The Doomed Oasis

5. The Quicksands of Umm al Samim

Whitaker was waiting for me on that same rooftop over looking the desert, but this time he was pacing up and down it. His movements were caged and restless. He checked only momentarily as I entered. ‘Will Philip Gorde come and see me, do you think?’ he asked, and when I told him No, he resumed his pacing. ‘After all these years, to talk to me like that!’

It was too dark for me to see his face, but I could tell from the stooped outline of his shoulders, the lowered head, above all the nervous quickness of his movements, the way he spoke, that his mood was one of desperation. ‘All my life I’ve had to use subtlety. It’s been part of my job out here. Always the need to find my way through the maze of Arab politics. Never a straight course. Always the devious approach. These oilmen out from England — stupid men like Erkhard who don’t understand the Arab mentality — they don’t realize the problems of these Bedou sheikhs, the feuds, the vague boundaries that didn’t matter so long as it was desert sand and nothing more. History, culture, race — they go back three thousand years and more, virtually without change, untouched by Western civilization. It’s a culture in which the individual is still dominant, personality and human emotions the overriding factor governing men’s actions. And over all this are the outside factors — international politics, the Foreign Office. Even Philip doesn’t really know the Arab — though he likes to think he does.’

It was the fact of having somebody with him of his own race. The words came out of him in a pent-up torrent. But what he said was said for his own benefit, not for mine; an attempt to justify his actions. But when he’d said it all, he turned and faced me, suddenly almost humble: ‘Suppose I go to Philip myself?’

There was no point in raising his hopes. ‘I don’t think it would do any good.’ And I told him about Gorde’s visit to the PRPG.

His head came up. ‘In other words, I was right. The Company’s not allowed to enter into any agreement involving the Hadd border.’ There was relief in his voice, but it was overlaid by the bitterness of frustration. And he added acidly, ‘Nice of the Political Resident to confirm my own assessment of the situation so exactly.’ His shoulders sagged; he turned his face towards the desert. ‘Then I’ve no alternative now … ‘ He said it to himself, not to me. standing very still, looking out to where the stars met the hard line of the sands. ‘Over thirty years I’ve been out here. Grant. I’m practically a Bedou. I think like them, act like them … I’m over sixty now and I know more about the Arab and Arabia … ‘He stopped there and in the stillness I could hear the breeze rattling the palms. He turned slowly and stared at me. ‘All these years out here and a boy of twenty-four sees it clearer than I do.’ His voice was harsh, his face grim, the lines cut by sand and sun so deep they might have been scored by a knife.

‘It’s a pity you didn’t reach that conclusion earlier,’ I said.

He took a step forward, his eye bulging, his body taut, gripped in a sudden blaze of anger. But all he said was. ‘Yes, it’s a pity.’ He turned and resumed his pacing, the shoulders stooped again. ‘Heredity is a strange thing,’ he murmured. ‘If we’d been less alike … ‘ He shrugged and added, ‘In that case I don’t suppose he’d have gone back to the locations against my orders.’ He fell silent again then. The breeze was from the east and it brought with it the murmur of Saraifa like the beat of the surf on a distant shore.

‘You wanted to see me,’ I reminded him. The sound of that distant crowd made me anxious to get back to Gorde.

‘Yes, about finances.’ He kicked a cushion towards me and told me to sit down. ‘Just what have I got left?’ he demanded, folding himself up on the floor beside me.

I was glad Gorde had returned my briefcase then. I could have told him the position more or less from memory, but all the papers were there and it made it easier. He shouted for Yousif to bring a light and for the next ten minutes I went over the figures with him. He hadn’t much left. But there were some shares I hadn’t sold and they’d appreciated quite considerably, and after repaying back loans, I thought he’d have just enough if he lived quietly. I thought he’d decided to go home, you see, to leave Arabia and retire. It seemed reasonable for a man of his age. ‘I’m sorry it’s not more,’ I said, putting the papers back in their folder.

He nodded. ‘I’ll have to borrow then.’

‘It would be better,’ I said, returning the file to my briefcase, ‘if you could arrange to live within your means.’

He stared at me, and then he burst out laughing. But the laughter was without humour. ‘So you think I’m beaten, do you? You think I’m turning tail and heading for home like a village cur … ‘ The fury building up in him seemed to get hold of his throat so that the words became blurred. That’s what they’ll all be thinking, I don’t doubt — Gorde, Makhmud, that man Erkhard.’ And then in a voice that was suddenly matter-of-fact: ‘I take it you’ll be going back in one of the Company planes?’

‘Gorde has offered me a lift.’

‘Good. I’ll have letters for you to various merchants in Bahrain. A list of things to order, too. Would you like to wait here whilst I write them or shall I send Yousif up with them later? When is Philip leaving, by the way?’

‘First light.’ And because I wanted to make certain I didn’t miss the flight I asked him to have the letters sent after me.

He nodded. That gives me the night in which to think this thing over.’ He summoned Yousif and gave him instructions to take me back to the palace. ‘By the way,’ he said, as I got to my feet, ‘you mentioned a package Griffith had brought you, something David took to him on board the Emerald Isle. Was that his survey report?’

I nodded.

‘Based on Henry Farr’s old report?’

‘Yes.’

‘I take it Entwhistle was running a check on David’s locations? You don’t know with what result, I suppose?’

‘No. He didn’t say.’

He had risen to his feet and standing close to me, he seemed to tower over me. ‘I’d like to see my son’s survey report. Have you got it with you in your briefcase?’

I realized then why he’d considered his finances inadequate. ‘Good God!’ I said. ‘You’re surely not going to start drilling operations on that border … ‘ I was staring at him, remembering what Gorde had said. But there was nothing wild-eyed about him. He was bitter, yes. He’d been humiliated, deeply shocked by the behaviour of a man he’d always regarded as his friend, but the eye that met mine was level and unflinching and I knew that he hadn’t yet crossed the borderline into madness. ‘You haven’t a hope of succeeding now,’ I said. ‘The Emir will be watching that border and the instant you start drilling … ‘

He smiled thinly. ‘I’m not afraid of death, you know. Being a Muslim makes one fatalistic.’ He turned away, leaning his body on the parapet and staring out across the dunes, grey now with the first light of the risen moon. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I haven’t made up my mind.’ He hesitated and then turned to me. ‘But if I should decide to go ahead then I’d like to have David’s report. He gives the locations, I take it?’ And when I nodded, he said. ‘Do they coincide with Henry Farr’s?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, of course not. I ran a check survey myself, you know. That was a long time ago now when I had a bodyguard of more than a dozen men, all on the Company’s payroll, and the use of the Company’s equipment.

In those days — quite soon after the war — I reckoned my chaps could hold the Emir off if it came to a showdown long enough for me to pull out with my equipment. But it never came to that. I got away with it without the Emir knowing. But I knew I couldn’t do that with a drilling rig.’

‘Then how do you expect to get away with it now?’ I demanded.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know that I can.’ He was smiling softly to himself. ‘But I’ve been out here a long time, Grant. I know that little Emir inside out. I’ve had spies in Hadd sending me back reports and I think I know enough now … ‘ He gave a little shrug and the smile was no longer soft; it was hard, almost cruel. ‘I’m outside the Company now. It makes a difference. And it’s just possible that I could get away with it where the Company couldn’t.’ He straightened up. ‘Well, what about it? Are you going to let me have David’s report?’

It wasn’t ethical, of course. He hadn’t been mentioned in his son’s Will. But then I’d failed with Gorde and I could now regard myself as free to take what action I liked. Also I thought that had David known what I now knew, he would have wanted his father to have the locations. I gave him a copy of the survey report and after writing the location fixes out on a slip of paper, I gave him that, too.

He glanced at it and then slipped it into the folds of his cloak. Thank you.’ He held out his hand. ‘You’ve come a long journey. I’m sorry it didn’t have a pleasanter ending. I’ll send Yousif with the letters in a few hours.’

I hesitated. But I knew he wasn’t a man to take advice. ‘In that case you’d better let me know what I’m to tell Gorde.’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’

I left him then, standing alone on that rooftop with the desert clean and white behind him, and followed Yousif out to the battered Land-Rover. It was cooler now and I felt almost relaxed. In a few hours I should be able to have a bath and a change and sit back with a long, cool drink. And yet, riding down the palm-shadowed track between the date gardens, I found myself filled with a strange nostalgia for the place. It had an appeal I found difficult to define, a sort of poetry, and the dim-remembered lines of a poem came into my mind, something about being ‘crazed with the spell of far Arabia’ and stealing his wits away.

I was beginning to understand what this place had meant to David, to a boy who’d never had a real home before and who was wide open to the strange beauty of it and as impressionable as any Celt.

I was still thinking about this when we ran out from the shadow of the palms and saw the square, black with the mass of men standing there. The roar of their voices came to us in a wall of sound. Yousif eased his foot off the accelerator, hesitating, uncertain whether to drive straight to the main gate or not. And then three figures rose from beside the shireeya and stood blocking our path.

‘Sheikh Khalid’s men,’ Yousif said and there was relief in his voice as he braked to a stop. They clambered on to the mudguards, talking urgently in the hard, guttural tongue that is always associated in my mind with flies and sand. ‘We go a different way. Is much better.’ Yousif swung the Land-Rover round, circling the gravel rise and approaching the palace from the rear through a litter of barastis, all apparently deserted. We stopped finally at a small door with an iron-barred grille set in an otherwise blank wall.

Khalid’s three men closed round me as I got out, and when I told Yousif I wanted to be taken straight to Gorde. he said, ‘You go with them now, sahib. Sheikh Khalid’s orders.’ And he drove off, leaving me there.

Eyes peered at us through the grille. The door opened and I was hustled through the dark passages of the palace and up to my turret room. There my three guards left me. and standing at the embrasure I looked down on what was obviously a very explosive situation. The crowd was being harangued by a man on a rooftop opposite, and another was shouting to them from the back of a camel. The whole square was packed solid. Every man and boy in the oasis must have been gathered there, and many of them were armed.

Camels were being brought into the square and men were mounting on the outskirts of the crowd. And all the time the agitators shouting and the crowd roaring and the tension mounting. The air was thick with menace, and then somebody fired a rifle.

