"If the tribes get word of a Nazrani in the sands, it will be all they will talk about. Ibn Saud's men will hear of it."
"We'll be fast," said Hale confidently, "and if we meet any Bedu I'll speak only in order to return greetings, in Arabic with some northern accent like Ruwala-"
"And not get off your camel," added bin Jalawi. He had often told Hale that his huge English feet left monstrous footprints in the sand.
The 150-mile camel route from Hasa to Jabrin was mostly polished tracks slanting across gravel plains, but a number of times Hale did have to drive the commandeered RAF jeep over dunes, with the big 900-x-15 tires spinning heavily and sand thumping like deep water in the wheel wells. He had left Hufuf in the frosty dawn, but by the time he drove the jeep around the last sand ridge and finally saw below him the palm plantations of Jabrin, the sky was red with twilight, and a bandage from the jeep's first-aid kit was wrapped tightly around a splitting radiator hose, and the radiator itself had been patched by a helpful Bedu family at the last well, with a paste of flour and camel dung. The generator had been screeching for the last hour.
Through the jolting, dust-powdered windscreen he squinted around at the Jabrin basin. Though some of the tracts of palm trees were still flourishing in orderly rows, most were decimated and choked with wild acacia bushes, and several stretches showed only toppled, dry trunks. Until the jeep clattered down to the level of the oasis he could see the broken walls and foundation-lines of ruined buildings.
Salim bin Jalawi's party was camped on a flinty steppe by three well mounds, and out of sheer mercy for their eardrums Hale tromped on the brake pedal when he was still a couple of hundred feet away; and at long last he switched off the jeep's laboring engine.
The shrill whine of the generator blessedly squeaked to a halt, but in the sudden desert silence he felt even more conspicuous. He climbed stiffly out of the driver's seat and plodded around to the back, and as he unstrapped his two cases he squinted over his shoulder at the campfire and the tents and the humps of camels grazing beyond, and his nostrils flared at the warm aroma of boiled rice and butter on the alkali breeze.
The three men by the fire had stood up when the engine died, and Hale straightened the dusty kaffiyeh on his head and then hefted his cases and stepped away from the jeep. In spite of the head-cloth's protection and the cloudy sky throughout the long day, he could feel the sting of sunburn on his nose and forehead.
He trudged slowly across the gravel to the fires, noting that the camels had already been watered-the nearest well mound had been cleared of sand and its cover of lumber and skins had been pulled away, to be conscientiously replaced before leaving tomorrow morning, and the mound, a cement of sand and a hundred years of accumulated camel dung, glinted with muddy moisture in the firelight.
"Al Kuwa," he called. God give you strength. These men knew he was English-a Frank, a nominal Christian, a Nazrani-but he wanted to say nothing to emphasize it.
"Allah-i-gauik," the three of them replied, civilly enough. God strengthen you.
"You camp right at the well?" Hale went on in Arabic when he had laid down his cases and embraced bin Jalawi. From one of the other men he accepted a small cup of hot coffee made from the well water, and drank it-it tasted fresh, but he knew that a laboratory analysis would show high concentrations of albuminoid ammonia, indicating contamination of camel urine in the well water.
"We are on the border of the desolation of A'ad," said the man who had handed Hale the cup. He was a lean, black-haired 'Al-Murra tribesman with a leather cartridge belt over his shoulder and what looked like an old single-shot.450 rifle propped against a camel saddle beside him. "Even the Saar tribes will have the sense to stay out of the Rub' al-Khali in these nights." He laughed quietly.
"Or even in the days," said bin Jalawi helpfully, crouching to sit by the fire again. "Men's hopes are confounded when angels bend their courses down to earth." Squinting up at Hale, he said, "I'll wager the dibba came to Hufuf, after we left?"
