The Sacrifice

by Sarban

  She shook the brown bundle beside her and climbed out of the jeep. Her first deep gulp of air as she turned into the south made her gasp and wheeze with pain; she cringed away, turning her back to the breeze, and clawed out the water tin from among their gear. The steady wind of the south that had succeeded the storm’s fury was deadly. To Alison it seemed that no living tissue could be exposed to such fire without boiling and crackling, shrinking like bacon on a grill. Nicola, too, came groping blindly to the water-tin. They could not speak for the dust that filled their throats, for the soreness of their split and swollen lips. They unscrewed the cap of a second tin and drank, pouring the water over dust-caked faces, drenching their necks, shoulders and breasts. Quite reckless and unreasoning in the urgency of their need to relieve the pain of their parched throats and scorched skin, they emptied two tins before they were able to speak and look about them and think what to do.

  They moved round to the side of the jeep away from the wind to get what meagre shelter they could from it and crouched down with their backs to the south. Away on their left, the bulk of the sandstorm was drawn like a broad band of black paint across an immense canvas of pallid and dismal buff, for the ascending haze of the finest dust above the main mass of the flying sand had coloured the sky in exactly the same tone as the desert beneath: the land and air were indistinguishable.

  To east and south the sky was clear and from the south the sun was beating down with insufferable power. The girls’ drill shirts and trousers, which they had so far found the most comfortable desert clothes, were suddenly no more adequate than cobwebs to protect their bodies from the cruel searching blaze of sun and wind combined.

  Nicola licked her lips and managed a painful grin.

  ‘Five more minutes of that,’ she croaked, ‘and I should have passed out.’

  They got to their feet and tried to discern the Riggs’s truck which ought to have been behind them, somewhere across the waves of glittering gravel to the north. There was nothing now to be seen in that direction. They did their best to hold their faces for a few seconds in the other direction and look for Viljoen, but it was such agony to face the fiery breeze that they could make nothing out.

  After a while they turned their attention to starting the jeep’s engine again. The only way they found to stand up and do anything was to soak their light head-scarves in water and cover their faces up to the eyes. The scarves dried in a few seconds, and Alison filled a canvas wash-basin with water to place beside them while they worked on the engine, so that they could keep re-dipping the scarves. But the job was hopeless: not only was the whole engine smothered in dust as soft and fine as face powder, but every metal part was so heated that it burnt their hands. The spanners became too hot to hold unless clumsily wrapped in a rag.

  Nicola persisted doggedly, until she could do no more. Together they crept round the other side of the jeep again.

  ‘It’s no use. We shall both just get sunstroke. My god! Isn’t there any shade, anywhere? We can’t do a thing with that engine till it cools off. We shall have to wait till night. Wouldn’t a cold bath be paradise? I feel as if every drop of fluid in me has evaporated and I want just to soak and soak myself for hours to make it up!’

  Alison poured out more water to wet their scarves and shirts. ‘The next bath’s five hundred miles away,’ she said, ‘and if we go on like this we shall have used up all our water by tonight. A tin was supposed to last a day and we’ve used three today so far.’

  ‘We shall die if we don’t keep on using it,’ Nicola answered.

  Alison had lifted her wet scarf half-way to her face. Her hand remained there. She stared intently across the undulating desert.

  ‘What’s that? Dust. I saw the dust of something just there, going down into that gully. It’s out of sight now.’

  She got up and ran forward a few yards toward where the tract of gravel they were on dipped into a deep dry watercourse. Then she halted and stood listening.

  Instead of the roar of the truck’s engine coming up the unseen incline, they heard a clattering and pounding of hooves. A knot of a dozen horsemen came cantering over the rise and, without checking, rode down and surrounded them.

  Alison had rushed back to the jeep and both stood now backed against the vehicle, staring speechless at the dancing and sidling horses and veiled riders, not so much in alarm as in sheer surprise at the appearance of natives here where Viljoen had confidently asserted they would not see a native for three days. They had in fact seen none since leaving Tagourirt, and these did not look quite the same as the ragged fellows who had hung about their cars, begging or just staring, outside the fort.