The bullet smacked into the mud wall not far from my embrasure. It was all that was needed to set that crowd alight. Other guns were fired, little sparks of flame, a noise like fire-crackers, and a great shout; the crowd became fluid, flowing like water, moving with the sudden purpose of a river in spate. Men leaped to their camels, mounting on the arch of their lowered necks, driving them with the flood tide down the slope to the dark fringe of the date gardens.

In a moment the square was deserted, and with the murmur of the crowd dying to silence, the dark walls of my room closed in on me. I had a sudden, overwhelming need then to find Gorde and the others, and I picked up my briefcase and felt my way down the black curve of the stairs. A light showed faint in the passage at the bottom. A figure stirred in the shadows. Thick Arabic words and the thrust of a gun muzzle in my stomach halted me. It was one of Khalid’s men, and he was nervous, his finger on the trigger.

There was nothing for it but to retreat to my room again. In the mood prevailing in the oasis it was some comfort to know that I had a guard. I lay down and tried to get some rest. The sound of the crowd was still faintly audible. It came to me through the embrasure, soft as a breeze whispering through the palm trees. And then it died and there was an unnatural quiet.

It didn’t last long, for the shouting started again. Shots, too. It was a long way away. I got up and went to the embrasure, peering out at the empty square and the dark line of the palms shadowed by the moon. A glow lit the night sky to the east. It grew and blossomed. Then suddenly an explosion, a great waft of flame and smoke beyond the date gardens. And after that silence, the flame abruptly gone and the palms a dark shadow-line again in the moon’s light.

Voices called within the palace, the sound muffled by the thickness of mud walls, and then for a while it was quiet. But soon the crowd was ebbing back into the square, flowing into it in little groups, silent now and strangely subdued. I was sure that it was Gorde’s plane I’d seen go up in smoke and flame, and I stayed by the embrasure, watching the tide of humanity as it filled the square, wondering what they’d do now — hoping to God their passions were spent.

Bare feet sounded on the stairs. I turned, uncertain what to expect, my mouth suddenly dry. The beam of a torch probed the room, blinding me as it fastened on my face. But it was only my three guards back again, jabbering Arabic at me and gesturing for me to accompany them. I was hurried along dark passages, past gaping doorways where men sat huddled in dim-lit rooms, arguing fiercely. The whole palace was in a ferment.

We came finally to a low-ceilinged room lit by a pressure lamp, and in its harsh glare I saw Khalid sitting surrounded by robed figures. They were mostly young men and they had their guns resting across their knees or leaning close at hand against the walls. He rose to greet me, his face unsmiling, the bones sharp-etched in the lamplight. ‘I am sorry, sir, for the disturbance you have been given.’ A gesture of dismissal and the room quietly emptied, the conference broken up. ‘Please to sit.’ He waved me to a cushion on the carpeted floor and sat down opposite me, his legs folding neatly under him with the ease of a man who has never known a chair.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Did they set fire to Gorde’s plane?’

‘Is a mistake. They are angry and they fire some bullets into it.’ He was very tense, coiled up like a spring too tightly wound. Somewhere a child was crying, and I heard women’s voices, soft and comforting. ‘You ‘ave been to see Haj Whitaker, is not so?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘I understand you are concerned in the management of his affairs?’

‘His financial affairs.’ I didn’t want him to think I was responsible for anything that had happened out here. His manner, his whole bearing had changed, the surface layer of a university education gone entirely. I glanced over my shoulder. My three guards were still there, squatting in the open doorway.

Khalid was staring at me out of his dark eyes. The kohl had worn off. Lacking that artificial lustre, his eyes looked sad and sombre. ‘I have spoken with my father. I understand now what it is Haj Whitaker try to do for Saraifa. Unfortunately I am not before tonight in my father’s confidence.’ And he added with a trace of bitterness, ‘Better if he had told me. Better also if Haj Whitaker explain to David what he is doing.’ He paused there and I was conscious again of the strain he was under, of the tension building up in him. He leaned suddenly forward. “What will he do now?’ he asked me. ‘Now that Meester Erk-hard don’t honour the concession he sign. What will Haj Whitaker do?’

‘That’s his affair,’ I said. I didn’t want to become involved in this.

‘Please, Meester Grant. I must know.’

‘I don’t think he’s made up his mind yet.’

He stared at me. ‘Do you think he may leave Saraifa?’

And when I didn’t answer, his eyes clouded and he seemed to sag. ‘We have very much need of him now,’ he said quietly. ‘He has the ear of many sheikhs, of some of his own people also.’ And he added, ‘Since ever I am a small boy I have known about this great man Haj Whitaker. I can remember the feast to celebrate the original concession.

He was young then and full of fire. But always, always people here — my father and myself also — we have looked to Haj Whitaker. He is known from the Persian Gulf to the Hadhramaut, from Muscat on the Indian Sea to the waterholes of the Rub al Khali and the Liwa Oasis as a great man and the friend of all the Bedou. Particularly he is known as the friend of Sheikh Makhmud. If he desert us now … ‘

‘I’m sure he’s no intention of deserting you.’

But he didn’t seem to hear me, ‘There must be some reconciliation. It is altogether vital.’ He stared at me hard. ‘Meester Grant. There is something I must know. It is if I can trust you?’

That’s up to you,’ I said, wondering what was coming. And I added, ‘I’ve been virtually a prisoner since I returned from seeing Colonel Whitaker.’

He gave a quick, impatient shrug. ‘Is for your own safety.’

But I wondered. ‘Where’s Sir Philip Gorde?’ I didn’t want to be involved in this any further. ‘I’d like to be taken to him now.’

‘First you will listen please to what I have to tell you.’ He seemed to consider, his dark eyes fixed on me, searching my face. ‘I think you are a friend to David before you work for his father, is not so?’

‘It was because I befriended David that Colonel Whitaker asked me to look after his financial affairs.’

‘Yess. Yess, I believe that.’ But his eyes still searched my face as though he wasn’t sure.

‘What is it you want to tell me?’ I wanted to get this over. Presumably Gorde and Otto would be leaving with Erkhard and I wanted to be on that plane, away from the dark feuds of this desert world.

He didn’t answer at once. But then he suddenly seemed to make up his mind. He leaned forward. ‘David is alive,’ he said.

I stared at him, too astounded for the moment to utter a word. ‘Alive?’ Those three women … but remembering their attitude, I remembered Whitaker’s too. ‘What do you mean?’ I was suddenly extremely angry with Khalid. ‘How can he be alive?’ And when he didn’t say anything, I added, ‘It’s more than six weeks since your father sent an armed guard to arrest him, and they found his camp deserted.’

‘I know. But is alive.’ He said it very seriously.

‘Where is he then?’ I still didn’t believe him. I thought it was a damned stupid lie he’d thought up to try and keep Whitaker in Saraifa. As if Whitaker, with all his experience of the desert, would believe it. ‘You tell me where he is and ‘No.’ His voice was flat and decisive. ‘No, I don’t tell you — not yet. But is alive. That I promise, Meester Grant.’ I suppose he realized that just stating it wouldn’t convince me, for he went on quickly: ‘When Haj Whitaker is gone to visit the Emir, I am much disturbed for David’s life. He is already on that border almost two moons with the truck that was brought by his father across the Jebel mountains from Muscat. He is altogether alone and his father I believe to be hating him for things he has said.’

‘What sort of things?’

He shrugged. ‘He don’t tell me. But he is very much unhappy, I know that. He come here to this room to see me before he leave and he warn me there is no oil where Haj Whitaker is drilling, that the only place there is any probability of oil is on that border. He says also that his father is an old man now and has lost faith in himself and that he is drilling to cheat the Company, for revenge against this Meester Erk-hard and nothing more.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘He is as my brother. He don’t lie to me.’ And then he told me how he’d taken two of his men and a spare camel and had ridden to the border as soon as he knew David was to be arrested. He’d found David alone, deserted by his crew. After emptying the spare cans from the seismological truck, David had driven it into the Rub al Khali desert until it had run out of petrol on the side of that dune. Then he leaves the truck and rides on with us. It is all as we arrange it together.’

‘You mean you planned it in advance?’

‘Yess. It is all arranged between us because I am afraid for this emergency.’

The details fitted. They fitted so well that I was forced to accept what he’d told me as the truth. But he wouldn’t reveal where David was hidden. ‘He is with my two men — Hamid and a boy called AH. They are of the Wahiba and altogether to be trusted.’

‘Why have you told me this?’ I asked.

‘Because everything is gone wrong, everything David planned — and now I need your help. You are David’s friend and also you work for his father. I think per’aps only you can bring reconciliation between them. And without reconciliation … ‘ But he seemed reluctant to put his fears into words. ‘What do you think now, sir?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Is reconciliation possible? How will Haj Whitaker act when he finds David is alive?’

‘How would you react if you thought your son were dead?’ But I realized I’d no idea what Whitaker’s reaction would be. I didn’t know enough about their relationship, how he’d come to regard his son in those last months. If Sue were right and they really had been close at one time … ‘It’ll come as a hell of a shock to him.’

‘Yess, but is it possible — a reconciliation?’

‘Of course. Particularly now that Colonel Whitaker … ‘ I hesitated, wondering whether I ought to tell him what was in Whitaker’s mind. But I thought he’d a right to know that he was considering drilling on his son’s locations. After all, it was what David had wanted. They’d be able to work on it together now.

With this thought in mind, I was quite unprepared for the violence of Khalid’s reaction when I told him. ‘Is imbecility!’ he cried, jumping to his feet. ‘He cannot do that now. Is altogether too late.’ He was pacing up and down, very agitated and waving his arms about. ‘Sheikh Abdullah has already left to return to Hadd. He will report to the Emir all that has occurred here. If then Haj Whitaker remove his oil rig to the border … ‘ He turned to me, still in great agitation, and said, ‘It will mean war between us and Hadd. War, do you understand? For my father is guided by Haj Whitaker. The Emir knows that. And if Haj Whitaker himself is on that border, then the Emir will know there is oil there and that my father will concede no revision of the boundaries between Hadd and Saraifa. You understand? You will help me?’ He didn’t give me time to answer, but summoned my escort. ‘We leave at once, for there is little time. Excuse please. I go to my father now.’

He left then and I was alone with my three Arab guards. The child had stopped crying. There was no sound of women’s voices. The palace slept, and sitting there, thinking about David, convinced now that he was still alive, I gradually became resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to get away in the plane that morning.

