The Doomed Oasis

by Innes, Hammond;

  “I’m not leaving here,” I said, “until I know what happened to David.”

  There was a moment then when he hesitated as though about to tell me something. But all he said was: “Is best you talk to his father—Haj Whitaker.”

  “I intend to,” I said. And when I asked him whether Colonel Whitaker was in Saraifa, he replied: “I don’t know. He has his house here, but is most times at the place of drilling.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “To the south of ’ere, about ten miles towards Sheikh Hassa’s village of Dhaid.”

  We had entered the great courtyard. A man sidled up to us, made his salaams to Khalid. He was dark and toothy, with a ragged wisp of a turban on his head, and his eyes watched me curiously as the two men talked together. My name was mentioned, and finally Khalid turned to me. “Now all is arranged. Yousif speak a little English. He will show you where you sleep.” His hand gripped my arm. “Ask Haj Whitaker why he goes to see the Emir of Hadd almost two moons past. Ask him that, Meester Grant.” It was whispered to me, his lips close against my ear and a hard, angry glint in his eyes.

  But before I could question him he had drawn back. He said something to Yousif and with a quick salaam alaikum he left me, moving quickly through the campfires, the only man in all that throng who wore a European jacket.

  “Come!” Yousif seized hold of my hand. Heads were turned now in my direction, and here and there a man got up from the fireside and began to move towards us. I had no desire to stay there, an object of curiosity. Yousif guided me through dark passages and up to a turret room by a winding staircase where the plaster steps were worn smooth as polished marble by the tread of many feet. The floor was bare earth, the roof beamed with palm-tree boles. A slit of a window no bigger than a firing-embrasure looked out on to the flat, beaten expanse of the village square. I was in one of the mud towers of the outer wall, and here he left me with no light but the glimmer of moonlight filtering in through the embrasure.

  Strange, disembodied sounds drifted up to me on the warm night air: the murmur of Arab voices, the grunt of camels, a child crying—and in the distance the weird “chuckle of a hyena. I knelt on the firing-step, peering down. Beyond the mud houses I could see the darker mass of the palms. Bare feet sounded on the turret stairs and the yellow light of a hurricane lamp appeared; the room was suddenly full of armed men bearing bedding, which they laid on the floor—a carpet, some blankets, an oryx skin, and a silken cushion. “May Allah guard you,” Yousif said, “and may your sleep be as the sleep of a little child.”

  He was halfway through the door before I realized what that long speech in English must mean. “You’re Colonel Whitaker’s man, aren’t you?”

  He checked and turned. “Yes, sahib. Me driver for Coll-onel.” He was staring at me, his eyes very wide so that the whites showed yellow in the lamplight. “I tell Coll-onel you are here in Sheikh’s palace.” He was gone then.

  There was no doubt in my mind that he’d been sent to find me. Whitaker was in Saraifa, and Khalid had known it as soon as Yousif had sidled up to us. I sat down on the silken cushion, staring blindly at that cell-like room. There was nothing to do now but wait. I felt tired; dirty, too. But I’d no water with which to wash. No soap, no clothes—nothing but what I was wearing. Yousif had left me the hurricane lamp, and its light reached dimly to the palm-wood rafters. A large desert spider moved among them with deliberation. I watched it for a long time as it went about its unpleasant business, and finally I killed it, overcome with a fellow-feeling for the flies caught in its web. And then I put out the lamp and rolled myself up in a blanket.

  It was hot, but I must have fallen asleep, for I didn’t hear Yousif return; he was suddenly there, his torch stabbing the darkness, almost blinding me.

  “Coll-onel say you come.”

  I sat up, glancing at my watch. It was past eleven thirty. “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  Down in the courtyard the fires were almost out, the Sheikh’s retainers lying like corpses wrapped in their robes. A few stirred as we crossed to the gate, now barred and guarded; a brief argument and then I was in a battered Land Rover being driven at reckless speed across the deserted village square, down into the date-gardens. Behind us the palace fort stood bone-white in the moonlight, and then the palms closed round us.

