The Doomed Oasis

by Innes, Hammond;

  “Au revoir.” She held out her hand and I was conscious again of the steel grip of those thin fingers. “You are his friend. I know that now. And when you find him you will warn him?” I nodded, not saying anything. “And you can give him my love also,” she said with a sudden flash of gaiety. And then serious again: “The boy Akhmed will be waiting each morning for you at the ’otel. I have arranged it. He knows many people and he can help you if you wish. And remember, please,” she added, “this is an island very close to the great deserts of Arabia—much closer than Algerie is to the Sahara. And the desert is Arab. Your Eenglish officials and the oil men, they know only what ’appen on the surface. They can see the bees swarm, but they do not know when the old queen die. You understand?” And with that she pulled back the bead curtain and I was out in the passage again, where the dance music sounded faintly. She took me as far as the alleyway, where the boy was waiting, and then with a final touch of those fingers, a flash of white teeth, she was gone.

  It was only after I was back in the car that I realized I didn’t know her name. I got it from the boy—Tessa; a very European name for a girl of her mixed parentage. Later I learned that it was a shortened form of Tebessa, the town on the Algerian-Tunisian border where she had been born.

  I lay awake a long time that night wondering about David, about what had really happened. Three women—his mother, his sister, and now this girl Tessa—all convinced he was alive. And the picture she had sketched of him, the warning of trouble brewing … I went to sleep with the unpleasant feeling that I was being caught up in the march of events. And in the morning Mahommed Ali drove me to the airport.

  3.

  The Empty Quarter

  We took off shortly after ten, skimming low over sand flats that ran out into the shallows where fish stakes stood in broad arrows. The white coral buildings of Muharraq vanished behind us, and after that the waters of the Gulf stretched away on either side, a flat sea mirror shimmering in the heat, and the colours were all pastel shades.

  The plane was piloted by the Canadian I had swum with the previous day—Otto Smith. He had joined me on the apron just before take-off and, realizing that I’d never seen what he called “this Godforsaken country” before, he had offered to make it a low-level flight. We flew, in fact, at less than a thousand feet. A white-winged dhow swam like a child’s toy on the sheet-steel surface below, and where the water shallowed to islands banked with sand it was translucent green, the sand-banks sugar white.

  We crossed the Qatar Peninsula: a glimpse of an oil camp, the airstrip marked out with oil drums, the camp a wheel of concentric buildings and the rig a single lonely tower. A sheikh’s palace standing on an empty beach, square like a military fort, the mud of its walls barely discernible against desert sand. The palm-frond shacks of a barasti fishing village, and then the sea again, until the white of gypsum appeared on the starboard side and miniature buttes of sand standing out of the water marked the mainland coast of Arabia.

  The plane was full of equipment and stores bound for an oil camp along the coast towards Ras al Khaima, beyond Sharjah. There were only three passengers besides myself—an officer of the Trucial Oman Scouts and two oil men who were straight out from England and could tell me nothing. I sat in silence, in a mood of strange elation, for the sight of the desert so close below the plane gave me the illusion at least that Saraifa was within my reach.

  We followed the coast all the way. Shallow sand dunes replaced the glare of gypsum flats, the coast became dotted with palms, and here and there a pattern of nets spread out on the shore to dry marked a fishing village. About an hour and a half out Otto Smith called me for’ard to look at Dubai. “The Venice of Arabia,” he shouted to me above the roar of the engines. A broad estuary dog-legged through the sand-banks, dwindling amongst the town’s buildings, which crowded down to the waterfront, capped by innumerable towers, slender like campanili—the wind-towers that Tessa had talked of, a simple system of air-conditioning brought from Persia by the pirates and smugglers of the past.

  Ten minutes later we reached Sharjah: another estuary, but smaller and with a sandbar across the entrance, and the mud town crumbling to ruin. We came in low over a camel train headed south into the desert, the glint of silver on guns, the flash of white teeth in dark faces, and a woman, black like a crow, with a black mask covering her face, riding the last camel. Watchtowers stood lone sentinels against the dunes, and far away to the east and southeast the mountains of the Jebel were a hazy, dust-red wall. We came to rest close by the white glare of the Fort, and behind it lay the camp of the Trucial Oman Scouts.

