The Doomed Oasis

3. The Empty Quarter

We took off shortly after ten, skimming low over sand flats that ran out into the shallows where fish stakes stood in broad arrows. The white coral buildings of Muharraq vanished behind us and after that the waters of the Gulf stretched away on either side, a flat sea mirror shimmering in the heat, and the colours were all pastel shades.

The plane was piloted by the Canadian I had swum with the previous day — Otto Smith. He had joined me on the apron just before take-off and realizing that I’d never seen what he called ‘this Godforsaken country’ before, he had offered to make it a low-level flight. We flew, in fact, at less than a thousand feet. A white-winged dhow swam like a child’s toy on the sheet steel surface below, and where the water shallowed to islands banked with sand it was translucent green, the sand banks sugar white.

We crossed the Qattar Peninsula; a glimpse of an oil camp, the airstrip marked out with oil drums, the camp a wheel of concentric buildings and the rig a single lonely tower. A sheikh’s palace standing on an empty beach, square like a military fort, the mud of its walls barely discernible against desert sand. The palm frond shacks of a barasti fishing village, and then the sea again, until the white of gypsum appeared on the starboard side and miniature buttes of sand standing out of the water marked the mainland coast of Arabia.

The plane was full of equipment and stores bound for an oil camp along the coast towards Ras al-Khaima, beyond Sharjah. There were only three passengers besides myself — an officer of the Trucial Oman Scouts and two oilmen who were straight out from England and could tell me nothing. I sat in silence, in a mood of strange elation, for the sight of the desert so close below the plane gave me the illusion at least that Saraifa was within my reach.

We followed the coast all the way. Shallow sand dunes replaced the glare of gypsum flats, the coast became dotted with palms and here and there a pattern of nets spread out on the shore to dry marked a fishing village. About an hour and a half out Otto Smith called me for’ard to look at Dubai. The Venice of Arabia,’ he shouted to me above the roar of the engines. A broad estuary dog-legged through the sandbanks, dwindling amongst the town’s buildings which crowded down to the waterfront, capped by innumerable towers, slender like campanili — the wind towers that Tessa had talked of, a simple system of air-conditioning brought from Persia by the pirates and smugglers of the past.

Ten minutes later we reached Sharjah; another estuary, but smaller and with a sand bar across the entrance, and the mud town crumbling to ruin. We came in low over a camel train headed south into the desert, the glint of silver on guns, the flash of white teeth in dark faces, and a woman, black like a crow, with a black mask covering her face, riding the last camel. Watch towers stood lone sentinels against the dunes, and far away to the east and south-east the mountains of the Jebel were a hazy, dust-red wall. We came to rest close by the white glare of the Fort, and behind it lay the camp of the Trucial Oman Scouts.

Sharjah Fort was like any desert fort, only now it was an airlines transit hotel. Two rusty iron cannon lay in the sand on either side of the arched entrance and all the interior was an open rectangular space with rooms built against the walls. Otto took me to the lounge and bought me a beer. The room was large, the walls enlivened with maps and coloured posters; the tiled floor gritty with blown sand. ‘How long are you going to stay here?’ he asked me. And when I said I was waiting for Gorde he looked surprised. ‘Well, you’re going to have a darn long wait,’ he said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Didn’t they tell you? He sent a radio message through yesterday to say he’d changed his plans. He’s being flown back to Bahrain tomorrow.’

So that was it… that was why Erkhard had changed his mind. A free ride in a Company plane and I’d be in Sharjah by the time Gorde got back to Bahrain. ‘Thank God you told me in time,’ I said.

‘In time? Oh, you mean you want to ride back with me.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry, fellow. I got a full load from Ras al-Khaima. And not to Bahrain either — to one of the off-shore islands.’ And he added, ‘It’s too bad. They should have told you.’

I sat, staring at my beer, momentarily at a loss. ‘Is there any way I can get to Abu Dhabi from here?’

‘Today?’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, you haven’t a visa, have you?’

That was no good then. ‘When’s the next flight back to Bahrain, do you know?’

‘Civil? Oh, there’ll be one through in a day or two. The manager will have the flight schedules.’

I asked him then who would be flying Gorde back to Bahrain, but he didn’t know. ‘Might be Bill Adams, might be me.’ He took a long pull at his beer. ‘Probably me, I guess. He likes to have me fly him. Reminds him of the old days when he was boss out here and we flew everywhere together.’ And he began telling me about an old Walrus they’d flown in the early days just before the war. ‘One of those push-prop amphibians. Boy! We had fun with that old kite. And Gorde didn’t give a damn; he’d let me slam it down any old place.’

‘Could you give him a message?’ I asked, for I was quite certain now that the note I’d left with Erkhard’s secretary would never be delivered.

‘Sure, what is it?’

I hesitated. ‘Perhaps I’d better write it.’

‘Okay. You write it. Then whoever picks him up tomorrow can give it to him.’ His freckled face crinkled in a grin. ‘You might’ve been waiting here for weeks. Not that there aren’t worse places than Sharjah to be marooned in. This time of year the bathing is wizard. Know what I think? I think that in a few years’ time this coast will be one of the world’s great winter playgrounds.’ I finished my note whilst he was extolling the tourist attractions of the Persian Gulf, and then he began talking about the strange places he had landed in. ‘Have you ever been to Saraifa Oasis?’ I asked him.

‘Saraifa? Sure I have. We had a concession there once.’

I asked him how far it was to Saraifa and he said something over two hundred miles. A long way across the desert, but less than two hours’ flying by plane. ‘Has it got an airfield?’

‘Sure. You don’t think I walked, do you? But that was four years ago,’ he added. ‘I’m told the sand has moved in since then. Funny thing.’ He glanced at me quickly. ‘You’re out here on account of young Whitaker; his lawyer — that right?’

I nodded.

‘Well, that last time I flew Gorde in to Saraifa, it was the day David Whitaker arrived there. It was about the last thing Gorde did before he handed over to Erkhard and went home on sick leave. We flew in to Saraifa to break it to the Sheikh Makhmud that the Company wasn’t going to renew the concession. They were arguing about it all evening with that one-eyed devil, Haj Whitaker, sitting there like an Arab and swearing by the Koran that he’d get even with Erkhard. Has anybody mentioned the Whitaker Theory to you?’

I nodded.

‘Oh well, you’ll know what it meant to the old Bedouin then. Saraifa was his baby. He’d negotiated the concession and if it hadn’t been for Erkhard they might have been drilling there now. But Erkhard was the new broom and if Whitaker could have got at him that night I swear he’d have killed him with his bare hands. It was as elemental as that.

Now, of course,’ he added, ‘it’s a different story. Erkhard’s under pressure and Haj Whitaker-’ His navigator called him from the doorway. ‘Okay, Eddie. Be right with you.’ He swallowed the rest of his beer and got to his feet.

‘You were saying you were there in Saraifa when David Whitaker arrived?’ I said.

‘Oh, yes. Well … I was just there, that’s all. He was dressed in Bedouin clothes; he was very young and he looked scared stiff. Couldn’t blame the poor kid. He’d never been in Arabia before, never met his father before, and that black-hearted bastard just stared at him as though he wished the floor would open up and swallow him. He even introduced the boy to us as David Thomas. It seemed like he didn’t want to acknowledge him as his own son, which wasn’t very clever of him, for the boy had the same cast of features — the nose, the jaw, the heavy eyebrows. Well, I must go now.’ He held out his hand for the envelope. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see Gorde gets it. And I’ll come and rescue you sometime during the week if you haven’t flown out by Gulf Airways.’ A wave of the hand and he was gone, out through the screen door. I was alone then with the posters and the lazy circling flies and the old magazines.

It was siesta time and after the departure of the plane the Fort went back to sleep. I was allotted a room and after I’d had a shower, I went up on to the terrace that ran like a broad firing step round the inside of the walls and sat there in a pair of shorts and sun-glasses staring at the shimmering line of the mountains. Down there to the south, where the high volcanic peaks disappeared below the sand horizon, lay Saraifa. Two hundred odd miles, Otto had said. I remembered Griffiths’s description of conditions in summer — hot enough to burn the tyres off a truck and the soles off your boots. The heat came up at me with a furnace fierceness and the flat expanse of the airfield lay in mirage-pools of water.

