‘I’d better get going,’ he said. ‘When should I come back?’
He’d left a list of arms that Gavril had drawn up.
‘Give me till tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘Come here late. Come on your own.’
He shook his head.
‘I’ll need help to carry it all.’
She looked disappointed, then sniffed once and shrugged.
‘Bring your fucking friends, then. We’ll have a party.’
To Ethan’s surprise, the arms were waiting for them when they turned up at the WAP office. Bob was nowhere in sight, but another man, a Libyan, handled the transaction smoothly while Helena looked on. His luxuriant black hair was combed back and fell down almost to his shoulders. He wore a white silk burnous and fingered a string of amber prayer beads while he talked. Helena eyed Ethan all the time, but he noticed that she sometimes let one nail-varnished hand rest on the Libyan’s, and that he did not draw his hand away. He gave his name as Tariq, but revealed nothing more of himself. His English gave away the fact that he had spent some time in the United States.
Ethan had been accompanied by Gavril and two other monks. As they began to carry the weapons, wrapped in sacks, out to the alleyway, the Libyan turned to Ethan.
‘I had things to see to in the new harbour,’ he said. ‘While I was there, I heard of someone, a German or an Austrian, I can’t be sure, who was also buying guns. Perhaps he is a friend of yours. Perhaps you and he work together?’
Ethan shook his head.
‘I know of no Germans,’ he said. ‘Though I’m sure there are many Germans who try to help the people of Palestine.’
They said their farewells. Gavril and Ethan waited till they were safely back at the hotel before speaking. They knew Aehrenthal was ahead of them. They would have to leave on the following day.
26
The Road to Kufra
After the coast comes the sand. Beyond a certain point, the Sahara is inevitable. It stretches right across, from Morocco in the west to the shores of the Red Sea in the east. It is not a sea but a vast ocean that has swallowed worlds. It runs south to the Sahel region, engulfing entire nations, gathering their bones, turning men and animals and stone to dust.
They drove by night, navigating by GPS, their headlights dancing as they climbed tall dunes and rolled down the other side. At the top of each dune, the headlights would point at the sky, like searchlights in search of aeroplanes long vanished. Ethan wondered if his grandfather had journeyed like this, listening for German planes, twisting the dial on his radio to stay in touch with base.
When they camped by day, they switched off their engines and a silence fell on them like no other silence. In that silence, they thought they could hear the Earth turn. The silence, like the sand, went on for ever. Sarah could have lived in it an entire lifetime. She thought it cleansed her. The silence, and with it the great emptiness and the pure, pure air. When she breathed, she could feel the air reach her lungs, and she wanted to drown in it, to feel the perfect desert air reach inside her, driving out all the filth and contamination Egon Aehrenthal and his men had inflicted on her.
When she listened it was as if she listened to the most perfect music, to a singer with perfect intonation, a song with perfect harmony. The silence became a code for the desert itself, a place that could swallow whole armies and coffles of slaves without trace.
Sometimes a lonely bird would creep across the sky, its wings outstretched to ride on the air currents. Once she saw a kestrel, once a flight of ducks. She thought of the birds often, their freedom and mastery of the air. She would watch them soar, wondering where they had come from.
They drove south to Jalu, a palm-fringed oasis where they stopped for dates. They proceeded down along the palificata track, the old Italian route to Kufra. Here and there they saw signs of the Second World War: abandoned jerrycans, a rusted tank, strands of barbed wire, a telegraph pole – the detritus of a conflict over territory on which no one would ever grow a fruit tree or flowers.
Ethan followed Sarah late one afternoon after they woke, walking beside her along a flat alley between high dunes. In winter, the desert was cold and more bleak than at any other time, but the further south they travelled the warmer it grew.
There had been few opportunities for them to talk. If they weren’t in the jeeps, they were bivouacked in a circle of monks in leather jackets, while a guard watched for bandits or Aehrenthal. Behind them, at the camp, the monks were saying morning prayers.
