‘There are no routes,’ he said. ‘The desert is a sea, a sea of sand, bahr ramal.’
Ethan persisted.
‘Even at sea there are shipping lanes. There are routes that avoid strong currents, routes through narrow channels. There are dunes out there. Some are as tall as mountains.’
‘The sands shift. Wind comes and lifts the dunes, it blow and blow until is nothing where was once something, something where was once nothing.’
He looked out to where the sun was extinguishing itself in the western sands, on its way to drown in the waves of the Atlantic.
‘One day, even this desert will have vanished, even the sun will dry up and shrivel and become blackness.’
Ethan could not tell whether he was smiling or not.
‘It’s time to get going,’ he said.
The going got tough very quickly. The moon was almost full, and galaxies of stars like candy floss augmented the light it cast, throwing a blanket of silver across the humped and lawless sand. This was somewhat to the good, but the stark shadows the moonlight created made it hard to navigate between dunes or to tell which were safe to climb or likely to collapse the moment the spinning wheels of the first jeep touched them.
Ethan travelled in front with Gavril and the guide, Sarah took the rear with two monks called Claudiu and Flaviu, neither of whom spoke a word of English.
Outside, light and darkness turned the desert to something very like the surface of the moon. Sarah felt herself crawl across it, an alien being on a world without fixed points. The slow passage of shadows, the turning of the stars and the steady passage of the moon all dimmed her eyes. She started to doze, then fell fast asleep.
When she next woke, they had stopped in a broad wadi. They had started unloading the Hagor fast-up tents and were hauling sleeping bags and other equipment inside. When everything had been stowed or left behind, the monks assembled, as they assembled every morning, to sing matins. Ayyub looked on from a distance, disapproving.
The last stars passed away on the bright horizon. Camping tables were laid out, and soon the smell of supper wafted through the dunes. Just as it confused everyone to sing matins before sleep, so everyone had a stomach unable to cope with the changes a night-time existence thrust on them.
No one slept well that day. The bright sunshine proved unbearable, the tents retained an unaccustomed amount of heat, sand crept into the folds of everyone’s skin and even seemed to work its way down into the pores and behind the eyelids.
They struggled through noon, and were out of their tents soon after, preferring to drive on than remain in misery. Ayyub agreed there were now few benefits to travelling by night. In daylight, they had a much better chance of finding their way or spotting Aehrenthal. They decided to stay awake by day and sleep once the sun went down. The caravan was reformed and they set off once more.
On the following day they came to another wadi surrounded by five-hundred-foot-high dunes. Sunset had already touched the sky with red and pink, gold and green. They were all exhausted. They got down stiffly, their bodies aching from the profound hammering they’d received during the day’s journey. There was a chance they might find the lost city in another day.
They wolfed down their food, then checked their weapons. If they did reach Wardabaha, there was a chance they’d come across Aehrenthal and his men. Tents snapped open across the floor of the ancient river bed. The monks chanted early vespers together, under Gavril’s direction, then headed for their beds.
When Sarah ate, her digestive system was in such disorder that she could barely keep food down. The shock of her abduction had never really left her, and this latest journey and the knowledge that Aehrenthal was somewhere around revived those earlier sensations.
She sat up for a while, talking with Ethan. It was the only time of day when they could find an opportunity to be with one another, and with every day that passed it grew more important to do so. They talked of hopes and fears, of memories good and bad, of relatives, of whatever came to mind, but of Sarah’s pain they said nothing. Each day, more and more, they returned to their love for one another, and how precarious it felt, yet how necessary to them both. It was not a matter of whispering sweet nothings or inviting seduction, or inciting lust. They both wanted time for that, but they knew that their love and its fulfilment depended utterly on the outcome of this expedition and the downfall of Aehrenthal and his plans.
As they parted, Ethan noticed that it was darker than usual for the time of day. It was far too early for him to have learnt the rhythms of the desert, and he knew he could not trust his own judgement. Only Ayyub was properly attuned, and Ethan did not trust him.
He looked up and saw clouds scudding across the sky. Most seemed to be grey, but here and there clouds of a distinctly blacker hue moved at a slower pace. There was a little breeze at ground level now, that picked up the finer sand and carried it along.
Sarah stepped inside her tent. Its sides were stretched like a drum against the growing wind. Thoughts of Oxford came to her. The spires, the river, the colleges were all vivid in her mind, but in the way matters of dreams are vivid. The whole city seemed to her nothing more than a setting for an episode of Morse or Lewis. Whatever she saw in her mind’s eye was accompanied by snatches of classical music. She preferred Amy Winehouse or Joy Division. Here in the desert, her best memories turned to sand. If she had ever wanted drama, she had found it in abundance.
She lay awake in the dark, her mind spinning with thoughts of what the following day might bring. She still could not sleep. There was no help for it, she thought, but to get up and go outside for a walk. She dug out a bag of clothes she’d bought in Tripoli expressly to wear at night: woollen socks, a heavy Benneton pullover found on a stall in the suq, and above it a man’s jelabia that Ethan had bought for her in the area where men’s clothes were up for sale.
It had grown colder than usual, and the darkness had increased by several degrees. She went inside to retrieve her torch, then set off down the wadi. Within minutes, the contours of the landscape had inveigled her away from the wadi floor up onto a channel between two dunes whose height she could only guess at. Walking on the loose sand was far from easy, but something drove her upwards and away from the camp, a need to walk, to push herself to exhaustion. Her thighs soon started to ache. She had not yet recovered her strength after her ordeal, and even if she thought she was up to a walk through the dunes, the truth was that her muscles had not regained their elasticity.
She decided to sit down for a spell. Nobody would miss her, after all, and the sand was more comfortable to sit on than walk over. As she sat, she yawned and looked up at the black sky. The clouds tumbled like clothes in a drier. In the end, she turned her eyes away, finding herself made almost giddy by the dark movements. She yawned again, more deeply this time, and to her surprise her head started to drop. Jerking awake, she decided her objective had been attained and started to get to her feet in order to work her way back to the camp. But as she moved, her thighs protested. It felt comfortable in the little dip she had made for herself in the sand, so she thought she’d stay some minutes longer, until her legs were properly rested.
She yawned again, then a second and a third time. Next thing she was on her side, fast asleep and snoring.
Afterwards, she could not guess with any accuracy how long she’d been out. It was a deep sleep, she knew that, and she knew that she’d only come round from it with difficulty. What wakened her was the sensation of rain falling on her head. Heavy rain. Cold heavy rain that soaked her hair in seconds and ran in rivulets down through her collar and onto her back and chest. When she moved, she could feel fast-flowing water on either side of her. It was cold water, and it sucked at her, as if eager to pull her with it, to drag her downwards.