Rapture of the desert

by Violet Winspear

  "No, they all seem strangely far away." Chrys caught her breath. "I think the lure of the East has come upon me, Maud. I thought I could be cool and distant towards all this, but suddenly I feel like a moth caught up in the threads of a gaudy web. I'm sun-struck, overwhelmed, and too entranced to struggle for my freedom. The sensation is dreamlike . . . shall I wake in a while and find myself alone in the flat I shared with Dove?"

  "Do you want to?" Maud studied the face of Chrys beneath the shifting green light of the fig leaves.

  Chrys considered the question and then shook her head. "While I had my dancing I had all I needed. But now — now I have become vulnerable like other lonely people. I believe the East calls to the lonely at heart."

  "It does, Chrys, and you are sensitive enough to realize it."

  "You have no more doubts, Maud, about bringing me here?" Chrys spoke seriously. "I don't want to be a liability. I'll wear that floppy hat, even dress like a boy, if it will make me seem less — alien to the Arabs."

  "I don't think," drawled Maud, "that it will be thought quite proper if a young boy is seen in the double tent, especially at night. Arabs have a rather salacious sense of humour. No, things should be quite safe with Peter Dorn at the dig."

  They took a final stroll around the lovely gardens before driving home to the hotel. While Maud paid the driver Chrys stood and gazed at the sky, where the sun seemed to be smouldering away in a fountain of colour and flame. She visualised the sands of the desert bathed in that riot of colour, barbarous and yet beautiful, and the image quickened her breath and made her lips part . . . almost as if ready to receive a kiss. She was looking

  like that as a car came to a halt at the corner of the square, in front of one of the old, shuttered-looking Arab houses that faced the hotel. Three men emerged from the limousine and made their way to the huge, nail-studded door of the house. Each man was robed, and walked with that feline grace so apparent in some of the Arabian people. Dignity and aloofness matched that grace, and as Chrys glanced across the road one of the men turned a moment and looked directly at her, standing there in her pale dress in the rich dying light of the sun.

  It was no mistake, the height, the stance, and the gleam of a high red boot under the great cloak. He even seemed to incline his covered head slightly, and she pictured a smile curling on the well-cut lips under the black moustache.

  Then the great door of the Arabian house was opened and the trio of men disappeared into the courtyard, with its glimpses of a fountain and the tall silhouettes of palm trees. Then the door closed, but Chrys had the disquieting feeling that eyes gazed at her through the narrow iron grille in the door, and she felt them to be mocking and dangerously persistent as the eyes of a tiger stalking its prey.

  She was glad to escape into the hotel with Maud, but when she was alone in her room she picked up the little Hand of Fatma as if compelled and felt in that moment a strange sense of fatalism. He had sent her the charm to let her know they would meet again, out there in the desert, and she was faced with the decision to remain at Beni Kezar, or make some excuse to Maud and catch the late train back to civilization, where men in picturesque robes did not make silent and subtle threats which seemed to sway a girl between flight and fury.

  She stood there in the darkening room, the charm clenched in her hand, and she knew that a confrontation with him was inevitable if she entered the desert, the great gold garden, where menace and enticement threw their shadows across the sands.

  She would throw this charm in his face and tell him to go to the devil ... she would tell him scornfully that she wasn't remotely interested in becoming an inmate of his harem!

  Despite this resolve Chrys awoke the following morning with a knot of tension at the base of her stomach, so that she couldn't eat and drank cups of coffee for her breakfast. She and Maud were setting out early so they wouldn't lose the first coolness of the day and arrive at the camp in the heat of the sun. Chrys was presented with the floppy-brimmed hat which was meant to hide the brightness of her hair, and as she put it on and pulled the brim down over her left eye, she reflected that it was a pity she hadn't been wearing the hat at the railway station, along with her plain shirt and pale brown riding trousers.

  "Well, will I pass as a member of a desert dig?" She grinned at Maud, and betrayed not a hint of her nervous excitement, which the coffee had stirred up instead of settled.

  The older woman studied her and looked quizzical.

