The Sleeping Sands (12 page)

Saleh secured the travellers’ packs on three strong mules and the party headed off into a dreary rain-soaked and mud-bound morning. All day, they trudged on, meandering across a characterless and un-peopled landscape of mud and gushing water courses, each of which forced a new diversion. The noise of incessant rain and the effects of its miserable damp chill militated against any conversation as they dragged across the barren and monotonous country. Antonio made an occasional attempt to lift their dwindling spirits with a song but the cold and the ponderous slapping of the mules’ hoofs sucking into the mud defeated him. Layard attempted to question Saleh about the countryside they were passing through. However, its self-evident lack of intrinsic interest and the muleteer’s own worries about his absent wife and family made short work of any reply. The three waded on in silence.

At length, after a day of unbroken and featureless monotony, they came to a small, stony pathway that led down to the banks of the Jordan River. Here, at a place that Saleh identified as Joseph’s Ford, they found the crossing guarded by a party of Bashi Bozuks. Saleh led them a little way along the river, to a small settlement of reed huts, where Layard was able to purchase the corner of a hovel to rest the night. In the morning, they found the three of them were little drier than if they had spent the night exposed to the full force of the rain. Shivering in their soaking rags, the party drove on until they reached the village of Kuneitirah where they encountered the remnants of a caravan that had been attacked by Bedouin raiders on the high road to Damascus. Saleh determined that it was time for them to leave the road.

‘We cannot continue this way in safety, Effendi,’ he explained to Layard. ‘We must head across the hills and find a way to cross the quarantine in secret.’

He led the party into a series of rough, low hills, where they began to pick their way through a landscape of slippery, stony paths, inclines of rebellious mud and streams that had been bloated by the rain to impassable torrents. For every three paths the mule-driver attempted, two would inevitably lead to infuriating dead ends. Layard felt that the party travelled further away from their destination with every twist and turn. The mules snorted and dragged in irritation at every change of direction and Layard and Antonio found themselves forced to assist Saleh driving them on; pushing, pulling and slapping the unwilling animals, so that soon all six, men and beasts, were mud-spattered, footsore and in foul states of temper.

By the time that the light began to fade on their second day out from Zeytun, they had barely made any progress into the hills and Layard sensed that they were fast exhausting all of the roads open to them. After a particularly arduous and bad-tempered journey along a snaking, narrow, water-logged gully, they came to a sudden halt by a muddy bluff, where the path they had been following had been washed away by a gushing, brown water course. Layard cursed and demanded of Saleh whether they would ever be free of the maze of hills – challenging the muleteer’s much-lauded knowledge of the country. Saleh retorted by suggesting that no sane man would have attempted to cross the quarantine to Damascus in any conditions, let alone during such abysmal weather and the two fell to arguing, while the mules looked on in contempt. They were only halted by a sudden, frightened shout from Antonio.

‘Effendi!’

From the steep banks of the gully above, a band of wild looking men came howling suddenly upon them. Layard reached for his gun, strapped to the nearest mule, but in the heat of the argument, the neglected and resentful animal had wandered several yards from him and Layard found himself grasping for nothing but empty air. Saleh took one look at their assailants and flung himself, sliding down the bluff, disappearing into the darkness. Slipping on the slick and stony ground and flailing towards the mules, Layard and Antonio found themselves cut off from the animals and surrounded, facing an array of long guns and vicious looking swords. In an impotent rage, Layard turned from one attacker to the next, growling in wordless anger, while Antonio clutched at his sleeve and whimpered. Layard glared defiantly at the men and clenched his fists.

Their appearance was all the more outlandish for their drenched appearance. Their wild hair was plastered to their heads by the rain and their faces and clothes were streaked and smeared with thick mud. In the fading light, only their wide white eyes stood out against their grimed appearance. Their ragged military uniforms were only just discernible under the filth but their raving, cruel expressions and half-starved frames belied any evidence that these men had once been part of some disciplined body. Even in the rain, Layard could perceive a stench from them. It was a stink of fear, blood and desperation. He knew, looking into their greedy, unreasoning eyes, that he had little chance of negotiating with them.