He looked at her. Time was healing her, but after what had happened in the house at Sighisoara, he could not be sure she would not slip back to her horror and self-disgust. Feeling his eyes on her, she slipped her hand inside his.
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘What happened before… I’m sorry about that. I didn’t doubt you, don’t think that. I wanted you, I have never wanted a man so much. You must understand that.’
‘I was too fast. You need to recover. Aehrenthal, that whole crew, they aren’t behind you yet. Who knows, it may take years, your entire life, to be over it.’
She walked with him a few more steps.
‘Don’t say that,’ she said. ‘You forget that I love you. You forget you love me. That has already made a difference. Sometimes I have nightmares, and I dream I’m being raped again, and it terrifies me, you can’t imagine how much. But other times I have good dreams, and I mostly dream about you, and sometimes I dream we’re in bed.’ She grinned.
He grinned back, then took her in his arms. She made no attempt to resist, letting herself fall against him, with her head on his shoulder. They stood like that, defying everything, for a long time, while all around them the desert grew dark and the moon and stars grew bright in a cloudless sky.
Someone beeped a horn, calling them back. It was time to go.
They stayed in Kufra only long enough to restock on food and water. Apart from the Italian fort that towered over the oasis, and the stark contrast between green fields and the ochre shades of the sand, there was nothing to keep them in the oasis. Gavril didn’t want to draw attention to the expedition, so only he, Ethan, and their guide went in.
Gavril wanted to find out whether Aehrenthal had passed through Kufra. Unfortunately, he had no photographs of the Austrian, and no idea how large his party might be. He instructed the guide to ask the most obvious people in the oasis, people who might have supplied a party heading west towards Rebiana and the great sand sea beyond it. No one knew anything, or so they said. Ethan spotted some tourists and overheard them speaking English. One, he guessed, was German, another Scottish. He walked over to where they were haggling for a can of petrol.
‘I heard you speaking English,’ Ethan said. There was a pretty girl among them. She smiled at him and looked away.
The Scottish man, whom Ethan put at about twenty-five, dressed in a thermal vest and stained blue dungarees, answered.
‘Piss off. We dinnae want any fucking hash. We’ve got more than we can smoke already.’
‘You’re welcome to it,’ Ethan said. ‘But I’m not here to play games. How long have you been in Kufra?’
‘What’s it tae you? If you’re polis, this is no your country.’
‘It’s not yours either, chummy.’ Ethan walked right up to him. He had handled hard cases like the Scot from the first day he went out on the beat.
‘Listen to me, sonny,’ he said. ‘Very carefully. You talk to me politely, you tell me the truth, and you walk out of Kufra with both fucking legs. The same thing goes for anybody with you. I have jeeps out there and men with guns in them, and believe me, they will hurt you if you try to mess with me.’
‘Sonny’ went red with anger, but the flare-up lasted only seconds. Adding things up, he melted like butter. Without another word, he slouched over to join the girl. She shifted out of his way and started talking to another one of their party. Ethan turned to the man he thought was German.
‘I want to know if you’ve seen a second party like ours. An ex
pedition heading into the deep desert. All men. Tough-looking bastards. Their leader is a tall man with a scar on one cheek.’
‘I saw someone like that. He was speaking German, that’s why I noticed. Is your man German?’
‘Austrian.’
‘Of course. His accent.’
‘Where did they go?’
The German waved his hand in the vague direction of the west.
‘Out there somewhere,’ he said.
‘How long ago was he here?’
‘Maybe two days. Yes, I’m sure – two days. And you’re right, they were tough-looking bastards.’
27
The Sand Sea
All was not lost. Just because Aehrenthal had gone into the desert in search of Wardabaha, there was no reason to suppose he would arrive there ahead of them. There were no roads where he was going, just acre upon acre of sand, whipped up into high dunes by the wind. A wrong turning, a false intuition could take a car far out of its way as it dropped down from an unclimbable dune and was forced to drive between the high sands until a gap opened up to let them through. Even then, there might still be repeated twisting and turning before they could get back to their original route.