But if I’d been manoeuvred clear of Gorde, and Whitaker was inaccessible, there was at least one person available to me here. And as the sun sank and the breeze came up, damp off the sea, I dressed and made enquiries about getting to Dubai. A lieutenant of the Trucial Oman Scouts, who was in the lounge having a drink, offered to take me in after the evening meal.

It was just over twelve miles to Dubai, out past the sheikh’s palace with its string of fairy lights and the hum of its generator, and along a winding road beaten out of the sabkhat. The road was as black and hard as macadam and all to the right of us were salt flats running out into the sea — a thin, baked crust, treacherously overlaying a slough of mud that was as lifeless as the surface of the moon. To the left the desert sand was humped like the waves of a petrified sea, and far in the distance the mountains of the Jebel, purple and remote, stood sharp-etched on the earth’s rim.

As we drove through this empty world I asked the lieutenant whether his outfit was expecting trouble in the interior. He laughed. ‘We’re always ready for trouble. That’s what we’re for.’ And when I mentioned the rumours circulating in the bazaars of Bahrain, he said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about them. Bahrain’s always buzzing with rumours.’ He had a soldier’s contempt for civilians and I think he thought I was scared.

The hospital was a mile or two outside Dubai, a solitary building sprawled over a sand hill. The last glow of the sun had gone, the sky fading to darkness, and the building stood black against the sand. Night was falling fast. ‘Give Doc Logan my salaams and tell him I’ll come over tomorrow and help him drink his Scotch,’ my lieutenant said and roared off in his Land-Rover towards the distant wind-towers of Dubai.

The hospital was a ramshackle building, part mud, part wood; a strange place to meet a girl I hadn’t seen for four years. She came to the little waiting-room dressed in apron and cap, and at the sight of me she stopped and stared in surprise, for nobody had bothered to enquire my name.

‘Mr Grant! I–I can’t believe it.’ She came forward and shook my hand.

‘Well, you’re not the only one,’ I said. ‘I can hardly believe it myself.’

Her hand was smooth and dry and firm. Her face looked thinner and the fat of youth had been worked out of her body; her blonde hair was bleached almost white by the sun, her skin tanned. She looked fit and the shine of youth was still in her eyes. It was a strange meeting, and for me — and I think also for her — it brought a feeling of relief, for there was that bond between us and from that moment neither of us could feel entirely alone any more. It was also to have the effect of making me determined, somehow, to get to Saraifa.

‘We can’t talk here,’ she said. ‘I’ll be b-back in a minute.’ Still that slight attractive hesitation in her speech.

When she returned she had removed her cap and apron and wore a light coat. We left the hospital and strolled north whilst the sand turned from brown to silver and the stars came out. I held her arm because I felt her need and mine for the touch of companionship, and the wind was warm on my face.

She had received my letter, but she hadn’t been to Bahrain, hadn’t even written to Erkhard. ‘What was the use?’ She seemed at first to have accepted the fact of her brother’s death and she was quite willing to talk about him. And as she talked, the picture that emerged was of a man I had only just begun to guess at.

She had come to Dubai two years ago, not so much to be near him — she had had the sense to realize that she would very rarely see him — but because of his fascination for Arabia, which he had somehow managed to convey to her. ‘I was here almost three months before I saw him, and then he came, without warning. He was straight out of the desert, from a survey down by the Liwa Oasis, and I didn’t recognize him at first. He was dressed as an Arab, you see. But it wasn’t that,’ she added. ‘And he hadn’t changed, not really.’

She paused there, as though collecting the details of that meeting from the recesses of her memory. ‘I can’t explain it,’ she said finally. ‘He was just different, that’s all. He had become a man and there was a remoteness about him. Do you read the Bible, Mr Grant? Those descriptions of the prophets. There was something of that about him. He always had enthusiasm, a sort of inner fire, but now it seemed to have depth and purpose.’

She had only seen him four times in the two years she had been out there, but each time her reaction had been the same. ‘It was as though he had become dedicated.’

‘Dedicated to what?’ I asked. But she couldn’t tell me, not in so many words. ‘To a way of life,’ she said, and went on to talk about the influence his father had had on him. The relationship hadn’t been at all easy at first. They started off on the wrong foot, you see. When David arrived at Saraifa Sir Philip Gorde was there with his pilot. The driver should have taken David to his father’s house; instead he was brought straight to Sheikh Makhmud’s palace. It meant, of course, that his arrival was immediately known to two Europeans. It complicated the whole thing, particularly as David was virtually smuggled into Arabia. His father thought it due to wilful disobedience and he was furious.’ She smiled at me. ‘I think they hated each other at first. They were too much alike, you see.’

I asked her whether she’d met Colonel Whitaker, and she nodded.‘Once, just over a year ago.’ He’d come to the hospital to see her. ‘It was just curiosity,’ she said. ‘There’s no feeling between us — not like there is between him and David. David’s got much more of his father in him than I have. And anyway,’ she added, ‘after being so long in Arabia he has the native attitude to girls; necessary for the procreation of the race, but useless otherwise. Being a nurse, I know. They’ll go to any lengths to get a sick boy to the hospital, but a girl child — she can die or not, just as she pleases.’

I asked her then what impression she had got of her father and she gave a slight shrug. ‘There’s no love lost between us, if that’s what you mean?’

‘Yes, but what’s he like?’ And I explained that I was looking after his financial affairs and had come out partly in the hope of meeting him.

She didn’t answer for a moment, as though she had to think about it. ‘It’s odd,’ she said at length. ‘He’s my own father. I know that. I think we could both feel that in our bones. But it meant nothing.’ She hesitated. Finally she said, ‘My only impression is one of hardness, almost of cruelty. It’s the desert, I think; the desert and the Moslem faith and the Arabs he’s lived with so long. He’s a little terrifying — tall, one-eyed, imperious. He’s like an Arab, but the sheikhs I’ve met are much softer, gentler men, more guileful. He has a strange quality of command, the sort of quality I imagine some of our kings once had when they believed implicitly in the Divine Right. You could never be easy in his company. His whole personality, it radiates-’ She paused, at a loss for words. ‘I can’t explain it, but he frightens me.’

‘What about David?’ I asked. ‘Did he feel the same way?’

‘At first. Later he came under his spell so that he looked upon him as something akin to God.’ He had been, she said, under the spell of his father when he had first come to see her. He had had six months at Saraifa, living the life of an Arab, and a year at an oil school learning to become a geophysicist. He had come to her straight from his first experience of field work and was then going on leave to Saraifa. ‘He talked a lot about Saraifa — about the way the desert was moving in on the oasis, slowly obliterating the date gardens. He could be very emotional about it.’ She smiled gently. ‘He was like a woman at times, the way he wanted to defend Saraifa.’

‘Defend it?’ I thought for a moment she was referring to the rumours of trouble.

‘From the Rub al Khali,’ she said. ‘From the sand. He dreamed of taking a seismological outfit there and proving his father’s theory. Oil, he said, was the only hope. If he could prove there was oil there, then the concession would he renewed and there would be money to rebuild the falajes.’ That word again. I asked her what it meant, but all she said was, ‘It’s some system for bringing water to Saraifa and it has largely been destroyed.’ She sighed and sat down on the sand, her hands clasped about her knees. I gave her a cigarette and she sat there smoking, remembering I suppose the last time they had been together.

‘Did he ever take a seismological truck into Saraifa?’ I asked her.

She looked at me quickly, her eyes big and round in the starlight. I think she had forgotten for the moment that I was there. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. And after a long silence she added softly, ‘I know so little about him really. I don’t know what he was doing, or why he was so depressed; and the truck abandoned like that. I know so little.’ And then she looked at me again and said with great emphasis: ‘But I know he was a man — a real man; and also that he would endeavour to the limit for something he believed in.’

‘Saraifa?’

She nodded. ‘Perhaps — for Saraifa.’

‘Because of his father?’

She didn’t answer for a while. At length, she said, ‘No. Not because of his father.’

‘What then?’

‘The people, his friend Khalid — the sand killing the place. I don’t know. The sand probably. That was something physical. He was always fascinated by physical things. He liked action.’

‘But he was a dreamer, too?’

