Sunset Oasis

But it didn't come.

Rather, everything suddenly stopped.

Just as the storm cloud had caught us and flung us in all directions in the desert, so it quickly receded and moved on to a place unknown. Quiet reigned and the sun shone. We, though, continued to cough and spit out the yellow sand which had filled our throats and mouths and I heard the panting, disjointed voice of the guide ordering his men to gather up whatever could be retrieved of the goods scattered over the desert. One of the Bedouin cried out, 'But we've lost two of the camels,' to which the guide replied, 'If they're alive they'll come back. Redistribute what's left of their loads among the other camels.' Catherine, who had kept her head buried in my chest the whole time, raised a pale and dust-stained face as she ripped its covering off, let out a long breath and tried to smile.

Still in a state of astonishment at myself, I said, 'It wasn't very frightening.'

'What wasn't?' mumbled Catherine.

'Death.'

She drew back a step, raised her gaze to mine, and asked me, 'You mean, it wasn't very close?' I thought for a second before answering, 'On the contrary, it was very close.'

She was no longer listening to me, however. Breathing hard and coughing, she was carefully removing the sand from her face and clothes, and I was incapable of explaining to her how it was the nearness of death which had made it familiar and desirable. At the same moment, I found Ibraheem, the orderly, before me, his face hidden behind a mask of clinging yellow grains that left only the eyes and lips showing.

'Are Your Excellency and madame all right?' he asked me.

'We are. And what about you, Ibraheem?'

'As you can see, sir, I'm an old man. When the darkness fell on us, I recited the double profession of faith, but more time has been written for us, praise God.'

Ibraheem is the only one among the soldiers who has undertaken the journey to the oasis before. In his youth he took part in one of the military expeditions against Siwa, and Brigadier General Saeed commended him to me for that reason.

Catherine was following our conversation and she gestured towards Ibraheem and said, 'Now do you see?' but I didn't ask her what she was talking about, nor was there time to ask. The whole caravan was bustling with activity and the kneeling camels had started to rise in preparation for departure.

The caravan continued on its way in the midst of complete quiet. The noise of the winds and the roaring of the camels had disappeared and the caravan pursued its path over smooth, still sands, as though the desert had never known a storm. The tired camels moved forwards slowly and the drivers, exhaustion drawn on their faces too, didn't try to hurry them. At midday we reached a small well edged with a few trees, most of them withered, and there we found one of the two camels the caravan had lost. It was kneeling and moaning, its body bearing long open wounds like the parallel strokes of a whip.

The guide patted its neck and told it, 'You should have stayed quiet during the storm, my friend, not run from it to your destruction. Haven't the desert and the caravans taught you anything?'

Then he bent over and started anointing its wounds with oil that he poured from a metal flask. He turned towards me while I was observing what he was doing and said, as though in self-defence, 'This isn't the storm season. It came at least a month early. I've lived with this desert all my life and know it like the back of my hand. I've memorized its tracks and its seasons, but it's treacherous. No matter how long you live with it and how safe you feel in it, it can still betray you.'

'Not so much as men.'

Busy doctoring the camel with both hands, he asked me, 'What did you say, Excellency?'

'I asked you how much longer we'll stay here.'

'The camels have to rest. We'll spend the rest of the day and the night here.'

The guide gave orders that we, that is Catherine and I, should be the first to use the well and kept the rest of the caravan away from us. After we had washed and changed our clothes, which were full of sand, we moved off a way and the men approached, cheering and jumping into the muddy pool surrounding the well. We stood in the shade of a palm tree, where their laughter and shouts reached us as they frolicked in the water, and Catherine said, smiling, 'It might be said that those men are happy to have been saved from death. And it might be said that they did indeed find it frightening.'

'And it might be said too that I was as afraid of it as they were, but when it came close to me and I touched it, I found it smooth and soft, and it whispered to me, "Come. The faster you come, the better." It's not the first time I've faced death. But here, in this desert, there's something I can't explain, something beckoning, or calling.'

Catherine burst out angrily, 'That's enough! You know I'm not afraid of death. It will come at its appointed time. But I don't yearn for it and I don't woo it. This life is for us to live, so let's try to give it some meaning. The truth is it's you that is scaring me now.'

'Pay no attention, then. It may just be a passing moment. Ever since beginning this journey I've never stopped thinking about what has happened to me in my life. Few pleasures, heavy sorrows. As though the desert were asking me, "If this is how things stand, isn't it true that the faster it comes the better?"'

'I told you, it's not the desert's fault. It's not your gloomy thoughts about death that are upsetting me now because you're not the only person to have discovered them, and most people perhaps think that way in moments of crisis and sorrow, but… there's something beyond that that's been inside you for a while and which is no fault of the storms or the desert. So what is your crisis, Mahmoud? You're the only one who knows. All I know is that this desert will fight us and so will the oasis and so will enemies known and unknown and, of course, we will die in the end. We shall die like everyone else, but we have to die undefeated.'

'And who said I want to kill myself?' I replied. Then I laughed. 'The people of the oasis are going to take that task upon themselves! Why would you even imagine I'd kill myself? What do we have, in fact, other than this life? We have to live it to the last instant.'

Catherine raised her hands and her eyes widened a little as she said, 'How is it I still haven't gone mad?'

At that moment, Ibraheem approached us, the water still dripping from his hair and running over the wrinkles of his brown face. 'Does Your Excellency require anything?' he said.

I smiled as I asked, 'And what can you do for me in this place, Ibraheem?' Ibraheem turned in the empty waste and pointed to a tall, emaciated palm tree, saying, 'It's date season. If this palm tree were to produce any, I'd climb it for Your Excellency.'

'What a hypocrite you are, Ibraheem! If you climbed it, you'd break your neck, and what good would that do me? And you want to go on living, don't you?'

He spread out his hands and said, 'For the sake of the little ones, Your Excellency.'

Catherine said, 'Instead of climbing the palm tree, then, tell us something useful about the oasis before we arrive.'

'But I've told you everything I know, madame. It's like no other place and its people are like no other people. Say what you like about them, they're the bravest people I've ever seen. When I came with the army twenty years ago, we bombarded the town with artillery and the only weapons they had were small rifles, which they fired at us from behind the walls. But despite all their dead they didn't surrender until their ammunition ran out. They have their feuds, but they always form one front against outsiders. And they also don't allow… outsiders in their houses.'

'Especially infidels, isn't that so?' said Catherine, laughing.

Embarrassment appeared on Ibraheem's face as he mumbled, 'I'm sorry, madame.'

Catherine turned to me and said, 'Indeed, I read that they hate Europeans especially and that they have killed a number of European travellers who went to explore the oasis.'