Jan’s eyes were steady as they met the old man’s gaze. ‘I have come to live here,’ he said quietly. ‘Morocco is my home now. I have no home anywhere else in the world.’ He leaned forward slightly, a note of earnestness in his voice. ‘If there is wealth at Kasbah Foum, it shall be developed for the benefit of the people here. That is what I promised Marcel, and I shall keep my promise.’
He had spoken seriously and with force. The old man nodded. But he was still uncertain. ‘You are not a Frenchman,’ he said. ‘And you have only recently arrived in Morocco.’ He hesitated and then added, ‘What you say may be the truth at this moment. But a man easily changes his mind when his roots are not deep in the soil of his promise.’
‘I have come to live here,’ Jan repeated. ‘Morocco is my country now.’
The Caid glanced up at his son and then stared at Jan. It was as though he were weighing up the two men in his mind. There was a long silence. Finally he said, ‘Allah be my guide in this. It shall be as Capitaine Duprez wished it. I will give you — ‘
‘No.’ All’s hand descended on his father’s shoulder, gripping hold of it, digging his powerful fingers into the old flesh. ‘These men are strangers. They want the silver. Nothing more. They do not love our people.’
‘I do not believe it,’ the old man said, trying vainly to pluck his son’s hand from his shoulder.
‘Do this thing,’ Ali said, ‘and, as Allah is my witness, there will be trouble among the people.’
I stared at the scene with a sense of shock, scarcely able to believe that this was a son speaking to his father. In strict Berber etiquette the man should be as a child in the presence of his father, even to the point of making a request through an intermediary. Yet Ali’s manner was openly hostile, even contemptuous. The others in the room had noticed it, too. They were whispering and muttering among themselves whilst the two men — father and son — stared at each other. They were like two adversaries who had battled a long time. Finally the Caid gave a little sigh and his eyes, as they turned away, had the vacancy of the very old; it was as though they looked beyond the flickering walls, back through the dim vistas of the past. Slowly he pulled himself to his feet. Ali made no move to help him. His face was cruel with the look of satisfaction. ‘My father is tired,’ he said in French. ‘I must ask you to leave and permit him to rest.’
We waited for the Caid to speak. He stood there a long time, staring into vacancy. And all he said in the end was, ‘Yes, I am tired now. We will talk of this some other day.’
Jan-started to say something, but Ali silenced him with a gesture. He took his father’s arm and led him out. The Caid did not protest. But he paused in the doorway and looked back. His eyes fastened on Jan. And suddenly they weren’t vacant any more. They were intensely alive as though he were examining Jan’s features for a sign by which he could come to a decision. ‘Barak allaho fik!’ he murmured. ‘Allah bless you!’ His voice was gentle, like a monk saying a benediction. And then he was gone.
They brought lights and escorted us down the narrow stairs, across the open space of the roof top and into the bowels of the kasbah. A hand gripped my arm in the half dark. ‘I don’t like it,’ Jan whispered. ‘Ali is in control here.’
His words echoed my thoughts. We were in the dark tunnel of the entrance passage now. It was intensely cold and I tried to convince myself that that was why I was trembling. We passed the rectangular gap lit by the red glow of the brazier. Figures were huddled around it, as they had been when we arrived. They did not seem to have moved. It was just a brief glimpse and then the carbide flames were flickering on blank walls again, silhouetting the cowled, shadowy figures round us.
With a sense of relief I heard the scrape of the securing bar, the creak of the heavy wooden door. There was a rush of fresh air, a murmur of polite farewells, and then we were out in the cold, bright glitter of the star-studded night.
I turned, surprised that we were, in fact, outside the kasbah. For a moment the carbide flares lit the passageway and the swarthy, aquiline faces of our escorts, framed in the cowls of their djellabas. They were outlined for an instant, motionless like a tableau, and then the door thudded to and we were alone. It was only then, whilst the wooden securing bar was being dropped into place, that I realised we had been shown out without our guide.
Jan had noticed it, too. ‘Where’s Moha?’ he asked. His voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘Do you think…’ He didn’t finish the sentence, but I saw his hand reach into his breast pocket to make sure he still had the deeds there. ‘Do you remember the way back?’ he asked.
‘I think I can find it,’ I said. We had started to walk across the courtyard. We reached the archway and there ahead of us was the dark, towering shape of Ksar Foum-Skhira. There was no singing now. The village seemed as quiet as the grave. We came to the first of the wells and then we were under the shadow of the walls.
We stopped there as though by mutual consent and stood listening. There was no breath of wind and in the stillness my ears picked up small sounds — the grunt of a camel, the cry of a child; sounds that were innocent and yet, because they were not of our own world, disconcerting. ‘Do we have to go back through the palmerie?’ Jan said. ‘Couldn’t we cut across the Post and get on to the piste?’
The thought had been in my own mind, too. We both of us felt the need for open country round us. ‘All right,’ I said and we turned back, skirting the walls of Ksar Foum-Skhira, moving slowly, feeling our way in the darkness. Once we stumbled into a caravan of hobbled camels who champed and belched in the darkness, shifting their positions with nervous grunts.
We were on the south side of the village now and the going was slow, for we were in an area of intense cultivation and all the ground was criss-crossed with small earthworks about a foot high to retain the water when the irrigation ditches were allowed to flood. The palms thinned out and we were suddenly in soft sand. Here the desert had moved in on the palmerie, killing the trees and half burying them in steep dunes. We were a long time getting through the dunes, but at last we came out on to hard, flat desert and there, straight ahead of us, were the walls of the ruined souk.
After that we had no difficulty in finding the piste. We struck away from it to the right, making straight for Kasbah Foum, taking our bearing from the shape of the mountains hunched against the stars. The going was rough and uneven and we stumbled repeatedly over stones or fought our way through patches of dry, brittle scrub. It seemed a long time before we saw the faint glimmer of light that marked the position of the camp. We made steadily towards it and gradually the light separated into two lights and we could see the shape of the bus and, beyond it, the tents.
We couldn’t have been more than two or three hundred yards away, when there was a sudden cry — a yell that rose to a scream; high-pitched, sudden and frightening. It was cut off abruptly. I checked at the sound of it and in the same instant the headlights of the bus were switched on. They cut a great swath through the desert night and figures leapt to view, a huddle of Berber men bending over something on the sand of the piste. They straightened up and stood like frozen figures caught in some fearful act that should have remained cloaked by the night.