The Doomed Oasis

by Innes, Hammond;

  “No. He doesn’t know.” His face was grey and haggard. “All this killing and destroying—it’s so bloody futile, a lust for oil. Can’t they understand the oil won’t last? It’s just a phase, and when it’s past they’ll be faced with the desert again; and the only thing that will matter then is what they’ve built with the oil against the future.” And he added angrily: “The Emir didn’t care a damn about that border until my father got Gorde to sign a concession. It was just sand, and nothing grew there. And then to cancel it … I can still remember the look on Sheikh Makhmud’s face that night. God!” he exclaimed. “The callousness of men like Erkhard—Gorde, too. They don’t care. These people are human beings, and they’re being buggered around by hard-faced men who think only in terms of commerce and money.”

  We were out of the alley, back in the glare of the crowded market place. He spoke to Salim and gave him money, a handful of Maria Theresa silver dollars poured from a leather bag, and then we settled ourselves in the dust by the entrance gate, leaning our backs against the crumbling mud walls amongst a crowd of listless refugees who watched us curiously. “I’ve sent Salim to buy fresh camels,” David said. “We’ll leave as soon as he returns.”

  “How long will it take us to reach the Hadd border?” I was feeling very tired.

  But his mind was on Khalid. “I must find out what’s happened to him.” He was silent a long time then, tracing patterns in the sand with his camel stick. And then abruptly he rubbed them out with the flat of his palm. “If he’s dead …” His emotions seemed to grip him by the throat, so that the sentence was cut off abruptly. And then, his voice suddenly practical: “In that case, there are his men. He had more than a score of them, a paid personal bodyguard. Wahiba mostly and some Rashid; all good fighters.” He was staring hungrily out into the burning distance of the desert. “I need men,” he whispered, his teeth clenched. “Men who’ll fight. Not these—” He gestured with contempt at the listless figures around us. “A score of men properly armed and I could put the fear of God into that bloody little Emir.”

  I didn’t bother to ask him how, for I thought it was just wishful thinking and all in his imagination. My eyes were closing with the heat and the weariness of my aching muscles. I heard him say something about getting me to Sharjah as soon as he could, and then I was asleep.

  I woke to the voices of Salim and the two Wahiba; they were arguing loudly whilst David sat listening, a tattered Bible propped on the rifle across his knees. Two camels stood disdainfully in front us. “They’ve become infected with the mood of this place, blast them!” David closed the Book and got to his feet. A crowd was beginning to collect. He said something to Hamid and the man looked suddenly like a dog that’s been beaten. And then David took his rifle from him and handed it to me. “Come on!” he said. “Let’s get going.” He spoke angrily to the two Wahiba and then we mounted.

  The camels were thoroughbred Oman racing camels. I could feel the difference immediately. The crowd parted, letting us through, and we picked our way daintily down the rocks. Out on the flat gravel of the desert below, we moved into an ungainly canter, circling the hill on which Dhaid rested and heading northeast again.

  “These people,” David said, “they’re so damned uncertain—full of guts one minute, craven the next. Salim I didn’t expect to come. But Hamid and Ali …” He sounded depressed. “My father now, he can handle them the way I’ll never be able to.” There was admiration, a note of envy in his voice. “They’d never have left him in the lurch.” We rode in silence then and at a gruelling pace, the heat very great, so that I was thankful for the water we had got at Dhaid.

  We camped at dusk and David had just lighted a fire when he turned suddenly and grabbed his rifle. I heard the pad of camels’ feet and then the riders emerged out of the gathering darkness. There were three of them, and David relaxed. “Salim, too,” he whispered. He didn’t give them any greeting, and they slunk to the fire like dogs. I gave Hamid back his rifle. He took it as though it were a gift and made me a long speech of thanks. “They’re like children,” David said. His voice sounded happy.

  We had a handful of dates each and some coffee, that was all. And then we rode on.

