The Desert Castle

by Isobel Chace

  Lucasta sniffed again. ‘I shan’t say goodnight to him I shan’t! He can think what he likes! He’ll probably think I’m too young and ally to have remembered his rotten code!’

  Marion sighed. ‘I should think he can hear every word through the wall if you speak so loudly.’

  ‘Good!’ said Lucasta. She heaved herself into bed, pulling the blankets up over her head. ‘Goodnight, Marion. It isn’t your fault!’

  But she felt unaccountably guilty all the same. What could have happened up there to upset Lucasta to this extent? Marion tried to read for a while, but wild visions of Gaston trying to force himself on Lucasta kept coming between her and the written word. Common sense told her it was far more likely to have been the other way round, and that worried her too. She should have done something about it, Marion told herself, something more than she had done, but quite what that something should have been she didn’t know.

  She switched out the light above her bed and fell deeply asleep almost at once. In the night she thought she heard rain pelting down on the roof outside, but dismissed it as being absurd. It hadn’t rained once since she had arrived here. At the first light of morning, however, it was still raining. Marion reached over to shake Lucasta awake, but there was no one there. In an instant she was out of bed and calling her name, but there was nobody there to answer her and, when she felt the girl’s bed, it was cold to her touch. Wherever Lucasta was, she had been gone for a long, long time.

  CHAPTER IX

  They were very patient at the desk. The rain, they murmured, where would anyone have gone in this rain?

  ‘But someone must have seen them!’ Marion interjected. ‘Did they have breakfast at any time?’

  ‘I will enquire,’ the receptionist soothed her. ‘It may be that they have already gone on the horses.’ He broke into a flood of Arabic designed to encourage those who were doing their best to mop up the puddles as fast as they appeared on the marble-tiled floor.

  ‘But what am I to do?’ Marion demanded.

  The receptionist looked at her with reproachful eyes. ‘Are you sure that they are nowhere in the Rest House?’ he asked without much hope. He went to the door and looked out at the teeming rain, his shoulders hunched against his dislike of the wet. Marion went and stood beside him. There was no sign of Gaston’s car, but it could have been parked further round the corner out of sight.

  ‘They could have been gone for hours!’ she sighed.

  The man beside her quivered like a cat faced with something distasteful, then inspiration struck him. ‘You must have your breakfast! You are cold and hungry, no? And afterwards perhaps they will have arrived. I will order your breakfast to be brought to you at once.’

  The dining-room, like everywhere else in the Rest House, had been thoroughly disorganised by the rain. The electricity had failed and, as the Cave had no other means of lighting, a Tilley lamp had been lit and placed on a strategic table, accentuating the shadows m the corners and breathing heavily in a way that made Marion hope it was not going to explode. Her experience of oil lamps was strictly limited, confined to the occasional battle with a hurricane lamp, and this one, with its glowing mantle, pump at the ready, and polished exterior, bore little relation to its battered cousin that Marion and her mother kept in the cellar of their house in London “against eventualities”, as Mrs. Shirley put it.

  Toast, jam, and butter were brought almost immediately, together with some hot water with which the waiter invited her to make her own coffee, pointing to the jar of instant powder on the table. In other circumstances, Marion would have enjoyed her breakfast, but her anxieties as to what Lucasta and Gaston were up to had deprived of her any appetite. Yesterday she had felt a thrill to be sitting in one of the actual caves that the Nabateans had carved out of the hillside, today she barely noticed her surroundings. There was no one else in the dining room. The little alcoves round the room were dark and empty, and without the multicoloured glass lights it was hard to see the chisel marks left by the mason who had dressed the stone of the walls.

  How could Lucasta have done this to her? Had her quarrel with Gaston been a blind to throw her off the scent of what they had planned together? And, worst of all, what was Gregory going to say to her?

  Marion was so sunk in misery that she scarcely noticed the tourist policeman as he came in, his Air Force blue sweater glistening with damp from the rain. He had come right up to her table before she realised he was waiting to speak to her.

  ‘Have you found them?’

  His face looked white in the light of the Tilley lamp, without any colour at all, but his eyes were kind and there was no sign that he had any bad news for her after all. She took a deep, gulping breath, and tried to calm herself.

  ‘You have ordered horses this morning,’ he said in only slightly accented English. ‘They are waiting for you. It is best to have your ride as quickly as possible in this rain.’

  ‘But I can’t go without the others!’ She looked up at his surprised face. ‘I must wait for them!’ she almost pleaded with him.

  ‘If you wait there may be too much water,’ the policeman told her, but Marion wasn’t listening.

  ‘Perhaps they went ahead?’ she suggested.

  The policeman frowned. ‘You have some companions with you?’ he questioned her. ‘A man and a woman?’

  Marion nodded eagerly. ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘There are some people who have gone into Petra this morning. I will ask if they are among them. I may not have seen them myself, but they will have signed the book.’ He smiled and for the first time Marion saw him as a man and not just at a uniform. It was apparent to her that he had seen her as a woman from the start and she found herself aware of the naked appreciation in his eyes. ‘You will come quickly?’ he commanded her. ‘You will not waste time. The horses and your guide are waiting for you.’