She nodded. ‘Yes, he was a dreamer, too. He was always a rebel in the world he knew. When we were kids … he’d escape into a world of his own. A m-mental world, you see.

It was always much larger than life. He’d invent games — just for the two of us. And then, later — well, the gang life attracted him for the same reason. It was a form of escape.’

‘And you think his father’s world — Saraifa — was an escape?’

She shrugged. ‘Escape or reality — what does it matter? It was real to him. I remember the second time he came to see me. He took me to dinner at the Fort at Sharjah and he was full of plans, bubbling over with them. He was going to take over from a man called Entwhistle who was sick. And after that he was going on a month’s leave — to Saraifa. A busman’s holiday; he was going to run a survey for his father. He was so full of it,’ she said a little sadly. ‘And so bloody optimistic,’ she added, almost savagely.

‘Where exactly in Saraifa was he going to try for oil?’

‘I don’t know. What does it matter?’

‘Was this in July of last year?’

She nodded, a glance of surprise. ‘He had his own ideas; something he’d unearthed in some old geological report. I couldn’t follow it all. When he’s excited he talks nineteen-to-the-dozen and I’m never certain what is fact and what he’s made up. He seemed to think he could do in a month what GODCO had failed to do the whole time they’d had the concession. He was always like that. He could build a whole kingdom in five minutes — in his mind.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Once, you know, he ran a tramp shipping line out of Cardiff. It got so big that every ship that came into the docks belonged to him. That was the first time he got into trouble. He beat up a night watchman for telling him to get off the bridge of an old laid-up Victory ship.’ She sighed. ‘That was the sort of boy he was.’

‘And after he’d been to Saraifa?’ I asked. ‘Did he come and see you?’

‘No, he flew straight back to Bahrain. I didn’t see him until December.’

She didn’t seem to want to talk about it, for I had to drag it out of her. Yes, he had been going to Saraifa again. She I

admitted it reluctantly. He’d been loaned to his father.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

‘I can’t be sure about anything, but that’s what I understood.’

So The Times Correspondent had been right. And I remembered how Erkhard had skated round the question.

‘It was all so strange,’ she muttered. ‘I thought it was what he’d been wanting all along. Instead he seemed — I don’t know how to put it — almost appalled at the prospect. He was in a most extraordinary state of nervous tension-’

‘Had he seen Erkhard?’ I asked. ‘Was it Erkhard who had loaned him to his father?’

‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t talk about it. He just came to tell me where he was going and what he was doing. He didn’t stay long. In fact,’ she added, ‘it was a rather awkward meeting and I had the feeling he’d only come because he’d felt it was his duty.’

But I was barely listening to her, my mind on Erkhard and this extraordinary arrangement. If it was true, then it could only mean one thing — that Erkhard and Whitaker had some sort of an arrangement … an improbable combination if Otto was to be believed. ‘And this was in December?’

She nodded.

‘You said you’d seen him four times,’ I said. ‘When was the fourth?’

The fourth?’ She stared at me and her face looked very pale. ‘It was in February.’ She couldn’t remember the date, but it was early in February. I knew then that he’d come to her after he had boarded the Emerald Isle, probably that same night, because she said she was called out well after midnight by an Arab boy and had found him sitting alone on the sand. ‘Somewhere near here,’ she said, looking about her.

‘Did he talk about his father?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Though-’ She hesitated. ‘I think they’d had a row. I can’t be sure. It wasn’t anything he said.’ And she added, ‘He wasn’t very communicative, you see.’

I asked her how he’d behaved. ‘Was he scared at all? Did he behave as though he was in fear of his life?’

She looked at me quickly, her eyes searching my face. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No, I don’t think he was scared. More-’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t explain. He just behaved strangely, that’s all-very strangely.’ In fact, most of the time he’d been with her he’d sat in absolute silence. ‘David could do that. As a kid I got used to those silences. But … I don’t know. This seemed deeper, somehow, as though-’ But she couldn’t put it into words. ‘He didn’t talk much,’ she reiterated. ‘There was a moon and I remember his eyes riveted on my face. It was as though he couldn’t look at me enough. I felt… it was as though he wanted to capture an impression, take a sort of mental picture with him. It was a very strange, uncomfortable feeling — and he looked so like his father in the Arab clothes he was wearing.’

‘Did he tell you what he was doing?’

‘No. He wouldn’t tell me anything, but I had the feeling that it was dangerous. He was terribly thin, nothing but skin and bone, and his eyes, staring at me, looked enormous and very pale in the moonlight. When he left he kissed me, not with warmth, but as though he were kissing a priestess who held the key to the future in her hands. And just before he left me, he said a strange thing. He said, “Whatever you hear of me, Sue, don’t believe it.” And he added that if anything happened to him, I was to write to you. And then he left me, walking quickly across the sand without looking back.’

We were sitting on a little rise and the sand fell away from us, sloping gently to a barasti settlement, the dark shapes of the palm-frond huts barely visible, for the moon was new and only just risen. Nothing stirred and the only sound was the bleat of a goat. ‘I can’t believe he’s dead,’ she said. ‘I won’t believe it.’

And because it was what she wanted to believe I told her about the girl in Bahrain and about her mother’s reaction. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mum did everything she could to discourage his interest in Arabia. But too late. When we were small she shared her thoughts with us, and her thoughts were of the man she called our “Uncle Charles”. That album of press-cuttings — they were almost the first pictures I ever remember looking at. And now here we are, the two of us, in Arabia.’

‘And your father?’ I asked. ‘Did he talk to you about Saraifa?’

‘To me?’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘I’m only a girl. He wouldn’t talk to me about what he was doing.’

‘You say David was loaned to him by GODCO,’ I prompted.

She nodded and when I pressed her for the reason, she said almost sharply, ‘Oh, his father is doing what he’s always done out here — dabbling in oil.’ And then almost gently: ‘It’s rather sad really. One by one the concessions he negotiated for GODCO have been abandoned. He was once a great figure out here — a sort of Lawrence.’ She had pity for him, even if she had no love.

‘And now?’ I asked.

‘Now?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. David wouldn’t talk about him, not that last time. But there are all these rumours. He had this theory, you know. Some say it’s crazy, but I’ve met others who believed he was right.’

I asked her whether she’d met Entwhistle. I thought perhaps he might have been to see her. But she shook her head.

‘What about these rumours?’ I said.

‘They’re just rumours.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know whether they’re true or not. Nobody I’ve met has ever been to Saraifa. With the border in dispute nobody is allowed to go there. It’s just… well, the desert is like the sea used to be, you know — exaggerated stories are passed on by word of mouth.’

I pressed her then to tell me what the stories were and she said, ‘He’s supposed to be drilling on his own account — with an old broken-down rig operated entirely by Bedouin. The oil boys I’ve talked to all say that’s nonsense, that uneducated desert Arabs couldn’t possibly operate an oil rig. But I don’t know. Though I’m scared of him and have no feeling for him, I know he’s a remarkable man, and you’ve only got to talk to the officers here to realize that the Bedouin are very quick to pick up a working knowledge of machinery.’

She threw the stub of her cigarette away and got to her feet. ‘I wish to God I knew what had happened.’ Her voice trembled; she was very near to tears. There was a lot more I suppose she could have told me about him, but I didn’t press her. I thought there was plenty of time and that I’d see her again. For her sake I steered the talk to other things. We passed a watch tower, standing like a lonely border keep, and she told me they were still manned, the guard climbing in through the hole halfway up the tower’s side every night and pulling the ladder up after him.

‘It looks so peaceful here,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘It is — on the surface. But who knows what is going on underneath? Certainly not our people. Some of these young English boys who are sent out here to advise-’ She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I wonder. What must the sheikhs think? This desert way of life, it goes right back to Hagar and Ishmael, racially and culturally hardly changed. They know human nature the way these youngsters out from England will never know it. They’re full of guile and intrigue; the Pax Britannica, even the oil, is just an incident in time. It’s only a few years back, you know, that the Sheikh of Dubai fell upon an Abu Dhabi raiding force, killing over fifty of them. It wasn’t very far from here.’

Back at the hospital she asked me whether I had arranged transport to get me back to Sharjah. ‘I can walk,’ I said. But she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You’d lose your way in the dark. You’d either wander into the desert or else into the sabkhat. Step through the crust of that and nobody would ever see you again.’ She insisted that I stayed at the hospital.