  Sharjah Fort was like any desert fort, only now it was an airlines transit hotel. Two rusty iron cannon lay in the sand on either side of the arched entrance, and all the interior was an open rectangular space with rooms built against the walls. Otto took me to the lounge and bought me a beer. The room was large, the walls enlivened with maps and coloured posters, the tiled floor gritty with blown sand. “How long are you going to stay here?” he asked me. And when I said I was waiting for Gorde, he looked surprised. “Well, you’re going to have a darn long wait,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Didn’t they tell you? He sent a radio message through yesterday to say he’d changed his plans. He’s being flown back to Bahrain tomorrow.”

  So that was it … that was why Erkhard had changed his mind. A free ride in a Company plane and I’d be in Sharjah by the time Gorde got back to Bahrain. “Thank God you told me in time,” I said.

  “In time? Oh, you mean you want to ride back with me.” He shook his head. “Sorry, fellow. I got a full load from Ras al Khaima. And not to Bahrain either—to one of the offshore islands.” And he added: “It’s too bad. They should have told you.”

  I sat, staring at my beer, momentarily at a loss. “Is there any way I can get to Abu Dhabi from here?”

  “Today?” He shook his head. “Anyway, you haven’t a visa, have you?”

  That was no good, then. “When’s the next flight back to Bahrain, do you know?”

  “Civil? Oh, there’ll be one through in a day or two. The manager will have the flight schedules.”

  I asked him then who would be flying Gorde back to Bahrain, but he didn’t know. “Might be Bill Adams, might be me.” He took a long pull at his beer. “Probably me, I guess. He likes to have me fly him. Reminds him of the old days when he was boss out here and we flew everywhere together.” And he began telling me about an old Walrus they’d flown in the early days just before the war. “One of those push-prop amphibians. Boy! We had fun with that old kite. And Gorde didn’t give a damn; he’d let me slam it down any old place.”

  “Could you give him a message?” I asked, for I was quite certain now that the note I’d left with Erkhard’s secretary would never be delivered.

  “Sure, what is it?”

  I hesitated. “Perhaps I’d better write it.”

  “Okay. You write it. Then whoever picks him up tomorrow can give it to him.” His freckled face crinkled in a grin. “You might’ve been waiting here for weeks. Not that there aren’t worse places than Sharjah to be marooned in. This time of year the bathing is wizard. Know what I think? I think that in a few years’ time this coast will be one of the world’s great winter playgrounds.” I finished my note whilst he was extolling the tourist attractions of the Persian Gulf, and then he began talking about the strange places he had landed in.

  “Have you ever been to Saraifa Oasis?” I asked him.

  “Saraifa? Sure I have. We had a concession there once.”

  I asked him how far it was to Saraifa and he said something over two hundred miles. A long way across the desert, but less than two hours by plane. “Has it got an airfield?”

  “Sure. You don’t think I walked, do you? But that was four years ago,” he added. “I’m told the sand has moved in since then. Funny thing.” He glanced at me quickly. “You’re out here on account of young Whitaker; his lawyer—that right?�
�

  I nodded.

  “Well, that last time I flew Gorde into Saraifa, it was the day David Whitaker arrived there. It was about the last thing Gorde did before he handed over to Erkhard and went home on sick leave. We flew in to Saraifa to break it to Sheikh Makhmud that the Company wasn’t going to renew the concession. They were arguing about it all evening, with that one-eyed devil Haj Whitaker sitting there like an Arab and swearing by the Koran that he’d get even with Erkhard. Has anybody mentioned the Whitaker Theory to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, well, you’ll know what it meant to the old Bedouin, then. Saraifa was his baby. He’d negotiated the concession, and if it hadn’t been for Erkhard they might have been drilling there now. But Erkhard was the new broom, and if Whitaker could have got at him that night I swear he’d have killed him with his bare hands. It was as elemental as that. Now, of course,” he added, “it’s a different story. Erkhard’s under pressure, and Haj Whitaker …” His navigator called him from the doorway. “Okay, Eddie. Be right with you.” He swallowed the rest of his beer and got to his feet.

