Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (62 page)

He continued his evening walk, exchanging greetings with
neighbours and waving when he caught sight of his eight-year-
old half-brother, Abdullah, who was leading the family's three
cherished goats homeward. And then, when he caught sight of his own home, a small but sturdy square of rough-hewn
rock, he paused as always to admire its clean lines in the setting
sun, each stone glowing radiantly as though from within.

His evening inspection over, he opened the small door to
his house and ducked his head as he entered. His wife, Jehan,
wearing her black headcloth and
abbeya,
was squatted on the
floor, grinding
kibbe,
a lamb-and-cracked-wheat dish, with a
wooden pestle in a large hollowed square of rock. She smiled
up at him with her heavy-lashed eyes. Despite the harsh desert
climate and years of toil which had creased and cracked her
once-soft skin to a tough leathery hide, she was, at forty, still
a handsome woman of angular planes and profound strength.

'How is our guest, my wife?' he asked softly.

'He has awakened twice and eaten,' she whispered, smiling.
'A few more days and he will be up and about.' She quietly
continued to grind the
kibbe.

Naemuddin pushed aside the curtain which sectioned off
the single large room. Quietly he approached the pallet in the
dark far corner and looked down. The man was asleep.

Naemuddin nodded to himself. Rest was what the patient needed now, and food and water, but only in small amounts.
Feeding him too much too quickly after his near-starvation
and exposure to the elements would only make him sicker. It was nothing short of miraculous that the nomadic bedouins who had brought him here had found him, an even greater
miracle that he had not died.

'Life or death,' Naemuddin murmured gravely. 'Which ever
destiny had been chosen for him is the will of Allah.'

Allah's will, too, Naemuddin thought, had brought him
here, into his house. Yet the stranger was an enigma he could
not fathom: hair the colour of the desert sand, one leg, and
feverish jabber in many tongues, including fluent Arabic. Yet
Naemuddin was certain that Allah, in his good time, would
unravel that mystery when ready to do so.

Naemuddin started to turn and leave, when the man sud
denly moaned in his sleep. He recognized at once that the
sound was one not of pain, but of terror.

Schmarya emitted another strangled sob. In his sleep, he
was once again falling through that horrible tunnel of empty
air, the wind whistling and shrieking, the jagged fingers of
rock coming closer, closer, ever closer . . .

With a scream he awakened and tried to sit up, but the
effort proved too costly. His head slumped wearily back down
upon the pillow. It was a moment before he became aware of
Naemuddin. He stared at him as though seeing an apparition.

'Who are you? Where am I?' Schmarya was certain he
shouted the questions in Russian; in actuality, his voice was
weak, barely a raspy croak.

Naemuddin did not reply. He squatted down and hunkered
there, smiling gently.

Schmarya repeated his question, in Hebrew this time.

Naemuddin shrugged and held out his hands helplessly.

Schmarya tried one last time, in Arabic.

Naemuddin's eyes lit up. 'I am Naemuddin al-Ameer, and
you are in my house,' he replied in Arabic.

'Your house?'

'The house of my father, and his father before him. You are
at the oasis of al-Najaf.'

Schmarya let out a deep sigh. 'Then I am not dead.'

Naemuddin chuckled. 'No, you are not. Indeed, you are
very much alive.' For a moment he felt compelled to ask
Schmarya many things. Who he was. Where he was from. How he had learned such surprisingly fluent Arabic for one
with the fair skin of the British. But he stifled his curiosity.
Questions and answers would only tire the man. There would
be time enough to ask them tomorrow, or the day after.

Weakly Schmarya tested his limbs. He grimaced at the pain
which shot through him, but he felt relieved. It didn't feel as
if any bones had been broken. Then he suddenly realized he was not wearing his wooden leg. His eyes danced with terror.
Without that most precious possession he would not be able
to walk. Would not even be able to stand.

'My leg!' he whispered hoarsely. 'My
leg!'

'That?' Naemuddin gestured toward the corner, where the
prosthesis was propped against the wall.

Schmarya nodded and sighed a breath of relief.

'The bedouins were puzzled by it. They found it lying beside
you.'

'It must have come loose when I fell. Thank God they didn't
leave it behind.' Schmarya shuddered at the possibility.

