KH02 - City of Veils

by Zoë Ferraris

  To the southeast he spotted it. What he had first mistaken for a wadi—a narrow rivulet snaking its way through the flat land—was actually a trail of some sort. Before getting back in the car, he checked the tires. They were fuller than normal because of the heat, and a rough drive on hot sand could swell them to bursting. He let a bit of air out of each, gauging it with the ease of old habit. Then he got in and drove off the road into the lumpy desert, where the sand was gently mounded like frozen ocean waves. The Rover handled well as he crossed the valley to the point where the trail emerged. He got out of the car and reconnoitered: it was a vehicle trail, originating even farther south on the main road, heading east toward the dunes and then curling north to avoid a large sandy depression that might have been too soft to drive on. From there the trail swung southeast again, disappearing behind a hill.

  He set the Rover on the trail and followed it for a kilometer. As he rounded a dune, a surprising vista opened up. There was a nook among the dunes, a small valley of sorts that was protected from the wind by a large group of boulders. A small, rectangular house stood in the center of this valley, and tire tracks led to the garage.

  No one seemed to be home. He approached slowly, gazing around at the sky and a crevice where a canyon of sorts cut a path between the dunes. He looked for dust clouds, any sign of someone coming or going. Sand rose in spurts from the dunes above, swept upward by the insistent wind. He parked in front of the house and waited a few minutes, but no one appeared.

  He draped his binoculars around his neck and approached the front door. The sound of his footsteps on the gravelly dirt in front of the house were announcement enough, but he knocked anyway. No reply.

  The front door was unlatched. Inside he found a small room, an even smaller bedroom, and a kitchen. It seemed claustrophobic after the sweeping vista outside the door, but this was a desert dwelling, the small rooms and thick mud walls designed to keep out the heat as well as the night chills. He wandered through it. The cupboards were stocked with canned and dried goods. There was nothing in the refrigerator. A five-gallon jug of water stood open on the counter, its contents evaporating. As he sealed it up, he noticed a cup on the counter. It was dry, but he could make out the vague imprint of lips on its rim.

  Miriam appeared in his mind as if she’d been sent there. He felt the first stirrings of unease. Whoever lived here—and it was probably Mabus—would have had the common sense to stop up the water jug. But someone in a rush might have forgotten.

  Going back out to the front, he scanned the road with his binoculars, but a rising cloud of sand blanketed the view. The wind was picking up now, and an unusual redness was tinging the eastern sky. If someone was coming, he wouldn’t be able to see, much less hear them, above the wind. Feeling anxious, he went back inside. The wooden floor creaked so heavily beneath his weight he suspected that it was hollow. Walking slowly around the perimeter of the room, he found a trapdoor cut out of the floorboards. With his pocketknife he was able to pry it open, revealing a small metal ladder that led to a cellar.

  Descending slowly, relishing the cool air despite its stuffiness, he entered a tiny room that was half the size of the small main room above. There was a desk here, two file cabinets, and a low shelf of books. The desk held a neat stack of papers. Nayir glanced through these and immediately stopped to read the second paper in the pile.

  It looked like a journal article, but it wasn’t bound. At the top a professional logo read The Journal of Criticism. It seemed ludicrous to him that an entire journal would be devoted to criticism. The article’s title bothered him more: “The Qur’aan Unveiled: How the World’s Most Influential Book Has Been Built on a Lie.” He scanned the article, stumbling over several passages of long, unfamiliar terms, but catching phrases here and there—abandoning the convention… Islam was a social movement with no true religious core… the Qur’aan as it is today was not as it was revealed to the prophet Mohammed… wholly one-fifth of the Qur’aan is incomprehensible…

  The paper’s author was Wahhab Nabih. Beneath this were similar papers written by Nabih: “The Qur’aan and the Erroneous Notions of ‘Salvation History’ ” and “Rethinking Qur’aan: How Mohammed Was Wronged by His Editors.”

