The Weeping Desert Read online

“Indirectly. His parents have offered me a holiday on their sheep farm. It’s really too good an opportunity to miss. Now, let me see to your hand.”

  The room where the old sheikh lay was cool and peaceful, but already there were seven guards with rifles outside the door and another two on the balcony.

  “He’s a very tough old man, despite the last few years of soft living,” said Dr. Robinson. “A few days’ rest; he’s already talking about a cabinet meeting.”

  The sheikh was propped on a large white pillow, looking strangely different without his kaffiyah and aba. His head was a mass of tight silvery curls, but the eyes in the sharp, dark face were clear and unclouded as a young man’s.

  “Khadija,” he whispered.

  Khadija bent and kissed her father’s cheek. He looked at her bare face with some astonishment, and then he lifted his hand and touched her soft skin.

  “You look like a little girl again,” he smiled.

  Then his eyes moved upwards towards John, tall and fair, standing behind Khadija. He held out his veined hand, the big ruby ring glinting in its opulence.

  “My son,” said Sheikh Abd-ul Hamid. “Indeed you have proved yourself a worthy son. That rascally Ahmed Karim shall no longer be my heir. This I have decreed today.” The old man paused for breath. “It is my regret that I cannot make you—a foreigner—my heir, for Shuqrat needs a ruler who is a man of rock. But I shall decree that your son shall be the hereditary ruler of Shuqrat and the line continue from his blood.”

  Khadija could not speak. Her son, the heir.

  “Then I have your permission to marry your daughter, sir?” John asked seriously.

  “You are already married, my son.”

  “But I want to take Khadija back to England again, and to be married in the church of my parents.”

  The sheikh sighed, but he approved of John’s wish to follow his parents’ customs.

  “I give my permission,” he said, and then he lay back, looking very tired.

  John and Khadija left the hospital unnoticed. The place was already swarming with ministers, police and gift-laden visitors, and half of the Royal Shuqrat Army lined the corridors. If Ahmed Karim had any sense, he would be half way to America by now.

  John helped Khadija into the jeep and smiled up at her. Her face was still unbelievably beautiful despite the streaks of grime and tousled hair.

  “Well,” said John. “Where to, Mrs. Cameron?”

  Khadija’s voice sang with joy. “Mrs. Cameron—that’s me.”

  “I’m afraid it is not nearly as pretty a name as Flower of the Desert, or whatever you’re called.”

  “I think,” said Khadija, solemnly putting her hands together. “I think that now I am a European wife, I should like to go shopping.”

  “Shopping!” John grinned. He was still laughing as he swung the jeep out of the hospital gates. “You’re learning fast!”

  “I wish to look at the Cold Store and Ali bin Ali’s,” said Khadija. “If I am to be a housewife, then I must buy your food at these shops.”

  “Hold on,” said John, with visions of Khadija buying for twenty mouths in her enthusiasm. “Let’s get married first and settled in our own home. It’ll be a company bungalow, you know. We can’t move into one of your father’s old palaces.”

  “I shall love a company bungalow,” said Khadija. “They are like dolls’ houses!” She was bubbling with excitement. “I am so looking forward to going into Au bin Ali’s like a European wife, with my basket and my husband! And will you please arrange to have Yasmine shipped back to me from this so-horrid quarantine?”

  One moment she was laughing, her dark eyes full of merriment; the next, she was clutching the door handle, eyes hollow, voice agonised.

  “I feel sick,” she moaned. “I think…I am going…to…faint…” She slid from the seat into a crumpled heap on the floor of the jeep.

  John slammed on the brakes. He bent over her. She was clammy and pale. He pulled her up onto the seat. Then he swung the jeep round and raced back to the hospital. The hospital forecourt was crowded with police and army and officials, but they scattered as John swerved to a stop outside the entrance. He lifted Khadija’s limp body out of the jeep and strode in with her in his arms.

  “Sheila! Sheila!” he shouted to a disappearing trim white figure. “It’s Khadija; she’s fainted.”