"The bedouins who brought you here said you had suffered
a severe fall,' Naemuddin told him. 'It was a miracle, they
said. You landed in a pocket of sand which cushioned your
fall. Otherwise . . .'Naemuddin cursed himself silently. What
a stupid, callous thing to have let slip. 'You will be fine,' he
reassured Schmarya. 'We have no doctor here, but several of
us are wise in the ways of accidents and their remedies. A few
more days of rest and then—'

'A few
more
days!' Schmarya looked horror-stricken.
'How . . . how long have I been here?'

'Five nights.'

'Five nights! And . . .' His throat was suddenly dry. 'And
how long was I out there before I was found?' he asked in a
whisper.

'That I do not know precisely. Three days. Four.' Naemud
din frowned. 'The bedouins could only guess from your
condition.'

Five nights and . . . three or four days! Could that be poss
ible? It would mean that he'd dropped off the face of the earth,
so to speak, for eight or nine days altogether, and adding the
three days he had already been gone from the kibbutz before
the accident had occurred . . .

Schmarya could well imagine the consternation he had pro
voked at Ein Shmona. He must send a message . . .

'Perhaps tomorrow,' Naemuddin told him. 'For now, I think
you should get more sleep.'

Schmarya gazed into the gentle liquid eyes of this man who had taken him into his house and was selflessly nursing him.
He was beholden to him for his life. And the bedouins who
had found him. He owed them the greatest debt a man could
incur.

'I owe you so much,' he said heavily. 'How will I ever repay
you?'

'If a man finds another in the desert, he does not rescue him
in order to be repaid,' Naemuddin said quietly. 'We are all
travellers on the same sandy sea. In other circumstances, you
would have done the same for one of us. Now, sleep.'

Schmarya shut his eyes. Sleep. He could already feel it drift
ing over him in a dark, peaceful mantle. 'Yes, you are right,'
he murmured thickly. 'A little sleep . . . And then tomor
row . . .'

'Yes, tomorrow.'

But Schmarya was already snoring steadily.

Under Naemuddin and Jehan's care, Schmarya's strength
increased with remarkable alacrity. The next morning, he
stepped outside the house for the first time and took a short
walk in the sun. The day after that, he explored the entire
oasis. Everyone stared at him with curiosity, but he paid no
heed to the attention he received. He was too busy comparing
al-Najaf with Ein Shmona.

The two settlements, he learned, were a mere twelve miles
apart, which made them neighbouring villages, but other than
himself, the inhabitants of neither village had ever met those
of the other.

The settlements shared much in common, but al-Najaf, with
its ready supply of oasis water and several hundred years of
inhabitation and cultivation, enjoyed a more comfortable and
placid existence. At Ein Shmona, all that had awaited the
settlers was the stingy well and a nearby cliff face where rock
could be quarried and hewn. Ein Shmona did not boast the
fields which had been laid out and irrigated for several hundred
years. But there was a pioneering spirit at Ein Shmona which
al-Najaf perhaps once had had and no longer needed. Yet
the industriousness of the inhabitants of both settlements was
equal. The major difference Schmarya noticed was that while
everything at Ein Shmona had to be done by trial and error,
the people of al-Najaf had accumulated a wealth of knowledge
passed down through the centuries. Coaxing an existence from
the desert was second nature to them. The difficulties between
man and desert had long since been resolved. This not being
the case with Ein Shmona, Schmarya was especially excited
by the two priceless discoveries he made—the water wheel and
Archimedes' screws.

With those, the final pieces of Ein Shmona's water problem
fell into place. He realized now that rerouting the water from
the spring he had found, and piping it to Ein Shmona, was but the first step toward irrigating the kibbutz. These two ancient,
time-honoured tools—this simple wheel and the giant, delicately carved wooden screw—were the final necessary
implements. With improved variations on these ingenious
instruments, far more desert fields could be watered and
brought to fruition than he had ever dared dream possible.

The Negev could indeed flower.

Now he could hardly wait to get back to Ein Shmona, bring
ing with him not only the gift of water but also a solution for
distributing it to the surrounding desert.

Suddenly the Promised Land held more promise than ever.

Fourteen months later, when the five miles of six-inch water
pipe carried a ceaseless flow of fresh cool spring water to the kibbutz, everyone cheered and celebrated. Schmarya was
toasted repeatedly, and spoken of in awe. He had become the
hero of the settlement.