Chapter 30

Yes, not a bad day at all,’ he said again. ‘You know, the flats are rather interesting . . . bugger to get out there, though . . . and so hot . . .’ He drained off the whisky in one long gulp and then poured himself another, which was even more generous than the first. ‘Couldn’t get the bloody donkey to move this morning, though! After that damned woman had got me up and moving, I thought I’d better make an early start of it, try to beat the sun, you know; but the bloody ass wouldn’t budge. Lead it I could; but what would be the point of leading a donkey and cart all the way over to the flats?’ He lifted his glass. ‘Aghh, that’s better . . .’

*

Phipps had the beast by its halter; but whatever he did, it would not move of its own accord. After thoroughly exhausting his English vocabulary of profanity, he wished he had learned to curse in the local language; one expletive was all he had picked up, and at that the animal seemed to be even more indifferent. He stopped halfway up the street to think about what he’d done differently the day before, when the beast had merrily trotted out of the city and he’d had to do his best, with one hand on the reins and one frantically groping behind him, to stop the equipment from falling off. Why not today?

Returning to the cart, he rearranged the cushion, carefully putting the hard object it concealed to the side, got back into the driver’s seat, and again flicked the animal’s haunches with his cane. Nothing. He clicked, clucked, squawked, and whistled. Nothing. He shook the reins. He rocked up and down in simulation of a moving cart. But the ass would not move; it just stood there in absolute contempt, ears pricked, nose sneering.

Out of the corner of his eye, Phipps saw the two unwashed heads of children peeking around the corner of a bomb-blasted building, one on top of the other; they giggled at him. He tried to ignore them and raised his cane, about to strike again at the stubborn animal; but before he could do so, the lower head of the two whiplashed and the connected body suddenly came tumbling out into the street with a cry. The filthy urchin found his feet and after a brief glance back at his partner he blinked up at Phipps. His hand came up in front of him and he began to jerk it to and from his dirty mouth, as if he were shovelling in badly needed nourishment. He then pointed to the donkey.

‘Of course,’ Phipps cried, slapping a knee with his hand. The two boys hopped away laughing as the foreigner jumped down from the seat. He skidded back along the cobblestones but before reaching the sandstone portico of the Water Resources building and its chiselled inscription, he turned into a side alley and trotted up to a dilapidated stable; inside he found the animal’s nose bag.

His early female visitor and her stomach problem hadn’t really been the reason why he was up and away at such an early hour. He had made sure he’d done so every day this week, since the purchase of his two new wheels—and four new legs. The earlier he went, the fewer people there were to gawk at him and make snide comments about the foreigner with his stupid donkey. In fact, the ailing woman had made him late and if it hadn’t been for her he would have been out even earlier.

Phipps could see the shadows around him shortening and could smell the coming day; he hurried to attach the nosebag as quickly as he could. But no sooner had he clambered back up into the driver’s seat than he remembered the satellite photograph. ‘Shit,’ he cried and slapped his knee again. Then he hit the beast with the cane, the first time in his annoyance and the second time to try and stop it moving. It wouldn’t; so he jumped down to remove the nosebag; he then headed back once more to the building. ‘That bloody woman,’ he muttered as he passed the chiselled inscription.

For all the good it had so far been, he needn’t have bothered. Most of the remote sensing that Phipps had shipped out with him was too old to be useful. It had been snapped by the Americans during an earlier revolution, when superpowers waited off the coast and blew their rhetoric in with the sea breeze and sent their spy planes and satellites over to capture in colour what they might one day be fighting for: orange rocks, ochre soil, and a smattering of scrubby vegetation—to say nothing of the sand. Now the images were no longer needed by spies and the makers of history in far-away capitals and their only student was a lone hydrologist working for a little-known charity based in a dingy office in London. And for him they were proving a lot less useful. He had pinned this particular photograph above his sleeping mats, hoping that in his dreams he might make some sense of it, understand a few of its enigmas. But he hadn’t, and the only purpose it now served was to make him even later.

Reaching the end of the street, Phipps felt heat on the back of his neck; he turned and saw the sun clipping the tops of the derelict buildings behind him. He flicked the reins and then reached behind him for his big, floppy hat. The city seemed empty, and the few people who were on the streets hardly noticed the Englishman sat up on a two-wheeled cart being towed westward by a donkey. All the same, Phipps pulled the wide brim of his hat down over his eyes and sunk deeper into the seat. ‘Yaa,’ he cried and struck the beast with his goad. He began to relax.

