Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

I read the report through carefully as we flew south into the desert. It was typewritten, highly technical — quite beyond my comprehension. For this reason I do not intend to give the details. But there were several references to the ‘Whitaker Theory’, and right at the beginning there was a paragraph that read: It should not be imagined that I stumbled on this by accident. If anything comes of it, the credit must go to Henry Fan. He surveyed the area in the very early days of the war. The Saraifa Concession was fairly new then and Fan’s outfit was the only survey team in the area. Moreover he made his report at a time of crisis in the Middle East; it was pigeon-holed away in the Company’s headquarters and shortly afterwards he died fighting in Abyssinia. I was fortunate enough to come upon this report when searching old surveys for anything that had a bearing on Saraifa -

I leaned back in my seat, thinking about the war and how that old report had got lost in the files. Colonel Whitaker had fought in Eritrea. The same area. I wondered whether he and Farr had ever met. I was thinking about that when Gorde leaned across to me. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What are you going to do about that report when you get back to Bahrain?’ He was smiling, tight-lipped. ‘The boy’s like his father,’ he grunted. ‘A dreamer. The same dream, too.’

The dreams of youth sometimes come true,’ I said. I was remembering how Sue had talked of him.

His eyes clouded and he looked away from me, staring out of his window towards the mountains. ‘Ah yes, the dreams of youth.’ He gave a little sigh. ‘But the boy’s dead and Charles isn’t a young man any more.’

‘And what about Farr?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘He’s dead, too.’

‘You don’t think they could be right?’

The Whitaker Theory?’ He gave a snort. ‘Charles had a nose for oil, a sort of instinct for it, like Holmes. But he didn’t know a damn’ thing about geology. That nose of his cost the Company a lot of money. We struck oil, but never in large enough quantities. I should know,’ he almost snarled. ‘I backed him and it cost me my job out here. And I loved it,’ he added quietly. ‘I love this country. Look at it.’

He leaned across, pointing to the desert that lay below the wing-tip, a corrugated dune sea stretching to the mountains that lay all along the horizon. ‘Clean and hard and cruel. I had twenty years of it. I know it better than I know my own country and it calls to me the way the sea calls to a sailor — and I’m stuck in a damned office in London; I haven’t been out here for almost four years.’ And he relapsed into silence, staring out of his window.

But a moment later he touched my arm and pointed downwards. A great sweep of dunes thrust eastwards, narrowing like a finger till the tip of the yellow sand touched the red rock wall of the mountains. Right below us a black line wound like a thread across the dunes — a camel caravan going south and leaving a faded snail-like smudge behind it in the sand. The Ramlah Anej,’ he said in my ear. ‘We’re crossing the eastern edge of the Rub al Khali.’ And ft

he added with a sort of boyish delight, ‘I’m one of the very few men who’ve crossed the Empty Quarter by camel. Charles and I did it together. We said we were looking for oil, but that was just an excuse.’ He was smiling and his eyes were alight with the memory of it, so that through age and illness I got a glimpse of the young man he’d once been.

After that he fell silent and left me alone with my thoughts as the aircraft roared steadily south, the mountains always away to the left, always marching with us, a moon-mad landscape of volcanic peaks, sometimes near, sometimes receding to the lip of the earth’s surface. And below us, the sun marked the desert floor with the imprint of our plane, a minute shadow dogging our course.

It was just after four when the navigator came aft and woke Gorde, who had fallen asleep with the curtain drawn across his window and his battered hat tipped to shade his eyes. ‘Jebel al-Akhbar coming up now, sir. Otto wants to know whether you’d like to fly over Hadd or make a detour?’

‘May as well have a look at the Emir’s hide-out,’ Gorde murmured, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Long time since I last saw it.’ He got to his feet and motioned me to follow him.

The view from the flight deck was a blinding glare made bearable only by the green shade above the pilot’s head. All away to the right of us was sand as far as the eye could strain, a petrified sea corrugated by the action of the wind. But from the left mountains were closing in, bare, black, lava-ash mountains marked by patches of a livid, chemical green. They swept round ahead of us in a long curve, terminating abruptly at the sand sea’s edge in a bold headland topped by a pinnacle of bare rock. ‘Jebel al-Akhbar,’ Gorde said, nodding towards it over the pilot’s head. There’s an old stone fort on the top of it and the town of Hadd is right underneath. Remarkable place. There’s a saying amongst the Arabs of this part — Who holds al-Akhbar, holds Hadd. You’ll see in a minute.’

Otto was pushing the control column forward and as we lost height the headland began to come up fast. ‘See the fort?’ Gorde’s hand gripped my arm. ‘I got a gazelle there once. The Emir invited us hunting and a Saluki bitch named Adilla cornered it for me right under the walls there. My first visit to Saraifa,’ he added. The time we signed the original concession.’

I could see the fort clearly now, a biggish place, crumbling into ruin, with an outer ring of mud and rock walls and in the centre a single watch tower perched high on a pinnacle of rock. We skimmed it with about a hundred feet to spare and on the farther side the hill dropped sheer to a valley shaped like a crescent moon and half-ringed with mountains.

The valley floor was flat, a patchwork quilt of cultivation; date palms, grey with dust, stood thick as Indian corn in mud-walled enclosures, and there were fields of millet green with new growth. In the further reaches of the valley, where cultivation dwindled into grey, volcanic ash, a solitary sand-devil swirled a spiral of dust high into the air.

‘Hadd.’ Gorde stabbed downwards with his thumb, and peering over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of a mud town that seemed built into the rock below the fort. Right below us a melee of men and goats and camels stood transfixed beside a well. Mud walls towered above them, and looking back I saw the town of Hadd climbing into its rocky cleft with a great fortified palace built on many levels facing towards the desert. A green flag fluttered from a flagpole. ‘Always reminds me of the Hadhramaut,’ Gorde shouted in my ear. ‘They build like that in the Wadi Duan. Well-sited, isn’t it?’ He might have been a soldier, his interest was so professional.

Otto half-turned in his seat. ‘I’m setting course now for the position given in the search report, that okay?’ And when Gorde nodded he banked the plane so that I had a last glimpse of the Wadi Hadd al-Akhbar, a little oasis of green set against a nightmare backdrop of volcanic rock. And then it was gone and the arid, lifeless desert stretched out ahead of us.

Gorde produced the slip of paper he’d used for making notes and handed it to the navigator. ‘Those are the fixes for the Saraifa-Hadd border locations. Plot them now. We’ll be flying over them as soon as we’ve had a look at the spot where he abandoned his truck.’

We flew on in silence then and gradually the gravel plain gave place to sand, the dunes getting higher, their shadows longer until they were towering crescent-shaped downlands stretching into infinity. The navigator passed Otto an alteration of course and the shadow of the plane came ahead of us, growing imperceptibly bigger, as we lost height. ‘Have we crossed the border?’