  "I'm afraid you'd look beguiling in a sack, Chrys. That old hat of mine looks dashing and sort of Garboish on you, and those trousers never looked that good on a boy."

  So they set out on this clear and beckoning morning, riding the horses which they had hired from the kaid, with their porters and loaded camels following on behind. Chrys glanced behind her and was fascinated by those long-necked animals, with a leather thong fastened into a nose ring so the driver, seated way up on the powerful humped back, could guide his beast and be master of its truculent disposition.

  Soon they had left behind them the old, sun-burned walls of the town and outcrops of rock appeared, breaking through the sand like bare white bone, with scrub-mimosa flowering here and there to make a bright splash of colour.

  Hills rose against the dazzling blue sky like the

  battlements of old mined castles, and the breeze that blew across the peachy-coloured sand was filled with a tang of wild, unknown places. The jingle and rustle of the harness was pleasant on the morning air, for the hooves of the animals were muffled by the sand, so that they seemed to be gliding across velvet itself.

  They passed a few quiet Bedouin encampments, wherever a small stream flowed among a group of palm trees, where the low black tents were pitched, curtained at one end and wide open at the other, where the cooking fires were built, and where the gold-skinned children played among the goats and the small herds of mouflon, the little sheep like balls of wool, and often the only means of support for these rambling gipsy-like families. The black sheep among them wore strings of blue glass beads, Chrys noticed. They were obviously "lambs of Satan" and needed extra protection from the evil eye.

  The tall women in their homespun dresses, clad like Ruth and Rachel, filled their fat-bellied water jars at the stream, and Chrys wondered what it was like to be always a tent-dweller, wandering from oasis to oasis, and bearing with a patient smile the extremes of hot and cold weather, the primitive conditions of being a wife and a mother many miles from the civilized comforts of a city woman's life.

  As Chrys rode by on her Arab horse, obviously a girl despite her masculine attire, the Bedouin women gazed after her, and they probably wondered what her life was like. She smiled at them, but they considered her with gravity, as if she were even more strange to them than they could ever be to her. And they were right! The desert was their proper background, into which they blended with a rugged, biblical grace. She in her trousers and brimmed hat must seem to them a peculiar species of womanhood.

  When the last encampment was left behind, the horses and their riders, and the laden camels, were engulfed in the silence of the rolling sands, turning to white-gold as the sun rose higher and cast its brilliant hot

  light down over the desert. The heat of the day was beginning, like a cloak of saffron silk, heavy and clinging as it touched the skin. Chrys became aware of the heat like gloves on her hands as she held the reins of her mount, and the back of her shirt clung against her shoulders. She was glad of the brimmed hat, shielding her untried eyes from the ashen blaze of the sand.

  How far away was England and all that had happened there to bring her to this desert. She looked about her, and it was real and not a mirage. The heat and the shimmer of the sands were a living reality and she was a part of it all. She sat upon the red saddle of a grey Arab horse, and was surrounded by a sea of molten gold, sculptured sometimes into the shape of waves... glowing and relentless, a place to be lost in without a guide, who sat high on his camel, a pattern of heart-shaped hoof marks left in
the sand behind them.

  They stopped to drink tea and to eat jammy doughnut puffs in the shade of some rocks, and Maud asked her how she was enjoying her first encounter with the desert.

  Chrys looked at Maud and the answer lay in her eyes. In the shadow of the hat's brim they were intensely blue; the magic of it all was trapped in her eyes like a little flame. "It's tormenting and it's wonderful," she said. "It's like nothing else I've ever known."

  "You don't find it monotonous ?" Maud gave her a very direct look over the rim of her mug of tea. "It must all seem very different from the colour and enchantment of your world of ballet. Ballet was more real to you than real life, so you told me, and now you have seen the primitive desert-dwellers, and the black tents they live and die in, living a life in which theatres and gaiety play no part."

  "In the difference of it all lies the fascination." Chrys gazed around at the couched camels, and the porters with their lean faces and fierce eyes that were falcon-like in their quickness and their regard, their feet as tensile as their hands and tanned to the shade of

  leather. Chrys hugged her mug of tea, and felt as if all the secrets of the silent desert were being slowly revealed for her.

