“I believe that a caravan, crazed and dying from thirst, left the road to follow a mirage. It was their last effort, and the beasts and men began to drop out like locusts flying over burning grass. I believe the road swung to the right instead of to the left, southeast instead of northeast. I saw what I thought were markers to the southeast.”
“Truly we should go southeast, and I believe we are. If we could see the sun, I think it would be over there.” I pointed to a faintly luminous patch in the sky.
“I think that’s a thinning of the dust cloud and the sun’s behind us. Since I’ve appointed you the watch, I would like to have you turn back from your own conviction. Let’s see if we can get a shadow.”
He put the point of his small dagger on his thumbnail. It cast a discernible shadow on the pink sheen, a trick I had not seen before. The sun was where he had indicated and we were heading down a devil’s road toward Death. With self-hatred in my heart, I ordered the retreat. Nicolo rode nonchalantly to his place.
Midafternoon before the midnight that would complete nine days out of Lob, we rested by a meager well below a dune-ringed plateau of sand stretching northward as far as we could see. There was only a half-measure of water for every man, none for the beasts; and many whirlwinds raising brown towers that suddenly collapsed in falling palls might foretell the dread sirocco. The most flamboyant sunset I could remember ushered in the most chill, desolate twilight. By the time the leprous moon, gourd-yellow, cleared the eastern dunes, the cameleers lay wrapped in their barracans, each beside his picketed mount, trying to dream away their hunger, thirst, and dismay before the midnight call. Between times of hanging their heads in despair, the horses neighed and stamped. Occasionally a camel raised a horrid bubbling cry that stretched every nerve in hearing to the breaking-point before it as suddenly and unaccountably subsided.
Once I thought I heard an echo of the yell up and away on the plateau.
I thought so without any great conviction. But soon after this, there was no doubt of my hearing what we called zither music all about our encampment. My gaze wheeled to Nicolo, posting accounts by the light of a sputtering tamarisk torch. He did not raise his head and some little tension in his body told me that he too heard the devilish sound.
It died away soon, and the eerie whist disclosed another sound that I had thought was only a trick of my pulse and breath. It appeared to be carried on the breeze from far out on the plateau and was imaginable as the harsh utterance of a cicadalike insect at the last dim edge of hearing. On that frontier, it rose and fell a little, never any louder than the hum of a mosquito when one is half-awake, and whatever its origin, I believed it to be a genuine sensory experience, not an auricular illusion.
I lost it for a moment, but groping in the silence, found it again. It became discernibly plainer with the passing moments, and I began to search my memory for its likeness. I had heard many natural sounds that it faintly resembled, but the one that it fitted best was the one that caused the most unpleasant tightening of my scalp. That was the sound made by a moving caravan at a good distance.
Truly I had expected to hear a sound of this general sort long before tonight. Not only the Nestorian priest had promised it; the old cameleers who had passed this way before had given me detailed accounts of its manifestation, usually associated with disaster. Trying to put myself in Mustapha’s shoes, I had thought of it as some natural sound of the desert, transmuted by human imagination into a thing of terror. But as it came clearer, I was awe-stricken by its uncanny familiarity. Drivers appeared to be shouting and cursing at their beasts the same as on any rough road, horses neighed, goaded camels uttered their inimitable complaints. I could not resist the impression that a marching caravan was much nearer than the volume of the sound would indicate, as though it was muted by some barrier other than distance—as though it broke through from some other world. But that might be an effect of its source’s being well over our heads on the sandy plateau, whereby only a kind of echo floated down to us.
The camp was waking. A few of the drivers covered their heads so they could not hear; others sat up, fingering their amulets. I rose and walked into Nicolo’s torchlight. He saw me and laid down his pen.
“Excuse me, signor, for interrupting your work,” I said.
“It was already pretty well interrupted by the sounds out yonder,” he answered in a pleasant tone. “I would almost think they’re real.”
“I do think they’re real.”
“Of course they are, in that we really hear them, not imagine them. So is the zither playing. I meant I can almost believe that there’s a caravan of living men and beasts out there in the dark.”
“I think there is.”
“Men go in search of such caravans—and never come back. You might think of them as a mirage of the ear instead of the eye. Perhaps the sound is mysteriously borne from some caravan road scores of miles distant. Listen! I fancy it’s growing a little fainter——”
I thought the same.
“I believe it’s a lost caravan within a mile of us,” I insisted, “and you should order fires built and pots clattered.”
“What will we use for fuel? There’s no dried dung—not enough tamarisk to make a torch. Would you have us set fire to our stores? Anyway, could they see it behind these dunes? As for a clatter of pans and pots, it wouldn’t carry far against the wind, and the drivers would think we were summoning the Devil and kill all three of us. But suppose it was a lost caravan, and we found it and brought it here. They’re out of water or they wouldn’t be traveling at this hour, and mad or dying. What could we do for them. What might they do to us?”
“I’m considering riding up on the plateau.”
Nicolo’s eyes glistened in the moonlight. “If you believe it’s a real caravan in distress, of course I’ll do nothing to stop you.”
I turned away and my thoughts turned inward. The sounds of men’s shouts and beasts’ cries were as plain as the shape of the camels I had seen two days before. Perhaps there was a natural sound heard often in this region that resembled the noise of a caravan on the march, but my unusually sharp ears had tonight discovered evidences, missed by other listeners, of the thing itself. I remembered the faint prints at the junction of the northern road with ours—one hard local wind might have made day-old tracks appear several weeks old. Then another memory stopped my heart.
What of the false road I had followed half a mile? If a day or two earlier another caravan had been similarly led astray and had followed the course to the last white bone, the captains might even now be seeking their lost way. Tonight they might have wandered within hearing of our encampment, and just now had yielded to despair and turned away.
But the Devil that had sent a legion of demons to call me to my destruction could put logic in my brain to make me follow on.
3
In the light of day, my mare Roxana was a lively red-bay. The night had turned her black, and it seemed I hardly knew her as I got her between my thighs, as though a hell nag had been picketed in her place to bear me to my doom. It seemed that I hardly knew myself as I made up the dunes, as though my identity had been washed out in the thin flood of moonlight, and I was some sort of puppet being led on a string by the Powers of Darkness. I felt the enmity of the sands, the wind, the strange shadows, even the moon, whom aforetime I had loved. All were ineffably menacing to the little torch of life within my breast.
Instead of one long sand dune climbing up the plateau, there was a series of dunes of increasing height and steepness, with black valleys between. I could hear nothing but my mare’s grunting and the shuffle of sand all up that strange ascent, but as we gained the plateau, the sounds I had followed became suddenly much louder and more sharply accented. These were not natural phenomena. Either a caravan of living men and animals moved to the windward, or else a legion of demons was deliberately and perfectly imitating its characteristic clamor.