Pharaoh (35 page)

Taken aback by the unexpected words, Avner took out a five-shekel note and handed it to the old man, then said, ‘What can you give me in exchange?’

The old man put the money into his satchel, raised his eyes to Avner’s face and said, ‘Perhaps . . . hope.’

Avner shivered suddenly, as if the wind blowing down from Mount Carmel had got under his clothes.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

But the old man did not reply and his empty eyes stared into space, as if just for an instant he had been the unwitting messenger for a mysterious force which had now disappeared.

Avner looked at him for a while without saying anything, then continued on his way, absorbed in his thoughts.

The last glow of the sunset faded from the immense desert and the first stars began to shine in the darkening sky. Blake continued onward, even though his feet were bleeding inside his boots. Sarah was wearing running shoes and moved more easily with lighter steps, but both of them were at the limits of their endurance.

Suddenly the wind knifed across the enormous empty space and the two looked at each other anxiously, reading in the expression of the other the knowledge of what was about to happen.

‘It’s coming,’ said Blake. ‘We have to prepare ourselves.’

‘But where do you think we are?’

‘By now, we should be almost at the Beer Menuha road. We should be able to see it when we’ve gone over that little hill up ahead. But that doesn’t mean much. Just that on the road we may find someone who’ll pick us up.’

‘What’ll we do if we get caught by the storm?’

‘What I’ve already told you. If we find some shelter, we’ll use it. Otherwise we’ll lie on the ground and try to protect each other by covering our heads, our mouths and noses. And then we’ll wait until it passes.’

‘But it could last for days.’

‘Yes, but there’s nothing else we can do. The alternative is to die of suffocation. The dust is as fine as talc and it stops you breathing in minutes. Come on now. We’ll make it.’

Blake turned to the east and saw that the line of the horizon was disappearing in a white mist. He hurried as fast as he could to the little hill, which was now only a short distance away. When he got to the top, the Beer Menuha road was visible, deserted for as far as the eye could see. However, at the foot of the hill there was a boulder as tall as a man, a large outcrop of flint surrounded by smaller stones that had broken off it over the years because of the drastic swings in temperature.

Blake turned to call Sarah and heard her saying, ‘Oh, God, the moon! It’s red . . .’

Blake looked up at the surreal sight. The disc of the rising moon was veiled by a bloody shadow which expanded and reflected over the endless plain.

‘The eclipse,’ said Blake. ‘The bloodied face of Isis . . . Hurry now, before the storm catches us. It’s getting near. I can feel it.’

Sarah joined him and saw that he had put down his pack and was frantically piling stones on the north-west side of the big boulder to form a windbreak. She set to, helping him as the wind gathered strength and the air grew thicker and denser with every minute that passed.

‘We should try to eat and drink something,’ said Blake. ‘Who knows when we’ll get another chance?’

Sarah dug into her pack and passed him a packet of biscuits and a few dried figs and dates. Blake took his water bottle out of his own pack and handed it to her. After she had finished, he drank a few long draughts himself.

He was beginning to taste the dust in his mouth. He glanced towards the moon, which was gradually being covered by that bloody veil, and then said, ‘We have to find some way of protecting ourselves, otherwise we’ll die. It’s nearly here.’

He looked around desperately and then again at the horizon.

‘What are you looking at?’ asked Sarah before she tied a handkerchief over her mouth.

‘This shelter isn’t going to be enough and neither will that handkerchief . . . Oh, God . . . there’s no time left, no time . . .’

Suddenly his eyes fixed on Sarah’s pack.

‘What are these things made of ?’ he asked.

‘Gore-Tex, I think,’ answered the girl.

‘Then maybe there’s some hope for us. If I remember rightly, the pores in Gore-Tex only release water vapour, so they should keep the dust out and let us breathe at the same time.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘You aren’t thinking of—’

‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking,’ said Blake, and emptied the contents of the packs into a plastic bag that he jammed between some rocks. He held out the upside-down pack towards Sarah. ‘Put this over your head,’ he said, looking her in the eyes. ‘We don’t have any choice.’

The girl obeyed and Blake pulled the cord, tightening it around her neck. Then he wrapped her scarf several times round her neck and the pack opening. ‘How’s that?’ he asked.

A muffled reply that could have meant anything was the answer, but Blake took it to mean that everything was all right. He squeezed her hand hard, then carried out the same operation on himself and closed the opening of his pack as best he could with two handkerchiefs knotted together.

When he had finished, he felt for Sarah’s hand and pulled her down. They curled up on the ground with their heads against the wall, held each other tight and awaited the arrival of the storm.

Barely a few minutes had passed before it broke in all its fury. The surface of the desert was stripped bare by the violence of the wind and the cloud of dust enveloped everything, eliminating the sky and the earth, the stones and the hills. Alone, the moon managed to keep a vague, orange glow alive in the western half of the sky, but there was no one in the wide, deserted expanse to see it.

Every now and then, Blake held Sarah tighter to him, as if to transfer the will to resist and survive this challenge, or perhaps to take courage from her instead.

He could hear a sound like hail battering the big rock because the wind was so strong it was raising thousands of tiny pieces of stone and dashing them against it. The words of Elijah came to him: ‘And there came to pass a wind so powerful as to shake the mountains and to split the stones . . .’ This was the hell of the Paran desert, a place where only prophets guided by the hand of God dared to venture.

The shrill whistling went on and on. The incessant rattling of stones against the boulder and the complete darkness that surrounded them made them lose all sense of time. He tried to concentrate on Sarah’s body, on the beating of her heart; tried to overcome the terrible mental strain and the increasing sense of being suffocated. Now the dust was everywhere, covering every millimetre of their skin, passing through their clothes as if it were water, but their nostrils and lungs were safe for now and they knew that although breathing was difficult it wasn’t impossible.

