Shooting the Sphinx

by Avram Noble Ludwig

  Ari had taken a pillow from his room. He’d spent enough of his life driving around in vans and four-by-fours to lose any sleep on a scout. Ari could feel Samir’s eyes watch him closely, looking for any hint or clue that Ari would send his job to Jordan. Ari had no thoughts one way or the other, so he screwed his head into his pillow and closed his eyes.

  At first, Ari feigned sleep. He could hear the chatter of Arabic from the front seat until the silences between phrases began to grow. It wouldn’t be long now. Ari knew from many a car journey with film crews all over the world, the small talk always peters out, and then even thoughts, until a vacant meditative stare takes over, but not for the man in charge, no, never for him. No, Ari’s eyes stayed closed.

  For an hour or two, Ari would doze and wake. If the car jolted or slowed, he would lift an eyelid and catch a glimpse of a water buffalo ploughing a field, or a scrawny dray mule dragging a cart, or an old 1960’s truck coughing black smoke, its bed piled up impossibly high with bales of cotton.

  On his side of the road, a green swathe of cultivated land followed the bank of the Nile. They drove south, following the river toward its distant glacial Ugandan source. An ancient tractor, its sun-baked red paint faded to a rusty pink, chugged along tilling under plucked beanstalks and bare chickpea plants. Children picked cotton. Men dressed in dishdashas moved among them with sacks to collect the white puffy little balls. Half a mile beyond that, the lush greenery of the crops ended.

  The Nile fed a mile-wide oasis, a river of green in an ocean of sand. Every possible hectare at the edge of the desert had been cultivated for thousands of years. An ancient system of irrigation ditches, occasionally watered by an odd diesel pump chugging away, spilled the river up its banks to flood then dribble through those narrow farms.

  The red Toyota slowed to a crawl at a military checkpoint that looked like a tollbooth. A soldier wearing sunglasses waved them over to the side of the road with his rifle.

  “What’s up?” Ari looked at Samir for the first time since getting into the car.

  “We are about to enter a restricted zone. There is little reason to come. Very few people live out here. We are almost at the Sahara.”

  The soldier asked some questions of Wael and pointed at Ari.

  “He wants to see your passport,” said Samir.

  Ari pulled out his well-worn little blue book and passed it up front. He was always nervous whenever any soldier took hold of his passport. He couldn’t help himself. He’d had to buy it back from underpaid sergeants on roadsides a few times in other countries. He looked at Samir, who seemed to enjoy Ari’s discomfort. The soldier found the big tourist visa and started to argue with the location manager.

  “Why doesn’t he just give him the two bucks?” asked Ari.

  Samir didn’t answer. Ari finally pulled out a couple of bills and handed them out his own window. The soldier took them, closed the passport, and handed it back.

  “Do you think we like paying baksheesh to any soldier or policeman who thinks it’s his right?” asked Samir.

  This wouldn’t happen in Jordan, Ari almost said, but kept quiet.

  Again they passed the towering cotton bales on the rickety truck. The Toyota left the highway, veering off onto a road straight out into the desert dust as far as the eye could see. They drove for an hour without passing another car. Strange shapes emerged in the road casting long shadows. Giant sandstone pillars rose up one hundred feet high, some shaped like jagged mushrooms, their shade like beach umbrellas, their bases cut away from beneath them by millennia of shifting sands.

  The tan pillars gave way to flat rocks; polished black pebbles polka-dotted the desert floor. A shimmering speck of green materialized down the road, a distant oasis; then it disappeared into heat waves on the horizon. At first, Ari thought it was a mirage, but the green speck returned several times, then grew into date palms rising up slowly above the sand. As the Toyota approached, Ari saw a few very dark-complected men wearing turbans up in the trees pruning dead palm fronds or lowering flat baskets of red dates on long ropes from treetops forty feet up in the air.

