The Doomed Oasis (33 page)

“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 burnt away. He seized 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 rest 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 tire 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 northwest. 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 This, after the lonely weeks he'd spent in that filthy area of quicksands … I didn't need the set, withdrawn look of his face, the occasional mumbling of the lips to tell me that he was mentally very near the end of his tether.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.

“Saraifa,” he said. “I'll know the worst then.” I think he could already picture the misery that awaited us.

Halfway there we met with a family of the Junuba heading towards the mountains with a long string of camels loaded with dates for the coast. They gave us the news. The last
falaj
had ceased to flow that morning. Sheikh Makhmud was said to have died during the night. His brother, Sheikh Sultan, ruled in his place. We purchased some dates from them—we had been unable to buy any supplies in Dhaid—and hurried on.

All the way to Saraifa the traces of disaster were with us: the carcass of a camel, a body sprawled in the sand, discarded arms. But, according to the Junuba, the Emir's men were not in the oasis. “They don't need to attack now,” David said. “They can sit on the
falajes
they've destroyed and just wait for the end, like vultures waiting for a man to die.” And he added: “Sheikh Sultan will make peace. He's a gutless, effeminate old man, and they know it.”

The wind increased in force until it was blowing a strong
shamal
and we never saw Saraifa until the crumbling walls of a date-garden appeared abruptly out of the miasma clouds of wind-blown sand. The palms thrashed in the blinding air as they closed around us.

We passed a patch of cultivation, the green crop already wilted and turning sear. And when we reached the first
shireeya
, we found it dry, the mud bottom hard as concrete, split with innumerable cracks. The
falaj
channel that supplied it was empty. The skeletal shape of little fish lay in the sand at the bottom of it.

Only when we came to the outskirts of Saraifa itself was there any sign of human activity. Camels were being loaded, household possessions picked over. But most of the
barastis
were already empty, the human life gone from them. Men stopped to talk to us, but only momentarily. They were bent on flight.

It was the same when we reached the mud buildings in the centre of Saraifa. Everywhere there were beasts being loaded. But it was the tail end of the exodus; most of the houses were already deserted. And in the great square under the palace walls the watering place no longer delivered its precious fluid to a noisy crowd of boys with their asses; the ground round it was caked hard, and the only persons there were an old man and a child of about two.

We circled the walls and came to the main gate. The great wooden portals were closed. No retainers stood guard on the bastions above. The palace had the look of a place shut against the plague and given over to despair David sat for a moment on his camel, looking down on the date-gardens half hidden beneath the weight of driven sand, and tears were streaming down his face. He turned to me suddenly and swore an oath, demanding that the Almighty should be his witness—and the oath was the destruction of Hadd. “Khalid is dead,” he added, and his eyes burned in their sockets. “Now I must do what he'd have done, and I'll not rest till the
falajes
are running again—not only the five they've destroyed, but the others, too. That I swear, before Almighty God, or my life is worth nothing.”

We rode out of Saraifa then, leaving behind us the pitiful sight of a people driven from their homes by thirst, heading into the desert, our heads bent against the wind, our mouths covered. Once David paused, his arm flung out, pointing. “Now you see it. Now you see the Rub al Khali rolling in like the sea.” And indeed it did look like the sea, for through gaps in the flying curtain of sand I could see the dunes smoking like waves in the gusts, the sand blowing off their tops in streamers. “That's what Khalid was fighting. Like water, isn't it? Like water flooding in over a low-lying land.” And, riding on, he said: “With the people gone, the wells all dry … this place won't last long.” His words came in snatches on the wind. “How long will they survive, do you think—those families hurrying to go? They're not nomads. They can't live in the sands. They'll die by slow degrees, turned away by sheikh after sheikh who fears they and their beasts will drink his own people out of water. And what can they live on when their camels are gone?”

He was riding close beside me then, “Sometimes I hate the human race … hate myself, too, for being human and as cruel as the rest.” And then quietly, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing: “There'll be men die in Hadd for what I've seen today.”

It was the strange choice of words, the way he was trembling, and the violence in his manner—I thought he'd been driven half out of his mind by Khalid's death and the tragic things we'd seen.

“All I need is a few men,” he whispered to me. “Khalid's are all dead. Half a dozen men, that's all I need.”

The sun's heat increased and the wind gradually died. I suffered badly from thirst, for we hadn't much water left and we were riding fast. Towards midday, in a flat gravel pan between high dunes, we came upon the tracks of heavy vehicles. We followed them and shortly afterwards heard the roar of diesels. It was the drilling-rig, both trucks floundering in a patch of soft sand. The big eight-wheeler was out in front, the rig folded down across its back, and it was winching the second truck, loaded with pipe and fuel drums, across the soft patch.

