Declare (31 page)

The Bedu had presumably had their coffee and made their morning prayers before Hale’s party had arrived at the meeting place, and now they all, bin Jalawi included, began the monotonous falsetto singing that they could keep up for hours—a high trilling chatter of “
La ilaha illa ’llah,”
which meant
There is no God but God
, repeated until it became as meaningless to Hale as the songs of birds.

As his legs and back rediscovered the postures of riding, Hale gradually became aware of wrongnesses in his clothing—he missed the constriction of the woven leather belt Bedu wore over the
kidneys and abdomen; and without a dagger at his waist his robe didn’t fold into the natural pocket in which he used to carry the comforting weights of compass and notebook and camera; and most of all he missed the strap over his right shoulder, the wooden stock by his elbow, and the rifle muzzle bobbing always ready in his peripheral vision.

The Ash Shaq was a gravel plain between eroded cliffs, and in the patches where low dunes transected it Hale could see little wake trails in the sand on the south sides of the solitary
abal
shrubs, indicating the prevalence here of the Shamal wind. Late in the afternoon Hale’s party came upon the al-Sur water hole—bin Jalawi rode his camel up the western cliff slope to scout ahead along the higher ground and be sure that no other desert folk were pausing there for water—and then when he waved broadly from a farther promontory Hale and the others goaded their camels past the water hole in a fast walk. The gravel was polished and packed in paths radiating from the ring of stones, but there were no very fresh camel droppings visible.

Twice a fox scampered across their path, and Hale’s companions told him how the desert foxes would sometimes stand in front of a man on his knees praying and imitate the man’s gestures, distracting him from his devotions; and how Al Auf had once set up a head-cloth and robe on a stick, and when the fox imitated the scarecrow’s immobility, Al Auf had succeeded in catching the creature. Hale nodded without envy, remembering but not sharing with these Bedu a time when, at his approach, solitary foxes had run with evident deliberateness across the unstable slip-faces of dunes and provoked the roaring of the sands, like courtiers summoning kings.

At dusk rain began to fall from the low sky, and by the time the darkness forced them to make camp, the rain was thrashing down with a numbing constant hiss onto the gravel. They had not found any wood or brush for starting a fire, and when they had all dismounted and unloaded the camels, Ishmael distributed cheese sandwiches, commercially sealed in cellophane.

Hale unrolled the sleeping bag that had been strapped to his
camel, and he covered it with the rug and sheepskin from under the saddle, but as he lay on the humped mattress of gravel, the icy water found its way in and gathered in unwarming pools at his elbow, hip, and knee. Even though he had not slept at all the night before, he slept now only fitfully, often shivering awake to glance around at the dim shapes of the camels sitting facing away from the wind.

In the gray light of dawn Hale was awakened by the Arabs calling to one another as they roused the hobbled camels; frost crackled on the sheepskin as he pushed it off, and the camels’ breath was white plumes in the dawn air. Hale sat shivering and rubbing his bare feet while all his companions except Ishmael knelt in the wet gravel facing west toward Mecca to pray, and then he struggled stiffly to his feet when bin Jalawi started a fire of old heliotrope roots which he forced into flame with gasoline and scrapings from a bar of magnesium. The brassy ringing of a pestle pounding coffee beans in a mortar promised hot coffee, and another Bedu was soon mixing flour with water and kneading it into lumps to flatten and drop onto the embers of the fire. The camels had wandered off to a patch of green
arfaj
and were chewing noisily.

One of the Arabs had walked away to dig a hole in a sand dune, and he came back with the news that the rain had penetrated the sand as deep as his forearm. All the Bedu were cheered, and glanced around to fix the area in their memories, for a good soaking rain would produce grazing that would be green for years to come.

But though the sun was a red disk in the cleared eastern sky, throwing a watery rose light over their labors as they lifted the wet bales and saddlebags back onto the camels and strapped them securely down, the Bedu were soon moody and grumbling, for the course now lay due east, toward salt flats and the sulfur spring at Ain al’ Abd.

