Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

I think perhaps he might have told me more, but at that moment a man burst into the room shouting something, and instantly all was confusion. The room emptied with a rush that carried me with it out on to the white glare of a rooftop. Below us a single camel climbed wearily up the track, urged on by its rider. Khalid pushed past me. ‘Is one of my father’s racing camels,’ he said.

Five minutes later he returned with the rider, a thick-set man with long hair twisted up in his headcloth. Khalid talked for a moment with Sheikh Hassa and then with Salim. Finally he came to me. ‘The oilmen have left and at dawn this morning several large raiding parties from Hadd crossed our borders. My father orders me to return.’

My surprise was occasioned less by the news than by the realization that the camel must have made the journey in less time than we had taken in the Land-Rover. But Khalid’s next words jolted me into awareness of what it meant to me personally. ‘You go now with Salim.’

‘But

‘Please, Meester Grant.’ His face looked old now beyond his years, haggard after the long drive, the sleepless night. His eyes, staring at me, burned with an inner fire. ‘Is altogether important now. Tell David what has happened, that his plan has failed and that there is no hope now of the oil concession. He must go to his father immediately.’

But my mind was on the practicalities. That’s all very well,’ I said, glancing uneasily at the old man. ‘But Salim doesn’t speak any English. And I don’t know the country.’ I looked about me quickly. Khalid’s bodyguard was behind him, Sheikh Hassa right beside me. There was no escape. ‘Where am I supposed to go anyway? Where is David?’

‘You go to Umm al Samim.’

Sheikh Hassa leaned his black beard forward, and his harsh voice repeated the words ‘Umm al Samim’ on a note of surprise. And then he looked at me and rolled his eyes up into his head and laughed and made a strangling sound.

‘What’s he mean by that?’ I demanded. ‘What’s he trying to tell me?’

Khalid’s hand gripped my arm. ‘The Umm al Samim is quicksands. But there is a way,’ he added quickly, and I glanced at Hassa and knew that he’d been telling me that I was going to my death. ‘I tell you there is a way,’ Khalid said fiercely. ‘Salim knows it as far as the first good ground. He will guide you as he guided us when we make original exploration two seasons past.’

‘And what about the rest?’

‘You will find by testing with a stick. Perhaps when you call, David or the Wahiba will hear you.’ His grip on my arm tightened. ‘You will go?’

‘Suppose I refuse?’

‘Then I take you with me back to Saraifa.’ He was looking me straight in the face. ‘This is what you want, isn’t it correct — to find David? Now you find him.’ And he added, staring at me hard, ‘Are you afraid to go?’

‘No, I’m not afraid.’ I saw him smile. He knew after that I’d hardly refuse. ‘All right, Khalid,’ I said. ‘I’ll go. But what do you want me to do? A boy hiding out in some quicksands isn’t going to help you now.’

‘He must help us — he and his father. We are at point of desperation now, and it is his fault.’ He said it without rancour, a statement of fact, and he added, ‘It was a good plan, the way he visualize it — to go into hiding and by making appearance he is dead to draw attention to his survey. He think you will succeed to obtain the signature of Sir Gorde to a concession and that then per’aps we have oil, at least the support of the Company and so of your people.

I

But instead all is turned to disaster. Because he is working on that border the raiders of Hadd are in our territory and the concession Haj Whitaker arrange is torn up. We have no Arab friends like the Emir has. We are alone and everything is in conspiracy now to destroy us.’

His words, the intensity with which he spoke, showed me the tragedy of it — father and son working for the same ends, but against each other. ‘Yes, but what can he do?’

‘He must ride to a meeting with his father. Salim has good camels. You and David together — you must persuade Haj Whitaker to stop drilling on the Hadd border and to go to Bahrain, to the Political Resident. If they don’t send soldiers, then please to send us modern weapons and automatic guns so that we can fight.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what you say. I only hope it works out.’

Tell David also … ‘ He hesitated. Tell him it is possible I do not see him again. And if that is happening, then say to him that he is my brother, and the Emir Abdul-Zaid bin Sultan — my enemy into death.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘He will understand.’

‘But you’re not going to your death.’

‘Inshallah! I do not know that.’ His tone was fatalistic. This is an old feud, Meester Grant. As old as Saraifa is old, or Hadd. It goes back many centuries to the days when all the falajes are running with water, a hundred channels making irrigation for the palms. Then Saraifa is a great garden extending many miles and the dates go by camel north, to the sea and to India, across the mountains to the Batina coast, and south to the Hadhramaut — even, some say, to Mukalla and the olden port of Cana to be carried by dhow to the far places of the world. But we are always too much occupied with our gardens and the people of Hadd are very much envying us for our riches. They are men of the hills, cruel and hard and altogether without goodness. So.’ He gave a helpless little shrug. ‘So it is that we are always fighting for our date gardens and one after another the falaj channels are being destroyed until Saraifa is as you see it now, open to the desert and soon to die if the falajes are not rebuilt. Do you know, Meester Grant, there is not one man who can tell me, even when I am a little boy — even by the hearsay of others, his father or his grandfather — what it is like when there are more than six falajes working. Always wars … always, until the British come a hundred years ago. And now’ — he spread his hands in a little gesture of helplessness — ‘Now another war perhaps, and if we do not have a victory, then it is finish and in a few months the shamal will have blown the sands of the Rub al Khali over our walls and our houses and we shall be like those old lost cities in India … There will be nothing to show that we ever exist in this place.’ He stopped there, a little breathless because he had put so much of himself and his emotions into foreign words. ‘You tell him that please.’ He turned then and spoke rapidly to Salim. The tattered figure moved towards me. ‘You go now,’ Khalid said. ‘ Fi aman allah! In the peace of God.’

‘And you also,’ I said. The skinny hand of my guide was on my arm, a steel grip propelling me down mud steps out into the shadowed cool of an alley. In a little open space beyond there were camels crouched and at his cries three tall beasts lumbered to their feet. They had provisions already loaded and dark skin bags bulging with water. A boy brought two more camels and Salim chattered a gap-toothed protest as he realized that I didn’t even know how to mount my beast. They brought it to its knees and put me on it and at a word it hoisted me violently into the air. The old man put his foot on the lowered neck of the other and stepped lightly into the saddle, tucking his legs behind him.

We left Dhaid by a small gateway facing south, just the two of us and the three pack beasts tied nose-to-tail. The boy ran beside us as far as the base of the limestone hill and then we were out on the gravel flat and travelling fast, a peculiar, swaying gait. It required all my concentration just to remain in the saddle. Perhaps it was as well, for it left me no time to consider my predicament. Our shadows lumbered beside us, for the sun was slanting towards the west, and Salim began to sing a high-pitched, monotonous song. It was a small sound in the solitude that surrounded us, but though I couldn’t understand the words, I found it comforting.