They had a small guest room and I spent the night there, and in the morning she arranged a lift for me in a TOS truck going back to Sharjah. She looked cool and very matter-of-fact as she said goodbye to me. ‘Come and see me again before you leave. And if you have any news-’ She left it at that, and I sat and watched her from the back of the truck as we drove away, a solitary figure in white standing motionless outside the hospital. She hadn’t moved when I lost sight of her behind a shoulder of sand.

It was that lack of movement; I became suddenly instinctively aware of a loneliness that matched my own, and my heart went out to her. And as the truck roared along the packed mud surface of the Sharjah track it wasn’t of the girl who had walked with me in the moonlight on my first night on the edge of the Arabian desert that I was thinking, but of that other girl — the girl who had come to my shabby office in Cardiff to plead for help for her brother. She was a woman now and though she might not like her father, I felt he had given her something of himself that made her, like him, an unusual person. She had courage, loyalty and a strange aura of calm, an acceptance of life as it was. They were qualities both restful and disturbing, and remembering every detail of that walk in the sands, the watch tower and her perceptive comments on the desert world, I knew I didn’t want to lose her, knew that somehow I must discover what had happened to David and set her mind at rest. I was half in love with her. I knew that before ever the truck reached Sharjah, and all that morning I walked, filled with a restlessness that was the restlessness of frustration. But you could walk for a day and still have no sense of progress in the merciless emptiness of the sea of sand that stretched away to the south.

I had my lunch in the company of a German commercial traveller and two American tourists staying the night on their way to India. The German could talk of nothing but the fact that his product had been copied in Karachi and was on sale in almost the identical wrapping in the bazaars of Dubai. The Americans were from Detroit, plaintive and unable to see any attraction in the untamed beauty of the desert, faintly disturbed by the condition of the Arabs, nostalgic for a hotel that would give them the built-in sense of security of a Statler.

The sound of aircraft coming in low interrupted the desultory conversation. Ten minutes later the screen door was flung open and Otto came in with his navigator. ‘Hi!’ He waved his hand and came over to me. ‘Fairy godfather, that’s me. Anything you want, Otto produces it. The Old Man’s in the manager’s office right now.’

‘Gorde?’

He nodded. ‘But watch out. He’s hopping mad about something.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and went across to my room and got my briefcase.

The manager’s office was by the arched entrance and seated opposite him in one of the big leather armchairs was a much older man with a yellowish face that was shrivelled like a nut. He had a tall glass in his hand and on the floor at his side lay a rubber-ferruled stick. Small bloodshot eyes stared at me over deep pouches as I introduced myself. He didn’t say anything but just sat there summing me up.

I was conscious at once that this was a very different man to Erkhard. He looked as though he belonged in the desert, a man who had had all the red blood baked out of him by the heat. He wore an old pair of desert boots, khaki trousers and a freshly-laundered cream shirt with a silk square knotted round his throat like a sweat rag. A battered brown trilby, the band stained black by the perspiration of years, was tipped to the back of his grizzled head.

‘You got my message,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Yes. I got your message. But that wasn’t what brought me.’ His voice was dry, rasping, the words staccato as though life were too short for conversation.

‘Should be in Bahrain now.’ He gave the manager a brusque nod of dismissal and when we were alone he said, There’s a newspaper on the desk there. That’s why I’m here. Read it. I’ve marked the passage.’

It was the airmail edition of a leading London daily. The marked passage was on the foreign news page. It was headed: NEW OIL DISCOVERY IN ARABIA? — Desert Death of Ex-Borstal Boy Starts Rumours. It was written ‘by a Special Correspondent’ and besides giving a full and graphic account of David Whitaker’s disappearance and the search that had followed, it included his background; everything was there, everything that I knew about the boy myself — his escape from the police in Cardiff, the fact that he was Colonel Whitaker’s son, even the details of how he’d been smuggled into Arabia on a native dhow. The story ran to almost a column with a double-column head, and about the only thing it didn’t give was the location he’d been surveying immediately prior to his death.

‘Well?’ Gorde rasped. ‘Are you responsible for that?’

‘No.’

‘Then who is?’

That was what I was wondering. Whoever had written it had access to all the information that I had. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You’re David Whitaker’s solicitor. His Executor, in fact, Otto tells me.’

‘Yes.’

‘And just over two days ago you were in London.’

‘Nevertheless, I’m not responsible for it.’

‘A young kid just out of oil school and operating in an area he’d no business in … a criminal to boot.’ He glared at me, his fingers drumming at the leather arm of the chair. The Political Resident had that paper specially flown down to me at Abu Dhabi. The Foreign Office has teleprinted him that half the London press have taken the story up. He’s furious.’

The facts are correct,’ I said.

‘The facts!’ But he was thinking of the boy’s background. ‘You know where his truck was found abandoned? Inside the borders of Saudi Arabia,’ he almost snarled. ‘A story like that — it could spark off another Buraimi; only worse, much worse.’ He paused then, staring at me curiously. ‘Your note said you wanted to see me. You said it was urgent, something about this boy — a communication.’

I didn’t answer at once, for I’d read through to the end of the newspaper story, to the editorial footnote that had been added at the bottom: The London Office of the Gulfoman Oilfields Development Company issued a statement yesterday denying that there was any truth in rumours that the Company had made an important new oil strike. Asked whether David Whitaker had made a confidential report prior to his death, an official of the Company stated categorically that nothing was known in London about any such report. Despite the Company’s denials, GODCO shares went ahead yesterday in active dealings on the London Stock Exchange. ‘Well?’

‘Suppose there’s something in it?’

‘Suppose pigs had wings,’ he snarled. ‘Well, come on, man. What was it you wanted to see me about?’

For answer I opened.my briefcase and handed over the envelope David had addressed to him. ‘Have you seen Colonel Whitaker since you’ve been out here?’ I asked.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He was staring down at the envelope, arid when I started to explain, he cut me short. ‘Oh I’ve heard the talk if that’s what you mean. But it’s nothing to do with the Company. If Charles Whitaker likes to waste his money trying to prove a theory-’ He grunted. ‘It’s just damned awkward, that’s all. The boy’s death makes a colourful story and coming on top of his father’s activities-’ He gave a little shrug and slit open the flap of the envelope with his finger. ‘Erkhard was trying to keep it quiet — and rightly. Saraifa is a trouble-spot. Always has been. And the political chaps are touchy about it.’

That doesn’t explain why he should try to prevent me seeing you.’

He had taken out a letter and two wads of foolscap. ‘What’s that? What are you talking about?’ He reached into his pocket for his glasses.

I told him then how I’d been given facilities for Sharjah as soon as it was known that he had changed his plans and was flying back to Bahrain.

‘What are you suggesting?’ he demanded.

That Erkhard didn’t intend us to meet.’

‘Nonsense. What difference could it make to him?’ He put on his glasses and after that he didn’t talk as he read steadily through the contents. Finally he said, ‘Do you know what this is, Mr Grant?’ He tapped one of the foolscap sheets. ‘Do you know what he’s trying to get me to do?’

‘Sign some sort of undertaking, but I don’t know exactly-’

‘Undertaking!’ he rasped. ‘If I sign this-’ He waved the sheet of paper at me. It would commit the Company to drilling four test wells at locations to be supplied by you.’ He took his glasses off and stared at me. ‘Is that right? You hold the locations?’

‘Yes,’ I said. They’re in a separate envelope. If you sign that document, then I’m instructed to hand it across to you.’

‘But not otherwise?’

‘No.’

‘And you’ve got it with you?’

I nodded. ‘It’s here in my briefcase.’

‘And if I don’t sign … What do you do then?’

‘In that case I imagine my actions wouldn’t concern you.’.

‘No?’ He laughed. And then he was looking down at the document again. ‘I see here that you will be acting as agent for Sheikh Makhmud and his son Khalid in this matter. Have you ever met Sheikh Makhmud?’

I shook my head.

