Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

‘Queer chap,’ he said. ‘Fact is I didn’t like him much when he came out to take over my outfit. But then,’ he added, ‘You don’t like anybody very much when you’re suffering from jaundice.’

‘But you felt differently about him later?’ I prompted.

‘Aye. Got to know him a bit better then. We were two days together whilst we moved to a new location. Then he went off to Saraifa. He’d got some leave due and he was going to spend it mucking around with an old seismological truck his father had got hold of.’ I asked him what had made him change his mind about David, and he said, ‘Oh, the way he talked. He was a great talker. Mind you,’ he added, ‘he was still too chummy with the wogs for my liking, but you couldn’t help admiring the chap. Wanted to make the desert blossom and all that.’

‘Water?’ I asked.

He nodded. That’s it. He’d got a bee in his bonnet about it. Talked about Saraifa being doomed. Well, of course, it is. I’ve only been there once, but-well, you’ll see for yourself. A few more years-’ He didn’t talk for a while after that, for we had come to soft sand; he took it fast, his foot pressed hard down on the accelerator, and we bucketed through it like a small boat in a seaway.

We came off the sand on to a hard gravel pan that scintillated with a myriad diamond gleams. ‘Mica,’ he shouted. The glare of it was dazzling. ‘You interested in geology?’

I shook my head.

‘Pity.’ He seemed genuinely sorry. ‘Damned interesting country.’ For him there was nothing else of interest in Arabia. We bucked another stretch of sand, ridged into shallow waves, and then he told me what had decided him to check David’s survey report. Amongst the papers in that attache case he had found Farr’s report. ‘Didn’t tell the Old Man. Thought I’d keep it in reserve. God knows where David dug it up. It was twenty years old, the paper all faded; the typing too. Could hardly read the damned thing.’

‘Have you got it with you?’ I asked.

‘Aye.’ He nodded. ‘I wasn’t going to leave that behind. I’ll show it to you later. Can’t think why the Company didn’t do something about it.’

‘There was a war on,’ I said. ‘And Farr was killed in Abyssinia.’

‘You know about it then?’ He seemed surprised.

‘David referred to it in his report.’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

We hit another patch of sand, a solid vista of it that stretched interminably ahead of us. We didn’t talk much after that. It was soft sand and the going was tough. Twice the seismological truck got bogged down and we had to lay sand mats. The sun sank slowly down into the desert behind us as we ploughed on, engines roaring, radiators steaming. We were in big dune country that was like a huge, petrified sea, the waves coming up one after the other, yet never moving, always motionless, and the shadows lengthening behind them. It had an eerie, still quality; and it left me with a sense of awe, for it had a certain majesty, a cruel, lost quality that was unnerving. Once I shouted, ‘Is it like this all the way to Saraifa?’

‘Christ! I hope not,’ he yelled back.

‘But don’t you know?’ I asked.

‘How the hell should I? Never been here before.’

The sun set, a brick-red ball of fire, hazed it seemed with dust. Here and there we came upon the derelict remains of trees, gnarled and twisted in a life-long struggle against crippling odds. Dusk descended swiftly and the light faded out of the dunes. Behind us they stood like downlands etched sharp against the sky’s last light. Above us the stars suddenly appeared. Again the truck behind us became bogged and we dug the sand mats down in front of the wheels and pushed and strained to gain a few yards. And when at last we got it moving there was no light left and it was dark.

‘Will you be able to find Saraifa in the dark?’ I asked Entwhistle.

‘Inshallah,’ he said, and we pushed on.

How he did it I don’t know, but about an hour later the dunes became smaller, the stunted tree-growth more noticeable, and then suddenly we ran out on to hard gravel again. And shortly after that the headlights picked up the first of the date gardens, a sad relic of a once fertile place, the walls no longer visible, just the starved tops of the palms sticking up out of the sand.

We passed between two of these ruined gardens and then we joined a well-worn track where the sand had been ground to a fine powder; there were the marks of tyres, the droppings of camels. The headlights picked out the round bulk of a watch tower with men running from it, their guns gleaming with silver furnishings. Entwhistle slowed as they stood, barring our path. They wore turbans and long white robes and strapped across their shoulders was a sort of harness of leather studded with the brass of cartridges; stuffed into their belts were the broad, curved-bladed khanjar knives, the hilts of silver glinting wickedly. As we stopped they came swarming over us, enveloping us with their harsh guttural speech, all talking at once, white teeth flashing in villainous dark faces.

‘What do they want?’ A black-bearded ruffian had the muzzle of his gun jammed against the side of my neck, and though I tried to keep my voice under control I don’t think I was very successful.

‘All right, all right,’ Entwhistle was shouting at them. ‘One at a time for God’s sake.’ He didn’t seem in the least bit scared. Finally, after a long conversation with my bearded friend, he said, ‘It looks like trouble. We’re more or less under arrest.’ He spoke to the bearded Arab again and then he was ordering men on to the Land-Rover and others to the truck behind. ‘It seems,’ he said as we moved off, ‘that Sheikh Makhmud sent a party out in two Land-Rovers this afternoon to arrest my outfit and bring me back to Saraifa for questioning.’ And he added, ‘This could be the sort of thing David came up against. They’re scared stiff of the Emir and frightened to death of any activity on the Hadd border.’

‘Didn’t you know that before you decided to run a survey there?’ I asked.

‘Of course I did. But I was reckoning to run the survey and get out before anyone discovered I was there.’ He crashed the gears savagely. ‘I took a chance and it didn’t come off, that’s all.’

We skirted the crumbling wall of a date garden. The palms were green here, the gardens uninvaded by the desert sand. And then suddenly we were in the open, driving on hard gravel, and straight ahead of us, a black bulk against the stars, was the shadowy shape of the Sheikh’s palace standing like a fortress on its hill. The wooden gate of the arched entrance was closed, but it opened to the cries of our guards, and then we were inside, in a great courtyard packed with men and camels and lit by the flames of cooking fires. In an instant we were surrounded, lapped round by a tide of men, all shouting and brandishing their weapons.

A big, portly man appeared, his face black as a Sudanese. The Sheikh’s secretary,’ Entwhistle said to me. He looked like a eunuch, fat and soft, his manner almost feminine. He gave orders for the care of the men and then escorted us into the palace, along dark corridors sparsely lit by smoking lamps made out of old cans, to a small room that looked out on to a central courtyard. Here the earthen floor was carpeted with rugs, the walls lined with cushions; an Arab rose to greet us. He was a compact, stocky man with almost black eyes and a proudly curved nose. The khanjar knife stuck in the girdle of his finely-woven robe was a beautiful example of the silversmith’s craft. ‘Sheikh Makhmud,’ Entwhistle whispered.

I found my hand held in a firm grip. ‘You are welcome to Saraifa,’ the Sheikh said in halting English. ‘My house is your house.’ He had an air of command, yet his voice was gentle. But the thing that surprised me most was the fact that he wore glasses. They were silver-rimmed glasses and they drew attention to the blackness of his eyes. His clean-shaven face was long and tired-looking. He was a man of about Gorde’s age, I suppose. The other occupant of the room had also risen, a thin man with a greying moustache and a little pointed beard, his eyes heavily made up with kohl. He was Makhmud’s brother, Sultan.