Why, for example, am I so cheerful this morning, in this heat and after the threat, which I know to be real? Is it all thanks to the dream? It must be. It can't be because of the two glasses of whisky I drank last night. I used to depend on whisky to withstand the loneliness of this oasis and I brought a sufficient supply of boxes from Cairo. Now, however, I'm drinking less and less. Why? Perhaps it's the extreme heat which prevents me from drinking, and perhaps it's not having anyone to drink with. 'No drinking without a drinking companion,' as they say. I don't have a friend in this town to drink with and my wife doesn't drink.
Catherine was of use to me, though, despite that, in our first days and weeks here. Each had only the other in the midst of this atmosphere of hostility and isolation with which the oasis took us unawares. After the working day was over we'd be alone together, me with my glass in front of me. We'd chat about any topic but something would start up, as usual, in my mind. I'd watch her, observing her body, whose every beauty I know. I'd go over its details and imagine the feel of her skin and of the embrace of our bodies and she'd blush and smile and I'd give her that long look she well understands. And the fact is we exhausted in a few weeks all the energy of our passion, after which a malaise swept over me. Catherine, however, kept searching with unceasing anxiety for something that might prolong the nights of our renewed desert passion. Some nights she would draw close to me, as I drank with a calm and a listlessness that were quite apparent to her, throw herself into my lap, and nervously and rapidly cover my face and neck with kisses until she did indeed arouse me and drag me out of my lethargy. On other nights she'd plead with me to be soft and delicate, her unseeing fingers caressing my chest with the utmost slowness. She would try to take charge herself of the intimacy, an attempt I would reject, making love the way I liked, and which she was used to, forcing her into complete submission on the bed, and I think that, despite her reproachfulness, that satisfied and pleased her, just as it has since the beginning of our relationship. In the end, however, familiarity and excess bled to death all her attempts, and mine, to invent new forms of pleasure, and we settled to a rhythm of unplanned encounters on occasional nights, rather than every night as before.
Is this the malaise of marriage that my friends in Cairo never tired of discussing, and from which I would flee to other women? And has this oasis of silence hastened this malaise? Perhaps.
The first light of dawn spreads and the outlines of Shali appear.
The town loses its grandeur when you draw close to it. It no longer displays the shape of a volcano or a pyramid. Rather, it becomes nothing more than yellowish mud houses piled on top of one another, like a dust heap pierced by holes which are the three windows of each storey. To the right, however, it stretches to the town of Aghurmi, after which, to the east, is the forest of palm trees that so please the eye after the contemplation of that upside-down funnel of dust and the gloomy Mountain of the Dead. Look, then, only to the east.
The sun's rays were really scorching my forehead, however, and I heard Catherine moving about in the house, so I rose from where I was sitting.
She greeted me with a smile. She is always more beautiful in the morning after a long, deep sleep. Insomnia is not one of her problems.
She had put the breakfast plates on the table in the spacious main room.
As we sat down, she said, 'Someone's looking refreshed this morning.'
'It's our free day. At least I shan't have to be strangled in the heat by my officer's uniform.'
'But your wicked wife is going to ruin your day off by taking you to the terrifying ruins.'
Smiling, I said, 'Precisely! Even though there's nothing better to do on our holidays, or at any other time.'
She laughed and said, 'Precisely! We're not exactly worn out by visits and social obligations.'
While we were having breakfast, however, I asked her in passing, 'What are you looking for in the ruins, Catherine? You take books with pictures of the temples with you and I see you reading them closely at home, so what exactly are you looking for?'
'I'm looking for the greatest man in the world. For Alexander.'
'I've known that for some time. You want to see the temples he visited here. But it seems you're looking for something else.'
She put down the teacup from which she'd been drinking, frowned slightly and said, 'I shall tell you a secret. I don't know what I'm looking for.'
I gave her an enquiring look and she went on, 'I came to the oasis full of dreams that I'd discover something new in the midst of these ruins, something neither the ancient historians nor the travellers who have visited the oasis had recorded. I have the capacity to do so because I know languages they did not, but I'm not finding much. With Ibraheem I visited the tombs in the Mountain of the Dead and they have all unfortunately been robbed — the mummies and the coffins and all the remains that might have been of use to any search.'
Then she sighed and said, 'And you know what happened last Friday when I visited, or tried to visit, the large temple, the Temple of the Oracle.'
'I hope you'll have better luck today, but are you aware of what the people of the oasis are saying?'
She replied indifferently, 'That I'm searching for the treasure they've been looking for everywhere among the temples, which they've dug around and beneath so much that they're ruined?'
'Exactly. Ibraheem warned me and advised me to warn you.'
'All my visits take place by day and under their eyes, so they're welcome to come and take the treasure when I find it.'
She fell silent for a moment, then looked me straight in the eyes and said, 'But of course you don't believe that nonsense, do you?'
'Frankly, I wish you would find some treasure and that we could escape with it to an unknown place.'
She laughed. 'Then you have a long time to wait! Still, I'm happy you're in a good mood this morning. Why, I wonder. If we were in another place, I'd say you'd fallen in love again but here, poor you, there aren't any women. One never ever sees them.'
'As though we ever saw the men!'
As I rose I said, 'Come on, we ought to leave early before the sun gets hot. You know we have to be back before noon.'
When she left to get dressed I said to myself, 'But you're not wrong, Catherine. The reason is indeed a woman! A woman who hasn't left me all my life long. Ni'ma visited me last night or this morning and filled me with joy. All I can remember of the dream is her beautiful face, which took me back to the days of innocence and celebration.'
'Dusky Ni'ma' got her name from the colour of her smooth, clear, golden-brown skin, which was like the colour of the Nile in flood. They couldn't think of a truer description for that unique colour and I doubt whether anyone, herself perhaps included, knew the names of her father or mother. My father bought her from the Slavers' Market as a young girl to help my mother with the housework, then gave her to me when she grew older. We were raised together and played together and were happy and she was my friend and closer to me than Suleiman my brother. I may have touched her and kissed her while we were playing, the way children do, but what I liked about her at that age were the stories she used to tell me. Where had she learnt them? From her mother, who died when she was a child? From the other girl slaves in the house or outside it? I don't know. But her stories were full of good kings and bad kings and each time she'd change the same story, so that it was as though I were hearing it for the first time, and she'd tell it as though these were things that had just taken place. Her voice would tremble as she told of how the villain cast a spell on the good king and seized his throne after turning him into an ape, and how the enchanted king saw his daughter, who was imprisoned in the palace, and how his attempts to make her recognize him with cries and dumbshow failed. Ni'ma's eyes would overflow with tears as they took the captive princess to marry the evil king, and then her face would shine with joy when the handsome prince arrived. This handsome prince would always come and release her from captivity and the hateful marriage. Then he would undo the spell on the good king, who would reward him with marriage to the princess. When I was small, I heard stories from my mother and the slave girls and other women servants in the house, but Ni'ma's were the only ones that stayed with me, along with her face as she told them, the companionship of our childhood, and the secrets we shared.