Khalid was gone about ten minutes. When he came back his face was pale, his manner subdued. ‘I tell my father I am going to Dhaid to gather more men.’

‘Did you tell him about Whitaker?’

‘No, I don’t tell him. And I don’t tell him about David either — not yet. Is very much disturbed already. Come!’

‘Is David at Dhaid?’ I asked.

‘No. But Sheikh Hassa holds that village for us. He will give us camels, and perhaps Salim bin Gharuf is there. I don’t know. We have to hurry.’ He gave an order to my escort and I was hustled out of the palace into the great courtyard where his Land-Rover stood. The escort piled in behind us and as we drove down into the date gardens it was difficult to believe that the people of this peaceful place were threatened with extinction; that they had been so roused that night that they’d set fire to an oil company plane. The breeze had died and the whole world was still. Nothing moved. And when we ran out into the desert beyond the palms, it was into a dead, white world, for the moon was high now. We headed south, Khalid driving the Land-Rover flat out, bucking the soft sand patches, eating up the flat gravel stretches at a tearing speed.

We were held up for a time by a choked petrol feed and the first grey light of dawn was taking the brightness from the moon when a needle-tip of latticed steel showed above the grey whale-back of a dune. It was Whitaker’s oil rig, a mobile outfit — the sort they call an ‘A’ rig, truck and drill combined. It stood up out of the desert floor like a steel spear planted in the sand as a challenge to the vast wastes of emptiness that surrounded it. Beside it was a barasti, two Bedou tents and some tattered wisps of black cloth that acted as windbreaks.

As we neared it we heard the sound of the diesel, could see the Arab drilling crew busy drawing pipe. Other Arabs were loading a second truck with lengths of pipe. Early though it was the place was humming with activity, and when Khalid stopped and questioned them, he learned that Yousif had arrived just over an hour before with orders for them to prepare to move.

Whitaker had made his decision. He was moving his rig to the Hadd border and up in my empty turret room there were doubtless letters waiting for me to take to Bahrain. ‘Is crazy!’ Khalid cried, jumping back into the driving seat. ‘Why does he do this now? He should do it before or not at all.’ He drove on then, passing close below the derrick. It looked old and battered, the metal bare of paint and burnished bright in places by the drifting sands. The derrick man was up aloft stacking pipe, his loin cloth smeared with oil, his turbanned head a bundle of cloth against the paling sky.

Dawn was coming swiftly now and beyond the shallow slope of a dune I saw the tinsel-gleam of Erkhard’s aircraft. It stood at the far end of a cleared stretch of gravel and the sight of it brought back to me my urge to escape from the desert. But when I demanded to be taken to it, Khalid took no notice except to give an order to the Arabs in the back. I reached for the ignition key. A brown hand seized my arm, another gripped my shoulders and I was held pinned to my seat while we plunged at more than thirty miles an hour into a world of small dunes, and the plane vanished beyond my reach.

After that the going was very bad for mile after weary mile. And when finally we came out of the little dune country, it was on to a gravel plain ribbed by crumbling limestone outcrops. A few dried-up herbs, brittle as dead twigs, bore witness to the fact that it had rained there once, many years ago. The land was dry and dead, flat as a pan, and as dawn broke and the sun came up, I lost all sense of horizon, for the whitish surface reflected the glare in an endless mirage.

All the way from the rig the going was bad. We had more trouble with the petrol feed and it was past midday before we caught sight of the low hill on which Dhaid stood. It throbbed in the heat haze, looking like the back of a stranded whale surrounded by pools of water. The crumbling mud walls of the village were merged in colour and substance with the crumbling rock on which they were built, so that it wasn’t until we stopped at the foot of a well-worn camel track that I could make out the shape of the buildings. There was a single-arched gateway, and we had barely started up the track on foot when the villagers poured out of it and rushed upon us, leaping from rock to rock, shouting and brandishing their weapons.

Khalid showed no alarm, walking steadily forward, his gait, his whole bearing suddenly full of dignity. And then they were upon us, engulfing us; a wild, ragamuffin lot, teeth and eyes flashing, dark sinewy hands stretched out to us in the clasp of friendship. They were dirty, dusty-looking men, some with no more than a loin cloth, and they looked dangerous with their black hair and bearded faces and their animal exuberance; and yet the warmth of that unexpected welcome was such after that empty, gruelling drive that I greeted them like brothers, their horny, calloused hands gripped around my wrists. It was the beginning of my acceptance of desert life.

Sheikh Hassa followed behind the rest of the village, picking his way sedately over the rock, his gun-bearer just ahead of him carrying his new BSA rifle which was his pride and joy. He was a short, tough-looking man with a shaggy black beard that gave him an almost piratical appearance. He greeted Khalid with deference, touching his hand with his fingers, carrying them to his lips and to his heart. ‘Faddal.’ And we went up the track and through the gateway into the village. A crowded square pulsating in the heat, a cool, darkened room spread with a rug, camel milk in bowls still warm from the beast’s udder, and talk — endless, endless talk. I leaned back on the cushions, my eyelids falling, my head nodding. The buzz of flies. The buzz of talk. Not even coffee could keep me awake.

And then Khalid called to me and introduced me to a sinewy old man who stood half-naked in the gloom, a filthy loin cloth round his waist and his headcloth wound in a great pile above his greying locks so that he looked top-heavy. This was Salim bin Gharuf. ‘He is of the Duru,’ Khalid said, ‘and he knows the place.’ I asked him what place, but he ignored that. ‘Is better now that you wear these please.’ He produced a bundle of Bedou clothing, holding them out to me.

They were cast-off clothes and none too clean. ‘Is this really necessary?’ I demanded.

He nodded emphatically. ‘Is better you look like one of us now.’

‘Why? Where are we going?’

‘I tell you later. Not here. You will change please.’ He helped me off with my European clothes and wound the loin cloth round my waist; the long, dusty robe, the length of cloth twisted about my head, sandals, too, and an old brass-hiked knife for my belt. Sheikh Hassa watched me critically. I think the clothes were his. Men came and peered and the crowded room resounded with their mirth.

Khalid sensed my annoyance. ‘They don’t mean any disrespect, sir. And you are going where no faranji has been before — save David.’

It was meant to mollify, but all it did was rouse my curiosity again. ‘Well, if you won’t tell me where he is,’ I said, ‘at least tell me how long it will take us to reach him.’

‘A day and then half a day if we travel fast. Perhaps two days. I don’t know. There is possibility of a storm.’

I think perhaps he might have told me more, but at that moment a man burst into the room shouting something, and instantly all was confusion. The room emptied with a rush that carried me with it out on to the white glare of a rooftop. Below us a single camel climbed wearily up the track, urged on by its rider. Khalid pushed past me. ‘Is one of my father’s racing camels,’ he said.

Five minutes later he returned with the rider, a thick-set man with long hair twisted up in his headcloth. Khalid talked for a moment with Sheikh Hassa and then with Salim. Finally he came to me. ‘The oilmen have left and at dawn this morning several large raiding parties from Hadd crossed our borders. My father orders me to return.’

My surprise was occasioned less by the news than by the realization that the camel must have made the journey in less time than we had taken in the Land-Rover. But Khalid’s next words jolted me into awareness of what it meant to me personally. ‘You go now with Salim.’

‘But

‘Please, Meester Grant.’ His face looked old now beyond his years, haggard after the long drive, the sleepless night. His eyes, staring at me, burned with an inner fire. ‘Is altogether important now. Tell David what has happened, that his plan has failed and that there is no hope now of the oil concession. He must go to his father immediately.’

But my mind was on the practicalities. That’s all very well,’ I said, glancing uneasily at the old man. ‘But Salim doesn’t speak any English. And I don’t know the country.’ I looked about me quickly. Khalid’s bodyguard was behind him, Sheikh Hassa right beside me. There was no escape. ‘Where am I supposed to go anyway? Where is David?’

‘You go to Umm al Samim.’

Sheikh Hassa leaned his black beard forward, and his harsh voice repeated the words ‘Umm al Samim’ on a note of surprise. And then he looked at me and rolled his eyes up into his head and laughed and made a strangling sound.

‘What’s he mean by that?’ I demanded. ‘What’s he trying to tell me?’

Khalid’s hand gripped my arm. ‘The Umm al Samim is quicksands. But there is a way,’ he added quickly, and I glanced at Hassa and knew that he’d been telling me that I was going to my death. ‘I tell you there is a way,’ Khalid said fiercely. ‘Salim knows it as far as the first good ground. He will guide you as he guided us when we make original exploration two seasons past.’

‘And what about the rest?’

‘You will find by testing with a stick. Perhaps when you call, David or the Wahiba will hear you.’ His grip on my arm tightened. ‘You will go?’

‘Suppose I refuse?’

‘Then I take you with me back to Saraifa.’ He was looking me straight in the face. ‘This is what you want, isn’t it correct — to find David? Now you find him.’ And he added, staring at me hard, ‘Are you afraid to go?’

‘No, I’m not afraid.’ I saw him smile. He knew after that I’d hardly refuse. ‘All right, Khalid,’ I said. ‘I’ll go. But what do you want me to do? A boy hiding out in some quicksands isn’t going to help you now.’

‘He must help us — he and his father. We are at point of desperation now, and it is his fault.’ He said it without rancour, a statement of fact, and he added, ‘It was a good plan, the way he visualize it — to go into hiding and by making appearance he is dead to draw attention to his survey. He think you will succeed to obtain the signature of Sir Gorde to a concession and that then per’aps we have oil, at least the support of the Company and so of your people.

I

But instead all is turned to disaster. Because he is working on that border the raiders of Hadd are in our territory and the concession Haj Whitaker arrange is torn up. We have no Arab friends like the Emir has. We are alone and everything is in conspiracy now to destroy us.’

His words, the intensity with which he spoke, showed me the tragedy of it — father and son working for the same ends, but against each other. ‘Yes, but what can he do?’

‘He must ride to a meeting with his father. Salim has good camels. You and David together — you must persuade Haj Whitaker to stop drilling on the Hadd border and to go to Bahrain, to the Political Resident. If they don’t send soldiers, then please to send us modern weapons and automatic guns so that we can fight.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what you say. I only hope it works out.’

