The Doomed Oasis (28 page)

He nodded. “I'll have to borrow, then.”

“It would be better,” I said, returning the file to my briefcase, “if you could arrange to live within your means.”

He stared at me, and then he burst out laughing. But the laughter was without humour. “So you think I'm beaten, do you? You think I'm turning tail and heading for home like a village cur.…” The fury building up in him seemed to get hold of his throat, so that the words became blurred. “That's what they'll all be thinking, I don't doubt—Gorde, Makhmud, that man Erkhard.” And then in a voice that was suddenly matter-of-fact: “I take it you'll be going back in one of the Company planes?”

“Gorde has offered me a lift.”

“Good. I'll have letters for you to various merchants in Bahrain. A list of things to order, too. Would you like to wait here whilst I write them or shall I send Yousif up with them later? When is Philip leaving, by the way?”

“First light.” And because I wanted to make certain I didn't miss the flight I asked him to have the letters sent after me.

He nodded, “That gives me the night in which to think this thing over.” He summoned Yousif and gave him instructions to take me back to the palace. “By the way,” he said, as I got to my feet, “you mentioned a package Griffiths had brought you, something David took to him on board the
Emerald Isle
. Was that his survey report?”

I nodded.

“Based on Henry Farr's old report?”

“Yes.”

“I take it Entwhistle was running a check on David's locations. You don't know with what result, I suppose?”

“No. He didn't say.”

He had risen to his feet and, standing close to me, he seemed to tower over me. “I'd like to see my son's survey report. Have you got it with you in your briefcase?”

I realized then why he'd considered his finances inadequate. “Good God!” I said. “You're surely not going to start drilling operations on that border.…” I was staring at him, remembering what Gorde had said. But there was nothing wild-eyed about him. He was bitter, yes. He'd been humiliated, deeply shocked by the behaviour of a man he'd always regarded as his friend, but the eye that met mine was level and unflinching, and I knew that he hadn't yet crossed the borderline into madness. “You haven't a hope of succeeding now,” I said. “The Emir will be watching that border, and the instant you start drilling …”

He smiled thinly. “I'm not afraid of death, you know. Being a Muslim makes one fatalistic.” He turned away, leaning his body on the parapet and staring out across the dunes, grey now with the first light of the risen moon. “I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I haven't made up my mind.” He hesitated and then turned to me. “But if I should decide to go ahead, then I'd like to have David's report. He gives the locations, I take it?” And when I nodded, he said: “Do they coincide with Henry Farr's?”

“I don't know.”

“No, of course not. I ran a check survey myself, you know. That was a long time ago now, when I had a bodyguard of more than a dozen men, all on the Company's payroll, and the use of the Company's equipment. In those days—quite soon after the war—I reckoned my chaps could hold the Emir off if it came to a showdown long enough for me to pull out with my equipment. But it never came to that. I got away with it without the Emir knowing. But I knew I couldn't do that with a drilling-rig.”

“Then how do you expect to get away with it now?” I demanded.

He shrugged. “I don't know that I can.” He was smiling softly to himself. “But I've been out here a long time, Grant. I know that little Emir inside out. I've had spies in Hadd sending me back reports, and I think I know enough now.…” He gave a little shrug and the smile was no longer soft; it was hard, almost cruel. “I'm outside the Company now. It makes a difference. And it's just possible I could get away with it where the Company couldn't.” He straightened up. “Well, what about it? Are you going to let me have David's report?”

It wasn't ethical, of course. He hadn't been mentioned in his son's will. But then I'd failed with Gorde and I could now regard myself as free to take what action I liked. Also I thought that, had David known what I now knew, he would have wanted his father to have the locations. I gave him a copy of the survey report and, after writing the location fixes out on a slip of paper, I gave him that, too.

He glanced at it and then slipped it into the folds of his cloak. “Thank you.” He held out his hand. “You've come a long journey. I'm sorry it didn't have a pleasanter ending. I'll send Yousif with the letters in a few hours.”