  "Seduction isn't true love," Maud murmured. "You might look at it all next week and wish yourself on the steamer home."

  Chrys smiled and shook her head, for confidence was

  suddenly spreading through her like a weed, strangling any last-minute doubts she had about venturing into the Garden of Allah. The desert all around them had become a dazzling ocean of gold, but she was no longer afraid of what it held in store for her.

  She crumbled the remnants of a doughnut and threw the crumbs into the shade of a rock. Tiny azure birds flew down on them, making a cawing sound .. . despite the hawks of the desert the blue birds still came and made it their home. Perky and pretty, they pecked at the crumbs, bright specks of chestnut on their little backs.

  "I think, Maud, that in some ways my training in ballet has prepared me for the desert life. The dance demands a spartan regime and loads of stamina and soul. Even applause cannot spoil a ballerina, for she knows that early the next morning she must be at the barre, training alongside the novice, and sweating every bit as hard to keep trim and supple and disciplined. Here in the desert I shall ride and dig and keep fit, but if I had taken a desk job for a year I dread to think of the consequences! It is better for the legs to become a little bowed than for the ballet dancer's bottom to spread! "

  Maud laughed and climbed to her feet. "Come along, Pavlova. We've only about another hour's ride to the diggings, and I am sure Peter is impatient for our arrival. He'll get no end of a kick out of taking you on as a pupil, and you may even be lucky enough to find a Roman bowl."

  "I'd get a thrill out of that myself." As Chrys swung into the saddle of her horse she felt not a twinge of pain from her back injury and was certain today that fortune

  smiled on her, almost as warmly as the desert sun.

  The porters urged their grumbling camels to their feet, and Chrys half-turned in the saddle to watch the men tuck their bare feet around the long necks of the animals. Bells jingled on the harness of the camels, and the djellabas of the men were stark white against the shaggy buff coats. The cheche of one of the men was draped almost like a mask across his face, and she felt the glitter of his eyes as he caught her looking at him. At once she looked away from him, and cantered her horse to catch up with Maud.

  But as she rode along she was distinctly aware of that rider high on his camel saddle behind her. It was instinctive with her to notice grace of movement, and that particular porter had mounted his animal with long-legged movements of peculiar grace, and up there on that high saddle he didn't slouch but sat there as proudly as a prince.

  Her heart jarred strangely in her side. Her thoughts flew over the sands, over the water, to a terrace above the Thames, where she had danced with a man whose movements had been as animal and supple as those of the Arab riding in the wake of her horse. He too had been masked, and she wondered if he was still enjoying the night spots of London, or whether he had yet returned to his house called Belle Tigresse.

  She felt the quick beating of her heart as she rode along, and fought the odd compulsion to glance again at the porter behind her. Surely it was coincidental that a movement of the body, a turn of the head, a flick of the eyes, had reminded her of a man she would far sooner forget? Surely it was a flash of the old anger that made her blood run fast through her veins! They had parted with bare civility. He had clicked his heels and gone out of her life.

  "Beware of melting when you reach the desert," he had said, in that taunting way of his. "And if you do melt, be sure you are in the correct pair of arms."

  "There is one thing for sure," she had retorted.

  "They will never be your arms."

  "Perhaps not," he agreed. "But on the other hand there is an old Arab saying to the effect that the most unlikely thing to happen is nearly always the thing that does happen.'

  It was those words, and the tiny mocking smile at the edge of his mouth, which haunted Chrys and made her look twice at every man she saw out here, seeing in the slightest gesture a resemblance which probably never existed at all.

  She restrained herself from looking round and prodded her mount to catch up with Maud's. Probably eager to reach the Roman diggings where she had last searched for coins and relics alongside her husband, Maud had given her mount quite a bit of rein and they had forged well ahead of Chrys when all of a sudden she saw the horse shy wildly at something across his path. The long forelegs threshed the air, and the next instant Maud was flung half out of the saddle, with her right foot holding her in the stirrup as the horse bolted in fright across the hot sands.