Tell David also … ‘ He hesitated. Tell him it is possible I do not see him again. And if that is happening, then say to him that he is my brother, and the Emir Abdul-Zaid bin Sultan — my enemy into death.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘He will understand.’

‘But you’re not going to your death.’

‘Inshallah! I do not know that.’ His tone was fatalistic. This is an old feud, Meester Grant. As old as Saraifa is old, or Hadd. It goes back many centuries to the days when all the falajes are running with water, a hundred channels making irrigation for the palms. Then Saraifa is a great garden extending many miles and the dates go by camel north, to the sea and to India, across the mountains to the Batina coast, and south to the Hadhramaut — even, some say, to Mukalla and the olden port of Cana to be carried by dhow to the far places of the world. But we are always too much occupied with our gardens and the people of Hadd are very much envying us for our riches. They are men of the hills, cruel and hard and altogether without goodness. So.’ He gave a helpless little shrug. ‘So it is that we are always fighting for our date gardens and one after another the falaj channels are being destroyed until Saraifa is as you see it now, open to the desert and soon to die if the falajes are not rebuilt. Do you know, Meester Grant, there is not one man who can tell me, even when I am a little boy — even by the hearsay of others, his father or his grandfather — what it is like when there are more than six falajes working. Always wars … always, until the British come a hundred years ago. And now’ — he spread his hands in a little gesture of helplessness — ‘Now another war perhaps, and if we do not have a victory, then it is finish and in a few months the shamal will have blown the sands of the Rub al Khali over our walls and our houses and we shall be like those old lost cities in India … There will be nothing to show that we ever exist in this place.’ He stopped there, a little breathless because he had put so much of himself and his emotions into foreign words. ‘You tell him that please.’ He turned then and spoke rapidly to Salim. The tattered figure moved towards me. ‘You go now,’ Khalid said. ‘Fi aman allah! In the peace of God.’

‘And you also,’ I said. The skinny hand of my guide was on my arm, a steel grip propelling me down mud steps out into the shadowed cool of an alley. In a little open space beyond there were camels crouched and at his cries three tall beasts lumbered to their feet. They had provisions already loaded and dark skin bags bulging with water. A boy brought two more camels and Salim chattered a gap-toothed protest as he realized that I didn’t even know how to mount my beast. They brought it to its knees and put me on it and at a word it hoisted me violently into the air. The old man put his foot on the lowered neck of the other and stepped lightly into the saddle, tucking his legs behind him.

We left Dhaid by a small gateway facing south, just the two of us and the three pack beasts tied nose-to-tail. The boy ran beside us as far as the base of the limestone hill and then we were out on the gravel flat and travelling fast, a peculiar, swaying gait. It required all my concentration just to remain in the saddle. Perhaps it was as well, for it left me no time to consider my predicament. Our shadows lumbered beside us, for the sun was slanting towards the west, and Salim began to sing a high-pitched, monotonous song. It was a small sound in the solitude that surrounded us, but though I couldn’t understand the words, I found it comforting.

The sun vanished before it reached the horizon, hazed and purple as a mulberry. We camped at dusk where the dusty green of new vegetation spattered the sand between ribs of limestone. The camels were let graze and Salim built a fire of furze and cooked a mess of rice and meat. One of the pack beasts was in milk and we drank it warm from the same bowl. And when he’d looked at his ancient rifle, oiling it carefully, we mounted and went on again.

We travelled all that night without a break. The moon turned the desert to a bleak, bone white, and in the early hours a mist came up and it was cold. By then I was too tired to care where I was going and only the pain of the saddle chafing the inside of my thighs, the ache of unaccustomed muscles, kept me awake. The dawn brought a searing wind that whipped the mist aside and flung a moving cloud of sand in our faces. Lightning flashed in the gloom behind us, but no rain fell — just the wind and the driving sand particles.

We stopped again for food, lukewarm and gritty with sand, and then on again until the heat and the moving sand drove us into camp. I laid my head on my briefcase, covering my face with my headcloth, and slept like the dead, only to be woken again and told to mount. My nose and mouth were dry with sand and we went on and on at a walking pace that was relentless in the demands it made on my endurance. Dawn broke and the sun lipped the mountains that poked their rugged tops above the horizon to the east. Salim didn’t sing that day and as the wind died and the sand became still, the heat increased until my head reeled and dark specks swam before my eyes.

My midday we were walking our camels along the edge of a dead, flat world that stretched away into the west, to disappear without horizon in a blur of haze. There was no dune nor any outcrop of rock, no tree, no bush, nothing to break the flat monotony of it. Salim turned in his saddle. ‘Umm al Samim,’ he said with a sweep of his hand, the palm held downward and quivering. I remembered the strangled sound Sheikh Hassa had made at the mention of that name, and yet it looked quite innocent; only that unnatural flatness and the dark discoloration of water seepage revealed the quagmire that lay concealed below the crust of wind-blown sand.

We followed the shore of the sands for about an hour whilst the sun beat down on us and the dull expanse shimmered with humidity. And then, by the gnarled remains of some camel thorn, we dismounted and started into the quicksands, leading our camels.

Close in-shore there were patches of solid ground, but farther out there was nothing that seemed to have any substance, the ground and air both quivering as we struggled forward. I can’t remember any sense of fear. Fear is a luxury requiring energy, and I had none to spare. I can, however, remember every physical detail.

It was a sabhkat on the grand scale, and beneath the hard-baked crust my feet touched slime. At times it was difficult to stand at all, at others I broke through to the black filth below, and at every step I could feel the quiver of the mud. The camels slithered, bellowing in their fear, in constant danger of losing their legs and falling straddled. We had to drag the wretched beasts, even beat them, to keep them moving. This and the need to be ready to give them some support when they slipped did much to keep my mind from the filthy death that threatened at every step. And whenever I had a moment to look ahead, there was the Umm al Samim stretched out pulsating in the humid glare, innocent-seeming under its crust of sand, yet deadly-looking because it was so flat and level — as level as a lake.

And it seemed to have no end. It was like the sea when visibility is cut by haze. But here there were no buoys, no markers that I could see, nothing from which Salim could get his bearings. Yet once I saw the old tracks of camels, the round holes half filled with sand, and whenever I broke through to the mud below, my feet found solid ground before I was in farther than my knees; in some way that was not apparent to me Salim was following a rib of rock hidden below the surface of the sand.

Time had no meaning in the pitiless heat and the sweat rolled dripping down my back. I had a moment of panic when I would have turned and run if it had been possible. But then a camel slipped and a moment later Salim seized my arm and pointed ahead with his rifle. Little tufts of withered herbs lay limp in isolated clumps, and on the edge of visibility a gnarled thorn tree shimmered like a witch, its gaunt arms crooked and beckoning.

With the first of the withered herbs I felt the ground under my feet. It was hard and firm, and when I set my foot down nothing quaked, there was no gurgling sound, no sound of imminent break-up of the crust. Where the camel thorn stood there was naked rock and I flung myself down, revelling in the scorched hardness of it.

We were on a little island, raised imperceptibly above the flat level of the quicksands, and it was as far as Salim had ever penetrated. I watched him as he searched for Khalid’s tracks, stopping every now and then to call, a high-pitched, carrying sound made with his hands cupped round his mouth. But the steaming heat absorbed his cries like a damp blanket and there was no answer.

In the end he gave it up and began prodding with his camel stick along the edge of the sands. Twice I had to pull him out, but finally he found firm ground beneath the crust and leaving the camels we started forward again, moving a step at a time, watching the quiver of the crust and prodding with the stick.

Behind us our tracks vanished into nothing. The rock island vanished, too, the white glare swallowing even the bulk of our camels. We were alone then, just the old man and myself in a little circle of flat sand that quaked and gurgled and sucked at our feet.

I don’t know how long we were feeling our way like that. Once we saw the faint outline of a camel’s pad, but only once. And then suddenly thorn trees throbbed in the haze ahead, looking huge, but dwindling as we approached the firm ground on which they stood. They were no more than waist-height and standing beside them, Salim cupped his hands and called again.

This time his cry was answered, a human voice calling to us, away to our left where the sands ran flat. I thought it was imagination, perhaps an unnatural echo of Salim’s voice, for there was nothing there; an empty void throbbing in the heat, and the air so intensely pale it hurt the eyes.

And then suddenly the void was no longer empty. A man had materialized like a genie out of the heat of a furnace, his face burned black by the pitiless heat, his lips cracked, his ragged beard bleached by the sun, his hair, too, under the filthy headcloth.

He came forward and then stopped, suddenly suspicious, reaching for the gun slung at his shoulder. ‘Salim!’ Recognition brought a quick flash of teeth, white in the burnt dark face. ‘Wellah! Salaam alaikum.’ He came forward and gripped Salim’s wrist in a Bedou handclasp, whilst the old man talked, his words coming fast and high-pitched with excitement. And then the man turned to stare at me, pale eyes widening in startled disbelief. It was only when he finally spoke my name that I realized this strange nomadic-looking figure was David Whitaker. ‘It’s a long time,’ I said. ‘I didn’t recognize you.’

He laughed and said, ‘Yes, a hell of a long time.’ He reached out his hand and his grip was hard on mine. Not content with that he took hold of both my shoulders and held them as though overwhelmed by the need for physical human contact. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. And again, ‘I can’t believe it.’

I could hardly believe it myself. He was greatly changed. As Sue had said, he’d become a man. But even in that first glimpse of him I recognized again the quality of eagerness that had first attracted me to him. ‘So you really are alive,’ I don’t think I’d fully accepted the fact until that moment.

‘Yes, I’m alive — just.’ His dark face was cracked in a boyish grin. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘It never occurred to me you’d come out here to look for me. Hell of a bloody journey. How did you know where I was?’ But I suppose he saw I was exhausted, for he added quickly, ‘Come up to the camp. You can stretch out and I’ll have Ali brew some coffee.’ He called to two men who had materialized out of the weird glare and were hovering on the edge of visibility. ‘My companions,’ he said.

They came forward warily, like dogs suspicious of a new scent, and they both had service rifles gripped in their hands. The elder he introduced as Hamid; a big man with long hair to his shoulders, bearded and impressive like a prophet. The other was little more than a boy, his face full-lipped and smooth, almost a girl’s face, and he moved with the same natural grace. His name was Ali bin Maktum.

