The Pharaoh Key, page 12
He seized it with a muffled cry, sucking and gulping down the warm water.
“Easy,” she said, working it out of his grasp and giving it to Garza.
They both drank in turns before she cut them off. Gideon shut his eyes tightly, counted to ten, opened them again. Imogen was still there. “How did you—?”
She interrupted sharply. “I’m going to unpack and couch these camels. Then I’ll join you and we can talk.”
Gideon watched as Imogen expertly unsaddled her camel, unpacked the others, couched them in the shade of the tamarisks, and came back over with the water bag. It still seemed unreal.
She let them drink again. When they were done, Gideon found her looking at him with a degree of amusement and satisfaction on her face.
“I know,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of questions. So save your breath while I explain. I sensed that crooked camel driver was planning to do this all along. He was never going to bring his camels into the Gebel territory—he’d lose them all, and probably his life as well.” She opened up her haversack, and inside Gideon could see wads of Egyptian pounds. “Here’s the money we paid him. I got it back along with the four camels, the supplies, and most of the water. I had to leave him two camels and some water so he wouldn’t die on his way back to Shalateen, poor sod.”
“But how did you do it? I mean, relieve the man of his camels, money, and supplies?”
“It’s a long story, better left for later. A night around the fire, perhaps.”
“I watched you handle those camels,” said Garza. “You’re no newbie. And you speak fluent Arabic. Guess it’s not only Mekky who’s been lying.”
She nodded. “I’m afraid that’s true.”
“So what’s your game?”
“Your gratitude for my saving your life is overwhelming.”
“I don’t like being lied to,” Garza replied.
“Reasonable enough,” said Imogen. “Right. I’m not really a geologist. Although for a layman, I suppose that term is close enough. Technically, I’m a geoarchaeologist.”
“What’s that?”
“An archaeologist who specializes in geology and geography. In my case, I study ancient mining. I’m looking for the gold mines of the Middle Kingdom. The source of the vast gold resources of the pharaohs has never been found. I’m going to find it.”
“So why lie to us?” said Garza.
“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “I’d been knocking about Shalateen trying to figure out how to get into these mountains without attracting attention when you two bumbling Yanks showed up. I realized you’d make perfect cover for my search.”
“Gold mines?” asked Gideon. “You looking to get rich?”
She laughed. “I’m a scholar. That wasn’t a lie. I want to make a name for myself by solving one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. If I solve this one, I’ll have my choice of tenure-track positions. Oxford is lovely—ever been there?”
“No,” said Gideon.
“How do you know the mine’s out here in the Proscribed Area?” asked Garza.
“Many reasons. Ancient records, satellite imagery, geology. I’m pretty sure I’ve pinpointed it.”
“So where is it, then?”
“Let us just say it’s a two-day ride past Gebel Umm—where you’re going. I’ll drop you off with supplies and two camels, go on to my site, and then pick you up on my return—just as we’d originally planned.” She paused. “Any more questions?”
Garza said nothing. The sun was dropping low on the horizon, casting a golden light across the sands.
She gave him a penetrating look. “I’m not the only liar here.”
“What do you mean?” Garza asked.
“You haven’t fooled me for a moment,” She flashed him a cynical smile. “Photographer, my arse. There’s no film in that camera of yours.”
“I haven’t needed to take any photos yet.”
“Good try. But after retrieving the supplies, I searched them and found no film anywhere. Besides, what photographer these days isn’t working in digital?”
There was a silence.
“Well?”
Gideon was about to speak when Garza stopped him with a gesture. “No.”
“No?” She raised her eyebrows.
“While it’s true we’re not working for Nat Geo, we’re not going to tell you what we’re doing.”
She shook her head. “Here I’ve saved your hides. And I leveled with you.”
“Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.” Garza said with finality.
Imogen gave him a long, cool stare. Then she said, “Care to mount up? We’ve still got a long way to go. And I hate to break the news to you, but in that little contretemps with our camel driver we lost a third of our remaining water—maybe more.”
