Hammond Innes - The Doomed Oasis

David stood for a moment, staring down at him. ‘Poor kid,’ he murmured. ‘I found him lying in a pool of blood by the ashes of their camp fire. I suppose they thought he was dead. Salim’s body was close beside him. They’d slit his throat.’ His voice shook. The murdering, dung-eating bastards! Why did they have to do it? There were at least twenty of them there, twenty of them against an old man and a boy.’ Apparently he’d found the camp deserted, our four camels wandering loose. They must have been disturbed by the sound of the explosions,’ he said. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have left the camels. They only took one. It was the other that led me to their camp; it was I

wandering around on three legs, bellowing with pain. I had to finish it off.’ He gave a quick, angry shrug as though wanting to dismiss the whole thing from his mind. ‘Well, let’s get him up into the tower. He can’t lie here.’

He got the camel to its feet and stood it close by the wall of the tower. Standing on its back he was just able to reach the hole halfway up the tower’s side. He scrambled in and from the dark interior produced a crude ladder made of palm wood. We dragged the boy up and laid him on the dirt floor and David plugged and bound the wounds again, using his headcloth which he tore in strips. ‘A bloody lousy piece of luck,’ he said. ‘I’d planned to get you away before daylight. With Salim to guide you, you’d have been in Buraimi tomorrow, in Sharjah by the next day. I’d got it all planned. Now … ‘ He shrugged. ‘We’ll have to do some fresh thinking.’

It was daylight now. It came filtering into the interior of the tower through the entrance hole and through four narrow slits in the thick walls. They were firing embrasures and they reminded me of the turret room I’d occupied in Saraifa. But the view was vastly different. Two of them looked out east and west, each covering an arm of the walls. The other two, close together, faced south; they looked straight down on to Hadd itself.

‘Well, that’s all I can do for him.’ David got to his feet. ‘You stay here. I must have a word with Hamid and bin Suleiman. And then we must deal with the camels.’

He left me sitting by one of the embrasures and I had time to think then. The excitement of the action that had sustained me so far was gone now. The future stared me in the face and I began to be afraid of it. However impregnable the fort’s position, there were still only four of us, and right there below me was that Arab town teeming with life and utterly hostile. I could see men clustered thick in the open square and some of them were armed. It could only be a matter of time.

They had already started work on the well inside the walls. Men were being lowered into it and every now and then a bundle of stones and rubble was handed up. The sun was rising behind the mountains. The sky was crimson and all the desert flushed the colour of a rose. It looked very beautiful, so serene in the clear morning air, and the mountains standing like cut-outs painted purple.

It was just after the sun had lipped the mountain tops that David climbed back into the tower. They’ve started work on that well in the square, haven’t they?’

I nodded. The little square was teeming like an ant-hill.

‘What are they — townspeople or the Emir’s bodyguard?’ He had his rifle with him and he came straight over to where I was squatting on the floor beside the embrasure.

‘Both,’ I said. The men working on the well were mostly stripped to the waist. But standing about, watching them, were a number of armed men, their bodies strapped about with cartridges, a band of brass that glinted in the sun; their rifles, untrammelled with silver, had the dull gleam of modern weapons.

He pushed past me, kneeling in the embrasure, steadying himself with his elbows on the sill as he brought the rifle to his shoulder and fired. The sound of the shot was very loud in that dim, confined place. ‘That’s one of them that won’t go murdering old men and boys again.’ He was trembling slightly as he sat back on his heels.

The crowd in the square was scattering. A little knot gathered in one corner, and then that, too, melted away and the square was suddenly empty. ‘An occasional shot like that and they’ll learn to leave it alone. In a day or two they’ll begin to understand what it’s like to have the sources of water cut off, the wells dry.’ He got up and set his gun against the wall. ‘Not that they’ll die of thirst. They’re better off than the people we saw in Saraifa.’ He went back down the ladder and left me staring at the empty rectangle of the sun-drenched square, littered with the baulks of timber they’d brought in to shore up the inner walls of the well. Behind me the wounded boy moaned restlessly, muttering words I couldn’t understand, and when I went to him, I found his dark eyes wide open and staring, his skin dry and parched. I gave him some water and then David called to me.

He and Hamid had started unloading the camels. Bin Suleiman kept watch from the eastern wall. We worked fast, but the sun was high above the mountains before we’d humped all the stores and the last of the water skins up into the tower. ‘What about the camels?’ I asked as we lifted the saddles from their backs. It was already blisteringly hot, the bare rock acting as a fire-brick and throwing back the sun’s heat. There was no vestige of vegetation inside the fort for them to feed on.

‘I’ll keep one for you. The other three will have to be slaughtered.’

They were fine beasts in the prime of life and in beautiful condition. But when I started to remonstrate, he cut me short. ‘What did you imagine we were going to do with them? We’ve no other meat.’ He stared at me angrily. ‘Even the Bedou, who love camels a damn’ sight more than I do, don’t hesitate to kill them when they’re short of food. And we’re going to be short of everything before we’re through.’

I stood and stared at him. Without camels, he’d have no means of retreat. He’d be trapped here …

‘Do you reckon you could get through to Buraimi on your own?’

I hesitated. But I knew now there was no alternative for me — only death here on this pitiless hilltop. ‘I could try.’

‘Good. We’ll keep the one you’ve been riding then and get you away tonight as soon as it’s dark.’

Immediately after we’d breakfasted, bin Suleiman butchered the three camels, slitting their throats and letting the blood drain into a tin bowl. The carcases were then disembowelled and the meat cut into strips and hung to dry in the sun. Flies buzzed and the place smelt of blood, and yet it didn’t seem unnatural. Sand and rock and the blazing sky, that boy lying in the dim interior of the tower, his breath gurgling in his throat and blood seeping on to the floor, and below us an Arab town ruled by a man consumed by a murderous greed. Death didn’t seem so hateful when life itself was so cruel.

Action followed hard upon my thoughts. Hamid, from his lookout post on the very top of the tower, called down to us; men were circling the hill to the north. From the walls we watched them climb by the camel track. They were well spaced out, their guns ready in their hands. Others were coming up by the zig-zag path direct from Hadd. Lying prone on the blistering stones, we waited, holding our fire. The stillness seemed to break their nerve, for they began shooting at a range of almost three hundred yards.

The attack when it came was a senseless, ill-directed affair, men clawing their way up the last steep rock ascent to the walls without any supporting fire. We caught them in the open, unprotected, and the attack petered out almost before it had begun. They went back down the sides of the hill, taking their wounded with them and not leaving even a single sniper to harass us from the shelter of the rocks. ‘It won’t be as easy as that next time they come.’ David’s eyes had a cold, dead look, untouched by the light of battle that I’d glimpsed for a moment on bin Suleiman’s broad animal face.