The Weeping Desert (18 page)

He kissed her again, this time with a racing passion that almost swept her senses away. She clung to him, not caring if his arms were crushing her slender body and his mouth bruising her lips. This was what she was made for. He loved her. He needed her. It was all she wanted to know.

“I love you, too, John,” she whispered. “My tall Englishman who has the sun caught forever in his hair.”

“I’m taking you away with me,” he said, his voice low. “Is-if has left the door open and the Gate of the Dead. We must go quickly.”

“It is not that easy,” Khadija faltered, the happiness fading from her eyes. “Much has happened. Ahmed Karim has arranged for our marriage to be—how you say?—annulled. He is planning a marriage ceremony to join me in wedlock to him next week.” In her distress, her English became more incoherent. “I am being kept a prisoner, that’s why, until then.”

“All the more reason to get you out of here now,” said John.

“That is not all,” said Khadija. “In order that I obey Ahmed Karim has taken a hostage.”

“A hostage?”

She nodded faintly, her lips barely moving.

“My father,” she said. “My beloved and respected father. He is also a prisoner. He is their hostage against my default.”

Chapter Nine

John tried to calm Khadija’s distress with hope that he did not really feel. The old sheikh a hostage; that was a dangerous situation. He touched her hair thoughtfully.

“First I’m going to get you away, to a friend who is a nurse and absolutely reliable. You will be safe with her. There can’t be any marriage to Ahmed if you are not here, that’s obvious.”

“But my father…?”

“We’ll find him. Don’t worry. Shuqrat is not such a big place and someone is sure to talk for money. Ahmed Karim would not dare to harm your father if he really wants to marry you. If you are free, then we will be in a much stronger position to bargain.”

Khadija shuddered. “Let us go quickly,” she said.

“You won’t get far dressed like that,” said John. “You must have some sort of disguise.”

Khadija brightened. “Bless your friend Carol for my case of English clothes! They will be a perfect disguise. No one would expect to see an Arab princess in a Western trouser suit!”

John turned away. He looked out of the stone alcove to the vivid blue water where the dhows sailed like brown moths on a clear mirrored sea. A tanker, grey and blurred in the dazzling sunlight, edged across the horizon. He tried to relax the tenseness out of his neck muscles. This was no time to have a headache.

He could hear movements behind him as Khadija undressed. There was no outraged feminine modesty because he stayed in the room. Khadija had certainly altered.

“I am ready,” said Khadija breathlessly.

She had put on her favourite flared black crepe trousers and silk pink and gold tunic. Her hair hung long and loose and her face was bare.

“Only my women have ever seen my face, so no one will recognise me,” said Khadija. “It could not be more simple.”

John took her hand. “Come on then. Let’s hurry.”

By now he knew his way out of the summer kiosk and through the courtyards to the Gate of the Dead. The tiny caged birds sang sweetly as they hurried past, and the fountains splashed into the cool marble basins. All was quiet and peaceful.

John felt the moisture break out on his forehead as the sun beat down on them. They moved quickly from patches of shade to the next, following the walls of buildings.

“Stop! Who are you?” A guard had spotted them and came running across the courtyard, his gun swinging clumsily.

“Hello, there,” said Khadija, casually putting on her big sunglasses. “What a cute place you’ve got here,” she went on in a terrible American accent picked up from the old television movies she had seen. “Is it all right if we have a look round?”

“You are not allowed here,” the guard rapped out. “How did you get in?”

“Well, we saw this little gate open and—”

“You must leave immediately. Come this way. This is a royal palace. You are not allowed.”

“Say! A royal palace?” Khadija pretended to dawdle as the guard hurried them towards the royal mosque. He unlocked a small door in the wall and pushed it open a little way.

Khadija flashed him a big smile. “Can I come back and take some photographs?” she asked brightly.

“No!”

The guard could not get rid of them quickly enough. John kept quiet. Khadija was doing very well on her own.

“How about tomorrow?” Khadija insisted. But the door slammed shut and they were outside the wall, somewhere in the
souk
.

John took Khadija’s arm. “You were marvellous,” he whispered.

“I was terrified. I think I am not such a good actress.” She led John rapidly through the gloom of the narrow lanes of the
souk
,
ignoring the calls of the merchants to stop and look at their wares as they sat cross-legged in the doorways of their shops, smoking hookah pipes or European cigars. Urchin boys giggled at Khadija’s trousers and held out their grubby palms.

“Baksheesh, baksheesh,”
they whined impudently. They came out into the main street, into blazing sunlight. John stopped a cruising taxi and helped Khadija into the back.

“Walhid el Said,” he said to the driver. “We can pick up my jeep there,” he added to Khadija in a low voice. “Then I’ll take you somewhere safe before looking for your father.”

“I know where my father is,” said Khadija calmly.

“Good heavens, Khadija! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You did not ask me.”

John looked out of the taxi window for a few moments to cool his temper. “All right, where is he?”

“He is at Wadi Amd. There is a cave with a hole that leads to the stomach of the world. It is a terrible dark hole with no bottom. A stone that falls, falls for ever. My father is captive there. Is-if learned this from Ahmed Karim’s men, who did not know that she can read their lips.”

John had heard of these holes, clefts in the desert caused by shifting rock formations millions of years ago.

“I will show you the way,” said Khadija.

“You’re going to stay with a friend of mine at the hospital,” John said firmly. “Her name is Sheila and she’ll look after you. I’ll find this place, Wadi Amd, on my own.”

“That is impossible. How will you find a camel thorn bush shaped like a fat old Sultan at sunset prayer? Or three boulders with smooth faces to the East?” Khadija flashed her dark eyes scornfully.

“If those are the map directions, then you can come with me,” John frowned. “Let’s hope you can map-read better than most women.”