Nearing the edge of the city, he started to practice, in the local language, contrived dialogues, which he was supposed to be having with village peasants in order to gain their help. The words flowed well, as they had always done so; the only trouble so far had been the shortage of peasants with whom he could converse.

The single road leading west out of town forked near the beginning of a slope that eventually rose into the headland, upon which stood Sa’ An’s ancient citadel, an imposing fortification that Fahid, the custodian, never tired of telling him about. A week or so before, on his first trip out with the cart, Phipps had asked a local for directions using one of his shaky set-dialogues—on his second attempt, the man had understood.

In fact the language wasn’t totally new to him. After dropping out of medical school, surviving the wrath of his father, and working for a while on a mushroom farm to make a little money, he had hitch-hiked through several Gulf countries as part of a grand tour that he had designed for himself to take him to places that few other westerners visited; and he had enjoyed himself for the best part of a year in glorious isolation, speaking only when he had to, in sentences memorised from a phrase book. Before coming out this time—his second to the region but his first to Sa’ An—he had prepared himself better by hiring a tutor in London for twice-weekly lessons and had surprised himself with how much he had remembered from that first trip many years before. During class he had used the same tactic of memorising complete dialogues—much to the chagrin of his teacher, a bossy lady whom he called Miss Saabira.

‘How often do you take irrigation water from your well?’ he asked himself in a perfectly executed sentence. ‘What species of tree used to grow on your land?’ was his next, near-perfect line. ‘What have you done about the encroachment of sand?’ By now they were all pretty easy for him, and during his first week of excursions into the area, he had used them to great effect. He then tried out a new one; one that he had learned after class. ‘Where do you find your seed for the following year if this year’s crop has failed?’ That one was again perfect—it had to be. He smiled as the sweating donkey pushed a turd out of its backside.

Every time Phipps ran through a conversation with himself, the weasel face of his language teacher, Miss Saabira, popped into his mind. She hovered above his badly-pronounced vowels and misplaced verbs, snapping corrections in her piercing voice. Phipps hardly had the money to pay her and the charity that hired him hadn’t offered, so it was very fortunate when the Americans contacted him at the last minute and took care of most of his financial difficulties. Miss Saabira got her money; and due to the fact that the outstanding bill was so large, he had to write a cheque—and so he had learned Miss Saabira first name, Yasmeen, which had to be written above large figure for the amount owed.

‘Bear left,’ the peasant had replied those few days before. The direction, however, was pretty obvious and he need not have bothered asking. Pulling on the left side of the reins, he determined again to one day take Fahid’s advice to bear right and go and have a poke around the ramparts of the ancient citadel. Not today, however, and the donkey took its cue and continued trotting west along the hot, dusty road out of Sa’ An.

‘How have the seasons changed in the last few years?’ It was almost too hot to think. One more: ‘When did the government stop sending water down the irrigation channels?’

*

The donkey slowed; but because the road continuously deteriorated, the billows of dust that they pushed up kept growing, and they left behind them a long plume that blew from the road towards the mountains on the sea breeze. A lizard skittered across the road in front of the them, yellow and green with a quivering coxcomb along its neck. The ass didn’t waver one bit, as it had similarly not done so on the first day when a snake had crossed their path and Phipps had realised that the beast must be short sighted.

The lizard’s appearance was timely; it ended language practice just as they were getting close to the first village; Phipps pushed the weasel-faced instructor from his head—with her bossy corrections, I-know-best tone, and sullen disposition—and concentrated on his surroundings. He raised his beak and carefully surveyed the fields that ringed the village. Lone stalks of a failed maize crop stood here and there like markers for old graves, where death lurked beneath the surface. Elsewhere the stalky remnants of failure had been partly interred in the soil, as if the farmer had tried to hide his shame but had given up the attempted burial and fled.

