City of Veils (48 page)

The third dune proved impossible to scale. It was high, two hundred meters at least, and steeper than the ones he’d traversed. Every time he tried to climb it the Rover slid sideways, forcing him back down. He zigzagged up and down five times before he stopped. He couldn’t turn around to try it again, and when he put the car in reverse and tried to drive backward, he found himself getting entrenched in sand. He feared that if he kept going forward he would lose his sense of direction, lose sight of the camel. Had its rider seen him? Probably not, through all the dust and sand. He or she was just on the other side of the enormous dune.

Steeling himself, he got out of the car and stood for a moment at the bottom of the dune. From this vantage point, it was much steeper than it had seemed from behind the wheel. He went to the trunk and took out the ropes, hanging them on his shoulder as he fished around for the pickax. He thought it had been among his supplies, but apparently not. He shut the trunk and headed quickly up the dune.

The going was faster than the previous time. Despite the steep angle, despite the pounding of his heart and the lashing wind, now so full of sand that it was almost impossible to keep his eyes open, he was climbing like a goat, thanks to a burst of adrenaline. He forced his way to the crest and scanned the other side.

The camel was climbing toward him, slipping in the sand but making a desperate, valiant effort. On its back the rider was crouched low, clutching the camel’s neck with both arms. He saw a strand of brown hair and a flash of white arm. Miriam. Nayir shouted, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind. He unwound the rope at his shoulder and shouted again. This time she looked up, squinting. Great sheets of sand blew between them, and the wind was so fierce at the top of the dune that Nayir was stumbling sideways. He shouted again.

He tied the rope end in a loop and slid the first few feet down the side of the dune. He had to get close enough to lasso the camel’s neck but not so far down that he would lose control of his sliding. Miriam saw him, tried calling something, but all he heard was the faint sound of a woman’s voice lost on the wind.

He fought the wind to move to the right, then threw the lasso. It missed. He dragged it back and threw it twice again. The camel was slipping backward now, Miriam gripping its neck in panic. He slid lower, stopping himself a few feet down, and threw the rope again. It hit Miriam’s head and she sat up, grabbing but missing it. He threw once more. This time she caught it. She fumbled to slip it around the camel’s neck.

Nayir didn’t see the rest. He was glancing at the looming storm. The center of the mass was a yellowish darkness, and above it a tremendous red wall had been moving steadily closer so that its core was nearly upon them. Like a bright belt of fire shooting tongues of flame in every direction, it was deep scarlet and a few hundred feet wide. He scrambled back to the top of the dune, a razor’s edge now shooting sand straight into the sky. He slid down the other side, pulling with all his might, feeling the tug of the camel on the other end. He dug his legs into the sand, pulling and pulling until the camel appeared at the edge. It gave a jerk of surprise but found its footing and angled a path down the dune.

Nayir ran to meet it, gripping the rope tightly. Miriam was clutching the beast’s neck and shaking all over. He led the camel down the dune and for a panicked moment lost sight of his car. But the sheets of falling sand lifted, and he saw the dim outline of the Rover. He made quickly for it, dragging the camel and Miriam behind him.

F
ace and arms raw from the burning wind, Nayir unwound his
shumagh
and turned to Miriam. She was in the Rover’s passenger seat, coughing and gagging, tears streaming down her face.

“Just breathe, Miriam,” he said, reaching quickly to the backseat for a spare headscarf and handing it to her. “Here, use this.”

She took the scarf and coughed into it, breathing in ragged wheezes. Finally she sat up, her whole torso shaking with the effort of breathing. She put a hand on her chest and tried to talk but cringed in pain.

He reached back to find a water bottle. “Drink some water. As much as you can.”

She took the bottle, wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her sleeve, and took a tentative swig. She winced as she swallowed, blinking furiously.

“You’ll be okay,” he said. “Just keep coughing.”

She gave another obedient cough. It brought more tears to her eyes.

“I thought you were Mabus,” she croaked.

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Just keep drinking.”

