Chapter 39

‘Yaa,’ Phipps cried, trying to rein in the donkey.

He had just driven the cart through a dried-up river bed, a wadi without a name, and had crested its western bank, when he caught a glimpse of what he’d been searching for these past few days. The animal brayed and the cart creaked to a halt. Phipps sat up straight, tilted the wide brim of his floppy hat, and squinted into the hazy distance. His weathered face cracked into a smile as he whistled air out between his teeth. ‘Beau-ti-ful,’ he muttered, dropping the syllables from his chapped lips. His hand slipped under his hat and he scratched at his dry scalp, filling his fingernails with dandruff.

‘Now then, Ariel’ he said to the donkey, ‘where exactly are we?’ He reached behind him for his knapsack, from which he pulled a folder of maps and satellite photographs. After several minutes’ of pouring over the images he slammed them into his lap with a loud huff, and then he stuffed the whole lot back into the folder then the folder back into the bag. ‘Bloody useless!’ he said, throwing the bag behind him.

His Global Positioning System, a cheap gadget that could have pinpointed his exact location anywhere on the surface of the globe, making his life a whole lot easier, lay in a dark drawer back in his office, dead without batteries, which could neither be recharged nor replaced in Sa’ An.

About the only useful things on any of the maps were the line that marked the coast and the black circle of the city. Using the two of them and guessing at how far the ass had pulled him, he could usually make a stab at where he should be on the paper. But whenever he did so, his surroundings bared no similarity whatsoever to the symbols, shading, and annotations that fell under his forefinger. In the decades since the mapmakers had been here, every feature had grown, diminished, shifted, or simply disappeared and been replaced by something else, making it the most protean of landscapes that he had ever seen. That everything changed rapidly, Phipps could have coped with—he had built his career, after all, on the quantifying of that very flux—but what confused him was the way that the evolving geomorphology behaved. Water sprang from the ground where it shouldn’t, and was absent where it should be plentiful. Sandy soils still yielded at least one crop a year whereas richer soils produced nothing at all and had been abandoned. Trees grew unusually tall on the sides of windy ravines, but were absent from more suitable locations. And so on. Mostly Phipps loved his job, which kept him outside, alone, and remote; but sometimes the things he had to work with could be every bit as infuriating as people: erratic, incomprehensible, and given to upsetting his sensibilities.

He squinted again into the shimmering distance and grinned: at least the dunes were right where he expected them to be. The view seemed to tranquillise him and he felt himself letting go, detaching himself from the struggles of Mankind and his own part in those struggles. He was making the mistake of thinking like a human-geographer, seeing the world as a garden for man’s activity. It was a mistake because the garden was unpredictable and could at any time bite back at the hand that tries to till it.

A Landscape such as the one surrounding Phipps would only seem to be a mess to the people who try to tame it; who want something from it. Such a person, looking down on those dunes, would see lined up on the western edge of the steppe a disaster waiting to happen

Phipps thought he was wiser than that. What he saw in the flux of the dessert was a majestic organic phenomenon, part of nature’s unknown and unknowable dynamics, a thing of beauty. He grinned again at the mirage but then, suddenly remembering that he was here to serve man, the great gardener, and not his own spiritual impulses, he sat up straight in his seat and picked up the reins, as if he were about to pull away.

Instead of yelling at the donkey, however, another thought came to him, and he bent forwards and reached under the seat with his right hand. He found the cool metal beneath a piece of sackcloth and brought up his new gun. ‘I’d better try you out,’ he said, feeling its weight in his palm. He checked the clip, released the safety catch and pointed the weapon well over the donkey’s head. But instead of pulling the trigger, he sighed and lowered his shooting hand. ‘Better not, eh Ariel?’ he said to the animal, and then he jumped from the cart. He stumbled up a nearby hillock and when he’d caught his breath he again held up the gun and took aim. Looked along its barrel, he spotted a smudge of smoke over the horizon and following it earthwards he could just make out an amorphous clump of human dwellings. ‘More trees into the fire,’ he said, and then he shot the gun.

*

Finding humans living in such a vile place might have shocked Phipps on his first day in the field; but not now, not after weeks of seeing desperate people eking out wretched existences in similar patches of hell all over the steppe. He simply grinned as he rolled down a gentle incline into the miserable little village, with one eye on the immense dunes to his left and the other on the stick-and-mudbrick houses to his right. The two sides were adversaries at war and the road marked a line between them. This, however, was not a quick fight that would be over in minutes; it was a titanic struggle drawn out over years—but a fight to the death all the same.

