The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  The newcomers rode straight up to the head of the column. I remembered ‘Ali as a gangly boy, thin as a rake — the son of one of Mukhtar’s wives who’d died in childbirth. Even as a child, I recalled, he’d had a fascination for weapons, constantly taking rifles and pistols to pieces and reassembling them. He looked like a younger version of Mukhtar himself, wiry even by Hawazim standards, with a long, narrow face and a trim goatee beard. ‘Peace be on you!’ he called.

  ‘And on you!’ I replied. ‘Who shot the plain-clothes man?’

  ‘I did!’ Ali said proudly, holding up a sniper’s rifle with a telescopic sight. ‘I call this weapon Hawk’s Eye.’

  ‘“The master’s stroke is worth a thousand”,’ I said, quoting a Hazmi proverb. ‘A split-second later and Elena might be dead. Where on earth did you get those weapons from anyway?’

  ‘We stole them in Libya, and a Hazmi who’d been in the army taught us how to use them. We’re crack shots now!’

  ‘Thank you!’ I said. ‘You saved our lives!’

  ‘The thanks is to God. One day, perhaps — God willing — you will save ours!’

  The troop rode off and joined the column farther down. Mansur spurred his camel and caught up with us. ‘Aren’t we going back to the village?’ Elena asked him.

  ‘No. It’s the first place they’d look,’ he said. ‘Even if the men weren’t there, they’d hold the women and children hostage. Thank God they didn’t already. They came into the village not long after sunrise this morning in a convoy of twelve vehicles.’

  ‘The convoy that passed us in the night!’ Elena said.

  ‘I don’t know, but they were looking for you, and somehow they knew you might be with us. We swore we hadn’t seen you, but they searched the village and found your motor-cycle. Things looked bad, and I thought they might try to take some of us hostage, so I offered to show them where you were.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It was the only way to be sure we knew where they were. Anyway, they sent seven cars off somewhere else and five after you. I guessed from my talk with father last night you were heading for Khan al-Anaq and sure enough, 1 located your tracks. I’d already primed our best trackers to follow. While the police were lying up behind the dune, waiting for you to come back, our men silenced the sentries and brought the camels up quietly. Then I slipped away from the police, sent ‘Ali and his guns up to a high position to cover us, and we crawled through the desert until we were near the ruins.’

  ‘Praise be to God.’

  ‘The Blessings of the Divine Spirit be upon us. We’ll need it where we’re going.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Elena asked.

  ‘To the Jilf.’

  ‘What’s the Jilf?’

  ‘It’s a Hawazim place.’

  ‘It’s a natural fortress in the middle of al-Ghul,’ I explained, ‘a huge mountain massif as big as Corsica, riddled with cave complexes so vast you can get lost in them, and criss-crossed by wadis with walls thousands of feet high. The Jilf’s like a whole country in itself, and it has everything the Hawazim need: water, grazing for the animals, shelter. There are only two entrances: one through a cleft called the Siq, and another underground through a series of caves — so they can’t be sneaked up on.’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘It’s three days’ ride across al-Ghul — a hard journey at the best of times, but in a ghibli...’

  ‘Sssh!’ Mansur hissed. ‘Look at this!’

  He pointed with his camel-stick. For a moment I held my camel back and listened. There it was, that eerie boooooommm! boooommm! of Raul’s drum that set your teeth on edge, and icy fingers clawing your spine. The columns of dust had mushroomed into giant whirling vortices hundreds of feet high. ‘Get out your ropes,’ Mukhtar bawled. Every man snatched from his saddle-bag a length of rope ten or twelve feet long, looped at both ends, and fitted one loop around his front saddle-horn and flung the other to the rider in front, who fitted it over his rear horn. ‘This is the only way we can keep together in a ghibli,’ Mansur shouted. ‘Once it strikes, it’s like the darkest night.’

