On the fourteenth day the landscape changed again. The broken plain gave way to a massive escarpment rising above the flatland at least two thousand feet, a huge, apparently impenetrable wall directly in front of them. As they approached it throughout that day Holliday began to pick out sandy scars in the face of the escarpment, the mouths of wadis, or ancient riverbeds forming sloping approaches to the high wall.
Toward the end of the day they reached one of these and barely slowed as they climbed up the escarpment along the winding trail of sand. Holliday tried to imagine what this place would have looked like when man first walked here a hundred thousand years ago. Probably paradise; in huge areas of Libya and Egypt the weather ran in cycles, drying and wetting, the desert expanding and contracting like a gigantic lung. As recently as the time of the pharaohs much of the landscape they were traveling through had been home to waving fields of grain, tumbling rivers and streams and forests and veldts alive with herds of wandering animals and their predators. The riverbed they were working their way along was easily as wide as the Mississippi and had probably been much faster. It was all very hard to imagine.
They reached the top of the escarpment and left the sand-filled riverbed as darkness fell, and by the time they pitched camp for the night they had traveled a good distance along it. The next day was spent moving across the top of the plateau, traveling more west than south now. Every now and again they passed the abandoned ruins of mud- and salt-brick villages and once something that had to have been an old colonial fort, Italian or French. At noon they actually crossed a road lined with electrical transmission towers and in late afternoon they crossed another.
By Holliday's rough calculations they had traveled at least six hundred miles from the wreckage of Your Heart's Desire. That put them closer to the border of Algeria, Niger, and Chad than anywhere else. From one frying pan into another, he thought. Algeria was a corrupt semidictatorship and a hotbed of ethnic Berber al-Qaeda terrorists, Niger was in the midst of a Tuareg insurrection and Chad had their UFDD rebel alliance. Who was it who said that God had forgotten Africa? A very bad place for an American to be, worse for a woman and suicide for an Israeli. Getting out of this was going to be some piece of work.
The sixteenth day turned out to be the last. Late in the morning they reached another, much narrower wadi and instead of crossing it they turned abruptly, following it almost due north. By midafternoon the wadi petered out and they climbed up out of the ancient watercourse. They were at the edge of the escarpment, two thousand feet above a giant tract of rolling desert that reached the horizon. The small caravan came to a momentary stop.
To their left, along a precipitous goat track that angled down the face of the cliff, there was a sand rift between the main escarpment and a long extrusion of sandstone. It looked like the space between a person's thumb and forefinger. From where Holliday sat perched on his camel the sandy rift looked to be ten or twelve miles long. Big enough to hide an entire army if you wanted. To the right, in the far distance, was a large blot of green shimmering like a mirage in the light of the burning sun. Something that looked suspiciously like a paved road ran directly through it, angling along at the foot of the escarpment.
Civilization.
Holliday felt a single small surge of hope and exhilaration. He saw what the men from Your Heart's Desire had not: a way out of their predicament. He yelled to the man on the camel in front of him.
"Hey!"
The man in the Tuareg robes turned in his saddle, the lethal automatic rifle clutched in his hands. When he spoke his muffled voice was harsh and dry; he was a man who had spent his life in the parched desert.
"Matha tureed?" the Tuareg said, dark eyes peering out over the masklike veil over the lower half of his face. Holliday pointed toward the oasis in the distance. The turbaned man looked.
"Where are we?" Holliday said, his arm extended, finger still pointing. The man called to his companion on the camel ahead of him and the other Tuareg turned in his own saddle and replied in a long string of guttural Tamasheq. The man in front of Holliday nodded, then turned again.
"Wadi el Agial, sadiqi. Zinchechra. Germa."
Whatever the hell that meant.
They edged down the goat path for several hours, the unprotected drop only a gut-clenching foot or so away from their camels' slapping hooves, every lurching, swaying step threatening to be their last. Holliday had never had a problem with heights, but after twenty minutes or so he was forced to look the other way and finally simply shut his eyes against the nauseating vertigo.
They reached the bottom at about four o'clock and spent another hour crossing the flat hardpan of the little valley, heading for the fingerlike extension of the escarpment that separated them from the expanse of desert beyond.
The surroundings included scrub bushes, thornbushes, the occasional desert beetle, and a great deal of hard, crusted white sand. Then they began to see small herds of goats being herded by Tuareg men in their traditional turban, and some children playing. Eventually they saw what appeared to be a permanent camp of some kind in the distance.
The closer they got, the larger the encampment became. The goat-and-camel-skin tents were much larger than the pup-sized ones they and their captors used and there were thornbush enclosures of goats and picket lines of camels everywhere. Taking a quick count as they passed, Holliday estimated that there were at least five hundred men in the camp. Interestingly the location of the tents and corrals was such that except at high noon it would be perpetually in the shadow of either the escarpment or its extension, making it next to invisible from the air. Up-to-date tactics for an ancient people against a modern enemy: the airplane and the satellite.
At the far side of the camp the group stopped in front of a moderate-sized tent and gestured for Holliday and Rafi to dismount. One of the armed men gave a harsh command and rapped the camels on the nose with a little stick. The animals obediently dropped down on the knees of their front legs and Rafi and Holliday climbed down. The guard gestured to the tent opening and they went into the stifling interior.
It was luxurious in comparison to what they'd seen in the last two weeks. The walls were set out with heavy pillows and the floors were covered with woven rugs in a dozen different vivid patterns. A small cast iron grill stood in the middle of the tent and there was a ventilation hole in the ceiling to let out the smoke. Their guard turned and spoke.
"Sa arje'o halan," he said.
Holliday nodded even though he didn't know what had been said. So did Rafi. The man in the turban and robe turned on his sandaled heel and walked out of the tent. Outside they heard an exchange and then the sound of the camels moving off. Both Holliday and Rafi dropped down onto the pillows.
"He said he'd be right back, I think," muttered Rafi. Holliday nodded, exhausted.
"Two weeks on a camel. My fanny's turned to stone," he grunted.
"I'd hate to tell you what mine feels like," said Rafi, sighing, then leaning back and closing his eyes. "What did our blue friend tell you when we were up on the plateau?"
"Something like: Wadi el Agial, sadiqi. Zinchechra. Germa," answered Holliday, trying to remember. "Any idea what it means?"
"I know exactly what it means," said Rafi, opening his eyes and sitting up. There was excitement in his voice. "Wadi el Agial means Valley of Life, sadiqi means my friend, Zinchechra is the name of an ancient mythical castle and Germa is the capital of an almost forgotten kingdom. I know precisely where we are: this is Virgil's Garamanthia, the warrior kingdom of the Garamathes. This is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world."