  Sheila hurried back and looked quickly at Khadija. “Bring her in here,” she said. “Put her on the bed. I think she’s coming round. Leave her with me for a moment.”

  John wandered out into the corridor, worried and puzzled. It couldn’t be the heat; Khadija was used to that. Perhaps she had fainted from hunger. Yes, that was it. Even he had not eaten since he got off the plane.

  He stared at the gold-framed picture of the ruling sheikh on the wall. “My son, my son,” the old man had said. It was unbelievable. He would bring his parents out to Shuqrat for a holiday. He had a feeling that Sheikh Abd-ul Hamid and Dr. and Mrs. Cameron would all get on very well together.

  Sheila came out of the small side room. Her expression was coolly efficient and she spoke with artificial brightness.

  “Well, the young lady is feeling much better now. She’s sitting up having a cup of tea. You can take her home.”

  Sheila smoothed out her uniform, nodded at John and turned away. She just wanted to escape somewhere—away from the pair of them, to come to terms with her own disappointment.

  “What’s the matter with her?” John caught at her arm.

  “Why did she faint?”

  Sheila raised one pale pencilled eyebrow. “Don’t you know? Really I’m surprised. I’m not an obstetrician, of course, and it hasn’t been confirmed, but I would have said that your wife was pregnant.”

  John stared at her.

  “Pregnant?”

  “Oh, you men,” said Sheila impatiently. “Always so surprised. Don’t you know anything? Pregnant: she’s going to have a baby.”

  Chapter Ten

  John did not immediately go into Khadija’s room, but stayed, stunned by the news, outside in the corridor. A window looked out on to a high wire fence, and beyond that was the bleak grey shadowed waste of sand and stones. Nothing moved. It was a landscape without life.

  But a new life…a baby. Khadija’s baby. John felt sick at the significance of her pregnancy. Her marriage trick had seemed pathetic and brave as a bid for freedom, but now John saw it as a cool and clever scheme to provide her child with a father, an English father.

  But who was the real father? John’s anger grew as he thought of all the lonely males working on the site—the bachelors and semi-bachelors—or perhaps it was one of her own race, her affianced cousin?

  Another wild thought leapt into John’s tortured mind. How many weeks pregnant was she? There was James, his own brother; John remembered the passionate scene he had interrupted.

  “Sheila! Tell me! How long has Khadija—”

  But Sheila had already gone, with barely a rustle of her starched apron. Only the faintest whiff of her Cologne hung in the air. John clenched his fists. So many incidents seemed now to have another meaning. Khadija’s dependence upon his father—a doctor. Her interest in the hospital and the National Health Scheme. Her purchases of trousers and loose tunic tops. The night she had crept into John’s bedroom, her lovely hair all loose round her bare shoulders.

  John went into the small side room, his thoughts in a turmoil. Khadija was sitting up, sipping a cup of tea. She smiled at John.

  “I am feeling much better now,” she said cheerfully. “Will you please take me to wherever I am to stay until we return to England? I should like very much to stay with your friend Sheila.”

  “You’re going back to your father’s palace,” said John in a voice he hardly recognised. “I will arrange transport for you.”

  “Very well,” said Khadija, looking puzzled. “But will you not take me yourself?”

  “Khadija,” John began coolly. “I want you to know that I have
no intention of holding you to anything. You no doubt feel a measure of gratitude to me for rescuing your father, but that does not mean you have to go through any form of marriage with me. I admire…admire”—he began to flounder for words—“all your efforts to gain your freedom, so I think it is only right that I should give you back your freedom, your complete freedom.”

  Khadija stared at him, dazed. “Gratitude? But I don’t just feel gratitude.” She looked bewildered and hurt. “I love you, John. I don’t want my freedom, as you call it. I want to be your wife.”

  Wife. John ran his tongue over his dry lips. His poor Khadija, his lovely Khadija, someone else’s wife. “I’m afraid that’s impossible now,” he said stiffly, and he made as if to leave the room. “I can’t marry you.”

