O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [26]
In the daylight, thanks to my improved footgear, I had not found it difficult to keep up with our guides, but in the booby-trapped dark I fell behind again, and twice was trodden upon by the lead mule.
After about an hour of this the wind came up. An already cold night turned bitter, with the added pleasure of sand driven into our faces. I took off my spectacles, which were in danger of being sandblasted into opacity if not actually blown off my nose, wrapped my abayya more firmly around my body, and followed the dim form ahead of me.
It then commenced to rain. Ali and Mahmoud appeared, waiting for us to catch them up so they could help control the mules. Soon the drops were pelting down; lightning and thunder moved in on us until the storm was directly over our heads as we pressed on, clinging to the halters of the skittish animals for fear our tents and pans would gallop off into the night. The track, never a road, turned slick, and then sticky, until even those of us who had four feet were having a hard time of it.
When the hail began I stopped dead. “Damn it all!” I shouted at full voice, necessary against the rush of wind and the fast-increasing crescendo of pings of the hailstones on the big convex iron saj. “Why is it so almighty important that we reach Beersheva tonight?”
Neither of our guides chose to explain. However, my protest seemed to trigger their own recognition of futility, because they did not insist on pressing on. We fumbled about in the maelstrom for a while until the wind seemed to lose a few degrees of strength and I realised we were against an outcrop of rock. There we hobbled the mules closely and removed their burdens. Ali retrieved the big tent, but rather than attempting to put it up in the gale and the rocky ground, we simply crawled under it and wrapped ourselves up in its folds, huddling together in a mound while the hail smacked at the goat’s hair above our heads. It eventually died off into the silent whisper of snowfall; finally, towards morning, there was stillness and a deep, creeping chill.
I had drifted into something resembling sleep when the half-frozen tent shifted and crackled, and someone left our communal warmth—Ali, I decided, hearing his footsteps retreat. He returned a few minutes later, rustling strangely, and stopped near where we had tied the mules. After a couple of minutes he left the mules and came back towards where the three of us lay, and then stopped again. Up to now I had refrained from moving, theorising that if I continued to lie there numbly I might not awaken to the full force of the cold, but now I worked my hand up to where the rough tent lay across my face, and I pulled it away just in time to see Ali, crouched down on snow-covered ground and with his hands stretched well away from his body, strike at the flint he held. The spark set off a great whump of petrol-triggered flame: instantly the wet bushes he had dragged up burst merrily alight, and we had a fire.
This morning, unusually enough, Mahmoud cooked. He began with a porridge of some odd grain, hot and sweet and laced with cinnamon, eaten with wooden spoons from the common pot. This was followed by the inevitable flat bread, except that for him the big curving saj behaved itself and produced a bread that was light and unburnt and cooked through, tasting deliciously of wheat and eaten by tearing it into pieces and dipping it into a tin of melted butter. Then Mahmoud sent Ali back to the mules—it was now light enough to see what he was doing—and he came back with a dented tin that lacked a label. Hacking it open, he handed it to Mahmoud, who upended it over a pan. To my astonishment, it landed with a spurt of fat sizzling, and the smell of bacon shot up into the frigid air.
Mahmoud cooked the bacon crisp, and then set the pan on the ground between us. He did not eat any himself, but took out his prayer beads and watched with his inscrutable look as the three of us polished off the meat and even ate a good part of the grease, dipping bread into it until we were near to bursting.