The village seemed today, as it had been every day except the first, when he had found, in one of the houses, a lone occupant: a very old man, sickly thin, drawn, and gaunt. Phipps saw him peering out through an opened door, hiding in the shadow like a wraith, and had called out to him; but the man at once disappeared, into the darkness of his hovel. Phipps followed, in through the swinging door, and found him lying terrified on the hard planks of a bed in the corner of the room. With unfocussed eyes he began to prattle about omens and fate but he soon he drifted off into a stupor, from which he hadn’t awakened. Phipps had expected to find a corpse the next day; but when he looked, the house had been empty—only a soiled bed-sheet remained on the wooden lattices.

Phipps jumped off the cart, thought about tying up the donkey, but decided to take its nosebag away instead. He pulled an old army-surplus knapsack from the back of the cart, slung it over his shoulder, and began to walk towards the nearest well. He already had everything from this village in his notebooks but he looked all the same, eyes down, boots kicking at the earth. The soil was poor, but the sand content here was still low and with a little irrigation it would have been cohesive enough to support the roots of most cereals—at least wheat and maize. The land would never again see cash crops; that much was certain.

He dropped a stone into the hole and counted off the seconds until the sound of a distant splash finally echoed up to his ears. He frowned, picked up the leather bucket that lay at his feet, and dropped it over the side, quickly making sure that the rope attached to it was securely tied off on the bar stuck through the mouth of the well.

‘Bugger,’ Phipps said. He reached out and pushed at the rope that had snapped taught a little too soon. The suspended bucket bounced around the stone wall. ‘Must have gone down overnight!’ he said to himself. He left the bucket swinging on the end of its rope and trudged off to look for another water source.

Four failures later he was back at the cart with his empty water bottles wondering what he was going to do about his increasing thirst. On his first day out he had come prepared with bottles of rank city-water, drained from the rusting pipes of the hotel. But on finding sweet water under this village he had got into the habit of filling up here—and checking the level of the water table at the same time.

‘Idiot,’ Phipps suddenly cried out; and without unslinging his knapsack he trotted back to one of the wells, where he retrieved some extra rope before returning to the first. He got his water, but only just, by scraping the leather receptacle along the rocky bottom.

When the donkey had drunk off its own bucketful, and its nosebag was back in place, they started out of the miserable village. Phipps scribbled a few numbers into a notebook: one of which was the length of extra rope he had tied onto the bucket in order to get his bottles filled: almost a metre! Scientifically inaccurate of course, but good enough to tell him that something disastrous was happening. He played with the idea of a phantom water table for several minutes before abandoning it as being too preposterous.

The whole hinterland, though, was preposterous and defied scientific explanation. Before coming to the country, Phipps had culled information from previous but long-ago expeditions, remote sensing, and papers by so-called experts from the west, who had never even set foot in the country. And he had arrived with a set of pre-conceived ideas about what he would find. Nothing, however, was as he had expected it to be—soils, geomorphology, water tables, land use and cultivation, vegetation—it was all different. He knew what he ought do—start again from scratch. He should first build his own database and go from there. But he wasn’t sure if he had the time of or the inclination to do it—he had more important things to do now.

He dropped the notebook into the knapsack with an exasperated gasp and fished out his pipe and a pouch of fresh tobacco. He stuffed stringy leaves into the pipe’s bowl; but before putting a match to it, he refreshed himself with half a bottle of cool well-water—it wouldn’t do to draw that rough smoke over a parched throat.

A pipe always helped him to think better and now with the first puff, as the nicotine hit, his stimulated mind pulled together the variables of the problem beneath the ground. Bedrock porosity, aquifer capacity, extraction rate, recharge rate—all he heaved into the equation. But on the second puff he coughed, the elements of hydrology spilled from his mind, and he cursed again at the lousy tobacco. He peered into the smouldering weed. Even with the help of that woman, it has taken several day’s worth of expenses, and all he’d got for his dirhams was the roughest ounce of weed he’d ever smoked. Camel shit would probably taste better! He pictured the woman clutching at that horrible cloth she tied around her head and tearing into the stallholder, her black eyes quivering with indignation. He grinned and struck the donkey with the cane. ‘Mrs. Azziz,’ he muttered under his breath and without thinking he stuck the pipe’s stem back in his mouth. Before drawing, however, his tongue picked off a grain of sand. He pulled out the pipe, spat, and then looked around.

In his field work, Phipps hadn’t yet made it beyond the alluvial flats, but the desert seemed to be getting closer every day; and as he now thought, he wouldn’t even need to make the trip: he could just wait here and before long the dunes would come to him. He looked into the shimmering scrub-land ahead and picked out the next village.