  Elena and I rummaged in our saddle-bags, found our ropes and fitted them, only just in time. Suddenly Raul’s drum was a deafening roar — the engines of a B52 bomber fed through a million amplifiers. I saw Elena cover her ears. The very earth seemed to shake. The Hawazim pulled down their hoods, knotted their shamaghs across their faces and bent low over their saddle-horns. ‘Here it comes!’ Mansur growled, as the air convulsed and the wall of dust punched into us with incredible speed, almost knocking us out of our saddles. The camels tried to swing around away from the onslaught. The power of the wind was shocking. I never remembered having been through any storm as raw and terrifying as this. The whole desert seemed alive with some malicious, primeval force. I felt a wave of fear breaking inside me; it was the storm rumbling back across the generations, an instinctive terror out of the collective memory of the tribe. The sky was so dark that I could scarcely make out the riders in front of me, and the sand-devils screamed around my head like banshees, chattering, rasping, cackling in my ears. I leaned across the saddle-horn like the others and held tight as my camel pounded on grimly, snuffling as the sand gathered around its sealed nostrils, turning its head out of the storm. Seams of damp red sand began to form along the folds of my jibba. There were crashes like peals of thunder overhead, and beneath the camels’ feet the ground seemed to bank and yaw. The dust clouds coiled around us like enormous serpents, wailing and spitting. Suddenly I saw the shadows of more camels — dozens of them — standing, half-hidden in the furls of the dust. These were big bull-camels, heavily laden with litters of tiny cloth tents that billowed like sails, and hung with rolled tents, rugs, blankets, saddle-bags, chests, pots and utensils. They carried the women, children, old people, and the entire possessions of the tribe. The Hawazim women had quickly and efficiently loaded everything they owned on to their camels and simply faded into the desert as they had been doing for generations. They had nothing that couldn’t be carried on a camel; their belongings were pared down to the bare minimum. As we drew nearer, Aysha’s child-like face peeked at us cheekily out of her litter, and I saw that she was now dressed in a full-length dark shirt, her hair covered with a tightly-bound headcloth. ‘Peace be on you!’ she screeched through the storm. ‘Thank God for your safe arrival!’

  As we passed, a brown arm emerged from the litter, swinging a length of rope with a loop on the end. ‘Join on the last camel!’ Mukhtar shouted at her. The caravan halted for a moment while the women’s camels were hitched up. Mukhtar ordered ‘Ali and his men to take a Hawazim tabla and bring up the rear.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Elena yelled to me. Her voice was so tightly muffled by the shamagh across her face that she sounded as if she were trying to shout under water.

  ‘It’s an old Hawazim trick!’ I yelled back. ‘The last person in the caravan beats the drum so that the guide knows the caravan is all there. It’s used for night marches. Simple but ingenious, like most Hawazim things!’

  In a few minutes ‘Ali’s tabla boomed out from the back. Mukhtar gave the order to move, and the camels plodded into the eye of the storm. For hour after hour we marched to the beat of the drum, until we were half mesmerised by the noise and the constant barrage of dust in our faces. Soon night fell, and we stalked on in almost total darkness, unable to do anything but cling on to our camels, each of us marooned in his or her own private world. We were heading straight into al-Ghul, the most fearsome tract of desert on earth. We could not go back, for behind us Hammoudi waited. Our lives now depended on my uncle, Mukhtar, and all the skill and knowledge he’d acquired in a lifetime of survival. Tonight there were no stars to guide him, no moon to steer by, and I prayed to the Divine Spirit I’d ceased to believe in long ago, that he knew the way. For the slightest variation from true would mean ending up in waterless, trackless desert, hundreds of miles from anywhere, completely lost.

  36

 
It took three days to reach the Jilf, and they were three of the hardest days I remember. The wind never let up completely, and we rode on blinded by dust with grit in our throats, and a constantly nagging thirst. During the occasional lulls Mulch-tar would halt the caravan, and we’d drink a gourd of water each — no more, no less — and eat a strip of biltong. Sometimes we’d halt long enough to snatch a few hours’ sleep under a blanket slung from the camels’ backs, but very soon it would be off again into the cutting edge of the storm. When the ghibli finally blew itself out an hour before dawn on the fourth day, the desert seemed so unnaturally silent that my ears filled the night with imaginary seashell sounds. The sunrise brought us a new desert of many colours, washed and raked clean by the wind, and there, blocking out the horizon, lay the massive granite island of the Jilf.