‘What do you want?’ he demanded, and immediately fell silent as a long, sharp sword-point was pressed rudely under his chin.

‘Shut up!’ barked a tall, broad-shouldered brute of a man, stepping forward from the crowd. ‘Give us all your food, your clothes and your money!’

With the sword at his throat, Layard reached carefully for his purse. He offered it out, his hand shaking in helpless anger. The man laughed cruelly and snatched the purse from him. It tore open as he grabbed it, spilling its handful of piastres onto the ground. The man swore and leaned forward. With a shout, Antonio leapt at the man, battering at his outstretched hands with a flurry of weak blows. The man swore again and delivered an enormous open-handed blow to the side of Antonio’s head, launching the boy clear off his feet to land face-down on the sodden ground. The sight of the little dragoman sprawled at the ringleader’s feet drew a chorus of humourless laughter and a thin, sharp-featured fellow stepped forward to level his long gun at the boy’s head.

‘Don’t waste ammunition on him,’ sneered the leader. The man chuckled and rotated his gun, to bring the butt savagely down in the middle of Antonio’s back. The boy cried out in pain and writhed in the mud, clutching at his back, to the further amusement of the gang.

‘Bah, we don’t have time for entertainment,’ snapped the thickset man. ‘The Pasha’s patrols won’t be far behind us. Gather up these coins and see what they have in those packs of theirs!’

‘And the mules?’ asked one of the band.

‘Leave the animals to starve with these two wretches,’ said the leader, coldly. ‘They will only slow us down. Hurry now! We have wasted too much time already.’

One of the men picked Layard’s few remaining coins from the dirt, while the rest of the gang grabbed at their packs and pulled them apart, their contents spilling out onto the ground. Like a pack of tattered and bedraggled vultures, they clutched and tore at Layard’s possessions, squabbling and bickering until the leader’s urgent and angry commands restored some semblance of order. They proceeded to rifle through the packs, hungrily pulling apart and eating any food that they found and packing Layard and Antonio’s clothes into smaller bundles that they could easily carry across the rough terrain. After cursory inspection, his barometer, compass and other instruments were roughly discarded, as was his medicine case. The weasel-faced rogue who had beaten Antonio yanked Layard’s double-barrelled gun from its holster and held it up to the leader.

‘What about this?’ he asked, eagerly.

The leader walked to the man and grabbed the gun. He turned it round in his hands, poked clumsily at its unfamiliar mechanism and spat.

‘This is no good to us,’ he growled and threw it contemptuously to one side.

Layard stifled a cry of dismay as he saw his precious gun land, half-submerged in a filthy puddle. He stood and watched powerlessly as the men completed their desecration of his possessions, gathered them up and swarmed up the far side of the gully. In the darkness, he could make out one last, hulking silhouette linger to deliver its final taunt.

‘Go home, little Frank!’ cried the leader, ‘There is nothing but death in these hills.’

With that, the man vanished into the night, so that as suddenly as they had been ambushed, Layard and Antonio found themselves alone.

Layard bent down to Antonio, lying curled and whimpering on the floor. He had a slick, dark stain on his forehead. His cheek showed a cut from a stone where he had fallen. Layard gently helped the boy into a sitting position and began to clean the cuts as best he could with a corner of his linen shirt. He reached down to where Antonio’s tarbush had fallen and placed the now begrimed and soaked cap on the boy’s head.

‘Antonio, that was very brave of you, but very foolish,’ said Layard, his voice still shaking with emotion. ‘What were you thinking of?’

With a grimace of pain, Antonio held out his dirty, clenched fist and opened it to reveal a small, mud-caked object. He rubbed the mud from it as best he could and handed it to Layard with a shy, small smile.

‘I couldn’t let them get this, Effendi,’ he said, between short, shallow breaths. ‘He said that you needed it to bring you good fortune.’

Layard looked down at the object, dully gleaming in his hand. It was the Bashi Bozuk’s sefira.

‘Brigands! Thieves! Filthy sons of bitches! What have those animals done to you?’