‘Now let’s have coffee and we’ll talk.’ David took my arm and led me to where the ground was higher and tattered pieces of black Bedou cloth had been erected as windbreaks, stretched on the bleached wood of camel thorn over holes they had scraped in the soft limestone. ‘Faddal!’ It was said with Bedou courtesy, but with an ironical little smile touching the corners of his mouth.

He sent Hamid off to look to our camels, and whilst the boy Ali brewed coffee over a desert fire of sand and petrol, he sat beside me talking hard about the heat and the humidity and the loneliness he had been suffering in this godforsaken place. I let him run on, for I was tired and he needed to talk. He was desperate for the company of his own kind. He’d been there six weeks and in that time Khalid had made the journey twice to bring them food and water. ‘I wouldn’t trust anyone else. They might have talked.’ He was tracing patterns in the sand then, his head bent, shadowed by the headcloth. Flies buzzed in the sudden silence. ‘Why are you here?’ His voice came taut with the anxiety of a question too long delayed. ‘Who told you where to find me — Khalid?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Khalid.’ And I added, ‘There’s a lot to tell you.’

He misunderstood me, for his head came up, his eyes bright with sudden excitement.’ It’s all right then, is it? You saw Sir Philip Gorde and he signed that concession agreement I typed out?’ The words came breathless, his eyes alight with hope. But the hope faded as he saw my face. ‘You did see Sir Philip, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I gave him the envelope.’

‘Well then

‘He didn’t sign the agreement.’

The effect of my words was to knock all the youth right out of him. His face looked suddenly old and strained, lines showed so that he seemed more like his father, and his shoulders sagged. ‘So it didn’t work.’ He said it flatly as though he hadn’t the spirit left for any display of emotion, and I realized that all the weeks he’d been waiting here alone he’d been buoyed up by this one hope. ‘I thought if I disappeared completely, so completely that everyone thought I was dead … They did think I was dead, didn’t they?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everyone, including your father, presumed you were dead.’ And I added, a little irritably because I was so tired, ‘You’ve caused a lot of people a great deal of trouble; and your mother and sister a lot of needless grief.’

I thought for a moment he hadn’t heard me. But then he said, ‘Yes, indeed, I realize that. But Sue at least would understand.’ His face softened. ‘How is she? Did you see her?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw her.’ And that, too, seemed a long time ago now. ‘I don’t think she ever quite accepted the idea that you were dead. Nor did your mother or that girl in Bahrain.’

‘Tessa?’ The lines of strain were momentarily smoothed out. ‘You saw her, too?’ He seemed surprised, and he added, ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve put you to a great deal of trouble.’ He was staring down at the sand patterns between his feet. Abruptly he rubbed them out. ‘I was so convinced it was the only way. I had to get past Erkhard somehow. I thought if I could get my report to Sir Philip Gorde. He was the one man … ‘ His voice faded. And then, still talking to himself: ‘But I couldn’t just send it to him. It had to be done in some way that would enable him to override the political objections. I thought all the publicity connected with my disappearance … I’d planned it all very carefully. I had a lucky break, too. That night I visited Captain Griffiths on the Emerald Isle, there was an agency correspondent in transit to India stopping the night at the Fort in Sharjah. I saw him, told him the whole story — my background, how I’d escaped from Borstal and got myself out to Arabia, everything. I thought a story like that… ‘ He darted a quick glance at me. ‘Didn’t he print it?’

‘After you were reported missing, when the search had failed and you were presumed dead.’

‘Yes, I made him promise he wouldn’t use it unless something happened to me. But didn’t it have any effect?’

‘It seemed to cause quite a stir in the Foreign Office.’

‘But what about the Company?’

‘It put the shares up,’ I said, trying to lighten it for him.

‘Hell! is that all?’ He gave a bitter little laugh. ‘And I’ve been sitting here … waiting, hoping … ‘ His shoulders had sagged again and he stared out into the throbbing glare, his eyes narrowed angrily. ‘All these weeks, wasted-utterly wasted.’ His voice was bleak. He looked weary — weary and depressed beyond words. ‘I suppose you think now I’ve behaved like a fool — disappearing like that, pretending I was dead? But please try and understand.’ He was leaning towards me, his face young and defenceless, his voice urgent now. ‘I was on my own and I knew there wasn’t any oil where my father was drilling. I ran a check survey without his knowledge; it was an anticline all right, but badly faulted. It couldn’t hold any oil.’ His voice had dropped to weariness again. He’d been over all this many times in his mind. ‘I don’t know whether he was kidding himself or trying to cheat the Company or just doing it to get his own back on Erkhard. But I wanted the Company to drill on my locations, not his. I wanted oil. I wanted it for Saraifa and I wanted it to be the real thing.’

‘Your father wanted it, too,’ I said gently. ‘And he, too. was convinced there was oil where you did your survey.’

That’s not true. He refused to believe me. Told me I was inexperienced, that I’d no business to be on that border and forbade me ever to go near it again.’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘you’d better listen to what I have to tell you.’

The coffee was ready then and I waited until Ali had poured it for us from the battered silver pot. It was Mocha coffee, bitter and wonderfully refreshing, and as I sipped the scalding liquid I told him the whole story of my journey and all that had happened. Once whilst I was telling it, he said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.’ And later, when I came to the point where Gorde had left me with Entwhistle and we’d been fired on, he apologized again. ‘I’m afraid you’ve had a hell of a time, sir, and all my fault.’ That ‘sir’ took me back, for it still didn’t come easily from him.

But it was my account of that first interview with his father that really shook him. When I had explained to him what his father had been trying to do, he was appalled. ‘But Christ! Why didn’t he tell me? I’d no idea. None at all. And when Khalid told me he’d been to see the Emir of Hadd … ‘ He stared at me, his face fine-drawn, his voice trembling as he repeated, ‘Why the hell didn’t he tell me what he was trying to do?’

‘I think you know why,’ I said. ‘You were employed by the Company, and the Company to him meant Erkhard.’ And I added, ‘Erkhard knew your background, didn’t he? He used that as a lever to get you to spy on your father.’

It was a shot in the dark, but it went home. ‘He tried to.’ His tone was almost sullen; he looked uncomfortable.

‘And you agreed?’ I’d no wish to conduct a cross-examination, but I thought it essential he should see it from his father’s point of view if I were to succeed in bringing them together again.

‘I hadn’t any choice,’ he said, stung to anger by my question. ‘Erkhard threatened to turn me over to the Cardiff police.’

‘And your father knew about that?’

‘It didn’t mean I was going to do what Erkhard wanted.’

‘But you’d agreed to do it,’ I insisted, ‘and your father knew you’d agreed.’

‘I suppose so.’ He admitted it reluctantly. ‘He’s still got his friends inside the Company.’

So there it was at last, the basic cause of the rift between them — the thing that girl Tessa had hinted at, that Sue had felt but hadn’t been able to explain.

‘Christ!’ he said. ‘What a bloody stupid mess! And all because we didn’t trust each other like we should have done. How could I guess what he was up to? Though it’s just the sort of twisted, devious approach … ‘ His voice faded and once more he was staring out into the void. ‘I got very close to him at one time, but even then I was always conscious of a gulf, of something hidden that I couldn’t fathom. He’s very unpredictable, you know, Mr Grant. More Arab than the Arabs, if you see what I mean.’ He was very much on the defensive then. ‘After four years I can’t say I really understood him. Switching races like that, and his religion, too — it left a sort of gulf that couldn’t be bridged. And when Khalid told me he’d been to see the Emir, it made me wonder … ‘ He hesitated. ‘Well, as I say, he’s unpredictable, so I decided it was time I put my plan into action and disappeared. Khalid thought so, too.

Ill

He’d brought Hamid and AH, two of his most trusted men. and a spare camel. So … ‘ He shrugged. ‘I knew it was hard on Sue. Hard on Tessa, too- and on my mother. But I was alone, you see. I’d nobody to turn to, except Khalid He was the only man in the world who had faith in me. And I couldn’t look to the Company for help. Erkhard had made that very plain. And anyway, oil companies are in business for themselves, not for the Arabs. They’ve beer known to sit on an oilfield for years for political or commercial reasons … ‘ The sweat was pouring off him and he wiped his hand across his brow. ‘Well, go on,’ he said. ‘What happened when Erkhard came to Saraifa — die my father succeed in getting a concession signed?’

But I think he’d guessed that I shouldn’t have come here alone if it were all settled. He listened, silent, not saying a word, as I told him the rest of my story. Once his eyes came alight with sudden excitement; that was when I told him or my second talk with Whitaker and how Khalid and I had seen the drilling rig being dismantled for the move up to the Hadd border. The thought that his father was at last doing what he’d been wanting him to do for so long gave him a momentary sense of hope. But it was only momentary, for I went straight on to tell him of the scene at Dhaid and how the lone rider had brought the news that Gorde and Erkhard had left and Hadd forces had crossed the border into Saraifa. ‘So it’s come to that, has it? Open war between Hadd and Saraifa.’ His body was suddenly trembling as though with fever and his voice was bitter. ‘And Khalid sent you to me. What did he say before you left? What message did he give you?’

‘He said he thought this time Saraifa had reached the point of desperation.’ And I gave him the gist of what Khalid had said to me. When I had finished he didn’t say anything for a long time, sitting there lost in thought, staring out across the flat misery of the Umm al Samim ‘The only home I ever had,’ he whispered. ‘Did you see it when the shamal was blowing, with the Rub al Khali like a sea, the dunes all smoking and the sands pouring into the date gardens? It’s like a flood then.’ His father’s words — his father’s voice almost. ‘The oasis is doomed, you see. Doomed to extinction by the desert. But that’s a natural process; something to be fought with the natural resources of the country. Khalid and I, we were going to rebuild the old falaj channels with the money from oil royalties. That was our dream. But this … ‘ He stared at me hard, his eyes wide. ‘You’re sure it’s war, are you? It’s not just a border raid?’

I gave him Khalid’s speech then, as near as I could remember it word for word.

