Sandstorm

16
Crossroads

AS THEskies brightened to the east, Omaha slowed the van at the top of the pass. The road continued down the far side…if the rutted, stone-plagued track could be called a road. His lower back ached from the constant bump and rattle of the last ten miles.

Omaha braked to a halt. Here the road crested the last pass through the mountains. Ahead, the highlands dropped to salt flats and gravel plains. In the rearview mirror, fields of green heather spread, dotted with grazing cattle. The transition was abrupt.

To either side of the van lay a moonscape of red rock, interrupted by patches of straggly, red-barked trees, bent by the winds flowing over the pass. Boswellia sacra. The rare and precious frankincense trees. The source of wealth in ages past.

As Omaha braked, Painter’s head snapped up from a light drowse. “What is it?” he asked blearily. One hand rested on the pistol in his lap.

Omaha pointed ahead. The road descended through a dry riverbed, a wadi. It was a rocky, treacherous course, meant for four-wheel-drive vehicles.

“It’s all downhill from here,” Omaha said.

“I know this place,” Barak said behind them. The fellow never seemed to sleep, whispering directions to Omaha as they wound through the mountains. “This is Wadi Dhikur, the Vale of Remembrance. The cliffs to either side are an ancient graveyard.”

Omaha popped the van into gear. “Let’s hope it doesn’t become ours.”

“Why did we come this way?” Painter asked.

In the third row of seats, Coral and Danny stirred, slumped against each other. They sat straighter, listening. Clay, seated beside Barak, merely snored, head craned back, lost to the world.

Barak answered Painter’s question. “Only the local Shahra tribe know of this route down the mountains to the desert. They still collect frankincense from the trees around here in the traditional manner.”

Omaha had never met anyone from the Shahra clan. They were a reclusive bunch, almost stone age in their technology, frozen in tradition. Their language had been studied at length. It was unlike modern Arabic, almost a reedy singsong, and contained eight additional phonetic syllables. Over time, most languages lose sounds, becoming more refined as they mature. With the additional syllables, the Shahri language was considered to be one of the most ancient in all of Arabia.

But more particularly, the Shahra called themselves the People of ’Ad, named after King Shaddad, the first ruler of Ubar. According to oral traditions, they descended from the original inhabitants of Ubar, those who fled its destruction inA.D 300. In fact, Barak might be leading them down the very path to Ubar that the People of ’Ad had once used to flee its destruction.

A chilling thought, especially shadowed by the entombed graves.

Barak finished, “At the bottom of the wadi, it is only thirty kilometers to reach Shisur. It is not far.”

Omaha began their descent, in the lowest gear, creeping at five miles per hour. To go any faster risked sliding out in the loose shale and rocky scree. Despite the caution, the van skidded all too often, as if traveling on ice. After half an hour, Omaha’s hands were damp on the wheel.

But at least the sun was up, a dusty rose in the sky.

Omaha recognized that hue. A storm was coming. Due to strike the area in a few more hours. Already winds off the sands blew up the wadi, blustering against the less-than-aerodynamic van.

As Omaha rounded a blind bend in the riverbed, two camels and a pair of robed bedouin appeared ahead. He hit the brakes too hard, fishtailed the rear end, and struck broadside into a precariously stacked set of stone slabs alongside the road. Metal buckled. The slabs toppled.

Clay startled awake with a snort.

“There goes our collision deposit,” Danny griped.

The two camels, loaded and strapped with bales and overflowing baskets, gurgled at them, tossing their heads, as they were walked past the stalled van. It looked like they were carrying an entire household on their backs.

“Refugees,” Painter said, nodding to other similarly laden camels, mules, and horses moving up the dry watercourse. “They’re fleeing the storm.”

“Is everyone okay?” Omaha asked as he fought the gearshift knob, punching the clutch. The van lurched, rocked, and finally began to roll again.

“What did we hit back there?” Coral asked, staring at the toppled stones.

Danny pointed to other similar stone piles that peppered the graveyard. “Triliths,” he answered. “Ancient prayer stones.” Each was composed of three slabs leaned against one another to form a small pyramid.

Omaha continued down the road, wary of the stacked stones. This was made more difficult as “traffic” grew thicker the lower down the riverbed they traveled.

Folks were fleeing the desert in droves.