‘And you know nothing about the Middle East.’ He was staring at me and his eyes had the suggestion of a twinkle. ‘It has its humorous side, you know. The boy must have thought you a most remarkable lawyer.’ He went back to the document again. ‘Further, it commits the Company to the payment of an advance of a hundred thousand pounds in respect of oil royalties of fifty per cent, provided always that Sheikh Makhmud and his son agree to grant to the Company the sole concession from date of signature to the year two thousand. Well,’ he said, ‘there’s your undertaking. The boy must have had a touch of the sun when he typed that.’ And he tossed it across to me. ‘Read it yourself and tell me what you think of it — as a lawyer.’

I glanced through it quickly, wondering what he expected me to see in it. ‘It looks perfectly legal,’ I said.

‘Exactly. That’s what makes it so damned odd. He’d taken the trouble to look up all the legal jargon for that sort of a document.’ He leaned suddenly forward. ‘He couldn’t have got that in the desert, could he? It means he looked it up before ever he went out there, before he’d even run his survey.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘That his report’s a phoney. I’m not a fool, Grant. That boy’s been got at, and I can guess who’s got at him. Here. Take a look at the survey report.’ He thrust it at me. ‘He used his own typewriter for that. The other’s different, probably an office machine. He typed that document and then went out into the desert-’

‘David lost his life as a result of that survey,’ I reminded him.

‘Did he? How do you know what caused his death?’ He glared at me. ‘You don’t, and nor do I. Nobody knows- or even what’s happened to him. Has anyone mentioned the Whitaker Theory to you?’

‘I know about it,’ I said. ‘Is that why you think he’s been got at?’

He nodded. ‘Way back in the thirties Charles Whitaker began claiming that we’d find the oilfields continuing down from the Gulf here between the sand seas of the Empty Quarter and the Coastal mountain ranges to the east. It seemed a possibility, and remembering how Holmes’s theory had finally been proved right in Bahrain, I took a chance on it and moved some of my development teams in from the coast. It was an expensive business and Buraimi was about the limit from the practical point of view. I was operating partly in the Sharjah sheikhdom and partly in Muscat territory, and after I’d burned my fingers, even the big companies like Shell and ARAMCO wouldn’t look at his theory.’

That was a long time ago now,’ I said.

‘Yes, before the war.’

‘What about Saraifa? Did you do any development work there?’

‘No, it was too far from the coast. I sent a geological party in 1939, but the initial reports weren’t very encouraging and then the war came and the chap in charge of the survey was killed. We didn’t try again, though Charles was always pressing us to do so. He had a political appointment for a short time after the end of the war, but when he rejoined the Company in 1949 he was still just as convinced that he’d be proved right in the end.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor fellow! It had become an obsession — Saraifa in particular; he wanted us to try again there. The wartime development of desert transport made it a practical proposition, but the political situation between Saraifa and Hadd was worsening, and anyway I’d lost faith in his theory by then.’ He stared at the foolscap sheets in my hand. ‘If that survey report had been turned in by one of our most experienced geophysicists I wouldn’t touch it.’

‘Because of the political factor?’

‘No. Not just because of the political factor.’

‘What then?’

He hesitated. ‘Because it doesn’t fit in with the reasons I’m out in the Gulf area.’ He stared at me then, his eyes narrowed above the tired pouches of flesh. ‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘the Company’s been spending too much money out here and getting too little in return. Nobody is supposed to know this yet — not even Erkhard, though I think he’s guessed. My instructions are to carry out a thorough investigation of all our development projects in the Gulf with a view to cutting down our commitments. It amounts to a reassessment of the value of each project and those that show no real promise of yielding results are to be abandoned. So you see-’ He gave a little shrug, his hands spread out. ‘This is hardly the moment for me or anybody else to involve the Company in new commitments.’

‘I see.’ There was really nothing more to be said and I folded the papers and put them in my briefcase.

‘It’s a funny thing.’ He was leaning back in his chair, his eyes half-closed, chuckling to himself. The Company did this once before. They sent Alex Erkhard out and because I was sick and hadn’t the energy to fight him, he got my job. And now, four years later, I’m back with the same powers he had and the knowledge that he’s made more mistakes than I did and lost the Company a lot of friends.’ Again that dry, rasping chuckle, and then his eyelids flicked back. ‘What I’ve told you is in the strictest confidence, you understand. You’ve been put to a lot of trouble to contact me. I thought it only fair to explain the situation to you. If it’s any satisfaction to you, I’d add that a report like that isn’t conclusive. Seismology never is; it’s simply an indication. The only way to be sure you’re sitting on an oilfield is to drill down and find out.’

‘And suppose Whitaker’s doing just that?’

‘Hmm. To know the answer to that we’d have to know the locations the boy was surveying and where his father’s drilling.’ He stared at me. ‘Well, there it is. You’ve got your instructions-’

I nodded. There was no point in continuing the discussion. ‘You’re going back to Bahrain, I take it, Sir Philip?’

‘Bahrain? Oh, you’d like a lift in my plane, is that it?’

I nodded. ‘Please.’

He seemed to hesitate. But then he said, ‘All right.’ He picked up his drink. ‘You know my pilot — Otto Smith? Perhaps you’d be good enough to get him for me.’ He tapped his leg. ‘Can’t move about like I used to.’

‘I’ll get him,’ I said. And I went out and left him there, leaning back in the chair with his eyes half-closed as though exhausted.

I had some difficulty in finding Otto, but eventually I ran him to earth in the showers, sitting naked, smoking a cigarette and gossiping with the navigator. I waited whilst he dressed and then went back with him to the manager’s office.

Gorde was in the same position, but now he had my briefcase open on his lap and he was peering down at a sheet of paper he held in his hand.

I can’t remember what I said to him — I was too angry. I think I called him some pretty unpleasant names, but all he said was, ‘What did you expect me to do?’ His tone was mild. Almost he seemed amused. ‘If I’d asked you to let me see the locations you’d have refused. Quite rightly.’ And he added, ‘I just wanted to check them against the position where his truck was found.’

‘But you’ve no right-’

‘Of course, I’d no right,’ he said. ‘But yelling at me and getting yourself into a muck sweat won’t alter the fact that I now have them. Do you know where they are?’ he asked, peering up at me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had an opportunity-’

‘On the Saraifa-Hadd border. Right bang on the bloody border.’ He glared at me. ‘I suppose you’ll tell me you didn’t know that the border was in dispute?’ The way he said it implied that I’d tried to put something over on him. Angrily I told him that I didn’t have the advantage of his lack of scruples. ‘I kept strictly to my instructions and refrained from opening the envelope until I’d seen you.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk about it in a moment.’ He levered himself round in his chair. ‘Is the plane refuelled yet, Otto?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I’ll check if you like. Are you wanting to leave right away?’

‘Yes, right away. But first I want you to check that your tanks are full. A personal check please. You’ve got to have enough fuel on board to fly to the Saraifa border and back.’

‘I’m afraid we have to have authority to fly to Saraifa, Sir Philip.’

‘Since when?’

Otto hesitated. ‘I don’t know exactly. Since the trouble there, I guess. It was just after you left; a border clash between Saraifa and Hadd. They had to send the Trucial Oman Scouts in and since then nobody has been allowed to go to Saraifa.’

Gorde gave a little sigh. ‘Let’s not argue about it, Otto. I intend to have a quick look at these locations. Now then, how do we go about it without some little clerk reporting my movements to the PRPG, eh?’

Otto thought for a moment. ‘I think the best thing would be to say we’re doing a recce of certain areas, taking a look at a seismological outfit we’ve got operating at the foot of the Jebel, possibly landing at Ras al-Khaima if we’ve time, otherwise returning here. If we make it vague like that, I guess it’ll be all right. That is so long as you don’t want to land at Saraifa.’

‘I don’t know what I want to do,’ Gorde grumbled. ‘Haven’t had time to think about it yet.’ He poked around in my briefcase until he found a sheet of plain paper. ‘Communications here still functions for civilian messages, doesn’t it?’ And when the other nodded, he pulled a gold pencil from his pocket and began to write. I watched him as he signed his name and read it through. I was more curious than angry now; he’d taken matters out of my hands and for the moment my only concern was to get on this flight.