21
THEY RODE ALL night, without stopping for the usual four hours of rest. At dawn they paused at a thicket of thorny scrub to rest the camels and let them eat. A blood-red light broke over the eastern horizon as the sun rose.
Imogen unpacked one camel and Gideon helped her boil water. With their rug shredded to make improvised buckets, they used one of the camel blankets instead. Breakfast was coffee and a bone-dry piece of flatbread. They ate in silence. Gideon noticed Imogen glancing repeatedly at the eastern horizon.
“What are you looking at?”
She shook her head. “Probably nothing.”
Garza brought out the paper maps and spread them on the blanket, weighing them down with stones. He examined them for a while and, with his compass, triangulated their position using the peak of Gebel Umm, which now rose high above them, along with a secondary peak to one side. He drew two lines on the map from each of the bearings he’d sighted. The lines crossed at a narrow wadi.
“That’s where we are,” he said, tapping the crossing point. Beyond, the map was almost entirely blank—an expanse of paper with just a few wandering contour lines and the word UNSURVEYED liberally applied. Only the main peak of Gebel Umm itself was marked.
“I thought we’d be a lot farther than that.” Gideon said. “We rode all night and we’re barely any closer.”
Imogen came over and knelt, looking at the map. “All the winding back and forth in these wadis eats up a lot of distance without much progress.”
“Where on the map are your mines?” Garza asked.
Her hand swept vaguely over a large blank spot north of Gebel Umm. “Up in there.” Once again Gideon noticed Imogen scrutinizing the eastern horizon. The sun had come up, but the horizon had a thin brown line along it.
“Unsaddle the camels,” she said.
“I think we’d better keep going,” said Garza. “We’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be by now.”
Imogen ignored him as she couched her camel and began unsaddling it.
“What is it?” Gideon asked. “Is there a problem?”
Still not replying, she pulled off the saddle and blankets, then carried the saddle over to the edge of the wadi, where a pile of black rocks mounted up.
“Couch your camel next to mine and unsaddle her,” she ordered Gideon.
Gideon went to his camel, which was grazing on what looked like the thorniest bush in Egypt, its prehensile lips navigating the thorns as it plucked off what little greenery the plant had. He took the camel’s halter in hand and, using the stick, tried to get it to move away from the bush. After roaring in complaint, the camel grudgingly followed. He tapped it and the camel eased itself down. Gideon fumbled with the cinch.
“What the hell are you doing?” Garza asked, coming over. “We can get in at least a few more hours before it heats up.”
Imogen came over and, with expert efficiency, untied his saddle and slung it down next to hers, alongside the rock pile. “Look over there,” she said.
Garza and Gideon both looked in the direction she was pointing.
“Where?” asked Garza.
“That line on the horizon.”
“What of it?”
“It may be a haboob.”
“What the hell’s a haboob?”
“Also called a brown roller. It’s the worst kind of dust storm.”
Gideon squinted at the horizon. “I already noticed it. But I can’t see much of anything.”
“By the time you do, it’ll be too late.”
Garza, frowning, rummaged in the pack and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He glassed the horizon with an expression of annoyance, which quickly disappeared into a look of concern. Wordlessly he handed them to Gideon.
A dark reddish wall, a thousand feet high, seemed to lie across the horizon. As Gideon watched he could see it boiling and churning and getting bigger, closing in on them at an almost surreal speed. It did indeed look like a giant roller, approaching as if to flatten them.
“What do we do?” he asked quickly.
“Try to survive.” Imogen pointed to the saddles. “Manuel, you make a breastworks out of those saddles that we can use for shelter. Dig the supplies in behind them and weigh them down with the water bags. Gideon, you scoop out a depression for us to lie down in behind it. When the storm comes, we’ll pull the camel blankets over ourselves. I’m going to try to find a sheltered place for the animals.”