  In the early hours of the morning, with the moon high and a white miasma of mist lying over the desert, we approached the ninth well of the Mahdah falaj. Hamid and Ali were scouting ahead on either flank. David and Salim rode close together, their rifles ready-to-hand across their knees. The tension had been mounting all through that night ride, for we’d no idea what we were going to find at the end of it.

  For the first time I rode my camel without conscious thought of what I was doing, my whole being concentrated in my eyes, searching the mist ahead. The desert was very still and, half concealed under that white veil, it had a strange, almost eerie quality. From far ahead came a weird banshee howl. It rose to a high note and then dropped to an ugly cough. “Hyena,” David said and there was loathing in his voice. The sound, repeated much nearer and to our flank, checked my camel in its stride. It was an eerie, disgusting sound. A little later Salim stopped to stare at some camel tracks. There were droppings, too, and he dismounted, sifted them through his fingers, smelt them, and then delivered his verdict: men of the Bait Kathir, and they had come south the night before with two camels belonging to Saraifa.

  “Loot,” David said, and we rode on in silence until about ten minutes later Hamid signalled to us. He had sighted the first corpse. It had been stripped of its clothes and there wasn’t much meat left on the bones, which stared white through the torn flesh. The teeth, bared in the remains of a beard, had fastened in agony upon a tuft of dried-up herb.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight with the sand all trampled round about and stained black with blood, and after that the bodies lay thick. They had been caught in ambush and slaughtered as they rushed a small gravel rise where the enemy had lain in wait. There were camels, too, their carcasses bared to the bones and white and brittle-looking like the withered remains of dwarf trees dead of drought. The whole place smelt of death, and things moved on the edge of visibility. Two men slunk away like ghouls, mounted their camels, and disappeared into the mist.

  We let them go, for David’s only interest was to discover whether Khalid had been killed. Methodically he and Salim checked every corpse, whilst the two Wahiba scouted the edges of the battlefield. David could put names to most of the bodies, despite decomposition and the mutilations of scavengers, and one I recognized myself: the leader of Khalid’s escort. He lay face down in the tire marks of a Land Rover, and close beside him were the bodies of three more of Khalid’s men, stripped of their clothes and arms.

  We hadn’t far to go after that. The tire marks lipped a rise, and a little beyond, the burnt-out remains of the Land Rover itself loomed out of the mist. They had sought cover behind it, and their bodies had been ripped to pieces by a murderous fire. Khalid lay with eyeless sockets and half his face torn away. The near-naked body was already disintegrating, and where the stomach had been torn open the rotten flesh crawled with maggots and the blood was dry and black like powder. Four of his men lay near him in much the same state of putrefaction.

  “The waste!” David breathed. He was standing, staring down at the remains of his friend, and there were tears in his eyes. “The bloody, senseless waste!” There was a shovel still clipped to the Land Rover, its handle burnt away. He seized it and attacked the ground with violent energy, digging a shallow grave. And when we’d laid what was left of Khalid to rest and covered it with sand, David stood back with bowed head. “He might have saved Saraifa. He was the only one of them who had the vision and the drive and energy to do it.” He wiped his face with his headcloth. “May he rest in peace, and may Allah guide him to the world beyond.” He turned his back abruptly on the grave and strode blindly off across the sand towards the gravel rise that had been the scene of the ambush.

  Along the back of it ran a ridge of bare rock. Behind it the ground was scattered with the br
ass of empty cartridges. “War surplus.” He tossed one of them to me. “Governments sell that stuff. They never think of the loss of life their bloody auctions will ultimately cause. A pity the little bureaucrat …” But he let it go at that, wandering on along the ridge. At four places we came upon the empty magazines of automatic guns; in each case they lay beside the tire marks of vehicles. “They hadn’t a chance,” he said bitterly and started back to where Salim waited with the camels.

  Before we reached them, Ali came hurrying back. He had been scouting to the east, along the line of the falaj, and had almost stumbled into a small Hadd force camped by the next well. He said the walls of the well had been thrown down, the whole thing filled with sand and rock. We waited for Hamid. He was a long time coming, and when he did arrive his manner was strange, his eyes rolling in his head as words poured out of him. “He’s just buried his father,” David said. “The old man’s body had a dozen bullets in it.” Grimly he gave the order to mount.