“I thought you said no one knew about this back door out of the mountains,” Painter asked Barak.

The Arab shrugged. “When you’re facing the mother of all sandstorms, you run toward higher ground. Any ground. I wager every riverbed is being climbed like this. The main roads are surely worse.”

They had heard periodic reports over the radio as reception came and went. The sandstorm had grown in size, as large as the Eastern Seaboard, whipping up eighty-mile-per-hour winds, packed by scouring sands. It was shifting sand dunes around like they were whitecaps on a storm-swept sea.

And that was not the worst. The high pressure system off the coast had begun to move inland. The two storm systems would meet over the Omani desert, a rare combination of conditions that would whip up a storm unlike any seen in ages before.

Even as the sun dawned, the northern horizon remained cloaked in a smoky darkness. As they descended the mountain road, the storm ahead grew taller and taller, a tidal wave cresting.

They finally reached the bottom of the wadi. The cliffs fell away to either side, spilling out into the sandy salt flats.

“Welcome to the Rub‘ al-Khali,” Omaha announced. “The Empty Quarter.”

The name could not be more fitting.

Ahead stretched a vast plain of gray gravel, etched and scoured with pictographic lines of blue-white salt flats. And beyond, a red ridge marked the edge of the endless roll of dunes that swept across Arabia. From their vantage, the sands glowed in pinks, browns, purples, and crimsons. A paint pot of hues.

Omaha studied their fuel gauge. With luck, they’d have just enough gas to reach Shisur. He glanced over to the Desert Phantom, their only guide. “Thirty kilometers, right?”

Barak leaned back and shrugged. “Thereabouts.”

Shaking his head, Omaha turned forward and set off across the flat-lands. A few straggling folk still trudged toward the mountains. The refugees showed no interest in the van heading toward the storm. It was a fool’s journey.

No one in the van spoke, eyes fixed forward on the storm. The only sound: the crunch of sand and gravel under their tires. With the cooperative terrain, Omaha risked pushing the van up to thirty miles per hour.

The winds unfortunately seemed to pick up with every half mile, blowing streams of sand from the dunes. They would be lucky to have any paint on the van when they reached Shisur.

Danny finally spoke. “It’s hard to believe this used to be a vast savannah.”

Clay yawned. “What are you talking about?”

Danny shifted forward. “This wasn’t always desert. Satellite maps show the presence of ancient riverbeds, lakes, and streams under the sand, suggesting Arabia was once covered by grasslands and forests, full of hippos, water buffalo, and gazelle. A living Eden.”

Clay stared at the arid landscape. “How long ago was this?”

“Some twenty thousand years. You can still find Neolithic artifacts from that time: ax blades, skin scrapers, arrowheads.” Danny nodded to the wastelands. “Then began a period of hyperaridity that dried Arabia into a desert wasteland.”

“Why? What triggered such a change?”

“I don’t know.”

A new voice intervened, answering Clay’s question. “The climatic change was due to Milankovitch Forcing.”

Attention turned to the speaker. Coral Novak.

She explained. “Periodically the Earth wobbles in its orbit around the sun. These wobbles or ‘orbital forcings’ trigger massive climatic changes. Like the desertification of Arabia and parts of India, Africa, and Australia.”

“But what could cause the Earth to wobble?” Clay asked.

Coral shrugged. “It could be simple precession. The natural periodic changes in orbits. Or it could be something more dramatic. A flip-flop of the Earth’s polarity, something that’s occurred a thousand times in geologic history. Or it might have been a burp in the rotation of the Earth’s nickel core. No one can really say.”

“However it happened,” Danny concluded, “this is the result.”

Before them, the dunes had grown into massive hummocks of red sand, some stretching six hundred feet high. Between the dunes, gravel persisted, creating winding, chaotic roadways, nicknamed “dune streets.” It was easy to get lost in the maze of streets, but the more direct route over the dunes could bog the hardiest vehicle. Something they could not chance.

Omaha pointed ahead, directing his question to Barak, meeting the Desert Phantom’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “You know your way through there, right?”

The giant of an Arab shrugged again, his usual response to everything.

Omaha stared at the towering dunes…and beyond them, a wall of churning dark sand rising from the horizon, like the smoky edge of a vast grass fire sweeping toward them.

They had no time for wrong turns.