Hale now recalled hearing of the place—the Bedu he had traveled with had never visited it, for the water was foul and the place was said to be a haunt of djinn. He assumed Ishmael was paying a stiff price for these guides.

By midmorning they had reached the border of the desert where the red sand gave way to the gray-white salt flats, and before they
could proceed across they had to dismount and tie knotted cords under the hooves of the camels to keep them from slipping.

It had not rained here last night, and at first the salt sheets grated crisply under the camel’s hooves, and Hale’s companions looked unearthly with their chins and eyebrows underlit by the glare of reflected sunlight; the camels walked carefully, for fossil sea shells and the stumps of dead
’ausaj
bushes projected sharply from the gray surface; then their hooves began to break through the salt to the greasy black mud, and their progress became a slow, sliding dialogue between balance and gravity, punctuated by the curses of the riders and the camels’ panicky braying. When at last the beasts climbed long-legged up the shallow slope of the first of a succession of white dune chains, they had spent two hours traversing less than two miles.

The glaring gray expanses of salt still stretched away around them into the flickering horizon, and the Bedu muttered and kept their hands on their rifles, for in the universal dazzlement of the reflecting flats, every distant bush or rock seemed to be a cluster of tents or mounted men. And Hale thought too that he saw whirlwind shapes rising from the distant expanses of desert, among the dark spots in his vision that were just sun glare on his retinas; and he wondered what topologically effective shapes he might be able to make with the reins and his camel stick, if he should have to in a hurry. Once in Berlin he had made an ankh out of a dagger and a length of rope.

At dawn the Bedu had been sniffing the breeze for any whiff of alien campfires, but now they swore and spat, for the breeze from the ten-miles-distant ocean was fouled with the rotten-egg reek of sulfur. And the camels were moving slowly even across the sand, for their long necks were down low so that they could sweep their big heads back and forth and graze on the green
’ausaj
bushes as they walked; among the desert Arabs the
’ausaj
was considered to be haunted by djinn, and they would never use it as campfire fuel.

At noon the Bedu insisted on stopping for a smoke. When they had dismounted, bin Jalawi ceremoniously shook some dry tobacco from a leather pouch into an old .30 caliber cartridge shell, then
struck a match to it and took several deep puffs from the hole where the primer had once been; then he passed it to the man next to him. When the makeshift pipe came around to Hale, he inhaled the harsh smoke deeply, wishing that Moslems could bring themselves to indulge in liquor as well.

Before getting back up onto the camels, the Bedu had to chat for a few minutes in the warming sun, and as they swapped old stories that they must all have heard many times before, they checked their rifles—the men carrying automatic weapons popped the magazine out and worked the action to eject the chambered round, while the ones with bolt-action rifles stripped the bolt out and wiped it off before sliding it back into the breech. Hale knew that the desert Arabs were forever idly stripping and reassembling their rifles, but today it seemed to him that they performed the habitual actions more deliberately than was usual, and he noticed that when the men finally got to their feet, each rifle now had a round ready in the chamber.

They had ridden for another hour across the low white dunes when the young man who had first returned Hale’s greeting pointed ahead. “Ain al’ Abd,” he said uneasily.

The rotten-egg smell had grown stronger, and Hale had followed the example of his companions and pulled his
kaffiyeh
across his face, tucking the ends into the black
agal
head-ropes; now from the narrow gap between the lengths of cloth he squinted ahead and saw a dark shadow line that proved to be the edges of a depression in the marshy sand.

A meteor strike? wondered Hale. He remembered seeing a meteor crater some thirty miles southwest of here, near Abraq al-Khalijah, which meant high stony ground in an empty region—the crater had encompassed forty acres, and its cliff sides were twenty or thirty feet high; the meteorite had fallen in the 1860s, and the ’Ajman and ’Awazim tribes had avoided the place because of the Bedu superstitions about the Shihab, the shooting stars that knock down evil spirits who fly too near to heaven. The Coptic Christians in Egypt had a similar notion about the Perseid meteor showers in August, calling them “the fiery tears of St. Lawrence,” whose feast day was August 10.