  It was as breathtaking as I remembered it, a baroque city from a mystic’s dream, an ochre-coloured sprawl of grooves, clefts, galleries and twisted natural pillars that gave the impression in places that it was in the process of meltdown, and in others that there were strange beasts — dragons, griffons and centaurs — imprisoned in the rock straining and stretching to get out. As we neared the entrance to the Siq, almost invisible until you were upon it, Elena craned her neck to gaze up at an ancient, sand-blasted red butte that towered thousands of feet above us, shaped like a hunchbacked man crouching forward with his hands around his knees. ‘They call that “The Doorkeeper”,’ I told her, and realised suddenly that my lips were cracked and painful. ‘It guards the entrance to the Siq.’

  ‘When did you last see this place, Jamie?’ she asked hoarsely.

  ‘Not since I was small. It’s amazing what stays in your head.’

  Mukhtar couched his camel near the entrance, and all around us camels blubbered and rumbled as they were barracked and unhitched. Many spread their legs and staled and the air was heavy with the smell of camel-urine. Men and women slid out of the saddle, stretched, groaned, and began to unlace waterbags for a drink. Elena and I dismounted stiffly and went to join Mukhtar, crouching by the Siq entrance. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it!’ I told my uncle, coughing dust. ‘Three days’ march across al-Ghul in a Mother storm, and you bring us right to the point you were aiming for.’

  Mukhtar moistened his white lips with his tongue. ‘Man shabb ‘ala shi shabb ‘alay,’ he said, ‘“He who grows up with a thing grows old on it”. It’s simply a skill, like any other. The praise belongs not to me, but to the people. Not a peep of complaint even from a child. You couldn’t have got a trained army to do that. And thank God it only lasted three days. It was a Mother storm all right, but I’ve seen worse. I remember one that lasted two whole weeks.’

  ‘Yes, so do I,’ Mansur said, his one good eye glittering wryly as he hunkered down with us and unstrung a waterbag, ‘but we didn’t ride through it, did we!’

  He filled a gourd with water and handed it to his father.

  Mukhtar took it with both hands: ‘The thanks is to God,’ he said. ‘This is my reward.’ He drank a little, then lifted the cup. ‘Here’s a salute, Omar!’ he said. ‘To your friend Elena. She’s the only one here not brought up in Hawazim ways, yet she went through the ghibli without a murmur. At first I thought her a mollycoddled city girl. But she’s proved herself as good as any Hazmiyya.’

  ‘Amen!’ I said, knowing that Mukhtar had just doled out the highest praise anyone could ever expect from a Hazmi. Elena blushed, but looked pleased.

  ‘If you don’t marry her, you’re a fool,’ my uncle added. ‘And do it quick, or I’ll marry her myself!’ Elena and I looked at each other, and burst into embarrassed laughter.

  ‘Here,’ Mansur butted in roughly, pushing a cup in my direction, ‘drink water. It’s the last you’ll get until we reach the Makhrubat. The waterbags are all flabby as townsmen’s bellies. One more day would’ve killed us all.’

  ‘At least the government won’t be able to follow us here,’ I said. ‘Our tracks are long gone.’

  Mukhtar stood up, as if reminded suddenly that Hammoudi was after us. ‘Aye,’ he growled, ‘the ghibli has covered our tracks all right, but the government have got aeroplanes and those whirling chopper things. They’ll soon be out now the storm’s down. We must get under cover. Mansur, send ‘Ali and his scouts into the Siq to clear it. Get everyone else mounted.’

  The Siq was a fissure in the rock, made aeons ago when the mountain above had split apart due to tectonic pressure, and was just wide enough to allow the camels to pass in single file. It twisted and turned into the heart of the massif, under overhangs and through half-caverns where the light washed along the walls in prismatic colours, along the foot of sheer, vertical chasms where the surface patina of manganese red seemed to have dripped and trickled down like toffee. It took an hour to get through it, and out into the great wadi beyond, opening like a magnificent imperial amphitheatre between stacks of sandstone so massive that an aeroplane could safely have wheeled and turned between them.

  Ali and his scouts returned to the main column a little later and reported that the way ahead was clear. ‘There are no fresh tracks, Father,’ Ali said. ‘No one has been here recently, and there has been rain this year; the grazing is abundant.’