With one hand on his jumpy hat, Phipps noticed the feeble attempts made by the villagers to keep back the dunes: they had planted shrubs, in several ragged lines of defence, foot-soldiers. But the shrubs had been crippled by the wind and stood bent at the waist for want of a simple crutch. And now, knee-deep in sand and gasping for water, they waited for death to overcome them.

Nearby, he saw old, mutilated stumps of trees, like the bones of desecrated corpses, sticking out of the earth. Living trees would have been helpful; but they had been plundered long ago and fed into the ovens; they had not been allowed to remain and resist the desert.

He noticed barren spaces that until recently would have been fields, and before that would have been pristine wilderness with all of its innate defence mechanisms. Broken-down walls surrounded some of the abandoned fields, collapsed fences others; but most of the land was now unconfined and windswept.

Small, unwashed children heralded his appearance in the village. They ran around his cart, chasing each other with outstretched arms and playful noises. They were skinny and dirty but none of them looked hungry or sickly, and Phipps wondered if things weren’t that bad here after all. But his next thought dampened his rising hope: the malnourished, diseased kids wouldn’t be out with the healthy ones; they would be indoors—or in the ground already.

Anyway, at least people still lived here, whatever condition they might be in. Now all he had to do was to persuade them to stay, to remain as the first line of defence and help keep back the encroaching desert.

Strangely, none of the adults had yet come out to see what the noise was about, to see what new affront to their lives the wind had blown in amongst their houses. He looked around, but saw only ragamuffin youngsters playing in the dust. Getting out of the cart, he asked what he thought was a boy where his father was. The boy pointed with a begrimed finger and said something in a very feminine voice that Phipps could not understand. He looked along the urchin’s digit, squinting into the bright afternoon, and then started to walk, down what was the village’s only road.

All the houses huddled together in a knot, which at first seemed strange to Phipps, given the endless space that ran away from them. He swept his head through a wide arc, surveying the surroundings, trying to see what might have caused this, and noticed a small knoll to his left, no more than a rocky outcrop—but definitely not a dune. He realised that the houses were in a very gently hollow, leeward of the rock, where the wind would be broken up and weak.

Beyond the settlement, in a fenced square of land, no larger than a tennis court, stood a silent line of men and women, among stalks of withered corn. At first Phipps wondered what they were doing but he soon noticed that between their hands passed buckets—moving quickly, but without a drop of whatever was inside spilling over their rims. He tried to see what was happening to the buckets at the end of the line, but his view was obscured by a stack of canes, overgrown with creepers and vines. He then tried to look beyond the field, for the well that must have been there, but he could see nothing.

Before he knew what was happening, he was again surrounded by yelping children, snapping at his ankles like playful puppies. The buckets suddenly stopped moving and twenty pairs of eyes fell on him.

A man, dressed in baggy trousers and a faded grey blazer, stepped out of the line and yelled something, to which one of the kids replied. ‘White foreigner,’ was the only phrase Phipps could catch.

The jacketed man threw down an empty bucket and started forward, his trousers filling out in the breeze; the others, some of whom first placed their buckets onto the ground with more care, melted in behind him.

Phipps stood his ground and gestured in the traditional manner of a greeting. Oh hell, he thought, I come in peace; but he raised his hands and uttered a ‘good afternoon’ instead.

He carried official letters of introduction with him, written in the local language, that explained clearly who he was, who he was working for, and what he wanted to do; but he had given up showing these as a means of introduction because of the embarrassment it caused to villagers, most of whom could not read; if, after some time in a village, he identified an educated person, then he might bring out the letters. Today he left them in his knapsack and tried his best to repeat some of his memorised sentences.

The man with baggy trousers replied with a few words but the others remained silent, staring blankly—if they understood, they didn’t show it. Despite Phipps’s first impression, nobody was hostile—they had no fight left in them. Phipps continued to pull sentences from his memory; some of them smiled when he told them, awkwardly, that he could help them to keep back the desert and return their land to production; others walked away.

If it hadn’t been for the naughty children and their antics, the village would have offered him all the excitement of a cemetery.

‘Pistachios,’ an old man replied when Phipps asked about the crops they used to grow, ‘and cashews.’

He knew what was coming: the now-familiar story of old rivers drying up, the dams and the government’s irrigation schemes, degradation of the soils, and a dropping water-table. He tried a different tack: ‘No, I mean before the nuts; what did you grow then; what did your grandparents used to grow on this land?’

The old man looked at Phipps as though Phipps were retarded and asking the most stupid question in the world. What could be more important than a cash crop? Just put back the water so that we can get on and make some more money.

