The Doomed Oasis

by Innes, Hammond;

  “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 fieldwork 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 be 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 likes 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 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 murmured. “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 watchtower, 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 stay 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 watchtower 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 blue 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 from 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 brusq
ue 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 wasn’t 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.”