Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  Onkeir had said that Jared would die but Bismallah, he lived.

  Book 4

  18

  Since hearing of it I had not given any thought to Jared's buried fortune in Abyssinia, but once his fever broke I would hear a great deal about it, for during the next restless hours he tossed and mumbled over and over, "Got to go back, dig gold .., get it OUT. Got to go back ... MUST .., get it OUT."

  When I considered this I could see his point. I daresay it was enough to haunt any man who had nearly died to remember how cleverly he'd buried his gold so that no one else would find it. I could only do my best to soothe him, but now that his terrible crisis had passed and he was going to live, Onkeir and I had to deal with fresh worries. Our present situation, for instance, was untenable: we were stranded on a vast plateau of gravel, pockmarked stone and shifting sand dunes, we had very little water left, and although Onkeir volunteered to ride to the well at Bir Misaha and Till our guerbas this would leave me vulnerable should the last surviving bandit return with friends to exact revenge. It was not a pleasing situation. By the second night Onkeir was even more uneasy, and when I asked what troubled him now he admitted to still another fear: the spirits of the three dead men buried nearby.

  At this I nodded; enough was enough, we would go. Stamping out the campfire we packed up the tent and slung a sheepskin between two of the camels, and once this was secured with ropes Jared was lifted onto this primitive stretcher. He rallied enough to swear feebly at his helplessness, which drew a smile from Onkeir. "Sidi better," he said. "Keifhalaki, Sidi?"

  "Tayib, damn it," growled Jared.

  Under a moonless sky we led the camels to the well at Bir Misaha and rested for two days before we set out for the well at Bir Dibis. Once we were there, said Onkeir, we must decide what next to do because Bir Dibis lay on the Darb-el-Arba'in, the old Forty Days Road that came up from the Sudan, and there might be caravans. From Bir Dibis, he said, we could continue east to the Nile as planned, or—

  "Or what?" I asked.

  "Follow the Forty Days Road to the north."

  "Why?" I said, puzzled.

  To the north lay el-wah El Kharga, the Great South Oasis, he explained, and at its southern tip lived his daughter Saadiya, in a small oasis just below Baris. The Sidi might have planned to go to the Nile and to Assuan, but when he reached it, what then? The Sidi needed a place to heal and to grow strong, the Sidi needed a beyt, a home, and in the oasis of El Hagar there was a well with good water, many date palms—and his daughter.

  Jared, overhearing this, said, "How far?"

  Either was far, said Onkeir, but the trail north—perhaps a day longer, perhaps not—was safer, a well-traveled route as the Sidi must know, having heard of it, surely, and it led to El Hagar, where he could rest.

  I looked at Jared and smiled. "Well?"

  He nodded. "There's sense in what he says. Let's go north."

  We joined the first caravan that came out of the Sudan on the Forty Days Road—natron smugglers, confided Onkeir, whispering the words—and with them we traveled north over treacherously rough ground. As the Tuareg say, if a man is not killed in the desert he lives forever, and by the fourth day Jared had not only forgotten his buried gold—or so I thought—but sat astride one of our camels, although not yet strong enough to mount without help.

  Once in a while as we drank tea by the campfire at night Onkeir would speak of the Great Oasis toward which we headed: it was big, very long, he said, and it lay well below the desert with half a dozen villages inside it. "If it lies below the desert you mean a depression?" said Jared, but Onkeir didn't know the word nor did I know what it meant. "They happen in the deserts but they're not usually inhabited," he explained.

  I couldn't imagine what a depression was or even that an oasis could exist in this sterile, desolate country with its cone-shaped heaps of gravel, and slippery round stones, but one day I saw the outline of mountains ahead, and running parallel to them a high wall of earth or sand. "We are nearly there," said Onkeir.

  When he had ridden ahead Jared turned to me. "They're all Berbers at Kharga and I don't speak or understand their language, so we'll be entirely in Onkeir's hands."

  "We can trust him, surely?"

