‘You don’t?’
‘Most certainly not!’ he proclaimed to the night sky, his voice cold and powerful, as if he were sitting in his office at home, and not lying in the desert freezing his toes off. ‘And I do not huddle either! I absolutely refuse to participate in such an undignified activity. The cold is not life-threatening. I shall not succumb to improper behaviour merely to decrease a temporary discomfort.’
Before I knew it, my hand had moved. We lay not far from each other, and it reached out, crossing the distance and coming to rest on top of his arm.
‘Even with your wife?’
His arm shifted almost imperceptibly. ‘You are not really my wife.’
‘Do you mind keeping up the pretence until it’s not so freezing anymore?’ I lifted an eyebrow. ‘Or would you rather that I go huddling and cuddling with one of the other men out there?’
His arm flipped in a startlingly fast movement, and his fingers closed around my wrist in an iron vice.
‘Stay - right - where - you - are!’
No matter how icy his voice was right then, somehow it managed to make me feel warm inside, warmer than a thousand campfires. His eyes gleamed in the dark, sending a shiver down my back.
‘Oh, really? What will you do if I don’t?’
He moved. I barely had time to see his shadowy form rear up above me, casting a shadow worthy of a Titan, before he came down on me. His weight drove the breath out of me for a second, and that was all the time he needed. His arms encircled me, and we rolled to the side, wrapping us up in our blankets and clothes until they were an inseparable tangle. When we came to a halt at the foot of a small dune, I was still out of breath, and not just because of the impromptu wrestling match. My blood was pumping fast, and I felt tingly all over.
‘Let go!’
‘Why?’ His cool voice slid into my ear, smooth and seductive. ‘You wished to engage in huddling and cuddling, did you not? Well, we are.’
I tried to push him away - but his arms were so tightly wrapped around me, pressing my arms to my sides, that I couldn’t even try. So I thumped my head into his chest instead.
‘This isn’t cuddling!’
‘Why, my love?’
‘Because I want to strangle you!’
‘Let’s say it is a new version of cuddling - modified and improved.’
‘Blast you! Let go of me!’
‘No.’
I began to fire a barrage of bad language at him, most of which I had picked up from Arabian sailors and traders in the bazaar, and none of which I actually understood. Mr Ambrose listened, not loosening his grip the tiniest bit. When I had finally run out of breath, he commented: ‘You seem to have made a promising start learning Arabic. However, your vocabulary could be called somewhat one-sided.’
‘You can take your vocabulary and stick it up a camel’s…’
I might have gotten further had he not right in that moment covered my mouth with a kiss. Heat surged through me, my body instinctively moulding itself to his, growing softer, stopping to fight. No, that wasn’t true. I never stopped fighting. But a moment ago I had been fighting to get away. Now I was fighting to get closer!
From somewhere, I heard a low growl. My eyes, closed in ecstasy, flew open to look for the hyena, or lion, or whatever was lying in wait in the dark night. Only then I realized where the growl had come from: my very own throat!
Slowly, my hands managed to crawl up his chest, until they had reached his face and could pull him closer. He made a low, masculine sound in the back of his throat, and an involuntary smile tugged at my lips.
‘So…’ he murmured against my mouth. ‘About the effectiveness of my modified version of cuddling…’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you still cold?’
Cold? Is he kidding?
Cold was forgotten. The concept of cold belonged to another universe now.
‘No! I’m not!’
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘You… you…arrogant son of a bachelor! You Ibn himar!’[24]
‘Not according to my birth certificate.’
‘Kol Ayre!’[25]
‘That would present slight anatomical difficulties.’
‘Kool Khara!’[26]
‘I do not like the taste of it much. Mind your language!’
My disgraceful language apparently didn’t bother him too much, though - for the next thing he did was pull me closer and press another kiss on my lips. Rolling over, he placed himself so that one side of me was shielded from the bitter cold by the thickest wad of blankets, the other by his body, and, gently breaking our kiss, he pulled me against his chest. Sometime later, I drifted off into sleep, suppressing a grin as I snuggled into him.