  With a wail of horror Khadija slid off the side of the bed, the cup clattering to the floor. She pushed past John and ran barefooted out into the corridor.

  “Khadija!”

  She ran through the open doorway, out into the hospital drive, her hands held upwards, the same terrible cry coming from her lips.

  “Whatever’s that?” asked Sheila abruptly as she was passing. “Sounds as if someone is being murdered. Or the purging of an evil spirit.”

  “Something like that.” John shuddered. He moved away, not after the fleeing figure, but towards his jeep.

  Sheila stood watching him drive away in the other direction. She could not begin to understand what was happening. What could John have said to upset the young Arab princess so much? She sighed. A lover’s quarrel, she supposed. Well, she had better make sure no word of it reached His Highness’s elderly and aristocratic ears.

  John drove blindly back to the mess at Walhid el Said. The place was still deserted. Their empty glasses stood on the table, and yet it seemed months had passed since they stood here together that morning.

  He sat down in a chair, his head in his hands. He was at a complete loss. Now that his anger was dying down he found it hard to believe that his own sweet Khadija could have been so scheming and deceitful. And then, there was this other, this unknown man in Khadija’s life. He tried to shut the picture from his mind, but he could not and the mental torment was sharp-edged and bitter tasting.

  He did not know how long he sat there, and he did not notice that the room had grown strangely dark. At first he thought he must have slept, and it was past sunset. But a glance at his watch told him that there was at least an hour before the sun would set in the abrupt and regular way of the Middle East.

  John went curiously to the window. Why was it so dark? Was there an eclipse of the sun? He looked up, and stared.

  A huge cloud had appeared from nowhere, straddling the sky, horned and moving quite fast. It was sooty black, curling its horns like an animal ready to charge, enormous and menacing, and completely blacking out the sun and all its earthward rays.

  John saw their houseboy running wildly across the compound waving his arms, obviously frightened.

  It was coming in from the sea, blown across the Gulf from Persia. For a moment John wondered what would happen when it reached land.

  The first few drops hit the corrugated roof like stones, then the cloud burst itself open and the torrential rain fell in sheets upon the dry and scorched desert. It cascaded off the roof like a waterfall, drenching John’s face and shirt.

  He hurried round the bungalow, shutting windows and doors, kicking back wet carpets and mopping up puddles.

  Their compound quickly turned into a quagmire of greyish-yellow mud. The road was already inches deep, and the water swirled around the tyres of the jeep, trying to find an outlet. John watched, fascinated; he had never seen so much rain fall in so short a time.

  The telephone rang, loud and urgently.

  “Hello. Hello. Who’s that?” It was Brett Stevenson’s voice.

  “Hello, Brett. It’s John Cameron.”

  “What on earth are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on leave. Never mind, the more that can help the better.”

  “Is it the pumping station. Are you flooded out?”

  “We’re shipping quite a weight of water, but I’ve enough coolies here to cope. They are diverting the water towards the sea. But the town’s in a sorry mess. No drainage system of course. I want every man off-duty to go in and help. The souk’s gone—collapsed in the first few minutes—and the shanty-towns are washed out. The foundations of the sheikh’s old palace are apparently seriously undermined, torn away by the torrent of water that poured in through a gateway and could not escape.”

  John could hardly hear what Brett was saying because of the rain thundering on the roof. He cupped his hands round the phone.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “…you know, the old tower at the end, looking out to sea, it’s got a decidedly dangerous tilt to it. Very dicy. Look, John, round up anybody you can find, and—wait a minute, I’m just getting a message in from the RAF station down the coast. Whoa, better stay put, John! There’s a whale of a shammal following that cloud, and it’s due to hit land any minute now. Better wait until it’s blown over. Likely to be some masonry flying around.”

  John waited to hear no more. The tower would be Khadija’s summer kiosk. And wasn’t that where she would go to hide and weep—to the room that was her mother’s prison? Even now, she was probably standing at one of the open alcoves, watching the rain, unaware that the tower’s foundations were undermined, unaware of the shammal racing in from the sea.