  Whitaker’s house was an old mud fort on the far side of the oasis. Most of it seemed to be in ruins, the courtyard empty, the mud walls cracked and crumbling. There was sand everywhere as we hurried through a maze of passages and empty rooms. The place seemed dead, and I wondered that a man could live alone like this and retain his sanity, for he seemed to have no servants but Yousif and to live in Spartan simplicity in one corner of this vast, rambling building.

  We came at last to a room where old portmanteaus and tin boxes stood ranged against the walls, and then I was out on a rooftop that looked out upon the desert. He was standing against the parapet, a tall, robed figure in silhouette, for there was no light there, only the moon and the stars. Yousif coughed and announced my presence.

  Whitaker turned then and came towards me. His face was in shadow, but I could see the black patch over the eye. No word of greeting, no attempt to shake my hand. “Sit down,” he said and waved imperiously to a carpet and some cushions spread on the floor. “Yousif. Gahwa.” His servant disappeared, and as I sat down I was conscious of the stillness all about us—no sound of Arab voices, none of the tumult of the Sheikh’s palace, no murmur of the village below the walls. The place was as isolated, as deserted as though we were the only people in the whole oasis.

  He folded himself up, cross-legged on the carpet facing me, and I could see his face then, the beard thinning and grey, the cheeks hollowed and lined by the desert years, that single imperious eye deep-sunken above the great nose. “You had a good journey, I trust.” His voice was oddly pitched, hard but unusually high, and he spoke the words slowly, as though English were no longer a familiar language.

  “It was interesting,” I said.

  “No doubt. But quite unnecessary. It was clearly understood between us that you would make no attempt to contact me direct. And though I admit the financial situation must have seemed—”

  “I came about your son,” I said.

  “My son?” He looked surprised. “Your letter merely said you were worried about the amount of money I was spending.”

  “Your son appointed me his executor.”

  He moved his head slightly, the eye glinting in the moonlight, bright and watchful. He didn’t say anything. Behind him the low parapet hid the desert, so that all I could see was the great vault of the night studded with stars. The air was deathly still, impregnated with the day’s heat.

  “I’m not convinced your son died a natural death.” I hadn’t meant to put it like that. It was his stillness, the overpowering silence that had forced it out of me.

  He made no comment and I knew that this was going to be more difficult than my interview with Erkhard, more difficult even than my meeting with Gorde, and some sixth sense warned me that this man was much more unpredictable. The clatter of cups came as a distinct relief. Yousif moved, silent as a shadow, on to the rooftop and poured us coffee from a battered silver pot. The cups were handleless, the Mocha coffee black and bitter.

  “Does his mother know he’s dead?” It surprised me that Whitaker should think of her; and when I told him that I’d broken the news to her myself, he asked: “How did she take it?”

  “She didn’t believe it at first.” And because I had an overwhelming desire to break through his strange aura of calm, I added: “In fact, she seemed to think it was your own death I was reporting.”

  “Why? Why did she think I was dead?”

  “The stars,” I said. “She believes in astrology.”

  He sighed. “Yes, I remember now. I used to talk to her about the stars.” And he added: “It’s a long time ago. A long time.”

  “Do you believe in astrology, then?�
�� I asked.

  He shrugged, sipping noisily at his coffee. “Here in the desert we live a great deal by the stars. It is very difficult not to believe that they have some influence.” And then, abruptly changing the conversation: “How did you get here? It’s not easy to get to Saraifa.” I started to tell him, but as soon as I mentioned Gorde, he said: “Philip Gorde? I didn’t know he was out here.” It seemed to upset him. “Did he tell you why he was here?” He mistook my silence. “No, of course not. He’d hardly tell you that.” He shook his cup at Yousif to indicate that he’d had enough, and when I did the same the man departed as silently as he had come, leaving a dish of some sticky sweetmeat between us. “Halwa. Do you like it?” Whitaker made a vague gesture of invitation.

  “I’ve never tried it.”

