Secret of the Sands

by Sara Sheridan

  Wellsted wakes before the camp rises at dawn. He lies enjoying the relative coolness of the air and checks to see if the girl is in position as usual, wakened and tending the fire, ready for the coffee to be heated. Sleepily, he registers that she is not in place. As he rolls over he catches sight of her figure – a vague shadow in the half-light, a little way off, beside the shallow well. He freezes. Zena is washing herself. She has removed the burquah and is pouring a thin trickle of water down her skin. That is a plucky decision, he thinks. With water so scarce and modesty so vital it might even be an act of rebellion. The lieutenant is mesmerised. With the sky still dark, Zena looks like the silhouette of a water nymph – some kind of magical creature from another world. The lieutenant has never seen anything so beautiful. He swallows, transfixed as, naked, she stretches lazily, brushes the water off with her palm, and then carefully coils her hair into place before pulling her burquah over her head. His breathing seems too loud – he is terrified that she will notice him and yet he cannot look away. No wonder they stole you, he thinks. No wonder some man paid two hundred dollars to possess such beauty. Wellsted will remember this moment for his whole life – it is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love. The girl drinks a long draught of water and turns back towards the fire. As she approaches, he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath as if he has been asleep all along. Zena prods the fire and sets a pot of water to boil. It is almost sunrise. He could swear he hears her sigh and within five minutes the spell is broken, slavers stir and the aroma of coffee scents the air.

  The men pray again, the Bedu murmuring something about prayer being better than sleep as if they miss the muezzin and his haunting music – the first call of the day. After a breakfast of coffee and more camel’s milk during which Wellsted manages to rip his gaze from Zena by pure force of will, they saddle up and lead their animals along the stony path to the higher ground. This is where they must quit the safety of the wadi and continue into the mountain range. The jabel is a rough wall of rock between the valley and the desert, in many places only navigable by foot, if at all.

  ‘This is the slowest part of the journey, my friend,’ Ibn Mohammed tells Wellsted as if he is speaking to a fool. The slavers are only tolerating their travelling companion, that much is clear, but the lieutenant takes it in good part. He shows no sign that he minds being the idiot pupil, the man who has no idea.

  ‘And so we will not ride here?’

  ‘If the men mount the camels there surely will be losses, so we lead them.’

  It is a long, hot day and hard going. This is, after all, the hottest part of the year. The men banter as they make their way slowly up the rocky path. Kasim tutors the infidel in pronunciation and teaches him vocabulary.

  ‘And so, the word for “sun”?’ Wellsted enquires, the shingle splaying from his camel’s hooves as the sun shines down relentlessly.

  A sliver of a sly smile plays around Kasim’s full lips. It amuses him how little the white man knows. ‘In the Quran the word is shams. But it is also referred to as siraaj, which means a torch or as wahhaaj which means a blazing lamp.’

  ‘Thank you. In my language we have only one word for it,’ Wellsted admits.

  What he does not add is that England is a good deal less sunny than anywhere he has been in Arabia and in London there are many more words for rain than an Arab need ever employ. He is keen to learn, not to prove how clever he is and he submits to the role of pupil willingly.

  ‘Siraaj,’ he practises. ‘Wahhaaj.’

  By nightfall, they have reached safer ground. With the food finished and the final prayers said, Zena, thoroughly exhausted, decides to make her bed outside the circle of saddles. She hopes that she will feel able to sleep soundly if only she is away from the men. As she settles, Kasim shouts to attract her attention. Then, when she does not jump at his command, he abandons his position by the fire and stands over her.

  ‘Move,’ he orders, pointing her back towards the group, herding the girl like a mule or an errant sheep that must be bullied. ‘Over there.’

  Chastened and afraid of his hectoring tone, Zena sits up and pulls the rug towards her body, gazing towards Wellsted for confirmation of what action she should take. He is her master, after all, and it is his orders she will follow. Such insubordination takes guts for in the normal run of things everyone jumps at the slaver’s command. Kasim laughs.