  Noticing that they were well mounted and all dressed alike, Alison began to wonder whether they might not be some sort of French native troops: a patrol possibly sent out to look for them —assuming that it had somehow become known that they were not travelling the route that the French expected them to follow.

  She spoke, therefore, in French; but none of them apparently understood. They closed in round the jeep and seven or eight of them dismounted, slipping to the ground with a curiously smooth, flowing movement which the floating of their voluminous robes exaggerated. At close quarters then Alison saw that they were not armed in any modern military fashion. They wore curved swords in scabbards of black leather ornamented with brass and silver, and they carried spears which had immoderately long blades furnished with a dozen hooked barbs along each edge: gross implements too lavish of point and fang for thrusting and killing cleanly.

  None of the natives addressed them, but carried on a whispered conversation among themselves while watching the girls all the time through the very narrow slits left open between their head-cloths and the thick grey veils drawn across their faces. They were small men, slimly built, but made to look broader by their loose gowns, baggy trousers and wide burnouses. Their hands and feet, the only parts of their bodies left exposed by their dress, were small and finely modelled. Their fingers had never been used to grasping anything but the bridle and the spear and sword. The costume they wore seemed generally similar to that of the desert people the girls had already seen south of the Atlas, about the oases on the caravan route, except that the clothes of this group were in much better repair and cleaner. Alison observed, also, that they could not have been caught by the sandstorm: their white gowns showed no traces of the clinging brown dust that covered her and Nicola.

  There was another difference: these nomads were quiet; their movements were controlled and gentle and there was a remarkable grace in all their gestures. The soft dark eyes that glinted and glanced behind the narrow slits of their veils were shy rather than fierce. Impossible as it was to communicate with them, Alison was persuaded that they wanted nothing but to satisfy their curiosity and to be helpful. Their calmness, and their gentle, pacific behaviour were in very queer contrast to the outrageous barbarity that had forged and sharpened the three-foot jagged blades of their spears.

  The two girls spoke together in low voices.

  ‘No use telling them to go away, I suppose?’

  ‘No. It’s their desert, anyway.’

  ‘What do you suppose all the deaf-and-dumb language they’re doing means?’

  ‘Don’t know. Perhaps they’re trying to tell us something about the other cars.’

  ‘Shall I give ’em some cigarettes?’

  Nicola moved with the intention of getting into the jeep to look for a packet of cigarettes. Immediately one of the men laid his hand on her shoulder, and at the same time uttered two or three words in a clear voice, high-pitched like a girl’s or a young boy’s.

  Alarmed for a second Nicola spoke sharply in French.

  The man dropped his hand, drew back a little then pointed up the slope to the east.

  ‘I think he means they want us to go with them over there somewhere,’ Alison said.

  ‘What a hope! Oh lord! Why doesn’t Riggs come? I suppose he’s gummed up with sand too.’

  Two or
three of the men now exerted themselves in a more elaborate pantomime. They scooped handfuls of sand and threw it into the air, made motions of flight or fear, then crouched pulling their burnouses over their heads. They stabbed their forefingers downwards to the ground they were standing on and then vigorously shook their hands, palm outwards towards the girls in an unmistakable gesture of negation. Turning half away after that they pointed to the eastern skyline and then laid their hands with palms together beside their cheeks and bent their heads, signifying, clearly enough, sleep.

  Nicola knelt down by the water-basin and dabbled her hands and wetted the scarf round her face again.

  ‘I suppose they mean to be helpful,’ she said wearily, ‘but I’m so hot my brains just won’t work. Do you think they know where there’s some shade?’

  ‘That’s it, I think,’ Alison said.

  One of the nomads who had remained sitting on his horse then uttered a shrill cry. The others all swung in his direction and gazed away westward. The girls jerked round to see what their attention was fixed on.

  ‘Oh god!’ Nicola cried in a voice of horror. ‘It’s coming back!’