‘Have Communications send that off right away.’ He held out the message. ‘Then check your fuel. Oh, and Otto,’ he added as the pilot was leaving. ‘We’ll be flying on to Bahrain tonight.’ The door closed and he turned to me. ‘I suppose you think I owe you an apology, hm?’ He handed me back my briefcase. ‘Well, maybe I do. But I spent a lot of my time in Saraifa, and anyway I’m an oilman. We’ve no built-in moral code like you boys when it comes to things like locations.’ He folded the foolscap sheet and put it back in its envelope and sat there tapping it against his thumbnail, lost in thought. ‘It’s just possible, I suppose-’ He said it softly, speaking to himself.

That Colonel Whitaker’s drilling one of these locations?’

But he shook his head. ‘In that area? He wouldn’t be such a fool.’ Silence again, and the rhythmic tapping of that envelope. ‘However-’ The small, bloodshot eyes peered at me curiously, and then he began to chuckle. ‘A provincial lawyer — and it’s just possible you might have got hold of the thing the Company has been searching the Gulf for during almost thirty years.’ The rasp of that chuckle seemed to threaten to choke him. ‘You and Charles Whitaker. God Almighty!’ he gasped. ‘And that boy … he’d never have dared operate on that border on his own.’

‘You think they were together then?’

‘How the hell do I know?’ He handed me the envelope. ‘I don’t know where Charles is drilling any more than you do. I’m not even certain he is drilling. It’s just rumours.’ He reached for his stick and dragged himself to his feet. ‘But I mean to find out,’ he said. ‘If Charles is drilling on these locations-’ He let it go at that and since he seemed to take it for granted that I was going with him, I stuffed the envelope into my pocket, picked up my briefcase and followed him to the door. As he pulled it open he said to me over his shoulder, ‘Prove Whitaker’s theory correct, and on that border, and you’ll be in politics so deep, my friend, that you’ll wish you’d never been born. But I can’t believe it,’ he added, limping out into the bright sunshine. Tig-headed, proud, revengeful. … He still couldn’t be such a bloody fool.’ And he stumped off across the courtyard, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

We took off ten minutes later and by then I’d had an opportunity to glance at the contents of that envelope. There were several foolscap sheets headed: REPORT OF SURVEYS CARRIED OUT ON SARAIFA TERRITORY; and it was sub-headed: Basis on which an Immediate Programme of Test Drilling is Recommended at Points A, B, C amp; D. Pinned to it were four sheets of graph paper, covered with figures and diagrams. There was also a sketch map giving his survey points, a whole series of them, each with the position pin-pointed in latitude and longitude. A number of Arab names were given, but none that I could recall from my brief examination of the map in Erkhard’s office. Points A, B, C amp; D were marked in red ink; they were very close to each other, in a little huddle at the eastern end of the line of his survey. There was no covering letter. Just the report and the sketch map.

I read the report through carefully as we flew south into the desert. It was typewritten, highly technical — quite beyond my comprehension. For this reason I do not intend to give the details. But there were several references to the ‘Whitaker Theory’, and right at the beginning there was a paragraph that read: It should not be imagined that I stumbled on this by accident. If anything comes of it, the credit must go to Henry Fan. He surveyed the area in the very early days of the war. The Saraifa Concession was fairly new then and Fan’s outfit was the only survey team in the area. Moreover he made his report at a time of crisis in the Middle East; it was pigeon-holed away in the Company’s headquarters and shortly afterwards he died fighting in Abyssinia. I was fortunate enough to come upon this report when searching old surveys for anything that had a bearing on Saraifa-

I leaned back in my seat, thinking about the war and how that old report had got lost in the files. Colonel Whitaker had fought in Eritrea. The same area. I wondered whether he and Farr had ever met. I was thinking about that when Gorde leaned across to me. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What are you going to do about that report when you get back to Bahrain?’ He was smiling, tight-lipped. ‘The boy’s like his father,’ he grunted. ‘A dreamer. The same dream, too.’

The dreams of youth sometimes come true,’ I said. I was remembering how Sue had talked of him.

His eyes clouded and he looked away from me, staring out of his window towards the mountains. ‘Ah yes, the dreams of youth.’ He gave a little sigh. ‘But the boy’s dead and Charles isn’t a young man any more.’

‘And what about Farr?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘He’s dead, too.’

‘You don’t think they could be right?’

The Whitaker Theory?’ He gave a snort. ‘Charles had a nose for oil, a sort of instinct for it, like Holmes. But he didn’t know a damn’ thing about geology. That nose of his cost the Company a lot of money. We struck oil, but never in large enough quantities. I should know,’ he almost snarled. ‘I backed him and it cost me my job out here. And I loved it,’ he added quietly. ‘I love this country. Look at it.’

He leaned across, pointing to the desert that lay below the wing-tip, a corrugated dune sea stretching to the mountains that lay all along the horizon. ‘Clean and hard and cruel. I had twenty years of it. I know it better than I know my own country and it calls to me the way the sea calls to a sailor — and I’m stuck in a damned office in London; I haven’t been out here for almost four years.’ And he relapsed into silence, staring out of his window.

But a moment later he touched my arm and pointed downwards. A great sweep of dunes thrust eastwards, narrowing like a finger till the tip of the yellow sand touched the red rock wall of the mountains. Right below us a black line wound like a thread across the dunes — a camel caravan going south and leaving a faded snail-like smudge behind it in the sand. The Ramlah Anej,’ he said in my ear. ‘We’re crossing the eastern edge of the Rub al Khali.’ And ft

he added with a sort of boyish delight, ‘I’m one of the very few men who’ve crossed the Empty Quarter by camel. Charles and I did it together. We said we were looking for oil, but that was just an excuse.’ He was smiling and his eyes were alight with the memory of it, so that through age and illness I got a glimpse of the young man he’d once been.

After that he fell silent and left me alone with my thoughts as the aircraft roared steadily south, the mountains always away to the left, always marching with us, a moon-mad landscape of volcanic peaks, sometimes near, sometimes receding to the lip of the earth’s surface. And below us, the sun marked the desert floor with the imprint of our plane, a minute shadow dogging our course.

It was just after four when the navigator came aft and woke Gorde, who had fallen asleep with the curtain drawn across his window and his battered hat tipped to shade his eyes. ‘Jebel al-Akhbar coming up now, sir. Otto wants to know whether you’d like to fly over Hadd or make a detour?’

‘May as well have a look at the Emir’s hide-out,’ Gorde murmured, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. ‘Long time since I last saw it.’ He got to his feet and motioned me to follow him.

The view from the flight deck was a blinding glare made bearable only by the green shade above the pilot’s head. All away to the right of us was sand as far as the eye could strain, a petrified sea corrugated by the action of the wind. But from the left mountains were closing in, bare, black, lava-ash mountains marked by patches of a livid, chemical green. They swept round ahead of us in a long curve, terminating abruptly at the sand sea’s edge in a bold headland topped by a pinnacle of bare rock. ‘Jebel al-Akhbar,’ Gorde said, nodding towards it over the pilot’s head. There’s an old stone fort on the top of it and the town of Hadd is right underneath. Remarkable place. There’s a saying amongst the Arabs of this part — Who holds al-Akhbar, holds Hadd. You’ll see in a minute.’

Otto was pushing the control column forward and as we lost height the headland began to come up fast. ‘See the fort?’ Gorde’s hand gripped my arm. ‘I got a gazelle there once. The Emir invited us hunting and a Saluki bitch named Adilla cornered it for me right under the walls there. My first visit to Saraifa,’ he added. The time we signed the original concession.’

I could see the fort clearly now, a biggish place, crumbling into ruin, with an outer ring of mud and rock walls and in the centre a single watch tower perched high on a pinnacle of rock. We skimmed it with about a hundred feet to spare and on the farther side the hill dropped sheer to a valley shaped like a crescent moon and half-ringed with mountains.

The valley floor was flat, a patchwork quilt of cultivation; date palms, grey with dust, stood thick as Indian corn in mud-walled enclosures, and there were fields of millet green with new growth. In the further reaches of the valley, where cultivation dwindled into grey, volcanic ash, a solitary sand-devil swirled a spiral of dust high into the air.

‘Hadd.’ Gorde stabbed downwards with his thumb, and peering over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of a mud town that seemed built into the rock below the fort. Right below us a melee of men and goats and camels stood transfixed beside a well. Mud walls towered above them, and looking back I saw the town of Hadd climbing into its rocky cleft with a great fortified palace built on many levels facing towards the desert. A green flag fluttered from a flagpole. ‘Always reminds me of the Hadhramaut,’ Gorde shouted in my ear. ‘They build like that in the Wadi Duan. Well-sited, isn’t it?’ He might have been a soldier, his interest was so professional.