  ‘Order your habshi inwards,’ he insists. ‘If you want her to last the night, that is.’

  Wellsted flicks his hand to indicate Zena should do as she is told. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘next to me.’

  Ibn Mohammed snorts lewdly, Kasim returns to his pos ition by the fire and the group settles quickly.

  ‘Goodnight,’ Wellsted whispers and turns respectfully away from his charge. His instinct is that he must not take advantage of the girl in any way. She is so vulnerable and he wants to protect her. The truth is that he is in awe. He falls asleep thinking of her washing in the half-light of the early morning, a smile on his face.

  Even though she is tired and her belly is full, Zena still finds it difficult to drift off. She can feel the white man lying beside her, and the other men too, all around. She occupies herself considering Wellsted’s country. By sheer logic, given the questions the man has asked, it must be a place where there are no rocky mountains and men do not own each other. When she tries to comprehend it, she sees an eerie crowd of white-skinned djinns in her mind’s eye, peering at her, reaching out long, spindly fingers at the end of elongated, bone-white arms. She hopes Wellsted will not take her to his homeland almost as much as she hopes he will not fulfil his promise and set her free, for so far from her Abyssinian home, whatever will she do without a household in which to live? Zena does not relish the thought of making her own way in the world now she has seen more of what the world is like – she wants to be free, but does not see how that can be possible. She wishes her grandmother had seen her married and that the old lady had been able to let her go. Heavens, even marriage to a cowherd would be better than this. Her nerves are on edge.

  Just before midnight, she senses a movement in the blackness beyond the circle and her body stiffens. During daylight hours, she is aware that the slaves constantly eye her, as if under the dark burquah her body is a secret prize. God knows who else is out here, on the high mountain path, watching and waiting. Her ears burn as the movement beyond the fire repeats itself. The noise is coming nearer. Zena freezes, scarcely able to breathe. Her eyes are wide open, searching the ebony pitch. Someone is there. Something. She can hear it edging towards her, closer and closer, from behind.

  She gulps a mouthful of air and automatically her hand closes around a large stone. When she can bear the tension no longer, she jumps up, ready to kill if she has to, ready to fight for her life.

  ‘Help,’ she gasps, but her mouth is dry and the word comes in a whisper.

  As she peers towards the sound, the darkness is unaccountably empty. She looks closer but no one is there. Turning sharply, she checks her travelling companions to see if any of them are missing but the figures slumped around the dying fire are in place and no one has stirred. For a moment, Zena wonders if there is a phantom, if out on the jabel ghosts lie in wait for human flesh and the djinns she should fear are here in the mountains rather than in some far-off, alien place peopled by white men. A cold terror creeps across her skin and in temper she throws the rock away. Whatever it hits, moves. The sound is further off this time and she makes out a long, dark snake – a python perhaps or a horned viper, a cobra, or a puff adder – it is too dark to tell. Whatever it is, it is sliding away into the stony hinterland, like a venomous spirit, low into the night. In fright she lets out a sharp, high-pitched squeal and recoils, tripping backwards over her master, scrabbling to find another stone.

  In a second, Wellsted is awake with his knife in his hand. He jumps up and grabs her arm, pulling her out of the way.
He checks the others but the rest of the party only turn over and slumber through the disturbance or perhaps merely ignore it.

  ‘What happened?’ he asks. ‘What is it?’

  Zena’s voice breaks. She starts to cry. ‘A snake,’ she explains. ‘It was a big one. I threw a rock and frightened it off.’

  Wellsted pulls her down, out of the line of sight. ‘I heard they will sleep near men for warmth,’ he whispers kindly. ‘That is all. Don’t worry.’

  Zena’s wide, frightened eyes are all he can see of her. ‘It was a snake,’ she repeats pointing into the darkness. ‘It might have been a constrictor.’

  Wellsted lifts the thin carpet on which she has been lying and moves it to the inside tier of the sleeping circle, putting himself between Zena and his saddle.

