Fighting down growing panic, she switched on the torch and tried to find her way back. But everything had changed. She found a channel that headed downwards, and followed it, feeling the chilly water tugging around her ankles and rising higher. She had to find Ethan, had to warn them all of the danger they faced. People died in flash floods, swept away before they knew it, from a place where they had never expected to see water at all.
Down in the wadi, they already knew the risk. Ayyub had warned them the moment the rain started to hit the tents. Moments later, the first water started to flood the wadi, and the monks had started to tumble back out of their tents.
‘Don’t waste time on the tents,’ shouted Ayyub. ‘Get into the vehicles and drive out of here.’
Ethan couldn’t see Sarah anywhere. He grabbed Ayyub as he was scurrying past.
‘Have you seen Sarah?’
‘The woman? Yes, she’s with her two monks, Claudiu and the other one. The jokers.’
‘Where are they? Quickly.’
Ayyub saw Gavril leap aboard the jeep he shared with Ethan. The engine started up.
‘There’s no time,’ he shouted. ‘The flood will sweep us all away.’
He tore at Ethan’s arm in his panic, and forced him aboard the jeep before leaping in himself. Gavril saw they were aboard and put his foot on the accelerator. For half a minute their hearts were in their mouths while the tyres spun, unable to get traction on the wet sand. Then the back wheels caught and, with a terrible roaring of the engines, the jeep leapt forward and tore into the darkness. Behind them, a second and third jeep pulled away. There was a roaring of water as the wadi filled.
28
After the Rain
The rain fell for two hours then stopped. One moment it was pouring down, the next it came to a stop, as though someone had turned off a giant tap. It was still dark, and floodwaters still lay in low places, where they waited for the unwary.
Several hours more of darkness passed, during which everyone stayed on board the jeeps and did what they could to sleep upright.
Out to the east, over Lebanon and Israel, and down along the Western Desert of Egypt, a ball of fire rose above the rain-sodden sands, and quickly set to work drying off the surface water. On the desert, fine vegetation was triggered into brief life. Jerboas, roused from their holes, scampered across the desert floor. Long-eared fennec foxes ran over the dunes, keen to eat anything in sight. And high overhead, its engines humming softly, an aircraft crossed the desert from north to south.
‘Egon,’ said Iorghiu Bogoescu, his second-in-command, waking Aehrenthal from the deep sleep he’d fallen into during the rainstorm. ‘The rain’s over. Mohamed wants to talk to you. He says it’s urgent.’
Aehrenthal yawned and stretched.
‘I need to piss,’ he said, opening the door and stepping out. He went to one side, unzipped his trousers, and unleashed a stream of pungent urine onto the side of a dune. When he went back to the cars, his guide, Mohamed, was waiting for him.
‘Good morning, excellency,’ he muttered. He held his hand to his side, preferring not to shake the hand of someone who had just urinated standing up, holding his organ in that filthy manner of the unbelievers.
‘Iorghiu tells me you have something to report.’
Mohamed nodded. He was a young Tuareg from Ghadames called Mohamed ag Ewangaye. Mohamed had never revealed his face to anyone in the group, but his fierce eyes said as much about him as a nose or a mouth might have done. For several years he had lived in Kufra, where he made his living taking adventure-seeking Europeans into the deep desert, to search for the Cave of the Swimmers or investigate Second World War battlefields. He had heard tell of Ain Suleiman, and that there might be Tuareg there, but never a word of Wardabaha.
‘Sir, I climbed up this dune’ – he pointed to a tall dune to their right – ‘to the very top. I wanted to see how everything looks after the rain, whether the road ahead is dangerous. But the first thing I saw was an oasis, maybe five miles west of here. I am sure it is Ain Suleiman. The Spring of Lord Solomon. We shall be there this morning, insha’ allah.’
Aehrenthal received the news with equanimity. His quest was as good as over.
‘Pass word round,’ he said. ‘We leave after everyone has eaten.’