Otto half-turned in his seat. ‘I’m setting course now for the position given in the search report, that okay?’ And when Gorde nodded he banked the plane so that I had a last glimpse of the Wadi Hadd al-Akhbar, a little oasis of green set against a nightmare backdrop of volcanic rock. And then it was gone and the arid, lifeless desert stretched out ahead of us.

Gorde produced the slip of paper he’d used for making notes and handed it to the navigator. ‘Those are the fixes for the Saraifa-Hadd border locations. Plot them now. We’ll be flying over them as soon as we’ve had a look at the spot where he abandoned his truck.’

We flew on in silence then and gradually the gravel plain gave place to sand, the dunes getting higher, their shadows longer until they were towering crescent-shaped downlands stretching into infinity. The navigator passed Otto an alteration of course and the shadow of the plane came ahead of us, growing imperceptibly bigger, as we lost height. ‘Have we crossed the border?’

The navigator nodded. ‘Just crossing it now.’

Gorde’s hand gripped my elbow. ‘That’s the trouble with this damned country,’ he said. ‘The borders are nothing but map references. Nobody cared so long as it was just a waste of desert sand. But you try explaining map references to an Arab sheikh once he’s dazzled by the prospect of oil.’

The navigator leaned across and made a circling movement with his hand. Otto tipped the plane over on the port wing-tip and we searched the glaring dunes below us. We circled like that, slowly, for several minutes, ana then suddenly we straightened out, swooping down towards the humped back of a dune, and there, halfway up it, was the truck, almost obliterated by sand. I never saw such a desperately lonely-looking object in my life, a piece of dead machinery lying there like a wrecked boat in the midst of an ocean of sand.

We slid down on to it like a hawk stooping to its prey. It was a big closed-in truck, old and battered looking and patched with rust. There were no markings on it and as it rushed away beneath us Gorde echoed my own thoughts: ‘What was the fool doing, driving that truck alone into these dunes?’ he demanded. ‘Do you know?’ He was glaring at me, and when I shook my head, he grunted as though he didn’t believe me. ‘A good twenty miles west of the survey locations,’ he growled. ‘He must have had some reason.’

Otto banked steeply so that the truck was there, just beyond the port wing for us to stare at. But looking at it couldn’t explain its presence on the slope of that dune, and in the end Gorde gave instructions for us to proceed to the locations David had surveyed and motioned me to follow him back into the relative quiet of the passenger cabin.

‘Well,’ he said, dropping into his seat, ‘what do you make of it, eh?’ But I could see he didn’t expect an answer. He was slumped in his seat, an old man lost in thought. ‘Doesn’t make sense, does it?’ he grumbled. ‘The boy dead somewhere down there below us and his father not caring a damn and busy drilling a well-’ He turned to me. ‘How did they get on, those two, do you know? What were their relations just prior to the boy’s death?’ And when I didn’t say anything, he snapped, ‘Come on, man. You must know something. You’ve come all the way out from England; you wouldn’t have done that unless you knew a little more than you’ve told me.’ He stared at me angrily. ‘Have you seen his sister?’

I nodded.

‘Well, what does she say about it? He must have talked to her.’

‘She’d like to think he’s still alive.’

‘What, in this country — and the truck lying there on that dune for almost two months?’

‘She’s never been into the desert.’

‘No, of course not.’ He asked me again what she had said about him, and whilst I was telling him the desert below gradually changed, the dunes altering shape until they were long ridges like waves with gravel flats in the troughs.

I was just telling him about the last visit David had made to his sister when the plane gave a lurch, the port wing tipped down and over Gorde’s shoulder I caught a glimpse of tyre marks running straight like the line of a railway along the length of a flat stretch between two dunes. A pile of rusted tins, the black trace of a fire, the remains of a dug latrine; they were there for an instant and then the plane straightened up and we flew on, following the tyre marks that had scored a straight line wherever the sand was soft.

Gorde got up then and I followed him forward. Indications of another camp came up at us, swept by beneath the plane. We were flying very low, the line of the dunes on either side closing us in. And then, straight ahead, the black shadow of a truck. It was stationary and we came up on it fast, belly to the gravel flat, roaring over it so close that I could read the black lettering on its side — G-O-D-C-O — and could see the drill at its rear turning.

It was the same sort of truck as the one we had seen abandoned a short while back, and as we turned and came down on it again, a figure in khaki shorts and an Australian bush hat waved to us. There were Arabs moving about by the drill and close by the truck was a Land-Rover with G-O-D-C-O painted across its bonnet.

Gorde swung round on me. ‘What the devil’s a seismological truck doing here? Did you know it was here?’

‘Of course not.’ For one wild moment I thought those three women might be right and I almost tore the glasses from Gorde’s hand. But the khaki figure was broad and thick-set, the round, brick-red face covered with ginger hair.

Gorde tapped Otto on the shoulder. ‘Can you land here?’ he demanded. ‘I want to talk to that man. Who is it? Do you know?’

‘Looks like Jack Entwhistle,’ Otto answered, and he swung the plane over again, circling back with the wing-tip almost scraping the top of the dunes. He was flying with his eyes glued to his side window, searching the ground. ‘Looks okay,’ he said. ‘No big stones, no wadis that I can see. I guess I can get down. Don’t know how it will be taking off again.’

Gorde didn’t even hesitate. ‘Then put her down,’ he said. His face had gone a sickly yellow. He was furious.

‘Hold tight then.’ The plane banked again, came in level over the flat gravel pan and I felt the drag as the flaps and undercarriage went down. He flew about half a mile with the ground so close that we might have been in a car, then he gave her full throttle, lifted her up and round in a turn that left my stomach behind me. We came back on to the line of the gravel, slow and dropping this time with the truck standing bang in our path. The wheels touched, bounced once on a rough patch, and next time we stayed down, bumping heavily over the rough surface, stones rattling against the outside of the fuselage, until the brakes came on and we slowed to a halt.

We were about three hundred yards from the truck and the man who had waved to us was already in the Land-Rover coming towards us. By the time the navigator had got the fuselage door open the Land-Rover was drawing up alongside. The air that came in through the open door was hot with the glare of sun on sand. There was no wind and the heat seemed trapped between the dunes. Gorde moved awkwardly down the fuselage, supporting himself with his hands on the backs of the seats. He looked tired and old and very grim as he faced the man who came in from the desert. ‘Entwhistle, isn’t it?’

‘That’s raight, Sir Philip.’ The man was North Country, square and stocky, the eyes grey in the red, dust-filmed face. He looked pleased. ‘It’s grand to see you out here again, sir. How are you?’ He wiped his hand on the seat of his shorts and held it out.

Gorde ignored the hand, ignored the warmth and friendliness of the other’s tone. ‘Who gave you orders to run a survey here?’

Entwhistle hesitated, dropped his hand. He looked momentarily off-balance, uncertain of himself.

‘Was it Erkhard?’

‘No, sir. To be honest, Sir Philip, nobody gave me orders.’

Then what the hell are you doing here? You’re a hundred miles from your survey area.’

‘Aye, I know that.’ He ran his hand a little nervously over his face. ‘It isn’t easy to explain. You see-’ He hesitated. ‘I was the chap who carried out the ground search for David Whitaker. You know about that, do you?’

Gorde nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘And make it short. I haven’t any time to waste.’

But Entwhistle wasn’t the sort of man to be browbeaten. ‘If it comes to that, Sir Philip, I don’t have any time to waste myself. I want to run this survey and get the hell out of here as fast as I can.’ His tone was obstinate. This isn’t what you’d call a healthy place. I got here two days ago and we hadn’t been camped twenty-four hours before we had a visit from a bunch of Bedou. They didn’t behave like nomads; more like the Emir’s men. Though we’re still in Saraifa here.’

The Saraifa concession was abandoned four years ago,’ Gorde said sharply. ‘You’ve no right here. None whatever.’

‘I’m well aware of that, Sir Philip.’

Then why are you here?’

