‘What’s up, skipper?’ he asked.
‘Fetch the first-aid kit, Bill. Be quick about it. Their child is sick.’
In the headman’s hut, it took only moments for Donaldson to make his diagnosis. The air was cooling as night approached, but he could still feel sweat trickling from his forehead.
‘Tetanus,’ he announced. ‘Quite advanced, by the look of it. The jaw’s rigid, and the bairn has lost weight, I daresay. Ask the mother how long it is since he got the wound.’
He pointed to a wide, unhealed cut on the boy’s forearm. It was red and puffy, and the child — he seemed between one and a half and two — had clearly made matters worse by scratching it.
Gerald asked, but no one could tell him exactly how long. In the desert, they counted seasons and years and sometimes months; but days and weeks meant nothing.
In one corner, the holy man had insinuated himself. He watched, his eyes never straying far from the dying child. Beneath his breath, he murmured something, whether a prayer or a curse, Gerald could not tell.
Donaldson unwrapped a glass vial of antitoxin and injected it into the child’s arm. The mother, already hopeless, made no protest. Si Musa watched the priest, his shrewd eyes seeking out what was hidden in the old man’s heart.
When they left the hut, the sun was setting like a ball of liquid fire, its hues of crimson, rose, gold and turquoise shredded by a billion spores of fine sand that turned them to greens and ochres, vermilions and russets. Fires were lit, using camel dung for fuel. The desert stove was rolled out, and Skinner got it going, surrounded by a bevy of giggling Tuareg women who had never seen a man sully his hands with domestic labour.
A camel was singled out and slaughtered, its hide stripped and set aside, its carcass cut into six parts, and everything that was not eaten preserved for other functions. Bread was baked on fires laid on the sand. Soon, a smell of cooking meat filled the cold night air. Leary showed his hosts how to grill the meat on the petrol-fuelled desert stove. Gerald ordered more rations broken out and made ready for the meal. Bully beef, tinned peaches, rice, potatoes, ten cans of baked beans — great sacrifices that they knew they would regret in the days to come.
In the hut, the baby fell asleep. Donaldson looked tense. He said it would be touch and go, and feared the consequences of his having attempted to treat the child at all.
Elsewhere through the encampment, families were preparing less palatable meals. Tonight’s banquet was a sort of state dinner, reserved for the Imashaghen and their guests. The Anislem chose not to partake of the infidel fare, declaring it haram and forbidden to Muslims, but he was overruled by Si Musa, who said the food had come from Egypt and that the Egyptians were a Muslim people. Shaykh Harun slunk away to find food more fitting his status, but Gerald noticed that he moved back again under cover of darkness, and remained on the edge of the circle, no doubt listening intently to all that was said.
They ate well. What would have seemed poor rations in another time and place made a great feast for poor desert dwellers and soldiers. The camel was stringy, the meat was undercooked, and sand had drifted into everything. But no one complained. They washed the gritty food down with green tea, brewed three times, each brew weaker and sweeter than the one before.
The conversation was choppy, limited by the great linguistic gulf that separated the soldiers from the Tuareg. Questions were relayed through Gerald and Si Musa, answers given in the same way. It was cumbersome, but both parties gained a little understanding of one another. Throughout the meal, however, all participants were aware of a dull underlying tension, of the silence that emanated from the headman’s hut, of the baby that did not cry and whose death might at any moment be pronounced. The Tuareg passed round pinches of snuff from little containers they carried round their necks, and Donaldson raided the cigarette ration, handing over packs of Senior Service coffin nails as though they were sweeties. Some of the Tuareg had smoked before, others subsided into fits of coughing.
There was music afterwards, and dancing, the men in one group, the women in another, their swaying movements lit by fires fuelled by dung laced with petrol. Beneath a sky so packed with stars it seemed a dome of silver and ebony, the sharp percussive notes of the tindi drum echoed through the sands like gunshots, softened only by the gentle scraping of two imzads. And then, out of nowhere, appeared a man wearing a white veil and carrying a flute. One by one, the dancers stopped and the instruments fell silent. The flute player began to play, softly at first, then with growing vigour, as if he wooed the stars; and as he played an ochre moon appeared above the horizon and rose into the shining firmament. As it climbed into the night sky, it shed its ochre tones and grew silver like the stars.
The music stopped, everyone clapped, and it was time for bed. The flute player came across to Gerald, and said he looked forward to speaking at greater length in the morning. It was Si Musa. Gerald said goodnight, and explained that he and his men planned to spend the night, as they always did, next to their vehicles.
They moved the Chevvys onto flat ground on the other side of the oasis from the Tuareg huts.
‘Time for a powwow, gentlemen,’ said Gerald as soon as they’d checked things over and were rolling out their sleeping bags on the sand. It was bitterly cold: the day’s heat had long vanished. Moonlight lay across the dunes, giving them the appearance of sheets of ice. Wrapped up in their Tropal coats, the men were tired and cold and looking forward to getting back to Cairo. A groan went up as Gerald spoke. Powwows could stretch into the night.
‘We’ve got to radio back to base tonight. If anything happens to us, this will all have been wasted if we don’t get the coordinates through. We’ll take an astrofix now. The rest of you can be setting the aerials up.’
Skinner, Clark, Donaldson and Leary clustered round the radio car, setting two tall poles to front and rear, rigging the support lines, and stringing the dipole antenna between the poles. While they were struggling to get the aerial set up, Gerald and Max Chippendale took out the theodolite and screwed it onto its tripod.
Max put a wide wooden board beneath the tripod legs and spent the next five minutes with a plumb bob trying to get the instrument absolutely flat.
‘Who the fuck thought you could use one of these on sand?’ he swore, as he did every time he had to get it straight. He fiddled with the legs, tightening and loosening, while Gerald lit the tripod with his Kempthorne torch, one he’d ‘liberated’ from an Aussie patrol.
‘OK, skipper. It’s as plumb as I can get it.’
He put his eye to the theodolite’s telescope and picked out a star.
‘Up,’ he called out as the star moved across the lens. Gerald noted the time, using his chronometer.
Back at the radio car, Leary had his receiver buzzing. He twisted dials until the time signal came through from Big Ben, and Gerald confirmed the coordinates. He dictated a brief message to Leary, who encrypted it and transmitted the result to Kufra.
‘Let’s have a spot of swing, Weary,’ someone said, and other voices joined in, calling for music before they settled down, a desert custom. Leary’s wireless ranged from 4.2 to 7.5MHz and could pick up most short-wave broadcasts. He twiddled the dial and caught Glenn Miller’s band halfway through ‘In the Mood’. Clark found the rum pot and doled out rations to keep the cold at bay. No one declined.
Next thing, Peggy Lee was singing her new hit with the Benny Goodman sextet, ‘Full Moon’. Above them, the moon moved majestically through its field of stars, the twenty-eight lunar mansions, through al-Haq‘a, al-Han‘a and al-‘Adhara, past stars and planets named by the Arabs centuries ago. The song ended, and Leary moved the dial again, this time picking up Radio Belgrade. They listened uncomprehending to a barrage of German propaganda, but everyone knew what they were waiting for. They weren’t disappointed. A record crackled briefly, then the airwaves were filled with the lush voice of Lale Anderson, the German Angel of the Soldiers.