rest and to divide their one tin of sardines and the last of the oranges. They had not spoken for an hour or more. As she flung herself down exhausted on a patch of grass, her veil wildly askew, her cheeks flushed, Mrs. Pollifax gasped, "This certainly answers one question that troubled me."

  "What?" asked Max, dropping down beside her.

  She turned her head and grinned at him. " 'There's a dance in the old dame yet, toujours gai, toujours gai . . .' "

  "What on earth!"

  "A quote from archy and mehitabel," she explained with a twinkle. "On the day that Carstairs' assistant called me about coming here—good heavens not even a week ago—I had just decided they must think me too old for any more assignments. I was brooding over this when the phone rang."

  Max burst out laughing.
"Thanks, I didn't think I could ever laugh again. You really thought that? You doubted?"

  "Of course I doubted."

  He looked her over in the dim light and shook his head. "I can't even remember how you looked when we met—very civilized, I'm sure. Now I'm traveling with this wild-looking peasant woman in a torn djellabah and cracked sandals, and as for myself I've been panting the last mile, and yet you really thought ... I hope I'm not getting hysterical but I find that awfully funny."

  She smiled at him sunnily. "Not that funny but do have some more orange. Sidi Tahar, how much further?"

  He pointed ahead. "Dawn is soon and the rocks grow few. We are near the desert, the real desert." He said gravely, "You know, of course, the desert is where you must go now, it's the only way out of this country for you."

  She realized that she'd known this for a good many hours but that it had been inadmissible to consciousness because of the overwhelming obstacles still between them and escape. She said with a tired attempt at humor, "And I've so carefully hung on to my return Casablanca-New York plane ticket ... I even have my boarding card."

  Max said indignantly, "You sound damned confident, Sidi Tahar, that we'll get to Rouida, find Khaddour Nasiri and get out of Rouida. How can you be so confident when you don't even know how to find the man? Is this your Allah again?"

  "But I have visited the village a number of times over the years," he said calmly, surprising them. "I have enjoyed tea with the headman el-Kebaj and talked with him of the Koran— no, he is not one of us and he is to be avoided—and I have slept in Khaddour's house on my way to—" He smiled. "To other places."

  "To the desert," she said, nodding. "To the Polisarios."

  "Yes, where you must go now, too, before you can be delivered to Algeria for a new ticket and boarding pass."

  But his words held no reality for her, they were blocked by too many uncertainties and a wall labeled Rouida, and so she relegated them to the country of dreams.

  Max said impatiently, "But haven't you roused suspicions in Rouida, going there like that?"

  Sidi Tahar shrugged. "I am invited here and there from time to time when it pleases Allah. I am known to wander, for it is a principle of the order to which I belong to help the poor, and the poor are everywhere." He smiled. "It is said that humility is the wealth of the poor, and that sitting with the rich hardens the heart ... So says the law of the Brotherhood, built on the Koran."

  "I see," said Mrs. Pollifax, touched by those words. Her glance dropping to Ahmad she saw that he was holding Sidi Tahar's hand now, and listening to him with an adoring look on his face. He was transferring his hero-worship to Sidi Tahar— which was for the best, she told herself sternly, because of the four of them it was Sidi Tahar who had the best chance of getting through to the Polisarios. She and Max were the outsiders, disguised Westerners and so very conspicuously sought by the police.

  They buried the empty sardine tin and the orange peels in the gravel and started out again. "Not far, not far now," Sidi Tahar told them, and he took the lead with long confident strides, his djellabah flowing loosely behind him like a cape. The sky was lightening perceptibly in the east, the dark shadows cast by the rocks were shrinking and there was a freshness to the air, a suggestion of warmth to the cold night air, a stirring of wind. As they continued walking Mrs. Pollifax realized that she was walking on sand exclusively now and that they had left the rocks behind them. When a small hill rose up ahead of them Sidi Tahar held up a hand for them to stop.

  "Listen," he said, smiling.

  The early gentle breeze was delivering to them the sound of a rooster crowing. "A village?" she gasped.

  "Yes, Rouida is off to our left. We will not climb the hill to see, we creep up the side of it, please."

  It was a low hill, and crawling to its crest Mrs. Pollifax peered over the top and caught her breath because directly ahead lay the desert, that great lonely expanse of land uninterrupted by trees, villages and man, illuminated just now by the moon that was close to slipping away beyond the horizon. She looked and marveled: here was the world of nomads and hermits, and of men of God like de Foucauld, of unseen oases and the graves of caravaners and explorers. She turned her head to the left and a mile away saw the shadowy outlines of Rouida, a cluster of low flat-roofed buildings hugging the earth.

  Abruptly Max pointed and said, "Look! What's that?"

  Far away on what had been an empty desert a moment ago a line of dark shapes was blurring the horizon, arriving there as suddenly as if they'd climbed a steep mountain to reach its crest and become visible all at once; the tiny figures stretched out in single line almost a mile from east to west.