Gideon and Garza did as she said, once again scooping away sand with their sore hands. Sudden apprehension gave their limbs renewed strength. They laid the blankets in the depression and stacked the saddles, water bags, and Imogen’s now half-crushed Vuitton case in front of them. Imogen moved the camels down the wadi and couched them, staking their halter ropes into the sand. As they worked, the dark wall approached, higher and higher, yet strangely silent. It was almost black at the bottom, where it appeared to be boiling, pulling up ropes of sand from the ground and threading them into great streamers. The air around them was dead calm and unnaturally cool.
“Jesus,” said Garza, staring at it.
“Before it hits,” said Imogen, “we lie facedown, as close to each other as possible. We pull the camel blankets over us and hang on tight. If we start getting buried in sand, try to shift it off—don’t let it accumulate or you’ll suffocate.”
“How long will it last?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Is that all?”
“It’ll be the longest ten minutes of your life.”
The wall was now approaching swiftly, like the leading edge of a mushroom cloud, mounting ever higher, churning up bushes and scrub and shredding them to pieces in its powerful turbulence. In another moment the sun was blotted out, casting them into gloomy shadow.
“Get down,” Imogen said. “Now!”
They lay facedown, squeezed together in the depression behind the saddles, and drew the rugs and blankets over them. Gideon felt himself pressed against Imogen, the scent of soap and perspiration mingling with the smell of camels.
“For God’s sake, don’t let go of the blankets,” she said.
Now a sound filled the air: a deep vibration, almost like the low notes of an organ, rising in volume and power until the ground itself seemed to vibrate.
And then it hit. A thunderous roar was followed by a blast of wind, which seized the blanket Gideon was gripping and tried to tear it out of his hands. He could feel the force pulling on the saddles, and then suddenly they were gone, sucked upward in a great stream of sand, spinning away over their heads. A dense soup of airborne sand burst into their makeshift shelter. Gideon tried to breathe but got a mouthful of sand instead. He coughed and buried his mouth and nose into the crook of his arm. The screaming wind was flapping and jerking the blanket so violently that finally one gust wrenched it out of their collective grip. Now the full force of the sandstorm fell down on them: a torrent of sand and gravel, driven by the wind at a hundred miles an hour. Gideon felt the scouring blast of it rake his back, literally shredding the loose folds of his galabeya. He tried to raise himself slightly to take a breath and suddenly felt his body sucked upward by the blast. He was almost carried off before he felt an arm wrap around his back and yank him down. Choking, gasping, face buried, he desperately tried to breathe something other than sand. The screaming of the wind was so intense it sent a searing pain through his eardrums.
And then the wind abated. For a moment, he felt enormous relief that the storm was passing, until he realized he was mistaken: a weight was settling down on him, blocking out the scouring blast. It quickly grew heavier. They were being buried alive.
“Keep the sand off!” Imogen screamed in his ear.
Gideon struggled to push himself up even as the mass pressed down. A terror of being buried seized him and he gave his body a violent shake; another twist and he was able to force himself up through a waterfall of sand, straining, muscles popping. But it was a losing battle: more sand was falling than he could keep on top of. Finally, exhausted and defeated, he stopped fighting it and curled up, cupping his hands over his nose and mouth, his entire universe shrunken to a fetal ball in the midst of a wrathful power beyond all imagining. It went on, and on, and on, as a dreadful half night fell and everything grew blacker until he felt like a speck, a fragile disintegrating atom, buried in massive, impenetrable darkness.
22
AND THEN SUDDENLY there was silence again. Gideon swam back into consciousness from far away, wondering where he was for a moment. He couldn’t budge. He tried to move his arms but they were frozen. With a muffled scream he struggled, twisting and squirming ferociously in claustrophobic terror—and the sand began to give. With a heroic effort he threw his entire body into a rotational motion and felt more sand slipping around him. With a third, desperate attempt he managed to sit up, the sand cascading away.
An eerie calm had settled. A thin rain of dust was falling, forming a kind of fog. He tried to speak and found that his mouth was packed with sticky sand, which he did his best to cough out. Around him, in the dim light, he could see nothing but mountainous drifts of sand. His companions had vanished.