  I was glad to go. Dawn was breaking and a hot wind beginning to blow from the northwest. I was sick of the sight of so much death. So was David. This, after the lonely weeks he’d spent in that filthy area of quicksands … I didn’t need the set, withdrawn look of his face, the occasional mumbling of the lips to tell me that he was mentally very near the end of his tether. “Where are we going?” I asked as we rode towards the next well, the wall of which was just visible on the horizon, a little rock turret above the drifting, moving sands.

  “Saraifa,” he said. “I’ll know the worst then.” I think he could already picture the misery that awaited us.

  Halfway there we met with a family of the Junuba heading towards the mountains with a long string of camels loaded with dates for the coast. They gave us the news. The last falaj had ceased to flow that morning. Sheikh Makhmud was said to have died during the night. His brother, Sheikh Sultan, ruled in his place. We purchased some dates from them—we had been unable to buy any supplies in Dhaid—and hurried on.

  All the way to Saraifa the traces of disaster were with us: the carcass of a camel, a body sprawled in the sand, discarded arms. But, according to the Junuba, the Emir’s men were not in the oasis. “They don’t need to attack now,” David said. “They can sit on the falajes they’ve destroyed and just wait for the end, like vultures waiting for a man to die.” And he added: “Sheikh Sultan will make peace. He’s a gutless, effeminate old man, and they know it.”

  The wind increased in force until it was blowing a strong shamal and we never saw Saraifa until the crumbling walls of a date-garden appeared abruptly out of the miasma clouds of wind-blown sand. The palms thrashed in the blinding air as they closed around us.

  We passed a patch of cultivation, the green crop already wilted and turning sear. And when we reached the first shireeya, we found it dry, the mud bottom hard as concrete, split with innumerable cracks. The falaj channel that supplied it was empty. The skeletal shape of little fish lay in the sand at the bottom of it.

  Only when we came to the outskirts of Saraifa itself was there any sign of human activity. Camels were being loaded, household possessions picked over. But most of the barastis were already empty, the human life gone from them. Men stopped to talk to us, but only momentarily. They were bent on flight.

  It was the same when we reached the mud buildings in the centre of Saraifa. Everywhere there were beasts being loaded. But it was the tail end of the exodus; most of the houses were already deserted. And in the great square under the palace walls the watering place no longer delivered its precious fluid to a noisy crowd of boys with their asses; the ground round it was caked hard, and the only persons there were an old man and a child of about two.

  We circled the walls and came to the main gate. The great wooden portals were closed. No retainers stood guard on the bastions above. The palace had the look of a place shut against the plague and given over to despair David sat for a moment on his camel, looking down on the date-gardens half hidden beneath the weight of driven sand, and tears were streaming down his face. He turned to me suddenly and swore an oath, demanding that the Almighty should be his witness—and the oath was the destruction of Hadd. “Khalid is dead,” he added, and his eyes burned in their sockets. “Now I must do what he’d have done, and I’ll not rest till the falajes are running again—not only the five they’ve destroyed, but the others, too. That I swear, before Almighty God, or my life is worth nothing.”

  We rode out of Saraifa then, leaving behind us the pitiful sight of a people driven from their homes by thirst, heading into the desert, our heads bent against the wind, our mouths covered. Once David paused, his arm flung out, pointing. “Now you see it. Now you see the Rub al Khali rolling in like the sea.” And indeed it did look like the sea, for through gaps in the flying curtain of sand I could see the dunes smoking like waves in the gusts, the sand blowing off their tops in streamers. “That’s what Khalid was fighting. Like water, isn’t it? Like water flooding in over a low-lying land.” And, riding on, he said: “With the people gone, the wells all dry … this place won’t last long.” His words came in snatches on the wind. “How long will they survive, do you think—those families hurrying to go? They’re not nomads. They can’t live in the sands. They’ll die by slow degrees, turned away by sheikh after sheikh who fears they and their beasts will drink his own people out of water. And what can they live on when their camels are gone?”