  "Those are camels, they have to be," said Max in awe. "It's a caravan!"

  "So many," whispered Mrs. Pollifax and watched in amazement as perhaps a hundred or more camels plodded slowly out of the desert hammada, their very slowness speaking of long arduous days of travel, dust, endurance, heat. She said, "But I didn't realize caravans still existed. Sidi Tahar, what do they bring?"

  "Many things," he said. "If they're unfreighted they would be camels on their way to market to be sold. If they're loaded they will be carrying trading goods from Mali and Senegal or Mauritania—spices, goatskins, copperware, ivory, gold—and also carpets and jewelry made by the desert nomads such as the Berbers and Tuareg." He shrugged. "For us this is good, it brings distraction. We will go down to Rouida before the caravan grows nearer—it is still an hour away—for when it arrives it will bring much excitement, and in that confusion—" He looked at them sternly now. "You hoped for rest, I know, but this is a gift to us. Come! Before it grows lighter . . , we must move like shadows and go."

  Hearing him Mrs. Pollifax felt a stab of panic that sickened her. She wasn't ready to move on and it had nothing to do with physical stamina. It was her nerves that were raw and quivering now, she wasn't ready yet to learn whether this final attempt to escape would succeed or fail, the thought of more suspense was almost unendurable. She needed time after coming so far, she wanted to shriek her protest, remind Sidi Tahar that she'd not slept for over twenty-four hours, and she wanted—needed—to stay here in this coveted safety zone and rest. She wanted—

  To take root here? inquired another part of her politely, and for how long, Emily?

  It was, after all, a life and a future that Sidi Tahar was presenting to them; biting her lips she struggled to her feet.

  As if he read her thoughts Sidi Tahar said gently, "It is all in the hands of Allah .., it is written."

  She nodded, remembering that, when translated, the word Islam meant submission to God and she wished that she had such faith, which to a fiercely individualistic Westerner seemed pure fatalism. From her childhood she wearily dredged up the expression that God helped those who helped themselves, and placing this next to Sidi Tartar's faith she found enough on which she might lean. Once on her feet she could even feel a certain giddy recklessness about what lay ahead. Perhaps something of the East had entered into her, after all, or perhaps she'd simply become too tired to worry. In any case, she thought, if she was found and arrested she would at least be allowed to sleep.

  Sidi Tahar took full command now and gave stern instructions: Mrs. Pollifax was to keep her face veiled at all times, making sure only her eyes showed, and Ahmad was to walk beside her. If Max, with his stubble of beard, would keep his head lowered and shuffle his feet instead of striding along like a Westerner he would pass easily as a peasant from the hills, but he must be careful how he walked. He, Sidi Tahar, would do any necessary speaking because Max's Arabic was that of the cities and the people here were Berber.

  Persuaded by his confidence they prepared to relinquish the protection of the hills, and in the dusk preceding sunrise they began their approach to Rouida from the west while the caravan of camels, still distant, approached it from the south. Mrs. Pollifax hoped they moved like shadows but as they left behind the last withered scrub she felt terribly exposed and vulnerable; there was nowhe
re to hide and they had been in hiding for so long that open space frightened her.

  As they neared the village it emerged more clearly from the shadows, taking shape: she saw a circular well ahead, in what appeared to be an unpaved village square . . , and then she saw the car. It was parked not far away from the well, so out of place in this primitive scene that it added to her unease; it was an anomaly here at the edge of the desert, it didn't belong here, it implied a messenger from the city, it implied danger—but then, even worse, she noticed a man curled up asleep on the step to the well. Without hesitation Sidi Tahar led them past the man, who stirred, jerked awake and looked up at them with sleep-bleared eyes. "Salam," murmured Sidi Tahar, and the man nodded, returned a reply but watched them with curiosity as they passed. She did not turn to look back but shuffled along behind Max, past a long building with a cola sign over it, and then Sidi Tahar mercifully drew them into a narrow alley between two buildings and she sighed with relief at reaching cover.

  She said, "That car—"

  Sidi Tahar nodded. "Yes, it had a Marrakech license plate. Watch your veil!"

  She nodded, one hand clutching her veil tighter, her heart beating fast.

  The illusion of cover proved short-lived, however, because the village was not asleep after all, its wakefulness had merely-been hidden by its outer walls. In the passageway down which they walked the doors stood wide open to dark rooms with earth floors. There was the smell of cooking oil and of charcoal smoke; a barefoot child stood in a doorway and stared at them. Soon this passage intersected with another and they turned to the right, then to the left and right again, the streets bordered by continuous mud-stained walls broken only by doorways or tiny windows like eyes. Dear God but this is a real maze, she thought, and marveled at Sidi Tahar's sureness. Twice they met the shadows of men huddled into their djellabahs, their sandals slapping the earth as they passed, and then abruptly Sidi Tahar turned and entered a long and much wider passage. At its farthest end Mrs. Pollifax saw light and space again—the desert —and realized that he had chosen this dark and crooked route to conceal them.