He realized with a thrill of horror that they must be still buried in the sand. He began digging, scooping like mad and drawing the sand back, and very quickly he exposed a swatch of blue cloth—Imogen’s galabeya. Frantically he cleared the sand away toward where her head would be, uncovering first a thick strand of golden hair and then her face.
“Imogen!”
He cleared sand from around her nose and mouth and then, frantically scooping, from the rest of her face. Her mouth was partly open, packed with sand, and she was not breathing. He cleared away the sand with his fingers, managed to raise her head a bit, and put his mouth on hers, breathing in. He waited; the air came back out; and then suddenly she was coughing like mad, rising up and doubling over, gasping and choking.
And struggling up next to her was Garza, writhing and spluttering as he wrestled out of the sand.
At last all three had freed themselves from their sandy graves. Imogen’s face was covered with powdery dust, her eyes wet and bloodshot, mouth ringed with mud. The air around them was slowly turning from a dark orange to a brighter yellow.
“The camels,” gasped Imogen.
“The camels can wait,” Garza spluttered, still shaking sand out of his hair.
“If we lose the camels, we die.”
They rose to their feet, shaking out their galabeyas. Gideon could feel the sticky wetness of blood where flying sand had scored the flesh of his back.
Imogen stumbled away in the direction where she had couched the camels, beside the rock pile. There was nothing but sand.
“Are they buried?” Garza asked.
“No. They must have stampeded.”
As they stood there, a hot breeze swept through and the air cleared. Gideon looked around. The landscape had become unrecognizable. All trace of tracks and landmarks were gone. The thornbushes had been stripped of their few leaves and many uprooted. Most of their meager supplies had disappeared. There were no tracks of the fleeing camels. The wind had scoured the land clean.
“In dust storms, camels go downwind,” Imogen said. “Gideon, you come with me. Manuel, see if you can dig up our water bags and supplies. We need to hurry.” She set off at a trudge, moving westward down the broad wadi, Gideon hurrying to catch up.
The wash twisted and turned among black lava flows before coming to an open basin, surrounded by sandy hills. They peered in every direction, but saw no camels.
“We need to get higher,” Imogen said.
With much difficulty, they climbed a pile of volcanic rubble forming a loose hill. It was a hand-and-foot climb, and Gideon’s hands, already cracked, began to bleed from the sharp lava. He said nothing and, after a grueling half hour they reached the top. The view was extensive and it revealed, beyond the sandy basin, hundreds of volcanic hills cut by canyons and serpentine washes—a labyrinth of sand and stone—with range after range of mountains beyond.
“Jesus,” said Gideon. “How are we ever going to find the camels in there?”
After a long silence, Imogen said: “We’re not.”
“Surely they must be somewhere.”
“A camel can run thirty miles an hour. Even if we knew where they were, they’ve already gone too far away for us to catch them.” She turned and started back down the hill.
Gideon hustled to follow her. “So what are we going to do?”
“I’m thinking,” she said. “Stop asking questions.”
By the time they got back to camp, Garza had managed to uncover one water bag. The rest had ruptured. Most of their other supplies were gone. He’d found two panniers with maps and some food, but that was it. He was in a dark mood.
They passed around the water bag and all had a drink. Finally Imogen spoke. “Going back isn’t an option. We’ve got one two-gallon bag of water. In this desert, a person should have a gallon a day. A quart a day would be the minimum to keep you alive—if you’re willing to go half crazy with thirst. Eight quarts divided by three people…it’s not nearly enough to get us back to Shalateen.”
“There’s got to be water in the fog oases,” said Gideon. “What do you know about them?” he asked Imogen.
Imogen glanced up toward Gebel Umm, visible in the hazy distance peeking between two lesser peaks. “Well, very little. On the eastern side of the mountain there are supposed to be some high-altitude valleys where prevailing winds off the Red Sea condense into perpetual fogs. It creates a kind of microclimate. Or so it’s said—nothing I read indicated anyone had ever been there and seen the phenomenon firsthand.”