  ‘That girl is too jumpy,’ Kasim growls, without rising.

  Almost immediately the most feared slaver in Muscat is breathing deeply again. Zena feels a sting of outrage. The snake might have attacked, had it not been for her vigilance.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Wellsted comforts his charge. ‘It’s gone now. You did well to make it out at all in this pitch. Come – sleep closer to the fire. It’s safer.’

  He hands her over as if she is lady and he is her protector, for how else might an officer of the Indian Navy behave? She feels herself relax as she pulls the blanket into place over her frame.

  When dawn comes, Zena wakens from her first deep sleep since she left the city, and the coffee is already brewed. There is a fuss among the livestock – a slave is basting a camel’s skin in butter for the beast has developed the mange. Still sleepy, she rises and drinks some milk, sweet and so fresh that it is warmed by the animal’s body rather than the sun. Wellsted smiles at her from the other side of the fire, saddling his camel ready to go. She smiles back.

  ‘Come,’ Ibn Mohammed wrangles the men. ‘All of you! The sun is rising ahead of us! Today we can ride!’

  Zena nods at one of the slaves. The man has only half his teeth left in his head and a strange tattoo on his cheek that forms a dark cicatrice – a spiral. He spits as he holds the camel while she hoists herself onto the high saddle and gees the beast into the caravan that has formed, waiting to be off.

  The snakes will not come now it is light, she thinks as Ibn Mohammed continues to curse the laziness of the men who are not yet in line, and Wellsted, at the head as if he is born to it, leads the party into the mountains. Zena sees Kasim notice him. The white man, she thinks, is surprising them, but then that is not necessarily a good thing.

  As the men move higher, the way is stonier and more difficult until, at last, almost a fortnight after the caravan left the streets of the capital, the stones turn into shingle and within two hours they thin to a fine sand, at first of different colours – with black and green mixed copiously with the white. Then the spectrum of colour fades completely until it disappears into a haze of white heat and sand. Any words for sun, or heat, or sand seem somehow an understatement. When the desert appears, it is breathtaking. As the boulders disappear and the trees and bushes evaporate, the undulating dunes stretch for miles only punctuated by a stray boulder or the bleached-out, skeletal remains of what was once an olive tree.

  There has been no rain for months. Anything that lives in these conditions must bear an impossible torment of burning, baking, parching and scorching. The scorpions are hiding below the dunes, the vultures circle, looking for any oryx that have strayed this far, hoping at the very least for a square meal of dead snake or lizard. The flies have disappeared for the air is a furnace. To the lieutenant, the landscape seems larger than anywhere on earth he’s been – an immense void in the business of the world. In a heartbeat, he understands why religions are born on the sands – there is nothing here for a man but his own mind. He will enter this place only with what he can carry with him and will leave the same way.

  ‘It’s like a cathedral,’ the lieutenant mouths in a whisper. It is not for nothing that the Arabs call Rubh Al Khali the Empty Quarter.

  Turning, the lieutenant senses a change in Ibn Mohammed. He catches a genuine smile on the man’s face for the first time since they met. This wilderness is his home, he thinks – the less life the better. The pride of Muscat belongs here and not among the social niceties of city society.

  ‘You cannot map this in your little book,’ the slaver sneers, proud that his homeland cannot be tamed and measured by the infidel. ‘The sands move,’ he says sternly. ‘You cannot write them down. It is too large. The desert runs from here till Cairo. Sand and wind all the way.’ Both Ibn Mohammed and Kasim are from Bedu stock. Their families have travelled in this way for many generations. They are born to it. If it disconcerts the white man so much the better.

