Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

I pressed her then to tell me what the stories were and she said, ‘He’s supposed to be drilling on his own account — with an old broken-down rig operated entirely by Bedouin. The oil boys I’ve talked to all say that’s nonsense, that uneducated desert Arabs couldn’t possibly operate an oil rig. But I don’t know. Though I’m scared of him and have no feeling for him, I know he’s a remarkable man, and you’ve only got to talk to the officers here to realize that the Bedouin are very quick to pick up a working knowledge of machinery.’

She threw the stub of her cigarette away and got to her feet. ‘I wish to God I knew what had happened.’ Her voice trembled; she was very near to tears. There was a lot more I suppose she could have told me about him, but I didn’t press her. I thought there was plenty of time and that I’d see her again. For her sake I steered the talk to other things. We passed a watch tower, standing like a lonely border keep, and she told me they were still manned, the guard climbing in through the hole halfway up the tower’s side every night and pulling the ladder up after him.

‘It looks so peaceful here,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘It is — on the surface. But who knows what is going on underneath? Certainly not our people. Some of these young English boys who are sent out here to advise-’ She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I wonder. What must the sheikhs think? This desert way of life, it goes right back to Hagar and Ishmael, racially and culturally hardly changed. They know human nature the way these youngsters out from England will never know it. They’re full of guile and intrigue; the Pax Britannica, even the oil, is just an incident in time. It’s only a few years back, you know, that the Sheikh of Dubai fell upon an Abu Dhabi raiding force, killing over fifty of them. It wasn’t very far from here.’

Back at the hospital she asked me whether I had arranged transport to get me back to Sharjah. ‘I can walk,’ I said. But she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You’d lose your way in the dark. You’d either wander into the desert or else into the sabkhat. Step through the crust of that and nobody would ever see you again.’ She insisted that I stayed at the hospital.

They had a small guest room and I spent the night there, and in the morning she arranged a lift for me in a TOS truck going back to Sharjah. She looked cool and very matter-of-fact as she said goodbye to me. ‘Come and see me again before you leave. And if you have any news-’ She left it at that, and I sat and watched her from the back of the truck as we drove away, a solitary figure in white standing motionless outside the hospital. She hadn’t moved when I lost sight of her behind a shoulder of sand.

It was that lack of movement; I became suddenly instinctively aware of a loneliness that matched my own, and my heart went out to her. And as the truck roared along the packed mud surface of the Sharjah track it wasn’t of the girl who had walked with me in the moonlight on my first night on the edge of the Arabian desert that I was thinking, but of that other girl — the girl who had come to my shabby office in Cardiff to plead for help for her brother. She was a woman now and though she might not like her father, I felt he had given her something of himself that made her, like him, an unusual person. She had courage, loyalty and a strange aura of calm, an acceptance of life as it was. They were qualities both restful and disturbing, and remembering every detail of that walk in the sands, the watch tower and her perceptive comments on the desert world, I knew I didn’t want to lose her, knew that somehow I must discover what had happened to David and set her mind at rest. I was half in love with her. I knew that before ever the truck reached Sharjah, and all that morning I walked, filled with a restlessness that was the restlessness of frustration. But you could walk for a day and still have no sense of progress in the merciless emptiness of the sea of sand that stretched away to the south.

I had my lunch in the company of a German commercial traveller and two American tourists staying the night on their way to India. The German could talk of nothing but the fact that his product had been copied in Karachi and was on sale in almost the identical wrapping in the bazaars of Dubai. The Americans were from Detroit, plaintive and unable to see any attraction in the untamed beauty of the desert, faintly disturbed by the condition of the Arabs, nostalgic for a hotel that would give them the built-in sense of security of a Statler.

The sound of aircraft coming in low interrupted the desultory conversation. Ten minutes later the screen door was flung open and Otto came in with his navigator. ‘Hi!’ He waved his hand and came over to me. ‘Fairy godfather, that’s me. Anything you want, Otto produces it. The Old Man’s in the manager’s office right now.’

‘Gorde?’

He nodded. ‘But watch out. He’s hopping mad about something.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and went across to my room and got my briefcase.

The manager’s office was by the arched entrance and seated opposite him in one of the big leather armchairs was a much older man with a yellowish face that was shrivelled like a nut. He had a tall glass in his hand and on the floor at his side lay a rubber-ferruled stick. Small bloodshot eyes stared at me over deep pouches as I introduced myself. He didn’t say anything but just sat there summing me up.

I was conscious at once that this was a very different man to Erkhard. He looked as though he belonged in the desert, a man who had had all the red blood baked out of him by the heat. He wore an old pair of desert boots, khaki trousers and a freshly-laundered cream shirt with a silk square knotted round his throat like a sweat rag. A battered brown trilby, the band stained black by the perspiration of years, was tipped to the back of his grizzled head.

‘You got my message,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Yes. I got your message. But that wasn’t what brought me.’ His voice was dry, rasping, the words staccato as though life were too short for conversation.

‘Should be in Bahrain now.’ He gave the manager a brusque nod of dismissal and when we were alone he said, There’s a newspaper on the desk there. That’s why I’m here. Read it. I’ve marked the passage.’

It was the airmail edition of a leading London daily. The marked passage was on the foreign news page. It was headed: NEW OIL DISCOVERY IN ARABIA? — Desert Death of Ex-Borstal Boy Starts Rumours. It was written ‘by a Special Correspondent’ and besides giving a full and graphic account of David Whitaker’s disappearance and the search that had followed, it included his background; everything was there, everything that I knew about the boy myself — his escape from the police in Cardiff, the fact that he was Colonel Whitaker’s son, even the details of how he’d been smuggled into Arabia on a native dhow. The story ran to almost a column with a double-column head, and about the only thing it didn’t give was the location he’d been surveying immediately prior to his death.

‘Well?’ Gorde rasped. ‘Are you responsible for that?’

‘No.’

‘Then who is?’

That was what I was wondering. Whoever had written it had access to all the information that I had. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You’re David Whitaker’s solicitor. His Executor, in fact, Otto tells me.’

‘Yes.’

‘And just over two days ago you were in London.’

‘Nevertheless, I’m not responsible for it.’

‘A young kid just out of oil school and operating in an area he’d no business in … a criminal to boot.’ He glared at me, his fingers drumming at the leather arm of the chair. The Political Resident had that paper specially flown down to me at Abu Dhabi. The Foreign Office has teleprinted him that half the London press have taken the story up. He’s furious.’