“Easy,” she said, working it out of his grasp and giving it to Garza.
They both drank in turns before she cut them off. Gideon shut his eyes tightly, counted to ten, opened them again. Imogen was still there. “How did you—?”
She interrupted sharply. “I’m going to unpack and couch these camels. Then I’ll join you and we can talk.”
Gideon watched as Imogen expertly unsaddled her camel, unpacked the others, couched them in the shade of the tamarisks, and came back over with the water bag. It still seemed unreal.
She let them drink again. When they were done, Gideon found her looking at him with a degree of amusement and satisfaction on her face.
“I know,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of questions. So save your breath while I explain. I sensed that crooked camel driver was planning to do this all along. He was never going to bring his camels into the Gebel territory—he’d lose them all, and probably his life as well.” She opened up her haversack, and inside Gideon could see wads of Egyptian pounds. “Here’s the money we paid him. I got it back along with the four camels, the supplies, and most of the water. I had to leave him two camels and some water so he wouldn’t die on his way back to Shalateen, poor sod.”
“But how did you do it? I mean, relieve the man of his camels, money, and supplies?”
“It’s a long story, better left for later. A night around the fire, perhaps.”
“I watched you handle those camels,” said Garza. “You’re no newbie. And you speak fluent Arabic. Guess it’s not only Mekky who’s been lying.”
She nodded. “I’m afraid that’s true.”
“So what’s your game?”
“Your gratitude for my saving your life is overwhelming.”
“I don’t like being lied to,” Garza replied.
“Reasonable enough,” said Imogen. “Right. I’m not really a geologist. Although for a layman, I suppose that term is close enough. Technically, I’m a geoarchaeologist.”
“What’s that?”
“An archaeologist who specializes in geology and geography. In my case, I study ancient mining. I’m looking for the gold mines of the Middle Kingdom. The source of the vast gold resources of the pharaohs has never been found. I’m going to find it.”
“So why lie to us?” said Garza.
“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “I’d been knocking about Shalateen trying to figure out how to get into these mountains without attracting attention when you two bumbling Yanks showed up. I realized you’d make perfect cover for my search.”
“Gold mines?” asked Gideon. “You looking to get rich?”
She laughed. “I’m a scholar. That wasn’t a lie. I want to make a name for myself by solving one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. If I solve this one, I’ll have my choice of tenure-track positions. Oxford is lovely—ever been there?”
“No,” said Gideon.
“How do you know the mine’s out here in the Proscribed Area?” asked Garza.
“Many reasons. Ancient records, satellite imagery, geology. I’m pretty sure I’ve pinpointed it.”
“So where is it, then?”
“Let us just say it’s a two-day ride past Gebel Umm—where you’re going. I’ll drop you off with supplies and two camels, go on to my site, and then pick you up on my return—just as we’d originally planned.” She paused. “Any more questions?”
Garza said nothing. The sun was dropping low on the horizon, casting a golden light across the sands.
She gave him a penetrating look. “I’m not the only liar here.”
“What do you mean?” Garza asked.
“You haven’t fooled me for a moment,” She flashed him a cynical smile. “Photographer, my arse. There’s no film in that camera of yours.”
“I haven’t needed to take any photos yet.”
“Good try. But after retrieving the supplies, I searched them and found no film anywhere. Besides, what photographer these days isn’t working in digital?”
There was a silence.
“Well?”
Gideon was about to speak when Garza stopped him with a gesture. “No.”
“No?” She raised her eyebrows.
“While it’s true we’re not working for Nat Geo, we’re not going to tell you what we’re doing.”
She shook her head. “Here I’ve saved your hides. And I leveled with you.”
“Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.” Garza said with finality.
Imogen gave him a long, cool stare. Then she said, “Care to mount up? We’ve still got a long way to go. And I hate to break the news to you, but in that little contretemps with our camel driver we lost a third of our remaining water—maybe more.”
