The Pharaoh Key

21

THEY RODE ALL night, without stopping for the usual four hours of rest. At dawn they paused at a thicket of thorny scrub to rest the camels and let them eat. A blood-red light broke over the eastern horizon as the sun rose.

Imogen unpacked one camel and Gideon helped her boil water. With their rug shredded to make improvised buckets, they used one of the camel blankets instead. Breakfast was coffee and a bone-dry piece of flatbread. They ate in silence. Gideon noticed Imogen glancing repeatedly at the eastern horizon.

“What are you looking at?”

She shook her head. “Probably nothing.”

Garza brought out the paper maps and spread them on the blanket, weighing them down with stones. He examined them for a while and, with his compass, triangulated their position using the peak of Gebel Umm, which now rose high above them, along with a secondary peak to one side. He drew two lines on the map from each of the bearings he’d sighted. The lines crossed at a narrow wadi.

“That’s where we are,” he said, tapping the crossing point. Beyond, the map was almost entirely blank—an expanse of paper with just a few wandering contour lines and the word UNSURVEYED liberally applied. Only the main peak of Gebel Umm itself was marked.

“I thought we’d be a lot farther than that.” Gideon said. “We rode all night and we’re barely any closer.”

Imogen came over and knelt, looking at the map. “All the winding back and forth in these wadis eats up a lot of distance without much progress.”

“Where on the map are your mines?” Garza asked.

Her hand swept vaguely over a large blank spot north of Gebel Umm. “Up in there.” Once again Gideon noticed Imogen scrutinizing the eastern horizon. The sun had come up, but the horizon had a thin brown line along it.

“Unsaddle the camels,” she said.

“I think we’d better keep going,” said Garza. “We’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be by now.”

Imogen ignored him as she couched her camel and began unsaddling it.

“What is it?” Gideon asked. “Is there a problem?”

Still not replying, she pulled off the saddle and blankets, then carried the saddle over to the edge of the wadi, where a pile of black rocks mounted up.

“Couch your camel next to mine and unsaddle her,” she ordered Gideon.

Gideon went to his camel, which was grazing on what looked like the thorniest bush in Egypt, its prehensile lips navigating the thorns as it plucked off what little greenery the plant had. He took the camel’s halter in hand and, using the stick, tried to get it to move away from the bush. After roaring in complaint, the camel grudgingly followed. He tapped it and the camel eased itself down. Gideon fumbled with the cinch.

“What the hell are you doing?” Garza asked, coming over. “We can get in at least a few more hours before it heats up.”

Imogen came over and, with expert efficiency, untied his saddle and slung it down next to hers, alongside the rock pile. “Look over there,” she said.

Garza and Gideon both looked in the direction she was pointing.

“Where?” asked Garza.

“That line on the horizon.”

“What of it?”

“It may be a haboob.”

“What the hell’s a haboob?”

“Also called a brown roller. It’s the worst kind of dust storm.”

Gideon squinted at the horizon. “I already noticed it. But I can’t see much of anything.”

“By the time you do, it’ll be too late.”

Garza, frowning, rummaged in the pack and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He glassed the horizon with an expression of annoyance, which quickly disappeared into a look of concern. Wordlessly he handed them to Gideon.

A dark reddish wall, a thousand feet high, seemed to lie across the horizon. As Gideon watched he could see it boiling and churning and getting bigger, closing in on them at an almost surreal speed. It did indeed look like a giant roller, approaching as if to flatten them.

“What do we do?” he asked quickly.

“Try to survive.” Imogen pointed to the saddles. “Manuel, you make a breastworks out of those saddles that we can use for shelter. Dig the supplies in behind them and weigh them down with the water bags. Gideon, you scoop out a depression for us to lie down in behind it. When the storm comes, we’ll pull the camel blankets over ourselves. I’m going to try to find a sheltered place for the animals.”

Gideon and Garza did as she said, once again scooping away sand with their sore hands. Sudden apprehension gave their limbs renewed strength. They laid the blankets in the depression and stacked the saddles, water bags, and Imogen’s now half-crushed Vuitton case in front of them. Imogen moved the camels down the wadi and couched them, staking their halter ropes into the sand. As they worked, the dark wall approached, higher and higher, yet strangely silent. It was almost black at the bottom, where it appeared to be boiling, pulling up ropes of sand from the ground and threading them into great streamers. The air around them was dead calm and unnaturally cool.

“Jesus,” said Garza, staring at it.

“Before it hits,” said Imogen, “we lie facedown, as close to each other as possible. We pull the camel blankets over us and hang on tight. If we start getting buried in sand, try to shift it off—don’t let it accumulate or you’ll suffocate.”

“How long will it last?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Is that all?”

“It’ll be the longest ten minutes of your life.”

The wall was now approaching swiftly, like the leading edge of a mushroom cloud, mounting ever higher, churning up bushes and scrub and shredding them to pieces in its powerful turbulence. In another moment the sun was blotted out, casting them into gloomy shadow.

“Get down,” Imogen said. “Now!”

They lay facedown, squeezed together in the depression behind the saddles, and drew the rugs and blankets over them. Gideon felt himself pressed against Imogen, the scent of soap and perspiration mingling with the smell of camels.

“For God’s sake, don’t let go of the blankets,” she said.

Now a sound filled the air: a deep vibration, almost like the low notes of an organ, rising in volume and power until the ground itself seemed to vibrate.

And then it hit. A thunderous roar was followed by a blast of wind, which seized the blanket Gideon was gripping and tried to tear it out of his hands. He could feel the force pulling on the saddles, and then suddenly they were gone, sucked upward in a great stream of sand, spinning away over their heads. A dense soup of airborne sand burst into their makeshift shelter. Gideon tried to breathe but got a mouthful of sand instead. He coughed and buried his mouth and nose into the crook of his arm. The screaming wind was flapping and jerking the blanket so violently that finally one gust wrenched it out of their collective grip. Now the full force of the sandstorm fell down on them: a torrent of sand and gravel, driven by the wind at a hundred miles an hour. Gideon felt the scouring blast of it rake his back, literally shredding the loose folds of his galabeya. He tried to raise himself slightly to take a breath and suddenly felt his body sucked upward by the blast. He was almost carried off before he felt an arm wrap around his back and yank him down. Choking, gasping, face buried, he desperately tried to breathe something other than sand. The screaming of the wind was so intense it sent a searing pain through his eardrums.

And then the wind abated. For a moment, he felt enormous relief that the storm was passing, until he realized he was mistaken: a weight was settling down on him, blocking out the scouring blast. It quickly grew heavier. They were being buried alive.

“Keep the sand off!” Imogen screamed in his ear.

Gideon struggled to push himself up even as the mass pressed down. A terror of being buried seized him and he gave his body a violent shake; another twist and he was able to force himself up through a waterfall of sand, straining, muscles popping. But it was a losing battle: more sand was falling than he could keep on top of. Finally, exhausted and defeated, he stopped fighting it and curled up, cupping his hands over his nose and mouth, his entire universe shrunken to a fetal ball in the midst of a wrathful power beyond all imagining. It went on, and on, and on, as a dreadful half night fell and everything grew blacker until he felt like a speck, a fragile disintegrating atom, buried in massive, impenetrable darkness.