Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

I didn’t bother to ask him how, for I thought it was just wishful thinking and all in his imagination. My eyes were closing with the heat and the weariness of my aching muscles. I heard him say something about getting me to Sharjah as soon as he could and then I was asleep.

I woke to the voices of Salim and the two Wahiba; they were arguing loudly whilst David sat listening, a tattered Bible propped on the rifle across his knees. Two camels stood disdainfully in front of us. ‘They’ve become infected with the mood of this place, blast them!’ David closed the Book and got to his feet. A crowd was beginning to collect. He said something to Hamid and the man looked suddenly like a dog that’s been beaten. And then David took his rifle from him and handed it to me. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Let’s get going.’ He spoke angrily to the two Wahiba and then we mounted.

The camels were thoroughbred Oman racing camels. I could feel the difference immediately. The crowd parted, letting us through, and we picked our way daintily down the rocks. Out on the flat gravel of the desert below, we moved into an ungainly canter, circling the hill on which Dhaid rested and heading north-east again.

These people,’ David said, ‘they’re so damned uncertain; full of guts one minute, craven the next. Salim I didn’t expect to come. But Hamid and Ali … ‘ He sounded depressed. ‘My father now, he can handle them the way I’ll never be able to.’ There was admiration, a note of envy in his voice. They’d never have left him in the lurch.’ We rode in silence then and at a gruelling pace, the heat very great so that I was thankful for the water we had got at Dhaid.

We camped at dusk and David had just lighted a fire when he turned suddenly and grabbed his rifle. I heard the pad of camels’ feet and then the riders emerged out of the gathering darkness. There were three of them and David relaxed. ‘Salim, too,’ he whispered. He didn’t give them any greeting and they slunk to the fire like dogs. I gave Hamid back his rifle, he took it as though it were a gift and made me a long speech of thanks. They’re like children,’ David said. His voice sounded happy.

We had a handful of dates each and some coffee, that was all. And then we rode on.

In the early hours of the morning, with the moon high and a white miasma of mist lying over the desert, we approached the ninth well of the Mahdah falaj . Hamid and Ali were scouting ahead on either flank. David and Salim rode close together, their rifles ready-to-hand across their knees. The tension had been mounting all through that night ride, for we’d no idea what we were going to find at the end of it.

For the first time I rode my camel without conscious thought of what I was doing, my whole being concentrated in my eyes, searching the mist ahead. The desert was very still and, half-concealed under that white veil, it had a strange, almost eerie quality. From far ahead came a weird banshee howl. It rose to a high note and then dropped to an ugly cough. ‘Hyena,’ David said and there was loathing in his voice. The sound, repeated much nearer and to our flank, checked my camel in its stride. It was an eerie, disgusting sound. A little later Salim stopped to stare at some camel tracks. Their droppings, too, and he dismounted, sifted them through his fingers, smelt them, and then delivered his verdict — men of the Bait Kathir and they had come south the night before with two camels belonging to Saraifa.

‘Loot,’ David said, and we rode on in silence until about ten minutes later Hamid signalled to us. He had sighted the first corpse. It had been stripped of its clothes and there wasn’t much meat left on the bones, which stared white through the torn flesh. The teeth, bared in the remains of a beard, had fastened in agony upon a tuft of dried-up herb.

It wasn’t a pretty sight with the sand all trampled round about and stained black with blood, and after that the bodies lay thick. They had been caught in ambush and slaughtered as they rushed a small gravel rise where the enemy had lain in wait. There were camels, too, their carcases bared to the bones and white and brittle-looking like the withered remains of dwarf trees dead of drought. The whole place smelt of death and things moved on the edge of visibility. Two men slunk away like ghouls, mounted their camels and disappeared into the mist.

We let them go for David’s only interest was to discover whether Khalid had been killed. Methodically he and Salim checked every corpse, while the two Wahiba scouted the edges of the battlefield. David could put a name to most of the bodies, despite decomposition and the mutilations of scavengers, and one I recognized myself: the leader of Khalid’s escort. He lay face down in the tyre marks of a Land-Rover, and close beside were the bodies of three more of Khalid’s men, stripped of their clothes and arms.

We hadn’t far to go after that. The tyre marks lipped a. rise and a little beyond, the burned-out remains of the Land-Rover itself loomed out of the mist. They had sought cover behind it and their bodies had been ripped to pieces by a murderous fire. Khalid lay with eyeless sockets and half his face torn away. The near-naked body was already disintegrating and where the stomach had been torn open the rotten flesh crawled with maggots and the blood was dry and black like powder. Four of his men lay near him in much the same state of putrefaction.

‘The waste!’ David breathed. He was standing, staring down at the remains of his friend and there were tears in his eyes. ‘The bloody, senseless waste!’ There was a shovel still clipped to the Land-Rover, its handle burned away. He seized hold of it and attacked the ground with violent energy, digging a shallow grave. And when we’d laid what was left of Khalid to rest and covered it with sand, David stood back with bowed head. ‘He might have saved Saraifa. He was the only one of them who had the vision and the drive and energy to do it.’ He wiped his face with his headcloth. ‘May he re’st in peace, and may Allah guide him to the world beyond.’ He turned his back abruptly on the grave and strode blindly off across the sand towards the gravel rise that had been the scene of the ambush.

Along the back of it ran a ridge of bare rock. Behind it the ground was scattered with the brass of empty cartridges. ‘War surplus.’ He tossed one of them to me. ‘Governments sell that stuff. They never think of the loss of life their bloody auctions will ultimately cause. A pity the little bureaucrat… ‘But he let it go at that, wandering on along the ridge. At four places we came upon the empty magazines of automatic guns; in each case they lay beside the tyre marks of vehicles. ‘They hadn’t a chance,’ he said bitterly and started back to where Salim waited with the camels.

Before we reached them, Ali came hurrying back. He had been scouting to the east, along the line of the falaj, and had almost stumbled into a small Hadd force camped by the next well. He said the walls of the well had been thrown down, the whole thing filled with sand and rock. We waited for Hamid. He was a long time coming and when he did arrive his manner was strange, his eyes rolling in his head as words poured out of him. ‘He’s just buried his father,’ David said. ‘The old man’s body had a dozen bullets in it.’ Grimly he gave the order to mount.

I was glad to go. Dawn was breaking and a hot wind beginning to blow from the north-west. I was sick of the sight of so much death. So was David. This, after the lonely weeks he’d spent in that filthy area of quicksands … I didn’t need the set, withdrawn look of his face, the occasional mumbling of the lips, to tell me that he was mentally very near the end of his tether. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked as we rode towards the next well, the wall of which was just visible on the horizon, a little rock turret above the drifting, moving sands.