Entwhistle hesitated, rubbing gently at a desert sore that showed red and ugly beneath the sweat stain of his right armpit. ‘You never met David Whitaker, did you, sir?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Oh, well-’ He hesitated, and then, unable apparently to put it into words, he sought refuge in facts: ‘I couldn’t exactly say it in my report of the search. It would have put the Company on the spot, if you see what I mean. But there was something fishy about that truck there on a sand dune across the border into Saudi. There was nought wrong with it mechanically, you know. It was just out of fuel as though he’d driven it straight into the Empty Quarter until he’d no more petrol. And if you’d known David-’ Again the hesitation, and then a quick shrug. ‘He knew the desert — knew it a damn’ sight better than I’ll ever know it. What was he doing there, that’s what I’d like to know? If he’d been scared out of here by the Emir’s men, why didn’t he head for Saraifa?’

‘Come to the point,’ Gorde said impatiently. ‘I want to know why you’re here.’

‘Aye. Well, I went over every inch of that truck. I thought if there’d been foul play or anything like that, he’d have left some clue, something that a chap like myself, a fellow geophysicist, would understand. The only thing I found was an old attache case full of correspondence and copies of survey reports. One of those reports concerned this area.’

‘I don’t seem to remember reading that in the account you sent to Erkhard.’

‘No.’

‘You thought you’d keep it to yourself, eh? Thought you’d check on his findings on the quiet?’

Entwhistle scratched uncomfortably at the sore. ‘He was on loan to his father, you see. It didn’t concern the Company exactly. And he seemed so sure he’d-’

‘It never occurred to you, I suppose, that there’s a political factor?’

Entwhistle’s grey eyes stared at Gorde without flinching. ‘David Whitaker was a good bloke. I don’t know whether he sent a copy of that survey report to the Bahrain office or not; and I don’t care. Nobody had done anything about it. Not even his father. He was out on his own and he thought he was on to something. I spent the better part of a week searching the desert for his body, and it seemed to me if I couldn’t give him a headstone, I might at least see if he was right and we could name an oilfield after him. Maybe it sounds a little crazy to you, Sir Philip,’ he added almost belligerently, ‘but I just felt it was up to me to do something. I don’t like to see a good chap’s life thrown away for nothing. And if Erkhard kicks me off the Company’s payroll as a result, I shan’t cry my eyes out.’

Gorde didn’t say anything for a moment. He seemed lost in thought. ‘How far have you got with the check?’ he asked at length.

‘There are four locations given as probable anticlines in the report. I’ve done a check on the most south-easterly — Location D, he called it. Now I’ve just begun drilling the first shot-hole on Location C. If you care to come to the truck I can show you David Whitaker’s report. Or has Mr Erkhard already shown it to you?’

‘No, he hasn’t. Nevertheless,’ Gorde added, ‘I’ve seen a copy. Grant here was kind enough to show it to me.’ This on a note of irony, and he introduced me then. ‘A lawyer. Like you, he wants to know what young Whitaker was doing across the border into Saudi.’ He turned to me. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a seismological truck, have you?’ And when I shook my head, he said, ‘Well, if you want to see the sort of work David Whitaker was engaged on, I’m sure Entwhistle would show you over his vehicle.’ He turned back to Entwhistle. ‘No point in stopping you in the middle of drilling a shot-hole. You can finish the check on your Location C. Then you’re to pull out. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Relief and something akin to affection showed for an instant in Entwhistle’s face.

‘Results to be sent direct to me. And now take Grant to your truck and show him how it works. Meanwhile, I’ll write a letter for you to Sheikh Makhmud, just in case. I don’t doubt he knows you’re here.’ He stood back from the door. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said to me. ‘All right? And then I want to find Charles Whitaker’s rig; find out why he isn’t drilling here if his son was so damn’ sure.’

I nodded. I didn’t even hesitate. I was being given the opportunity of ten minutes alone with Entwhistle. I jumped out of the plane and it was like jumping into the full glare of an open-hearth furnace. Entwhistle remained a moment talking to Gorde, and when he joined me in the Land-Rover he glanced at me curiously so that I wondered what Gorde had told him about me. Stones rattled against the rusted mudguards as we batted over the gravel towards the truck which seemed to be standing in a pool of water. The mirage only lifted when we were within a hundred yards of it.

I was more interested in Entwhistle than in the mechanics of his seismological equipment, and as soon as we were in the shade of the truck’s interior, I asked him what he thought had happened to David. ‘I suppose there’s no chance that he’s still alive?’

It didn’t seem to surprise him that I’d made the suggestion. ‘Did you see my personal report to Erkhard, or was it some sort of a composite thing re-hashed by the Bahrain Office?’ he asked.

‘It was a general report,’ I told him.

‘Aye, I thought so. They’ll be letting the dust collect on mine in some pigeon-hole. Can’t blame them. I made it pretty plain what I thought.’ He hesitated, rubbing his hand across the ginger stubble on his chin. ‘A rum do, and no mistake. There was that truck half-buried in sand and about forty miles from the nearest waterhole. And nothing wrong with the damned thing but lack of petrol. Even the spare jerry-cans were empty.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ I asked.

He hesitated. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he muttered, eyeing me cautiously. ‘But I know this,’ he added with sudden violence; ‘a chap like David doesn’t drive into waterless desert with empty fuel cans. And to run out of juice just there … except for the centre of the Empty Quarter he couldn’t have picked a spot that was much farther from water.’ He stared at me and I think we were both thinking the same thing, for he said, ‘I’d like to know what his father thinks about it. In fact, when I’ve finished here I intend to drive over to Saraifa and see if the old Bedou knows-’ He stopped and cocked his head on one side, listening. Faint through the noise of the drill came the distant sound of an engine. I didn’t understand at first, but then it grew louder, over-topping the noise of the drill, and in a sudden panic of realization, I dived for the door, just in time to see the plane become airborne.

It passed so low over the top of the truck that I instinctively ducked, and as I straightened up I was cursing myself for a fool. I should have known. I should have realized Gorde might want to get me out of the way. I turned furiously on Entwhistle, who was standing in the doorway of the truck looking slightly uncomfortable. ‘You knew about this?’

‘Aye, he told me.’ He smiled a little doubtfully. ‘He asked me to give you his apologies for any inconvenience.’

‘God rot the old man!’ I muttered savagely. To be caught like that, to be fooled into thinking he was just trying to be helpful, and all the time-

I stared at the plane, which was rapidly dwindling to a speck, feeling suddenly helpless, isolated out here in an oven-hot world that I didn’t understand. ‘A day or two, he said,’ Entwhistle murmured apologetically. That’s all. I’ll try and make it as pleasant as possible.’

The plane had altered course. I saw it circle once and then it was heading back towards us and for a wild moment I thought perhaps he’d changed his mind. It came in low, flying slowly with the flaps down. But the under-carriage remained up. As it bumbled close over our heads something white fluttered down from the pilot’s window. And then it turned and disappeared low over the dunes, and the sound of it was lost again in the noise of the drill.

Entwhistle was already running to retrieve the object they had dropped to us. He came back with a cigarette packet and a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘All right. You can stop drilling,’ he shouted. He repeated the order in Arabic and as the drill slowed to an abrupt silence, he handed me the paper. On it was written in pencil: Stop drilling and proceed at once to Saraifa. Concentration of armed tribesmen camped in the dunes two miles north of you. Warn Sheikh Makhmud and give him my salaams. Philip Gorde. A chill feeling crept up my spine as I read that message, and Entwhistle’s comment did nothing to restore my morale.

‘Bit of luck, the Old Man flying down here.’ He flipped the coin that Otto had used to weight the packet. ‘Mightn’t have seen the sun rise tomorrow otherwise.’

It came as a shock to me to realize that he was perfectly serious. They would have attacked you?’ I asked.

‘Slit our throats, probably.’ He sounded quite cheerful.

‘But-’ I looked about me, at the dunes asleep in the heat of the day, the furnace-hot world of the desert all around me, quiet and peaceful. It was hard to believe. ‘But you’re still on Saraifa territory,’ I said.

He shrugged. The Emir would dispute that. And the political boys, all those bloody old Etonians — they don’t want any trouble. My name’s going to be mud.’ He stared down at the coin in his hand. And then he put it in his pocket and set about organizing the packing up of the outfit, leaving me standing there, feeling slightly lost, a stranger in a strange world.