  Jared said dryly, "He seems to regard me with a hell of a lot of awe since I 'rose from the dead' as he calls it. Yes, we can trust him. He'll tell them I'm a Turk from Alexandria, but heaven only knows who he thinks you are, it's best you say nothing and keep your face veiled."

  "I'll soon forget how to talk," I told him gloomily.

  "Ah, but you can talk to me" he teased. "I'll now have exclusive rights."

  When we reached the earth walls that spilled into the stony desert we parted from the caravan of smugglers; apparently El Hagar was too small and insignificant for them and they would water their camels farther north, at Bans, and so it was that we three descended alone into this strange depression below the desert floor, almost literally dropping down into it as we slipped and slid into a different world to meet the little oasis of El Hagar.

  It stood inside a wall of acacia built to hold back the encroaching sands, a dozen or more mud huts baking in the hot sun, shaded thinly by a green garden of noum palms while in the center stood its greatest attraction, a large artesian well from which water was coaxed into irrigation channels to feed the palms and the rice fields. It was dry, hot and untidy—not exactly a paradise, I thought, but after the harsh country through which we'd traveled its water and its trees looked beautiful.

  And for Onkeir there was Saadiya.

  I would notice later how the women of the village were seldom seen, and then only as faces in a window, but Onkeir's daughter Saadiya was of a different breed, her vitality still intact and her nature free. I would see her stand outside her mud-brick house, hands on her hips, while she harangued her children, her veil askew and her eyes alight with mischief. "O Prophet, O Apostle, she is like her 'umm, her mother," Onkeir said proudly, and he would tell of how Saadiya had refused to marry the man that he and her mother had chosen for her in the village. She had wanted Ismael, the caravan guide who passed through their village often, and she had acted like an enerregreg, he said, using the Tuareg word for a camel who roars mournfully when separated; I could imagine this for myself because Saadiya held nothing back, neither anger, sadness nor joy, and needless to say she was wife to Ismael now.

  We would sleep those first nights on the roof of Saadiya's tiny house but Jared was uneasy, not liking this, and to my surprise he dug deep into his saddle bags to bring out mosquito netting that I'd not known he possessed. "Why?" I asked. "You'll see," he said, and see I did, for as it grew dark and the steady hot wind faltered he lit a match to show me the netting thick with mosquitoes.

  "Too damn much water here," he said grimly. "Those palm trees sit in three inches of stagnant water—there's the rice field, too—and stagnant water breeds mosquitoes and mosquitoes mean malaria."

  It had simply not occurred to me that there could be too much water in the desert. "But this is an oasis, not desert," he reminded me. 'The desert's healthy. Tomorrow we'll look for a place outside of El Hagar to camp."

  For this we set out at dawn, filling a guerba with water and borrowing two donkeys from Saadiya. Having come up from the south, we headed east in the direction of the sharp hills and cliffs that shaped one side of the depression. The heat was already building and a steady wind from the north stung our faces with sand. Half a mile from the village we saw three truncated pillars rising out of the ground and casting three shadows; we rode over to look at them.

  "Roman—they have to be," Jared said, dismounting.

  "They're marble!" I said in surprise, glancing back at El Hagar's small mud huts.

  "For all we know there could be a whole city buried under our feet," he said, examining them. "They're half buried by the sand as it is."

  Bakuli and I had sometimes seen strange half-buried shapes in the desert, but there had been no one to explain them. "When w
ere the Romans here?" I asked.

  "Long ago, before Christ was born, and probably for a few centuries beyond. They've left ruins all through the Sahara and Egypt, forts and frontier posts and customs houses, and since the route from the Sudan passed here— the Forty Days Road—they would have been here, too. It must have looked very different in those times," he said, glancing around us at the inhospitable landscape. "I suspect El Hagar's artesian well was also built by them." He was eyeing the columns thoughtfully; what interested him, he said, was that two of them were of precisely the same height, being slightly taller than he was, and set six feet apart. "This is giving me an idea," he said, and pointed. "We could drop our mosquito netting over these two and make a tent, pinning down the net with stones."