  She nodded her head, saying nothing. She wished Gregory were with her. The look in the policeman’s eyes had accentuated her vulnerability and she, not normally nervous of being on her own, was strangely reluctant to leave the breakfast table and encounter him again.

  It was raining harder than ever when she did go outside. She ran down the path, her head well down, in a mad dash for the tourist office. There was no sign of the policeman there, but the young man who came up to her and shyly introduced himself as her guide seemed to know all about her.

  ‘Have the others gone ahead?’ she demanded, rather breathlessly, for her hundred-yard sprint had been faster than she usually travelled.

  The young man licked his lips nervously, not liking to admit that he hadn’t the remotest idea what she was talking about. He began his introductions all over again.

  ‘My name is Fawzi, I am your guide. Please to come this way to the horses.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marion, ‘but there should be three of us. The policeman said he would look in the book and tell me if they had signed it earlier.’

  The guide swallowed. ‘I will look,’ he said. He handed her a pen and pointed to the line where she was to sign, watching her closely as she did so. When she had written an impatient flourish that looked hardly anything like her usual signature, he studied the book intently, turning back to the previous page and running his finger down the list of names.

  ‘Well?’ Marion asked him.

  He closed the book with a bang. ‘It may be that they have gone. We must follow quickly.’ He smiled beatifically at her. ‘There is very much to see and you will want to see it all, yes?’

  Marion wondered if she did want to in all this rain. But the thought of what she was going to say to Gaston and Lucasta when she caught up with them drove her on. Indeed, she scarcely noticed the rain as she accompanied Fawzi outside again and down to where the horses were waiting, their heads bowed against the onslaught of the water that was still falling out of the skies. Since she had heard so much about the glories of Arab horses it was rather a comedown to these flinching misshapen animals, strong of back, but w
ith mouths like iron, and amenable only to the soft curses of the men who led them.

  Marion eased herself on to the plastic-covered saddle and held on to the toggle that the driver put into her hands. Fawzi, it seemed, preferred to walk, and Marion didn’t blame him. She thought she might well have preferred to walk herself, especially when the brute under her poked his way over the rough ground, avoiding the puddles with a delicacy that belied his real nature.

  ‘Fawzi, can you read English?’ she asked the young guide just as they were entering the narrow entrance of the Syq, slipping down the slope from the dam.

  ‘A little,’ he answered.

  Not at all, she thought to herself, and wished she had looked at the book for herself. ‘Are you sure they’re ahead of us?’ she said out loud.

  ‘Maybe they are.’

  In fact, most likely they were not. But it was too late to return. Fawzi would not understand her if she told him to turn back, and the driver’s whole attention was concentrated on hurrying his horse along, muttering in Arabic as he did so. Marion recognised the phrase “We are alive, thanks be to God”, again and again, repeated with more and more dislike of the avalanche of water that descended on them.

  ‘Yellah!’ Fawzi called over his shoulder. ‘Yellah!’

  ‘Yellah!’

  The driver took a firmer hold on the bridle and dragged the horse forward through the stream of water that was already running through the bottom of the Syq. The animal pulled away, stepping round the worst of the puddles and looking for shelter from the sides of the narrow passage so mat Marion bumped uncomfortably against the overhanging bulges which she had scarcely noticed the day before when she had been on her feet. With the Rest House scarcely out of sight, she was wet through to the skin and her shoes squelched when she moved them in the stirrups.

  The driver looked round, trying to entice the nag into a trot. He caught sight of the anxious misery written plain on Marion’s face.

  ‘Keef halak?’ he said with a grin.

  She knew what that meant. It was something Zein said to her, often and often, and it was she who had lovingly taught her the answer.

  ‘Mabsut—’ she began, and only belatedly remembered to put an “a” on the end as she was a woman. ‘Mabsuta el hamdu lillah. I am well, thanks be to God.’

  The man nodded. ‘Yellah! Hurry up!’ he roared at the horse.

  The channels that the Nabateans had cut into the rock to carry the excess of water away were already full to overflowing. Water streamed down the sides of the narrow passage, splashing into the puddles that grew larger, ran into one another, and began to stream down the slight incline.

  ‘It is a pity you won’t see the Treasury building with the sun shining on its face,’ Fawzi mourned. His English was better when he was talking about Petra, a subject he knew backwards, parroting his patter with the greatest of ease. ‘Have you heard about this building?’

  ‘A little,’ Marion replied, nursing her shoulder as her horse crashed her once again against the rocks.

  ‘It is known as the Treasury of Pharaoh. The Bedouin called it that when it had been forgotten why it was built. To the local Bedouin who had no education all sorts of things became the miraculous creations of Pharaoh. He was the evil genius of all their stories, just as Moses was the one who practised only white magic, controlling the natural forces. Had he not brought water out of stone?’ Fawzi looked up at the falling rain and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It had to be a magician who had built the Khasneh al Faroun. Faroun means Pharaoh. To men who lived only in tents, it was impossible that men had made such a building. That is why they thought there was treasure in the urn at the top. Pharaoh would naturally hide his gold out of the reach of those who would try to steal it. Nowadays, there is schooling for everyone, and such stories are not believed any more.’