  Chrys gave a cry of alarm and gave rein to her own mount in an attempt to catch up with the bolting horse. She was terrified for Maud, who looked in grave danger of being badly hurt if suddenly flung from the saddle.

  Fleet as her mount was, something flashed past on long thundering legs and with loping strides soon shortened the distance between itself and the frightened animal that was dragging Maud as if she were a puppet. The camel and its rider were soon ahead of the horse, and swerving skilfully in front of it they brought it to a standstill, head hanging and flanks heaving, its rider still at a painful angle, caught by her foot in the twisted stirrup.

  As Chrys galloped towards the group, she saw the rider of the camel kneel his animal, dismount swiftly and make for the figure of Maud. He gentled the horse, and was lifting Maud from its back as Chrys rode up

  to them and leapt from her own saddle.

  She ran forward, crying Maud's name. The man who had saved her turned his head to look at Chrys, and the cheche blew from his face, and eyes of a most unusual grey looked into the wild blue eyes of Chrys, and she was shocked, and at the same time too concerned for Maud to even speak his name as she stepped forward to where he had placed the shaken, perhaps injured woman, holding her so that she rested in the crook of his arm.

  Maud winced painfully as Chrys knelt beside her. "Hurts like the devil! " She gestured at her right foot. "Mustn't blame the horse. I think a jerboa darted in front of him and startled him. I didn't grab the reins tightly enough and he was up and away. Lucky my foot caught and held me, but I — I think it's twisted."

  "Allow me, madame. I shall try not to add to your pain." A lean hand emerged from the full sleeve of the spotless robes and the fingers passed briefly over Maud's ankle, causing her to bite down on her lip even at so gentle a touch. "I fear the stirrup may have crushed a small bone, madame." The smoke-grey eyes that did not belong to an Arab porter gazed into Maud's eyes. "It is essential that you see a doctor as soon as possible, and as it would not be possible for you to ride back to Beni Kezar, and there is not a doctor at your camp, I suggest that you allow me to take you to my house. I have a geologist friend in residence there who is also a qualified doctor, and it is not such a long ride as the one back to town.
"

  Maud was staring at him, absorbing his excellent English, and his lean but not Arab face with sheer amazement. Chrys at the other side of her watched the exchange of looks, and knew exactly what was passing through Maud's mind. Who on earth was this handsome devil who spoke like a gentleman instead of a porter?

  "Maud, I had better introduce you." Chrys looked at him then, and there was a wry little smile on her lips.

  "This is the Prince Anton de Casenove, who has a predilection for masks and subtle games, and I can tell you now that he has been following us around since the first moment we arrived at Port Said. The moustache fooled me, because when last we met he was clean-shaven, and I had not yet seen how Arab clothing can be a disguise in itself. In London the Prince wore the smartest tailoring from Savile Row, and I suppose if I expected to see him out here, I expected the same suave apparel, not un arabe from his head-ropes to his Moroccan leather boots! "

  "This is —" Maud shook her head in bewilderment. "This is really too much for me in my shocked state. A Prince?"

  "Quite so, madame." He inclined his head and a slight smile flickered on his lips. "Miss Devrel and I knew each other in London. But if she had known that I was coming to this part of the desert she would have gone to Timbuctoo in order to avoid me. My wicked sense of humour could not resist a little masquerade, but as things turned out it was a good thing I was on hand today. The camel and I were useful, eh?"

  "Much more than useful, m'sieur." Maud gave him a deeply grateful look. "I couldn't have held on to those reins much longer, and if I'd gone under those hooves —well, by now I'd be in paradise, or the other place. Thank you, young man, but all the same I think we ought to press on to camp. Perhaps your doctor could come to me there —?"

  "It would be much more comfortable for you at my house, madame." He spoke firmly. "Already that ankle is much swollen, and you are still very much shaken by your experience. I definitely think that you and your companion should come with me to Belle Tigresse. In fact I am going to insist that you do so."