  Almost lunchtime, they stopped for gas, and bought water and tan beans, which they scooped out of small metal dishes with flat hot bread pulled right out of a roadside oven fed by dried palm ribs. Boys sold them dusty brown dates on the vine, a large cluster for half an Egyptian pound. They were meltingly sweet and so cheap. Ari and Samir bought much more than they wanted. Their hunger sated, they piled back into the red Toyota and drove off away from the shade of the green fronds out into the noonday glare.

  Another half hour and Ari saw what they had come for. The horizon undulated. Dunes swelled around the car as it drove among them—first five, then ten, then twenty feet high, some massive as beached whales.

  “The Bedou call this The Sea of Sand,” said Samir. “The end of the Sahara desert. There is nothing for two thousand miles to the West, but…”

  “Emptiness,” Ari said.

  Samir said something in Arabic to Wael, the driver. Wael nodded, took his foot off the gas, came to a stop, and shifted the Land Cruiser into four-wheel drive. With a lurch, they turned off the road onto the sand.

  They drove fast along a row of small dunes, a stream of dust kicking up behind them. When they hit a dip in the dune line, Wael swerved over the crest and cut over to the next line of dunes a few feet taller than the ones before. Like surfers, they raced sideways along the static waves until they found a gap that would not flip them and crossed and climbed up the faces of bigger and bigger swells, each crest revealing a more enormous one on an elusive, tantalizing horizon. Sometimes the vehicle would fly over the top of a crest and drop airborne down the face of the next dune.

  The effect was as if the car were shrinking down to the size of a tiny toy. The dunes rose up to at least three or four hundred feet tall—almost as tall as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Elated, Ari wanted to go higher. If Samir had pointed Wael straight across the desert, Ari would not have objected.

  “Happy?” Samir shouted over the roar of the engine when the wheels left the ground.

  “Yes!” Ari shouted back.

  Summit fever overcame them. They were now on a quest for the largest, twisting around one towering dune after another. The Land Cruiser surged up on top of a plateau before an abyss.

  “STOP!” screamed Ari then Samir in Arabic.

  Wael slammed on the brakes, throwing them all forward. They could not see the sand below, the face of the dune was too steep, at least a five-hundred-foot drop.

  Wael put the Toyota in reverse and backed down the face of the dune, but too slowly. The sand slid down around them. Wael tried to go forward. The wheels spun. He tried to reverse. They spun again.

  “Doesn’t he know that he’s just digging the car down deeper when he spins the wheels?” asked Ari.

  “The car is his,” Samir snapped as he opened his door. Wael jumped out and immediately started digging away the sand in front of the wheels with his bare hands.

  Ari watched for a minute, thinking that digging would lead nowhere, but he said nothing. Wael finished scooping out craters in the soft sand in front of his wheels, jumped back into the driver’s seat, and gunned the engine. The car rolled down into the holes he had dug and almost up the other side until the wheels spun again. Wael dug new holes and repeated the process, gunning the engine with the same result. Impatiently, Ari took his camera case and a bottle of water out of the car.

  “What are you doing?” asked Samir, alarmed.

  “I’m going to snap some pictures of dunes.”

  “The desert is a dangerous place.” Samir walked over the soft sand to Ari. “I’ll come with you.”

  “Don’t worry. Once you get the car out, follow my footprints and find me.”

  Ari turned his back on Samir and started to walk away.

  “Wait, take a walkie-talkie.” Samir handed him a radio from the car. “If the wind gets strong, you must come back quickly or you will lose your wa
y. Your footsteps will be covered and we will not be able to locate you.”

  “Okay,” said Ari, taking the radio and pushing the key to talk. “Radio check.” He heard his own voice on the other walkies in the car. Then he turned and left them. He walked along the ridge where it dipped. As he descended, he started little sand avalanches with his feet. The fine grit worked its way down around his socks into his sneakers.

  This isn’t the beach, he thought grimly. The powdery sensation between his toes was annoying but not uncomfortable. He resigned himself to the dry powdered grit and climbed up the next ridge, trying to follow the firmest sand and find the easiest path to walk. When Ari reached the top of the next dune, his radio crackled.

  “Ari?”

  Ari pulled the walkie off his belt. “Yes, Samir?”