This one was occupied and his arrival was announced by a barking dog that looked as if it had leprosy and a screaming child, disease free but undernourished. He’d tried to introduce himself to the villagers a week ago, with both his memorised dialogues, which no one seemed to understand, and his documents and letters of introduction, which nobody could read. But they slowly realised what he was up to and twice already he’d surveyed the wells and the fields.

He mumbled a greeting to the first adult that came out to see him, an elderly man who always seemed to take charge when Phipps was around. The man returned the greeting with a nod of his head and followed Phipps to the first well. Poverty had ground extra years into this old man’s body and it looked as though each time the calendar showed a new year, the old man had already lived two. Phipps reeled off the first sentence of a dialogue about the weather and, understanding half of the old man’s reply, he continued with its second. At the end of the man’s unintelligible reply, Phipps nodded his head politely, feeling almost at ease in his company

The well still had water, but its level had dropped again. The old man muttered some numbers and then held up both his liver-spotted hands, palms flattened, a good foot between them. He glanced behind him and his frail voice made noises about the maize crop. Phipps stopped him with news of the wells in the next village. The man’s eyes dropped and his face blackened, as if a rogue cloud had blotted the sun and plunged him into deep shadow. A second later, his legs gave way and he collapsed onto the low circular wall surrounding the top of the well. His lips began to quiver in what seemed to be an invocation to his Maker. Phipps looked away and busied himself with his pencil and notebook while the old man on the stones tried to pull himself together.

He did so within a few moments and then struggled to his feet, coughing heavily. He cupped the side of his mouth with a curved palm and rattled a few words out of his throat, in the direction of the nearest buildings—a row of single story brick-and-tin hovels. A woman’s face appeared at a window, bound in a pink headscarf, looking like a startled rabbit at the top of its burrow. The first sound she made was a staccato of short syllables, a condensed summary of the bad news. The second sound she made, after the old man had given a one-word confirmation, was a maniacal high-pitched wailing, produced in some inexplicable manner by an overworked voice-box and a frenzied tongue.

The news spread fast and before Phipps could get back to his cart, half the village was wailing like demonic banshees. He doubted that even the death of a family member would produce such an outcry.

He struck the donkey with his cane; but before it could move, a man appeared out of the dust and took hold of the reins. He swatted a fly on the animals back and said something about disease. Several more men appeared, each with a tense expression stuck above their neatly trimmed beards. They quickly elected a spokesman and pushed him forward.

The man tried to step back, but the others closed ranks behind him and left him standing alone. Gaining confidence, he slowly unfastened a leather water bottle that hung from his shoulder on a strap; he held it upside down, allowing a trickle of water to fall into the dust; when it stopped he said, ‘Why?’

Phipps remained silent as he stepped down from the driver’s seat.

The man spoke again: ‘They think we are we being punished by God for something bad that we have done.’

Phipps looked into the man’s eyes. He knew what they had done. He’d seen firsthand the treeless, barren wilderness with its leached soils and empty wells. And back at the department building, with the help of Fahid, the custodian, he’d gone through the archives, piecing together the history of man’s misguided intervention in the area. He said nothing.

*

Phipps clipped the beast’s backside with the tip of his cane. ‘Yaa,’ he cried and the cart began to roll towards a dried-up river bed. The oldest villagers could remember when water had flowed along its course for most of the winter and half of the summer—a free and plentiful supply. Now, they told him, it only sprang alive once or twice a year when a flash flood pounded along its course, surging over its feeble banks to wash away a house or two if they weren’t lucky.

A little way farther along, the road passed over an abandoned irrigation channel, a straight ditch that looked like the slash from a jabbala. Phipps pulled up beside it, turned to his left, and squinted into the distance. The dam was up there somewhere, but the air was hot and full of dust and haze, and he saw nothing except the dull, shimmering outlines of the mountaintops. He imagined the ageing structure crumbling back into the orange bedrock from which it had been hewn.

Phipps turned back towards the hovels and saw the group of villagers dispersing. What could they do? The river, the irrigation channel, the dam—all gone. And now the water table was sinking and all they had left was one deep well, a long length of rope, and a bucket. ‘Yaa,’ he turned back and drove away.