They were working with furious energy, for they'd had refugees from Saraifa through their camp just before they'd pulled out, and they were scared. We stopped with them long enough to brew coffee and give our beasts a rest, and when we rode on, David said to me: “Why's he want to bring that rig here now? What good will it do?” He was haggard-eyed, his face pale under its tan. “They told me he'd requisitioned Entwhistle's seismological outfit—the men as well as the truck. He did that just after the battle, when he knew what had happened. I don't understand it. He must realize it's too late now.…”

The shadows of the dunes were lengthening, their crests sharp-etched against the flaming sky. We were working our way across them then, and as the sun finally sank, we came to the top of a dune, out of the shadow into the lurid light of the blood-red sunset, and in the gravel flat below we saw the tracks of vehicles and the blackened circles of campfires. “Location B,” David said, and we rode down into shadow again.

The camp had been abandoned that morning. So much Salim was able to tell us from the ashes of the campfires, and after that we kept just below the dune crests, riding cautiously, with Ali scouting ahead.

We'd only just lost sight of the abandoned camp when the thud of an explosion shook the ground and the sands on the steep face of a dune opposite slid into motion with a peculiar thrumming, singing sound. Our camels stood halted, their bodies trembling, and the singing sound of the sands went on for a long time. There was no further explosion. But almost as soon as we started forward again, Ali called to us and at the same moment there was the crack of a rifle and a bullet sang uncomfortably close.

I don't remember dismounting. I was suddenly stretched on the sand with Salim pulling my camel down beside me. David and Hamid were crawling forward to the dune crest, their guns ready. I thought for a moment we had been ambushed. But then Ali shouted a greeting. He had dropped his rifle and was standing up, throwing sand into the air. It was the Bedou sign that we came in friendship, and in a moment we were dragging our camels down the steep face of the dune and three Arabs were running to meet us, brandishing their weapons and shouting.

We had reached Colonel Whitaker's camp at Location C.

The tents were huddled against the base of a dune, black shapes in the fading light, and out on the gravel flat Entwhistle's seismological truck stood, lit by the glow of cooking-fires. There were perhaps fifteen men in that camp, and they flitted towards us like bats in the dusk. As they crowded round us, one of them recognized David. All was confusion then, a babel of tongues asking questions, demanding news.

David didn't greet them. I doubt whether he even saw them. His eyes were fixed on his father, who had come out of one of the tents and was standing, waiting for us, a dark, robed figure in silhouette against the light of a pressure lamp. David handed his camel to Salim and went blindly forward. I think he still held his father in some awe, but as I followed him I began to realize how much the day had changed him. He had purpose now, a driving, overriding purpose that showed in the way he strode forward.

There wasn't light enough for me to see the expression on Colonel Whitaker's face when he realized who it was. And he didn't speak, even when David stood directly in front of him. Neither of them spoke. They just stood there, staring at each other. I was close enough then to see Whitaker's face. It was without expression. No surprise, no sign of any feeling.

“It's your son,” I said. “He's alive.”

“So I see.” The voice was harsh, the single eye fixed on David. “You've decided to return from the dead. Why?”

“Khalid asked me to come here and talk to you. He wanted us to—”

“Khalid's dead.”

“I know that. I buried his body this morning.” David's voice trembled with the effort to keep himself under control. “He died because his father hadn't the sense to avoid a pitched battle.” And he added: “We passed that rig of yours a few miles back. It's too late now to start drilling on my locations.”

“On your locations?”

“On Farr's, then—as checked by me.”

“And by me,” Whitaker snapped. “Since you've got Grant with you, I presume you now have some idea what I was trying to do. If you hadn't disappeared like that—”

“Don't, for God's sake, let's have another row.” David's voice was strangely quiet. “And don't let's start raking over the past. It's too late for that now. Khalid was right. We've got to work together. I came because I need men.”

“Men?” Colonel Whitaker stared at him with a puzzled frown. “What do you need men for?”

“I'll tell you in a moment. But first I'd like to know what you're planning to do with that rig. You can't, surely, intend to drill here—not now, after what's happened?”

“Why not?”

“But it's crazy. It'll take you months—”

“You call it crazy now, do you?” Whitaker's voice was hard and pitched suddenly very high. “Last time I saw you, you were raising hell because I wouldn't drill here. Well, now I'm going to try it your way.”

“But don't you realize what's happened in Saraifa?”

“Of course I do. Sheikh Makhmud is dead and I've lost an old friend. His brother, Sultan, is Ruler in his place, and you know what that means. Saraifa is finished.”

David stared at him in disbelief. “You mean you're going to do a deal with the Emir?” His tone was shocked.

Whitaker's face was without expression. “I've seen him, yes. We've reached a tentative agreement.” And then as he saw the look of contempt on David's face, he exclaimed: “
Allah akhbar!
When are you going to grow up, boy?”

“You don't have to worry on that score, sir. I've grown up fast enough these past few months.” David's voice was calmer, much quieter. He seemed suddenly sure of himself. “But there's no point in discussing what's gone. It's the future I'm concerned with—the future of Saraifa. Can I rely on you for support or not?”

Whitaker frowned. “Support for what?”

“For an attack on Hadd. I've worked it all out in my mind.” David's voice came alive then, full of sudden enthusiasm. “For centuries they've been destroying other people's wells. They've never known what it is to be short of water themselves. I'm going to give them a taste of their own medicine. I'm going to destroy the wells in Hadd.”