Word Fulfilled, The (13 page)

Seventeen

The Arabian Desert

Fourteenth Day of Simanu

his is impossible!”

Jonah squinted against the glare of the midday sun that reflected off the light sand. Dunes rippled in every direction, the smooth sand of the one they traversed broken only by the hoof prints of the camels ahead. He had never seen so forsaken a land, worse even than the wilderness he walked between Damascus and Tadmor. At least there he had a discernible road and a few rocks to divert his attention from the endless stretch of sand and pebbles. Here it was just sand. Nothing but sand, sand, sand.

Early yesterday, before they departed Mari, Jamal called the drivers together. The men circled around him while they chewed the last of their morning meal. He spoke in the Assyrian tongue, but then in halting Hebrew for Jonah’s benefit.

“Follow close. Stay on trail. Do not stray left or right.” The leader spat a stream of red juice into the sand. “Between the rivers, water is not far below the sands. A man breaks the surface and the desert swallows him up like that.” He snapped his fingers.

Jonah stared, his mouth agape. He looked at the other drivers, shocked that none showed any concern.

“But . . . how do you know where to ride? How can you tell where the sand is thin?”

Jamal grinned, his chest puffed out. “Many times I cross this land. Only two camels have I lost.” He held up a finger and a thumb. “Just two.”

The other drivers nodded in apparent approval of his record.

“We stay to higher ground. Where there is no higher ground, we go slow.”

Jonah’s shoulders slumped.

Lll

He rode fourth in line. They forded the Purattu River at a stretch of narrows just upstream from Mari. Fortunately, a light rainy season left the river low, so the current created little problem for the animals. Still, the sight of the water roiling around the camel’s legs brought a wave of nausea up Jonah’s throat and forced his eyes to the horizon. Would this journey never end?

The worst began as soon as they regained the heights on the other side of the river. They topped the rise, and Jonah shielded his eyes against the glare and heat of the morning sun. The brilliance did not decrease even as the sun passed its zenith and moved behind him. Only when the sky flashed yellow and orange to signal the demise of another day, could he fully raise his eyelids. When he did, there was nothing to see but dunes devoid of vegetation, seemingly devoid of any life at all.

A day and a half east of Mari, he spied a lowland to the left of the trail. His eyes feasted on the diversity in the terrain, grateful for anything that broke the monotony of the dunes. The basin appeared completely flat. It lacked even ripples of sand like those over which he now traveled. He caught a glint of reflection from—could it be water? He leaned forward and squinted in the direction of the light. Pale, lime-encrusted puddles, tired remnants of the last rainy season, dotted the low-lying area. The puddles seemed to shrink before his eyes as the porous earth sucked at them from beneath and the arid air vaporized them from above.

Splotches of wetness lay amid a patchwork of dried mud chips, their jagged edges curled toward the sky as though beseeching the daystar for mercy from his relentless heat. The cracked earth stretched to the north until it disappeared into the waves of heat radiating from the baked ground. Was all Assyria like this? Little wonder it birthed such a harsh and cruel people, Jonah mused. If man tends to assume the personality of his environment, then the desert was an earthen Assyrian. It made sense to him.

The thought of the Assyrian people revisited in Jonah’s mind the reason for this journey.
“You are to go to the great city Nineveh and preach to the people repentance of their sins.”
From the moment the angel reiterated his commission on Joppa’s shore, the words clung to his mind and embedded themselves in his brain like an eagle’s talons gripping their prey. He recalled many of the questions that sprouted in his mind during the trek from Joppa back to Gath-hepher:
How do I get to Nineveh? Who do I see and where do I start? Do I see the king first, like I did in Samaria? Will they understand me? Jamal has learned some Hebrew from his travels, and I struggle to understand him. What of the people of Nineveh? I know nothing of the Assyrian tongue.

Jonah’s troubled mind retraced the journey that took God’s message of restoration to King Jeroboam in Samaria. Some of the same questions plagued that journey, but
Adonai
saw to His word. Jonah arrived at the court of the newly installed king in the wake of an assassination attempt and gained admittance into the court on the shirttails of Elihu, the war hero. That would not be repeated in Nineveh. A foreigner would be the last person granted an audience at such a time.

The camel yanked its head and took a stutter step. Absently, Jonah patted the beast on the side of her neck, then dropped back into his worries.

The old adage that you can’t steer a donkey that is standing still resurfaced in his mind. Well, he wasn’t standing still. He was moving. He was doing his part. But he had only been told what to do, not how to do it. Why did he feel no peace of mind? Why was the angel so silent?

The camel’s bellow yanked Jonah back to the present. The beast sidestepped, then lunged forward. Jonah cried out at the sudden movement. His legs shot up and flailed in the air for balance. He grasped at the blanket on the camel’s back, but his finger found no grip. For a brief moment, he teetered, then rolled off his mount and collapsed onto the trail in a cloud of dust.

Jonah sprawled on the sand and gasped to recapture the air forced from his lungs. A movement against his side caught his eye. He froze. From beneath his back, the rear half of a brown-and-tan patterned serpent writhed, its head pinned against the ground under Jonah’s body.

Jonah squirmed onto his side, away from the twisting snake. He scrambled onto all fours and looked up. The viper, curved fangs bared, launched itself at Jonah.