  "It would be very hot," I said doubtfully. "And without shade."

  "It's hot in El Hagar," he reminded me. "As for shade"—he shrugged—"palm mats, a rug—better than being eaten alive by mosquitoes. People here don't understand that those worms wriggling in the water of the rice fields grow up to be malaria-bearing insects."

  "Not even Onkeir?"

  Jared smiled. "He listened politely when I mentioned it, but I think he was laughing at me."

  We rode back into El Hagar, one idea excitedly begetting another. With Onkeir's help Jared laced palm trunks together just wide enough to insert as a floor between the two matching columns, and high enough hopefully to defeat snakes and scorpions. The mosquito netting, weighted at the top, formed a tent that fanned out well beyond the pillars and gave us luxurious space. Our blankets made a roof that cast a thin shade during the day and could be removed at night to see the stars. In the sand I buried dates to dry and season.

  When our creation was finished two days later we both stood back and looked it over critically. "Could still use a few refinements," Jared said.

  I couldn't help laughing. "It looks just like a playhouse that children build out of boxes and crates."

  "Well, who's more inventive than a child?" he said with a grin.

  The work having tired him, we spent the afternoon testing out our new home by lying on the platform with jugs of water beside us while I read more to him from his book about the explorer James Bruce in Abyssinia.

  " "The king,' " I read, " 'very often judges capital crimes himself. When the prisoner is condemned in capital cases he is not again remitted to prison, which is thought cruel, but he is instantly carried away and the sentence executed. .. . The capital punishment is the cross. The next is flaying alive.' "

  "This is not very restful," murmured Jared.

  " 'Lapidation,' " I continued, " 'or stoning to death, is the next capital punishment. This is chiefly inflicted upon strangers called Franks, for religious purposes.' Just see what you escaped," I remarked. "Barely," he said. "The wonder of it is that Bruce did."

  Each day I watched Jared grow stronger. I'm sure the villagers thought us mad to camp beyond their oasis, but they were not unfriendly. Apparently Onkeir had spoken to them of the fight with bandits and how miraculously Jared had survived deep wounds, Allah be praised, and how it was believed—in the strange manner of foreign people—that the sun could be healing. Once settled in our camp, Jared occasionally joined Onkeir and the other men in the village who sat for hours near the date market drinking cups of coffee, talking and observing the dates spread out like a carpet to dry. I would not part with my barracan, but during such visits Saadiya showed me how to mend its holes and often gave me goat's milk to carry back to our tent. From the date market we bought dates richer than any I'd ever eaten before, and from Saadiya we bought flour with which I made unleavened bread, burying it in the embers of our campfire at night to be crisply baked by dawn. But most of all Jared and I spent hours talking of our future. Land was cheap in Africa, Jared said, and was being settled, true, but how did I feel about Scotland?

  "Does it have space and sky?" I asked.

  "In the countryside, yes."

  "Then I'd like country. Can you write books in the country?"

  "Best place for it," he said. "Sheep, perhaps, and a garden?"

  "I don't know anything about gardens," I told him, "do you?"

  He laughed. "I grew up tending an acre of vegetables. If we'd not planted them every year there would have been some very hungry days in winter."

  Such talk was as nourishing as our simple diet of dates, bread, water and goat's milk; wealth was strictly relative, as I had already discovered.

  One evening, deepening a hole in the sand to build a better cooking fire, I found a round metal circle with a few letters barely discernible on it, and taking it to Jared we examined it. "Obviously a coin," he said, "and surely Roman, but I can't make out the letters."

  "1 see a C-o-n," I announced proudly.

  "Where?"

  I pointed, and narrowing his eyes he said, "You're right, and over here there's t-u-i-s. Well, well," he added, pleased, "the Roman Emperor Constantius. Let's see what else we can find, we've certainly time enough. Let's go exploring."

