The Hidden Oasis

by Paul Sussman

  Freya should have known by now that the moment it looked as if things were going to work out OK, something would invariably happen to ensure that they didn’t.

  As soon as she and Said had topped out – clambering their way onto the flat ground at the head of the cliff – she had swung round and looked down to check on Flin’s progress. The gorge had now narrowed to little more than the width of two tennis courts, its floor no longer visible, nothing visible save for the brilliant, burning ember of the Benben as it continued to shoot streaks of fierce red lightning up through the dust clouds into the sky above. In any other circumstances she would have been transfixed by what she saw, by the sheer impossibility of it. But her eyes were locked on Flin, watching intently as he worked his way up the final run of ladders, her confidence rising with each step he took.

  ‘Keep going!’ she yelled, hope surging within her as she realized he would be OK. ‘You’re going to do it! You’re almost there! Keep going!’

  Even as she shouted the ground beneath her feet had given a sudden, jarring lurch and the ladder Flin was climbing – Christ, he was so near, just a few metres off the summit! – started to pull backwards away from the cliff face. For a few brief, heart-stopping moments it had looked as if he might still be able to scrabble his way to safety. But then the pinions holding the top of the ladder in situ popped from the wall and the whole thing had toppled backwards, taking Flin with it.

  ‘No!’ she had screamed, burying her face in her hands. ‘Oh God no.’

  She was distraught, shattered, unable to believe that after everything they had been through these last few days, all the dangers they had faced and overcome, it should end like this, at the very final hurdle. So distraught and shattered that when, a few moments later, she caught a distant cry of ‘Hello!’ she dismissed it as a shock-induced trick of the imagination. Only when the cry came again, more insistent this time, percolating upwards through the reverberating crash of shunting rock, and at the same moment Said grasped her shoulder, did she realize that it wasn’t her mind playing games. She snatched her hands away from her face and looked over the edge of the precipice.

  ‘Flin! Flin!’

  He was standing below her, about ten metres down, clinging to a ladder while another – the one that had fallen away from the cliff – now dangled limply beside it like a shattered arm. She saw immediately what had happened: while the spikes securing the top of the upper ladder had failed, those holding its bottom end – or at least one of them – had somehow held firm in the rock, the steps performing a sort of twisting back flip and slamming into the cliff face below.

  By some miracle the impact hadn’t knocked Flin loose and he had managed to clamber onto the relative safety of the lower ladder. Freya felt a euphoric rush of joy and relief. It lasted perhaps a couple of seconds, then evaporated as the full picture started to come home to her. He was alive, but certainly wasn’t going to be for much longer.

  It wasn’t simply that the gorge walls were getting nearer by the second, pressing in on him like a gigantic pair of hands about to crush a fly. There should still have been just about enough time for him to climb out of the oasis. The problem was he had nothing to climb up. Between the top of the ladder on which Flin was perched and the bottom of the one that would bring him up to the cliff’s summit there were now five metres of empty space. For a brief moment she thought they might be able to get the fallen ladder back in position to bridge the gap, but as she watched the last remaining spike slid out of the cliff face and the ladder plummeted away into the maelstrom beneath.

  ‘Shit,’ she hissed.

  There was a pause, all of them standing frozen, no one knowing what to do. Flin shook his head as if to say: ‘It’s no good, there’s no way up,’ whatever slim chance he might have had growing slimmer with each passing second. Then, knowing it was futile, but also that she at least had to make some attempt to help him, Freya swung herself onto the topmost ladder and started back down into the gorge. Said tried to stop her, insisted he should be the one to go, but she knew that she stood the best chance. Shrugging away his hand, she continued her descent.

  Even the most experienced climber feels fear, and Freya was no exception. Sometimes it is low-level, nothing more than a speeding of the heart or a tingling in the gut. Other times it can be more intense, your entire being seeming to recoil and shrivel as you teeter on the brink of your own mortality. Freya had known both extremes and most things in between. But never, ever had she been as frightened as she was now, the ladder jolting beneath her, the approaching cliffs swamping her peripheral vision. Somehow she managed to keep the fear at bay, stowing it in the farthest corner of her consciousness and pushing herself downwards, moving from rung to rung until she had reached the foot of the ladder.

  ‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous!’ Flin was bellowing, waving her away. ‘Go back! Go on, get out!’

  She ignored him. Bouncing a couple of times to ensure the ladder was still secure, she hooked a leg through its bottom rung, grasped the next but one rung above and leant out, hanging practically upside down, reaching towards him. Still yelling at her to get away, Flin mirrored the movement, climbing almost to the top of his ladder and extending his hand towards hers. Even at their fullest and most desperate stretch there was still the best part of a metre between their fingertips. They tried again, and again, giving it everything they could, adjusting their positions, elongating their arms until it felt as if the tendons were going to snap, but it was no use and finally they were forced to admit defeat. Flin descended a few rungs, Freya pulled herself upright again.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ he yelled, glancing to left and right. The advancing rock walls were now at the outer limits of the ladder trail, the wooden steps starting to snap and shatter as a million tons of solid stone slowly ground over them. ‘Please, Freya, it’s over. Just get out. Save yourself. Go! Please go!’

  Again she ignored him, leaning back out and examining the rock face below, trying to see if there was any way of getting closer to him, of bridging that extra metre of space.

  There was a clear foothold just beneath her, a jagged hole ripped in the stone when the pinion securing the top of the missing ladder had torn itself free. If she could ease herself down onto that, keep a grip on the bottom rung of her ladder, that would bring her a bit nearer, give her some extra reach.

  It still wasn’t enough. Frantically she scanned back and forth, searching for something – anything – that might help. A horizontal crack ran across the rock face about two metres above Flin’s ladder, just about sufficient to provide a secure finger-hold. Even if he managed to get himself up there, that still left at least twenty centimetres between the crack and the very farthest she could stretch her hand towards him. She howled in frustration. It might as well have been a kilometre. There was no way they were going to make it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘I’m so sorry. I just can’t …’

  She broke off as something caught her eye. Above Flin and a little to his left: a thin flake of what looked like flint protruding a couple of centimetres from the cliff, exactly the same colour as the surrounding stone which is why she hadn’t spotted it before. Maybe, just maybe …

  ‘Listen,’ she cried, struggling to make herself heard above the roar of pulverizing rock. ‘You have to do exactly as I tell you. No questions, no arguments, just do it!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Freya!’

  ‘No arguments!’

  ‘You’re wasting—’

  ‘Just do it!’

  He gave an exasperated wave of the arm, then nodded.

  ‘You have to get yourself up to that crack,’ she called, lowering her foot into the hole the pinion had torn, grasping the bottom rung of her ladder and leaning down. ‘You understand? You’ve got to get your fingers into that crack.’

  ‘There’s no way …’

  ‘Do it!’

  Glaring at her, muttering, Flin started to climb. He got himself onto the fourt
h rung from the top of his ladder, then the third, then the second, reaching his arms out, pressing his body flat against the stone, hugging it, sliding his way up the cliff face inch by inch.

  ‘I’m going to fall!’ he bellowed.

  ‘You’re going to fall anyway in a minute. Keep going!’

  He remained where he was, cheek pressed hard against the rock face, wincing, eyes closed, seemingly unable to go any further. Then, with a supreme effort of will and a roar of ‘Bollocks!’ he forced himself up onto the top rung of the ladder and clawed towards the fissure, stretching, straining, wobbling. For a split second it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, was going to lose his balance and fall. Then his hand made contact with the crack and he was able to force his fingers inside, clinging to it for dear life while his feet balanced unsteadily on the ladder rung as though on a tightrope. Exhausted, dust-covered, terrified, Freya gave an ecstatic whoop.

  ‘Now for the hard part,’ she called.

  ‘You have to be fucking joking!’

