Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

Whitaker’s house was an old mud fort on the far side of the oasis. Most of it seemed to be in ruins, the courtyard empty, the mud walls cracked and crumbling. There was sand everywhere as we hurried through a maze of passages and empty rooms. The palace seemed dead and I wondered that a man could live alone like this and retain his sanity, for he seemed to have no servants but Yousif and to live in Spartan simplicity in one corner of this vast, rambling building.

We came at last to a room where old portmanteaux and tin boxes stood ranged against the walls, and then I was out on a rooftop that looked out upon the desert. He was standing against the parapet, a tall, robed figure in silhouette, for there was no light there, only the moon and the stars. Yousif coughed and announced my presence.

Whitaker turned then and came towards me. His face was in shadow, but I could see the black patch over the eye. No word of greeting, no attempt to shake my hand. ‘Sit down,’ he said and waved imperiously to a carpet and some cushions spread on the floor. ‘Yousif. Gahwa.’ His servant disappeared and as I sat down I was conscious of the stillness all about us — no sound of Arab voices, none of the tumult of the Sheikh’s palace, no murmur of the village below the walls. The place was as isolated, as deserted as though we were the only people in the whole oasis.

He folded himself up, cross-legged on the carpet facing me, and I could see his face then, the beard thinning and grey, the cheeks hollowed and lined by the desert years, that single imperious eye deep-sunken above the great nose. ‘You had a good journey, I trust.’ His voice was oddly-pitched, hard but unusually high, and he spoke the words slowly as though English were no longer a familiar language.

‘It was interesting,’ I said.

‘No doubt. But quite unnecessary. It was clearly understood between us that you would make no attempt to contact me direct. And though I admit the financial situation must have seemed-’

‘I came about your son,’ I said.

‘My son?’ He looked surprised. ‘Your letter merely said you were worried about the amount of money I was spending.’

‘Your son appointed me his Executor.’

He moved his head slightly, the eye glinting in the moonlight, bright and watchful. He didn’t say anything. Behind him the low parapet hid the desert so that all I could see was the great vault of the night studded with stars. The air was deathly still, impregnated with the day’s heat.

‘I’m not convinced your son died a natural death.’ I hadn’t meant to put it like that. It was his stillness, the overpowering silence that had forced it out of me.

He made no comment and I knew that this was going to be more difficult than my interview with Erkhard, more difficult even than my meeting with Gorde, and some sixth sense warned me that this man was much more unpredictable. The clatter of cups came as a distinct relief. Yousif moved silently as a shadow on to the rooftop and poured us coffee from a battered silver pot. The cups were handleless, the Mocha coffee black and bitter. ‘Does his mother know he’s dead?’ It surprised me that he should think of her; and when I told him that I’d broken the news to her myself, he asked, ‘How did she take it?’

‘She didn’t believe it at first. And because I had an overwhelming desire to break through his strange aura of calm, I added, ‘In fact she seemed to think it was your own death I was reporting.’

‘Why? Why did she think I was dead?’

The stars,’ I said. ‘She believes in astrology.’

He sighed. ‘Yes, I remember now. I used to talk to her about the stars.’ And he added, ‘It’s a longtime ago. A long time.’

‘Do you believe in astrology then?’ I asked.

He shrugged, sipping noisily at his coffee. ‘Here in the desert we live a great deal by the stars. It is very difficult not to believe that they have some influence.’ And then, abruptly changing the conversation: ‘How did you get here? It’s not easy to get to Saraifa.’ I started to tell him, but as soon as I mentioned Gorde, he said, ‘Philip Gorde? I didn’t know he was out here.’ It seemed to upset him. ‘Did he tell you why he was here?’ He mistook my silence. ‘No, of course not. He’d hardly tell you that.’ He shook his cup at Yousif to indicate that he’d had enough, and when I did the same the man departed as silently as he had come, leaving a dish of some sticky sweetmeat between us. ‘Halwa. Do you like it?’ Whitaker made a vague gesture of invitation.

‘I’ve never tried it.’

We were alone again now and the silence between us hung heavy as the thick night air, a blanket through which each tried to gauge the other. I let it drag out, and it was Whitaker who finally broke it. ‘You were telling me about your journey.’ He stared at me, waiting for me to continue. I broke off a piece of the halwa. It was cloying on the tongue and it had a sickly-sweet taste. ‘You arrived here with Entwhistle, one of the Company’s geologists. What was he doing on the Hadd border, do you know? The fellow had no business there.’

‘He was checking your son’s survey,’ I said.

There was a sudden stillness. ‘I see.’ He said it quietly. And then, in a voice that was suddenly trembling with anger: ‘On whose orders? Not Philip Gorde’s surely?’

‘No.’

‘Erkhard?’

‘You seem very worried about this?’

‘Worried!’ The word seemed forced out of him. ‘Don’t you understand what’s happened here tonight? The thing I’ve been dreading…. The thing I’ve been trying to avoid ever since I knew-’ He checked himself. And then in a quieter voice: ‘No, you’re new out here. You wouldn’t understand. One of the falajes has been stopped. And all because of this blundering fool Entwhistle running a survey on the Hadd border.’ His voice had risen again, trembling with anger.

‘He was doing what David was doing at the time he disappeared,’ I said quietly.

But it didn’t seem to register. He had withdrawn into his own thoughts. ‘Twenty years-’ His voice sounded tired. And then his eye was staring at me again. ‘How would you feel if the thing you’d worked for over a period of twenty years was in danger of being ruined by young fools too impatient to understand the politics of the desert?’ He turned his head and stared for a moment into the night. ‘The air is heavy. There’ll be a storm soon.’ He gathered his robes about him and rose to his feet, crossing to the parapet and leaning against it, staring out into the desert like some Biblical figure from the distant past. ‘Come here, Grant.’ And when I joined him, he stretched out his arm. ‘Look, do you see those dunes?’ He gripped my arm, pointing west into the desert.

Standing on that rooftop was like standing on the bridge of a ship lying anchored off a low-lying island. To the left lay the dark-treed expanse of the oasis, and beyond the date gardens I could see the village and the squat bulk of the Sheikh’s palace standing on its gravel rise. But to the right, where his arm pointed, was nothing but desert. Dim in the moonlight the dunes stretched away into infinity, a ridged sea of sand, pale as milk. ‘When you’ve seen a storm here you’ll understand. Then all the desert seems in motion, like the sea beating against the shore of the oasis, flooding into the date gardens. The dunes smoke. They stream with sand. They’re like waves breaking; the whole great desert of the Empty Quarter thundering in, the sand flowing like water.’ He turned to me and his grip on my arm tightened. ‘The only thing that stands between Saraifa and destruction is the camel thorn. Out there — do you see?

Those trees. They’re like a breakwater holding the sand sea back, and they’re dying for lack of water.’