deserted mine there. Carefully they descended into the tunnels, sounding the interior rocks in search of the crevices where the gold lay hidden.
In these tunnels, Nicola learned the secrets of mining, and he realized he would neither be the first nor the last. Those old abandoned dungeons told him the story of the ancient Pharaohs who were the first to extract gold from the rocks. After them came Romans, then Arabs, to this very same mine. He remembered how Muhammad 'Ali, the ruler of Egypt, used to send his Albanians here to bring him eight pounds of gold every two months.
That knowledge filled Nicola with enthusiasm as he watched the quartz being ground and sifted. And when he saw the gold pebbles shining in the brass tray during the process of purification with mercury, a feeling of triumph glowed within him. He could see the pebbles multiplying and eventually being formed under pressure into an ingot, which he would then forward to the Pasha at his office back in Cairo.
But that ingot, although it was made, never found its way to the Pasha's office in Cairo. It was big and heavy, so they left it in the mine for the night, and when morning came it was gone.
Issa—the Bedouin boy—was not preoccupied with the idea of truth and justice on a conceptual level. It was more like an instinctive anger flowing in his ancient Baja blood which made him stand trembling one night in the mine's courtyard, as if a fateful force required him to perform a task, the consequences of which he did not know. The presence of foreigners in the ancestral mountains of his people angered him, and he led three armed men into the mine of al-Sukra, and, while all were asleep, found the gold bar and carried it out of the mine. Issa hid the bar in his goatskin and disappeared with his companions into the desert night.
Earlier that day Nicola had celebrated the completion of the gold bar, which represented the harvest of two years' exhausting effort. Issa had watched Mario the foreigner, the Egyptian Pasha's partner, standing beside Nicola applauding, while the workers stood staring vacantly yet with a certain serenity at the gold bar, as if they did not really believe that the gold had been born of these rocks. Mario had ordered Issa to kill two goats to celebrate. So this was the nature of things, Issa had reflected: the gold went to the foreigners while the people got a bellyful or two of food for their pains. He looked at Mario, whom he had introduced to the desert from Marsa 'Alam one morning two years ago. These foreigners had been full of modesty and simplicity then. Now they acted as if they owned the mountain.
Perhaps it was this thought alone that drove Issa to think of taking the gold bar. He may have wished to reinstate his power over his private mountains at the price of breaking the authority of those strangers and shattering their arrogance. For he had no intention whatsoever of keeping the gold bar. He decided to take it, and at the same moment he decided to return it.
He urged his camel on in the desert night, the gold bar in his goatskin wallet glued to his breast as if it were a shield protecting him from unknown evils. Surrounded by his three companions, he headed south in the desert. They crossed Ra's Samadi and passed by al-Sharm; they could see the Ziyyara mountain to the west, on their right. Before dawn they arrived at Ra's Bushdadi; they crossed the Valley of Camels at the first light. They headed for the wells of Ringa, Hamata, and Ra's Nikrat, and reached the sea by afternoon, then veered westward once more toward the desert. They left behind them the ruins of the city of Baranis, built by Ptolemy-the-Flute-Player over a thousand years before in honor of his daughter. After they passed the Gulf of Banas, they rested for an hour at the foot of Batuga Mountain, then continued walking to the Shalatin well across from Zarkat al-Na'am on the route to the holy white Mount of 'Ulba, which they reached after two more days.
There they all collapsed, exhausted, at the foot of the mountain, as if prostrated in prayer like messengers returning from a holy mission.
The mountain loomed proud above them. A few random wild goats grazed on the upper slopes as if they were competing to reach the clouds. They moved cautiously so as not to slip on the green slopes. From between the dry rocks of the mountain, water flowed southward and westward into the Valley of 'Aidhab, to irrigate a thick forest there. The Baja tribes believed that it enclosed the spirit of their great ancestor, Koka Lanka, who spent his life in a deep cave inside the white mountain of 'Ulba, praying and worshipping, until, as time went by, his body changed into a rock itself. Meanwhile, according to the myth, his soul proceeded to tunnel out through the mountain in the form of springs so as to create a forest where it could dwell.
Thus that early morning at the foot of this mountain, which contained the rock which was in the past Koka Lanka, Issa, his descendant, took out the gold bar from its hiding place and placed it on a rock. He and his companions stood around it as if making their great ancestor Koka a witness to their act, reassuring him that his descendants continued to wield power over the desert and its mountains. All the Bashariyya, 'Ababida, and other different branches of the Baja tribe did likewise when some problem befell them: They took their worries and acts to the mountain that rose high into the sky, its impregnable crest surrounded with a white halo of clouds. The mountain became their shrine, like the Ka'aba at Mecca, an object of many pilgrimages. Down through the ages it had received the different migrations from across the sea, from the east, and even after the tribes dispersed to the west they always returned to the mountain. Issa believed in the power of the mountain as well as in its myth. As a boy he had learned that when God created Adam, He showed him the whole Earth spot by spot. When Adam saw Egypt, he saw 'Ulba Mountain covered with light. He named it the Blessed Mountain, and he prayed for it to be blessed and made fertile. Could there be any doubt that Adam was in fact their great ancestor Koka Lanka?
Issa, therefore, called on his ancestor as he stood at the foot of the mountain. He cried out loud so that Koka Lanka could hear him in his elevated cave. He told him in detail what he had done, and he lifted the gold bar as if bringing it nearer to the eyes of his ancestor. The sunlight gleamed on the bar, and Issa vowed that he would return the bar to its place in the mountain; for stealing was not part of his code of morals, and he asked for the blessing of his ancestor to guide him.
From the foot of the mountain came some of Issa's relatives and friends. They took the gold bar in their hands, turned it in the face of the sun two or three times, threw it against the rock to test its solidity and authenticity; then they returned it to Issa, blessing him. Issa placed it back in the goatskin and prepared his camel and set forth with his companions back to the mine.
They spent the night traveling, guided by the moon, the stars, and the planets. In the morning they passed a wild shrub near which they found a hat which Issa recognized as Nicola's. He ordered his men to look for the foreigner. After two hours of searching and smelling the ground, they found him. He was slumped over a rock, the cracked skin of his fingers bloody as if from digging for water.
He looked as if he were already dead. Issa bent over him, listening to his chest. Then he wet Nicola's face, careful not to pour more than a couple of drops at a time on his lips until he was able to drink. When Nicola started opening his eyes, he drank water in small sips, trembling. Issa took off his cape and covered him with it. Then he put him on the back of his camel.
So Nicola did not die, although he had been ready to. He had set forth five days before to recover the gold bar, but had become lost and had wandered for days in an exile of thirst. His fingers had scratched the ground but had failed to extract water from the rocks, just as he had failed to find the stolen gold.
He was not aware, of course, that the gold bar was hidden in Issa's garments all the time that Issa was leading the camel. They walked on toward al-Sukra and the mine, from the edge of death back toward life, with Issa as silent as he had been when he guided Nicola's camel on the day when Nicola first came into the desert.
On their way across the desert they passed the ancient cities in the Valley of 'Alaqi, the piles of stone of the fortresses in the Valley of Shanshaf and Wadi Sakit and al-Kharrit. They saw the old roads that the armies of the ancient Egyptians and the Roman Emperors had made—conquering as