The camel’s bellow pulled Jamal’s head around in time to see Jonah’s animal lurch off the trail and lumber down the slope toward the parched lakebed—without his rider. He pulled his own mount aside and urged him toward the panicked beast. Ignoring the shouts of his fellow drivers, Jamal set an angle to intercept the camel. He kept an eye on the sandy flats that bordered the basin. His camel labored under the load of both cargo and rider that drove the animal’s hooves deep into the sand.

The caravan master cursed under his breath. He leaned forward and urged his camel faster. The animals converged, and Jamal reached out for the lead rope. His fingers grazed the cord just as his own camel bellowed and pitched forward into the water-saturated flats. The beast roared in pain as his forelegs broke through the crust and sank. His knees snapped like twigs from the momentum and his weight.

Jamal flew from his seat and tumbled over the neck of Jonah’s mount. He landed on his back on the lake berm, the air forced from his lungs. He sprawled out to even his weight over the surface of the sand and lay still, knowing any movement would embed him into the mire. Jonah’s mount swerved to avoid Jamal’s camel, but her momentum carried her broadside into the writhing animal. She stumbled and collapsed on her side over Jamal’s outstretched legs.

Jamal’s lower body sank into the quicksand under the camel’s weight. Only his head, shoulders, and part of his chest still showed above the surface. The stricken caravan leader lifted his arm and reached out to grasp the hair on the back of Jonah’s camel, but the beast was past hope. Only the side of her massive hump remained visible above the sand. Jamal became aware of the shouts of his fellow drivers, who had leaped from their animals and ran down the slope. They slowed to test the surface as they crept across the flats.

His body immobilized, Jamal turned his eyes toward his men. The caravan’s second driver dropped to all fours, yanked off his keffiyeh, and crawled as close as he dared to his leader. He stretched forward over the crusted sand and whipped the light fabric toward Jamal’s head. The end of the head dressing landed less than an arm’s length from the trapped man. Jamal thrust his arm from the quicksand and groped for the material. The movement pushed his head and shoulders under the surface just as his fingers grasped the cloth.

“Pull! PULL!” Jamal’s rescuer screamed at the men behind him. The drivers clutched his legs to their chests and scrambled backward. The man stared wide-eyed as Jamal’s hand protruded from the sand, grasped onto the keffiyeh. The men pulled, and Jamal’s hand rose from the quicksand to the wrist, then to the forearm. A patch of sand bulged where Jamal’s head pushed back to the surface.

Sweat dripped from the rescuer’s forehead and burned his eyes with salty sweat. The cloth began to slip between his strained fingers. He squeezed tighter.

As Jamal’s brow broke the surface, his fingers stiffened, then went limp. The cloth slipped from his grasp, and his arm slid back beneath the surface. A final bellow from his injured camel broke the sudden silence, and she joined her master beneath the sands.

Jonah twisted his body away from the serpent’s lunge. He scrambled to his feet and felt a strike on his shoulder. The snake squirmed in the air, suspended by a curved fang snagged in the loose fabric of the desert robe. He jumped to his feet and threw his shoulder back to dislodge the serpent. The move threw Jonah off balance, and he tumbled backward down the incline toward the lakebed.

He came to rest on his stomach in full view of the frantic scene at the edge of the dried lake. Jamal arced over a camel’s neck—the camel Jonah recognized as being his own. A second beast stood knee-deep in sand and bellowed at the top of her lungs. Jonah watched, horrified, as his camel collapsed onto Jamal’s body. After a moment, it occurred to him that neither Jamal nor the camels could get up.

As the sand sucked at the caravan leader and the trapped camels, three men raced toward them. Jonah watched the lead runner tear off his head covering and flatten himself against the sand, reaching out to Jamal. Then he saw Jamal’s head sink beneath the sand. There came more shouts and more bellows; then all went quiet.

Lll

The caravan halted there for the day. Jonah hunched on the slope, his arms draped over his crossed legs. His glassy eyes fixed themselves on the stretch of sand that now betrayed no trace of the deadly drama he had witnessed less than an hour earlier. He had not moved from where he landed after he shook off the snake. The rest of the camel drivers huddled in quiet consultation. They still had precious goods to deliver. There would need to be a new leader. No one spoke out; no man volunteered. Every man there, save Jonah, had seen the desert claim men and beasts before. But this was Jamal. He was more than their leader. He was a brother.

There was also the matter of the snake. The desert viper was nocturnal, a night hunter, yet this one struck at midday. The two drivers behind Jonah who saw it lunge froze, shocked at the snake’s appearance. But when they dismounted and ran up to kill the serpent, there was no sign of it. Scuff marks on the trail betrayed Jonah’s struggle with the viper, but no telltale marks in the sand hinted where the snake may have come from, or where it may have gone.

Jonah sat apart from the others, his mind in turmoil. How could this be happening? He understood the misfortunes he met when he fled to Joppa. But why now, when he acted in obedience? Why the near-fatal encounters with the scorpion, the sandstorm, the snake—and if he had not been thrown from the back of the camel, certain death beneath the quicksand? And what of Jamal? He was innocent, merely a desert guide.

The questions niggled at him and birthed a dull ache in the back of his skull.