by Paul Sussman
‘What about you?’
‘I wait sais Brodie. We climb together. Go, go.’
She tried to argue, but he was having none of it – ‘I climb fast,’ he insisted, ‘like monkey’ – and so she did as he said. Stepping onto the ladder, she began her ascent. Zahir’s brother followed on behind, his rifle slung over his shoulder, the two of them clambering upwards from rung to rung, steadily pulling themselves away from the valley floor. The cliff face trembled and shivered like the flank of some distressed animal, but the ladders held firm and as she grew more confident in their strength Freya moved faster, the figure of Zahir falling away below, more and more of the gorge coming into view behind. More and more chaos and destruction.
She’d ascended about twenty metres, the length of four ladders, straight up, and was just starting on the fifth set of steps when the cliff gave a violent lurch. On the periphery of her vision, she caught movement above. Years of climbing experience had sharpened her reactions and instinctively she pressed herself flat against the ladder, jamming her head between two of the rungs so as to give it as much protection as possible. A shower of small rocks and pebbles clattered down onto her shoulders followed by three or four much larger chunks of stone which missed her by what felt like centimetres. She remained motionless, clamped to the ladder, waiting to see if the rock fall would continue. Aside from a few more sprays of gravel, that appeared to be it. Cautiously, she eased herself backwards, looking first up and then down.
‘You OK?’ she shouted to Said, who was a few metres below her.
He raised a hand to show he was unharmed. She started to look away, ready to resume the climb, then jerked round again, leaning further out from the cliff, eyes zeroing in on the ground below.
‘Oh no! Oh please God no!’
Said must have seen what she had seen because he had already started back down the ladder, waving at her to continue climbing. She ignored him, following him down, scrambling as fast as she could. The roar of the cliffs, the trembling of the rock face, the collapse of the oasis – everything receded as her entire world narrowed to the small patch of ground beneath, where Zahir lay prone beneath a car-bonnet-sized slab of rock.
She came to within a few metres of the valley floor and jumped. Slamming onto the sand, she scrabbled her way over to Said who was kneeling beside his brother. He was pinioned from the chest down, alive, but only just. His fingers clawed weakly at the top of the rock and a thin trickle of blood crept from the corner of his mouth.
‘We’ve got to get it off him,’ Freya cried, forcing her hands underneath the slab, straining to lift it.
Said just knelt there, stroking his brother’s forehead, his face set and expressionless. Only his eyes registered any emotion, gave any hint of the torment he must have felt to see his brother crushed and trapped like that.
‘Help me, Said,’ Freya groaned. ‘Please, we’ve got to get it off him. We have to get him out.’
It was futile and she knew it, had known from the moment she’d first seen what had happened. The slab was far too heavy, and even if by some miracle they did manage to move it there was no way they were going to get Zahir up 200 metres of vertical cliff and out of the oasis, not with the sort of injuries he’d be carrying. Despite that she continued to heave at the stone, her eyes blurring with tears, until eventually Zahir’s hand crept across the surface of the rock and, clasping hers, moved it away. His head shook slightly as if to say: ‘It’s no use. Don’t waste your energy.’
‘Oh God, Zahir,’ she choked.
He gave her hand a feeble squeeze and, rolling his eyes, looked up at his brother, spoke to him in Arabic, his voice a barely audible rasp, bubbles of mucousy blood popping from his nostrils. Although she couldn’t understand what he was saying, Freya caught the word ‘Mohsen’ – his son’s name – repeated several times and knew instinctively that he was making final arrangements, entrusting his family to Said’s care.
‘Oh God, Zahir,’ she repeated helplessly, holding his hand in hers, stroking it. Tears were now rolling down her face – tears of impotence, of sorrow, of guilt at all the doubts she had had about him, all the bad things she had thought and said, when all along he had been a good man, an honest man. A man who had given his life to save hers. She had wronged him, just as she had wronged her sister. And just as she had failed to help Alex in her hour of need, it seemed to her now that she was failing Zahir too, so that all she could do was to stroke his hand, and sob, and hate herself for the damage she always seemed to cause to those who did the most to help her.