I hesitated. But I knew he wasn't a man to take advice. “In that case, you'd better let me know what I'm to tell Gorde.”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

I left him then, standing alone on that rooftop with the desert clean and white behind him, and followed Yousif out to the battered Land Rover. It was cooler now and I felt almost relaxed. In a few hours I should be able to have a bath and a change and sit back with a long, cool drink. And yet, riding down the palm-shadowed track between the date-gardens, I found myself filled with a strange nostalgia for the place. It had an appeal I found difficult to define, a sort of poetry, and the dim-remembered lines of a poem came into my mind, something about being “crazed with the spell of far Arabia” and stealing his wits away. I was beginning to understand what this place had meant to David, to a boy who'd never had a real home before and who was wide open to the strange beauty of it and as impressionable as any Celt.

I was still thinking about this when we ran out from the shadow of the palms and saw the square, black with the mass of men standing there. The roar of their voices came at us in a wall of sound. Yousif eased his foot off the accelerator, hesitating, uncertain whether to drive straight to the main gate or not. And then three figures rose from beside the
shireeya
and stood blocking our path.

“Sheikh Khalid's men,” Yousif said, and there was relief in his voice as he braked to a stop. They clambered on to the mudguards, talking urgently in the hard, guttural tongue that is always associated in my mind with flies and sand. “We go a different way. Is much better.” Yousif swung the Land Rover round, circling the gravel rise and approaching the palace from the rear through a litter of
barastis
, all apparently deserted. We stopped finally at a small door with an iron-barred grille set in an otherwise blank wall.

Khalid's three men closed round me as I got out, and when I told Yousif I wanted to be taken straight to Gorde, he said: “You go with them now, sahib. Sheikh Khalid's orders.” And he drove off, leaving me there.

Eyes peered at us through the grille. The door opened and I was hustled through the dark passages of the palace and up to my turret room. There my three guards left me, and, standing at the embrasure, I looked down on what was obviously a very explosive situation. The crowd was being harangued by a man on a rooftop opposite, and another was shouting to them from the back of a camel. The whole square was packed solid. Every man and boy in the oasis must have been gathered there, and many of them were armed.

Camels were being brought into the square and men were mounting on the outskirts of the crowd. And all the time the agitators shouting and the crowd roaring and the tension growing. The air was thick with menace, and then somebody fired a rifle.

The bullet smacked into the mud wall not far from my embrasure. It was all that was needed to set that crowd alight. Other guns were fired, little sparks of flame, a noise like firecrackers, and a great shout; the crowd became fluid, flowing like water, moving with the sudden purpose of a river in spate. Men leaped to their camels, mounting on the arches of their lowered necks, driving them with the flood tide down the slope to the dark fringe of the date-gardens.

In a moment the square was deserted, and with the murmur of the crowd dying to silence, the dark walls of my room closed in on me. I had a sudden, overwhelming need then to find Gorde and the others, and I picked up my briefcase and felt my way down the black curve of the stairs. A light showed faint in the passage at the bottom. A figure stirred in the shadows. Thick Arabic words and the thrust of a gun muzzle in my stomach halted me. It was one of Khalid's men, and he was nervous, his finger on the trigger. There was nothing for it but to retreat to my room again. In the mood prevailing in the oasis, it was some comfort to know that I had a guard. I lay down and tried to get some rest. The sound of the crowd was still faintly audible. It came to me through the embrasure, soft as a breeze whispering through the palm trees. And then it died and there was an unnatural quiet.

It didn't last long, for the shouting started again. Shots, too. It was a long way away. I got up and went to the embrasure, peering out at the empty square and the dark line of the palms shadowed by the moon. A glow lit the night sky to the east. It grew and blossomed. Then suddenly an explosion, a great waft of flame and smoke beyond the date-gardens. And after that, silence, the flame abruptly gone and the palms a dark shadow-line again in the moon's light.