  “You were saying you were there in Saraifa when David Whitaker arrived?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Well … I was just there, that’s all. He was dressed in Bedouin clothes; he was very young and he looked scared stiff. Couldn’t blame the poor kid. He’d never been in Arabia before, never met his father before, and that black-hearted bastard just stared at him as though he wished the floor would open up and swallow him. He even introduced the boy to us as David Thomas. It seemed like he didn’t want to acknowledge him as his own son, which wasn’t very clever of him, for the boy had the same cast of features—the nose, the jaw, the heavy eyebrows. Well, I must go now.” He held out his hand for the envelope. “Don’t worry. I’ll see Gorde gets it. And I’ll come and rescue you sometime during the week if you haven’t flown out by Gulf Airways.” A wave of the hand and he was gone, out through the screen door. I was alone then with the posters and the lazy circling flies and the old magazines.

  It was siesta-time and after the departure of the plane the Fort went back to sleep. I was allotted a room, and after I’d had a shower, I went up on to the terrace that ran like a broad firing-step round the inside of the walls and sat there in a pair of shorts and sunglasses staring at the shimmering line of the mountains. Down there to the south, where the high volcanic peaks disappeared below the sand horizon, lay Saraifa. Two hundred-odd miles, Otto had said. I remembered Griffiths’s description of conditions in summer: hot enough to burn the tires off a truck and the soles off your boots. The heat came up at me with a furnace fierceness, and the flat expanse of the airfield lay in mirage-pools of water.

  But if I’d been manoeuvred clear of Gorde, and Whitaker was inaccessible, there was at least one person available to me here. And as the sun sank and the breeze came up, damp off the sea, I dressed and made enquiries about getting to Dubai. A lieutenant of the Trucial Oman Scouts, who was in the lounge having a drink, offered to take me in after the evening meal.

  It was just over twelve miles to Dubai, out past the sheikh’s palace with its string of fairy lights and the hum of its generator, and along a winding road beaten out of the sabkhat. The road was as black and hard as macadam, and all to the right of us were salt flats running out into the sea—a thin, baked crust, treacherously overlying a slough of mud that was as lifeless as the surface of the moon. To the left the desert sand was humped like the waves of a petrified sea, and far in the distance the mountains of the Jebel, purple and remote, stood sharp-etched on the earth’s rim.

  As we drove through this empty world I asked the lieutenant whether his outfit was expecting trouble in the interior. He laughed. “We’re always ready for trouble. That’s what we’re for.” And when I mentioned the rumours circulating in the bazaars of Bahrain, he said: “Oh, you don’t want to worry about them. Bahrain’s always buzzing with rumours.” He had a soldier’s contempt for civilians, and I think he thought I was scared.

  The hospital was a mile or two outside Dubai, a solitary building sprawled over a sand hill. The last glow of the sun had gone, the sky fading to darkness, and the building stood black against the sand. Night was falling fast. “Give Doc Logan my salaams and tell him I’ll come over tomorrow and help him drink his Scotch,” my lieutenant said and roared off in his Land Rover towards the distant wind-towers of Dubai.

  The hospital was a ramshackle building, part mud, part wood—a strange place to meet a girl I hadn’t seen for four years. She came to the little waiting-room dressed in apron and cap, and at the sight of me she stopped and stared in surprise, for nobody had bothered to enquire my name.

  “Mr. Grant! I—I can’t believe it.” She came forward and shook my hand.

  “Well, you’re not the only one,” I said. “I can hardly believe it myself.”

