For the first three days we rode over a barren plain scattered with flat stones. It reminded me of the land that the shoemaker had to cross after he died: everything stripped away and no houses or people, no trees or birds or shade, just the plodding eternity of tiny figures, their shadows growing longer as the sun moved through the sky.
Nothing lived on the plain except the snakes which lay tangled together on the hard ground, a writhing knot of them pulling apart with the sound of our approach and slip-sliding into their burrows as if they had never existed.
One evening the leper caught a snake with a forked stick. He cut its body in half, the head still fierce and the tail flickering with anger. He placed the two pieces on either side of the road and we walked between them because he said this was an old custom which would bring us luck.
We entered the land which was known as the Great Desert. Gusts of sand were drawn up in thin plumes like the smoke from a hundred campfires. Hills of sand were swelling around us as if there was yeast fermenting in their soft hot bellies. Sand moving and shifting and flowing like water. Our donkeys struggled to wade through it, although for the camel it was easy.
We reached a Bedouin encampment. At first I could not understand why these people had set up their leather tents here, with no shelter and no sign of food for their animals. But the leper said there were deep cracks in the rock where you could be sure of obtaining rainwater throughout the year.
Naked children were squatting in the dust. As we drew closer they crowded around us in a noisy circle.
“Pan,”
they chanted,
“pan, pan, pan,”
holding out their empty hands with this simple request. Swarms of flies were feeding on the cuts in their skin. We gave them dried biscuits which they swallowed whole.
The men showed no sign of aggression towards us. They were also naked apart from a scrap of cloth tied around their hips and indigo blue turbans on their heads. They had no fire but were cooking slices of meat and flat cakes on polished
stones, which they placed under the fierce glare of the sun. They offered us some of their food with an easy generosity and watched while we ate. The cakes were unsweetened and the meat was leathery; nevertheless, it was better than what we had. They gave us water too, which they filtered through a cloth bag. It was thick and white and slightly salty, but not unpleasant to drink.
The women were the last to approach, appearing suddenly out of the dizzy mirage of the land. They wore girdles made of palm leaves with a flap of piebald goatskin to cover their sex. Their long hair was braided and bound on top of their heads and decorated with ornaments of silver and gold, making it appear like shining fruit in the branches of a tree. They were less friendly than the men and the children, stopping before they were close and throwing stones at us while crying out in high ululations that filled me with a strange cold fear.
But now the days and nights of my memory begin to roll into each other as the image of the desert tightens its grip. I see myself riding beside the leper and sometimes he appears to be nothing more than my own shadow. I see myself moving through a blur of shifting colors: blue and green, lilac and purple. The pebbles of a dried riverbed are white under my feet, while the cliffs on either side of me are as red as blood.
Here is a place where the rock is threaded with a network of gold and here a swirling hollow in the rock which is filled with a dragon's hoard of bright jewels. Here is a boulder that has taken on the appearance of a magnificent palace and next
to it is one carved into the form of a human skull, the eyes staring but sightless.
By now we were on the Tih plateau where the stones were worn as smooth as polished marble from the abrasion of the wind. We had to lead the donkeys forward by their bridles or else they would have slipped and fallen. Even the camel swayed uneasily, its head swinging close to the ground as it groaned with dismay.
For days or perhaps it was for weeks, we had seen nothing growing in this dead land, but then suddenly there was the luxuriance of a patch of thorny bushes and next to them something that resembled an apple tree but bearing a gray-green fruit that was so bitter even the scent of it made the inside of my mouth feel parched and rough.
We had grown accustomed to the stillness of our surroundings, where nothing moved unless it was blown by the wind, but then we stumbled right into a colony of desert rats, hundreds of them scattering and leaping and bumping against the donkeys' legs before vanishing back into the land's camouflage.
I shall never forget the herd of gazelles, their delicate bodies materializing like mist out of the empty hills. In my surprise I dropped the orange I was holding and one of them darted forward and snatched it up, carrying the golden ball triumphantly in its mouth as if it had caught the sun itself.
We came to an open mine shaft which had been worked for precious metal and next to it an underground hall where anvils and hammers were laid out neatly on wooden benches,
waiting patiently for the return of the people who worked here. But they had already been gone for many generations, the leper said, it was just that things could remain undisturbed in the desert, time was different here.
And then a cave cut into the yellow side of a cliff. The welcome relief of cool air and partial darkness. The musky smell of an animal that had this place for its home and signs of where its heavy body had pressed into the soft sand on the floor.
The leper and I spent one night together in that cave. His mouth on my mouth so that I breathed his breath as if it were my own. My hands running over the scars where his damaged skin had been healed by the sunlight and I could feel the light touch of my fingers as if his body were mine. When I looked into his eyes I saw myself reflected there.
That night I slept and woke and slept again until I had grown so accustomed to finding the leper lying close beside me that we seemed to have been together for many years. But when the morning came he would not speak to me. He had a strange wistful look on his face. I asked him what was the matter but he only put his finger to my lips to quieten me.
We left the cave and continued on our way until we were confronted by the silhouette of two mountain peaks outlined like two huge heads against the sky. We followed a long descent into a ravine with the authority of these mountains watching us.
I remember seeing the footprints of an ostrich and thinking
that it looked as though a leaf had been walking along the track. And then a lion with the face of a man was observing us from a far ridge and I wondered if this was the creature whose sleeping body had been imprinted on the floor of the cave.
All I can remember of what happened next was passing through a narrow cleft of rock. That was when I lost the leper. He must have stepped back in the same moment that I was stepping forward. I turned to look for him but he had gone.
Just ahead of me there was a grove of fruit trees and a haze of green where the ground had been cultivated. When I tried to see beyond this image I could not, because everything at once became blurred and indistinct. I knew then that I had reached the edge of the world that the leper had allowed me to share with him. It was the end of the journey. I was ready to go home.
T
he priest went back the way he had come, rewinding the thread of where he had been, retracing his steps from south to north, from heat to cold, from olive tree and palm to oak and silver birch.
By the time he arrived at the port of Great Yarmouth he had been gone for more than a year and that meant it was over two years since the day on which the mermaid was found washed up on the sand.
He walked along the raised path through the marshes and past the old barn where he and the others had spent the night together with the sound of rats rustling in the straw. The same dog with pale eyes that had watched them go was there waiting for him among the trees, close to the boundary stone, its tail wagging in nervous expectation.
“Where are the others?” the people from the village asked
him when he came to their houses. He tried to explain how he had lost them all one by one and they nodded their heads as if they understood what he meant, although they remained perplexed.
The bottle of Jordan water was put into a silver casket and propped up on a little shelf in the church, close to the bell tower. At a certain time of the day the light through the window on which the feathered angel was painted would shine directly onto the casket. It was found to be very good at protecting those at sea from shipwreck and drowning.
The priest gave away his other mementos of the journey, although he kept the pebbles. He set them out in a line on his desk and he would often place one in the palm of his hand and let the place it contained seep into him. And he still had the book of travels which the leper had given to Sally. He read it to himself over and over again until he knew most of the words by heart.
Sometimes when I sit in the sunshine with my back against the rickety wooden hut, close to the fishing boats and the black stone under which the mermaid's hair is buried, I see the priest standing there beside me staring out towards the horizon. But I never try to talk to him. Nor do I walk down the main street of the village with the ground beneath my feet rutted by the wheels of carts, or peer into the open doors and windows of those battered houses which once reminded me of the nests of birds. Not anymore. That time is over. The place has changed and I am a different person now to the one I was then.
Julia Blackburn is the author of
The Emperor's Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert
, and
The Book of Color
. She lives in Suffolk, England.