by Paul Sussman
'And shut the door, please, Hosni,' he heard her say. More muttering, and the sound of a door slamming. 'That man is such a busybody!'
Khalifa smiled. 'Are you OK?'
'Fine,' she said. 'You?'
'Fine.'
'I won't ask where you are.'
'Best not to. The kids?'
'Missing you. Ali says he won't blow his trumpet till you get back. So feel free to stay away as long as you like.'
They laughed, although there was something forced about it.
'They're out with Sama,' she went on. 'At the festival. I'll tell them you rang.'
'Give them my love.'
'Of course.'
He'd been thinking about her for most of the day. Now, for some reason, he couldn't think of anything to say. He wished he could just sit there for an hour listening to her breathing.
'Anyway, it was just a quick call,' he said eventually. 'To make sure Hosni isn't making life too difficult for you.'
'He wouldn't dare.' Another silence. 'These men, Yusuf . . .'
'Don't ask, Zenab. Please. The less you know the better. So long as you're OK, that's all that matters.'
'We're OK,' she said.
'Good.'
He scoured his mind for something to add, some parting line of reassurance. All he could think of was to tell her that he'd seen the sea.
'Maybe we'll go there one day. I'd love to see you in a swimsuit.'
'You'll have to wait a long time before you get me in one of those!' She laughed indignantly, the sound dying away to silence. 'I love you, Yusuf.'
'I love you too. More than anything in the world. Kiss the kids for me.'
'Of course. And be careful.'
There was a final silence and then they both hung up.
He finished his tea and stood. The electricity still hadn't come back on and the main square was full of shadows. Ahead of him a large mosque loomed, its whitish stone seeming to glow in the moonlight as if it was made of ice. He had intended to get a bite to eat but instead wandered over to the mosque's entrance, slipping off his shoes and bathing his hands and face at a tap in the wall.
The interior was dark and silent, the few candles that had been lit doing little to dispel the enveloping gloom. Initially he thought he was the only person there, but then he noticed another man towards the back of the hall, kneeling, his forehead pressed to the ground.
He stood for a while, taking in the stillness, and then moved forward, his feet making no noise on the carpeted floor, stopping midway across the hall beneath a large chandelier, thousands of lozenges of glass dripping from the shadows as if the ceiling was weeping. He gazed up at it for a moment and then, turning towards the mihrab, lowered his head and began to recite.
Praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of all being;
the All-compassionate, the All-merciful,
the Master of the Day of Judgement;
Thee only we serve, and to Thee alone we pray for succour;
Guide us in the straight path;
the path of those whom Thou hast blessed,
not of those against whom Thou art wrathful,
nor of those who are astray.
As he prayed thus, asking God to watch over him, and his family too, he felt his cares and concerns gradually falling away, as they always did when he spoke directly to Allah. The world outside seemed to recede; or rather the interior of the mosque to expand so that its stillness and tranquillity filled the entire universe. Sayf al-Tha'r, Dravic, Chief Hassani, the army of Cambyses – all dwindled until they were no more than motes of dust floating in the eternity of God's embrace. He felt an overwhelming sense of calm.
He continued for twenty minutes, performing ten rek'ahs, or prayer cycles, before eventually coming to his feet and whispering amen. As he did so the chandelier above him suddenly burst into light, filling the interior of the mosque with a radiant whiteness. He smiled, sensing that in some way it was a sign his prayers had been acknowledged.
Back outside, the town square was once more ablaze with light and the petrol pumps working again. The attendant filled his tank and the eight jerrycans, while he himself filled the three water containers from a tap in the wall. By the time he'd paid for the fuel and bought himself another three packs of Cleopatras he had almost no money left. He got back into the car, drove on through the town and out onto the low dunes that washed up against its southern edge.
He didn't go far into the desert, just a couple of kilometres, and then pulled up beside a flattish hummock of sand, its sides covered with a thin mat of scrub grass. Behind him the lights of Siwa twinkled brightly. In the other direction, out across the desert, there was nothing, just an endless vista of moonlit emptiness. Somewhere far off a dog was howling. He ate some of the food Zenab had given him – the first time he had eaten that day – and, fetching a couple of blankets from the back of the Toyota, reclined his seat and curled up, gazing out of the window at the stars above. The thought suddenly struck him that having come all the way out here he had no real idea what he was going to do once he reached the army. He tried to focus his mind on what lay ahead, but he was too tired. The more he tried to concentrate, the more the army and Sayf al-Tha'r and Dravic dissolved before him, until eventually, somehow, they had transformed into a vast fountain of water spurting out of the desert, turning the sand around them into greenery. Beside him his gun lay cocked on the passenger seat. He'd locked the doors.
THE WESTERN DESERT
Tara jolted awake. Her head was in Daniel's lap and he was staring down at her.