As Aehrenthal busied himself with maps and GPS devices, Mohamed hung around restlessly. Finally, Aehrenthal swore and asked him what he wanted.
‘You didn’t give me time to finish, sir. When I was on top of the dune – it is a very tall dune, you must understand – when I was atop this great dune, after I have spotted Ain Suleiman, for I am sure it is Ain Suleiman my eyes have seen, then, sir, I spy out the rest of the desert and in the east, I see more cars. I cannot tell how many, for some were behind dunes, and the ones I saw disappeared about a minute later. I stay up there many minutes, but they do not reappear. Perhaps it is another expedition. They are a day, two days from us.’
Aehrenthal’s first reaction was to shrug. Plenty of expeditions came out here. Thinking it over, however, he’d been reliably told that they didn’t come in this direction. There was nothing for them out here, or so they thought.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Now, take my binoculars and go back up there, and see if you can spot them again. Stay there fifteen minutes, then come down. I don’t want to waste time in getting to Ain Suleiman.’
Sarah had been cast adrift, like a sailor after long voyages, on a sea of sand. Escaping the flash floods had forced her higher and higher, but she had climbed in the dark, and when she woke after a fitful sleep, all the world was strange. By some mischance, she had strayed into a field of very high dunes, each one of which blotted out her vision whichever way she looked.
She realised with a pang that she had no water and no food, not even a compass. Her orienteering skills were limited to those she had learnt in the Oxfordshire countryside during her first year as an undergraduate. Using the sun, she could get a rough idea of the four compass points. What she couldn’t do was work out a path through the dunes, whether to take her back to Kufra or further on to a city that had been lost for decades, a city that might well lie buried beneath centuries of sand.
After the soaking of the night before, her limbs ached. Any movement caught her short with muscle pain, and she feared getting cramp. But she knew she had no choice but to move. If she stayed here, lying on her side, she would die. She had no idea how long that would take. The sun could be hot, even in winter, and she had no protection from it. Even now, its rays were growing uncomfortable.
She scanned the very narrow horizon around her, trying to estimate which of the many dunes in her neighbourhood was the tallest. It wasn’t easy. In the end, she decided it didn’t matter too much if she selected the tallest dune or not. It would be enough to climb one close and to use that eminence as the first step to finding a way to safety. If she was lucky enough, she might catch sight of the expedition and make her way across to it. They’d be looking for her, she knew that. Ethan would not give up the search.
She got to her feet and made her way stiffly towards an ochre-coloured dune to her right.
The floods had not just swept down wadis, carrying everything in their path, but they had caused landfalls from many of the dunes, rearranging the landscape to suit themselves. Ethan’s expedition had paid no heed to direction, but pushed on in the dark, praying loudly, twisting, reversing, punishing their engines in a desperate bid to avoid the flash floods.
Now they watched as water sank into the thirsty sand or steamed under the hot rays of the sun where it cut through gaps between the dunes. The sky had cleared completely. A haze had settled across the surface of the sand, giving the landscape an eerie, unsettled look. It had become a place where the jinn might walk on an inner plane between the worlds of men and angels.
While Ayyub performed the two voluntary and the two obligatory prostrations of his morning prayer, Ethan and Gavril got out the navigational equipment and began to work out where the
y were. They had strayed from their original path by about two miles, but that diversion had taken them nearer Ain Suleiman. Despite that, their first goal was to find and rescue Sarah.
‘Let’s climb that dune,’ Ethan said to Gavril. ‘Bring the binoculars and let’s see what we can find.’
It was the hardest physical exercise either man had undertaken. The waterlogged sand made the going extremely difficult. It was hard not to slip back. Each foot was a conquest to be made and held. The dune was about four hundred feet high, and before they were halfway both men’s thighs felt as though another step would finish them. They rested for ten minutes, then started again. They had to rest several more times, growing weaker the nearer they came to the summit.
At the top, they lay down to recover from the climb, hoping their legs didn’t freeze. Ethan was the first to get to his feet and train his binoculars on the terrain below. Off to the west, he immediately picked out the palm fronds surrounding the Ain Suleiman spring, and the spring itself rippling blue in the gaps between the trees.