  “How are you? Are you thirsty?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do not drink all your water at once.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m good about that kind of thing.”

  “I can see you.”

  Ari turned around. Samir waved at him from a thousand feet away, the top of the neighboring dune. Ari waved back. A white speck rolled over the top of a dune and descended down into the bottom of the valley between them, slow and weightless.

  “What is that?” asked Ari.

  “It looks like a plastic bag for shopping.”

  It was exactly that, but it must have rolled in from a thousand miles away. Faded to translucence and sandblasted to the consistency of tissue paper, the thing was hardly a bag, but a ghost of one, a tumbleweed from a distant city.

  “Where did it come from?” asked Ari.

  “Libya.”

  “All the way across the Sahara?” Ari marveled that garbage could penetrate the emptiest place on earth.

  “Yes, the wind is from Libya.”

  “The west?”

  “Yes.”

  “The plastic wind.” Ari heard Samir’s laughter as he turned and descended down the far side of the dune, out of sight. When Ari reached the bottom of the next valley, he put the wind at his back. Knowing that the road was to the east, Ari walked and walked a serpentine path through the harder sand of the valleys beneath the dunes. Samir called him on the radio, but Ari did not answer.

  The radios could only transmit line of sight, so Ari soon lost contact. He stopped every so often and snapped a few pictures of the most magnificent dunes, but try as he might, the camera didn’t convey the scope and power of the tidal waves of sand.

  He began to hum, then sing, a tune he had heard once in a movie.

  “As he walked along the Bois de Bologne

  With an independent air,

  You could hear the girls declare,

  ‘He must be a millionaire.’

  I’m the man who broke the bank at Monte Car-arlo!”

  After an hour of walking, he continued east. They had not come for him, so they were still stuck, reasoned Ari. The sun was already halfway from high noon to the horizon. He had only one objective now—to find the road before dark. The wind died down, giving him no direction, but as the sun set in the sky, Ari walked away from it. He walked for another hour in the twilight. The dunes diminished in size as darkness closed in. There was no moon, only starlight. He scanned the sky for the North Star or the Southern Cross, but the stars seemed scrambled and unfamiliar. Stumbling over a ground that he could barely see, Ari hoped that he was moving in the right direction.

  He crossed over the top of one dune and saw headlights illuminating the black road at high speed from miles away. To intercept them, Ari would have to run. He tried to find the hard-packed places. He ran around the dunes and not over their soft tops. He picked up his pace until the dunes shrank back down to ripples lapping at the black ribbon of asphalt. Ari ran out into the middle of the road waving his hands.

  “Stop! Stop!” he yelled.

  A white pickup truck approached at high speed. Ari had to step out of the road to avoid getting hit. The truck came to a halt and reversed back to him.

  A tall thin young man with very dark skin and a pointy beard stared bewildered at Ari as if at some alien from another planet. The man said something in Arabic. Ari shook his head.

  “I…” Ari pointed at his own mouth. “… show…” Then he pointed ahead down the road. “… you?” Ari asked, pointing at the empty passenger seat. Comprehending, the man opened the door, which had a Governmental seal and some Arabic writing on the side. Ari got in. Ari pointed down the road and nodded. The man began to drive slowly.

  Ari sized him up. He wore a white shirt with breast pockets that had flaps on them. He had boots on and khaki trousers. He was not a city person, but very much of the desert. Ari read him as some sort of park ranger-type of a Bedou tribe.

  After about a mile, they both spotted the Toyota’s tire tracks in the sand on the roadside.

  “There! Right there!” cried Ari, but he didn’t have to. The ranger nodded. He put the truck into four-wheel drive and set out at about twenty miles an hour through the black desert night. The ranger drove expertly, much lower on the dunes than Wael had driven before. They followed the twin snakes of tire tracks back across the most giant dunes.

