“Don’t worry,” said Nordhausen, intent on swilling the water down. He ran a forearm over his brow and took a last swallow of water from the canteen, his eyes clearly betraying the fatigue and anxiety that had taken hold of them. The water was going to be a problem, unless they found a spring or well soon, and they had exhausted themselves with the digging. Now they had to find shelter and get out of the sun, or they would soon join their ammonite fossil for eternity, just another pair of bleached skeletons swallowed by the desert. The Professor immediately expressed his concern.
“This sun is killing me,” he breathed.
“We better head for the canyon wall,” Paul concurred. “With any luck we might find a cave or some other protected area. Then we can decide just how four or five liters of water is going to sustain us here.”
“God!” Nordhausen was finally realizing the depth of their dilemma. “I know there was a Camel Corps station built around an old fort somewhere in the area, and there are occasional Bedouins leading small tour groups. Someone will come along… but, on second thought, I don’t think we should count on help from the locals. The police ride about on camels here too, and we don’t want to attract any undue attention.”
“Right, so we’ll just wait until we’re desperate, I suppose.”
“Oh, don’t worry about the water. There are natural springs running from the rim of the canyon, and we should be able to find something soon enough. Remember? This was Lawrence’s hiding place. In fact, there was a well watered spring with a little punch bowl out on Jabal Rumm where Lawrence used to soak himself during their layovers here.” He rubbed his hands together at the thought. “Just what I need right now. Come on. Let’s find shelter and rest up until sunset. If we decide to move then we’ll have to trek it by night and sleep by day, just like Lawrence did in the movie.”
“What?”
“You know—when they crossed the Sun’s Anvil in the Nefud, on the way to Akaba.”
Paul shook his head. “Well they had camels, if you recall, and to drift off and slip from the saddle was as good as a death sentence. They knew better than to test the desert by day. Can we walk twenty miles in a single night? We’d be lucky to make one or two miles an hour in this terrain.” He paused, searching about them for a moment.
“Will you look at this place?” Paul had finally taken the time to survey their surroundings. They were in a wide valley, perhaps two miles across, and rimmed by sheer sandstone formations that seemed to thrust up from the undulating pink sand of the valley floor, like behemoths breaking through the swell of the ocean. The lower base of some formations was surrounded with a tumbled scatter of granite boulders and rock. Closer to the walls of the canyon there were more varied rock formations, well weathered, with near horizontal striations indicating their obvious sedimentary origins. The rosy sands swept up to the base of these formations, like waves washing against a ragged coastline. They gave the whole canyon the impression of a narrow bay, awash in flowing pink sand accented by lighter drifts of white that seemed to undulate along the lower terrain, like lines of frothy waves making their way to the shore. Over all, the great mass of Jabal Rumm rose to the imposing height of some 1500 feet, its sloping top lording over the canyon with a quiet regard. The valley had an eerie, awesome beauty about it, much like the Grand Canyon in Arizona, only on a smaller scale.
“Yes, this is the most beautiful location on the whole plain of Jordan,” said Nordhausen. “There’s an old fort out here somewhere, with ruins of a Nabataean Temple nearby.”
“Naba what?”
“They were an ancient people who lived in the region dating back to a thousand years BC. They built Petra, if you are familiar with that site. It was the center of a quiet little empire that had settlements hidden all through the region, with secret caches of water and a strategy of economic trade as their primary means of wielding power. This particular region was a meeting spot for caravans carrying incense from Arabia and Persia up to the King’s Road and Petra. The Nabataeans put quite a strangle hold on the Romans at one time. The temple ruins in this region probably date from that period, perhaps the 1st century BC. Tourists used to visit them, but they’ve been largely ignored in recent years. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something interesting!”
“Something interesting? You going to try and make this an archeological dig? And what about your ship? Isn’t the Arabesque expecting us soon? I must say, Robert, this was one wild ride.” Paul shielded his eyes as he looked around. “We’re well north of the main body of the Red Sea here. If we go due west we’ll hit the Gulf of Akaba. Is that where your ship is waiting?”
“The ship? Oh, we can forget about her for the time being. The rendezvous was supposed to be taking place right now. They’ll only wait a few hours before pulling up anchor and moving on. I’m afraid our charter on the Arabesque will have to be a write-off. Looks like we’re going to miss our dinner in Port Sudan tomorrow night as well. Shit! I shelled out fifteen hundred bucks for the charter flight to Cairo.”
“Cairo?”
“We couldn’t fly out of Amman, so I got tickets from Cairo. Thought we’d take a peek at the sphinx while we were there and—“
“Stop right there.” Paul held up a warning hand. “I don’t think I can stand to hear what you had planned for that little excursion. Well, get up. We’d better get started. It’s hot as hell out here.”
“I’m losing about five thousand bucks on this fiasco,” Nordhausen continued in his complaint.
“Serves you right.” Paul rubbed a bit of salt in the wounds as they started away toward the canyon edge. “Well then how do you propose to get us home, Robert?”
Nordhausen flashed him a smile. “Akaba! We’re going to follow in Lawrence’s footsteps, my friend. It’s the only settlement with air or sea connections nearby, and I think twenty or thirty miles should get us there.”
“Akaba? That’s going to be a very hard trek.”
“Well if Old Moses could make it on his way to the Wilderness of Zin, then we should do just fine.”
They were some time making their way over the rivulets of sand and small islets of crumbling rock. With each step the imposing formations of the canyon wall grew nearer, and they made their way to a deeply cloven sector that promised good shelter and shade from the sun. They were very tired when they reached it, after little more than a mile, and Paul had great misgivings about the long trek ahead of them to Akaba. When they reached the folded face of the rock, it was clear that neither one had any intention of beginning that journey soon.
“Let’s work our way into this rock face,” Nordhausen suggested. “The further back we get the cooler it is likely to be. Some of these fissures reach into the canyon walls for hundreds of feet or more. They’ve been eroding out for millennium.”
“That way looks promising.” Paul pointed at a gaping aperture where two large rock formations met in a fragmented collision. They climbed up over the large ochre boulders at the base of the fissure, and saw that the way did indeed wind into the hillside for some distance. It was just wide enough for two to walk abreast in the beginning, but the striated walls of smooth russet stone soon began to close in on them, and they took to single file, with Paul in the lead. His thin, angular frame had little difficulty negotiating the narrower spots, though Nordhausen complained as he squeezed around a turn in the fissure, hoping it would not dead-end on them.
It was already much cooler, which was the only consolation they had from the trek thus far, apart from the spectacular scenery. It was not long before Paul noticed the fissure beginning to widen out, opening on a sand drift the led up a gentle hill to the mouth of a cave.