The alluvial flats continued into the shimmering, hazy distance; but he expected no more villages to appear for a while. After decades of deterioration, the land was now little more than a semiarid steppe, supporting nothing besides a sparse, low lying scrub: Sa An’s bread basket. Its monotony dazed Phipps and having nothing more to do than keep the ass on the road, he shrunk under his wide-brimmed hat and filled another pipe.

He lit a match, drew up an even smoulder in the bowl with a few rapid puffs, and then inhaled deeply. The nicotine hit and took his mind quickly over the ravaged coastal plain in all its stark horror. His second lungful took him towards a hopeless future, in which by far the most sensible thing to do was to sit back and let nature take its course. He followed the exhaled smoke as it caught the sea breeze and disappeared towards the mountains. His eye was stopped in mid-air by a hawk, motionless in the air like a man who had just stretched out his arms to lift a cape from his back. It released itself from the hover and plummeted earthwards, but a moment later it defied gravity again, swooping into a thermal, on which it began to slowly ascend.

Phipps dropped his eyes to the ground to see what the bird had been aiming at, and beyond a craggy ridge he saw the tops of trees. He stood up at once, shielded his eyes, and squinted over the rock. Just as he brought the greenery back into focus, the donkey jerked the cart and he fell back onto the seat, dropping his pipe. ‘Steady,’ he yelled at the beast before jumped down to the ground. He grabbed his knapsack, and started out for the ridge, remembering after ten strides the animal’s nose bag.

As soon as he had ripped off the bag of feed, his haste evaporated into the hot morning and he looked up at the crag, following it away to the right, towards a point where it met the road half a mile ahead. He frowned and pinched at the raw skin of his forehead; he then swung the knapsack off his back and plunged in an arm. Out came a folder of maps, some printed and some drawn up by himself. Ignoring the colourful contours of the library maps, which he could no longer rely upon, he picked out one of his own: a sketchy rendering of the coastal plain’s flora, showing everything he had so far seen and identified. Low tech surveying and cartography, but good enough for now. His forefinger ran out of the city and through the first two villages, his eyes scanning the annotations either side of the pencil-line road. His heart jumped. Yes! He had been right: he hadn’t come across this particular clump of trees before.

Habit forced him to follow a zigzag line between patches of soil, and he ignored a more direct route that would have taken him mostly over rocky outcrops of shale and schist. He kicked at the loose dirt and mumbled a few compositions but his mind was on the trees and not with the thin, sandy sediment beneath his boots. After scrambling up the ridge he could clearly see his quarry: a stand of tall scizazi, not trees at all but a cross between a shrub and a cactus. They filled a hollow at the apparent terminus of a dry riverbed, which raged soundlessly out of the mountains. He fisted his right hand and thumped at his thigh with the knowledge that it was not a spring-fed oasis, but some kind of water trap that would be fed whenever runoff filled the wadi.

Sliding down the other side of the ridge, he underlined his stupidity with the realisation that any kind of spring, however small, would surely attract human residents in this parched landscape. It would have been on the maps and in his notebooks long before now. Still, he would poke around and see what might turn up. There was always a chance that a seed or two might have blown in on the wind or been carried down from the mountain in torrents of skidding water.

After half an hour of fruitless searching, he gave up and sat on a boulder in the middle of the wadi, sweating like a Sa’ An wrestler after a heavy round. He picked up a pebble and threw it towards the scizazi. ‘There’s not a hope in friggin hell of finding it down here,’ he said to himself, ‘on this godforsaken friggin’ wasteland.’ He arched his neck and looked up at the distant peaks; he wiped his brow with a sleeve and rested his hand over his eyes. ‘Suppose sooner or later I’ll have to get myself up there.’ He sighed and spat a sand-grain from his dry mouth towards the mountains.

*

Donkey, cart, and scientist made the far edge of the alluvial flats before midday—good time, given the distance, the heat, and the distractions suffered along the way. Today, Phipps had decided to go inland, having already checked several of the villages and much of the land towards the coast; but first he would eat. He found a farmer’s shelter at the side of a disused field, which was cracked into a patina of withered hexagons. The sun bladed through the walls and roof of the shack, but he found a little shade in one of its corners and lowered himself into a cross-legged position onto the floorboards. He unwrapped two pieces of unleven bread, inside each of which he had layered goat’s cheese and tomatoes.