'You were digging my heart out,' she mumbled. 'You had a trowel and you were digging my heart out.'
'It was just a dream,' he said gently, stroking her hair. 'Everything's OK.'
'You were going to bury me. There was a coffin.'
He bent down and kissed her forehead.
'Go back to sleep,' he whispered. 'Everything will be all right.'
She gazed up at him for a while, and then slowly her eyes drifted shut and she was asleep again, her face pale, her body limp. Daniel gazed down at her, and then, easing himself away, laid her head softly on the floor and stood. He began pacing up and down the tent, eyes flicking constantly towards the doorway, his features seeming to twist and warp in the flicker of the kerosene lamp, as if he was wearing a mask and it was slowly slipping.
'Come on,' he muttered. 'Where are you? Come on.'
Their guard stared up at him, face impassive, finger curled around the trigger of his gun.
THE WESTERN DESERT, NEAR SIWA OASIS
Khalifa woke with Zenab nuzzling his face. Or at least he thought it was Zenab. Then he opened his eyes, and realized that what he had taken to be the warmth of her breath was in fact the first rays of the sun pushing through the car window. He threw off the blankets, opened the door and got out, shivering, for the world had not yet had time to warm up. He said his morning prayers, lit a cigarette and climbed to the top of the low mound beside which he'd parked. To the north the ragged green crescent of the oasis stretched off to left and right, its salt lakes glowing a delicate pink in the light of the rising sun, columns of smoke drifting up from among the palm and olive groves. Everywhere else was desert, a jagged, broken landscape of sand and gravel flats and twisted rocky outcrops. He stared at it for a while, daunted by its emptiness, and then, flicking aside his cigarette, went back down to the four-by-four and pulled the GPS unit out of the glove compartment.
It was, as Abdul had said, all fairly self-explanatory. He keyed in the co-ordinates of the pyramid-shaped rock and pressed the GoTo key. According to the display it was 179 kilometres away, on a bearing of 133 degrees. He keyed in his current position as well, and that of al-Farafra oasis, and dropped the unit into his holdall along with Abdul's mobile phone and his gun. He then let a little air out of each of the tyres to improve traction, got back into the car and, starting the engine, moved slowly off into the desert, the wheels leaving a deep wake in the sand behind him.
He had
never driven on this sort of terrain before and took things carefully, keeping his speed low and even. The desert floor seemed solid, but there were unexpected dips and bumps, while occasionally he would come to the top of what seemed like a gently sloping dune only to find that the ground suddenly disappeared in front of him, plunging down twenty metres in a near-vertical wall of sand. At one point he almost rolled the car, only just managing to keep it under control as it slid sideways down a slope, cutting a deep groove in the desert's flank. After that he reduced his speed still further.
For the first few kilometres there were other tyre tracks in the sand, presumably from the vehicles that took tourists from Siwa out on desert safaris. Gradually these dwindled and then disappeared altogether. Every now and then he passed a swathe of struggling dune grass, and, twice, skeletons, half buried in the sand and bleached an unnatural white by the sun. Jackals, he thought, although he couldn't be sure. Otherwise there were no signs of life. Just sand, rock, gravel and, above, the immense powdery blue sky. The green fuzz of the oasis slowly receded until it was lost beneath the horizon.
It soon became clear that although the GPS unit had calculated the distance he had to cover as 179 kilometres, he was going to have to travel a lot further than that to reach his destination. The unit had given him a straight-line measurement. On the ground it was impossible to hold such a course, for impassable slopes of sand, high limestone ridges and sudden explosions of jagged rock meant that he was continually having to divert to left or right to find a route that was navigable by car. Sometimes the diversions were short, only a few hundred metres, sometimes three or four kilometres. All the while he was being shunted off line, as though pulled by a strong current. After two hours of steady driving, by which point he had, by his reckoning, covered seventy kilometres, he checked the unit's display to find the pyramid rock was only forty kilometres nearer. He began to wonder if he'd ever get there.
Slowly the morning passed. At one point he stopped to relieve himself, shutting off the engine and walking a few yards from the four-by-four. The silence was extraordinary, more intense than any silence he had ever known. He realized how intrusive the vehicle's engine must sound in this all-enveloping stillness. If Sayf al-Tha'r had patrols out, which he almost certainly had, they'd be able to hear him from miles off.
'I might as well radio in and say I'm on my way,' he muttered, walking back to the vehicle and starting it up again. He felt suddenly very exposed.
The landscape continued pretty much the same for another couple of hours. Then, around midday, he noticed what looked like a ridge of hills looming across the horizon ahead. It was impossible to make it out clearly at that distance, for the heat distorted its shape, making it swell and recede and shimmer, as if it was made of water. As it came nearer it gradually stabilized and he realized it wasn't hills at all, but rather a vast dune – a towering wall of sand stretching right across his line of sight in a single, unbroken curve, with other, higher dunes ranged behind it, like waves freeze-framed in the act of crashing down onto a beach. The outlying ranges of the Great Sand Sea.
