The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘Jamie!’ Elena wailed. ‘Do something for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Don’t struggle!’ I yelled. ‘It only makes it worse! We’ll get you out, don’t worry!’

  I saw her calm herself with an incredible effort of will and almost simultaneously Ahmad was at my side, tensing his great pectorals and swinging his hitching-rope. Elena caught it on the first swing. I took the end from Ahmad and flung it over the saddle-horn of my camel. ‘Hold on, Elena!’ I shouted, ‘Now listen. I’m going to draw my camel forward. Whatever you do, whatever happens, don’t let go of that rope. Wrap it round your wrists — anything — but don’t let go.’

  Elena nodded desperately. ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Yes.’ She tightened her hold on the rope, and I wrenched Ghazal forward. The rope tautened. There was a moment of resistance, then Elena was pulled clear with a jerk and lay panting and whimpering on the hard sand. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she said as I picked her up and hugged her, ‘that’s as near to the Sea of Darkness as I ever want to get.’

  ‘Al-Jadi!’ Ahmad cried, tears streaming down his cheeks, ‘I’ve got to get him out!’ I realised he was actually about to plunge into the sough to try and save the camel, and I gripped his great biceps. ‘Don’t be a fool, cousin!’ I growled. ‘Strong as you are, there’s nothing you can do. Your muscles will only take you down faster, and once in there, you’ll never get out.’

  Ahmad nodded his massive boulder of a head sadly, and we stood and watched the camel’s death-throes. The quicksand was already up to his withers and he made a last futile attempt to extract himself. His heavings only made him go down faster, and in a second the wildly thrashing head was all that was visible above the surface. Al-Jadi stared at us beseechingly with eyes popping out of his skull. Then he was gone. Elena burst into tears. ‘Jesus wept!’ she said.

  Ahmad snuffled. ‘Brought him up since he was a tiny colt,’ he said.

  I was about to say something soothing, when I was interrupted by a terrible cry from Mukhtar. My uncle had knelt down to examine a scattering of bones near by, and I suddenly realised that there were human skeletons among them — I saw at least three femurs and fragments of skulls. The piece Mukhtar was staring at, though, was definitely camelline, a massive thigh-bone attached to a wizened scrap of mummified skin. When he held up the dried skin to me, I saw that his face was distorted with shock. ‘Look!’ he said. On the skin was the clearly discernible lizard brand of our clan, with two chevrons added above the head. ‘That’s my father’s personal brand!’ Mukhtar said in a voice thick with emotion. ‘This is the place your grandfather met his death!’

  44

  Mansur gathered the scattered human bones reverently, feeling for drumsand with his camel-stick. It was a pathetic collection — a few thigh-bones and bits of shattered skulls. ‘I suppose the rest of the fifteen and their camels are in the drumsand with al-Jadi,’ he said.

  ‘This was my vision in the Shining all those years ago,’ Mukhtar said pensively. ‘Drumsand and camels sinking into it. God have mercy on them all.’

  Suddenly, Ahmad startled us with a shout, and held up some-thing small and greenish. ‘Didn’t you hear gunfire in your vision, Father?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well look at this: a spent cartridge case. And there’s more of them. Scores of them in the sand.’

  Within minutes we’d raked at least fifty rounds out of the desert surface within a radius of a few metres. ‘Incredible!’ Elena said. ‘Someone must have saturated the place with fire.’

  I took one of the cases and examined it. It was brass, greened by oxidation and unusually short and stubby — too thick for a modern high-velocity round. ‘That held a .45 bullet,’ I said, ‘they aren’t used much today except in pistols. Up to the end of the forties they were used in sub-machine-guns — not very efficient ones, they were too heavy. It’s not the kind of weapon used by the Hawazim or any other Bedouin tribe — no good for hunting, only for attrition.’

  ‘Who then?’ Mukhtar demanded. ‘The government?’

  ‘American and British special forces had them in the 1930s and 1940s but there were also some in private hands. What happened here, Uncle, was a deliberately organised massacre. Wingate’s party was mowed down, camels and all, and their bodies thrown into Abu Simm, with the carcasses of their camels after them.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Mansur cut in. ‘It was a poor job if they wanted to cover it up.’

