The Weeping Desert

  Chapter One

  It was approaching two o’clock in the afternoon. Another afternoon, any afternoon. They were all the same: hot, humid and as empty as the desert which rolled away into the haze like an ocean of sand.

  Khadija moved into an open alcove, hoping that some breeze might stir from the sea and cool her face. The view over the rooftops and harbour wall was still now, in the heat of the early afternoon while everyone slept. But she knew it was deceptive, and hordes of families would emerge with the coolness to shop and gossip and light their pots to cook an evening meal.

  But she would do nothing. There was nothing for her to do. This was a prison. A prison of love, perhaps; but she was a prisoner as surely as if chains shackled her ankles to the stone parapet.

  So many years now and still she lived like a bird in a cage, commanded only to sing sweetly, while outside the desert wept for her and its tears evaporated under the hot sun.

  She leaned her head against the cool stone and longed for freedom, whatever this freedom meant. She wanted it with a passion that simmered unsuspected behind the mask of her immobile features. The veil she wore when she left her private apartments hid more than just her face. It hid stirrings and tumult and a fierce determination to escape.

  It was approaching two o’clock in the afternoon. The white-hot desert sun had been at its highest for over two hours, scorching, blinding and burning anything or anyone foolish enough to go out without protection.

  John Cameron checked the last figures of his shift, wiping away the sweat which dripped off his chin onto the log sheets. He moved slowly round the machinery of the pumping station, examining gauges and fuel levels. The temperature was stifling inside the building.

  He dried his hands down the sides of his khaki shorts, sweat streaking the grime and oil. His short-sleeved shirt was blotted with damp patches between his shoulder blades. It was almost too hot to breathe.

  “She’s all yours,” he said with some relief to the engineer who was due to take over his shift. Don Parker took the log sheet from John and studied the figures. He was a small, wiry Australian, almost burnt black by the Arabian sun.

  “She’s pumping away real nice,” he said. “You go get yourself a cold beer, fella. Marvellous what a cold beer can do.”

  John licked the moisture off his top lip, dug out his sunglasses from his back pocket and checked his keys.

  “In another week, I’ll be home,” he said. “Back in England. I’ve had enough of the desert. You can keep it. England for two whole beautiful rainy months, and I’ll never complain about rain again.”

  “You’re nuts and blind. You hate it so much, you don’t see nothing. I tell you, fella, once the spell of the desert gets you, you get a sick feeling for that vast empty space for the rest of your life.”

  “I get a sick feeling all right,” said John drily.

  “Where d’ya live, mate? London?”

  John stared at the map on the wall. On it were a few ribbon-straight roads, scattered oases, four isolated towns, wells, innumerable Bedouin tracks like chicken’s feet pattering across the sand, and the rest of the map was blank.

  “No, up north. Pinethorpe. You wouldn’t have heard of it. It’s a small town on the north-east coast. A cold, chilly spot. But I’d welcome a North Sea blower right now. It’s enough to freeze your bones.”

  The Australian scratched his short, dark hair with the end of a pencil. “I like a bit of heat,” he said. “I don’t want no freezing winds. Now, this place in the winter just suits me fine. A nice seventy-five degrees, sunshine all day, pleasantly warm in the evening, sailing, swimming, cold beer, plenty of money. Nice company. What more could you want?”

  “Most of the nice company is married,” said John.

  “What are you worried about? Only three nurses on the camp, and you get the prettiest. About time you went on leave. We might get a look-in with Sheila. All right if I ask her to crew for me in a few races?”

  John jammed on a sweat-lined straw Stetson. “Go ahead. Ask her. She’s not tied to me.”

  “I’ll ask her at your party tonight, John.”

  John went outside the pumping station into the dazzling brightness. As always, the heat and glare hit him with surprise. He stood still for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust themselves.

  The pumping station at Walhid el Said had been built in a small depression in the desert. An outcrop of granite boulders guarded the eastern side, and behind it lapped the sea of the Persian Gulf, aquamarine blue, every droplet sparkling. The rest was desert; miles and miles of undulating sand dunes, glaring white now with a shimmering haze, like a white sea of waves and rollers moving without sound, stretching endlessly across the open frontier into Saudi Arabia.