Sarah passed the day in growing discomfort. With only herself for company, her fears expanded to fill her heart and mind. She feared the sun, the desert, dehydration. More than that, she feared Egon Aehrenthal. She felt certain he was close, for they had come within striking distance of Ain Suleiman, and she thought he might be there already, or on his way, and that she might stumble into him behind the next dune.
The day passed and night came, and she was left with the moon and the stars. Without cloud, the desert was bitterly cold. The moon moved through the stars like a misshapen disc of chalk. Her feet were freezing, and she wished the sun would come back, for all it would burn her and increase her raging thirst. The stars were not English stars, she thought. For one thing, it dazzled her to see so many of them, to see such a profusion of pure light. She knew nothing of their names, and only a few of their constellations: the Plough, Orion with his belt. They were the loneliest things in creation, and the most aloof, and watching them she felt herself drift. Out on the dunes, she thought she saw ghosts, but when she blinked her star-dazed eyes the ghosts flickered and blurred, and she was left alone on the sand, cold and lost and constantly on the brink of tears.
She must have slept at last, and deeply, for when she next opened her eyes, the sun had already climbed some way into the sky, and everything was growing hot again.
It seemed beyond her strength to climb another dune, but she knew she had to if she was to have any chance of spotting the expedition or Ain Suleiman. She dragged herself to her feet and found a suitable dune about two hundred yards away. It wasn’t very high, but she didn’t think she could find the energy to climb anything else.
As she struggled upwards, the dune wall faded from her sight. She was moving sightlessly, guided only by the sensations of her feet biting into the sand and pulling out again. Suddenly, her left foot encountered open space, and she went tumbling forwards, all four limbs sprawling across the dune. Had it not been for the way her right leg became entangled with the left, and the bracing motion made instinctively by her arms, she might have continued tumbling down the other side and landed back at the bottom, with the dune to climb again and quite beyond her strength to do it.
By luck more than balance, she landed about a yard below the top of the dune. It took several minutes for her to fight off the dizziness and catch her breath. When she was more herself, she looked down and blinked.
At first she found it hard to make out what lay below her. Just sand, she thought, more bloody sand. Then she squeezed her eyes and looked again. No, she thought, she was wrong, there was something down there, too far away to distinguish clearly, and blurred by shade.
She let herself slide down about one hundred feet, and the blur became a jeep, and the two smaller blurs beside it became men, though she couldn’t make out who.
She cried out, ‘I’m here!’, but her voice caught in her throat. She stood, then fell backwards, and continued her way down on her back, like riding a sledge when she was nine. She felt ecstatic, euphoria cascading from her like rain from a dog’s back. To be rescued, to know she would see Ethan again, to be within a short radius of the most precious objects in the world, and to create a new life for herself through their discovery. It all raced through her veins in the short space it took her to slide to the bottom of the dune.
She got to her feet and stood up, a smile broadly visible through her cracked lips and reddened face. A happy schoolgirl on a Christmas break, safely back with her family and friends.
When she cleared her eyes of sand, however, and looked towards the jeep, her heart skipped a beat. She did not recognise the two men. One was an Arab, the other wore a uniform she had never seen before. And as she looked, a door opened and a third man stepped out. All hope failed her. This man she did recognise. He was the end of her world. In him all things fell to their destruction. In him, she was in hell. He spoke to her, and his voice seemed to echo through the banks of sand as though he was everywhere, like a king of the jinn made physical at last, or Satan come to earth in a black uniform. She reached out for something to hold on to, but there was nothing, and she fell unprotected to the ground while her mind reeled and was replaced by blackness.
Ethan took turns at the driving wheel. His heart had not stopped beating since they discovered Sarah was missing. Only the tight grip he held on the wheel and the pressure of his feet on the pedals helped relieve the tension. It was like driving on Mars, boxed in by a landscape that belonged on a dead planet.
They had gone several miles when Gavril ordered Ethan to stop.