  Little by little, without their consciously noticing it while they were occupied with the natives, the steady, burning wind from the south had dropped. Now, Alison was aware of the same dead stillness as had preceded the frenzied blast of the storm before, and across the pallid waste the wall of darkness was in visible motion once more: this time, returning upon them. It seemed now to stretch in a wide arc the tips of which appeared to be curling round to envelop them, while the centre bellied out, rolling like a whole immense mountainside in motion, ponderously over the drifts of gravel directly towards them.

  The nomads broke into excited chattering and mad emphatic gesticulations to the girls; then, with their strange fluid grace, they all rose to their saddles again. Two brought their horses side-stepping close up to the jeep and with urgent gestures bade the girls mount on the cruppers behind them.

  Alison looked desperately up and down in a last hope of seeing one of the other cars, then grasped the hand the nomad was stretching out to her.

  ‘It’s the only chance we’ve got,’ she shouted and sprang up from the side of the jeep.

  ‘The water!’ Nicola shrieked. But the nomad would not stay. His horse was plunging and straining to be off. With one frightened glance back at the battle-front of the advancing storm, Nicola jumped onto the jeep and scrambled up behind the last of the riders.

  They cantered on to overtake the others who were going fast up the slope. The girls, awkwardly astride the animals’ haunches, with their feet dangling, gripped as best they could and held on to the high cantles of the saddles. Alison looked back once and saw the jeep an instant before it was engulfed in the black-brown cloud; then she felt the breath of the fiery wind on her back again. The horses began to gallop.

  It was all they could do to cling on. The horses went like gulls scudding on the blast. The burnouses of the riders spread like wings. They gained the height of the desert only a few yards in front of the sand-cloud. The lunatic wind within it bellowed and screamed, then, as they went slithering and bounding down the opposite slope, between tumbled boulders and over great stairs and slabs of rock, the storm’s rage seemed to soar shrieking far above their heads.

  The horsemen all bunched together and plunged into a narrow defile between vertical walls of rock. They tore recklessly down over a steeply descending rock floor for a hundred yards then pulled up where the overhang of the rock on one side projected so far as to make a broad, shallow cave. Shaken and cramped with gripping so hard to keep their uncomfortable seats through the mad gallop the girls tumbled from their mounts and threw themselves down in the shade of the rock.

  The storm seemed to have halted on the very ridge-line of the land above them, and there it had towered immensely high, covering one entire half of the sky up to the zenith with sand-brown murk. The demon winds that animated it wailed and screeched among the rocks that stood like broken battlements all along the crest. But down in the defile there was only a gentle stirring of the air.

  Alison and Nicola looked at one another, comprehending now what they had escaped.

  III

  They had thrown themselves full length on the shaded rock, trying to press as great an area of their bodies as possible against its cool surface. The nomads all dismounted and squatted, holding their bridles, close under the cliff. They turned their heads up to watch the towering storm and talked a little among themselves.

  Nicola untied her scarf, which in the course of their ride had slipped from her face round her neck.

  ‘I have a hellish thirst again,’ she said. ‘We should have grabbed a jerry-can of water before we bolted. How long do you think this’ll go on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alison. Her eyes were fixed anxiously on the clouds of sand whirling continuously upwards from the head of the defile. ‘Strange how it seems to stop there. Colonel De l’Aubespine said the winds behaved very queerly along the edge of the depression.’

  Nicola sat up and began to look about her and all at once she got to her feet uttering a loud shout of surprise and joy.

  ‘Water! Look! A lake!’

  She stood, pointing down the defile. At the bottom it opened out between two high and precipitous crags of a soft reddish brown colour, and beyond was a far-stretching prospect of shining water patched with shadows like islands.

  Alison stared down incredulously.

  ‘It must be a mirage,’ she said slowly. ‘That must be the depression, the Jauf. It’s all soft sand, they say.’

  ‘Mirage?’ Nicola repeated desolately. ‘It looks so real.’