The bread was stale and hard, as it always was, and he began to work his jaw. The broken slats of the shelter’s walls afforded him a good view of the land over which he had just crossed. Even these disgusting lumps of dough now between his teeth, he thought, could not have been produced there. It was hard to imagine that the area had once provided nourishment for millions of people. What was now dry, sandy, and leached earth used to be layered fans of alluvium, fed by rich sediment suspended in rivers that flowed down from the mountains. For aeons, the fans had slowly migrated up and down the coast and for millennia had supported civilisations, the evidence for which, in the form of ancient artefacts, he now lived amongst in the building of the former Department of Water Resources. But that gift of food was over—at least for the time being. He chewed on.

Wiping tomato seeds from his stubbly chin, he chose a different wall to look through, the south one, which allowed him to look up at the bare foothills and naked mountains. The images in his library of remote sensing all showed a thick covering of vegetation on every slope—ash, cedar, even pine at the higher elevations. None remained; every tree felled: chopped and fed into Sa’ An’s now-defunct economy; burnt in mother’s oven to cook the food to feed her growing number of babies; woven into the mud and bricks of every hovel on the plain.

Over tea, Phipps repeated his hypothesis: Sa’ An was living through a Malthusian nightmare, ravaged by war, disease, and famine, with its population back on the verge of the stone-age without its most essential natural resources. Hopeless and beyond help. A hell from which every living person should be allowed to flee. He grinned and smacked his lips on his sandwich: he was getting to like the place.

*

The first village he approached on his new inland tack was occupied: wisping smoke blew away from some of its hovels on the sea breeze. The road had been steadily breaking up for a mile or two, and the wheels of the cart now trundled over some tough resistance—it was such heavy going, in fact, that he was sure the axle was not far from snapping. But that couldn’t explain the intermittent cracks that he had just started to notice—first on the wheels themselves and then on the sides of the vehicle. Crack! And a minute later, crack! again. He swiped off his floppy hat and leaned over the side to see what had hit the woodwork, and then one got him. Crack! A small, but very hard, pebble on the crown of his head. His eyes went black for a fraction of a second and then he saw white dots flying off in all directions. He tightened his grip on the frame and was just strong enough to keep his body in the driving seat; otherwise he would have rolled overboard, headfirst into the broken road. His free hand rose to the painful injury.

He heard the screech of excited children running away from him, but couldn’t find them with his swimming eyes. The donkey plodded on, and he lolled back onto the cushion, trying to find the reins so he could pull up and get himself together. But before he could do so, the animal stopped; and because of the shadow now looming in front of him, he knew it hadn’t done so of its own accord. Phipps tried to shield his eyes from the sun, but he could only make out an outline. He reached for his hat, placed it on the top of his throbbing skull, and squinted out from beneath its brim. He saw a nomad.

Phipps reacted in an instant with a swift rotation of his torso, but what he needed he had removed from under the cushion and now lay beneath the seat, which he realised, in a crushing blow of regret, was a particularly stupid and naive place to keep it. He slumped backwards.

Phipps had learned to recognise nomads on his first day in the city.

Teenagers with pronounced cheekbones, narrowed eyes, and beaked noses had followed him everywhere with their compact wooden boxes and their shrill cries of ‘Hey, mister; shoeshine,’ in badly pronounced English.

The swarthy young man now in front of him had the same facial features and the same longish black hair that reminded Phipps of a gypsy. Unfortunately, instead of carrying just a small box, he was weighed down by daggers and pistols and his belligerent attitude told Phipps that he wasn’t offering to shine his boots. He didn’t release the animal, so Phipps began to get down from the cart. As his backside left the cushion the nomad shouted, in a language that bared no resemblance at all to the one the prim Miss Yasmeen Saabira had tutored him in back in London. Not put off, Phipps continued to clamber out of the cart—on the opposite side to the man.

A second nomad stepped forward; he took hold of the donkey and amongst the few words he directed at the fist nomad was a name: Cyrus.

Phipps licked at his dry lips as Cyrus walked around to confront him. He tried a greeting, received no reply, then rolled off a memorised sentence introducing himself and his work.

Cyrus stopped him with a raised hand; he then turned, and barked words to someone in the ring of people that had quickly formed around the cart.