*~*~**~*~*
Over the next few days, a tacit agreement developed between Mr Ambrose and me. We did our best to detest each other during the day, me flinging examples of my ever-growing vocabulary of Arabic swear words at him, he building up a thick wall of silence. But in the night…
In the night, different things happened.
We would lie down next to each other again, and he would fold me in his arms, creating a small cave of warmth for me amidst the cold desolation of the desert around us. The whole night he would hold me like this - and not just for warmth, either. The taste of his lips on mine… Up until then, I hadn’t thought it possible for anything to rival the savoury scrumptiousness of solid chocolate. I had been mistaken.
When, in the morning, he returned to his usual cold, standoffish, silent self, I sometimes asked myself whether I hadn’t simply dreamed up his night-time alter ego. But then the sun would go down, and the dark shadow of a tall man would stalk towards me.
‘Lillian?’
‘Yes?’
‘Come to me.’
The nights passed. I supposed the days passed too, but recently I had started paying a lot more attention to the former than to the latter. We travelled at a slow crawl through the desert, or maybe we were whizzing through it faster than a racing horse. I didn’t really know. In a landscape where everything always changed, blown away by the wind, it was hard to say where you were at any given time and how fast you were moving.
How many days passed before it happened, I didn’t know. I only knew that it was an excruciatingly hot day, and the sun was beating down on our heads with red-hot, iron hammers. In other words, a day like any other. That was the day on which it happened.
We were just moving up the side of a dune. Unfortunately, it was the side that lay full in the sunlight. Ambrose was struggling, making grunting noises with every step. I supposed he was having bowel problems. He hadn’t produced quite as much shit to burn yesterday as usual. Unfortunately, I couldn’t very well ask his namesake to step into the breach.
Suddenly, Ambrose stopped entirely. Blinking, trying to rouse myself out of my heat-induced stupor, I saw something black right in front of me on the glowing sand. It looked like a cross between a crab and a giant spider, with a huge, sharp tail at one end. Wait a minute… I had seen something like this in an encyclopaedia once, hadn’t I? What was it called again? A scorpion! Yes, that was it! A scorpion! Wasn’t its tail…?
I frowned. Somewhere at the back of my mind I was sure there was something important I had to remember about that tail. But it just didn’t want to come to me right then. Was it used in native medicine? Was it a delicacy in French restaurants? Yes, that was probably it! The French ate all kinds of weird stuff.
The scorpion clicked its pincers menacingly. Ambrose took a step backwards.
‘Oh, don’t be a chicken!’ I told the camel. Leaning down towards the scorpion, I told it in a very loud and clear voice: ‘Piss off!’
The scorpion hesitated for a moment - then turned, scuttled away and dived into a hole not far away.
‘There, you see?’ I patted Ambrose’s neck. ‘No need to get spooked. I’ll protect you.’
Only when I reached the top of the dune did I realise that there might be plenty of
reason to get spooked. I also realized that I probably hadn’t been the reason for the scorpion’s sudden retreat underground. Far, far ahead to the southeast I could see a yellowish something, like a sickly bank of clouds, hovering close above the ground. Far too close for it to really be clouds. At first I thought the thing wasn’t moving at all, but then I noticed that the distance between it and a solitary rock ahead of us was slowly shrinking. Finally, it reached the rock - and swallowed it up.
I shivered.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Youssef appeared next to me like a djinn out of a lamp. Only he didn’t come to grant me three wishes. His face was grim. ‘That’s the devil’s breath, Hanem.’
‘Does it smell?’
‘Worse. It bites, and chokes, and buries you alive. That’s a sandstorm, Hanem. One of the worst I’ve ever seen.’
I eyed the sickly cloudbank doubtfully. ‘It doesn’t look like much.’
One corner of Youssef’s mouth twitched in a humourless smile. ‘It looks more impressive once you get closer, trust me, Hanem.’
Quickly, he turned and barked a few orders in Arabic. Hurrying to the top of the dune, men began to dismount and make their camels sit down. Several removed their headscarves and started pouring water over them, others quickly began erecting tents on top of the dune.