  The scene, at this time of day, was bleached of colour, though John knew that around four, when the sun’s rays slanted away, the desert would become alive with a hundred shades, from palest coffee cream to mud brown, from fragile duck-egg blue to rich grape-grey. Shapes and hollows and crescents appearing with perfect contours.

  Now the only relief to the seared eye came from the stony track and the dusty grey of the tarred road which escorted the twin oil pipes over the desert and took the country’s wealth and sap to the huge tankers waiting at anchor at Oman Said. The twin pipes expanded and contracted as the day grew hotter then cooled, creaking and moving like a rusty snake, disappearing into the distance till the 24-inch diameter pipes were no thicker than shoelaces.

  There were gas flares, too dazzling to look at: monstrous hissing flames, shooting 320 feet high, which burned day and night. Enough excess gas to supply the whole of London, burning with such fury that it was impossible to go within fifty yards of the flare, and it was necessary to drive by quickly with the car windows closed.

  John jerked back his hand in pain. The jeep’s door handle was scorching hot. He wrapped a handkerchief round his palm and opened the door again. Despite the basketwork cushion, the leather seat was too hot to sit on and John spread his beach towel along the bench seat before he drove away.

  He drove over the rutted track to the chief engineer’s office, a low stone building built of large cement blocks like all the other site buildings. A sad cutting of Bahrain creeper clung to the verandah post, only vaguely green in the shimmering heat.

  John parked the jeep in a shaded spot, narrowly missing a sleeping Arab rolled in his cloak like a mummy, dreaming in the short shadows. The Arabs and immigrant labourers slept through the hottest hours. They lay on the rough ground like bundles of rags.

  He went into the chief engineer’s office, made for the refrigerator in the corner and helped himself to a bottle of coke. He flicked off the cap and poured the ice-cold caramel liquid straight down his throat.

  “You’ll give yourself a stomach upset, drinking like that,” said Brett Stevenson from behind the chief engineer’s desk. “Salt’s what you want.”

  “I’ve taken my salt tablets today.”

  “I’ve been out in this country for four years and I’ve never had a day’s sickness,” said Brett.

  “Good on you,” said John, taking out a second bottle. The cold wet glass soothed the burn on his hand.

  “Moderation in everything,” Brett went on. “And take your salt tablets regularly. I’ve seen many a man drink himself to death, when all he needed was a bottle of salt tablets.”

  “I’m not going to stay that long,” said John, hoisting his long frame up onto a stool and leaning his elbow on the drawing board. “I’m not coming back when I’ve done my second tour. Three years I signed on for, and that’s the end of my contract then.”

  “You may feel differently when you’ve had your home leave. The first tour is always the worst. It’s getting used to the
heat and the different way of life. Then suddenly it becomes part of your system and you can’t live any other way. Call it the spell of the desert,” added Brett, apologetically.

  “Don Parker was trying to feed me the same claptrap,” said John. “Well, it’s never going to get me.” He tossed the empty bottle to the grinning Yemeni office boy. “Here you are, Abdullah. Another one for the heap!”

  “Okay, boss.”

  Brett Stevenson lit his forty-third cigarette of the day. With cigarettes at twenty for a rupee, lung cancer never even entered his head, though it might already have entered his lungs. Besides, smoking kept the flies away. Today it was too hot even for the flies.

  “One hundred and thirteen in the shade today,” said Brett reflecting on the small spiral of grey smoke. “Ninety-eight per cent humidity on the coast. I wouldn’t like to guess the temperature inland in the desert, in the direct sun. Must be killing.” He flicked his match expertly at the whirling ceiling fan. “Cleethorpes you come from, don’t you?”

  “No, Pinethorpe. But it’s near Cleethorpes. Same part of the coast, only no holidaymakers. Nor ever likely to have if my mother keeps getting her own way. The councillors have nervous breakdowns at the thought of a fish and chip shop invading their select shopping centre, let alone bingo. They’re a stuffy lot.”

