Marguerite Kaye - Summer Sheikhs

The road to nowhere, she thought.

After lunch in a small village restaurant, where they waited out the midday heat for another hour, Salah turned the four-wheel drive vehicle off-road and struck out across the dunes.

Now they were completely alone. Within a few minutes they had left all signs of civilisation behind, and were surrounded by the rich emptiness of the desert. Heat shimmered over the dunes; the sun was a white blast furnace against a blue of startling intensity; the pale sand, broken by rocky outcrops now and then, stretched to infinity. Only when she turned to look back at Mount Shir was there any relief for her eyes.

After several hours, the sun began to set ahead of them, the sky turning fiery red and orange and the sun getting fatter and heavier as it approached the horizon. As she watched, the sky shaded to purple, and now the sun was a massive orange ball, larger than she recalled ever seeing it before. When it began to sink behind the horizon, the sky above turned midnight blue.

The sun disappeared in a blaze; the sky went black very quickly. And still they drove.

Salah did not put on the headlights. The world was shadows. There was no human light visible anywhere, just stars and a moon almost at the full, bathing the dunes in ghostly purple. Desi was seized with a sudden, atavistic dread.

She shifted nervously. ‘When do we stop for the night?’

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘An hour or so. Are you tired?’

She shrugged and took a sip of water from the bottle ever present between them.

‘A little. Aren’t you going to put the headlights on?’

‘What for?’

‘Can you drive in the dark?’

‘Why not?’

‘But how do you know where you’re going?’

Salah laughed. ‘There is only one way to navigate in the desert, Desi—by the sky. In daylight, by the sun. At night, by the stars. My forebears have done it for many thousands of years. Don’t worry—if my ancestors had not been good navigators, I would not be here.’

She laughed, and the strange dread lifted. They spoke little, but a feeling of peace and companionship settled over her as they drove on into the night. She almost forgot the harsh accusations of the morning in her pleasure at being with Salah in a world of two.

She had no idea how long they drove when at last a flickering light appeared in the distance. ‘What’s that? Is that a town?’

‘You will see,’ he said, and flicked on the headlights.

A cluster of strangely patterned tents met her eyes: a Bedouin encampment. By the time they reached it, a party of tall robed men was there to welcome them. Under instruction, Salah parked the Toyota against the wire fence of an enclosure, and they got out to be greeted by the men.

They were a tall race, clearly. The men towered over her in their flowing robes and turbans, with the dignified bearing of those who have never lost their connection to the land. They chatted with Salah in soft welcoming voices and led them past the wire enclosure, which proved to be a camel corral. In the flickering torchlight as they passed she saw a dozen beasts crouching on the ground, chewing and whuffling, their outrageous long curling eyelashes made even more seductive by moonshadow. Her heart leapt with the alien magic.

They were led to the centre of the encampment of tents, where there was torchlight and a charcoal brazier. Other men were moving about, laying a carpet with plates and food. Another took their bags and disappeared.

‘Is this a hotel?’ Desi asked in amazement.

‘It is a nomad camp. But the people are by tradition very hospitable. They are used to strangers appearing out of the desert. There are guided tours of the desert for foreigners. Such tourists nowadays often stay with the desert nomads like this.’

Desi was enchanted. A tall moustachioed man of impressive bearing and impregnable dignity bent to offer her a silver basin and a bar of soap, poured water over her hands as she washed, then gave her a weather-beaten square of cloth to dry them.

‘Is this a work camp?’ she asked. ‘Why are there no women?’

‘Women do not serve strangers,’ Salah said. ‘In the morning probably some will come and show you their craft work.’

‘Lovely! What sort of things do they make?’

‘Dolls, pottery, maybe. You will have to wait and see.’

Very soon food was laid before them.

‘Is it the desert air, or is this food totally delicious?’ Desi demanded, falling on it with a reckless abandon that she would have to pay for by eating starvation rations soon.

‘We haven’t eaten since lunch,’ Salah pointed out mildly.

‘Yes, but I’m so used to going without food, it shouldn’t get to me like this,’ Desi said. ‘I’ve been eating far too much since I got here; at this rate I’ll have to fast completely for a week!’

‘Not on this trip, please. The desert is dangerous enough without that.’

Desi nodded, taking his point, and consciously slowed her eating.

‘They use so much oil!’ she protested. ‘In the palace, too. Is that what makes it so flavourful? How on earth does everybody in this country not turn into an elephant?’

Salah laughed aloud. ‘Olive oil,’ he corrected her, as if he were talking about gold. ‘Olive oil is very healthy, as well as giving its delicious flavour to food. We grow our own species of olive. Barakati olive oil is rare but very prized in the world, and very little is exported. Its flavour is excellent.’

When the last of the food had been presented, they were politely left with only each other and the stars. Above them a shooting star rushed along a golden pathway to oblivion.

Suddenly the night air was heavy around them, weighted with awareness. And now that there was nothing to cloak it, their hungry need rose up like heat from the sand to cloud the space between them.

‘They are preparing our tent,’ Salah said, his voice low and hoarse. ‘Will you sleep with me, tonight, Desi? I want you.’

HER heart leapt with yearning, her body melted into instant need. But she looked at him for a moment, resisting, remembering his harsh words earlier in the day.

‘Tell me what it means to you, that you want me,’ she said quietly.

‘It means you are a beautiful, sensual woman.’

‘Not good enough. Next answer.’

‘What do you want to hear?’

‘You’ve thought yourself too good to talk to me for something like ten years. Now you’re sleeping with me. Have you looked at that fact?’

‘Is this why you came? To prove something to me?’ he asked.

‘My interest in proving anything to you runs in the minus figures, Salah. I find that when a person makes an accusation, he’s usually talking to a mirror. Are you trying to prove something to me?’

‘You forget that I did not go to your country. You came to mine.’

‘You forget that I did not go to your bed. You came to mine.’

‘Why did you come out to me? You came to me. You knew I was waiting.’

‘I think we’ve agreed the old sexual fire still has live coals amongst the ashes,’ Desi said. ‘Still, I don’t call stepping out of my room to get some air “coming to you”, exactly.’

‘You called my name. You knew I was there.’

‘I didn’t, actually. Why were you there?’

‘You know it,’ he said.

‘Closure, you say. What do you need closure on, exactly, Salah? Because you look as though you’ve had closure on everything in life. You look as if you’ve shut down everything except the food intake. What’s left?’

He put out one hand to catch her chin and turned her head. For one tremulous moment his eyes met hers.

‘You know what is left.’

Honeyed sweetness flooded up her body, making her neck weak.