  ‘Seems like it was all done in a hurry,’ Elena said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Wingate and Hilmi?’ I suggested. ‘They got away. Maybe whoever did this was so keen on catching them they botched the rest of the job.’

  ‘How do we know Wingate didn’t set it up himself?’ Ahmad said.

  ‘Whatever happened,’ Mukhtar answered grimly. ‘It wasn’t a chance encounter. No, to bring that off out here, against the Hawazim, in their own country, it would have had to be carefully and deliberately planned.’

  We committed the souls of the departed to the safekeeping of the Divine Spirit, standing with our hands raised palms inward, fingertips up, in Arab fashion, while Mukhtar recited Al-Fatih, the first verse of the Quran. From there on we walked in single file, pulling our camels by the halters. Mukhtar led silently, brooding, jabbing the sand angrily with his camel-stick. It was painstaking work, made the harder by the first pangs of real thirst. Our water was now almost finished — two half-full waterbags had gone down with Elena’s camel — and we daren’t drink more than a couple of gourd-fuls each a day. After another day’s march, though, we sighted a belt of low dunes in the distance — marshmallow pink, unreal against the pitiless sky. ‘There’s the dunes Hilmi described,’ Mukhtar said. ‘We’ll make for them. The drumsand should be behind us now.’

  Once in the dunes we were able to ride again, but our respite didn’t last for long. Now, the hot season was really on us, and the sun came out like a flashing sabre, so hot that it felt as if we were wearing greatcoats. To cap it all a khamsin wind kicked in, leaching us of moisture until our mouths were thick with mucus and we were doubled over our saddles with the terrible gut-pain of thirst. Since Elena no longer had a camel she had to sit awkwardly on the back of mine, clinging on to my saddle-horn. She perched there so silently that I sometimes had to feel for her to make sure she hadn’t dropped off. That night we drank the last of our water on empty stomachs. We couldn’t even spare enough to make bread. Elena and I huddled together all night, too hungry and thirsty to sleep, but just before dawn I must have dozed off, because I awoke suddenly from a dream in which I was standing before the al-Muhandis well with a fearful look on my face.

  That day we were almost past caring whether we lived or died. We simply clung on to our camels and let them take us. As a boy I’d talked to plenty of tribesmen who’d almost died of thirst in the desert, and once, on a desert jaunt with Ahmad, I’d gone three days without drinking, myself. I remembered how the thirst had become more and more agonising as it gripped our bodies until we’d had to tie our headcloths tight round our stomachs just to be able to stand upright. Our mouths had gradually got so clogged with mucus that our tongues seemed welded to our palates, and our eyes seemed to sink into our skulls. It was the camels that had saved us; they’d taken us home with the certainty of arrows. When we had turned up half-dead at al-Maqs, my uncle had forbidden us to drink, saying it would kill us. Instead, he’d made us suck drops of water from a wet rag for a whole night. Mukhtar told me that he’d once found three mummified corpses in the desert, three men lying on their blankets next to the carcasses of three hobbled camels. The men had lost their way, run out of water, simply lain down to die. I shivered as I remembered that chilling story now — that must have been how mother died, I thought suddenly, in slow agony, alone in the desert. No wonder my father had never wanted to talk or even think about it. Since we had no water, there was no reason to stop at midday, and we had no strength to walk, so we let the camels drift on, hanging barel
y conscious on their backs. It was almost sunset when Elena shook me excitedly, and I roused myself long enough to glimpse the stone lip of a well standing not far from a barrier-wall of high dunes, so tiny we might easily have missed it. ‘Al-Muhandis!’ I croaked through the bleeding skin of my lips. ‘Thanks be to God! We’re saved.’

  We couched our camels by the well, hobbled them, then sat panting in the twilight. ‘Come on!’ Elena said. ‘Let’s get water or we’ll just sit here till we die.’ I had to grin. Her face was red raw in the places that had been exposed to the sun, bleached white in others, her eyes sunken and bloodshot, rimmed with dust, and her fractured lips moved with the slow deliberation of a mechanical toy. ‘You look a mess,’ I said.

  ‘Jeez,’ she said, ‘have you seen yourself?’