Phipps waited.

‘Wheat,’ the man finally said, almost spitting out the word ‘And maize, and some other stuff that they never made a penny from—feed for animals, I think.’

Phipps took a deep breath and stepped back. They would never want to go back to that, he thought, staring at the forlorn peasants around him. Why not just tell them that the situation was beyond repair and they had all better pack off to the city as quickly as they could—at least then he could get on with his other line of work, give it the serious attention that it was due. His mind went back to London and his earnest-looking, black-suited sponsors popped into his mind. ‘We are counting on you in this, Doctor Phipps,’ one of them had said, the one who had spoken the most about financial gain—for both Phipps and the company he represented. ‘It’s all down to you.’

A fly buzzed under his nostrils; he swiped at it and then asked someone else about rocks. ‘Do you have a supply of big rocks?’ It was another stupid question and was met with even more derision. One more peasant walked away. The woman whom he had asked looked off into the wilderness; Phipps followed her gaze, seeing nothing but an endless supply of big, useless rocks. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We have to get them up onto the dunes; cover the windward surface of each dune with rocks—it will stop them moving.’ For the time being anyway, he added to himself.

Silence. One matronly woman pushed her leathery brow into sand-blasted furrows; an old man cracked his sallow face into a toothless grin; most kept their stony faces; and a few more walked away. One bold woman asked him to say it again.

‘Rocks,’ he tried again. ‘Rocks will break up the wind near the surface of the dune and stop the sand moving. After a while the dune will flatten and you can plant shrubs on it, then trees.’

‘We have tried many ways to stop the desert,’ the man with baggy trousers said.

The lines of shrubs, the fences, the walls—all apparently useless in their stand against the sand and wind, abandoned as lost causes. ‘Start with the rocks,’ Phipps said, ‘and we shall see what happens.’

*

That night he stayed in the village but thoroughly insulted the residents by insisting that he sleep under his own canvas and not in any of their dwellings. He thanked them for their hospitality, took a meagre meal from them, but downright refused to sleep in the same house as any of them.

He forewent a fire in his camp for the explicit purpose of showing the villagers that precious wood should not be used for such an extravagant purpose, He shivered in his sleeping bag and counted stars through the open door of his tent. He reached ten before his mind drifted back to earth. Is this a cure? he asked himself. Or simply further escape?

He must have met more people today than he had in any single day for a long time; and he had done so without thinking twice before making any of the contacts. The hatred that usually foreshadowed such intercourse with his fellow man was absent. The contempt for and loathing of others, that he thought was at the root of his problems, hardly showed their ugly heads. He hadn’t held back, made excuses, hidden himself, or run away. And even while he was actually conversing he hadn’t broken out in any cold sweats, felt wobbly at the knees, lost his voice, or gone to pieces in any of the other familiar old ways. He had held himself together.

Back in London he’d always felt trapped, swimming among a seething mass of humanity, retching at those he was forced to encounter. His mental suffering had been constant and mostly unbearable. It had even cost him his job.

Getting away changed everything. The knowledge that he didn’t belong probably had a lot to do with it. Not being a part of the culture and not having to immerse himself in the trivial aspects of daily life went a long way to restoring his sanity. And it seemed that the farther away he was, the more content he became and the easier it was to communicate with people. Out here in this patch of semiarid wilderness, he almost felt happy. His next thought, that of having one day to go back, made him shudder. Well, if he could find what he was looking for on the steppe and take back a specimen or two, he could collect his payment and retire to some lonely piece of wilderness like the one he was now almost happy in.

He totalled sixty five stars, three planets, a dozen satellites and a half-dozen meteorites before falling into a contented slumber. He dreamed of land he might soon call his home, populated only by goats, camels, and yellow reptiles.

*

Next morning, after finishing the breakfast of bread, dates and coffee the villagers brought him, he took directions for two more settlements that stood precariously on the edge of the desert between this one and the ocean, wished the villagers luck, and headed north. ‘ Rocks,’ he called back. ‘Start putting those rocs on the dunes.’

In the first hamlet, he found much of the same thing—a little worse, perhaps, in that the dunes were closer, the soil was sandier, and fewer people remained to make a stand and help put things right. But those few who greeted him were more eager to listen to his advice and at once began heaving rocks up the windward sides of the dunes.

He showed them a better way to make fences and a more efficient way to build walls. Luckily they had an excess of dried stalks (from a recent maize crop) and he showed them how to turn them into straw grids that could be set out on the soil to plant new crops in.

At the end of another very long day he again upset everyone by insisting that he sleep outside by himself.