'Allah u akbar!' was all he could think of saying. 'God almighty.'
He drove on until he came to the foot of the dune, which seemed to be holding the ones behind it in check, like a vast dyke. He got out and trudged to its summit. The sand was soft underfoot so that by the time he reached the top he was panting and his forehead was damp with sweat.
Before him an endless vista of dunes stretched off to the horizon, line after line of them rippling away into the far distance, silent and smooth and neat, completely different from the disordered landscape through which he had so far been travelling. He remembered a story his father had told him once about how the desert was actually a lion that had fallen asleep at the dawn of time and would one day wake again and devour the entire world. Looking out over the dune sea now he could almost believe it, for the orange-yellow sand had a velvety, fur-like quality to it, while the receding ridges looked like wrinkles on the back of some impossibly aged beast. He felt an irrational pang of guilt about stubbing his cigarette out on the ground, as if he was burning the flesh of a living creature.
He stood taking in the scene for some while and then scrambled back down to the car, his feet sinking into the sand almost to the level of his knees. He'd heard there were stretches of quicksand out here, especially at the bottom of dune slopes, and shuddered at the thought of being sucked down into one. However else this adventure ended, he told himself, it wasn't going to be like that.
Back at the car he let a little more air out of the tyres and, heaving three of the jerrycans down from the roof-rack, filled the tank, which was by now over half empty. He started the engine, selected first gear and powered slowly upwards into the dune ranges. According to the GPS unit he still had almost a hundred kilometres to go.
He drove through the afternoon, the tiny white blob of the Toyota dwarfed by the towering walls of sand, like a boat bobbing on an immense ocean. He kept the speed low, mounting each dune as it came, slowing at the top to check there wasn't a slip-face on the far side, then descending. In some places the dunes were close together. In others they were set further apart, with broad flat valleys between them hundreds of metres across. Behind him his tyre tracks stretched back into the distance like a line of stitches.
Initially he was able to steer a reasonably straight course. Gradually, however, the dunes grew higher, and their slopes steeper, so that at times he would come to the top of one and find himself gazing down at a near-vertical cliff of sand dropping away beneath him. He would then have to creep along the ridge until he found an easier place to descend, or else reverse back down and try to find a way around it, which could take him a dozen kilometres out of his path. Even with the windows closed and the air-conditioning full on he could still sense the merciless heat outside.
The further he progressed, the more it seemed to him that the landscape around him was possessed of some sort of rudimentary consciousness. The hues of the sand seemed to change as if the dunes had moods, and these were reflected in the shifting oranges and yellows of the desert surface. At one point he stopped to drink some water and a gentle breeze came up, causing the sand to hiss and sigh, as if the dunes were breathing. He felt an urge to shout out, to tell the desert he meant it no harm, that he was only a temporary intruder into its secret heart and as soon as his business was finished he would leave immediately and not come back. He had never in his life felt so small, nor so alone. He tried playing the Kazim al-Saher cassette, but it seemed inappropriate. So awed was he by his surroundings he even forgot to smoke.
At about five o'clock, the sun by now well down in the western sky, he came to the summit of a really massive dune and slowed to check the slope on the far side. As he did so, hunching forward over the wheel and peering through the windscreen, something caught his eye, ahead and to the left. He cut the engine and got out.
It was difficult to see it clearly, for the air was still unsteady with the afternoon heat. It looked like a hazy triangle floating above the dunes just this side of the horizon. He leaned back into the car and got the binoculars, putting them to his eyes and revolving the drums to bring the object into focus. For a while everything was blurred. Then, suddenly, it leaped into view: a dark, pyramid-shaped outcrop rising high above the sands like a huge black iceberg. About twenty-five kilometres away, he guessed. Twenty-eight according to the GPS unit. He swung the binoculars across the dune-tops around the rock, but could see nothing to indicate any human activity in the area, except a couple of vague black blobs that might or might not have been lookouts. He lowered the glasses and closed his eyes, listening. He didn't really expect to hear anything. To his surprise, however, he caught the vague whine of a motor, distant but unmistakable. The sound seemed to come and go, disappearing for a while and then returning again, each time stronger than before. The desert seemed to warp and stretch it so that it was hard to tell where it was coming from. Only when he'd been listening f
or almost a minute did he realize with a shock that it wasn't from the direction of the pyramid rock, but from behind him, back the way he had come. He swung round and focused the binoculars along the line of his tyre tracks. As he did so, a pair of motorbikes flew over the summit of the fourth dune back from where he was standing, no more than two kilometres away, following his trail.