  Mukhtar opened his ancient, turtle-like eyes and smiled. ‘She’s right!’ he rasped, sighing. ‘Let’s get to it.’

  We rose to our feet, rummaging for our hitching-ropes and a leather well-bucket. We worked slowly, licking our thick lips. ‘God!’ Mansur said, ‘that water’s going to taste like syrup to me whatever it’s like!’

  ‘Remember, don’t drink too much!’ Ahmad said, excitedly. ‘Only a mouthful at once!’ The ropes were joined, the well-bucket attached, and Ahmad swung it into the well. There was an empty, dry slap of leather meeting sand. We looked at each other, hardly believing our ears. Ahmad pulled up the bucket hand over hand, too easily, I saw. At last the bucket came out of the shaft, empty. ‘God damn that Hilmi to hell!’ Ahmad hissed, hurling the bucket into the sand at his feet. ‘If we ever get out of this I’ll throttle him. This well is completely dry!’

  For a moment I just eyed the others wildly, my senses spinning, remembering the dream that morning, the fearful expression on my face. I removed my glasses and forced myself to breathe deeply, calming my galloping pulse. I closed my eyes and for a moment it seemed to me that I heard an almost deafening flop-flop-flop sound. I opened my eyes and saw it: a desert rat hopping frantically across a sand-ridge. I followed the rat’s tracks with my eyes and had a clear vision of my father, Abu Sibaahi, the Father of the Desert Rat. To win the right to marry my mother, he’d had to survive in the desert for ten days without any water but what he’d found there. Suddenly I remembered how he’d done it; ‘Sip-wells!’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Elena asked.

  ‘There’s a colony of as-sibaahi — desert rats — here. They never drink, but they prefer to live where there’s dampness. If we could find a seam of moisture, we could suck out the water bit by bit.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ahmad said, ‘let’s look for a seam!’

  It took almost half an hour to find what we were looking for — a rat burrow, carefully hidden where a dune touched the desert surface. We dug it out and found a damp seam beneath. When we’d made a hole a couple of feet deep, Mukhtar brought over his precious hollow reed, inserted it into the sand and began to suck. His eyes lit up suddenly. ‘By God, Omar!’ he said. ‘It’s a bit brackish and gritty, but it’s the best water I’ve ever tasted!’

  When I drank my gourdful, I could actually feel the liquid seeping through me, trickling into every cell, restoring the balance, setting my body’s delicate mechanism in motion. There was an almost instantaneous feeling of well-being. After we’d all drunk, Ahmad began to collect water to make bread, sucking it into his mouth and spitting it into a gourd. No one objected. By the time we’d eaten, a magical transformation had taken place. We made ourselves comfortable and smoked our pipes, while Ahmad began to regale us with a story about a Hazmi he’d once pulled out of a deep well. ‘It was old Annad of the Qura Hawazim,’ he said, ‘he’d been following a stray camel on foot into al-Ghul and run out of water, and there he was dying of thirst by the time he came to Abu ‘Ashara — the well ten men deep.’

  He paused to take a drag from his pipe, and we watched him intently.

  ‘Anyway, there he was dying of thirst, see, and the water’s down there ten men below him, but he doesn’t have a rope. He’s being tortured by thirst and he can see that water just gurgling and swilling down there, but he can’t get at it. So you know what he did?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He jumped in the well, that’s what! Plummets ten men down — could easy have broken his neck.’

  ‘Or drowned.’

  ‘Or drowned, yes, or both. But the Divine Spirit was with him, see, the water was only up to his chest. So he drinks his fill, and just stands there in the water, waiting. He waits a day and a night, but at least he’s not thirsty any more. The next morning I trot along there with my herdsmen to water the herd, and one of my boys says, “Look, there’s a pair of Hawazim sandals.” I looked and there’s this pair of sandals, left neatly like somebody’s coming back for them, but there’s no tracks leading away, so I say “There’s somebody in the well, by God!” And there was. We pulled old Annad out; he was a bit shaky but at least he was alive. I said, “You’re a very brave man to jump into a well like that!” You know what he said? He said, “It’s remarkable what thirst will do.”’

