the awesome masses of rock had grown a multitude of ores, each of which Issa saw and touched and respected for its own characteristic color and life.
When the machines discovered the presence of those minerals, workers from the valley started digging into the mountain to reach them, and once they started they never knew when to stop. The inside of the mountain became a free-for-all. As long as the scaffolding held the tunnels open the workers kept mining, like machines themselves, machines whose only purpose was to create new passageways and causeways. Then they laid rails for wagons to carry the ores outside the caves, where camels were loaded to carry them across the desert.
Issa got to know all about these men who came from the Valley of the Nile to the caves and tunnels of the Darhib. No sooner did he encounter a foreigner or see a caravan loaded with ore on its way to the sea, than a great anger would well up in his heart. It made him wonder about the treasures the men toiled so hard to extract from his own mountains, from his world and universe. Whose right was it? Who was the real and true owner?
THIRD
DAWN ROSE FROM THE DEEP VALLEYS BEHIND the Sukra and Hamata and Abu Ghusun mountains, from behind the Samyuki, Zarkat al-Na'am, Abraq, and Misrar mountains. It spread over the hills and plains, dissipating the night's darkness into clouds that curled over the flattened mountain tops.
The light of the sun awoke Nicola as he lay naked in his only blanket, spread out on the rocks of the Darhib. He rubbed his eyes, then he stood erect and his blanket fell to the ground at his feet. He stretched, moving to limber his muscles, then walked to the levelled courtyard facing the three wooden houses and crossed it to his house, careful not to upset the chessboard resting on its small wooden stand.
Nicola went to a corner of the house and picked up a pitcher from the water barrel, filled his hands and slapped the water on his face and neck. From another pitcher he swallowed thirstily. Then he filled his tea kettle and bent towards a pile of wood and coal in a hole between two rocks. He blew away the old ash, rearranged the wood in the hole, then lit the fire and put the kettle on.
Such was Nicola's morning. Bitter tea was his breakfast. Afterward he climbed the Darhib and waited for the sun to rise completely. His eyes roamed the mountain tops and the valleys as his naked body welcomed the morning breeze. For a moment Nicola was filled with happiness. In those extremely brief times—between dawn and day, between the golden and the silvery, before Nicola began his daily ritual of suffering—he truly felt elated. He relived the old feeling that he had known when he entered the desert for the first time.
It was during a similar sunrise, forty or fifty years ago. Nicola had shivered, and there had welled within him a trembling yearning, a thirsting for the impossible; he had believed that he could summon his forces and hurry towards the horizon and grasp the very sun before it rose to its summit. The landscape around him was like that of some heroic myth as he rocked atop his camel, side by side with his friend Mario, the engineer from Italy, also on camelback.
Behind them there were three other camels carrying provisions and equipment and workers. These workers had been recruited by Mario's partner, an Egyptian Pasha named Khalil. He had said that the Bedouins of that desert knew only how to herd sheep and drive camels, and that besides, they were too proud to work in the mines. The Pasha, therefore, brought diggers and carpenters and rock carriers from Upper Egypt. He loaded them on camels together with provisions of oil and rice, flour, butter, tea, sugar, cigarettes, wood, ammunition, and drilling equipment. He told Mario that he would finance the work if Mario would oversee the production. And so they became partners. The Pasha stayed over for dinner in the wooden house owned by Sheikh 'Ali, the desert guide, in Marsa 'Alam. Sheikh 'Ali broiled a huge fish one of his boys had caught in the waters of the Red Sea. The Pasha had brought two bottles of Scotch to celebrate the occasion. After midnight, the Sheikh rose and woke up the workers and the camels. The caravan, including the Sheikh and Nicola and Mario, hurried to leave, and the Pasha stood to bid them farewell, wishing them success. Perhaps at that moment he was dreaming of the gold nuggets the small caravan would send, once the diggers extracted them from the mountain, al-Sukra, toward which they were heading. Unlike Nicola, to whom mining and exploration were ends in themselves, Mario and the Pasha thought only of gold.
Along the road they traveled between the mountains that long- ago morning, the caravan passed two or three clumps of trees. Along in the arid land, the trees made small spots of shade. The Bedouins would lead their sheep into the shade and set up their jute tents there—only to pull them down and move on when the sheep could find no more leaves to graze on. From time to time, as the caravan moved past one of these shady places, a creature would intercept them, a man, his arm covering his eyes as he spoke in an unintelligible language and waved a long, rusted sword. The caravan would stop, Sheikh 'Ali would pour a little water in a cup for the man and offer him a cigarette. When the man prostrated himself, Sheikh 'Ali would remark, “He is one of the Bashariyya.” The men were all barefoot, their hair long and their shoulders greased with a concoction of goat fat and sandalwood in the ancient custom of the Pharaohs of Thebes.
As they proceeded deeper into the desert, Mario told Nicola, “Those are your relatives and in-laws, Nicola. Isn't your wife Ilya an immigrant Caucasian? Al-Bashariyya too are immigrants from the Caucasian mountains. In ancient times, they came across the Lebanon and the Sinai Peninsula. They walked along the shores of the eastern coast of the Red Sea until they came to its southern end where they crossed into Eritrea in Ethiopia. Most of them settled in the deserts of the Sudan and in Egypt east of the Nile.”
Nicola looked at his dark “in-laws” doubtfully, thinking of his own white European skin. But Mario explained that five thousand years of residence under the hot African sun is bound to burn the skin and dye it a dark coffee color, whereas the Caucasian nose would never disappear.
“Look close, you'll see it is the same on all their faces. Don't their noses look like your wife's nose?”
Mario had an ability to be serious and frivolous at the same time.
Once in a while they would see a pile of white bones or a dry branch with a piece of cloth fluttering from it. These were the signs of death in the desert, and Nicola regarded them with awe.
Sometimes the bones would be the bones of a camel. If the bones were scattered, Nicola would realize that death must have overtaken the camel while he was running. At other times Nicola would note that the neck and head were stretched out, and he'd realize that the camel must have died sitting. The hyenas of the desert had devoured the flesh a d left the bones as white signs to travelers such as he.
And when a man dies in the desert, he is buried where he dies. They may find him dead on top of a rock or at the edge of a plain, desiccated by the heat, eyes extinguished in death. They may find him on the worn path, dead from the exhaustion of walking for days in search of a man, a voice, even an animal to lead him to a spot of water.
Nicola himself was to confront death in the desert. A man can wander futilely for days, looking among the rocks for a path or a sign of water. On the third or fourth day he will find himself alone among the endless dunes, mouth and throat parched, lips and toes cracked. Fear takes hold of him, but his instinct for survival drives him onward. He crawls and crawls; gradually he loses the sensation of thirst, but it becomes difficult to breathe through his dry mouth. He wavers between consciousness and unconsciousness. Then he sinks to the ground and relinquishes the right to rise again.
At that moment Nicola, facing death, said to himself: “I have done what I can. All I can do now is die in silence.” and he closed his eyes to obtain peace. Then he opened them to find the young Bedouin Issa standing at his head, a turban wrapped around his face and his sword in one hand, pouring water into Nicola's mouth from a goatskin flask.
After the caravan reached camp at al-Sukra work began: the workers were to re-open