  So this was Mabus’s hidden workshop, a storehouse for his blasphemous ideas and those of his sponsor, although it was seeming more likely that Nabih was an alias. It had been a good idea to stash this work out in the desert where no one would find it, but from the looks of it, the papers had not been confined to the Empty Quarter; they had been published in journals and were being read by the world.

  Disgusted, Nayir picked up the whole pile and began climbing the ladder. On his way up, he caught sight of something shiny down below. He descended and set the papers on the desk. Beneath the ladder, he found a wooden case with a glass cover, almost like a display case for a book. Inside lay a stack of old documents. He thought he recognized them from Majdi’s lab, but he didn’t have time to take them out and inspect them. Anyway, the case was locked, and he didn’t want to risk damaging them.

  He set the journal articles on top of the case and carried them upstairs. If this was evidence, he didn’t want to leave it behind. A small voice inside him was saying that a man had a right to blaspheme, that he would pay the price in the afterlife and that it wasn’t Nayir’s job to mete out punishment. Still, it enraged him that Mabus, a Westerner, had come here to study this country, its language and writing, its history and religion, for the sole, obsessive purpose of tearing it all down, or at the very least of making it seem foolish in the eyes of non-Muslims. Nayir didn’t give a lizard’s tail for the academic nonsense his uncle was constantly engaged in, but he knew enough about it to recognize their tools of attack, the cold, calculated way men destroyed ideas with the rational language of “science.” But this wasn’t science, not as Allah had created it. It was not a natural event but a contrived cruelty.

  He went back to the car and set the wooden case and the papers on the floor of the backseat. Sweat was trickling down his back, and he pulled a water bottle from the trunk, drinking it all at once. Then he went back into the house. He shut the trapdoor and returned to the kitchen. He couldn’t bring himself to open the water jug again and deprive Mabus of what might be his only means of survival here, but he was sorely tempted. Instead he went out the back door.

  He came to a sudden halt. In front of a tool shed, the ground showed evidence of activity. Scuffle marks and little brown clumps of dirt looked very much like blood spatter. He squatted and gently touched one of the clumps. The moisture had not completely dried, and a reddish hue stained his fingers. Blood indeed. He stood up, trying to make sense of what had happened. He noticed drag marks leading around the house and followed them. They took him past the bedroom window and all the way to the front of the house. Here the ground showed even more activity. Someone had come out the front door and gone down a slight incline on the eastern side of the house. There was a building down there, and when he reached it, he recognized a stable. A clipboard by the door held a note for Mabus: Came by this afternoon. All is well with your beauty, but she’ll be needing some more ointment for that shoulder laceration. It was signed in a scribble he couldn’t decipher. A camel keeper, no doubt, probably a man from the nearest town.

  Back outside he found a truck beside the building. It was hard to tell how long it had been there. On the floor of the front seat he found a book in English and a notepad with English writing on it, scribbles that meant nothing to him. He flipped open the glove compartment and found that the truck had been registered to SynTech. Could it be Eric’s? If so, where was Eric?

  He went back outside and studied the ground. Camel footprints led away from the building and due east into the dunes. He saw human footprints mingled with the camel’s. The shoe size was small. It was possible that the camel had run off on its own or been set free by its owner. But the footprints indicated that someone had come out of the house and approached the camel. They had not rel
eased the animal and walked back up to the house. They had probably climbed on the camel and taken off.

  He wished he were a Murrah; the men he knew from that tribe could have told him for sure whether the camel was carrying a burden. He bent over the footprints and pressed his palm into the sand as he’d seen the Murrah men do. The sand was hard packed and not easily compressed. He couldn’t tell how much weight it would have taken to make this print, but to him it seemed deep. And it must have been made relatively recently, because the wind was already blowing the topmost layer of sand away.

  He walked back up to his car and studied the ground around it. Unfortunately, the Rover had run over the other tracks that were there, and with the wind blowing up the looser sand it was going to be impossible to tell how recently the last person had driven off. But what mattered was the absence of tracks: no one drove off into the desert. Whoever had come here had driven in on the trail Nayir himself had come in on and driven out the same way. He turned back toward the stables. So who had taken the camel?