Voices called within the palace, the sound muffled by the thickness of mud walls, and then for a while it was quiet. But soon the crowd was ebbing back into the square, flowing into it in little groups, silent now and strangely subdued. I was sure that it was Gorde's plane I'd seen go up in smoke and flame, and I stayed by the embrasure, watching the tide of humanity as it filled the square, wondering what they'd do now—hoping to God their passions were spent.

Bare feet sounded on the stairs. I turned, uncertain what to expect, my mouth suddenly dry. The beam of a torch probed the room, blinding me as it fastened on my face. But it was only my three guards back again, jabbering Arabic at me and gesturing for me to accompany them. I was hurried along dark passages, past gaping doorways where men sat huddled in dim-lit rooms, arguing fiercely. The whole palace was in a ferment.

We came finally to a low-ceilinged room lit by a pressure lamp, and in its harsh glare I saw Khalid sitting surrounded by robed figures. They were mostly young men and they had their guns resting across their knees or leaning close at hand against the walls. He rose to greet me, his face unsmiling, the bones sharp-etched in the lamplight. “I am sorry, sir, for the disturbance you have been given.” A gesture of dismissal and the room quietly emptied, the conference broken up. “Please to sit.” He waved me to a cushion on the carpeted floor and sat down opposite me, folding his legs neatly under him with the ease of a man who has never known a chair.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did they set fire to Gorde's plane?”

“Is a mistake. They are angry and they fire some bullets into it.” He was very tense, coiled up like a spring too tightly wound. Somewhere a child was crying and I heard women's voices, soft and comforting. “You 'ave been to see
Haj
Whitaker, is not so?” And when I nodded, he said: “I understand you are concerned in the management of his affairs?”

“His financial affairs.” I didn't want him to think I was responsible for anything that had happened out here. His manner, his whole bearing had changed, the surface layer of a university education gone entirely. I glanced over my shoulder. My three guards were still there, squatting in the open doorway.

Khalid was staring at me out of his dark eyes. The
kohl
had worn off. Lacking that artificial lustre, his eyes looked sad and sombre. “I have spoken with my father. I understand now what it is
Haj
Whitaker try to do for Saraifa. Unfortunately, I am not before tonight in my father's confidence.” And he added with a trace of bitterness: “Better if he had told me. Better also if
Haj
Whitaker explain to David what he is doing.” He paused there and I was conscious again of the strain he was under, of the tension building up in him. He leaned suddenly forward. “What will he do now?” he asked me. “Now that Meester Erk-hard don't honour the concession he sign. What will
Haj
Whitaker do?”

“That's his affair,” I said. I didn't want to become involved in this.

“Please, Meester Grant. I must know.” “I don't think he's made up his mind yet.”

He stared at me. “Do you think he may leave Saraifa?” And when I didn't answer, his eyes clouded and he seemed to sag. “We have very much need of him now,” he said quietly. “He has the ear of many sheikhs, of some of his own people also.” And he added: “Since ever I am a small boy I have known about this great man
Haj
Whitaker. I can remember the feast to celebrate the original concession. He is young then and full of fire. But always, always the people here—my father and myself also—we have looked to
Haj
Whitaker. He is known from the Persian Gulf to the Hadhramaut, from Muscat on the Indian Sea to the water holes of the Rub al Khali and the Liwa Oasis, as a great man and the friend of all the Bedou. Particularly he is known as the friend of Sheikh Makhmud. If he desert us now …”

“I'm sure he's no intention of deserting you.”

But he didn't seem to hear me. “There must be some reconciliation. It is altogether vital.” He leaned suddenly forward, staring at me hard. “Meester Grant. There is something I must know. It is if I can trust you.”

“That's up to you,” I said, wondering what was coming. And I added: “I've been virtually a prisoner since I returned from seeing Colonel Whitaker.”

He gave me a quick, impatient shrug. “Is for your own safety.”

But I wondered. “Where's Sir Philip Gorde?” I didn't want to be involved in this any further. “I'd like to be taken to him now.”

“First you will listen, please, to what I have to tell you.” He seemed to consider, his dark eyes fixed on me, searching my face. “I think you are a friend to David before you work for his father, is not so?”