  She turned to the nomads who had looked round at her shout and, pointing to the shimmering space beyond the crags she pronounced the Arabic word she had learnt for ‘water’. They did not understand, but when she bent back her head and made the gesture of drinking from an imaginary bottle, one of the natives rose and with a little sign of the hand indicated that they should follow him down the ravine.

  ‘You see!’ Nicola cried in triumph. ‘It is water—or at least they know where there is some water. Come on!’

  The nomad, who seemed only a youth, went lightly and quickly down, over wide, irregular natural steps of rock, all of a dull red tone seamed and veined with black, yellow and watery green. The walls of rock, similarly marbled and pigmented, rose higher above them on either hand.

  Nicola held Alison back to let the youth precede them by a good distance, and then, lowering her voice, said:

  ‘They’re a queer lot, aren’t they? Did you notice anything peculiar about the one you rode behind?’

  Alison looked quickly back over her shoulder at the others who had remained squatting under the rock, then down at the youth swinging easily along in front of them. She made a little grimace and her head went slightly back.

  ‘Peculiar doesn’t seem the right word for it. Anyway, they’re friendly. They’ve saved our lives, I shouldn’t doubt. And we must look a lot more peculiar to them.’

  ‘All I can say,’ Nicola said very dubiously, ‘is that I never thought that at my age I should be in doubt whether someone was a man or a woman.’

  ‘They might have the same doubt about us in these things,’ said Alison. ‘It’s the robes and the veils.’

  ‘Yes, but their hands . . .’ said Nicola, still unsatisfied. ‘And look how that one walks.’

  ‘Well, anyway, don’t let’s look as if we thought there was something wrong. I reckon we can trust them, whatever they are. If they’d wanted to rob us they wouldn’t have rescued us and left our stuff behind.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking that, at all. . . . But those spears are pretty horrible, aren’t they? I say! I can’t believe that’s a mirage. It is water. Oh glory! Real wet water, lakes of it. My god, I’m going to wallow!’

  ‘It can’t be! Not all that,’ said Alison, narrowing her eyes and staring intently at the wide shining expanse
beyond the mouth of the cleft. But she spoke less assuredly now.

  ‘It is! It is!’ Nicola exclaimed with rising excitement. ‘And look! Down there at the bottom, by the foot of the rock. That’s grass, real green grass. It must be water.’

  They had come perhaps half a mile from where they had dismounted and had made a considerable descent. The floor of the defile sloped steeply, though the formation of the rock in broad, shallow ledges made the descent easy. Now, at a point where they were out of sight of the nomads above, the mouth of the cleft was only a few hundred yards below them. It debouched on what was most convincingly a wide, tranquil lake, the further shore of which was lost in a light haze on the eastern horizon. The shadows on the lake’s surface were now a dark blue-green and looked like tracts of rushes or real islands clothed with vegetation. The sky in front of them was pure dark blue, and the sun winked and sparkled on the water.

  The nomad below them turned and beckoned them on, and made the gesture of drinking that Nicola had used.

  They hurried down, and in another hundred yards complete conviction came: they clearly saw that the ground at the mouth of the cleft was carpeted with grass; green bushes were growing among the stones and in the crannies of the cliff, and clumps of tall reeds stood above their reflections in the still, blue water by the shore. Further out, here and there, a light, erratic breeze darkened the bright surface with a passing ruffle.

  They bounded past their guide and, with cries and whoops of glee, ran down, dancing over the deep, green grass, snatching handfuls of flowers and crushing juicy stems of weeds between their fingers as they went, on to the strand of the little bay that the lake formed within the jaws of the cleft. There they knelt, scooping up the water in their hands, douching their faces and necks again, throwing up handfuls in a sparkling spray with childlike excitement and joy. The water was fresh and very clear. They threw all past warnings to the winds and drank their fill.

  The nomad came down to them. He did not drink, but waited until they, sated, sat back on their heels and began to look about them, then he made another sign to them to follow him and walked away towards the side of the defile.