St. Lawrence, thought Hale with a nervous grin. The patron saint of Declare, perhaps. A martyr to it, certainly.

In early 1948 in the ruins of Wabar, at the southern end of the ancient dry Dawasir-Jawb riverbed that stretched for more than two hundred miles from the Al-Jafurah valley by the Gulf of Bahrain, Hale and bin Jalawi had found what Hale had believed was a Solomonic seal, an iron meteorite as big as a tire, among the scattered black pearls that were lumps of fused sand, and Hale had radioed an RAF base in Abu Dhabi to fly out a DC-3 Dakota to take the thing away… and too at Wabar they had found and conversed with the half-man king who had made a covenant to evade the… the
wrath of God
… which had destroyed his city and stopped the river and buried his pastures and farmland under the dead sands of the desert…

But as his camel rocked steadily closer to the shadowy streak in the white sand, Hale soon saw that this was not a meteor crater; and it was almost with disappointment that he finally looked down at the sunken black pool, forty feet across at the widest, that lay at the bottom of this six-foot depression in the desert. In the center of the pool the water rolled and swirled over a natural spring, and Hale could see that on the eastern side a channel curled away toward the Maqta marshes and the eventual sea.

Only Ishmael had ridden up to the edge of the slope with him. The five Bedu sat on their grazing camels several hundred feet back.

Hale squinted around at the remote horizon:
’ausaj
bushes and sand and salt and far-traveling wind, nothing else. Ishmael, perched awkwardly in the saddle on top of his camel, was staring down at the desolate sulfur-fouled spring.

“When is he going to be here?” Hale called, shifting to sit cross-legged on his own saddle. “The person we’re supposed to talk to?”

Only Ishmael’s eyes showed over the tied-across flap of his headcloth, but Hale thought the old man looked sick. After a few seconds Ishmael sighed visibly, then nodded toward the water and said quietly, “He is here.”

Hale followed the man’s gaze—the rainbow-smeared surface of the water was more bumpy and irregular now, as if the wrecked
chassis of a locomotive were rising up from the depths, humping the sliding water above it and about to break the surface—and then Hale’s face went cold, two full seconds before his ribs tingled like a mouthful of bubbling champagne.

Nothing was pushing up from below the surface. The surface of the pool had
clenched
, in defiance of gravity, into gleaming folds and hollows, like the consistent standing shapes in a boat’s wake; and the glassy ridges and depressions were moving, slowly and laboriously, sometimes shattering into explosive spray but more often holding their shapes. Curling streaks of tan silt rushed like pale flames across the gleaming black surfaces.

Two parallel ridges of water, ten feet long and tapered at the ends, flexed into symmetrical contours, and Hale thought they now resembled vast lips; beyond the ends and behind them, two upswelling domes suddenly seemed to be yard-wide bulbous eyes. Webs of silt flowed over the domes like eyelid membranes; the whole surface of the pool had swollen into a gleaming mound and now looked something like a blind amphibian head.

It was hard to grasp the scale of the pool—surface tension couldn’t hold this volume of any liquid in this shape, and Hale’s optic nerves apparently supposed that some magnification was going on—his vision kept blurring and he had to keep refocusing on the thing.

After a moment the eye hemispheres cleared of silt and were glistening black orbs, while turbulent whirls of sand still clouded the rest of the monstrously bulging pool. The eyes had nothing like irises, but there was focused attention, if not intelligence, in the gaze that was directed straight across thirty feet of heated air at Hale and Ishmael.

The faltering breeze from the pool was not only hot, but damp. The pool’s convoluted surface was steaming now, at least in the twenty-foot quadrant between the huge lips and the sand slope below Hale’s camel, and among the foggy wisps Hale could see that in the instant of its first appearance each puff of steam was a perfect ring, too brief to glimpse unless he happened to be staring at the right spot at the moment when one of them sizzled. Most of the
flashbulb-quick rings were as small as coins, but some were as big as steering wheels, and a few were just segments of circles that would have been wider than radar dishes. The water was hissing and popping, and now a counterclockwise breeze had started up around the pool, raising a haze of sand.