A few moments later, Saleh had rejoined them, scrambling up the slippery bank from a handhold he had found in the form of a patch of scrubby bushes by the water’s edge. Ignoring Layard and the injured Antonio, he had headed straight to his mules and begun to stroke and soothe them, murmuring words of reassurance and comfort. It was only once he was certain, by means of careful and thorough inspection, that the mules were unharmed that his attention turned to his human companions.

‘You are lucky to be alive,’ he informed them, ‘those men were deserters from the Pasha’s army. They face certain death if they are captured or if they try to return to their homes, so all they can do is roam these wastelands, preying on poor unfortunate travellers like us.

‘If there is one band, there will be more of them,’ he added, peering nervously in the dark. ‘Or, if not more packs of these dogs, there will be a troop of cavalry on their tail. If we’re caught by them, then we’ll either be shot as quarantine breakers or drafted into the army on the spot. We have to get moving, quickly, and try and find some shelter. Hurry up and gather your things, we need to go, now!’

Layard set about the job of gathering together his gun and instruments, aided, despite his protestations, by the still bleeding Antonio. Using the strap of his medicine case and strips torn from his cloak, he improvised a bundle, which he shouldered; not trusting the precarious makeshift pack to the mules. Loaded thus and with Antonio cradling the medicine kit, the travellers hurried back along the gully, searching for a new path that could lead them to safety.

Above them, the clouds thickened and the rain drove relentlessly against them as the wind rose. Above the howling wind, there was a distant rumble of thunder.

After more than an hour of searching, the exhausted travellers at last found a narrow, winding path leading from the gully that they had overlooked earlier in the evening. With much cajoling and physical persuasion of their reluctant mules, they managed to scramble up the path, which led gradually higher into the hills. Shivering in the cold and rain, summoning their last reserves of energy, they toiled slowly for a further two hours, slipping and staggering in the dark, until they emerged at last on the crest of the hill. The hill ran in a long, narrow ridge ahead of them, disappearing into the night. To their right, it fell off suddenly into a precipice, the extent of which was hidden in the darkness. Along the ridge, small knots of thorn bushes, wild olives and scattered thickets of oak and Aleppo pines made progress slow and perilous. The dead branches of the oaks, rotted and sodden in the rain were particularly hazardous. Every now and then one of the men or animals would step on what seemed like a solid branch only to find it give way like so much damp blotting paper to send them stumbling into the night. The wind continued to howl and fling cruel salvos of ice-cold rain against their exposed faces. Their saturated clothes had long since ceased to offer any protection from the storm. The chill bit them to their souls. As he walked, Layard was bothered for several minutes by a strange noise in his head until he realised it was the sound of his own teeth chattering. The thunder rumbled ever nearer now and the blackness of the unknowable void at their side was a constant, looming menace. With each slippery step, the fear of its dark embrace took gradual hold of them, until each foot forward became a thing of anxious terror. Only the unrelenting assault of the storm and the sense that they had no choice but to drive forward kept them plodding on. Their fingers and feet became numb and leaden and their slips and stumbles became more frequent – with every one a disaster avoided and their credit of blind luck depleted.

‘What was that?’ cried out Saleh, suddenly, a note of rising terror in his voice.

‘What?’ shouted Layard over the storm, ‘I heard nothing but the wind.’

‘I heard something,’ urged the mule-driver. ‘It’s those ruffians, they are after us!’

‘Collect yourself, man!’ commanded Layard. ‘There is nothing out here but us – and that won’t be the case for much longer if you don’t watch your step. Be careful, now.’

‘I swear I heard something,’ insisted Saleh. ‘Look – there!’

A flash of lightning illuminated the ridge. Saleh gestured wildly at the dark shadows behind them.

‘There they are!’ he screamed. ‘They are hunting us!’

‘Calm down, Sir!’ shouted Layard, casting a sideways look at Antonio, who was crouched in a paralysis of fear, staring in the direction Saleh had indicated.

‘There is nothing behind us; nothing but rocks and trees,’ he grabbed the muleteer’s shoulder with his free hand and pulled him forward. ‘Don’t cry out so,’ he said, in a softer tone. ‘You’ll startle the animals.’

The mule-driver stared at him for a long moment and then shook his head.

‘I am sorry, Effendi,’ he apologised. ‘I was mistaken. It is this awful night.’