  Quickly, before the wind obscured the tracks entirely, Nayir got into the Rover and took off to the east, in the direction the camel had gone. The sky was growing darker now, still tinged with the same deep, ominous red. As he drove through a gap between two high dunes the sand was rippling down the edges and rising in sweeps from the crests. The air itself was gritty with particles.

  At the base of the next dune he stopped and got out of the car. The camel prints led relentlessly forward as far as his eye could see. The wind was slowly filling them with sand from above. He had to get to higher ground, if only for a moment. From the backseat, he took his shumagh and wrapped it around his face, leaving only his eyes exposed. He tied the canteen to his belt and stowed his emergency survival tin in his robe pocket, then set off for the top of the dune.

  The wind was rising furiously, whipping his robe against his legs so hard that he had difficulty climbing. The dune was too steep. He couldn’t seem to make progress; for every step he took upward, he seemed to sink a few feet lower. His heart was pounding with exertion, and the fiery wind was heating him like flame. Halfway up he stumbled when a sheet of sand lashed his face, and before he knew it he was sliding back down the dune.

  He drove on, looking for a better dune. He needed just a little altitude to try to spot the camel. But the farther he drove, the higher the dunes seemed to get. They were steep, some as sheer as cliffs. The valley he was driving through began to narrow, partly because of the sand pouring down from the dunes. Soon there would be no more space for his Rover. It occurred to him that if anyone had come this way, eventually they would have had to scale a dune.

  By now the wind had completely obscured the camel tracks, and so he followed an invisible trajectory. Turning a slight bend, he saw that the valley came to an end. Or rather, it tapered enough to prohibit a car from passing through, but not a camel. Now he had no choice but to drive back in reverse—it was too narrow to turn around—or head over the dune. It was a dangerous thing to do: the dune had a high, sharp peak, and he wouldn’t be able to stop at the top for fear of getting the Rover stuck on the crest. How many times had he seen some giant SUV at the top of a dune, its wheels dangling uselessly on either side above the sand?

  He backed up to gain some headway, then accelerated at an angle up the side of the dune. Twice the car began to slip backward, but he finessed it, giving the gas just the right touch and praying the entire time. Traction, Allah, give me power and traction. When he was just about to reach the peak, the Rover gave a groan. It was hanging at a forty-five-degree angle and threatening to tip. It was impossible to see what lay on the other side of the dune, but it was equally impossible for him to get out of the car to check. In the time it would take him, the Rover’s wheels could easily become buried in sand. He touched the gas pedal gently, and with a jolt he shot forward, cresting the dune’s peak, lurching down the other side, and gasping as he took in a horrifying landscape: undulating dunes in the foreground crashing like waves on a high sea, and beyond them a giant, pulsing red wall of sand rising hundreds of meters into the sky and moving toward him like a desert tsunami.

  Dropping over the crest of the dune, he was fighting panic, certain that he’d never done anything stupider than this and equally certain that he represented the only chance for whoever was on that camel. He quickly scanned the landscape and spotted something—a flicker of black in the descending orange-and-red glow. It could have been the shadow of a dust devil or a random piece of trash, but he had a feeling it wasn’t.

  The Rover surfed down the dune, skidding at the bottom. He saw with relief that there was enough space between dunes that he could drive for a while, at least long enough to build up speed to climb the next one. He gunned the engine as hard as he dared; too much and he’d only dig trenches with the wheels. He kept the direction of the shadow he’d seen fixed in his mind, unmoving like the center of the universe, and headed up the next dune.

  This time he reached the peak more easily, and coming down the other side he saw the shadow again, only closer. It was a camel after all, heading toward him down the side of a dune. Someone was on the camel’s back, but the figure was so hunched over, shrouded against the lashing wind and sand, that he couldn’t make out if it was a man or a woman. For all he knew, it was Mabus he was racing off to rescue. But then it crossed his mind that only Miriam would be foolish enough to head into a sandstorm on the back of a camel—perversely, he hoped this was true. He tried to stop the car to see the camel more clearly, but the Rover was sliding uncontrollably down the dune. At least he was getting closer. There were maybe a hundred meters between himself and the camel.