  ‘Thanks be to God!’ Mukhtar muttered. ‘As long as the beasts have grazing, we shall have milk.’

  The news spread like wildfire through the company and the tribesmen began to urge their camels forward. The line broke into a series of knots as the animals lifted their heads, pricked up their ears and stretched out their great necks, pressing flank against flank together. Someone began to sing a tribal chant. First one man, then another, picked up the strain, and soon voices were combining in unison as the whole tribe roared together in full-throated harmony. Elena laughed. ‘What are they singing about?’ she asked.

  I cocked my ear to pick up the words. ‘About the beauty of women,’ I told her, ‘about the coolness of water, and the gift of green things, a description of Hawazim paradise.’

  She laughed again and my spirits soared suddenly. The dark alleys of Cairo — Julian, Nikolai — it seemed a world away. As we surged along the great wadi, the sandstone stacks seemed to grow even higher, their walls so grainy that they might have been vast pieces of ancient machinery pitted and rusted by time. In places pinnacles had separated themselves from the stacks and stood alone, planted in drifts of strawberry-pink sand, tilted over at perilous angles. Some of them were still attached to the main stacks by natural bridges, and others looked like trees or giant fungi with slender pedestals at ground level, and broad heads hundreds of feet above. Elena studied them with a round ‘o’ of wonder on her lips. Then, with no warning, Mukhtar swung his mount sharply into a hidden recess, an oval of rock half a mile in depth, so perfect it might have been hollowed out with a laser. Suddenly the voices fell silent. The knots of men began to fracture into single file. Some way up the facing wall, at perhaps two or three hundred feet, I saw two great arches opening in the rock. ‘That’s our place!’ Mukhtar said, pointing upwards. ‘You remember, Omar? Makhrubat al-Musawwara — The Caves of the Pictures.’

  The caves were reached by a perilous, winding path, wide enough for a laden camel to pass but so steep the beasts were panting before they arrived at the entrance. We slipped down from the saddle and hauled them the last few yards, through the mouth and into the caves. The caves were even bigger than I recalled. They were vast, a system of interlocking galleries opening out of each other, deep into the belly of the rock, incorporating rock pedestals, pillars and arches, so that they actually gave you the impression they’d been designed by warped and delirious human beings. ‘This is incredible!’ Elena said, as we led the camels inside. We both stared at the high vaulted ceiling in awe. The cave — which would have housed a division of troops — was divided into two by a dry-stone wall which separated the humans’ quarters from those of the camels. The Hawazim barracked their household camels amid a cacophony of noise, and unloaded their gear.
Saddles, litters, boxes, and saddle-bags were thrown down, bedrolls and rugs quickly spread, three-stone fireplaces set up and camel-dung fires lit. Families gathered around their own hearths. The dring-drang of coffee-mortars rang out invitingly, amplified by the acoustics of the chamber. The herdsboys collected the camels and led them down the steep path to the wadi where they would graze for the day. Mukhtar despatched guards for the herds, and sent ‘Ali and his scouts to set up the machine-gun in the Siq, just in case anyone should try to take us unawares.

  While Aysha supervised the unloading of Mukhtar’s baggage, my uncle took an oil lamp and led Elena and me into a series of tunnels at the back of the cave, through an aperture only just wide enough for us to pass, and into a cavern as large as the entrance-cave. High up in the rock ceiling a single opening let in a thick shaft of light, which was reflected back on a rippling, translucent surface. Elena sniffed at the moisture in the air, and whispered, ‘Water!’

  Mukhtar laughed with pleasure. ‘This is the real treasure of the Jilf,’ he said, shining his torch on a water-pool that extended fifty yards through the cave. Even though I’d seen the pool before, I couldn’t stop my mouth falling open in astonishment. This really was a Hazmi’s paradise.

  ‘When I was a young man I once dived into the water to find out how deep it was,’ Mukhtar said. ‘They tried to stop me; they say a demon serpent of immense size haunts the place. Anyway I did it, and it was so deep I couldn’t find the bottom. And by God it was cold! I didn’t find any serpent, though.’