21
THEY RODE ALL night, without stopping for the usual four hours of rest. At dawn they paused at a thicket of thorny scrub to rest the camels and let them eat. A blood-red light broke over the eastern horizon as the sun rose.
Imogen unpacked one camel and Gideon helped her boil water. With their rug shredded to make improvised buckets, they used one of the camel blankets instead. Breakfast was coffee and a bone-dry piece of flatbread. They ate in silence. Gideon noticed Imogen glancing repeatedly at the eastern horizon.
“What are you looking at?”
She shook her head. “Probably nothing.”
Garza brought out the paper maps and spread them on the blanket, weighing them down with stones. He examined them for a while and, with his compass, triangulated their position using the peak of Gebel Umm, which now rose high above them, along with a secondary peak to one side. He drew two lines on the map from each of the bearings he’d sighted. The lines crossed at a narrow wadi.
“That’s where we are,” he said, tapping the crossing point. Beyond, the map was almost entirely blank—an expanse of paper with just a few wandering contour lines and the word UNSURVEYED liberally applied. Only the main peak of Gebel Umm itself was marked.
“I thought we’d be a lot farther than that.” Gideon said. “We rode all night and we’re barely any closer.”
Imogen came over and knelt, looking at the map. “All the winding back and forth in these wadis eats up a lot of distance without much progress.”
“Where on the map are your mines?” Garza asked.
Her hand swept vaguely over a large blank spot north of Gebel Umm. “Up in there.” Once again Gideon noticed Imogen scrutinizing the eastern horizon. The sun had come up, but the horizon had a thin brown line along it.
“Unsaddle the camels,” she said.
“I think we’d better keep going,” said Garza. “We’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be by now.”
Imogen ignored him as she couched her camel and began unsaddling it.
“What is it?” Gideon asked. “Is there a problem?”
Still not replying, she pulled off the saddle and blankets, then carried the saddle over to the edge of the wadi, where a pile of black rocks mounted up.
“Couch your camel next to mine and unsaddle her,” she ordered Gideon.
Gideon went to his camel, which was grazing on what looked like the thorniest bush in Egypt, its prehensile lips navigating the thorns as it plucked off what little greenery the plant had. He took the camel’s halter in hand and, using the stick, tried to get it to move away from the bush. After roaring in complaint, the camel grudgingly followed. He tapped it and the camel eased itself down. Gideon fumbled with the cinch.
“What the hell are you doing?” Garza asked, coming over. “We can get in at least a few more hours before it heats up.”
Imogen came over and, with expert efficiency, untied his saddle and slung it down next to hers, alongside the rock pile. “Look over there,” she said.
Garza and Gideon both looked in the direction she was pointing.
“Where?” asked Garza.
“That line on the horizon.”
“What of it?”
“It may be a haboob.”
“What the hell’s a haboob?”
“Also called a brown roller. It’s the worst kind of dust storm.”
Gideon squinted at the horizon. “I already noticed it. But I can’t see much of anything.”
“By the time you do, it’ll be too late.”
Garza, frowning, rummaged in the pack and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He glassed the horizon with an expression of annoyance, which quickly disappeared into a look of concern. Wordlessly he handed them to Gideon.
A dark reddish wall, a thousand feet high, seemed to lie across the horizon. As Gideon watched he could see it boiling and churning and getting bigger, closing in on them at an almost surreal speed. It did indeed look like a giant roller, approaching as if to flatten them.
“What do we do?” he asked quickly.
“Try to survive.” Imogen pointed to the saddles. “Manuel, you make a breastworks out of those saddles that we can use for shelter. Dig the supplies in behind them and weigh them down with the water bags. Gideon, you scoop out a depression for us to lie down in behind it. When the storm comes, we’ll pull the camel blankets over ourselves. I’m going to try to find a sheltered place for the animals.”