The only question he asked himself was how long they would be able to hold on in these dreadful conditions. He was fully aware that, in any case, it would only be a simple question of time. Sooner or later, the humidity from their breathing would form a paste with the tiny particles of dust coating the Gore-Tex. And at that point, they would have to choose between suffocating because of lack of oxygen or because of the dust. How long would it be until nature, in all her awful might, dealt the final blow to crush them like insects in the dust?

The grip of tension and fatigue began to loosen as they drifted into a semi-conscious state. Blake realized that he had let go of Sarah’s body, but something was telling him that the force of the storm had let up slightly. Even the wind needed time to gather its forces again.

He stood up and untied the handkerchiefs round his neck, pulling his head free of the sack. A ghostly apparition met his eyes: a dark mass, enormous and luminescent, casting forth two pale milky lights. In the background, a continuous rhythmic sound like slow wheezing.

He took a better look and managed to focus on the shape behind the haloes of light penetrating the powdery thickness of the night’s atmosphere. It looked almost like a submarine sitting on the bottom of the ocean but was, in fact, a desert bus, one of those strange vehicles that managed to carry as many as fifty passengers from Damascus to Jeddah, from Oman to Baghdad along the most frightful tracks. Vehicles that were sealed like spacecraft with powerful filters and air conditioning.

He shook his companion, who seemed to be almost unconscious, and freed her head.

‘Sarah! Sarah, get up for Christ’s sake! We’re saved! Look! Look in front of you!’

Sarah sat up and sheltered her face with her hand, while Blake started walking towards the headlights.

‘Hey! Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Help! We got lost in the sandstorm. Help us!’

At that moment men bearing arms got out of the vehicle and one of them turned Blake’s way, pointing his gun towards the noise he thought he had heard. Blake was so overwhelmed by the thought of being saved that he didn’t realize what peril they were in. As he started shouting, though, he was thrown to the ground.

‘Shut up!’ a voice hissed into his ear. ‘Look! They’re armed!’

The man pointing his gun came towards them a bit, waving his torch back and forth through the thick dust. But Blake and Sarah, flattened as they were on the ground and covered with dust from head to foot, were totally camouflaged. The man kept peering into the gloom for a long while, listening hard. Then, reassured, he went back to the bus.

Three or four men wearing keffiyehs wound tightly round their heads and carrying machine guns came out of the rear door of the bus and took up positions at the four corners of the vehicle. Two more seemed to be checking the wheels.

‘But they might be—’ protested Blake.

‘We can’t risk it. They certainly aren’t Israelis. Let’s go back to our shelter. What time is it?’

Blake cleaned the face of his watch. ‘It’s just past midnight. Six more hours before the sun comes up.’

As they made their way back to the stone, they felt the wind start to rise again, but it seemed to have already spent the worst of its strength.

Then new shapes, seemingly coming from nowhere, were caught in the beams of the headlights.

‘Camels,’ said Sarah. ‘How the heck did they get here in this storm?’

‘The Bedouins,’ muttered Blake. ‘They can move through the desert like fish in water. Can you see anything?’

‘Yes, I can. Well, well. What do you know. Here come some more, and they’re all armed to the teeth. It looks like some kind of arranged meeting. Amazing.’

‘They could have got here with their eyes closed,’ said Blake. ‘After spending thousands of years in the desert, they’ve developed an incredible sense of direction. In weather like this, they can move about like ghosts, almost invisible.’

One of the men opened the rear door of the bus and let the newcomers in. They were all carrying machine guns. When the last one had entered, the bus started off again and disappeared shortly afterwards, going north, into the clouds of dust.

Blake and Sarah crouched down again behind the pile of stones, once more covered their heads with their packs and remained motionless beneath the fury of the storm. The lack of oxygen, their fatigue and their disappointment following the brief thrill of thinking they were about to be saved combined to take them into a sort of stupor in which they were neither sleeping nor waking. The only thing they felt was the keen cold that cut through to their bones and the fine dust that was starting to get inside the packs, forming a paste round their mouths and up their noses.

Suddenly Blake lifted his head to the west.

‘What is it?’ Sarah managed to mumble when she felt his movement.

‘Cordite,’ said Blake. ‘Smell that stuff in the air? That’s the smell of war.’

Blake loosened the pack on his head for a moment and listened, and for a few moments it seemed that the wind carried the roll of distant thunder.

Dawn arrived. They took their packs off their heads and pulled themselves into a sitting position, leaning against the pile of stones. The wind continued to blow strongly, but the worst was over. The air was still thick, as if there was a dense mist over the desert, but towards the east they could just make out a watery lightness in the distance.

‘Ready to get going again?’ asked Blake.

Sarah nodded. ‘We haven’t got much choice, have we? If we stay here, we’ll die. We have to get to the track going south. Sooner or later, we’ll find something. If our strength doesn’t fail us.’

They collected their things, put them in their packs and started off again. They dragged on wearily for hours until they were about to drop from exhaustion, when Blake saw a low concrete block to his left. The roof was made of corrugated iron and the doors and windows were half wrecked.

He entered and looked around. There was dust everywhere but there was a small room where the wind hadn’t done quite so much damage. Here they sat on the floor to drink what water they had left and to eat two cereal bars, their last. The packets of dried figs and dates had been open and the fruit was completely coated with dust.

They rested for half an hour and then continued on the long way to Beer Menuha. Hour after hour they walked, buffeted by the wind, protecting themselves as best they could and resting when they felt their energy flagging. They reached the Beer Menuha fork in the late afternoon and took the road to Yotvata.