John paid off the driver, and they hurried into the shade of the verandah. The mess was deserted. The men were all at work, and the houseboy had probably gone shopping. He collected some lengths of nylon rope, a flashlight, tools—anything he thought might be useful. Khadija went into the kitchen and fixed two cold drinks. She felt a small sense of achievement that she could now do some things for herself.

John wandered round the rooms searching for something he could take as a weapon. They did not possess firearms, and he did not fancy a piece of lead piping in case it was used on himself. Finally he picked up a can of pressurised deodorant and decided it would be as effective as anything in a surprise attack.

Khadija, too, was wandering through the rooms, curious to see how John lived in her country. The place was cluttered with men’s belongings. She did not think the houseboy did his work very well. She wrote John’s name in the dust which had already re-settled on the table and smiled to herself. If she was looking after John his home would be very different.

She stopped at a photograph in a carved frame. It was not the photograph which held her attention, but a small snapshot stuck corner-wise into the edge of the frame. It was of a group of men on the beach, leaning against a sailing dinghy which had been pulled up on the shore. It was easy to pick out John—he was so much taller. He was grinning at the camera and his arm was lightly round the shoulders of a small, slight girl with long fair hair.

Khadija felt her heart contract. Was this his “good friend”, the one at the hospital, this woman called Sheila? She put down the photograph and turned away hurriedly. She did not want to look at him with another woman.

Fortunately no one had borrowed John’s jeep. It stood, hot and dusty, under the car port. John wiped the front seat clean and piled his gear into the back: blankets, water, brandy, can of petrol.

“Let’s get going,” he said. “Which way, princess?”

“Left,”
she said simply, as they bumped up the track to the main road.

They drove endlessly along the straight road across the desert towards Saudi Arabia. The jeep ate up the kilometres, occasionally passing a loaded lorry coming from the other direction, or a string of grumbling camels carrying rushes like untidy haystacks on their backs. Occasionally wrecks of cars by the side of the road relieved the lifeless landscape, or the bleached bones of a donkey casually acted as a milestone in the lost wastes.

“Wadi Amd is near here,” said Khadija, dabbing the moisture from her face. Although the trouser suit had been a perfect disguise, now the trousers clung uncomfortably to her legs and she longed for the coolness of one of her own loose gowns.

They approached a small group of qaradh and samr trees, a few flat roofed hovels, crumbling and seemingly deserted, and a mosque decorated with chipped blue tiles. John slowed down fractionally in case there were children about. A few hens and beer cans scattered in the dust as they flashed through.

“That was Wadi Amd,” said Khadija.

“Jolly little place,” said John.

John thought it would be a miracle if
Khadija could find the whereabouts of a hole in this vast, empty desert. He was beginning to think it might have been wiser to have enlisted an expert guide to help.

“There is the camel thorn bush,” said Khadija, pointing. “Turn right here.”

John turned off the road and began to drive over the stony desert. There was no track to follow. He just kept straight on, bumping and jolting, changing down gear when the wheels encountered a patch of soft sand.

“I hope you know where we’re going,” he said grimly.

“I think there are the boulders.”

John peered through the windscreen. He could see nothing. Perhaps there was the faintest smudge on the horizon. He could not really tell; the windscreen was so dirty. But he did not dare stop in case the wheels got bogged down in a soft patch.

Gradually some shape did form on the horizon—a small outcrop of rocks, scattered on the desert, left aeons ago by some internal volcanic explosion. John slowed down, keeping a wary distance from the rocks. Surely Ahmed Karim would have left some guard on the old man?

“They will be in the cave,” said Khadija, reading his thoughts, “where it is cool.”

John stopped the jeep in the scant shade of a rock on the outskirts. The engine died down with a whine. It was strangely silent after all those miles of driving. They felt the heat blowing in on them; the desert winds racing insanely across the flat sand.

“Let’s hope there’s only one,” said John. “Now you keep out of the way.”

The entrance to the cave was a narrow shaft between the three boulders. John would have passed by and thought it just a jagged shadow, if he had not heard a cough come from inside. He slid nearer the opening, silently, looping the rope in his hand, his fingers firmly poised on the top of the can of deodorant. A tiny speck of red lit up the darkness as the man inhaled. He hesitated fractionally. He wanted to be quite sure it was a guard and not the sheikh himself. But he saw the red spark drop to the floor of the cave, and the man stamped it out with movements that were quite unshackled.

Twisting his shoulders sideways, John moved quickly through the opening. His fingers pressed down on the aerosol button, and a fine spray of deodorant caught the surprised guard in the face. For a moment it stung, and he put his hands to his face, howling, no doubt convinced he was blinded forever.

John looped the rope quickly over the man’s shoulders, and they struggled together, their feet slipping on the sloping cave floor. Suddenly John pulled the rope taut and the guard fell, his arms pinioned. John flashed the rope round him, down his body, securing his feet, then pulled him, like a badly wrapped Christmas parcel, out of the cave into the sunlight.

For a moment, John could not see. Then he heard Khadija saying: “Is my father there?”

“I don’t know,” said John, wiping his brow. “But it’s a funny place to leave a guard if he isn’t.”

“We must put him near a rock or he will fry,” said Khadija, quite competently tightening the knots.

They left the guard, securely trussed, in some shade. John looked quickly but carefully around in the shimmering heat, but they seemed to be the only people there. He unloaded more nylon rope and gave Khadija the big flash lamp to hold.

“Now understand this,” he said firmly. “You are to remain at the mouth of the cave, shining the light downwards for me. You are not to move. The floor of the cave is sloping and very slippery. If I fall, or your father falls, you can do nothing. You are not to move. Do you understand?”