‘What do they want?’ A black-bearded ruffian had the muzzle of his gun jammed against the side of my neck, and though I tried to keep my voice under control I don’t think I was very successful.
‘All right, all right,’ Entwhistle was shouting at them. ‘One at a time for God’s sake.’ He didn’t seem in the least bit scared. Finally, after a long conversation with my bearded friend, he said, ‘It looks like trouble. We’re more or less under arrest.’ He spoke to the bearded Arab again and then he was ordering men on to the Land-Rover and others to the truck behind. ‘It seems,’ he said as we moved off, ‘that Sheikh Makhmud sent a party out in two Land-Rovers this afternoon to arrest my outfit and bring me back to Saraifa for questioning.’ And he added, ‘This could be the sort of thing David came up against. They’re scared stiff of the Emir and frightened to death of any activity on the Hadd border.’
‘Didn’t you know that before you decided to run a survey there?’ I asked.
‘Of course I did. But I was reckoning to run the survey and get out before anyone discovered I was there.’ He crashed the gears savagely. ‘I took a chance and it didn’t come off, that’s all.’
We skirted the crumbling wall of a date garden. The palms were green here, the gardens uninvaded by the desert sand. And then suddenly we were in the open, driving on hard gravel, and straight ahead of us, a black bulk against the stars, was the shadowy shape of the Sheikh’s palace standing like a fortress on its hill. The wooden gate of the arched entrance was closed, but it opened to the cries of our guards, and then we were inside, in a great courtyard packed with men and camels and lit by the flames of cooking fires. In an instant we were surrounded, lapped round by a tide of men, all shouting and brandishing their weapons.
A big, portly man appeared, his face black as a Sudanese. The Sheikh’s secretary,’ Entwhistle said to me. He looked like a eunuch, fat and soft, his manner almost feminine. He gave orders for the care of the men and then escorted us into the palace, along dark corridors sparsely lit by smoking lamps made out of old cans, to a small room that looked out on to a central courtyard. Here the earthen floor was carpeted with rugs, the walls lined with cushions; an Arab rose to greet us. He was a compact, stocky man with almost black eyes and a proudly curved nose. The khanjar knife stuck in the girdle of his finely-woven robe was a beautiful example of the silversmith’s craft. ‘Sheikh Makhmud,’ Entwhistle whispered.
I found my hand held in a firm grip. ‘You are welcome to Saraifa,’ the Sheikh said in halting English. ‘My house is your house.’ He had an air of command, yet his voice was gentle. But the thing that surprised me most was the fact that he wore glasses. They were silver-rimmed glasses and they drew attention to the blackness of his eyes. His clean-shaven face was long and tired-looking. He was a man of about Gorde’s age, I suppose. The other occupant of the room had also risen, a thin man with a greying moustache and a little pointed beard, his eyes heavily made up with kohl. He was Makhmud’s brother, Sultan.
We sat cross-legged on the cushions and there was nothing in the Sheikh’s manner to indicate that we were anything but honoured guests. Polite conversation was made, partly in the Arab language, partly in English. Slaves came with a silver jug and a silver ewer. We washed our hands and then they brought in a simple dish of rice and mutton. ‘You eat with your right hand,’ Entwhistle whispered to me, and I tried to copy his practised movements.
I was hungry enough not to care that the meat was stringy and over-fat. We ate almost in silence and when we had finished, the hand-washing was repeated and then coffee was served in little handleless cups, poured by a slave from a silver pot of intricate native design. And with the coffee came the questions. Sheikh Makhmud’s voice was no longer gentle. It had a harsh, imperious quality, and Entwhistle was soon in difficulties with the language, lapsing periodically into English as he tried to explain his presence on the Saraifa-Hadd border. In the end he passed Sheikh Makhmud the note Gorde had written.
Entwhistle had just launched into an account of the attack that had been made on us when a young man entered. He was short, well-built, and beneath his brown cloak he wore an old tweed jacket. But it was the features that caught the eye; they were delicate, almost classic features, the nose straight, the eyes set wide apart, with high cheek-bones and the full lips framed by a neatly trimmed moustache that flowed round the corners and down into a little pointed beard. He looked as though he had just come in from the desert and I knew instinctively that this was Khalid, the Sheikh’s son; he had an air about him that showed he was born to command.
He greeted his father and his uncle, waved us to remain seated and folded himself up on a cushion against the wall. The brass of cartridge belt, the silver of khanjar knife gleamed beneath the jacket. He sat in silence, listening intently, his body so still that I was given the impression of great muscular control — a hard-sinewed body below the Arab robes.
There was a long silence when Entwhistle had finished. And then Sheikh Makhmud made what sounded like a pronouncement, and Entwhistle exclaimed: ‘Good God! I’m not going to do that.’ He turned to me. ‘He wants us to go to the Emir and explain that we were on the border without authority.’
‘You go freely,’ Sheikh Makhmud said in English. ‘Or you go with escort. Which you prefer?’
Entwhistle didn’t say anything. His face was set and pale.
‘Is very difficult this situation,’ the Sheikh said almost apologetically. ‘Very dangerous also. You must make the Emir understand please.’
‘Very dangerous for us, too,’ Entwhistle muttered angrily.
‘I don’t want any trouble.’
‘You want oil, don’t you?’
‘Colonel Whitaker is already drilling for oil.’
‘Then what was his son doing on the Hadd border?’ Entwhistle demanded. ‘He ran a survey there. He wrote a report. And then he vanished.’ There was no answer. ‘Khalid. You were his friend. What happened to him?’
But Khalid was staring out into the courtyard.
In the silence I heard myself say, ‘He got a letter through to me just before he disappeared. He knew he was going to die.’ I felt them stiffen, the silence suddenly intense. I looked at Khalid. ‘Did he die a natural death?’ His eyes met mine for a moment then fell away. ‘Somebody here must know how he died — and why.’
Nobody answered and the stillness of those three Arabs scared me. It was the stillness of unease. ‘Where’s Colonel Whitaker?’ I asked.
The Sheikh stirred uncomfortably. ‘You are full of questions. Who are you?’
Briefly I explained. I was still explaining when there was a sudden uproar in the passage outside and a man burst into the room, followed closely by the Sheikh’s secretary. A staccato burst of Arabic and they were all suddenly on their feet. I heard the word falaj run from mouth to mouth, saw Khalid rush out, quick as a cat on his feet. His father followed more slowly, the others crowding behind him.
‘What is it?’ I asked Entwhistle. ‘What’s happened?’
‘One of the falajes, I don’t know exactly but for some reason the water has stopped.’
We were alone now. Everybody had forgotten about us. It was as though that word had some sort of magic in it. ‘What exactly is a falaj?’ He didn’t seem to hear me and I repeated the question.
‘Falaj?’ He seemed to drag his mind back. ‘Oh, it’s the water system on which the date gardens depend. The water comes from the mountains of the Jebel anything up to thirty miles away and it’s piped into Saraifa by underground channels.’