Ethan spoke to their guide, a young Arab from Tripoli who had been born and bred in Kufra and knew the desert well. His name was Ayyub. He was a tall, good-looking man whose green eyes looked out on everything with a wide, searching gaze. He spoke good English with a strong accent.
Ethan asked him if there was a specific route another guide might have sent them on. Ayyub shook his head.
‘There are no routes,’ he said. ‘The desert is a sea, a sea of sand, bahr ramal.’
Ethan persisted.
‘Even at sea there are shipping lanes. There are routes that avoid strong currents, routes through narrow channels. There are dunes out there. Some are as tall as mountains.’
‘The sands shift. Wind comes and lifts the dunes, it blow and blow until is nothing where was once something, something where was once nothing.’
He looked out to where the sun was extinguishing itself in the western sands, on its way to drown in the waves of the Atlantic.
‘One day, even this desert will have vanished, even the sun will dry up and shrivel and become blackness.’
Ethan could not tell whether he was smiling or not.
‘It’s time to get going,’ he said.
The going got tough very quickly. The moon was almost full, and galaxies of stars like candy floss augmented the light it cast, throwing a blanket of silver across the humped and lawless sand. This was somewhat to the good, but the stark shadows the moonlight created made it hard to navigate between dunes or to tell which were safe to climb or likely to collapse the moment the spinning wheels of the first jeep touched them.
Ethan travelled in front with Gavril and the guide, Sarah took the rear with two monks called Claudiu and Flaviu, neither of whom spoke a word of English.
Outside, light and darkness turned the desert to something very like the surface of the moon. Sarah felt herself crawl across it, an alien being on a world without fixed points. The slow passage of shadows, the turning of the stars and the steady passage of the moon all dimmed her eyes. She started to doze, then fell fast asleep.
When she next woke, they had stopped in a broad wadi. They had started unloading the Hagor fast-up tents and were hauling sleeping bags and other equipment inside. When everything had been stowed or left behind, the monks assembled, as they assembled every morning, to sing matins. Ayyub looked on from a distance, disapproving.
The last stars passed away on the bright horizon. Camping tables were laid out, and soon the smell of supper wafted through the dunes. Just as it confused everyone to sing matins before sleep, so everyone had a stomach unable to cope with the changes a night-time existence thrust on them.
No one slept well that day. The bright sunshine proved unbearable, the tents retained an unaccustomed amount of heat, sand crept into the folds of everyone’s skin and even seemed to work its way down into the pores and behind the eyelids.
They struggled through noon, and were out of their tents soon after, preferring to drive on than remain in misery. Ayyub agreed there were now few benefits to travelling by night. In daylight, they had a much better chance of finding their way or spotting Aehrenthal. They decided to stay awake by day and sleep once the sun went down. The caravan was reformed and they set off once more.
On the following day they came to another wadi surrounded by five-hundred-foot-high dunes. Sunset had already touched the sky with red and pink, gold and green. They were all exhausted. They got down stiffly, their bodies aching from the profound hammering they’d received during the day’s journey. There was a chance they might find the lost city in another day.
They wolfed down their food, then checked their weapons. If they did reach Wardabaha, there was a chance they’d come across Aehrenthal and his men. Tents snapped open across the floor of the ancient river bed. The monks chanted early vespers together, under Gavril’s direction, then headed for their beds.
When Sarah ate, her digestive system was in such disorder that she could barely keep food down. The shock of her abduction had never really left her, and this latest journey and the knowledge that Aehrenthal was somewhere around revived those earlier sensations.
