Secret of the Sands. Sara Sheridan

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       Chapter Thirteen

      Jessop has thoroughly enjoyed his stay at the encampment. He has made notes about the Bedu and their way of life, the details of the trading routes of the tribe and their customs of war and has even managed some observations on the way one family interweaves with another. The site is temporary, of course. The Bedu are set to graze their animals there till only saltbush remains. The wells fill up once a season and the Bedu will stay to drink the water dry and then move on. The tents are comfortable enough though and, like most nomads, the tribe is hospitable to a fault. An Arabic tribesman will go hungry himself in order to feed his guests lavishly. It is well known that if you come across a camp in the desert and are accepted as a guest, you’ll always be fed better than the people who actually live there.

      By the third and final day, the doctor is gratified to see that there is a marked improvement in all but one little girl who, Jessop now fears, might well lose her sight as the infection progresses. Clearly it had advanced too far by the time he arrived and he knows there is little more he can do for the child but clean the pus and hope her body might rally. The danger is septicaemia, blood poisoning. If the little girl succumbs to it she will almost certainly die. He has tried to transmit this information but fears it loses something in the translation. The devoted mother, meanwhile, has placed a copy of the Quran under the girl’s sleeping rug and spits into the child’s face to clean it (starting Jessop all over again on the painful process of the vinegar eye wash). Now, leaving her daughter in the care of others, the woman has taken to following Jessop, entreating him to save her daughter in the same way he worked his magic on the other children. No amount of explanation or reassuring smiles and hand gestures seems to communicate that he can do no more, and she neglects her domestic duties and hovers in her dark burquah, a little behind the white men, occasionally breaking into a keening wail that makes Jones start.

      ‘I do wish she’d stop that!’ he says. ‘Bloody hullabaloo.’

      Jessop fans himself with a flat square made of rushes. He realised early on, even before they left Sur, that his concerns are different from Jones’ and he has now become tired of the repeated conversation about breeding strains and fetlocks, shipping livestock via Bombay, how much a chap might need to furnish a Knightsbridge house decently or fix its leaking roof and how Arabia has little to offer civilisation.

      Today is their last in the encampment and Jessop wishes he could discuss what he has found with Jones, but the lieutenant will not engage in conversation on any other topic than those most dear to his wallet. Still, it has become clear the more Jessop uncovers about conditions inland, the more difficult supplying any reasonable traffic of British ships seems to be. Both water supplies and tribal territories shift with such alarming regularity that he has come to the conclusion that the business of resupply might need to be assessed almost every time a British ship docks and treaties of alliance would have to be constantly renegotiated. It was hoped matters might prove more stable here than on the coast, but from his enquiries he now understands that if anything they are less so and there is very little out here in the hinterland anyway – it makes no sense even to use the place to ferry supplies. It is simply too dangerous and travelling through the desert has proved painfully slow. He’ll be glad to get back to the coast and rendezvous with the Palinurus when it comes back down from the inhospitable north.

      Preparations are underway for the party’s departure. The Dhofaris are making sure the camels drink as much as possible before the return journey and both Jessop and Jones are wordlessly steeling themselves for the privations of the trip. There is little enough to pack and, apart from overseeing the animals, the bearers and guides lounge drinking coffee, picking their teeth with araq and sharing the last of their supplies of qat leaves, which they chew open-mouthed. Stimulated by the effects, they argue over nothing in particular for hours while the Bedu avoid them. The tribes are not enemies, nor are they friends, Jessop notes in his diary. At prayer time, the Dhofaris and the Bedu lay down their mats separately, at meals they skirt around the edges of the other’s group. They have not travelled together and so the oath of the caravan where one traveller will fight to the death for another and all are brothers does not apply.

      On the last night, Jessop and Jones eat in the big tent, sitting on huge, hard pillows grouped around a central, low table piled high with food so laden with fat that it shines in the dim light from the oil lamps. The Bedu carry naphtha, harvested easily from the surface of the infertile plain and distilled into a crude fuel for lamplight, which smells faintly medicinal. ‘Arabia,’ Jones maintains, ‘consists of land either too desiccated for cultivation or too poisonous. It is as well that God has given them naft for they could not afford candles.’

      The emir and his eldest son sit to one side – the officers are cross-legged on the other. The boy has scarcely started to grow his beard, but he is accepted by the men of the camp as a leader in waiting. He is, after all, the son of a great man and wishes that he could be lost on the sands and make a name for himself, as his father did. The men respect his lineage and his pluck even though, as yet, he has had the opportunity to prove neither. He spends more time now with the adults than the other children and as a result has not succumbed to the eye infection, or at least, has not had kohl applied to his eyes by the solicitous woman who started the spread of the sickness.

      ‘Your people do not pray?’ the emir asks Jessop, as if in passing.

      So far, the emir has answered the doctor’s questions but has shown little interest of his own. This last night, the atmosphere feels stilted and the doctor is glad that the emir has thought to make an enquiry or at least start a conversation.

      ‘Ah. No. We do not pray as you do – five times a day.’

      For a long time, the emir does not respond. After the silence has started to drag he turns again to the white men. ‘And you eat pig? Drink the grape?’

      A grin breaks out on the doctor’s face. ‘Yes. Yes, all my people do.’ He reaches into the bag he always carries with him and helpfully pulls out a picture of King William on the face of a decorative, enamel miniature. The likeness shows His Majesty at his coronation a mere three years before.

      ‘This is our shah,’ he explains, ‘our caliph. Sultan, perhaps. We call him a king.’ Jessop is unaware that carrying this manner of representational likeness is deeply offensive to followers of Islam and tantamount to idolatry. The emir’s son glances sideways at his father to see what he might do, but the emir affects scarcely to notice the miniature.

      ‘Your shah is powerful? He has many camels? Many horses?’

      ‘Ah,’ Jones cuts in. ‘Yes. His Majesty King William loves horses.’

      This is, in fact, not strictly true. His Majesty is a sailor rather than a landlubber and his concerns are largely marine. In the main, he becomes enthusiastic about horses only if the animals are racing and he has taken a bet. But the comment at least brings the conversation round to a subject upon which Jones wishes to elaborate and he grasps upon it, becoming suddenly quite animated.

      ‘I am sure His Majesty would be most impressed by an animal of the tenor of your fine beasts. The sultan kindly sent him an Arab horse last year from Muscat and His Majesty by all accounts is completely taken by the creature.’

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