  He was riding close beside me then, “Sometimes I hate the human race … hate myself, too, for being human and as cruel as the rest.” And then quietly, his teeth clenched, his eyes blazing: “There’ll be men die in Hadd for what I’ve seen today.”

  It was the strange choice of words, the way he was trembling, and the violence in his manner—I thought he’d been driven half out of his mind by Khalid’s death and the tragic things we’d seen.

  “All I need is a few men,” he whispered to me. “Khalid’s are all dead. Half a dozen men, that’s all I need.”

  The sun’s heat increased and the wind gradually died. I suffered badly from thirst, for we hadn’t much water left and we were riding fast. Towards midday, in a flat gravel pan between high dunes, we came upon the tracks of heavy vehicles. We followed them and shortly afterwards heard the roar of diesels. It was the drilling-rig, both trucks floundering in a patch of soft sand. The big eight-wheeler was out in front, the rig folded down across its back, and it was winching the second truck, loaded with pipe and fuel drums, across the soft patch.

  They were working with furious energy, for they’d had refugees from Saraifa through their camp just before they’d pulled out, and they were scared. We stopped with them long enough to brew coffee and give our beasts a rest, and when we rode on, David said to me: “Why’s he want to bring that rig here now? What good will it do?” He was haggard-eyed, his face pale under its tan. “They told me he’d requisitioned Entwhistle’s seismological outfit—the men as well as the truck. He did that just after the battle, when he knew what had happened. I don’t understand it. He must realize it’s too late now.…”

  The shadows of the dunes were lengthening, their crests sharp-etched against the flaming sky. We were working our way across them then, and as the sun finally sank, we came to the top of a dune, out of the shadow into the lurid light of the blood-red sunset, and in the gravel flat below we saw the tracks of vehicles and the blackened circles of campfires. “Location B,” David said, and we rode down into shadow again.

  The camp had been abandoned that morning. So much Salim was able to tell us from the ashes of the campfires, and after that we kept just below the dune crests, riding cautiously, with Ali scouting ahead.

  We’d only just lost sight of the abandoned camp when the thud of an explosion shook the ground and the sands on the steep face of a dune opposite slid into motion with a peculiar thrumming, singing sound. Our camels stood halted, their bodies trembling, and the singing sound of the sands went on for a long time. There was no further explosion. But almost as soon as we started
forward again, Ali called to us and at the same moment there was the crack of a rifle and a bullet sang uncomfortably close.

  I don’t remember dismounting. I was suddenly stretched on the sand with Salim pulling my camel down beside me. David and Hamid were crawling forward to the dune crest, their guns ready. I thought for a moment we had been ambushed. But then Ali shouted a greeting. He had dropped his rifle and was standing up, throwing sand into the air. It was the Bedou sign that we came in friendship, and in a moment we were dragging our camels down the steep face of the dune and three Arabs were running to meet us, brandishing their weapons and shouting.

  We had reached Colonel Whitaker’s camp at Location C.

  The tents were huddled against the base of a dune, black shapes in the fading light, and out on the gravel flat Entwhistle’s seismological truck stood, lit by the glow of cooking-fires. There were perhaps fifteen men in that camp, and they flitted towards us like bats in the dusk. As they crowded round us, one of them recognized David. All was confusion then, a babel of tongues asking questions, demanding news.

  David didn’t greet them. I doubt whether he even saw them. His eyes were fixed on his father, who had come out of one of the tents and was standing, waiting for us, a dark, robed figure in silhouette against the light of a pressure lamp. David handed his camel to Salim and went blindly forward. I think he still held his father in some awe, but as I followed him I began to realize how much the day had changed him. He had purpose now, a driving, overriding purpose that showed in the way he strode forward.

  There wasn’t light enough for me to see the expression on Colonel Whitaker’s face when he realized who it was. And he didn’t speak, even when David stood directly in front of him. Neither of them spoke. They just stood there, staring at each other. I was close enough then to see Whitaker’s face. It was without expression. No surprise, no sign of any feeling.