‘So it’s my fault, is it?’ He said it with deep bitterness and after that he was silent for a long time. Finally, he looked at me. ‘Unto death, you said. Khalid used those exact words, did he?’ And when I nodded, ‘So it’s not just a raid-it’s the real thing this time.’ He was almost in tears, he was so deeply moved. And then sadly: ‘My father’s fault, too — he’s made his decision too late.’ And he began cursing softly to himself. Those dung-eating bastards from Hadd, they’ll smash down the last of the falaj channels. What would have taken twenty years by natural means will take less than that number of months. The desert will roll in. Christ Almighty! The bastards!’ It was a cry from the heart and I was conscious of desperation here, too — a desperation that matched Khalid’s. ‘They can’t fight a war against Hadd. They’ve nothing to fight it with — only antiquated guns.’

He began questioning me then, pressing me for details, many of which I couldn’t give him, for he wasn’t interested in his father now, or Gorde or the Company; his attention was fixed on Hadd and the way Sheikh Abdullah, the Emir’s representative, had behaved, and what had passed between him and Sheikh Makhmud that morning before Whitaker and Erkhard had arrived. The sun sank in a blood-red haze and the air became dank. My head nodded, my body suddenly drained.of warmth and shivering with fatigue. ‘You’d better get some rest now,’ he said finally. ‘We’ll be leaving as soon as the moon’s up and it’s light enough to see our way through the quicksands.’ He seemed to have reached some decision, for his voice was firmer, his manner less depressed. He brought me a tattered blanket musty with sand. ‘I’ve kept you talking when you should have been getting some sleep.’

‘What do you plan to do?’ I asked him. ‘You’ll go to your father, I take it?’

‘Yes. He’s still got a few of his bodyguard left. A dozen men and I could create a diversion that would keep the Emir busy until my father has time to make his influence felt in Bahrain. Khalid’s right. We must work together now — my father and I.’ The mention of Khalid’s name seemed to bring his mind back to his friend. ‘He said he was my brother, didn’t he? Unto death?’

‘Your brother, yes,’ I said. ‘But as I remember it, he used the words “into death” in connection with the Emir- “my enemy into death”.’

‘Well, pray God it doesn’t come to that.’ There were tears in his eyes and standing there, staring straight into the flaming sunset, he quoted from the Bible: ‘The Lord be between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever.’

Dimly I recognized the quotation as the oath sworn by his namesake; I didn’t realize it then, but this was the covenant, sworn in the midst of the quicksands of the Umm al Samim, that was to take him to that fort on top of Jebel al-Akhbar and to the terrible final tragedy.

I saw the sun set and the quicksands turn to blood, and then the sky faded to the palest pastel green and the stars came out. Lying there, it was like being stranded on a coral reef in the midst of a flat lagoon. Sometime in the small hours the wind woke me, blowing a drift of sand in my face. The moon was up, but its face was hidden in a cloud of moving sand. There was no question of our leaving and I lay till dawn, unable to sleep, my eye-balls gritty, my nose and mouth clogged with sand, and when the sun rose all it showed was a sepia haze. We ate in extreme discomfort, the sand whistling like driven spume across the flat surface of the Umm al Samim.

The storm lasted until almost midday, and then it ceased as abruptly as it had started. We cooked a meal of rice and dried meat, and then we started back, collecting our camels on the way and struggling through the quicksands to the solid desert shore. We mounted them and keeping the Umm al Samim on our left, rode till dusk, when we camped. A meal and a short two-hour rest and then on again with Salim arguing sullenly. ‘The old fool thinks the beasts will founder.’ David’s face was grim. He was in a hurry and he had no sympathy for men or beasts. ‘Like all the Bedou he loves his camels more than he loves himself.’

We marched all night and there were times when I hoped the camels would founder. My muscles were stiff and aching, and where the wooden saddle chafed my legs, I was in agony. The starlight faded, swamped by the brighter light of the risen moon, and in the grey of dawning day we reached the big well at Ain. Salim went forward alone to water the camels, for early as it was there were others at the well before us. ‘Men of the Duru tribe, I expect,’ David said as we sat on the ground with the loads stacked round us, brewing coffee. ‘Salim will bring us the news.’

I dozed and woke to the sound of the old man’s voice. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked, for his face was lit by the excitement of some great event. ‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s talked with some men of the Rashid, back from selling camels at Saraifa.’ David’s face was grey in the dawn. ‘They say there’s been fighting already — a battle.’

‘Between Hadd and Saraifa?’

‘It’s hearsay, that’s all. They don’t know anything.’ He didn’t want to believe it, but his voice was urgent as he gave the order to mount.

We loaded the camels in a hurry, and as we started out again, I saw that our direction had changed. I asked him where we were going and he said, ‘Dhaid. We’ll get the news there.’ And after that he didn’t talk. His mood was sullen and withdrawn, his temper short, and he answered Salim angrily whenever the old man protested at the pace of our march.

We rode all day and far into the night, and in the morning the camels were almost done, their pace painfully slow. We reached Dhaid a little after midday. Nobody came out to meet us. Camels dotted the limestone slopes of the hill and men lay listless under the walls of the village. Inside the arched entrance, the little open place was packed with people; whole families with their beasts and chattels were crowded there in the oven heat that beat back from the walls.

They were all from Saraifa — refugees; the atmosphere was heavy with disaster, the news bad. Two more falajes, they said, had been destroyed and a battle fought, out by one of the wells. Khalid was reported dead, his father’s soldiers routed. ‘Old-fashioned rifles against automatic weapons.’ David’s tone was bitter. ‘For months the Emir has been receiving a steady trickle of arms. And we’ve done nothing about it. Nothing at all.’

‘They’re independent states,’ I reminded him.

That’s what the political boys said when I told them arms were being smuggled in dhows to the Batina coast and brought by camel across the mountains. A perfect excuse for doing nothing. And now, if Khalid is dead … ‘ His voice shook. His face looked ghastly, the skin burned black, yet deathly pale. ‘Sheikh Makhmud’s an old man. He can’t fight this sort of a war. And the Emir has only to block two more falajes and his men can just sit and wait for the end.’

We left Salim with the camels and fought our way through the crowds to Sheikh Hassa’s house. We found him in the room where I had left Khalid a few days before. He was sitting surrounded by a crush of men all talking at once. The new rifle lay forgotten on the floor. Beside him sat a young man with long features that were tense and pale. ‘Mahommed,’ David whispered. ‘Khalid’s half-brother.’ He’d fled from the battlefield, but he’d seen enough to confirm the rumours we’d heard in the market place. The battle had been fought by the ninth well out along the line of the Mahdah falaj and the casualties had been heavy. Sheikh Makhmud himself had been wounded and the latest reports of survivors indicated that he had retired to the oasis with the remnant of his forces and was shut up in his palace and preparing to surrender.

David talked to the two of them for about ten minutes, and then we left. ‘Sheikh Hassa’s scared,’ he said as we pushed our way out into the shade of the alleyway. ‘All these frightened people flooding into his village … It’s knocked the fight right out of him. And Mahommed’s only a boy. Hassa will hand over Dhaid without firing a shot.’ He said it angrily, with deep bitterness. And he added, ‘Fifty resolute men could defend this place for a month — long enough to preserve its independence from Hadd.’

‘What about Khalid?’ I asked. ‘Did his brother say what had happened to him?’

‘No. He doesn’t know.’ His face was grey and haggard. ‘All this killing and destroying — it’s so bloody futile, a lust for oil. Can’t they understand the oil won’t last? It’s just a phase, and when it’s past they’ll be faced with the desert again; and the only thing that will matter then is what they’ve built with the oil against the future.’ And he added angrily, ‘The Emir didn’t care a damn about that border until my father got Gorde to sign a concession. It was just sand and nothing grew there. And then to cancel it … I can almost see the look on Sheikh Makhmud’s face that night. God!’ he exclaimed. ‘The callousness of men like Erkhard — Gorde, too. They don’t care. These people are human beings and they’re being mucked around by hard-faced men who think only in terms of commerce and money.’

We were out of the alley, back in the glare of the crowded market place. He spoke to Salim and gave him money, a handful of Maria Theresa silver dollars poured from a leather bag, and then we settled ourselves in the dust by the entrance gate, leaning our backs against the crumbling mud walls amongst a crowd of listless refugees who watched us curiously. ‘I’ve sent Salim to buy fresh camels,’ David said. ‘We’ll leave as soon as he returns.’

‘How long will it take us to reach the Hadd border?’ I was feeling very tired.

But his mind was on Khalid. ‘I must find out what’s happened to him.’ He was silent a long time then, tracing patterns in the sand with his camel stick. And then abruptly he rubbed them out with the flat of his palm. ‘If he’s dead … ‘ His emotions seemed to grip him by the throat so that the sentence was cut off abruptly. And then, his voice suddenly practical, ‘In that case, there are his men. He had more than a score of them, a paid personal bodyguard. Wahiba mostly and some Rashid; all good fighters.’ He was staring hungrily out into the burning distance of the desert. ‘I need men, ‘he whispered, his teeth clenched. ‘Men who’ll fight. Not these-’ He gestured with contempt at the listless figures around us. ‘A score of men properly armed and I could put the fear of God into that bloody little Emir.’

I didn’t bother to ask him how, for I thought it was just wishful thinking and all in his imagination. My eyes were closing with the heat and the weariness of my aching muscles. I heard him say something about getting me to Sharjah as soon as he could and then I was asleep.

I woke to the voices of Salim and the two Wahiba; they were arguing loudly whilst David sat listening, a tattered Bible propped on the rifle across his knees. Two camels stood disdainfully in front of us. ‘They’ve become infected with the mood of this place, blast them!’ David closed the Book and got to his feet. A crowd was beginning to collect. He said something to Hamid and the man looked suddenly like a dog that’s been beaten. And then David took his rifle from him and handed it to me. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Let’s get going.’ He spoke angrily to the two Wahiba and then we mounted.

The camels were thoroughbred Oman racing camels. I could feel the difference immediately. The crowd parted, letting us through, and we picked our way daintily down the rocks. Out on the flat gravel of the desert below, we moved into an ungainly canter, circling the hill on which Dhaid rested and heading north-east again.

These people,’ David said, ‘they’re so damned uncertain; full of guts one minute, craven the next. Salim I didn’t expect to come. But Hamid and Ali … ‘ He sounded depressed. ‘My father now, he can handle them the way I’ll never be able to.’ There was admiration, a note of envy in his voice. They’d never have left him in the lurch.’ We rode in silence then and at a gruelling pace, the heat very great so that I was thankful for the water we had got at Dhaid.