"Yes," Hale admitted. Dibba was the Arab term for locusts in the wingless, crawling stage, and armies of them often followed the airborne migrations. "Nothing extraordinary." In fact the dibba had advanced on Hufuf from out of the southern desert in a front four miles wide and two miles deep, and black masses of them had stripped the date trees so bare that they appeared to have been burned. When Hale had driven out of town at dawn, he had seemed to be driving over crunching black snow, and on the road he had seen half a dozen dog-sized monitor lizards springing up in the chilly air to catch strays from the low-flying last wave of winged locusts.
"'Nothing extraordinary,'" echoed bin Jalawi in a thoughtful tone, and the other two Bedu muttered to each other as they spread their robes and sat down. "Perhaps to the Franks the end of the world is nothing extraordinary."
Hale found a place to sit on the windward side of the fire, and he accepted a plate of rice ladled from the pan that would recently have served as the camels' drinking trough. He dug in hungrily with his right hand, licking his fingers, for he had brought only bread and cheese to sustain him during the day's jolting drive.
"A few million bugs don't make the end of the world," he said to bin Jalawi around a mouthful of rice.
"It is metaphorical," said bin Jalawi, using the English word.
In the twilight Hale could see several of the ruined forts of ancient Jabrin silhouetted against the purple sky. He knew that Jabrin had been a prosperous city long ago and that at some point the citizens had been driven out into the desert by a killing fever; the illness had abided at the place like a curse, and struck all the Arabs who had periodically made the attempt to live here since then. Oddly, travelers who stopped at the oasis never contracted the malady, and now the Bedu visited Jabrin only to use the wells and gather dates from the hundreds of date palms, which no one ever tended anymore.
Butterflies fluttered around Hale's face as he ate-little orange and black painted ladies-and bin Jalawi nodded somberly when he saw Hale brushing them away.
"You know better than to inhale one of them, bin Sikkah," he said, using Hale's Bedu name now that they were in the sands, rather than the city name Tommo Burks. "But don't crush them, or needlessly knock them into the fire."
"Poor ghosts," agreed one of the 'Al-Murra tribesmen. His gaunt face was sculpted into chiaroscuro gullies and prominences by the firelight as he too glanced around at the horizon notches that were the old forts. He wrung his hands for a moment as if washing them, then spread them to the sides, palm down. "At least they're the ghosts of men. South of here will be ghosts of other things."
Hale had read in the Hezar Efsan about ghosts of the A'adites. "The walking stones," he said.
"Uskut!" the man exclaimed; the Arabic word meant shut up! "Name them not!"
One of the butterflies had landed on bin Jalawi's palm, and he breathed softly on it, ruffling its wings but not dislodging it. "If you can hear," he said to it, "and think, remember us in your morning prayers; even the Nazrani."
Hale smiled sourly, but he was sure that if the butterflies were indeed ghosts, they were fragments of identity too minimal to be capable of thought. He sniffed the stone-scented wind and thought that there was no sentience at all in the miles of dark desert surrounding them; far away to the north and south might be hidden isolated clusters of warm Bedu tents, with perhaps overhead in the dark sky the astronomical distortions that indicated the passage of djinn through the Heaviside Layer, but the Jabrin region felt empty.
He knew that the desert south of them would not be empty; and he tried to pray, but in spite of his best efforts he found that his mental Pater Nosters quickly degenerated into a sterile recitation of the London Underground stations. Once again he envied Elena her faith.
"Bug," he said in useless English to the fluttering nullity on bin Jalawi's palm, "in your orisons, be all my sins remembered."
When he had finished the rice and scoured the plate with a couple of handfuls of sand, he wiped his hands on his dishdasha robe and then unzipped the longer of the two leather cases he had carried from the jeep; he lifted out of it a slim Mannlicher 9.5-millimeter carbine and a canvas bag of loaded stripper-clips, and another canvas bag that contained four custom-machined iron ankhs, wrapped in linen cloths to prevent clinking. Doubtless his Bedu companions imagined that the second bag contained spare cartridges on clips like the first-they would be scandalized by the sight of the devilish ankhs-and Hale decided not to trouble them with an explanation of the Egyptian looped crosses until the party had reached the regions where their protection would be necessary.