I had a bloody lucky escape.’
Then there was silence, broken only by the sound of her weeping.
Chapter Sixteen
SALAH felt blank, the way one feels after a bullet has hit: the emptiness of waiting for the pain.
He sat staring into the past, as all the carefully constructed armour of ten years collapsed into rubble around him. He had destroyed the dream by his own hand. Feeling began to blast in, a storm of grief and self blame.
She was completely blameless. The fault had been entirely his from the beginning.
She was right. He had acted towards her without generosity, without honour, all the while pretending that the lack of honour was hers. Even the least degree of decency had required that he ask her for the truth before judging her. And even believing it true, shouldn’t he have tried to understand the pressures of that new world? A man of forty-two, a girl of sixteen. What chance would she have stood? Why hadn’t he seen it before? Why hadn’t he judged differently when he got a little older?
He opened his mouth three times before he could speak.
‘Desi. There isn’t a word strong enough. What have I done? Desi, forgive me.’
He put his hand out to her but, still weeping, she twisted away.
‘Forgive? How can I forgive it?’ she howled.
‘Desi.’ His voice sounded completely unlike him. ‘My God. What a fool I am. Worse than a fool. A devil.’
She was sobbing inconsolably. ‘You said you loved me, you say now it was the biggest thing in your life—how could you think such a thing? How could you begin to believe it? Why didn’t you at least give me a chance?’
He swallowed. Ten years. What could make amends for such a waste of life and love?
‘Desi, I am sorry.’
‘Oh, great. Yes, that makes all the difference!’
The car was insufferably hot. Sweat was pouring off her, and she wound down the window and tried to catch her breath.
Salah started the engine. ‘We can’t stay here.’
He put the vehicle in gear and backed out onto the road again.
The sun was in the west, streaming into the car now from the front, now on the right, as the road curved and turned. It was burning hot, in spite of the air conditioning, and Desi felt sick with the brightness and the heat on her skin. For a few miles she twisted the sun visor this way and that, trying to block the rays, and then Salah pulled over again.
He got out, rummaged in the back for a moment, then came around to her side. Without a word he opened the door, lowered the window, tucked a cardboard window protector over the glass and rolled it back up. It covered the passenger window and a few inches of the windscreen, putting her in welcome shade.
When they were moving again, she said, ‘Thank you.’
He nodded, swallowing, as if he could not trust himself to speak.
‘You could have done that any time over the past three days, I suppose. But then, you had to sweat the truth out of me.’
They drove in silence, passing other cars on the road, glimpsing herds of camels and goats at distant nomad camps in the bleak, bleak desert. After a while Salah turned off the road and headed out over the sand again.
She wondered how she could ever have imagined such a landscape magnificent. It was nothing but emptiness.
RU still in desert? RU seducing Salah??? What is happening? Plz call as soon as U get coverage.
Desi read this message from another life dimly, hardly taking it in. Reception was poor, and she shut off the phone without answering.
Another hour passed, and then they were winding through a curious forest of rocky outcrops and into a valley between high walls of rock. Green scrub clung to the rock face here and there, and in places the wheels sank into mud or splashed through a stagnant puddle. In other places a thin trickle gave promise that this was a river bed.
‘In winter there are flash floods here,’ Salah said. ‘It is very dangerous.’ It was the first word that had passed between them for over an hour. ‘Two years ago all this area flooded for the first time in living memory. Even in the tribal traditions there was no history of such flooding.’
‘Ever the travel guide,’ she said.
Just before sunset the rock walls fell away and the vista opened up. The sky in the west was a brilliant fire of gold, with Mount Shir shining in white majesty over the growing shadows in the desert. In the distance she saw a collection of tents nestled beneath a stand of rock.
‘My father’s camp,’ said Salah.
It was as if a nomad encampment had entered a technology warp, and half its tents had been converted into air-conditioned caravans and trailers. All the modern equipment was nestled into the protective shadow between two large outcrops of black rock that jutted up from the desert floor. In front of them was ranged a nest of tents, half modern and half the low-slung nomadic type. And in front of that was the massive ancient site, where workers in straw hats toiled in rows, as if the nomads had taken to terrace farming. As they approached, an armed guard sitting on a rock peered at Salah’s face for a moment and waved the vehicle on.
‘I have to find out what arrangements have been made for us,’ Salah said, pulling up to park in the shade of a white trailer. ‘They are not expecting us yet. You can wait in the mess tent, Desi, or I can take you to my father.’
It was far too hot to sit in the car, though that was what she would have preferred. Desi squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, struggling to find focus in her shellshocked, blank state.
‘There will be people in the mess tent?’
Salah nodded.
‘Is there anywhere I can go and sit by myself?’
‘Not till I find out which trailer they have arranged for you.’
‘Your father, then.’
He led her to the long white caravan that served as the site office. Inside it was air-conditioned to a comparatively refreshing twenty-five degrees, nearly eighty Fahrenheit. Desi was desperately grateful to get out of the sun.
The archaeologist Dr. Khaled al Khouri was sitting at a desk inside. He was a solid, square-set man with grizzled grey hair, a face with deep lines furrowing his forehead and carved from his strongly cut nose to the corners of his mouth. When they entered he was engrossed in examining a dirt-impacted object with the sunburnt, intent young woman standing beside his chair.
Neither noticed them enter. They watched for a minute as the professor’s strong, competent fingers prised off the dirt of millennia to fall unheeded on his papers, and revealed a goblet.
With caressing strokes that reminded Desi of Salah’s hands on her body, he dusted down the little cup, turned it over, then held it still, gazing at the face of the bowl.