  The third dune proved impossible to scale. It was high, two hundred meters at least, and steeper than the ones he’d traversed. Every time he tried to climb it the Rover slid sideways, forcing him back down. He zigzagged up and down five times before he stopped. He couldn’t turn around to try it again, and when he put the car in reverse and tried to drive backward, he found himself getting entrenched in sand. He feared that if he kept going forward he would lose his sense of direction, lose sight of the camel. Had its rider seen him? Probably not, through all the dust and sand. He or she was just on the other side of the enormous dune.

  Steeling himself, he got out of the car and stood for a moment at the bottom of the dune. From this vantage point, it was much steeper than it had seemed from behind the wheel. He went to the trunk and took out the ropes, hanging them on his shoulder as he fished around for the pickax. He thought it had been among his supplies, but apparently not. He shut the trunk and headed quickly up the dune.

  The going was faster than the previous time. Despite the steep angle, despite the pounding of his heart and the lashing wind, now so full of sand that it was almost impossible to keep his eyes open, he was climbing like a goat, thanks to a burst of adrenaline. He forced his way to the crest and scanned the other side.

  The camel was climbing toward him, slipping in the sand but making a desperate, valiant effort. On its back the rider was crouched low, clutching the camel’s neck with both arms. He saw a strand of brown hair and a flash of white arm. Miriam. Nayir shouted, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind. He unwound the rope at his shoulder and shouted again. This time she looked up, squinting. Great sheets of sand blew between them, and the wind was so fierce at the top of the dune that Nayir was stumbling sideways. He shouted again.

  He tied the rope end in a loop and slid the first few feet down the side of the dune. He had to get close enough to lasso the camel’s neck but not so far down that he would lose control of his sliding. Miriam saw him, tried calling something, but all he heard was the faint sound of a woman’s voice lost on the wind.

  He fought the wind to move to the right, then threw the lasso. It missed. He dragged it back and threw it twice again. The camel was slipping backward now, Miriam gripping its neck in panic. He slid lower, stopping himself a few feet down, and threw the rope again. It hit Miriam’s head
and she sat up, grabbing but missing it. He threw once more. This time she caught it. She fumbled to slip it around the camel’s neck.

  Nayir didn’t see the rest. He was glancing at the looming storm. The center of the mass was a yellowish darkness, and above it a tremendous red wall had been moving steadily closer so that its core was nearly upon them. Like a bright belt of fire shooting tongues of flame in every direction, it was deep scarlet and a few hundred feet wide. He scrambled back to the top of the dune, a razor’s edge now shooting sand straight into the sky. He slid down the other side, pulling with all his might, feeling the tug of the camel on the other end. He dug his legs into the sand, pulling and pulling until the camel appeared at the edge. It gave a jerk of surprise but found its footing and angled a path down the dune.

  Nayir ran to meet it, gripping the rope tightly. Miriam was clutching the beast’s neck and shaking all over. He led the camel down the dune and for a panicked moment lost sight of his car. But the sheets of falling sand lifted, and he saw the dim outline of the Rover. He made quickly for it, dragging the camel and Miriam behind him.

  43

  Face and arms raw from the burning wind, Nayir unwound his shumagh and turned to Miriam. She was in the Rover’s passenger seat, coughing and gagging, tears streaming down her face.

  “Just breathe, Miriam,” he said, reaching quickly to the backseat for a spare headscarf and handing it to her. “Here, use this.”

  She took the scarf and coughed into it, breathing in ragged wheezes. Finally she sat up, her whole torso shaking with the effort of breathing. She put a hand on her chest and tried to talk but cringed in pain.

  He reached back to find a water bottle. “Drink some water. As much as you can.”