  We had heard of ruins not farm from El llagar, at a place called Dush where no one lived anymore. One day before dawn we set out with two camels and enough water to see us through the day, and traveling south, but east of the Forty Days Road, we found what remained of a temple, the entrance to the vanished building still intact, protected from the wind and sand by crumbling walls but its empty doorway leading only to the desert beyond. It was a silent place, full of ghosts and inhabited only by scorpions, but it was rich in pottery shards that we dug up before the sun grew noon-high. Our greatest discovery had the shape of a cup, and I handled it reverently. "How old?" I whispered.

  "Centuries old," said Jared, touching its eroded surface.

  "I wonder who it belonged to. 1 wonder how different from us they were."

  Jared smiled. "Not very different, I'm sure. They loved and hated and fought wars and planted seeds and bore children and, who knows, maybe they found relics here, too, from an even more distant past."

  I looked at him. "And stood here wondering about those other people just as we're doing at this moment?" When he nodded I said, "It's like a caravan then, isn't it, a long line of people on the march, one group passing out of sight and another coming along...."

  "Until a century's passed—another and another," he said "and here we are in whatever year this is, 1913 or even 1914 by now, holding a cup someone made and used nearly two thousand years ago."

  I shivered. "That's a long time, Jared."

  "With many changes."

  "Will we change?" I asked.

  "Everyone does, but you and I will change together," he said, "and that will make all the difference."

  When we rode back later to camp it was with a handful of eroded coins, the ancient cup, a few shards, and the sun was setting so that we traveled under a sky exploding with riotous oranges, pinks and scarlets. And always waiting for us was night: if our days were rich in companionship the nights with Jared were heaven.

  We had been two months at El Hagar when Saadiya's husband Ismael returned from guiding a caravan up the Forty Days Road, and with his arrival Jared said that it was time for us to think of leaving. 'Time to travel south and dig up my gold before my pockets are empty, Caressa."

  I felt a passing sadness to hear such words, for our days here in El Hagar had been the happiest of my life, but knowing that without the gold Scotland would be only a dream I said as cheerfully as I could, "All right, when do we start?"

  "Hear me out," he said soberly, "for I've thought it through in my mind ever since we came here. I have to go alone, Caressa."

  Dismayed, I cried, "Jared!"

  "Where I'm going is no place for a woman," he said firmly, "and I'll want to travel fast. Now listen and try to realize the worry you'd be to me. I've talked of it with Onkeir—"

  "With Onkeir!"

  "Yes," he said calmly, "for it's needed sorting out for the sake of dividing what money remains, and thinking what's best and safest for you. There's a railway
now as far south as Sennar, it goes by fits and starts but it goes, and in Sennar I can buy or hire a camel and be across the border in Teseney by the next full moon at the latest."

  I said despairingly, "But if it takes nearly a month to get there, that means a month to come back? Oh Jared." I looked around me at the desert that had seemed like magic and I realized the magic had been in me, for I was suddenly seeing its isolation and its smallness. "That could be two months."

  "You won't stay here," he said, guessing my thoughts. "I've thought long and hard on this and I want you to wait for me with your own people. In Cairo."

  "Cairo!" I cried. "I've no people there, Jared, why?"

  "I mean there's an American Consulate there," he said. "You and Onkeir will go by train—it's only two days' travel—and Onkeir has once visited Cairo so he knows a little of the city. He'll deliver you to the Consulate, for I won't let you travel alone."

  "But Jared—"

  'Two months," he emphasized, "and then we'll take ship for England, Caressa, and this you'll explain to them in Cairo because, unfortunately, it's going to take all my remaining dollars for you and Onkeir to reach Cairo and for me to travel south. Because of this—and it goes hard with me to say it—you will have to present yourself to the Consulate as a Distressed Citizen. However," he added firmly, "you will carry with you a promissory note with my pledge that I'll repay all sums advanced for your expenses as soon as I join you in two months."