She sat up for a while, talking with Ethan. It was the only time of day when they could find an opportunity to be with one another, and with every day that passed it grew more important to do so. They talked of hopes and fears, of memories good and bad, of relatives, of whatever came to mind, but of Sarah’s pain they said nothing. Each day, more and more, they returned to their love for one another, and how precarious it felt, yet how necessary to them both. It was not a matter of whispering sweet nothings or inviting seduction, or inciting lust. They both wanted time for that, but they knew that their love and its fulfilment depended utterly on the outcome of this expedition and the downfall of Aehrenthal and his plans.
As they parted, Ethan noticed that it was darker than usual for the time of day. It was far too early for him to have learnt the rhythms of the desert, and he knew he could not trust his own judgement. Only Ayyub was properly attuned, and Ethan did not trust him.
He looked up and saw clouds scudding across the sky. Most seemed to be grey, but here and there clouds of a distinctly blacker hue moved at a slower pace. There was a little breeze at ground level now, that picked up the finer sand and carried it along.
Sarah stepped inside her tent. Its sides were stretched like a drum against the growing wind. Thoughts of Oxford came to her. The spires, the river, the colleges were all vivid in her mind, but in the way matters of dreams are vivid. The whole city seemed to her nothing more than a setting for an episode of Morse or Lewis. Whatever she saw in her mind’s eye was accompanied by snatches of classical music. She preferred Amy Winehouse or Joy Division. Here in the desert, her best memories turned to sand. If she had ever wanted drama, she had found it in abundance.
She lay awake in the dark, her mind spinning with thoughts of what the following day might bring. She still could not sleep. There was no help for it, she thought, but to get up and go outside for a walk. She dug out a bag of clothes she’d bought in Tripoli expressly to wear at night: woollen socks, a heavy Benneton pullover found on a stall in the suq, and above it a man’s jelabia that Ethan had bought for her in the area where men’s clothes were up for sale.
It had grown colder than usual, and the darkness had increased by several degrees. She went inside to retrieve her torch, then set off down the wadi. Within minutes, the contours of the landscape had inveigled her away from the wadi floor up onto a channel between two dunes whose height she could only guess at. Walking on the loose sand was far from easy, but something drove her upwards and away from the camp, a need to walk, to push herself to exhaustion. Her thighs soon started to ache. She had not yet recovered her strength after her ordeal, and even if she thought she was up to a walk through the
dunes, the truth was that her muscles had not regained their elasticity.
She decided to sit down for a spell. Nobody would miss her, after all, and the sand was more comfortable to sit on than walk over. As she sat, she yawned and looked up at the black sky. The clouds tumbled like clothes in a drier. In the end, she turned her eyes away, finding herself made almost giddy by the dark movements. She yawned again, more deeply this time, and to her surprise her head started to drop. Jerking awake, she decided her objective had been attained and started to get to her feet in order to work her way back to the camp. But as she moved, her thighs protested. It felt comfortable in the little dip she had made for herself in the sand, so she thought she’d stay some minutes longer, until her legs were properly rested.
She yawned again, then a second and a third time. Next thing she was on her side, fast asleep and snoring.
Afterwards, she could not guess with any accuracy how long she’d been out. It was a deep sleep, she knew that, and she knew that she’d only come round from it with difficulty. What wakened her was the sensation of rain falling on her head. Heavy rain. Cold heavy rain that soaked her hair in seconds and ran in rivulets down through her collar and onto her back and chest. When she moved, she could feel fast-flowing water on either side of her. It was cold water, and it sucked at her, as if eager to pull her with it, to drag her downwards.
She scrabbled about, knowing she had to find her torch, that without it she’d be lost till daybreak. There was no doubt in her mind what was taking place. In the winter, there can be heavy downpours in the desert. They could be highly uncomfortable, but they never lasted long. But in that short time they could kill, creating flash floods in places like wadis – dried-up river beds. Even now, she saw that water was moving down from the peaks of the dunes, skimming fast over the sand, and heading for the lowest regions.
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