  They came out of the Syq at that moment and the salmon-pink facing of the Khasneh dominated their view.

  ‘That is the urn up there,’ Fawzi told her. ‘This place where we are is called the Wadi al Jarra, the Wadi of the Urn. You know what a wadi is?’

  ‘A dry river-bed,’ she said.

  ‘It is that, but it is not always dry. Do you want to stop and see inside?’

  Marion shook her head. ‘I saw it yesterday. I want to find my friends. Could you ask the traders if they have seen them?’

  But there were no traders to be seen. Some horses, saddled ready for the non-existent tourists, sheltered under the overhanging cliff beside the Treasury, but their drivers had taken refuge out of the teeming rain and of them there was no sign.

  ‘They will be here,’ Fawzi comforted her. ‘Or, if they are not, they will be back at the Rest House.’

  She wished she shared his certainty. In that instant when she had found Lucasta’s bed cold and empty she had known immediately what had happened. She would have been a fool not to know. The pair might have made up their quarrel, or they might never have quarrelled at all, but Lucasta wouldn’t have had to wait long before Marion had fallen asleep and then she would have knocked on the wall, using the code they had worked out between them. Perhaps she had even changed her room for Gaston’s, laughing to herself because Marion hadn’t suspected for a moment what she had been planning. But where had they gone, then? Had Gaston taken her home? Or had he driven her up to look at the site where he was working? It didn’t bear thinking about the Hartley family—and Gregory —had trusted Lucasta to Marion’s care, and she had failed them all. She would be sent home to England in disgrace—and what would happen then, with her mother in Devon and determined to sell the house, and herself without a job and absolutely nothing to look forward to?

  That Gregory would be furious, she didn’t doubt for a moment. It was all right for him to tell her not to worry, but he wouldn’t excuse her failure easily. Lucasta was his niece and she was only seventeen.

  There were no two ways about it, Marion should have looked after her better!

  The tears mingled with the rain on her cheeks and she wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. She was here, in Petra, the fulfilment of a childhood’s dream, and she might never go anywhere half as romantic ever again, so she might as well make an attempt to enjoy herself. But the savour had gone out of it. the dream had become a nightmare, black and threatening like the sky overhead. If Gregory were angry with her, the whole of life would be like this, she reflected unhappily. It had been bad enough when he had said he wouldn’t bring her here. That had hurt at the time, but the wound he had dealt her was like an aching void within her and it was getting worse all the time.

  ‘You must get off here,’ Fawzi broke into her thoughts.

  She started, looking wearily around her to get her bearings. Not far away was the Roman theatre, looking bleak and more black than red as the rain ran down the stone seats to the floor of the Stage.

  ‘I went up there yesterday,’ she said, pointing up on the other side of the Urn Tomb.

  Fawzi accepted this with a slight shrug. ‘You must visit the Silk Tomb. That is the most colourful of them all. It is like shot silk and beautiful.’

  There was nothing to do but dismount. Marion found she had stuck to the wet, cheap plastic of the saddle and, with rather less elegance than she would have liked to display, she slithered down to the ground.

  ‘Come, quickly!’ Fawzi urged her.

  She wondered why he was in such a hurry, but even as she stood there, the river-bed had started to fill with water and, looking down by the side of the Colonnade Street, she could see it moving relentlessly onwards and, in a matter of seconds, it had turned into a babbling stream that grew deeper and more violent every moment

  ‘There’s someone coming,’ she said. ‘It might be Lucasta and Gaston.’

  ‘We must hurry,’ Fawzi said anxiously. ‘They will close the Syq and we shall have to stay here if we don’t go quickly.’

  ‘You mean we won’t be able to get out?’

  Such a fate had not previously occurred to Marion, and now
that it had, she wondered why they didn’t turn round at once and go back to the Rest House.

  ‘We have a little time,’ he reassured her. ‘I am a good guide and you have given me money to show you a little of Petra. In one day you can’t see all of it, you must have two weeks to see everything, but we shall do as much as we can.’

  ‘I want to go back,’ Marion objected. ‘My friends aren’t here, and if they go back to the Rest House they won’t know where I am.’

  Some young boys clattered past on their donkeys, waving their arms in the air and yelling something to Fawzi as they hurried on.

  ‘We have everything in Petra to be comfortable,’ he muttered. ‘There is a camp not far from the museum. There is food, everything, and a place to stay.’

  ‘But I don’t want to stay here!’

  A horse that had followed the donkeys whinneyed gently beside her, and the rider, muffled up to the eyes in his kaffiyeh, the cloth some Arab men wear over their heads that was held in place with a black, knotted band, jumped down on to the ground, his boots sending the water splashing up all over Marion’s legs.

  ‘You’ve left it too late to go back now. They’ve closed the Syq. I was the last person to get through.’ Marion stared at him, unaware of the wet, unaware of anything except his familiar voice. Her heart thundered within her and her mouth dropped open in an astonished delight that would not be denied.