  Her hand was smooth and dry and firm. Her face looked thinner, and the fat of youth had been worked out of her body; her blond hair was bleached almost white by the sun, her skin tanned. She looked fit, and the shine of youth was still in her eyes. It was a strange meeting, and for me—and I think also for her—it brought a feeling of relief, for there was that bond between us, and from that moment neither of us could feel entirely alone any more. It was also to have the effect of making me determined, somehow, to get to Saraifa.

  “We can’t talk here,” she said. “I’ll be b-back in a minute.” Still that slight attractive hesitation in her speech.

  When she returned she had removed her cap and apron and wore a light coat. We left the hospital and strolled north whilst the sand turned from brown to silver and the stars came out. I held her arm because I felt her need and mine for the touch of companionship, and the wind was warm on my face.

  She had received my letter, but she hadn’t been to Bahrain, hadn’t even written to Erkhard. “What was the use?” She seemed at first to have accepted the fact of her brother’s death and she was quite willing to talk about him. And as she talked, the picture that emerged was of a man I had only just begun to guess at.

  She had come to Dubai two years ago, not so much to be near him—she had had the sense to realize that she would very rarely see him—but because of his fascination for Arabia, which he had somehow managed to convey to her. “I was here almost three months before I saw him, and then he came without warning. He was straight out of the desert, from a survey down by the Liwa Oasis, and I didn’t recognize him at first. He was dressed as an Arab, you see. But it wasn’t that,” she added. “And he hadn’t changed, not really.”

  She paused there, as though collecting the details of that meeting from the recesses of her memory. “I can’t explain it,” she said finally. “He was just different, that’s all. He had become a man, and there was a remoteness about him. Do you read the Bible, Mr. Grant? Those descriptions of the prophets. There was something of that about him. He always had enthusiasm, a sort of inner fire, but now it seemed to have depth and purpose.”

  She had only seen him four times in the two years she had been out there, but each time her reaction had been the same. “It was as though he had become dedicated.”

  “Dedicated to what?” I asked. But she couldn’t tell me, not in so many words. “To a way of life,” she said, and went on to talk about the influence his father had had on him. The relationship hadn’t been at all easy at first. “They started off on the wrong foot, you see. When David arrived at Saraifa, Sir Philip Gorde was there with his pilot. The driver should have taken David to his father’s house; instead he was brought straight to Sheikh Makhmud’s palace. It meant, of course, that his arrival was immediately known to two Europeans. It complicated the whole thing, particularly as David was virtually smuggled into Arabia. His father thought it due to wilful disobedience, and he was furious.” She smiled at me. “I think they hated each other at first. They were too much alike, you see.”

  I asked her whether she’d met. Colonel Whitaker, and she nodded. “Once, just over a year ago.” He’d
come to the hospital to see her. “It was just curiosity,” she said. “There’s no feeling between us—not like there is between him and David. David’s got much more of his father in him than I have. And anyway,” she added, “after being so long in Arabia he has the native attitude to girls—necessary for the procreation of the race, but useless otherwise. Being a nurse, I know. They’ll go to any lengths to get a sick boy to the hospital, but a girl child—she can die or not, just as she pleases.”

  I asked her then what impression she had got of her father, and she gave a slight shrug. “There’s no love lost between us, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes, but what’s he like?” And I explained that I was looking after his financial affairs and had come out partly in the hope of meeting him.

  She didn’t answer for a moment, as though she had to think about it. “It’s odd,” she said at length. “He’s my own father. I know that. I think we could both feel that in our bones. But it meant nothing.” She hesitated. Finally she said: “My only impression is one of hardness, almost of cruelty. It’s the desert, I think; the desert and the Moslem faith and the Arabs he’s lived with so long. He’s a little terrifying—tall, one-eyed, imperious. He’s like an Arab, but the sheikhs I’ve met are much softer, gentler men, more guileful. He has a strange quality of command, the sort of quality I imagine some of our kings once had when they believed implicitly in the Divine Right. You could never be easy in his company. His whole personality, it radiates …” She paused, at a loss for words. “I can’t explain it, but he frightens me.”