Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

The hospital was a ramshackle building, part mud, part wood; a strange place to meet a girl I hadn’t seen for four years. She came to the little waiting-room dressed in apron and cap, and at the sight of me she stopped and stared in surprise, for nobody had bothered to enquire my name.

‘Mr Grant! I–I can’t believe it.’ She came forward and shook my hand.

‘Well, you’re not the only one,’ I said. ‘I can hardly believe it myself.’

Her hand was smooth and dry and firm. Her face looked thinner and the fat of youth had been worked out of her body; her blonde hair was bleached almost white by the sun, her skin tanned. She looked fit and the shine of youth was still in her eyes. It was a strange meeting, and for me — and I think also for her — it brought a feeling of relief, for there was that bond between us and from that moment neither of us could feel entirely alone any more. It was also to have the effect of making me determined, somehow, to get to Saraifa.

‘We can’t talk here,’ she said. ‘I’ll be b-back in a minute.’ Still that slight attractive hesitation in her speech.

When she returned she had removed her cap and apron and wore a light coat. We left the hospital and strolled north whilst the sand turned from brown to silver and the stars came out. I held her arm because I felt her need and mine for the touch of companionship, and the wind was warm on my face.

She had received my letter, but she hadn’t been to Bahrain, hadn’t even written to Erkhard. ‘What was the use?’ She seemed at first to have accepted the fact of her brother’s death and she was quite willing to talk about him. And as she talked, the picture that emerged was of a man I had only just begun to guess at.

She had come to Dubai two years ago, not so much to be near him — she had had the sense to realize that she would very rarely see him — but because of his fascination for Arabia, which he had somehow managed to convey to her. ‘I was here almost three months before I saw him, and then he came, without warning. He was straight out of the desert, from a survey down by the Liwa Oasis, and I didn’t recognize him at first. He was dressed as an Arab, you see. But it wasn’t that,’ she added. ‘And he hadn’t changed, not really.’

She paused there, as though collecting the details of that meeting from the recesses of her memory. ‘I can’t explain it,’ she said finally. ‘He was just different, that’s all. He had become a man and there was a remoteness about him. Do you read the Bible, Mr Grant? Those descriptions of the prophets. There was something of that about him. He always had enthusiasm, a sort of inner fire, but now it seemed to have depth and purpose.’

She had only seen him four times in the two years she had been out there, but each time her reaction had been the same. ‘It was as though he had become dedicated.’

‘Dedicated to what?’ I asked. But she couldn’t tell me, not in so many words. ‘To a way of life,’ she said, and went on to talk about the influence his father had had on him. The relationship hadn’t been at all easy at first. They started off on the wrong foot, you see. When David arrived at Saraifa Sir Philip Gorde was there with his pilot. The driver should have taken David to his father’s house; instead he was brought straight to Sheikh Makhmud’s palace. It meant, of course, that his arrival was immediately known to two Europeans. It complicated the whole thing, particularly as David was virtually smuggled into Arabia. His father thought it due to wilful disobedience and he was furious.’ She smiled at me. ‘I think they hated each other at first. They were too much alike, you see.’

I asked her whether she’d met Colonel Whitaker, and she nodded.‘Once, just over a year ago.’ He’d come to the hospital to see her. ‘It was just curiosity,’ she said. ‘There’s no feeling between us — not like there is between him and David. David’s got much more of his father in him than I have. And anyway,’ she added, ‘after being so long in Arabia he has the native attitude to girls; necessary for the procreation of the race, but useless otherwise. Being a nurse, I know. They’ll go to any lengths to get a sick boy to the hospital, but a girl child — she can die or not, just as she pleases.’

I asked her then what impression she had got of her father and she gave a slight shrug. ‘There’s no love lost between us, if that’s what you mean?’

‘Yes, but what’s he like?’ And I explained that I was looking after his financial affairs and had come out partly in the hope of meeting him.

She didn’t answer for a moment, as though she had to think about it. ‘It’s odd,’ she said at length. ‘He’s my own father. I know that. I think we could both feel that in our bones. But it meant nothing.’ She hesitated. Finally she said, ‘My only impression is one of hardness, almost of cruelty. It’s the desert, I think; the desert and the Moslem faith and the Arabs he’s lived with so long. He’s a little terrifying — tall, one-eyed, imperious. He’s like an Arab, but the sheikhs I’ve met are much softer, gentler men, more guileful. He has a strange quality of command, the sort of quality I imagine some of our kings once had when they believed implicitly in the Divine Right. You could never be easy in his company. His whole personality, it radiates-’ She paused, at a loss for words. ‘I can’t explain it, but he frightens me.’

‘What about David?’ I asked. ‘Did he feel the same way?’

‘At first. Later he came under his spell so that he looked upon him as something akin to God.’ He had been, she said, under the spell of his father when he had first come to see her. He had had six months at Saraifa, living the life of an Arab, and a year at an oil school learning to become a geophysicist. He had come to her straight from his first experience of field work and was then going on leave to Saraifa. ‘He talked a lot about Saraifa — about the way the desert was moving in on the oasis, slowly obliterating the date gardens. He could be very emotional about it.’ She smiled gently. ‘He was like a woman at times, the way he wanted to defend Saraifa.’

‘Defend it?’ I thought for a moment she was referring to the rumours of trouble.

‘From the Rub al Khali,’ she said. ‘From the sand. He dreamed of taking a seismological outfit there and proving his father’s theory. Oil, he said, was the only hope. If he could prove there was oil there, then the concession would he renewed and there would be money to rebuild the falajes.’ That word again. I asked her what it meant, but all she said was, ‘It’s some system for bringing water to Saraifa and it has largely been destroyed.’ She sighed and sat down on the sand, her hands clasped about her knees. I gave her a cigarette and she sat there smoking, remembering I suppose the last time they had been together.

‘Did he ever take a seismological truck into Saraifa?’ I asked her.

She looked at me quickly, her eyes big and round in the starlight. I think she had forgotten for the moment that I was there. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. And after a long silence she added softly, ‘I know so little about him really. I don’t know what he was doing, or why he was so depressed; and the truck abandoned like that. I know so little.’ And then she looked at me again and said with great emphasis: ‘But I know he was a man — a real man; and also that he would endeavour to the limit for something he believed in.’

‘Saraifa?’

She nodded. ‘Perhaps — for Saraifa.’

‘Because of his father?’

She didn’t answer for a while. At length, she said, ‘No. Not because of his father.’

‘What then?’

‘The people, his friend Khalid — the sand killing the place. I don’t know. The sand probably. That was something physical. He was always fascinated by physical things. He liked action.’