The Doomed Oasis

by Innes, Hammond;

  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 downward. A great sweep of dunes thrust eastward, 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 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 hideout,” 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 seluki 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 watchtower 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 downward 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 mêlée 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, and 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 tire 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 tire 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 right, 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 brow-beaten. “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 stuck 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 attaché 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 thoug
ht. “How far have you got with the check?” he asked at length.

  “There are four locations given as probable anti-clines in the report. I’ve done a check on the most southeasterly—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 on 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.