  She ran through it with him, throwing constant glances to left and right as the gorge walls came to within ten metres of each other. He had to get his foot up onto the protruding rim of flint, she explained, and use that to lever himself up towards her outstretched hand. The manoeuvre she’d used back in the temple at Abydos had been crazy, but this was something else. And he wasn’t even a professional climber. There was no other option. It was either this or wait for the walls to knock him off, which they would in the next couple of minutes. Making sure he knew what he had to do, she adjusted her position and reached out an arm ready to catch him, stretching as far as she could.

  ‘Flin, you’ve only got one shot at this,’ she yelled. ‘So make sure you do it right.’

  ‘Well I wasn’t bloody planning on doing it wrong!’

  Despite herself she smiled.

  ‘In your own time,’ she called. ‘Just make sure it’s soon.’

  Rolling his eyes up towards her and then back down to fix the position of the flint, he mumbled a prayer even though he hadn’t seen the inside of a church for the best part of two decades and hoisted his foot onto the protrusion. A deep breath and he drove himself upwards, unleashing a wild, guttural yell as he released his grip on the crack and flung his hand towards Freya’s. She caught it, her palm clamping around his, his other hand coming up and seizing her wrist, his body swinging back and forth like a clock pendulum, feet scrabbling on the cliff face. He was heavy, much heavier than she remembered from Abydos, and she could feel her grip on the ladder rung starting to slip, her shoulder to crack as though her entire arm was going to be ripped away. Somehow she managed to hold on as his feet flailed and after what seemed like hours but must have been only a matter of seconds he managed to jam first one toe and then the other into the rock crevice. Coming up straight, he steadied himself, taking most of the weight off her arm.

  ‘Climb up me!’ she cried. ‘Use your feet, get yourself up to the ladder. Come on, there’s no time!’

  He started to do as she said, then stopped, teetering there on the rock face, one hand gripping hers, the other clasped around her forearm, his toes wedged into the crack, the gorge now only six or seven metres wide. Dust spewed up from below, wafting around them.

  ‘There’s no time!’ she cried, coughing. ‘Come on, Flin, climb up me. You’ve done the hard part.’

  All his furious energy of a few moments earlier seemed to have vanished. He just clung there staring up at her, eyes glued to hers, a curious expression on his face – part anxiety, part determination.

  ‘Come on!’ she screamed. ‘What’s wrong with you? We’ve got to get out! There’s no—’

  ‘It was me,’ he shouted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was me, Freya. I killed Alex.’

  She froze, her windpipe tightening as though she was being throttled.

  ‘It was me who injected her. Molly and Girgis had nothing to do with it. It was me, Freya. I killed her.’

  Her mouth was opening and closing, no words coming out.

  ‘I didn’t want to,’ he cried. ‘Please believe me: it was the last thing on God’s earth I wanted to do. But she begged me. Pleaded. She’d lost her legs, her arm, her sight was failing, her hearing – she knew it was only going to get worse, wanted to at least have some control. I couldn’t refuse her. Please try to understand. It broke my heart but I couldn’t refuse her.’

  The gorge walls were now less than four metres apart, towering shadows looming through the dust clouds. Neither of them even noticed. Freya hung from the ladder clasping his hand, Flin balanced on the crevice clutching her arm, both oblivious to everything around them, both locked together in a dimension of their own.

  ‘She said she loved you.’ His voice was hoarse, barely audible. ‘They were her last words. We sat out on her veranda, we watched the sunset, I injected her with morphine, I held her hand. And just as she went she said your name. Said she loved you. I couldn’t not tell you, Freya. Do you see that? I couldn’t not tell you. She loved you so much.’

  He held her gaze, his eyes bright. Thoughts tumbled through Freya’s head, emotions pulled at her. Everything seemed to spin and convulse as if her inner world had come to reflect the wider chaos all around. At the heart of it, however, holding firm amidst the rush of shock and pain and grief, was a single solid kernel of certainty: she would have done exactly the same if Alex had asked her. And she also knew – from the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, everything she had seen and learnt of him these last few days – that Flin had done what he had done out of kindness, out of compassion, out of love for her sister, and she could neither blame nor condemn him for it. On the contrary, in a curious way she felt in his debt. He had taken that burden onto himself. He had been there for Alex in her hour of need when she, her own sister, so palpably hadn’t.