  Later, Mukhtar ordered us to turn out all our rations. The sour camel’s milk was finished, and there was no more than a bottle of liquid butter, some tea and sugar, and a few kilos of flour. It looked pitifully little spread out on the blanket in front of us.

  ‘There’s enough for us all to eat for four days,’ Mukhtar announced. ‘It’s five days from here to the Jilf, so even if we set off back now, we’ll go hungry. But the water situation’s even worse. It’ll take us for ever even to fill one waterbag from this seam, and that won’t last a day in the heat. And what about the camels? They’ve already done five days without water, and there’s nothing for them here at all.’

  Ahmad looked at me sadly. ‘We’ll have to go back, Omar,’ he said. ‘There’s no choice. If we go on we’ll certainly die.’

  ‘I’m not giving up,’ I said. ‘Not so close.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ Elena said.

  Mukhtar shook his head. ‘It’s your choice,’ he said, ‘but even if you find Zerzura, there may be no water or food there. How will you make it back? The camels are already thirsty. If you don’t find water for them, they’ll die within a few days.’

  ‘The Divine Spirit will guide us.’

  Mukhtar considered it for a moment. ‘Very well, Omar,’ he said. ‘We’ll fill a waterbag for you, and give you some flour and the best camel we have for Elena. That’s all we can do. We’ll wait for you here for four days. If you aren’t back on the fourth, we’ll leave.’

  ‘That still means you’ll have a five-day ride without food!’

  ‘No, we’ll save our food and live on as-sibaahi while we’re here. If there’s rats, there may be lizards and snakes we can eat. God bless us, since you’re determined to go on the least we can do is wait for you. If we make it back to the Jilf we’ll give you another week before we move into the Sudan.’

  ‘That’s very reasonable of you, Uncle.’

  ‘The Divine Spirit is generous. But how you’re going to find your way across the Sand Sea just on Hilmi’s instructions, only God knows.’

  45

  In my dreams that night the dunes of the Sand Sea towered above us like frozen tidal waves, and I awoke to find that in reality they were even more massive. From our sleeping-place they looked like some vast organic growth with giant limbs and excrescences turning at almost every conceivable angle, stretching right across the skyline, with crests that must have been a thousand feet high.

  ‘How the hell are we going to get across them!’ Elena said, and I could hear the awe in her voice.

  We collected round the fire Mukhtar had kindled in a three-stone hearth, and he passed us glasses of sweet tea. ‘There’s a pattern to the sands,’ he explained. ‘Dunes are the embodiment of the wind; they have souls, they give birth like animals. The crests are their children, which leave their parents’ backs when they mature and travel across the desert alone. But the parents — the old root-dunes — are very ancient,
and they always lie along the axis of the prevailing wind. Here the wind is from the north, so beyond the first barrier wall, the dune-chains should be arranged in avenues.’

  ‘Then why is this first set so irregular?’

  ‘Because this is a place where the winds meet.’

  ‘I can’t see how we can ever get the camels up those slip-faces,’ Elena said, ‘they look as if they’ll slide as soon as we step on them.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Slip-sand assumes an angle of 33 degrees, max — more than that and it collapses. Those slip-slopes are at maximum elevation, but they’re stable.’

  ‘Anyhow, there’s a way up,’ Mukhtar said. ‘If you traverse the slip-face in a zig-zag you’ll find layers of hard sand. But be careful on the windward slopes — they seem much gentler, but you’ll find drumsand there. Probably nothing like Abu Simm, but worth avoiding just the same.’

  While we’d slept the others had spent hours patiently filling a waterbag for us from the sip-well. As we hefted it on to the camel’s back later, though, it seemed to offer a pathetically small margin of survival. Ahmad had generously lent Elena his own mount, a famous she-camel called Dhahabiyya — ‘The Golden One’.

  ‘Please,’ he said, concernedly, ‘take good care of her.’

  ‘I will, I promise,’ Elena said.

  We stood by our camels, and they lined up to watch us mount. There was no ceremony — the Hawazim excelled in ‘hallos’ but called goodbyes ‘The Little Death’; they were a too-frequent part of a nomad’s life, too regrettable to be lingered over.

  ‘May the Divine Spirit protect you,’ Mukhtar said. ‘Go in peace.’

  We mounted our camels and headed towards the dunes.