Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [257]
The chief merchant turned to Umar. ‘Katib. We must take what there is, and turn back to Arawan.’
‘You must turn back,’ Umar said. ‘We shall go on. But, from your kindness, allow our beasts to water first, and let us share out what drinking water there is. Your journey will be shorter than ours. Also, there is the guide.’
‘Take him. We know the way back,’ said the merchant. He looked relieved. He had agreed to come in the first place, Nicholas thought, only to show respect for the katib. The merchant said, ‘Will all your men wish to continue?’
Two of them didn’t. It left four, and himself and Umar to deal with six camels. He paid for some goats, and took what food could be spared. It was mostly millet, and kola nuts. He didn’t comment on that. He said. ‘Do we need all these camels?’
‘Yes,’ said Umar. They set off that night.
Now there was silence, for worried men did not talk for too long, especially as the night deepened and walking became automatic; the feet of men and camels travelling up and down the long, curving dunes, leaving them ploughed but unplanted behind them.
Above, the stars hung, enormous and glittering. Nicholas knew their names now: the names he’d learned on his first, ecstatic voyage; the names Diogo Gomes had used; the names in the books he had left behind, in the city where he had just spent part of a lifetime. The drovers had other names for them as well. Some were cheerfully obscene. Some were beautiful.
Beauty was what surrounded them now. It had been there from the beginning, but made indistinct by the host of people about them. Now they were but seven pepper-seeds upon an ocean which stretched, white as curds, to the rim of the universe; specks as remote as those he had watched from a sea-spattered cliff-top in Europe. And as the sun rose, disclosing the scalloped forms of the dunes, and sank, a vast glory at night, Nicholas experienced the liberation he had not so far been vouchsafed in his life: an emotion of awe and of thankfulness that he had felt nowhere else.
He said little that day or the next, but walked, and sat alone swaying for hour after hour on his beast, the two sticks of his tent in his fists, his shadowed eyes blind, while his mind began to make sense of many things. Whatever it was he had found, it was not the Sea of Obscurity. It was light, and self-knowledge, and peace.
On the third day, Umar roused him. ‘I have taken a decision.’
The world returned. Nicholas said, ‘Never mind your decision. What is this place, your desert?’
Umar smiled, ‘A place to go, when one has feasted with wise men, as you have. Do you want to hear of the problems of the flesh, instead of the soul? We cannot reach the wells by Taodeni as we wanted. Our water is low, and the guide, the takshif, says he smells a storm coming. Therefore we are travelling towards the wells of Bir al Ksaib instead.’
‘We’ll reach water much quicker that way?’ Nicholas said. For two days, he hadn’t felt hungry. Now he did.
‘Three days sooner. Perhaps two and a half. It may make all the difference.’
‘But it’s out of our way. So it will take longer to reach Taghaza afterwards?’
‘It will add two days to the overall journey,’ Umar said. ‘But the storm may add many more. We shall need to be prepared, that is all, and in good heart. We are eating. Come and talk to the men.’
The sandstorm, when it came, was the first, but not the worst. During it, nothing could be done but sit cocooned in its path while it belaboured the back and tore and whipped and stung its way through to the flesh, so that every man’s body was heavy with sand, and the eyes, the mouth, the ears became