  We were alone again now and the silence between us hung heavy as the thick night air, a blanket through which each tried to gauge the other. I let it drag out, and it was Whitaker who finally broke it. “You were telling me about your journey.” He stared at me, waiting for me to continue. I broke off a piece of the halwa. It was cloying on the tongue and it had a sickly-sweet taste. “You arrived here with Entwhistle, one of the Company’s geologists. What was he doing on the Hadd border, do you know? The fellow had no business there.”

  “He was checking your son’s survey,” I said.

  There was a sudden stillness. “I see.” He said it quietly. And then, in a voice that was suddenly trembling with anger: “On whose orders? Not Philip Gorde’s surely?”

  “No.”

  “Erkhard?”

  “You seem very worried about this.”

  “Worried!” The word seemed forced out of him. “Don’t you understand what’s happened here tonight? The thing I’ve been dreading … The thing I’ve been trying to avoid ever since I knew.…” He checked himself. And then in a quieter voice: “No, you’re new out here. You wouldn’t understand. One of the falajes has been stopped. And all because of this blundering fool Entwhistle running a survey on the Hadd border.” His voice had risen again, trembling with anger.

  “He was doing what David was doing at the time he disappeared,” I said quietly.

  But it didn’t seem to register. He had withdrawn into his own thoughts. “Twenty years …” His voice sounded tired. And then his eye was staring at me again. “How would you feel if the thing you’d worked for over a period of twenty years was in danger of being ruined by young fools too impatient to understand the politics of the desert?” He turned his head and stared for a moment into the night. “The air is heavy. There’ll be a storm soon.” He gathered his robes about him and rose to his feet, crossing to the parapet and leaning against it, staring out into the desert like some Biblical figure from the distant past. “Come here, Grant.” And when I joined him, he stretched out his arm. “Look, do you see those dunes?” He gripped my arm, pointing west into the desert.

  Standing on that rooftop was like standing on the bridge of a ship lying anchored off a low-lying island. To the left lay the dark-treed expanse of the oasis, and beyond the date-gardens I could see the village and the squat bulk of the Sheikh’s palace standing on its gravel rise. But to the right, where his arm pointed, was nothing but desert. Dim in the moonlight the dunes stretched away into infinity, a ridged sea of sand, pale as milk.

  “When you’ve seen a storm here you’ll understand. Then all the desert seems in motion, like the sea beating against the shore of the oasis, flooding into the date-gardens. The dunes smoke. They stream with sand. They’re like waves breaking; the whole great desert of the Empty Quarter thundering in, the sand flowing like water.” He turned to me and his grip on my arm tightened. “The only thing that stands between Saraifa and destruction is the camel thorn. Out there—do you see? Those trees. They’re like a breakwater holding the sand sea back, and they’re dying for lack of water.”

  “The falajes?” I asked, and he nodded. “Entwhistle said there used to be around a hundred of them.”

  “Yes. We’ve traced them from aerial photographs.”

  “Your son was very much concerned about—”

  “Oh, yes, concerned … But he lacked patience. He was like a young bull. No subtlety. No subtlety at all.” And he added: “What’s been done tonight can be quickly repaired. There’s an open well every mile or so along the length of the underground channel of the falaj. They’ve blocked one of those wells with sand and stone. It can be unblocked almost as quickly. But the old falajes …” He shook his head. “The wells are fallen in, the underground channels collapsed. Restoring them is a lengthy and costly business. Sheikh Makhmud has managed to restore just one in the fourteen years he’s been Sheikh of Saraifa. It took two years and cost more than twenty thousand pounds. If Saraifa is to survive …” He gave a little shrug. “We need a dozen new falajes, not one.”

  “And only oil will pay for them?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “David took the same view,” I said. “That’s why he was prospecting on the Hadd border.” And I added: “What happened, Colonel Whitaker? What happened to your son?”

  He turned and looked at me. “You think I should know?”

  “I’ve come a long way,” I said, “in the certainty that you must know.”

  His eyebrows lifted, the single eye stared at me, not blinking. “The certainty?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The certainty.” And I added: “He was on loan to you at the time he disappeared. It was the seismological truck you purchased in Basra last June that he left abandoned on the side of a dune twenty miles inside the borders of Saudi Arabia. And just before he disappeared, you visited the Emir of Hadd. You must know what happened.”