Why do I always get it so wrong? she thought. And why is it always the good people who end up paying for my mistakes?
Zahir seemed to understand what was going through her mind because his head came up slightly.
‘Is OK, Miss Freya,’ he said, his voice now no more than a faltering croak. ‘You my good friend.’
‘I’m sorry, Zahir,’ she cried. ‘We’ll get you out. I promise we’ll get you out.’
She started yanking at the rock again. Not because she thought she had any chance of moving it, but because it was so unbearable to do nothing, simply watch as his life slowly trickled away in front of her. Again Zahir shook his head and pushed her hand aside, mumbling something as he did so. His voice was too weak, the background noise too overwhelming for her to catch what he was saying. She bent right down, bringing her ear within an inch of his bloodied mouth.
‘She happy.’
‘What?’
His hand tightened around hers.
‘She happy,’ he repeated, an urgency to his voice, as if he was channelling what small reserves of energy he still possessed into making himself heard and understood. ‘She very happy.’
‘Who, Zahir? Who’s happy?’
‘Doctor Alex,’ he croaked. ‘Doctor Alex very happy.’
He’s delirious, she thought, drifting into some imaginary twilight world between life and death. Zahir tightened his grip further as if to show her that this was not the case, that he knew exactly what he was saying. Around them the oasis seemed momentarily to fall still and silent, although whether it was really happening or her senses were simply so focused on the figure lying beside her that everything else had been shunted away beyond the margins of consciousness Freya couldn’t tell.
‘I don’t understand,’ she pleaded. ‘What do you mean Alex is happy?’
‘In Dakhla,’ he wheezed, seeking out her eyes, holding them, trying to explain. ‘You ask if Doctor Alex happy. When you come first day. You ask if she happy?’
Freya’s mind spun back, through all the turmoil of recent events, to that first morning in Dakhla, before any of this had started. Zahir had taken her to his house for tea, she had gone into the wrong room, found the picture of Alex on the wall, he had surprised her.
‘Was she happy?’ she had asked him. ‘At the end. Was my sister happy?’
‘She very happy,’ whispered Zahir, fighting to get the words out. ‘We bring her here. To oasis. When she ill. We use rope, carry her down, she see with own eyes.’ Despite the agony he must have been in, he smiled. ‘She very happy. She happiest person in world.’
And now Freya’s mind was spinning again, something pulling at it, some vague memory, some connection demanding to be made. Her thoughts whirred and tumbled before suddenly Alex’s voice echoed inside her head, as clear and strong as if her sister had been standing right there beside her. The words she had written to Freya in that last letter, the one she had sent just before her death:
Do you remember that story Dad used to tell? About how the moon was actually a door, and if you climbed up there and opened it you could pass right through the sky into another world? Do you remember how we used to dream of what it was like, that secret world – a beautiful, magic place full of flowers and waterfalls and birds that could talk? I can’t explain it, Freya, not clearly, but just recently I’ve looked through that door and glimpsed the other side, and it’s just as magical as we ever imagined it. Somewher
e, little sis, there’s always a door, and beyond it a light, however dark things might appear.
And Freya realized that this was what Alex had been talking about all along: not some abstract recollection of a shared childhood fantasy, but something real, something tangible – her visit to the oasis with Zahir. Her last great journey. And while the pain of her sister’s murder remained as intense as ever, beside it there was now something else, a glimmer of light. For she knew how much joy it would have brought Alex to see this place, how excited she would have been by it, how very happy and fulfilled it would have made her in her final days. As Alex herself had put it: When you’ve seen that secret world you can’t help but feel hope.
‘Thank you, Zahir,’ she sobbed, clasping his hand, stroking his forehead, barely noticing as the thundering roar of shifting rock started up again around them. ‘Thank you for helping her. Thank you for everything.’
A pause, then:
‘You are as great a Bedouin as your ancestor Mohammed Wald Yusuf Ibrahim Sabri al-Rashaayda.’