Gideon and Garza did as she said, once again scooping away sand with their sore hands. Sudden apprehension gave their limbs renewed strength. They laid the blankets in the depression and stacked the saddles, water bags, and Imogen’s now half-crushed Vuitton case in front of them. Imogen moved the camels down the wadi and couched them, staking their halter ropes into the sand. As they worked, the dark wall approached, higher and higher, yet strangely silent. It was almost black at the bottom, where it appeared to be boiling, pulling up ropes of sand from the ground and threading them into great streamers. The air around them was dead calm and unnaturally cool.
“Jesus,” said Garza, staring at it.
“Before it hits,” said Imogen, “we lie facedown, as close to each other as possible. We pull the camel blankets over us and hang on tight. If we start getting buried in sand, try to shift it off—don’t let it accumulate or you’ll suffocate.”
“How long will it last?”
“Ten minutes.”
“Is that all?”
“It’ll be the longest ten minutes of your life.”
The wall was now approaching swiftly, like the leading edge of a mushroom cloud, mounting ever higher, churning up bushes and scrub and shredding them to pieces in its powerful turbulence. In another moment the sun was blotted out, casting them into gloomy shadow.
“Get down,” Imogen said. “Now!”
They lay facedown, squeezed together in the depression behind the saddles, and drew the rugs and blankets over them. Gideon felt himself pressed against Imogen, the scent of soap and perspiration mingling with the smell of camels.
“For God’s sake, don’t let go of the blankets,” she said.
Now a sound filled the air: a deep vibration, almost like the low notes of an organ, rising in volume and power until the ground itself seemed to vibrate.
And then it hit. A thunderous roar was followed by a blast of wind, which seized the blanket Gideon was gripping and tried to tear it out of his hands. He could feel the force pulling on the saddles, and then suddenly they were gone, sucked upward in a great stream of sand, spinning away over their heads. A dense soup of airborne sand burst into their makeshift shelter. Gideon tried to breathe but got a mouthful of sand instead. He coughed and buried his mouth and nose into the crook of his arm. The screaming wind was flapping and jerking the blanket so violently that finally one gust wrenched it out of their collective grip. Now the full force of the sandstorm fell down on them: a torrent of sand and gravel, driven by the wind at a hundred miles an hour. Gideon felt the scouring blast of it rake his back, literally shredding the loose folds of his galabeya. He tried to raise himself slightly to take a breath and suddenly felt his body sucked upward by the blast. He was almost carried off before he felt an arm wrap around his back and yank him down. Choking, gasping, face buried, he desperately tried to breathe something other than sand. The screaming of the wind was so intense it sent a searing pain through his eardrums.
And then the wind abated. For a moment, he felt enormous relief that the storm was passing, until he realized he was mistaken: a weight was settling down on him, blocking out the scouring blast. It quickly grew heavier. They were being buried alive.
“Keep the sand off!” Imogen screamed in his ear.
Gideon struggled to push himself up even as the mass pressed down. A terror of being buried seized him and he gave his body a violent shake; another twist and he was able to force himself up through a waterfall of sand, straining, muscles popping. But it was a losing battle: more sand was falling than he could keep on top of. Finally, exhausted and defeated, he stopped fighting it and curled up, cupping his hands over his nose and mouth, his entire universe shrunken to a fetal ball in the midst of a wrathful power beyond all imagining. It went on, and on, and on, as a dreadful half night fell and everything grew blacker until he felt like a speck, a fragile disintegrating atom, buried in massive, impenetrable darkness.
22
AND THEN SUDDENLY there was silence again. Gideon swam back into consciousness from far away, wondering where he was for a moment. He couldn’t budge. He tried to move his arms but they were frozen. With a muffled scream he struggled, twisting and squirming ferociously in claustrophobic terror—and the sand began to give. With a heroic effort he threw his entire body into a rotational motion and felt more sand slipping around him. With a third, desperate attempt he managed to sit up, the sand cascading away.
An eerie calm had settled. A thin rain of dust was falling, forming a kind of fog. He tried to speak and found that his mouth was packed with sticky sand, which he did his best to cough out. Around him, in the dim light, he could see nothing but mountainous drifts of sand. His companions had vanished.