  “Don’t suppose your parents were too keen on the idea of your coming out to Shuqrat for three years, were they?”

  John pushed back his fair, sun-streaked hair and thought of the family rows that had broken over his head for years.

  “They didn’t want me to be an engineer in the first place. They thought I ought to study medicine and go into my father’s practice in Pinethorpe. Even the oil business wasn’t respectable enough for them. When I told them I was coming to the Persian Gulf for three years, they nearly blew the roof off. Still, I came. And I’ve got to stick it, heat or no heat. I can’t go back and let them say ‘I told you so.’”

  Brett chuckled. “You stick to oil, boy. It’ll stick to you.”

  “Fortunately, my younger brother James is doing all the right things and so there will be another Dr. Cameron to engrave on the brass plate outside Glen Craven House.” John went over to the window and stood mesmerised by the pillar of flame of the distant gas flare. It was over half a mile away and yet he could still hear its thunderous roaring.

  “I can understand about the spell of the desert,” said John slowly. “It’s just this heat. It’s murder.”

  “Believe me, you new arrivals are having it easy,” said Brett. “Four years ago there was no electricity in Shuqrat, so no air-conditioners. We used to sleep on the roof. No water distillation. We used to drink the local well water, boiled first of course, but you still couldn’t get rid of the bracken taste or the colour. No fridges, no cold beer. No electric light, no cinema…

  “OK, so now it’s paradise. And next week I’ll be back in England.”

  “Counting the money all the way to the bank. That’s what you young fellows come out for. You get paid well.”

  “I came out for the experience,” said John. “I didn’t want to be just a drawing-board engineer. I wanted to be a real oil man.”

  “Then don’t grumble. Are you going into town, or are you going down to the beach?”

  “I’m going into town first. I’ve a gold necklace to pick up for my mother. Don Parker recommended a jeweller who doesn’t overcharge as much as the rest.”

  “Gold’s cheap out here. Should please your mother. Will you get me some flip-flops down the souk? Size ten. These are worn right through.” Brett inspected the holes in the soles of his plastic sandals. “I can’t make a pair last a month—all these damn stones.”

  “Right. You can collect them at my party tonight. Any special colour?”

  “You’re joking. Just get me a left and a right.”

  John reversed his jeep onto the dusty track and drove over the bumps until he reached the T-junction with the main tarred road into Oman Said, the capital of the sheikhdom of Shuqrat. Oman Said—at once port, town and marketplace; home of palaces and cardboard hovels, the flat-dwelling European community and the lonely political agent in his creeper-covered villa.

  John paused politely at the glowing London-style traffic lights. There were thirteen such sets of traffic lights in Oman Said—at T-junctions, roundabouts and occasionally at a crossroads. The Arab drivers completely ignored them. Only the Europeans made some show of obeying the winking lights. If Kuwait had traffic lights, then, praise be to Allah, Shuqrat was going to have them, too.

  A large yellow Cadillac overtook John at great speed, the crossed swords on the silver number plate denoting that the car was owned and perhaps driven by one of the numerous sheikhs in Shuqrat. The ruling family, of Sheikh Abd-ul Hamid spread in confusing strata throughout the tiny country where every brother, son and male cousin was a sheikh in his own right, with a regular monthly income from the precious and prolific oil revenue.

  John did not attempt to pass the yellow Cadillac, which had suddenly dropped to a cruising speed. The hawk-faced driver, handsome and faintly sinister with his small black beard, spotless white headcloth and black and silver agal, was casually lighting a cheroot, one hand lightly on the wheel, his eyes swiftly looking at a pair of strolling European women with their brazenly bare arms and legs.

  The cars were approaching the main shopping streets of Oman Said, thronged with taxis, bicycles, pedestrians, wandering cows, donkeys and goats. The open-fronted shops, built hurriedly of crude cement blocks, spilled their goods out onto the sidewalks—kettles, carpets, mattresses, silks, sandals, tins of sardines, camel saddles, Kashmir trays and dishes, Indian brassware, spices, Japanese cameras.