How she remembered the name she had no idea, but his smile widened, the expression barely visible beneath the surgeon’s mask of blood that now covered the lower part of his face. He squeezed her hand again, his strength spent, his eyes starting to dim. With a final effort of will, he pulled his hand free and started pawing at his djellaba, slowly dragging the material out from beneath the rock until he had found its pocket. He fumbled inside and removed something, pressing it into Freya’s palm. It was a green metal compass, chipped and heavily used, with a folding lid and a brass sighting wire on top. She knew immediately that it was her sister’s, the one she had taken with her on her rambles around Markham County, that had once belonged to a marine in the battle of Iwo Jima.
‘Doctor Alex give me,’ Zahir whispered. ‘Before she die. Now belong you.’
Freya gazed down at it, oblivious to the raging of the oasis around them. Flipping open the compass’s lid, she saw a pair of initials scraped into the metal on its underside: AH. Alexandra Hannen. She smiled and looked back at Zahir, started to thank him again, but in the few seconds her attention had been away his head had dropped to one side and his breathing had stopped.
‘He go,’ said Said simply. Reaching out, he smoothed his hand across his brother’s face, closing his eyes.
‘Oh Zahir,’ choked Freya.
For a moment they just knelt there, the ground quaking beneath them, the gorge walls lurching ever closer together, what looked like bolts of crimson lightning erupting from the top of the temple platform. Then, standing, Said motioned her back towards the cliff.
‘But we can’t just leave him,’ Freya pleaded. ‘Not like this.’
‘He safe. He happy. This good place for Bedouin.’
Still she remained where she was, forcing Said to lean down and take her arm and pull her to her feet.
‘My brother come here help you. He no want you die. Please, come, climb. For him.’
Freya couldn’t argue with that and after gazing at Zahir’s broken body for a few seconds longer, she turned and hurried back to the base of the cliff. Said had already leapt onto the bottommost ladder and was swarming up ahead of her.
‘I go first,’ he shouted. ‘Make sure is no broken.’
‘What about Flin?’ she yelled up at him.
He leant out and pointed back across the stretch of open ground in front of the cliff. The Englishman was running towards them, waving his arms madly, urging them to get climbing.
‘You follow me,’ Said shouted. ‘OK?’
‘OK,’ she called.
The Egyptian nodded, turned and started up the ladder, moving with feline speed and agility, his feet and hands barely seeming to make contact with each rung as he flew upwards. Freya hovered a few moments longer, not wanting to leave Flin too far behind. Then, with a final glance back at Zahir’s body and a murmured ‘Allez’, she grasped the ladder and started to climb.
All the way down from the temple platform Flin had been bellowing at the figures below, yelling at them to get moving, unable to understand why they were just kneeling there. It was only as he came up to the base of the cliff and saw Zahir’s body pinioned beneath the rock that the reason became apparent. He slowed to a halt, looking down and shaking his head, feeling many of the same things Freya had felt – sadness, helplessness, guilt at the way he had spoken to Zahir in his home in Dakhla. There was no time for proper contemplation nor to pay his respects in the way he would have liked. Dropping to one knee, he touched a hand to Zahir’s forehead and murmured a traditional Bedouin farewell. Then, jumping up again, he sprang over to the cliff and started to climb. The gorge’s walls were now less than 150 metres apart, the air filling with surging wafts of dust and grit, the oasis growing steadily darker.
Already some way behind the other two, he pushed on as fast as he could, trying to make up some of the intervening distance, the ground dropping away below him, the ladders creaking and groaning with his weight. Every now and then Freya would stop and lean out, looking down. He waved her on and continued climbing, trying to ignore the approaching cliffs and the trembling of the rock face and the burning in his lungs and arms and legs, to focus all his energies on just keeping moving.
