Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

The silence ceased abruptly, the stillness of the night rent by three deep, rumbling explosions that were instantly muffled and snuffed out by the collapse of the earth walls of the wells. The sound nevertheless went on, travelling back through the mountains, reverberating from face after face and gradually fading.

The boy still hadn’t moved when all sound had ceased. The baby camel stood beside him. It was as though the shattering effect of the explosion had turned them both to stone. Then suddenly he was jerked to life. For an instant his face was turned towards us, white and startled in the moonlight, and then he fled screaming down the hillside, the camel breaking away in ungainly puppet strides.

We turned then and followed a zig-zag track that climbed by crumbling outcrops, and below us the town came to life, the sound of voices, the glimmer of lights. A shot stabbed the night, but it wasn’t directed at anything in particular and we were close under the fort before the pursuit got under way. We could see them clear on the moonlight slope below us, zig-zagging up the path by which we had come. There were about a dozen of them, climbing in single file and moving fast with the agility of mountain goats.

The fort tower hung on the lip of the cliff above us, a white stone keep crumbling to decay, and where the track doubled back through a narrow defile in the rocks, David posted Hamid to guard our rear. ‘I hope to God we find Salim there,’ he panted. The path had steepened so that we climbed with our hands as well as our feet, rocks slipping away from under us. And then we reached the walls and the track led through a narrow opening.

We were inside the outer defences then, an open space of half an acre or more that occupied all the top of the hill. The walls had originally been about twenty feet high with a firing step round the inside, but they were now in a bad state of repair and there were few places where they were higher than ten feet. They were horse-shoe shaped, the two ends finishing abruptly at the cliff edge, the tower between them. There was no sign of the camels.

‘Damn the old fool! He should have been here by now.’ David’s sudden uneasiness made me wonder whether perhaps Salim had taken the opportunity to desert us. But when I suggested this, he shook his head. ‘Why do you think I sent Ali with him? That boy knew what those camels meant to us. No, something has happened to them.’

A shot ripped the silence apart. Hamid had opened fire on our pursuers and the sound of it echoed back from the naked rock faces that surrounded us. A scatter of shots sounded from lower down the slope and a bullet hit the wall close by us with a soft thud.

‘Wait for me here. I’m going to see what’s happened.’ David ran quickly across the open courtyard of the fort and out through the main gate on the north side, and when he was gone, I climbed to the broken top of the wall and threw myself down beside bin Suleiman. From this vantage point we commanded the final approach to the fort.

Perched high on the edge of the sheer cliff face, I could see right down into the town of Hadd. The market square, where we’d mined the third well, was clearly visible, a white rectangle with people moving about or standing in little groups. It was not more than a thousand feet away, an easy rifle shot. And the wells outside the walls; I could see them, too. I began to understand then why David had been so sure these damaged wells would stay out of action.

Immediately below was the defile. I could see Hamid stretched out on top of one of the rock shoulders. His rifle gleamed as he raised it to his shoulder. A stab of flame, the crack of the shot, and then silence again. On the slope beyond there was now no sign of pursuit. The men who had started to follow us were pinned down amongst the rocks. It was an incredible position, impossible to take from that side so long as it was defended by men who knew how to shoot.

A bullet whined low over my head and I ducked automatically, poking my rifle forward and searching the steep slope beyond the defile. But there was nothing to fire at. The night was still and without movement.

We remained in that position for two solid hours whilst the stars moved sedately round the sky and all away to our right the desert stretched its white expanse. The sense of isolation, of a long wait for ultimate death, gradually took hold of me. It had a strange effect, a throw-back, I think, to the mood that had filled me as we lay pinned down like rats on the slopes of Monte Cassino … a mood compounded of fear and the desire to survive that expressed itself in the need to kill, so that when a figure moved on the slope below me, my whole being was concentrated in my trigger finger, and as he stumbled and fell my only feeling was one of elation, a deep, trembling satisfaction.

A little after three the first glimmer of dawn brought the mountains into sharp relief. A small wind whispered among the stones and it was quite chill. It was the time of night when the body is at the lowest ebb and I began to worry about David, and about our rear. By now men from the village below could surely have circled Jebel al-Akhbar to climb by the camel track to the main gate. I called to bin Suleiman and made a motion with my hand to indicate what I was going to do, and then I abandoned my position and started on a tour of the walls.

The result was encouraging. They were built on sheer rock slopes. Only on the north side was there any means of reaching the fort. There the camel track climbed steeply from the desert below to enter by the only gateway. Old palm tree timbers sagged from rusted iron hinges. This was the way attack must come if it were to succeed. Bastion towers flanked the gate on either side and from the top of one of them I could see down the whole length of the track. It was empty. So, too, were the slopes of the hill. There was no cover and nowhere could I see any sign of David or the camels.

I was turning away when my eye caught a movement on the white floor of the desert below; four shapes moving slowly, their shadows more sharply defined than the shapes themselves. They were camels moving towards the bottom of the track, and as they turned to start the climb, I made out the figure of a solitary rider on the leading camel.

I lay down then on the broken stone top of the bastion and pushed the safety catch of my rifle forward. Our camels had numbered six and with David there should have been three riders. They came on very slowly whilst the grey of dawn overlaid the moonlight and the whiteness faded out of the desert.

As the light improved and they came nearer, I saw the body of a man lying slumped over the saddle of the second camel. Skin bags bulging with water confirmed that the beasts were ours and soon after that I was able to recognize David. I met him as he rode in through the broken gateway. He didn’t say anything as he dismounted, but his face looked grey. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

Those shots we heard … they rode straight into a party of the Emir’s men camped outside the town.’ He asked me then whether they’d tried to rush us yet.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re still pinned down less than a third of the way up the slope.’

‘Good. Give me a hand, will you.’ He led the second camel to the foot of the tower and got it couched. The body tied with cord across its back was Ali’s. ‘He’s badly hurt.’ We laid him gently on the ground. He moaned softly, barely conscious. He’d a ghastly wound in the chest. I’d seen the effect of a soft-nosed Bedouin bullet on the metal of a Land-Rover; now I was seeing its effect on human flesh and the sight appalled me. He’d a knife wound in the shoulder, too, and he’d lost a lot of blood; the dark, broad-lipped, girlish face had taken on a sickly pallor.