We camped at dusk and David had just lighted a fire when he turned suddenly and grabbed his rifle. I heard the pad of camels’ feet and then the riders emerged out of the gathering darkness. There were three of them and David relaxed. ‘Salim, too,’ he whispered. He didn’t give them any greeting and they slunk to the fire like dogs. I gave Hamid back his rifle, he took it as though it were a gift and made me a long speech of thanks. They’re like children,’ David said. His voice sounded happy.

We had a handful of dates each and some coffee, that was all. And then we rode on.

In the early hours of the morning, with the moon high and a white miasma of mist lying over the desert, we approached the ninth well of the Mahdah falaj. Hamid and Ali were scouting ahead on either flank. David and Salim rode close together, their rifles ready-to-hand across their knees. The tension had been mounting all through that night ride, for we’d no idea what we were going to find at the end of it.

For the first time I rode my camel without conscious thought of what I was doing, my whole being concentrated in my eyes, searching the mist ahead. The desert was very still and, half-concealed under that white veil, it had a strange, almost eerie quality. From far ahead came a weird banshee howl. It rose to a high note and then dropped to an ugly cough. ‘Hyena,’ David said and there was loathing in his voice. The sound, repeated much nearer and to our flank, checked my camel in its stride. It was an eerie, disgusting sound. A little later Salim stopped to stare at some camel tracks. Their droppings, too, and he dismounted, sifted them through his fingers, smelt them, and then delivered his verdict — men of the Bait Kathir and they had come south the night before with two camels belonging to Saraifa.

‘Loot,’ David said, and we rode on in silence until about ten minutes later Hamid signalled to us. He had sighted the first corpse. It had been stripped of its clothes and there wasn’t much meat left on the bones, which stared white through the torn flesh. The teeth, bared in the remains of a beard, had fastened in agony upon a tuft of dried-up herb.

It wasn’t a pretty sight with the sand all trampled round about and stained black with blood, and after that the bodies lay thick. They had been caught in ambush and slaughtered as they rushed a small gravel rise where the enemy had lain in wait. There were camels, too, their carcases bared to the bones and white and brittle-looking like the withered remains of dwarf trees dead of drought. The whole place smelt of death and things moved on the edge of visibility. Two men slunk away like ghouls, mounted their camels and disappeared into the mist.

We let them go for David’s only interest was to discover whether Khalid had been killed. Methodically he and Salim checked every corpse, while the two Wahiba scouted the edges of the battlefield. David could put a name to most of the bodies, despite decomposition and the mutilations of scavengers, and one I recognized myself: the leader of Khalid’s escort. He lay face down in the tyre marks of a Land-Rover, and close beside were the bodies of three more of Khalid’s men, stripped of their clothes and arms.

We hadn’t far to go after that. The tyre marks lipped a. rise and a little beyond, the burned-out remains of the Land-Rover itself loomed out of the mist. They had sought cover behind it and their bodies had been ripped to pieces by a murderous fire. Khalid lay with eyeless sockets and half his face torn away. The near-naked body was already disintegrating and where the stomach had been torn open the rotten flesh crawled with maggots and the blood was dry and black like powder. Four of his men lay near him in much the same state of putrefaction.

‘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 burned away. He seized hold of 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 re’st 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 tyre 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 north-west. 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 carcase 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 sere. 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 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 person there was an old man with 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 of 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 camp fires. ‘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 camp fires, 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 forwards 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 enough light 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.’

‘1 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.’

‘Are you out of your mind?’ Whitaker glared at him. ‘Even if you did blow up a well, what good would it do? In a day or at most two they would have repaired it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ David said quietly. ‘Just let me have a few men.’

‘Men? You won’t get men out of me for a crack-brained scheme like this.’ And then in a gentler voice, ‘See here, David. I realize you’ve probably been through a lot during the past two months. And if you’ve been out to the battlefield on the Mahdah falaj, as I rather suspect from your attitude, I don’t imagine it was a pleasant sight.’

‘It wasn’t a pleasant sight riding through Saraifa and seeing the people there without water and fleeing from the oasis,’ David answered hotly.

‘No. But … ‘ Colonel Whitaker hesitated. He’d seen the obstinate look on David’s face. No doubt he sensed his mood, too, which was desperately determined. ‘Come into the tent,’ he said. ‘I refuse to continue this discussion out here.’ He glanced at me. ‘If you’ll excuse us, Grant, I’d like to talk to my son alone for a moment.’ He pulled back the flap of the tent. ‘Faddal.’ It was said quite automatically. A carpet showed red in the glare of the lamplight, some cushions, a tin box, and the two of them were inside the tent and the flap fell.

The outline of the dunes, smooth and flowing like downlands, faded into darkness as I sat alone on the sand, a centre of curiosity for the whole camp. The sky was clouded over so that there were no stars and it was very dark.

It was about half an hour later that David suddenly emerged out of the night and sat down beside me. ‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing,’ he replied tersely. And after that he sat for a long time without saying a word, without moving. Finally he turned to me of his own accord. ‘I don’t understand him,’ he said. ‘It was like talking to a complete stranger.’ And he added, ‘I don’t think Saraifa means anything to him any more.’ The bitterness of his voice was overlaid with frustration. ‘It’s tragic,’ he whispered. ‘Half a dozen men. That’s all I asked him for. But he thinks it’s all a dream, that I don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘You told him about Khalid — what he’d said to me?’

‘Of course.’

‘And it made no difference?’

‘None.’

‘What did you talk about then?’

He laughed a little wildly. ‘About locations, geological formations, a drilling programme. He wasn’t interested in anything else.’ And then speaking more to himself than to me: ‘I couldn’t get through to him. I just couldn’t seem to get through.’ He beat his fist against the ground. ‘What do you do when a man’s like that?’ He stared at me angrily. ‘I don’t understand him. Do you know what he said? He said I was forgiven. He said everything was to be just as it was between us in the early days when I first worked with him. I’m to stay here and help him drill a well. He and I — together; we’re going to drill the most important well in Arabia.’ Again that slightly wild laugh. ‘And when I mentioned Hadd, he said Hadd or Saraifa, what did it matter now? He’ll treat with the Emir, with the Devil himself, so long as he’s left in peace to drill his well and prove his bloody theory to the damnation of Philip Gorde and all the rest of the oil boys. God! I wonder I didn’t kill him.’ And he added, ‘The man’s mad. He must be mad.’

‘Obsessed perhaps … ‘ I murmured.

‘Mad.’ He glared at me. ‘How else do you explain his attitude, his fantastic assumption that I’d be content to sit here drilling a well after what’s happened? For Khalid’s sake I’d have agreed to anything. I’d have played the dutiful bastard sitting at the feet of the Great Bedouin. But when I asked him for men … ‘ He shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t give them to me. He wouldn’t do a damned thing to help. Said I was crazy even to think of it. Me? And all he could talk about, with Makhmud dead and men he’d known for years lying by that well with their guts half eaten out — all he could talk about was his damned theory and how he’d known all along he was right. I tell you the man’s mad.’ His voice was sharp with frustration. ‘I wish to God,’ he said bitterly, ‘I’d never come out here, never set eyes on him. And to think I worshipped the man. Yes, worshipped him. I thought he was the greatest man living.’

The bitterness in his voice … ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked him.

Take what men I can and get the hell out of here. Do what I planned to do — without his help.’ His voice had a bite to it and he slid to his feet. There’s nothing else left for me to do — nothing that means anything, nothing useful.’ He left me then and hurried down to the dark shapes sitting around the cook fires, calling to them in their own tongue, gathering them about him. And then he began to harangue them.

A little wind had sprung up and it chilled the sweat on my body. But it wasn’t the drop in temperature that made me shiver. I was caught up in a situation that was beyond my control, isolated here in the desert with two men equally obsessed — the one with oil, the other with an oasis. And then Whitaker’s voice close behind me: ‘Grant. You’ve got to talk him out of it.’

I got to my feet. He was standing there, a dark silhouette against the dunes, staring down at where his son stood amongst the smoke of the fires. ‘His plan is madness.’

But I’d been with David too long not to feel sympathy for him. ‘He’s fighting for something he believes in,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you help him?’

‘By giving him men?’ His harsh, beaked face was set and stony. ‘I’ve few enough for my purpose as it is.’ And then in a softer voice: ‘I had my loyalties, too. But now, with Makhmud dead, I’m free to do what perhaps I should have done in the first place. I’ve seen the Emir. I’ve sent Yousif to Sharjah with those letters to merchants there. I’m re-checking the earlier surveys. In a few days we’ll spud in and start to drill. And when I’ve brought in the first discovery well, then all this trouble between Hadd and Saraifa will be seen in perspective, a small matter compared with the vast changes an oilfield will bring to the desert here.’

‘And your son?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘As I told you before, when I thought he was dead, I’d hoped he’d follow me, a second Whitaker to carry on where I left off. Instead, I find myself cursed with an obstinate, stupid youth who’s no respect for my judgment and opposes me at every turn.’ He put his hand on my arm and in a surprisingly gentle voice, he said, ‘Talk to him. Grant. Try and do for me what I know I can’t do myself. His plan is suicidal.’

He was looking straight at me and I was shocked to see there were tears running down his cheeks — not only from the one good eye, but welling out from beneath the black patch that concealed the other. ‘Do what you can,’ he said softly. And then he turned quickly away and went back to his tent.

Ten minutes later David was back at my side, looking tired and drained. ‘One man,’ he said in a bleak voice. ‘One man will come with me. That’s all. Hamid’s brother, bin Suleiman. And he’s coming, not because he understands my plan, but simply because with him, as with Hamid, it’s a blood feud now.’ He gave a shrug and a quick laugh. ‘Well. the fewer the better perhaps. They’ll drink less water, and water is going to be our trouble.’ He called to Hamid and gave the order to load the camels. ‘We’ll leave as soon as I’ve got the things I need out of Entwhistle’s truck.’

I started to try and talk him out of it, but he brushed my words aside. ‘My mind’s made up. Talking won’t change it.’ And then he said, ‘What about you? Are you staying here or will you come with me?’ He stared at me, a long, speculative look. ‘If you should decide to come with me. then I can promise to get you away to the coast with Salim as your guide.’ And he added, ‘If you don’t come, then I think I may be throwing my life away for nothing. You’re my only hope of contact with the outside world, and if the world doesn’t know what I’m doing, then it’s all wasted.’