‘It’s time one of us went up again, just to take another look. She could be in the next valley and we could miss her.’
Ethan volunteered to climb a nearby dune. At the top, while he was still catching his breath, the silence was broken by a single sound. A gunshot that seemed to come from all directions at once. A crack uttered by a pistol that seemed as near as it was far. A single bullet. For all he knew, a single death. He felt his legs give way. Fear descended without pity. Silence returned.
29
King Solomon’s Spring
Aehrenthal’s chief advantage lay (though he did not know it) in his guide, Mohamed. Unlike Ayyub, who knew the desert only as far as his tourist clients ventured, which was not far at all, Mohamed was a Tuareg and a descendant of Tuaregs. The desert was in his blood, its patterns, its labyrinths, its signs and disclosures, its mysteries and its dark secrets. The Tuareg knew everything and said little. Mohamed’s knowledge of the desert was the result, not just of his lifetime’s work, or that of his father and grandfather passed on to him, but of generation upon generation of veiled men who had lived their lives on the margins of survival, men who understood the long sands the way sailors know the sea or farmers the soil or soldiers the blood.
Although he had met and talked with plenty of foreigners, Mohamed was still profoundly unaware of their ways. When Aehrenthal explained that the woman he had taken on board and whose hands he’d tied with tape was, in fact, one of his wives who had been snatched by another expedition, Mohamed believed him and approved of his stern measures in restraining her before he was sure of her unchastity. If Aehrenthal wanted to kill her, Mohamed would recommend a single shot to the head, since rocks were not easily come by in this part of the desert and bullets were expensive. A knife across her throat would work as well, but it would be messy.
Using their most recent tracks to guide them, they made their way back to the rest of the unit without difficulty. On Aehrenthal’s orders, they had stayed put, using a radio signal to transmit their position across the dunes.
Aehrenthal was hungry and thirsty. He dragged Sarah from his jeep and pushed her across to where a long shadow stretched beneath a dune. The others followed him. Someone brought water. They were more confident about using their supply since they knew the oasis was only a short distance away. Aehrenthal’s cook set up a large camping stove on which he prepared eggs and bacon for everyone
. They ate in silence for a while, then someone switched on a radio. He spun the dial for a few moments, finally picking up LJB Radio Benghazi, broadcasting in Arabic. There was a brief discussion. Mohamed told them it was about the Second World War and the struggle against the Italians and Germans.
‘Now they are going to play music from that time,’ Mohamed said. Next thing, the radio blared out. Sarah recognised it at once, as though she remembered it. Lale Anderson singing ‘Lili Marleen’.
‘Vor der Kaserne
Vor dem grossen Tor
Stand eine Lanterne
Und steht sie noch davor…
Wie einst Lili Marleen.’
Aehrenthal’s men, though none was old enough to remember the wartime years, all knew the song as a German forces number, and could whistle along to it.
One of the men, whom Sarah recognised as one of her rapists from the castle, licked his lips and set down his plate.
‘Sir,’ he said, addressing Aehrenthal, ‘I suppose you’d like us to teach this young woman a few lessons. Teach her not to run off the way she did. I’ve been feeling an itch since we left home, if you know what I mean. I’d like permission to take her behind one of these dunes and give her a seeing to. Maybe we can all have a go, relieve our itches before we head on for this oasis.’
Aehrenthal stared at the man, a sergeant in his own guard unit. Serghei Comeaga was not an unintelligent man, and if he felt a stirring for female flesh, he kept it well under control.
‘The woman is out of bounds, Serghei,’ said Aehrenthal. ‘If anyone touches her, I touch her. She is my property. You do not steal my property. Later, I may give her to you, but for the moment I want to keep her with me. She will help me decipher the inscriptions, she will help me authenticate the contents of the city, and one day she will meet with museum curators to persuade them of the truth of what they see. When enough money has been paid, we will have the funds to begin our project. She will not matter so much then. You can all have her, you can all fuck her until she is blind and insane, for all I care.’
Spear of Destiny Page 24