  All of this flashed through Freya’s mind in a matter of seconds, time seeming to slow and expand to accommodate her thoughts. Then, with a nod, she squeezed his hand as if to say: ‘I understand. Now let’s get the hell out of here,’ and started to drag him up the cliff towards her. For a moment his face came right up against hers and their eyes met, both of them giving a faint smile of understanding, hardly visible through the choking curtain of grit. And then he was clambering up and over her and onto the bottom of the ladder, the sides of the gorge now practically touching them.

  ‘Go!’ she screamed. ‘Keep going!’

  ‘You first!’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking English! Go! I’m right behind.’

  She swung her free arm and gave him a hard slap on the backside to get him moving. Once he was on his way, she pulled herself back onto the ladder and followed him up, climbing as fast as she could, her hands hitting each successive rung just as Flin’s feet left it, the steps trembling so fiercely she didn’t know how they could possibly stay attached to the rock face. The dust began to clear slightly and she caught a glimpse of Said above, leaning down with his arm outstretched, waving them on. They drove themselves towards him, coughing and choking, the walls clamping ever tighter around them, now barely a metre and a half from each other. Up and up until finally Flin reached the top and Said grabbed his T-shirt and dragged him out. Freya was right behind. As the cliffs touched her shoulders and the sides of the ladder, the steps starting to warp and buckle beneath her feet, the wood to crack and splinter, she found herself seized beneath the armpits and hoisted up into the clean, clear, wonderfully open air on top of the Gilf.

  Gasping for breath, they all backed away, watching as the last few centimetres of the gorge closed up. What less than an hour ago had been a broad valley filled with trees and buildings and waterfalls was now reduced to a cleft little more than forty centimetres across, slashes of red light still streaking upwards from deep within it. Now it was just thirty, now twenty, now ten, the crash of grinding rock diminishing all the time, giving way to a low grating rumble.

  Even as the gorge sealed itself, there was one
final dramatic encore. From deep within the ground there echoed a booming roar – a lion with stone lungs was how Freya would later describe it – and a brilliant blade of crimson light erupted from the last of the crack, the force of it throwing them backwards, slamming them to the ground.

  ‘Don’t look at it,’ cried Flin, grasping Freya’s shoulder and rolling her over, pressing her face into the sand. ‘Close your eyes! Both of you!’

  Previously the lightning bolts had come and gone, flaring briefly before fading again, like shooting stars. This time the light endured, a gargantuan scalpel of fire that climbed and expanded, slowly forcing the walls of the gorge apart again as it formed into a towering obelisk of flame. It stood there, swaying slightly, the roar growing ever louder, Freya experiencing the curious sensation of being burnt without actually feeling any pain or discomfort. Then, as if it had proved its point, the light receded, withdrawing into the ground like a dying flame. There came one last stony growl and with that the gorge slammed shut and this time it remained closed. Silence.

  For a moment Freya lay there, then blinked her eyes open. She saw orange and thought for a confused instant that her retina had been damaged before realizing she was looking into the face of a flower: a delicate orange bloom that had somehow found purchase amid the barrenness all around.

  The enclosed flower is a Sahara Orchid. It is, I am told, very rare. Treasure it, and think of me.

  She smiled and, reaching out, clasped Flin’s hand, knowing it was all going to be OK.

  Later, once they had got back to their feet, and brushed themselves down, and gulped in the clean air, and spent a while vainly searching for any trace of the Hidden Oasis, the three of them started walking across the top of the Gilf Kebir, Said leading.

  The sun, inexplicably, seemed to have shifted backwards in the sky. When they had fled the gorge it had been well down in the west. Now it was almost directly overhead, bringing it back into synch with Flin’s watch, which read 2.16 p.m. They had been inside the oasis for only six hours. It felt like a lifetime.