He realized with a thrill of horror that they must be still buried in the sand. He began digging, scooping like mad and drawing the sand back, and very quickly he exposed a swatch of blue cloth—Imogen’s galabeya. Frantically he cleared the sand away toward where her head would be, uncovering first a thick strand of golden hair and then her face.
“Imogen!”
He cleared sand from around her nose and mouth and then, frantically scooping, from the rest of her face. Her mouth was partly open, packed with sand, and she was not breathing. He cleared away the sand with his fingers, managed to raise her head a bit, and put his mouth on hers, breathing in. He waited; the air came back out; and then suddenly she was coughing like mad, rising up and doubling over, gasping and choking.
And struggling up next to her was Garza, writhing and spluttering as he wrestled out of the sand.
At last all three had freed themselves from their sandy graves. Imogen’s face was covered with powdery dust, her eyes wet and bloodshot, mouth ringed with mud. The air around them was slowly turning from a dark orange to a brighter yellow.
“The camels,” gasped Imogen.
“The camels can wait,” Garza spluttered, still shaking sand out of his hair.
“If we lose the camels, we die.”
They rose to their feet, shaking out their galabeyas. Gideon could feel the sticky wetness of blood where flying sand had scored the flesh of his back.
Imogen stumbled away in the direction where she had couched the camels, beside the rock pile. There was nothing but sand.
“Are they buried?” Garza asked.
“No. They must have stampeded.”
As they stood there, a hot breeze swept through and the air cleared. Gideon looked around. The landscape had become unrecognizable. All trace of tracks and landmarks were gone. The thornbushes had been stripped of their few leaves and many uprooted. Most of their meager supplies had disappeared. There were no tracks of the fleeing camels. The wind had scoured the land clean.
“In dust storms, camels go downwind,” Imogen said. “Gideon, you come with me. Manuel, see if you can dig up our water bags and supplies. We need to hurry.” She set off at a trudge, moving westward down the broad wadi, Gideon hurrying to catch up.
The wash twisted and turned among black lava flows before coming to an open basin, surrounded by sandy hills. They peered in every direction, but saw no camels.
“We need to get higher,” Imogen said.
With much difficulty, they climbed a pile of volcanic rubble forming a loose hill. It was a hand-and-foot climb, and Gideon’s hands, already cracked, began to bleed from the sharp lava. He said nothing and, after a grueling half hour they reached the top. The view was extensive and it revealed, beyond the sandy basin, hundreds of volcanic hills cut by canyons and serpentine washes—a labyrinth of sand and stone—with range after range of mountains beyond.
“Jesus,” said Gideon. “How are we ever going to find the camels in there?”
After a long silence, Imogen said: “We’re not.”
“Surely they must be somewhere.”
“A camel can run thirty miles an hour. Even if we knew where they were, they’ve already gone too far away for us to catch them.” She turned and started back down the hill.
Gideon hustled to follow her. “So what are we going to do?”
“I’m thinking,” she said. “Stop asking questions.”
By the time they got back to camp, Garza had managed to uncover one water bag. The rest had ruptured. Most of their other supplies were gone. He’d found two panniers with maps and some food, but that was it. He was in a dark mood.
They passed around the water bag and all had a drink. Finally Imogen spoke. “Going back isn’t an option. We’ve got one two-gallon bag of water. In this desert, a person should have a gallon a day. A quart a day would be the minimum to keep you alive—if you’re willing to go half crazy with thirst. Eight quarts divided by three people…it’s not nearly enough to get us back to Shalateen.”
“There’s got to be water in the fog oases,” said Gideon. “What do you know about them?” he asked Imogen.
Imogen glanced up toward Gebel Umm, visible in the hazy distance peeking between two lesser peaks. “Well, very little. On the eastern side of the mountain there are supposed to be some high-altitude valleys where prevailing winds off the Red Sea condense into perpetual fogs. It creates a kind of microclimate. Or so it’s said—nothing I read indicated anyone had ever been there and seen the phenomenon firsthand.”