The order was for a woman, who without hesitation stepped forward and began to say something. Phipps turned to face her and after a moment realised that she was translating what he had said to Cyrus—she repeated a few of his own words before changing them into something unintelligible.

Phipps left his eyes on the woman even as Cyrus spoke again. She was colourful, shiny, and open. Not at all like the dour women whom he had got used to in the city and most of the villages out here on the plain. Where a city-woman would hide herself under a dark headscarf, this woman’s head was almost bear, stranded only twice by red ribbons that highlighted her black tresses beautifully. Her blouse was light blue, open around the neck, and jangling with beads and jewellery; and bright, patterned skirts billowed from her hips. She was not confined under a frumpy tent-like covering like most of the city women. She seemed confident.

Her ruddy face twinkled again and she spoke, in words that he could mostly understand. She told him who they were and where they had come from; but just as she mentioned their herds of animals, the armed Cyrus, who was still at Phipps’s shoulder, glared at her and raised his hand. She at once dropped her sparkling face to the dust and in mid sentence went silent.

Returned his attention to Phipps, Cyrus looked him up and down and puffed sharp breath onto his face. He then stepped away.

Phipps lowered his shoulders and let out some air. Daring not to move too much, he kept his eyes on the nomad, who walked up to the cart and leaned over its wooded side. Phipps parted his lips as the man began to rummage through the field equipment.

Cyrus came up with a levelling stave and theodolite, shaking them towards Phipps.

Phipps gave a pronounced shrug and swept his hand over the land. ‘Land survey,’ he said hopelessly in English, looking for the woman with the sparkling face. And then, unable to remember the word for measurement, he held the thumb and forefinger of his right hand up, an inch apart.

Cyrus threw the marked plank of wood and the delicate scientific instrument back into the cart with a froth of rapidly spoken words that the woman didn’t translate. A shovel, a fork, and a heap of plastic specimen bags seemed to tell him that Phipps posed no danger to them.

Relieved, Phipps turned away from the man and scanned the ring of onlookers. He found the woman and asked a simple question: ‘You people stay here? in this village?’ Even he knew that the nomads of the northern plain never settled in pastoral villages.

She began to answer but was cut off by Cyrus, who stepped between them, back into his confrontational position at Phipps’s shoulder. He barked at her and then stepped aside to let her continue.

‘We found this village empty a few weeks ago,’ she began, ‘and we have stayed here since. We came from the steppe which now has no pasture. Most of our animals died and we had to leave. There is nothing left for us there.’ She paused. ‘And there is nothing here.’

Phipps knew that a lot of the degradation of the northern plains had been caused by the overgrazing of the steppe by herds of cattle, sheep, and goats, reared by nomads. In London it had been a statistic. He was about to offer the required sympathy, when their conversation suddenly halted, interrupted by braying from the donkey as the medieval suspension on the cart strained under the excited jumping of several nomads who had clambered aboard. Voices rose and every person in the ring stepped back. Phipps turned his head, putting his chin over his left shoulder, and came face to face with the object of their excitement, its long barrel shafting up towards his nostrils.

He swivelled completely around to face the man who was now wielding the discovered weapon, raising his hands in what was supposed to be an open gesture of blamelessness, but what could have been taken for an act of surrender. He swallowed hard. ‘For the wolves,’ he managed to say, but only in English. He then grimaced, raised his head towards the sky, and howled, quietly, but in an imitation so close to the real thing that one of the babies in his circle of spectators began to cry. He dropped his head and shrugged again. The cry of the baby was joined by a sudden yelp; somebody else huffed, and a few more laughed—at him.

Cyrus found nothing humorous in the situation; he grabbed the gun from the man who had unearthed it and stuffed it into his own wide leather belt, alongside the brace of pistols that were already there. He said nothing.

Phipps watched his only means of self defence disappear as the nomad rearranged his waistcoat over its handle. He dropped his eyes to the ground and swore to himself, careful not to move his lips. As his eyes focussed on the nomad’s leather riding boots, the war-damaged face of the custodian was already filling his mind: Fahid, the unsalaried, teenaged caretaker of Sa’ An’s remaining cultural heritage; he would find him another pistol—for a few dollars. His eyes wandered up the black boots to their tops, into which disappeared the loose folds of the nomad’s black baggy trousers. He wondered if any horses survived.