For the first thirty or so metres the ladders ascended in a perfect vertical line, one directly above the other, and he made rapid progress. Then, at the top of the eighth ladder, the line suddenly stopped dead. A horizontal rope led away to his left, taking him along a narrow ledge – not much more than the width of a cigarette packet – to the base of a second set of ladders. This climbed for a further fifteen metres before also coming to a halt, another rope taking him along another, even narrower ledge – this time towards the right – and onto another brief run of steps. Which is how it went on, the ladder trail now zigzagging its way back and forth across the cliff face. At no point did it ascend more than three or four ladder-lengths at a time before breaking off and recommencing in a different place, the gap between each run of steps traversed by heart-stopping, rope-assisted shuffles along ledges and cracks.
Why the ancient Egyptians had arranged the whole thing in this way, staggering the ladders rather than allowing them to climb in an unbroken vertical, Flin had no idea. Probably because they were having to work around stretches of bad rock, he guessed, where their bronze anchoring spikes couldn’t get a proper hold. Whatever the case – and he didn’t give it more than the most fleeting of thoughts – his upward progress was dramatically slowed as he was forced into a succession of diversions to left and right, edging his way nervously from one set of ladders to the next.
Behind him the implosion of the oasis appeared to be gathering pace. The temple platform was now nothing more than a crumbling, dust-shrouded wedge of rock, the magnificent buildings a jumbled heap of ruins from the midst of which the Benben continued to emit spectacular, laser-like shafts of crimson lightning. The scene was apocalyptic, like some medieval artist’s depiction of Hell. It barely registered with him, so intent was he on working his way back and forth across the cliff, his hands and feet slipping and sliding as he drove himself on ever faster, taking more and more risks in his desperation to keep ahead of the walls closing in to either side.
Once he slipped while manoeuvring along a rope-line between ladders, dangling for a moment with a hundred metres of empty space looming vertiginously beneath him before he managed to regain his footing and scramble along to the next set of steps. On another occasion one of the ancient ladder rungs snapped, the splintered wood slicing a deep gash in his calf, causing him to howl in agony, blood streaming down his leg and into his boot.
He almost gave up hope, convinced there was no way he was going to make it; that the gorge’s jaws would snap shut around him before he could reach the top and clamber out to safety. He kept moving nonetheless, refusing to be beaten, zoning out the pain and the exhaustion and the throttling sense of vertigo, summoning every last vestige of strength to push himself on. The valley floor dropped e
ver further behind him – now completely lost in a fog of debris – the summit of the cliff drew closer above, and eventually despair gave way to hope as he traversed a final short ledge and there above him was a straight run of five ladders taking him directly up to the top.
Freya and Said had been hanging back on the upper part of the climb, not wanting to leave him too far behind. Now they were just below the summit, shouting and gesticulating, encouraging him onwards. He shouted back at them, telling them to get the hell out, and after a brief pause to drag some oxygen into his aching lungs, started on his final ascent. The walls of the gorge were now claustrophobically close. He covered the first of the five ladders, every muscle in his body screaming out in protest. Then the second ladder; the third. He was halfway up the fourth, just five metres from the summit, an excited surge of adrenalin sweeping through him as he realized he was almost home and dry, Freya’s screams of encouragement now clearly audible from above, when a jarring tremor ran through the cliff face. Locking his arms around the ladder, Flin waited for it to pass so that he could begin climbing again. As he did he felt the ladder lurch beneath him as first one and then another of the pinions holding its upper end to the rock face started to work free from their housings. He stopped, the steps settled, he moved up another couple of rungs, the ladder lurched again. Now he could see the bronze spikes slipping, inching their way out of the stone, the top of the ladder moving with them, pulling slowly away from the wall. He scrambled, but it was hopeless. As he clawed desperately for the bottom rung of the next ladder up, the pinions came completely free and there was no longer anything to hold the steps in place. For a brief, surreal moment everything seemed to stand still and he had the curious impression he was in one of those old silent movies where Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton engage in gravity-defying stunts high above the earth. Then, with a sickening sway, the top of the ladder arced backwards and away from the wall and he was falling helplessly through space, hands still gripping the wooden rung, a hysterical scream ringing out above him.