‘What is this? What is going on?’ Bringing his camel to an abrupt halt out of a gallop, Mr Ambrose slid down from the saddle and shot Youssef a menacing look. ‘Explain yourself, Youssef.’
In answer, the other man simply pointed towards the sickly-yellow cloud. I realized that already it was not quite so distant anymore.
‘Yes?’ Mr Ambrose demanded. ‘What is it about that thing?’
‘It’s a sandstorm, Effendi.’
‘And?’
‘We have to stop, Effendi. To seek shelter until it has passed.’
‘Seek shelter?’ Mr Ambrose’s eyes narrowed a fraction of an inch. ‘You do not honestly think that I will let this delay me, do you? That I will let a tiny bit of sand stop me from going on?’
The Arab sucked in a breath. ‘A tiny bit of sand? Effendi, I…’
‘We are going on, Youssef! Not another word.’
‘But Effendi…’
Mr Ambrose raised one, long, extended finger, and Youssef fell silent immediately. Taking another breath, he bowed his head. ‘Yes, Effendi. As you wish, Effendi.’
‘Are you sure that going on is wise?’ I dared to ask when we had started down the other side of the dune. ‘If he really thinks it’s dangerous, shouldn’t we listen to him?’
He gave me a look. One of those looks. ‘Do you know the size of an average grain of sand?’
‘No,’ I had to admit.
‘It is between 0.0024803 and 0.08 inches. Now, think carefully for a moment. Do you think I am going to let myself be stopped by something smaller than the tenth of an inch?’
‘Um… no.’
‘Indeed, no.’
And that was all he deigned to say on the matter. Maybe he was even right. Maybe it was silly to get anxious just over a bit of sand. But whenever I looked down towards the increasingly fast-approaching clouds of dust in the valley below, I couldn’t help getting the impression that it was more than just ‘a bit of sand’.
We had just reached the bottom of the hill when the rumbling started.
‘What’s that?’ I called, turning back towards Youssef. ‘Thunder?’
‘Yes, Hanem,’ he replied grimly, glaring ahead. ‘Out of a thunderstorm that doesn’t need lightening to kill.’
The rumbling grew, and soon it evolved into a continuous roar, like the sound coming out of the maul of a dragon too hungry to ever shut its dreaded jaws. Wind began to slap and batter against my thobe, and I had to grip my headscarf to hold it in place. The wind didn’t bring any relief from the heat. On the contrary, it was so hot it might make you think the gates of hell had opened.
‘It doesn’t seem quite so small anymore, does it?’ I yelled over the racket. Mr Ambrose was riding only a few paces beside me, but still I had to raise my voice to make myself heard. The cloud in front us was growing larger by the minute now. From where we stood, it looked the height of a small house. A few moments ago it had only seemed to be camel-high. ‘What did you say again? 0.0024801 inches?’
‘0.0024803’ he called back. ‘Not 0.0024801.’
‘Oh, of course, that makes a hell of a lot of difference!’
No answer.
‘If you haven’t noticed yet, there seem to be rather a lot of these 0.0024803-inch obstacles which you think are so easy to overcome. Maybe we should stop after all.’
No answer.
‘You are a stubborn son of a bachelor!’
‘I thought earlier you told me that I was the son of a donkey?’
‘That was before I ran out of Arabic insults!’
He turned his head to look at me. I would have said there was a stubborn set to his chin - only, it wouldn’t have been the truth. He didn’t need to set his chin in a stubborn way. Its mere shape, hard and angular like a block of granite, was already more stubborn than others could ever hope to be.
‘We can do this. No discussion. We’re going on.’
A gust of hot wind struck us and ripped his top hat from his head. Shooting out, his hand grabbed it just in time before it was driven away over the dunes.
‘Tell me…’ The roar in my ears had reached such a volume now that I had to roar myself to be heard at all. ‘Have you ever been in a sandstorm before?’
Silence. Or rather the absence of speech. With the storm winds wailing all around us, the very idea of silence was unthinkable.
‘Well?’ My heart started hammering faster. In front of us, the storm was towering higher than the tallest houses of London, now. It seemed like a cloud no longer, but a solid wall of sand, waiting to bury us. ‘Have you?’