  Cones of headlight illuminated the sand in the night until, slowing, they came upon a great mess of sand and footprints. The red Toyota Land Cruiser sat in the middle of a large hole. Wael and the location manager were both sweaty and shirtless in the cool chill of the desert night. Their skin was plastered with dust as if they wore tan makeup on their faces. They had been digging the sand from under the car with their bare hands. They peered up out of their giant foxhole, blinded by the headlights.

  The Bedou ranger got out of the cab of his truck and walked over to the two heads sticking up. Ari followed.

  “Where is Samir?” asked Ari.

  “He went to find you,” said the location manager. “When he could not hear you on the radio, he became frightened.”

  “Ugh.” Ari should have expected Samir to worry and come after him.

  The ranger waved for the two men to get out. Sheepishly, they climbed up the side. The ranger began to kick sand down into the hole around the car. Ari thought for a moment that they would tackle him, as he was undoing what they had spent hours on with their bare hands, but the ranger’s confidence gave them pause. He piled sand around the wheels, then gestured for all three of them to join him and put their shoulders to the car. Ari jumped down into the hole. Under the ranger’s command, the four of them rocked the vehicle back and forth. With each sway, the car raised up a quarter of an inch as the sand spilled under its tires. The Toyota slowly rose up out of the hole as if lifted by an invisible string. They rocked some more, and the ranger kept plying the wheels with more sand. In a matter of twenty minutes the car was back up on top of the dune. Sheepishly, they got into the Toyota and followed the ranger back out of the dunes along their tracks.

  They found Samir sitting in the sand by the side of the road surrounded by cigarette butts. He had seen the second set of tracks and realized that another car had come to their aid, so he had waited.

  On the drive back to Cairo, he did not speak or look at Ari. Ari wanted to make small talk, say something of the day, but Samir was humiliated. They reached Giza as dawn was breaking behind the Sphinx. Samir hadn’t said a word.

  PART SEVEN

  Love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.

  —Khalil Gibran

  Chapter 41

  The following morning, Ari headed to the airport to meet Beth, who was arriving on the overnight flight from New York. He grew more excited to see her the closer the moment of reunion. He had a bounce in his step walking through the terminal. Even the sight of the dreaded customs desk didn’t kill his mood. He did notice several wealthy Egyptian families with school-aged children rushing to make flights. Shouldn’t they be in school? he thought.

  He stopped behind the customs desk and looked up at the portrait of President Mubarak in a gilded frame. Lighthear
ted, Ari started humming the song from the protest. “Leave, leave, Hosni Mubarak.” One of the customs officials recognized the tune and gave him a dirty look. Ari quit humming, but savored the moment and the power of little bit of song.

  When he saw Beth rolling her suitcase toward customs, his heart quickened. Despite her anger over the cost overrun on the Sphinx, he had missed her. He hadn’t realized how much until that moment. He felt the urge to run to her and embrace her like long lost lovers in a movie. But for the customs officers between them, he might have done so until he noticed her talking to somebody. She wasn’t alone. Omar el Mansoor from Studio Giza, dressed in his bell-bottom jeans, was rolling his own suitcase right next to hers. He had a pair of ski boots slung over his shoulders.

  “What the…?”

  They both waved at Ari and walked past the customs desk without being stopped. Ari and Beth reached out to each other to shake hands, very businesslike, concealing their relationship from Omar. Ari felt a strange energy from her, sexual yet searching, as though she wondered if they were still lovers.

  “Same flight?” asked Ari with as much nonchalance as he could fake.

  “Same row,” said Beth.

  Ari turned to Omar. “I thought you were going to Sundance?”

  “I felt I had to come back,” said Omar. “The press of business.”

  “Omar came to visit our set, Ari,” said Beth. “He met Frank.”

  “Oh?”

  Omar gestured at the exit. “Shall we take my car?”

  “Thank you, no.” Ari craved a few minutes alone with Beth. “We have our own driver.”

  “Send them away, Ari.” She cast a meaningful glance at him. “We’re going with Omar.”

  In the back of Omar’s car, Beth sat between the two men.

  “How was the film festival?” Ari asked.

  “Sundance was fantastic.” Omar gave Ari a thumbs-up. “Awesome snow.”