He put the car in gear and began to pray,
Bism’allah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim.…
When he touched the gas, the wheels gave a jolt, but the car didn’t move. He pressed harder. Again, nothing. He pressed a little harder and heard the wheels slip, spinning uselessly in the sand. “Dammit.”

Miriam gave a soft moan of dismay.

His hands were shaking as he took them from the wheel. They had two choices now: either try to push the car out of its rut, or stay where they were and wait out the storm. He looked past Miriam to the window. As the storm bore down, columns of swirling sand rose around them like angry geysers. Between heavy gusts of lentil-thick air, he saw the camel still standing there, taking its meager shelter by the side of the car.

S
till blinking through tears, Miriam watched Nayir move with fluid strength as he reached back and collected a rope and a frightening-looking knife in a black sheath that he belted to his waist. Then he climbed into the backseat and leaned over into the rear, hauling all his gear forward onto the floor beside him. She watched him put on a pair of hiking boots.

“We’re going to have to wait here until the storm blows past,” he said. “It might be a long wait, but you can’t be afraid, all right?” She nodded. “Just relax,” he said. “Breathe slowly, and you won’t pass out.”

“Okay.”

“And whatever you do,” he said, looking straight at her, “don’t get out of the car.”

She nodded. He handed her another headscarf.

“What’s this for?” she gurgled, coughing again.

“Help me get the camel into the trunk.”

“What? Why?”

“Once the storm is over, the Rover is going to be stuck. It’s going to take more than two of us to get it out. That camel will be our only way of getting back to the road by Mabus’s house. We may even have to go farther, to the next town. And who knows what the dunes are going to look like once this is over?” He motioned to the window. “We might need the camel just to get out of here.”

“Okay. But is it going to fit?”

“It will be tight. Put this around your head. Tie it tightly and then wind this one around your face—including your eyes. Just leave a tiny slit. Take shallow breaths, and don’t faint. Keep breathing no matter what.”

He bent into the rear once again and brought out a box of tissues. He tore one into strips and handed them to her. “Put these in your ears. Get as much in there as you can. Hurry.”

He wrapped a piece of cloth over his nose and mouth, and knotted it securely at the back of his head.

“I’ll get out,” he said. “But I want you to climb back here. I’ll push the camel in, and you pull. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He covered his face and slipped out into the storm.

She balled the tissue and forced it into her ears, ignoring the pain and pressure of adjustment. She tightened the scarf around her head, then tied the other one around her face as she’d seen Nayir do. Then she scrambled into the rear, climbing over the heaps of gear in the backseat.

The trunk seemed much too small to hold a camel. With a wild roar and a flurry of sand, the rear door swung open, letting in a maelstrom. She squinted through it to see Nayir haul out two large jugs of fluid, probably gasoline, and set them on the ground. The camel was standing beside him, the skinny old thing lashing like a kite in the wind. Nayir handed her the camel’s reins and she took them and began pulling, but the beast only reared away. Miriam pulled harder.

The camel resisted. As Nayir bent over, trying to force it to step onto the gasoline canister, the beast shook its head in an obvious sign of reluctance. The sand was blowing violently into the car. They were so close to the bottom of the dune that it was as if a line of men were standing just behind Nayir, tossing buckets of sand into the trunk. Miriam noticed with alarm that the camel’s legs were buried to the knee and that it was dancing to free its feet.

Miriam scrambled forward. All her pulling was doing nothing. She got out of the car on the camel’s other side and they both bent down, grabbing its legs in a vain effort to lift it into the trunk, but they managed only to frighten the creature more. It was jumping up and down, shaking its head and making a terrible noise deep in its throat. Where Miriam went to grab the camel’s leash again, it kicked her hard in the leg and she fell backward into a churning pool of sand.

