The lost oases

by Ahmad Muhammad Hasanayn

Two years later I was back in the same desert, at the same spot where we had lost our way, and landed at the same well that had saved our lives on the previous occasion.

The desert calls, but it is not easy to analyze its attraction and its charm. Perhaps the most wonderful part of desert life is the desert night. You have walked the whole day on blistered feet, because even walking was less painful than riding on a camel; you have kept up with the caravan with eyes half shut; you follow mechanically the rhythm of the camels’ steps. Your throat is parched, and there is no well in sight. The men are no more in the humor to sing. Their faces are drawn with exhaustion, and with eyes bloodshot they keep a vague, hopeless look on the ever faint line between the blue of the sky and the dull yellow of the sand. The sheepskin water-vessels dangle limply on either side of the camels.

We do not talk very much in the desert. The desert breeds silence. And when we are in trouble we avoid one another’s eyes. There is no need for speech. Everybody knows what is happening, and everybody bears it with fortitude and dignity, for to grumble is to throw blame on the Almighty, a thing that no Bedouin will do. To the Bedouin, this is the life that was intended for him; it is the route that God decreed him to take; maybe it leads to the death that the Almighty has chosen for him. Therefore he must accept it. No man can run away from that which God has decreed, says the Bedouin. “Wherever you may be, Death will reach you . . . even though you take your refuge in fortified towers.”

But it is at such times as these that you vow, if your life is spared, that you will never come back to the desert again.

Then the day’s work is at an end. Camp is pitched. No tents are erected, for the men are too exhausted, too careless to mind what happens to their bodies. And night falls. It may be a starlit night, or there may be a moon. Gradually a serenity gets hold of you. Gradually, after a day of silence, conversation starts. Feeble jokes are cracked. One of the men, probably the youngest of the caravan, ventures a joke with more cheerfulness than the rest, and his voice is pitched in a higher key. Unconsciously the Bedouins attune their voices to that higher, louder pitch, and the volume of sound increases. The desert is working her charm.

The gentle night breeze revives the spirits of the caravan. In a few minutes the empty fantasses are used as drums, and there is song and dance. At the first sound of music men may have been tending the camels, repairing the luggage or the camels’ saddles, but that first note brings all the caravan round the embers of the dying fire. Every one looks at his comrades to make sure that all are alive and happy; and every one tries to be a little more cheerful than his neighbor, to give him more confidence. There is a game of make-believe, a little ghastly in its beginnings. We force ourselves to be cheerful, to make light of our troubles. “The camels are all right; I saw to that wound, and it is not so bad as I thought,” says one. “Bu Hassan says he has sighted the landmark of the well not far to our right,” says another. We work ourselves up by degrees to a belief that everything is really all right. It is bluff, maybe, from beginning to end, but the charm of the desert has prevailed.

It is as though a man were deeply in love with a very fascinating but cruel woman. She treats him badly, and the world crumples in his hand; at night she smiles on him, and the whole world is a paradise. The desert smiles, and there is no place on earth worth living in but the desert.

Song and dance take out from the men of the caravan the little vitality that is left after the ravages of the day. Their spirit is exhausted, and they fall asleep. They sleep beneath the beautiful dome of the sky and the stars. Few people in civilization know the pleasure of just sitting down and looking at the stars. No wonder the Arabs were masters of the science of astronomy! When the day’s work is done the solitary Bedouin has nothing left but to sit down and watch the movements of the stars and absorb the uplifting sense of comfort that they give to the spirit. These stars become like friends that one meets every day. And when they go, it is not abruptly as when men say farewell at a parting, but it is like watching a friend fade gradually from view, with the hope of seeing him again the following night.

“To prayers, O ye believers; prayers are better than sleep!” The cry comes from the first man of the caravan to awake. A few stars are still scattered in the sky. The men get up, and there is nothing better illustrates the phrase “collect their bodies.” Every limb is aching, and again their throats are parched. Yet what changed men they are! There is hope in them, confidence, perhaps an inward belief that all will come well.

The world then is a gray void, and only the morning fire breaks the cold north breeze. Our eyes instinctively turn to the east where the sun is rising. If there are no clouds, there comes a yellowish tinge in the sky that throws a curious elusive, elongated shadow behind camels and men, so faint that you can scarcely call it a shadow at all. Then comes a reddish tinge that gives warmth. It is just between dawn-break and sunrise that there is color in the desert. Once the sun is risen there is nothing but the endless stretch of blue and yellow, and the blue fades and fades until by midday the sky is almost wrung dry of color.