  “Well, I don’t.” He said it flatly, and it was difficult not to accept it.

  “Then why did you visit Hadd?”

  “Who else could do it?” And he added: “David was on the Hadd border against my orders—against Sheikh Makhmud’s orders, too. Somebody had to try and convince the Emir there wasn’t any oil there.”

  “Because the border’s in dispute.”

  “Yes. There’s been trouble there ever since the Company was first granted a concession to prospect in Saraifa. As you probably know, Saraifa is an independent sheikhdom. Unlike the Trucial States, it’s not even in treaty relation with the British Crown, though it’s generally considered to be a part of the British sphere of influence. Hadd is different again. It’s independent in theory and in fact, and during the last few years it has strengthened its ties with Arab countries. Some years back we were finally driven to sending troops in, to keep the peace, and they occupied the fort of Jebel al-Akhbar overlooking the town of Hadd. But we couldn’t do that now. It would be much too dangerous.” He hesitated, and then he added: “The risk would only be justified if vital interests of our own were involved.”

  “What sort of vital interests?” I asked. But I knew the answer before he gave it.

  “Oil,” he said. “From a Western point of view—as you’d know if you’d been out here any length of time—everything in Arabia comes back to oil.”

  “Your son’s death, too?” I asked. He looked at me, but didn’t say anything. “When did you first hear he was missing?”

  “Towards the end of February.”

  “Could you give me a date?”

  He frowned and for a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer that. But then he said: “I can’t be certain. Your calendar doesn’t mean very much to us out here in the desert. But by the moon it would be about the beginning of the last week in February.”

  Almost a week before the abandoned truck had been found by the Bedouin, more than three weeks before his disappearance had been reported to the Company. “You didn’t notify Erkhard.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? David was in the Company’s employ, even if he was on loan to you.”

  He didn’t say anything. He seemed suddenly to have withdrawn inside himself. I think perhaps he was waiting for my next question, knowing it
was coming.

  “The truck was discovered abandoned on February twenty-eight,” I said. “Yet you say you knew he was missing almost a week before that. How did you know?”

  There was a long pause. At length he said: “Some askari were dispatched from Saraifa. When they reached his camp they found it deserted, not a soul there; the truck and the Land Rover had gone, too.”

  “Askari?”

  “Members of Sheikh Makhmud’s bodyguard. Their orders were to arrest him and bring him back to Saraifa.”

  “Alive?”

  “Of course.” He stared at me angrily. “What other instructions do you imagine they would be given? They were dispatched by Sheikh Makhmud—at my request. That was immediately after my return from Hadd.” And he added: “It was done for his own good—and because it was necessary. The Emir was in a very dangerous mood.”

  So that was how it had been. “And you didn’t want Erkhard to know that he’d been operating on the Hadd border?”

  “I didn’t want Erkhard to know and I didn’t want the political boys to know. As I’ve said, David was there against my express orders. God Almighty!” he breathed. “The impatience of youth! They want the moon for breakfast and the sun for lunch.” He leaned on the parapet, staring down to the white sand below. “I blame myself,” he said quietly. “I should have packed him off back to Cardiff. Instead, I let him stay. More, I tried to think of him as my son, as God’s gift from my loins, a prodigal given back into my hands.” He shook his head. “I should have known it wouldn’t work.”

  He paused there and I didn’t say anything, for I felt his isolation here might trap him into some self-revelation if I didn’t try to force it. He looked at me again, the desert lines deep-etched by the moon, a long, sad, solitary face. “As you know, I’m a Muslim. I wanted him to become a Muslim, too. I wanted him to make the desert his home and to carry on where I left off in due course.” He sighed softly. “I forgot the boy was already nineteen, and only half mine … and that half as obstinate as the devil.” He smiled. In that harsh face it was a smile of extraordinary tenderness. “I turned him into a Christian instead.” He said it with bitterness, adding: “In the end I think he came to hate me.”