‘No! But I’ve been in plenty of snowstorms.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that snow makes you freeze. Sand doesn’t. So it can hardly be more dangerous.’
I threw another apprehensive glance ahead. Personally, I wasn’t entirely sure about that.
We had reached the bottom of the valley beyond the dune now. In front of us rose a small hill, and down that hill the storm came, buffeting, bashing, slashing, thundering. To my left, I saw a column of sand roar past and swallow a cactus whole. It disappeared from sight, as if it had never been.
‘Please, Effendi!’ Youssef’s voice was higher than usual, and scratchy, too. I realized that my own throat felt increasingly rubbed raw by the sand. Turning, I saw Youssef galloping towards us. ‘Please, let us stop! We have to stop moving! The storm isn’t dispersing, it’s headed right towards us! We cannot…’
The storm bellowed, cutting him off. A moment later, a brownish cloud of stinging vapour drifted between us, and Youssef was gone. Frantically, I opened my mouth and tried to call out, but I caught a full mouth full of sand and choked. Coughing like a maniac, I collapsed over Ambrose’s neck. The camel didn’t seem bothered in the least by the raging torrents of sand around us.
‘Blast! Ruddy stinking skanky hellhole of a…’
I coughed again, and had to close my mouth. Bloody hell! If you couldn’t even curse out loud anymore, things were really going down the drain!
Pulling the neckline of my thobe up to cover my mouth and nose, I raised my head a few inches from the stinking camel’s neck and tried to see where the others had gotten to. I blinked, thinking for a moment that there was something wrong with my eyes. The others weren’t there anymore. Neither were the camels, the mountains, the dunes or even the ground!
Only a tiny circle of space around me had remained halfway visible. Beyond that, all had been swallowed up by a yellowish mist. A mist that was turning darker moment by moment.
Bloody hell? Where’s the sun?
It wasn’t there anymore. The storm had swallowed it up like everything else. Like everyone else,
too.
Oh my God… Everyone?
‘Mr Ambrose!’
No answer. Wildly, I looked from right to left - if you could talk of directions in this semi-substantial world of swirling sand. Nothing. Not even the fluttering ends of his black tailcoat.
‘Mr Ambrose! Where are you?’
No answer. There was the roar of the storm and, other than that, utter silence.
Curse him! If he’s just keeping quiet to irritate me right now, I’m going to strangle him!
But what else could I do? How could I know for sure?
Well… there was one thing.
‘Dick, my darling? Dick, my darling come to me!’
No answer.
All right, he really couldn’t hear me. If he could, he would have definitely complained. Now, panic was really beginning to set in, and that didn’t make the problem of breathing any easier. With my breath speeding up, more and more sand rasped down my throat.
‘Ambrose! Ambrose, where are you, you bloody bastard!’
‘Grumph? Grumph!’ came the answer from underneath me.
I gave the camel a kick. ‘Shut up! I didn’t mean you!’
Taking my kick as friendly encouragement, Ambrose the camel hastened his steps. He seemed perfectly ready for a nice afternoon stroll through a stand storm. I let him go where he wanted. I was more than busy enough clinging on to him and trying to find something, anything in the darkening maelstrom around me that pointed to a sign of life.
Suddenly, there it was! A speck of black among the yellow-brown torrents.
‘Mr Ambrose!’
Did I hear an answer? I couldn’t be sure. Not over the roaring of the storm.
‘Mr Ambrose, it’s me! It’s m-’
Another violent fit of coughing overcame me. When it was over, the spot of black was gone.
Bloody hell! You can’t go on like this, Lilly!
No, I couldn’t. But what else could I do?
You can stop and think for a second, dolt! Think about the men! What did they do when Youssef ordered them to prepare for the sandstorm?
Of course! Ripping my water bottle from the camel’s saddle, I screwed it open and started pouring. In my haste, I wasn’t careful: I emptied almost half its contents over the piece of cloth covering my mouth and nose before my sense returned and I remembered that I still had to have something to drink later on. But still, the relief was immediate: Instead of forcing its way through the cloth into my throat, tiny particles of dust started to cling to the wetness outside.