She screamed but only managed to let in a mouthful of sand. Struggling to sit up before the sand swallowed her completely, she flailed and turned over, getting more sand into her headscarf. It poured in like water, and she scrambled to her knees, spitting and blinking. She couldn’t see anything. She stood up, but the wind lashed her so fiercely that she lost all sense of direction. Moving blindly forward, hands outstretched, she opened her eyes, then immediately regretted it as the sand cut a new prescription in the one eye without a contact lens. She lurched forward, the sand rising to her knees. It was like swimming in rapids, untethered to land. Sand came in sheets from both sides, shifting like a pack of dogs on a leash. It blew grains up her nose. She couldn’t breathe except in spasmodic gasps when her body forced her to take in air. She gasped, but her lungs rejected the fine granules of dirt and dust, closing off her throat. She wheezed.
Short little breaths. Don’t faint.

A hand on her back. Nayir clutched her shoulder and wrapped his arm around her torso before she blew away. He leaned against the solid air, forging brutal strides. Miriam’s mind was lost in her body; now she was her nose, pressing out sand. Now her hand, gripping Nayir’s arm in the darkness.

Something dribbled over the ridge of her lip and slid into her mouth at a jagged angle from the pressure of the wind. She tasted it. Blood. The sand whipped her like a million fragments of glass. Minuscule bullets of crystal and rock had torn sluices on those parts of her face where the scarf had blown away. Her eyebrows and her nose were wet with blood. She squeezed Nayir’s arm to remind herself that he was there, that she hadn’t slipped away. She felt the strength of his hand, the solidity of his grip.

An eternity later, just when she was about to black out, she felt a sharp yank and was thrust into the car. The door slammed behind her as buckets of sand blasted onto her lap, across her face, and down the collar of her robe. She tore off her scarf and blinked, seeing fragments of light and darkness, the red of blood, grains of sand in her eyes. With her tongue, she stroked the inside of her cheek. From the gum line she extracted a silver dollar of grit and spat it out. She used her fingers to scrape the rest of the sand from her mouth. She coughed again, then sneezed, ejecting a bitter muck onto her sleeve.

She opened one eye, tender and filling with tears, then the other. She was alone in the backseat.

She scrambled into the front. Sand was rising up the side window like an hourglass. Had he gone after the camel? Was he out there somewhere, suffocating in sand? She climbed across to the opposite window. Nothing. The light was dark red, turning to brown. She maneuvered into the backseat and then into the trunk. No matter where she went, she could see only sand. She slumped onto the trunk floor, her eyes stinging badly. She wiped them gingerly and felt wetness on her face. Her sleeve came away bloody, and the pain was so sharp she wanted to cry. She didn’t resist. The tears, she thought, would at least clear the grit from her eyes.

She heard a sharp thud like a footstep on the roof. Then another series of thuds, like several people clattering around. She looked up. The roof was slightly indented by the weight, so she climbed back toward the front, scrambling over the seat and falling to the floor, unable to move.

A pounding above made her open her eyes. She saw the edge of a knife slice through the roof, get stuck, and retract. Another thunderclap. More feet? The knife came in again, and this time it stuck. She swallowed and felt a river of sand cut new grooves in her throat.

N
ayir had waited for the sand to rise high enough so that he and the camel could climb on top of the car. It didn’t take long. In that time, he tied another swatch of fabric over his face, then another covering his eyes. He knew he had to work on touch alone. He tied the camel’s reins to his torso, fastening them with a slipknot in case the poor beast got sucked beneath the sand.

Once the sand had begun to bury the Rover, he climbed from the hood onto the roof and took the knife from its sheath. With some effort he managed to tie a rope to the hilt of the knife. All the while, the wind whipped torrents around him. He knelt down. With repeated jabs he dug the knife into the car roof until it had cut a thin hole and become wedged there. He pushed it in as deep as it would go, hoping Miriam had the sense to leave it alone.

The sand continued to climb. Every minute, he had to pull his feet out of the sand that had gathered around them. He packed the new sand beneath his shoes and made sure the rope was still tied to his waist and that the camel’s reins hadn’t slipped away. As the minutes went by, he felt his clothing being shredded, felt the wind strip an old layer of skin from his body. He oscillated between numbness and a raw, burning pain.