Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, of course not. I ran a check survey myself, you know. That was a long time ago now when I had a bodyguard of more than a dozen men, all on the Company’s payroll, and the use of the Company’s equipment.

In those days — quite soon after the war — I reckoned my chaps could hold the Emir off if it came to a showdown long enough for me to pull out with my equipment. But it never came to that. I got away with it without the Emir knowing. But I knew I couldn’t do that with a drilling rig.’

‘Then how do you expect to get away with it now?’ I demanded.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know that I can.’ He was smiling softly to himself. ‘But I’ve been out here a long time, Grant. I know that little Emir inside out. I’ve had spies in Hadd sending me back reports and I think I know enough now … ‘ He gave a little shrug and the smile was no longer soft; it was hard, almost cruel. ‘I’m outside the Company now. It makes a difference. And it’s just possible that I could get away with it where the Company couldn’t.’ He straightened up. ‘Well, what about it? Are you going to let me have David’s report?’

It wasn’t ethical, of course. He hadn’t been mentioned in his son’s Will. But then I’d failed with Gorde and I could now regard myself as free to take what action I liked. Also I thought that had David known what I now knew, he would have wanted his father to have the locations. I gave him a copy of the survey report and after writing the location fixes out on a slip of paper, I gave him that, too.

He glanced at it and then slipped it into the folds of his cloak. Thank you.’ He held out his hand. ‘You’ve come a long journey. I’m sorry it didn’t have a pleasanter ending. I’ll send Yousif with the letters in a few hours.’

I hesitated. But I knew he wasn’t a man to take advice. ‘In that case you’d better let me know what I’m to tell Gorde.’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’

I left him then, standing alone on that rooftop with the desert clean and white behind him, and followed Yousif out to the battered Land-Rover. It was cooler now and I felt almost relaxed. In a few hours I should be able to have a bath and a change and sit back with a long, cool drink. And yet, riding down the palm-shadowed track between the date gardens, I found myself filled with a strange nostalgia for the place. It had an appeal I found difficult to define, a sort of poetry, and the dim-remembered lines of a poem came into my mind, something about being ‘crazed with the spell of far Arabia’ and stealing his wits away.

I was beginning to understand what this place had meant to David, to a boy who’d never had a real home before and who was wide open to the strange beauty of it and as impressionable as any Celt.

I was still thinking about this when we ran out from the shadow of the palms and saw the square, black with the mass of men standing there. The roar of their voices came to us in a wall of sound. Yousif eased his foot off the accelerator, hesitating, uncertain whether to drive straight to the main gate or not. And then three figures rose from beside the shireeya and stood blocking our path.

‘Sheikh Khalid’s men,’ Yousif said and there was relief in his voice as he braked to a stop. They clambered on to the mudguards, talking urgently in the hard, guttural tongue that is always associated in my mind with flies and sand. ‘We go a different way. Is much better.’ Yousif swung the Land-Rover round, circling the gravel rise and approaching the palace from the rear through a litter of barastis, all apparently deserted. We stopped finally at a small door with an iron-barred grille set in an otherwise blank wall.

Khalid’s three men closed round me as I got out, and when I told Yousif I wanted to be taken straight to Gorde. he said, ‘You go with them now, sahib. Sheikh Khalid’s orders.’ And he drove off, leaving me there.

Eyes peered at us through the grille. The door opened and I was hustled through the dark passages of the palace and up to my turret room. There my three guards left me. and standing at the embrasure I looked down on what was obviously a very explosive situation. The crowd was being harangued by a man on a rooftop opposite, and another was shouting to them from the back of a camel. The whole square was packed solid. Every man and boy in the oasis must have been gathered there, and many of them were armed.

Camels were being brought into the square and men were mounting on the outskirts of the crowd. And all the time the agitators shouting and the crowd roaring and the tension mounting. The air was thick with menace, and then somebody fired a rifle.

The bullet smacked into the mud wall not far from my embrasure. It was all that was needed to set that crowd alight. Other guns were fired, little sparks of flame, a noise like fire-crackers, and a great shout; the crowd became fluid, flowing like water, moving with the sudden purpose of a river in spate. Men leaped to their camels, mounting on the arch of their lowered necks, driving them with the flood tide down the slope to the dark fringe of the date gardens.

In a moment the square was deserted, and with the murmur of the crowd dying to silence, the dark walls of my room closed in on me. I had a sudden, overwhelming need then to find Gorde and the others, and I picked up my briefcase and felt my way down the black curve of the stairs. A light showed faint in the passage at the bottom. A figure stirred in the shadows. Thick Arabic words and the thrust of a gun muzzle in my stomach halted me. It was one of Khalid’s men, and he was nervous, his finger on the trigger.

There was nothing for it but to retreat to my room again. In the mood prevailing in the oasis it was some comfort to know that I had a guard. I lay down and tried to get some rest. The sound of the crowd was still faintly audible. It came to me through the embrasure, soft as a breeze whispering through the palm trees. And then it died and there was an unnatural quiet.

It didn’t last long, for the shouting started again. Shots, too. It was a long way away. I got up and went to the embrasure, peering out at the empty square and the dark line of the palms shadowed by the moon. A glow lit the night sky to the east. It grew and blossomed. Then suddenly an explosion, a great waft of flame and smoke beyond the date gardens. And after that silence, the flame abruptly gone and the palms a dark shadow-line again in the moon’s light.

Voices called within the palace, the sound muffled by the thickness of mud walls, and then for a while it was quiet. But soon the crowd was ebbing back into the square, flowing into it in little groups, silent now and strangely subdued. I was sure that it was Gorde’s plane I’d seen go up in smoke and flame, and I stayed by the embrasure, watching the tide of humanity as it filled the square, wondering what they’d do now — hoping to God their passions were spent.

Bare feet sounded on the stairs. I turned, uncertain what to expect, my mouth suddenly dry. The beam of a torch probed the room, blinding me as it fastened on my face. But it was only my three guards back again, jabbering Arabic at me and gesturing for me to accompany them. I was hurried along dark passages, past gaping doorways where men sat huddled in dim-lit rooms, arguing fiercely. The whole palace was in a ferment.

We came finally to a low-ceilinged room lit by a pressure lamp, and in its harsh glare I saw Khalid sitting surrounded by robed figures. They were mostly young men and they had their guns resting across their knees or leaning close at hand against the walls. He rose to greet me, his face unsmiling, the bones sharp-etched in the lamplight. ‘I am sorry, sir, for the disturbance you have been given.’ A gesture of dismissal and the room quietly emptied, the conference broken up. ‘Please to sit.’ He waved me to a cushion on the carpeted floor and sat down opposite me, his legs folding neatly under him with the ease of a man who has never known a chair.