Before I saw the people sitting beside the fire, I was struck by the rich smell coming from the central spit. It was testament to my hunger that I should notice the roasting flank of meat before I noticed my new hosts. It was a single leg of goat, and drops of blood swelled on the simmering meat until they dropped to the fire. At my side the boys spoke rapidly, gesturing at me. They were addressing a withered old woman, who reclined on a thin camel-skin rug on a raised bed near the edge of the tent. Her hair was wrapped tightly in a thin, translucent shawl, lending her head the illusion of a desert tortoise. She held a long pipe to her mouth and puffed it in contemplation. The boys finished talking, and for some time the woman said nothing. Finally she nodded to them, and they bowed and scampered to the other edge of the tent, where they threw themselves onto a rug, pulled their knees to their chests, and stared at me. There were others in the tent as well, perhaps ten silent faces.
“You have come from far away,” said the old turtle woman.
I was shocked. “You speak Arabic?” I asked.
“Enough to trade. Please, sit.” She nodded at a young girl who sat near the door. The girl jumped to her feet and brought a small rug that she laid on the sand for me. I sat.
“My grandchildren said that they found you near the coast of the Red Sea.”
“They did. They gave me water and, by doing so, saved my life.”
“How did you get there?” Her voice was stern.
“An accident. I was on a ship traveling from Suez to Babelmandeb when there was a storm. The ship was wrecked. I do not know what happened to my shipmates, but I fear them dead.”
The turtle woman turned to the room and spoke to them. There was nodding and hasty chatter.
When she stopped speaking, I spoke again. “Where am I?”
The old woman shook her head. One eye, I noticed, deviated from the other, giving her an eerie sense of watchfulness, as if while she scrutinized me she was also carefully watching the room. “That is a dangerous question,” she said. “Already there are those who feel that the fame of the appearance has spread too far, that if too many people come She will not return. You are fortunate to have found me. There are those here who would have killed you.”
With those words, the relief of finding civilization was washed over with the nausea of fear. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Do not ask too much. You have come at an auspicious time. The Bantu astrologers say that tomorrow She may appear to sing. And then your questions will be answered.” And with those words, she raised her pipe to her mouth once again and turned first one eye, and then the other, back to the fire. No one spoke to me for the remainder of the evening. I feasted on the roasted leg and drank a sweet nectar until I fell asleep before the fire.
I awoke the next morning to find the tent empty. I prayed and then lifted the flap of the tent, emerging into the heat. The sun hung in the center of the sky; in my exhaustion, I had slept nearly to noon. The camels were still tethered, but both goats were gone. I went back inside the tent. I had no water to wash myself, but I tried my best to fold and smooth my headdress with my hands. I returned outside.
The paths were relatively empty; everyone must have been hiding from the sun. I saw a group of men saddling camels in preparation to hunt, and nearby a group of young girls, dressed in a vivid blue, grinding grain. Toward the outer edge of the encampment I saw the new arrivals, some of whom must have arrived at dawn, who still worked to unroll tents from the backs of stoical camels. I walked to the edge of the camp, where the tent city ended suddenly, and where a line had been etched, drawn by many tribes as a ritual barrier between their camp and the desert. The sands stretched out unbroken. I thought back on the old woman’s words. Long ago, when I was a child, I had accompanied my brother to Aden, where we spent the night with a tribe of Bedouin. The Bedouin speak their own dialect, but I understood some, as much of my youth had been passed in trading bazaars, where the young acquire a great collection of tongues. I remembered we had joined the family by their fire, and listened to their grandfather tell a story of a congress of tribes. In the light of the fire, he had described in exquisite detail each tribe, the robes they wore, their customs, their beasts, even the color of their eyes. I had been spellbound, and sometime during the night fell asleep before the story was finished, to awake only when my brother prodded me, and we crawled back into the tent. Now, standing at the edge of the open desert, something in that old man’s story returned to me, a sensation only, like a memory of a dream.
In the distance, beyond a small dune, I saw a flutter of red fabric, tickled by the wind. It was brief, like the short flight of a bird, but such visions are rare in the desert and beg inspection. I stepped across the line—at the time I thought this a superstition of infidels, although now I am not so certain. I climbed the dune and descended into a plain of sand. There was no one. I felt a presence behind me and turned. It was a woman. She stood nearly one hand shorter than me and stared up from behind a red veil. I thought by the darkness of her skin that she must be from one of the Ethiopian tribes, but when I kept staring at her, she greeted me. “Salaam aleikum.”
“Wa aleikum al-salaam,” I answered. “Where are you from?”
“From the same land as you,” she said, but her accent was strange.
“Then you are far from home,” I said.
“And you as well.”
I stood speechless, entranced by the softness of her words, by her eyes. “What are you doing alone in the sands?” I asked.
For a long time she didn’t speak. My eyes followed her veil down to her body, which was covered in thick red robes that gave no clue to the form that lay beneath. The fabric fell and pooled on the ground, where the wind had already dusted it with a layer of sand, giving the impression that she had risen from the dunes. Then she spoke again. “I must fetch water,” she said and looked down at an earthen pot she was balancing on her hip. “I am afraid I will get lost in the sand. Will you come with me?”
“But I don’t know where to find any,” I protested, shaken by the boldness of her proposition, by how close she stood to me.
“I do,” she said.
But neither of us moved. I had never seen eyes the color of hers– not dark brown like the women from my home, but softer, lighter, the color of sand. A breeze danced about us and her veil shook, and I had a fleeting glimpse of her face, strange in ways I couldn’t understand, for I blinked and again she was hidden.
“Come,” she said, and we began to walk. A wind whipped up around us, firing sand against our skin, stinging, like a thousand pins.
“Perhaps we should turn back,” I said. “Or we will be lost in the storm.”
She kept walking.
I caught up with her. The storm was getting worse. “Let’s turn back. It is too dangerous to be caught out here alone.”
“We cannot go back,” she said. “We are not from here.”
“But the storm—”
“Stay with me.”
“But—”
She turned. “You are frightened.”
“Not frightened. I know the desert. We can return later.”
“Ibrahim,” she said.
“My name.”
“Ibrahim,” she said again and stepped toward me.
My hands hung limply at my side. “You know my name.”
“Quiet,” she said. “The sand will stop.”
And suddenly the wind disappeared. Fine particles of sand froze in the air, like tiny planets. They stayed suspended in space, unmovable, whitening the sky, the horizon, erasing everything but her.
She stepped toward me once more, and set the pot on the ground. “Ibrahim,” she repeated and lifted her veil from her face.
I have never seen a vision so beautiful and yet so hideous. With woman’s eyes she stared at me, but her mouth wavered, like a mirage, not the mouth and nose of a woman, but of a deer, its skin soft with fur. I couldn’t speak, and there was a howling, and the sand took motion once again, spinning about us, blurring her. I raised my hands to my eyes.