  The sidewalks were a blur of humanity: Arabs and immigrant workers—Pakistanis and Persians clad in long dirty shirts and European jackets; a drift of Yemenis; dhoticlad Indians and the occasional sheikh with spotless, flowing robes and black cloak; beggars and squatters; a few English and Dutch, their women always in pairs; and the rare Arab woman, a shapeless bundle in her enveloping black cloak, billowing like a black bird, the black leather mask completely concealing all but her eyes. Sometimes a wisp of coloured chiffon trailed in the dust beneath the hem of her black cloak, or perhaps another shred of fabric was twisted between her henna’d and ringed fingers. They hurried on their errands, for the new wealth and bustle of Oman Said was confusing and bewildering to the women.

  John found a place to park his jeep outside the new building of the British Bank of the Middle East. It had a clean, modern, reassuring look about it, but Shuqrat building methods were so amateur and haphazard that it would not be long before the paint peeled, the wood warped, the window catches ceased to function and the air-conditioners fell off their ledges.

  Either side of the bank were the two food shops most patronised by the European community, Hassan’s Cold Store and Ali bin Ali’s. The shops held identical stocks of American and British tinned goods, frozen goods imported from Britain and a small quantity of fresh salad stuff which was flown in twice a week from Beirut in an old Dakota.

  There was no sense of competition between the two shops. They both charged the same exorbitant prices while supplying the staid, unchanging British preference for cornflakes, baked beans and sausages. The managements had no business sense. They never re-ordered before stocks were completely exhausted; thus it was quite normal for the British, population to find themselves without gravy powder or marmalade for months at an end.

  John made a brief tour of the Cold Store, hoping that perhaps something new had been imported which might vary the mess menus. He looked in the meat cabinet, where huge hulks of frozen meat, encased in ice, were quite unrecognisable. He picked up a couple of tins of American fried onion rings, which were a good party snack. He by-passed the potato crisps; they would taste like cardboard. A couple of vacuum-sealed tins of cashew nuts should still be fresh…and half a dozen little tins of cocktail sausages.

  Before he knew
it, John had spent well over seven pounds on practically nothing. Fortunately, in rupees it sounded less, and he left the Cold Store unperturbed by the high cost of living.

  “So that’s what you are going to feed us with at your farewell party,” said a pleasant, feminine voice. “Hardly inspiring. If I didn’t consider the company worth it, I don’t think I’d even bother to come.”

  “Cheeky,” said John, grinning over the top of his armful of tins. “You know you’d give your right hand rather than miss a mess party. They are the most swinging parties in Shuqrat.”

  “The noisiest, the latest and the rowdiest, I should say,” said Sheila O’Donaghue, falling into step with John. “‘The bachelors’ mess at Walhid el Said is hardly the top of this tight little social circle.”

  “Madam, you’re speaking of the beer stains I love,” said John, tipping the tins into the back of the jeep. He moved back quickly, carefully avoiding the hot metal.

  The afternoon was still humid but, somehow, Sheila managed to look cool and unflustered in her cotton frock and open-toed sandals. Her long fair hair was scraped up into an absurd knot on the top of her head, and the small tendrils at her neck and ears were corkscrews of spun gold. She had tanned slowly and carefully because of her fine complexion, and the result was an even honey-brown which made her skin look like velvet.

  John looked down at the young nurse, and for the first time felt a momentary pang that he was leaving Shuqrat next week.

  Sheila smiled back at him. “I shall miss you,” she said in her completely honest way.

  “You won’t have time to,” said John quickly. “The boys are practically queueing up to take you out while I’m on leave.”

  Sheila heard the brief second of panic in John’s voice, and sighed inwardly. “Sounds as if I shall have a whale of a time,” she said lightly. “Well, see you tonight, John,” and she turned to walk to her Mini Traveller, which was parked further along the sea front.

  John knew that he had disappointed her, again. But he could not help it. He felt nothing for Sheila except a pleasant and comfortable affection. He was twenty-six. There was the world to see yet, and he wanted to travel light. He did not want to be encumbered with any emotional ties or responsibilities.