  Wellsted is suitably daunted. He wonders how – and if – Jessop and Jones have survived. The Arabian customs of hospitality and the quaint oath of the caravan make sense now he truly comprehends the scale of the desolation. In an environment such as this, these customs are not courtesies – they are the only way to stay alive. Only a fool would enter this place of emptiness without knowing with some degree of certainty that his fellows will do anything to save him. It’s different from what he saw at Aden – there he only hovered on the fringes and could not see the scope of the void. Just like Mickey showed him in Muscat, he pulls his headdress into place across his face, mask-like as a litham. If he does not cover his skin now he realises he will burn the already pink flesh so badly that it will flake away entirely in the searing heat. Behind him, the habshi sits absolutely straight in the saddle.

  ‘How far away are we from Jessop and Jones now? When do you think we will get to them?’ the lieutenant asks the slavers.

  Ibn Mohammed’s tawny eyes narrow to a slant. Time is meaningless here. No man can rush in this heat for long. If you push yourself hard you will simply die quicker. Experienced travellers take their pace from the camels.

  Kasim is more accommodating. He considers the lieu-tenant’s question slowly. He does not know exactly where the emir has camped but their destination certainly is a long way to the north. They will meet Bedu en route and ask for directions and in the meantime they must simply check their position at night by the stars, and in the daytime by the direction of the wind, when there is any. If they are lucky they will travel perhaps 40 miles in a day and they are making for Riyadh, which is a long way off – 750 miles or so. That is a journey of twenty days (though time in the desert disappears and the slavers have known caravans make less than 15 miles in a whole day if the sand is very soft). In any case, from Riyadh they will have to make a new plan – depending on the news of where the emir has pitched. Like many things on the Peninsula, the target is moving.

  ‘Within a week, I hope,’ he says slowly, knowing this is hopelessly optimistic. ‘Perhaps two weeks. Three. In sh’allah. Though of course, it may be more.’

  Ibn Mohammed turns his face into the sun.

  ‘Of course. Of course,’ Wellsted agrees. Look at the place. As he gestures at the landscape, Zena slopes directly across his view sending the now-familiar sting of protective feeling through his frame. ‘A week. A fortnight. A month. How could anyone know? In sh’allah. Indeed.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It has been over two months since their capture, not that Jessop and Jones are aware of that, and for a brief period Jones has been removed from the tent. It is the fourth time this has happened.

  ‘Well,’ he says under his breath, ‘this is a turn-up. I wonder what in the hell they want now?’

  He is unsure what he is supposed to say as none of his officer’s training or indeed the first-rate education in the schoolroom in his family’s shabby house on one of Knightsbridge’s smarter streets has prepared him for this. A gentleman is never naked, at least not in public, and Lieutenant Jones is of the view that the emir’s tent is certainly a public place. In London he knows that the gentlemen of the Whatley Club recently inspected an Indian prince who was put up to the job over dinne
r. When an autopsy is performed on a black man or a Chinaman, the Medical School is packed to capacity. All society has a natural interest in anything or anyone different from itself. Still, he is uncomfortable. It’s not the same for a white man. A nigger is a savage and lives naked in the wild. A white fellow, in particular Lieutenant Jones, certainly does not. Having to wear the jubbah is bad enough.

  The emir peers at Jones’ golden pubic hair and tuts loudly. One of the other men laughs hysterically – not an action designed to make a chap stand proud. They have not inspected Dr Jessop like this, for the doctor has not left the prison tent at all, except when they have marched with the caravan. They are most likely more interested in him, Jones muses, because Jessop is older and is not blonde. Besides, it is Jessop who killed the emir’s daughter so, he thinks, to the emir and his men, he, Harry Jones Esq., is the superior specimen – far more interesting than Jessop’s mud-coloured hair, which is clearly not diverting in the least. The attention is an honour, he flatters himself, and perhaps there will be an advantage to it. A fellow never knows what such savage men may do. But they have picked him and that is surely a good thing.

  ‘I can sing,’ he says, hoping to please the assembled tribesmen. ‘Sing,’ he says again loudly over the rush of conversation as they try to understand what he has said. He takes a deep breath, recalls his days in the church choir at St Luke’s and decides to simply show them.