  The jeep’s engine came to life at the first touch, and John blessed its reliability. He drove as quickly as he dared through the river of rain flooding the road. Fans of spray flew up as the wheels ploughed through the muddy grey water. John hoped the jeep was high enough out of the water to save the engine from being choked. He passed several cars at the roadside trying to start lifeless engines.

  The town was a shambles. It was flooded to about a foot deep, more in some narrow alley-ways where the rushing water had built up. The older men stood looking at their sodden shops with resignation, but youths and children were paddling about in the water as Khadija had danced in the garden, full of delight and laughter.

  Clusters of cows huddled together like small islands, water up to their knees. The nimble goats had scrambled up to higher levels, bleating. Debris swirled past; the road crumbled into sudden holes and ruts; a lorry rushed headlong, splattering John’s windscreen with mud.

  The rain was easing off. It dwindled to a few huge drops then suddenly there was a great burst of heat as the sun slid out from behind the cloud. Immediately the whole place was steaming, the vapour rising as if from a great vat of cooking. John was already wet through, but now the sweat began to pour off him. He had only got a few minutes in which to reach the sheikh’s old palace before the shammal hit Oman Said.

  He heard the shop signs beginning their familiar swinging and clattering.

  Loosened shutters began banging. People hurried off the streets. Others wound their headscarves round their faces.

  Suddenly the shammal hit the town with tremendous force. The wind tore through the narrow streets, turning rivers into tidal waves. Walls collapsed as the poor quality cement absorbed water like a sponge. Flags shredded and disappeared. Cans and stones were hurled through the air with demonic fury.

  John stopped the jeep. It was impossible to drive any further. The flying dust and sand was blinding and choking him. He set off on foot, head down. He knew the way to the old palace through the souk, but one look at the steaming rabbit-warren of humanity—shopkeepers trying to salvage goods, children looting, sodden rushes falling from great gaping holes, mud and rubbish churning into yellow sludge—and he decided it would be hopeless to try and fight a way through.

  He had some idea of the location of the Gate of the Dead. Tin cans, cardboard boxes and ragged washing torn loose and sent flying and scattering, raced past him towards the endless miles of desert. Two women hurried ahead of him, their wet black gowns and cloaks plastered with grey du
st, their sandalled feet thick with mud. As they disappeared into a hovel, John felt the full force of the wind tearing at his shirt, determined to rip it from his back.

  Now he could see the tower vaguely in the swirling sand. It was still standing, but it was definitely leaning away from the sea. A crowd had gathered, foolishly, to watch.

  The Gate of the Dead still held firm despite the battering wind, but the rain had loosened part of the old wall and John clambered up over the stones. The damage in the beautiful courtyards of the palace was a sad sight. Dead birds and flowers floated on the muddy water. Urns were overturned, the fountains choked with debris, and smashed light bulbs and electric wires swung dangerously.

  “Khadija! Khadija,” John called as he waded through the water towards the summer kiosk. The guards seemed to have vanished, perhaps to stop people getting in from the souk.

  The tower creaked ominously and it seemed to John, straining his eyes, that it shifted fractionally.

  “Khadija! Where are you, Khadija?” There was desperation in his voice.

  Then he saw her, in the main courtyard, sheltering upon some steps with a group of black-gowned, wailing women. She was drenched to the skin, the thin stuff of the silk trouser suit clinging to her slim figure, her hair dripping and bedraggled.

  John did not know whether to be angry or relieved.

  “Get out! Get out!” he shouted. “You’ll be killed if you stay there. That tower’s going to collapse any minute!”

  Khadija looked round at the sound of his voice, and her face lit up with joy. She flung herself into the water and began wading towards him, her arms outstretched.

  They clung together for a few moments, relief and desperation and love for each other too strong for words, their closeness saying all that was needed.

  “You’ve got to get out of here quickly,” urged John.

  “It’s my women,” said Khadija, hopelessly. “They won’t move. They were too frightened to go through the souk, and now the guards have barricaded the main entrance against looters.”