Tim Powers - Declare

“He doesn’t want a Nazrani out in the sands,” said bin Jalawi philosophically, sipping coffee at a sidewalk café in the Al-Hufuf town square. “Not when the spirits have got everybody stirred up in this way. Even the yakhakh are animated. Perhaps, Tommo Burks, it is the end of the world.”

Yakhakh were locusts, and in fact a net had been draped over the café’s awning poles to keep the flying grasshoppers off the tables; every three or four years the insects migrated up from Abyssinia, and today the sky was actually darkened by clouds of them passing overhead toward Kuwait, as if the sun were eclipsed.

Hale drummed his fingers on the wooden table. “National Geographic he treats this way!” he said angrily. “I wish I were a journalist, I’d write a story about him.” He frowned at bin Jalawi. “Can you…sell off the supplies we’ve bought, and the camels, and dismiss the men we’ve hired? I think I’ll be buying a plane ticket back to Kuwait.”

“Certainly.” Bin Jalawi cupped his hand and rubbed his thumb across the inside of his index finger in a universal gesture. “The men will want pay for the time they’ve waited-I can distribute it.”

I’ll bet you can, Hale thought. “But could you secretly hold back some of the supplies, after making a big scene with trying to get the best prices in returning the rest of them?-and quietly keep a couple of the best guides on our payroll, after noisily firing the rest?”

“Alahumma!” said bin Jalawi; the phrase meant to be sure or unless possibly . “This would be in order to disobey the king-to be subject to arrest, in the company of an infidel Nazrani in the sands. A greater pay-scale would be required from the Creepo.”

“‘You limpin’ lump o’brick-dust,’” sighed Hale, quoting Kipling’s Gunga Din at him, as he often did. “Yes, double the pay-it’ll still be cheaper than hiring all ten of them at the old rate. And keep back six or eight of the best camels. Eight. I’ll get somebody to board the Kuwait plane as Tommo Burks. And then I’ll meet you and the camels and the two guides at the Jabrin oasis in…what, a week?”

“If we ride hard. And how are you going to get to Jabrin?”

“I’ll drive a jeep there. The camel route from Hassa to Jabrin would be navigable in a jeep.”

“The journey will destroy the jeep.”

“Well, I haven’t got to drive it back, have I? I’ll ride one of the unburdened supply camels on the return trip, and just abandon the vehicle at Jabrin. And when you sell back the supplies, don’t sell the sled , understand? Nor the ropes and shovels.”

Hale had bought a sand sled that could be pulled by camels, and he was hoping the meteorite could be dragged to a gravel plain where an RAF aircraft could land.

“If the tribes get word of a Nazrani in the sands, it will be all they will talk about. Ibn Saud’s men will hear of it.”

“We’ll be fast,” said Hale confidently, “and if we meet any Bedu I’ll speak only in order to return greetings, in Arabic with some northern accent like Ruwala-”

“And not get off your camel,” added bin Jalawi. He had often told Hale that his huge English feet left monstrous footprints in the sand.

The 150-mile camel route from Hasa to Jabrin was mostly polished tracks slanting across gravel plains, but a number of times Hale did have to drive the commandeered RAF jeep over dunes, with the big 900-x-15 tires spinning heavily and sand thumping like deep water in the wheel wells. He had left Hufuf in the frosty dawn, but by the time he drove the jeep around the last sand ridge and finally saw below him the palm plantations of Jabrin, the sky was red with twilight, and a bandage from the jeep’s first-aid kit was wrapped tightly around a splitting radiator hose, and the radiator itself had been patched by a helpful Bedu family at the last well, with a paste of flour and camel dung. The generator had been screeching for the last hour.

Through the jolting, dust-powdered windscreen he squinted around at the Jabrin basin. Though some of the tracts of palm trees were still flourishing in orderly rows, most were decimated and choked with wild acacia bushes, and several stretches showed only toppled, dry trunks. Until the jeep clattered down to the level of the oasis he could see the broken walls and foundation-lines of ruined buildings.

Salim bin Jalawi’s party was camped on a flinty steppe by three well mounds, and out of sheer mercy for their eardrums Hale tromped on the brake pedal when he was still a couple of hundred feet away; and at long last he switched off the jeep’s laboring engine.

The shrill whine of the generator blessedly squeaked to a halt, but in the sudden desert silence he felt even more conspicuous. He climbed stiffly out of the driver’s seat and plodded around to the back, and as he unstrapped his two cases he squinted over his shoulder at the campfire and the tents and the humps of camels grazing beyond, and his nostrils flared at the warm aroma of boiled rice and butter on the alkali breeze.

The three men by the fire had stood up when the engine died, and Hale straightened the dusty kaffiyeh on his head and then hefted his cases and stepped away from the jeep. In spite of the head-cloth’s protection and the cloudy sky throughout the long day, he could feel the sting of sunburn on his nose and forehead.

He trudged slowly across the gravel to the fires, noting that the camels had already been watered-the nearest well mound had been cleared of sand and its cover of lumber and skins had been pulled away, to be conscientiously replaced before leaving tomorrow morning, and the mound, a cement of sand and a hundred years of accumulated camel dung, glinted with muddy moisture in the firelight.

“Al Kuwa,” he called. God give you strength. These men knew he was English-a Frank, a nominal Christian, a Nazrani -but he wanted to say nothing to emphasize it.

“Allah-i-gauik,” the three of them replied, civilly enough. God strengthen you.

“You camp right at the well?” Hale went on in Arabic when he had laid down his cases and embraced bin Jalawi. From one of the other men he accepted a small cup of hot coffee made from the well water, and drank it-it tasted fresh, but he knew that a laboratory analysis would show high concentrations of albuminoid ammonia, indicating contamination of camel urine in the well water.

“We are on the border of the desolation of A’ad,” said the man who had handed Hale the cup. He was a lean, black-haired ’Al-Murra tribesman with a leather cartridge belt over his shoulder and what looked like an old single-shot.450 rifle propped against a camel saddle beside him. “Even the Saar tribes will have the sense to stay out of the Rub’ al-Khali in these nights.” He laughed quietly.

“Or even in the days,” said bin Jalawi helpfully, crouching to sit by the fire again. “Men’s hopes are confounded when angels bend their courses down to earth.” Squinting up at Hale, he said, “I’ll wager the dibba came to Hufuf, after we left?”

“Yes,” Hale admitted. Dibba was the Arab term for locusts in the wingless, crawling stage, and armies of them often followed the airborne migrations. “Nothing extraordinary.” In fact the dibba had advanced on Hufuf from out of the southern desert in a front four miles wide and two miles deep, and black masses of them had stripped the date trees so bare that they appeared to have been burned. When Hale had driven out of town at dawn, he had seemed to be driving over crunching black snow, and on the road he had seen half a dozen dog-sized monitor lizards springing up in the chilly air to catch strays from the low-flying last wave of winged locusts.