Marguerite Kaye - Summer Sheikhs

The sun was scorching. The Land Cruiser was air-conditioned, but that did not stop the sun coming through the windows, and setting her skin on fire. Desi had always loved heat, but this was something else. There was no shade anywhere, it was hour after hour of burning sand, till her eyes grew hypnotized and her brain tranced.

She would not protest or complain, because she suspected he was waiting for just that. Nor did she want to give him any excuse for turning back. It’ll be hell on wheels, Desi, Sami had said, but even she could not have foreseen this.

Desi lifted the bottle of water to her lips for the fiftieth time that day, and took a long swig. She’d never drunk so much water in her life.

‘I suppose if we ran out of gas or water out here, we’d be dead in an hour,’ she observed mildly.

‘It would take longer than that. But we will not run out,’ Salah said.

At noon they stopped only briefly to eat and drink. Salah, wearing his desert robe and the headscarf she had learned to call keffiyeh , got out to stretch, but Desi remained in the vehicle. To step outside in this heat would be tantamount to suicide, or at the very least, instant second-degree burn. She had put on shorts and a T-shirt in the nomad camp this morning, and now she was sorry. But it was too much effort to think of changing into something with sleeves.

After only fifteen minutes they were on their way again.

In late afternoon Salah pointed through the windscreen. ‘We’ll camp there,’ he said.

Desi frowned and shaded her eyes till she saw it: a large outcrop of sand-coloured stone ahead. She would not have seen it if he hadn’t pointed it out. The best way to see anything out here was by the shadow it cast, and there was no shadow.

‘Will there be some shade? Why can’t I see a shadow?’ She was desperate to be out of the sun.

‘On the other side. The sun is behind us now.’

‘Are we heading east?’ Desi frowned and looked at the sun. They were. She hadn’t noticed him change direction. ‘Why?’

Salah glanced at her ruefully. ‘I’m sorry. I overshot. We should have reached it an hour ago.’

‘Thus the great desert navigator whose ancestors survived to produce him!’

‘As long as the mistakes are not fatal, of course, one survives.’

‘You can’t imagine how comforting.’

At least they could laugh.

Ten minutes later—how deceiving distances were when you had no real landmarks!—they reached it. The mound was much bigger than she had imagined, a small hill, the size of a substantial building. As Salah slowed the Land Cruiser and pulled around to the other side, Desi gasped in relief.

‘An oasis!’ she cried. ‘A real, true blue oasis!’

‘At this season the water will be brackish.’

Two dozen palm trees surrounded a large pool of water in the rock’s welcome shadow.

‘Heaven is a relative construct, I see,’ Desi said.

Salah pulled the vehicle up underneath a rock overhang and Desi tumbled out.

Even in the shade it was boiling hot. She gasped. ‘Wow! How right you were about travelling in this heat! Is it all going to be like this?’

‘No,’ he said, opening the back and beginning to unload supplies. When Desi moved to help him he waved her away. ‘Leave it to me for now. You are too hot. Go and sit in the shade.’

He was right there, and she could assume he was more used to this heat than she. She sank down on a rock and watched him heave out the tent.

‘I think I’ve drunk four litres of water today! Do we have enough?’

‘We have plenty. When did you last take a salt tablet?’

She told him, and he nodded approval.

She knew she must be sweating, but she’d never have known it by her skin. In such dry air, sweat seemed to evaporate before you saw it.

‘I suppose this is as good as a detox cure,’ Desi mused.

When Salah had unloaded the equipment and supplies, he slammed the tailgate and turned to look into the sun.

With his eyes narrowed, his chiselled face outlined by sun and shadow, he looked fiercely handsome, a face from another century. Desi felt lightheaded, almost drunk, with his beauty.

‘You’re the image of the desert,’ she said dreamily.

Salah flicked her a glance. ‘You need food,’ he said.

He bent to pick up the roll that was the tent, and carried it to a flat spot among the trees. Desi set down her bottle, dusted her hands on her butt, and moved to help him.

An hour later the tent was up, the sleeping bags unrolled, and Desi was watching the sun go down to glory over the desert as she scooped up the last morsel of lamb and aubergine stew.

‘Does this place have a name?’ she asked dreamily.

‘It is called Halimah’s Rest.’

‘Halimah? Didn’t you tell me she was a great queen or something?’

‘Yes. After her husband’s death, she held the throne for her son against all comers for years.’

‘What was she doing out here in the middle of nowhere?’

‘Queen Halimah and her army got lost during a battle. A local Bedouin boy led her to this oasis. The army camped here and refreshed themselves and went on to win the battle the next day. Later Halimah commanded that the pool be banked with brick and a well dug, to the great benefit of the Bedouin. You can still see the remnants of the brick walls.’

‘Who was she fighting with?’

‘Adil ibn Bilah, her dead husband’s nephew, who wanted to take the throne from her.’

‘He didn’t succeed?’

‘No. He was killed, and Halimah made an example of his generals. No one challenged her rule for some time afterwards.’

The sun was all but gone now. Salah got up and moved among the trees, collecting palm leaves and bark. Desi sat and watched the desert change from gold to red and then to purple.

The desert went on forever. A sense of unreality settled over her. What stories the sand whispered to the secret ear!

‘This is so weird,’ she murmured, after a long silence.

‘What?’ Salah began laying a fire with what he had collected.

‘I feel as though I’ve plugged into a mindset that’s been sitting here forever. As if time is nothing, only the desert exists.’

‘The desert has many effects on the mind. You’ve never been in the desert before?’

‘I’ve done a couple of photo shoots in the more obvious places. Golden beaches and palm trees. Once we went out to an old battlefield and I posed by burntout tanks. That was horrible. But never right out in the middle of nowhere, never where the desert could really get to you. Never anywhere I felt like this.’

‘There is more than one sort of mirage,’ Salah said, setting a match to the fire.

‘Meaning?’

‘People see what they want to see in the desert.’

‘And what do I want to see?’

‘That in the desert time is transcended, perhaps. That time does not matter.’

She went still with the truth of it. There was silence between them, and then, as if driven, he went on.

‘If there is only the desert and eternity, how can ten years matter? Do you yearn for that time of innocence, Desi? I, too. We drive across the desert together, and I know that, if only we had been more thabet —what word is it?—stead…steady…’

‘Stea—’ Her throat closed. She cleared it. ‘Steadfast.’

Darkness was settling around them as the first stars appeared. Thick, roiling smoke curled up from under the stacked leaves, and then a puff of yellow flame.

‘Steadfast, yes. We might still be here together, but how different it would be. You would be my wife. Our children would be sleeping in the tent. Do you feel their ghosts, Desi, as I do?’

Baba, Baba, I want a drink!

Her heart convulsed at the nearness of the dream. Desi opened her mouth to breathe.