I asked him what exactly he planned to do, but he wouldn’t tell me the details. ‘You’d have to know the ground or you might agree with my father and think it crazy. But I assure you,’ he added with great conviction, ‘that with any luck at all it will work. It’s the last thing the Emir will be expecting, and the fact that we’ll be a very small party … ‘ He smiled. ‘It makes it easier really- the first part at any rate. And I promise you you’ll not be involved in the rest. Think it over, will you, sir? I need your help in this — desperately.’ He left it like that and disappeared abruptly into the night.

I lay on the hard ground, listening to the movement of the camels, the sounds of preparation for another journey. A little wind came in puffs, sifting the sand, and it was dark. A stillness had enveloped the camp. I don’t think I’m any more of a coward than the next man, but to seek out death, deliberately and in cold blood … You see, it never occurred to me he could succeed. I thought his father was right and that he was throwing away his life in a futile gesture. I remembered Gorde’s description of Whitaker-an old man tilting at windmills. David was very like his father in some ways. I closed my eyes, thinking of Tanganyika and the hard life I’d led there, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder. ‘Well?’ David asked, and when I nodded almost without thinking, he passed me a rifle. ‘I take it you know how to use it?’ He had another which he handed to bin Suleiman and a revolver with holster and belt which he strapped to his own waist.

The stark reality of what I was doing came with the feel of the well-oiled breech under my hand. It took me back to days I thought I’d forgotten — to the deadly slopes of Monte Cassino, to Anzio and the Gothic Line. I rose quietly to my feet. Salim and Ali were loading cartons of explosive cartridges on to one of the camels. Hamid and his brother, a squat, hairy man with wild eyes and a low-browed head, were packing coils of fine wire and a contact plunger with its batteries into the saddle bags of another beast.

The camels staggered to their feet, bulking suddenly large against the overcast, and we were on our way.

A lone figure standing by one of the tents watched us go. It was Colonel Whitaker. He made no move to stop us, nor did he call out. We left the camp in silence and though they knew we were going, no man stirred from the camp fires. It was as though they feared to have any contact with us; it was as though we had already passed beyond the shadows of death.

Clear of the camp we turned east, working our way silently up the face of a dune in short zig-zags. At the crest we stopped to mount, and then we were riding, the dark desert all around us and the swaying shapes of our camels the only movement in the stillness of night.

The clouds thinned and gradually cleared, leaving us exposed in bright moonlight. But if the Emir had men watching Whitaker’s camp, we never saw them. Dawn found us camped among sparse camel thorn on a flat gravel plain. Sharp-etched against the break of day stood the jagged tops of the mountains. Dates and coffee, and then sleep. ‘We start at dusk,’ David said and buried his face in his headcloth.

The withered camel thorn gave little shelter and as the sun climbed the burning vault of the sky, it became very hot. Flies worried us, clinging to the sweat of exposed flesh, and we suffered from thirst for our water bags were empty and all we had was the contents of two water bottles. We took it in turns to keep watch, but the shimmering expanse of gravel that surrounded us remained empty of life.

As the sun sank we lit a fire and had a huge meal of rice and dried meat. A bowl of warm camel’s milk passed from mouth to mouth. Our four Arabs talked excitedly amongst themselves and the meal finished, they began to oil their guns, cleaning them with loving care. In contrast David and I sat silent, doing nothing. The sun set and in an instant the sky had paled. The visibility was fantastic in the dry air, everything sharp and clear, as though magnified. ‘You’d better tell me what you plan to do,’ I said, and my voice reflected the tension that had been growing in me all through that long, inactive day.

David was staring at the distant line of the mountains and for a moment I thought he hadn’t heard my question. But then he said, ‘It isn’t easy to explain to somebody who has never been to Hadd.’

‘I’ve flown over it,’ I said.

He looked at me then, a sudden quickening of interest. ‘Did you see the fort of Jebel al-Akhbar? Did you see how the town is backed right into the rock?’ And when I explained how I’d passed close over it in Gorde’s plane, he said, ‘Then you know the situation. That fort is the key to Hadd. Who holds that fort holds the people of Hadd in the hollow of his hand. It’s as simple as that.’ He was suddenly excited, his eyes bright with the vision of what he planned to do. ‘When there was trouble here before the Trucial Oman Scouts moved into the fort and that was the end of it.’

‘We’re not the Trucial Oman Scouts.’ I thought it was time he faced up to the facts. There are six of us, that’s all. We’re armed with rifles and nothing else. And our ammunition is limited.’

‘There’s ammunition for us in the fort,’ he said. Two boxes of it and a box of grenades.’ Apparently he and Khalid had found them left there by the TOS and half-buried under a pile of rubble. They were out hunting as the Emir’s guests and had taken refuge in the fort during a sandstorm. ‘It’s a long time ago now,’ he added, ‘but I think we’ll find the boxes still there. We buried them pretty deep. As for numbers … ‘ He gave a little shrug.‘One man, well armed and determined, could hold that tower for as long as his water held out.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Water. It always comes back to water in the desert, doesn’t it?’ And he slid to his feet and gave the order to move.

As we rode he pointed out the fort to me, small as a pinhead on top of a hill that miraculously detached itself from the line of the mountains, standing clear in the last of the daylight and much nearer than I had expected. ‘Dawn tomorrow,’ he said, ‘that’s where we’ll be.’ He looked very much like his father as he stared at me, his youthful features set in the grimmer mould of an older man. ‘God willing!’ he breathed. ‘And when we’re there you’ll understand.’ He rode on then with his four Wahiba, talking with them urgently in their own tongue and leaving me to ride alone, prey to my own forebodings.

Dusk fell and merged imperceptibly into night. The stars lit our way and in no time at all it seemed, there was the Jebel al-Akhbar, a black hat of a hill bulked against the night sky. We rode slowly in a tight little bunch. The time was a little after ten. ‘We’ll water our camels at the well on the outskirts, fill our water bags … ‘ David’s voice was taut.

‘And if there’s a guard?’ I whispered.

‘We’re travellers from Buraimi on our way to the coast. Bin Suleiman will explain. He’s known here.’

‘And after we’ve filled our water bags?’

‘Ssh!’ The camels had stopped at a signal from Hamid. We sat still as death, listening. There were rock outcrops ahead and the dim shapes of buildings. A solitary light showed high up on the slope of the hill, which now towered above us, a dark mass against the stars. Somewhere a goat bleated. There was no other sound.

A whispered word from David and we moved forward again. The well-head appeared, a simple wooden structure topping a crumbling wall of mud and stone. We dismounted and the leathern bucket was dropped into the depths. The wooden roller creaked as it was drawn up. One by one the camels were watered; one by one the skin bags filled. And all the time the wood creaked and we stood with our guns ready. But nobody came. The solitary light vanished from the slope of the hill, leaving the whole town dark as though it were a deserted ruin. Salim and Ali left with the camels and David went to work with cartridges of explosive and detonators. And when he’d mined the well, we went forward on foot, running the thin line of the wire out behind us.

The second well was close under the walls and there were camels couched near it. We could hear them stirring uneasily, could even see some of them, dark shapes against the lighter stone. A man coughed and sat up, dislodging a stone. The sound of it was magnified by the silence. And then I saw his figure coming towards us. Hamid and bin Suleiman moved to intercept. They talked together in whispers whilst David went on working and I helped him, glancing every now and then over my shoulder, expecting every moment to hear the man cry out and raise the alarm.

But nothing happened. The camels quietened down, the man went back to his interrupted sleep and David was left to complete his work in peace. He worked fast and with absolute sureness, but it all took time. It was past midnight before he had finished and a paler light above the mountains warned that the moon was rising.

As we trailed our wire towards a gap in the crumbling walls, two shots sounded far out in the desert behind us. We checked, standing there motionless and sweating. But there were no more shots. ‘Somebody out hunting gazelle,’ David whispered. They do it at night by the lights of their Land-Rovers.’ And we went on through the gap which led to a narrow alley. There were no doors to the buildings on either side, only window openings high up. The alley led into the market place. More camels, some goats and figures asleep against the walls of the houses. The well was on the far side. There was a baby camel there and a small boy lay curled up beside it. The camel, its coat fluffy as a kitten’s, rose on straddling, spindly legs and gazed at us in amazed silence. The boy stirred, but didn’t wake. A dog began to bark. I caught hold of David’s arm. ‘You’ve done enough surely,’ I whispered.

‘Scared?’ He grinned in the darkness and shrugged me off. ‘We can’t climb to the fort till the moon’s up.’ And he squatted down in the dust and went to work. The boy suddenly sat up, staring at us round-eyed. I thought, My God! If he kills that child … But David said something and the boy got slowly to his feet and came hesitantly forward, gazing in fascination. David gave him the wire to hold. A man moved in the shadows by an archway. The boy’s father. As he came forward, other figures stirred. A little knot of men gathered round us. But the boy sitting there in the dust beside David, helping him, made it all seem innocent. They stood and watched for a while, talking with Hamid and bin Suleiman, and then they drifted back to their sleep.

The moon rose. The mud walls of the houses on the far side of the open place stood suddenly white, and moment by moment the dark shadow-line retreated until it touched the base of the buildings and began to creep across the ground towards us. At last David tied his mine to the well rope and lowered it down. We left then, and the boy came with us, trailing the baby camel behind him. Other figures followed us, curious but not hostile. They don’t belong to Hadd,’ David whispered. They’re Bedou in from the desert to sell camels. Otherwise we’d never have got out of there alive.’

‘What did they think we were doing?’

‘I said we were testing the wells before installing pumping equipment. They know all about pumps. They’ve seen them in Buraimi and also in Saraifa.’ By the second well we picked up the line of our wire, clipped on another coil and trailed it to the limit up the hill just outside the walls. There David fastened it to the terminals of the plunger, and then he handed it to the boy and told him what to do. ‘He’ll tell the story of this moment till the end of his days.’ He patted the boy on the shoulder, smiling almost cheerfully as he turned and left him.

We climbed quickly, came out from the shadow of the wall on to the moonlit slope of the hill and on a rock, well above the rooftops of the highest houses, we halted. The boy was squatting there beside the detonator, his face turned towards us. David raised his hand above his head and then let it fall. The boy turned away and his shoulders hunched as he thrust down on the plunger.

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.