I glanced up from the book and looked around me. The motionless man across the road had disappeared. There was nobody in sight. The silence was eerie, and the stillness, the utter stillness and desolation of the place was profoundly oppressive. I knew I was being watched. I knew that every little move I made, every sip of whisky and every puff of a cigarette, was being carefully noticed. I detest violence and I never carry a weapon. But I could have done with one now. For a while, I toyed with the idea of starting the motor and driving on down the road until the engine boiled over. But how far would I get? Not very far in this heat and without a fan. One mile, perhaps, or two at the most ...
No - to hell with it. I would stay where I was and read my book.
It must have been about an hour later that I noticed a small dark speck moving towards me along the road in the far distance, coming from the Jerusalem direction. I laid aside my book without taking my eyes away from the speck. I watched it growing bigger and bigger. It was travelling at a great speed, at a really amazing speed. I got out of the Lagonda and hurried to the side of the road and stood there, ready to signal the driver to stop.
Closer and closer it came, and when it was about a quarter of a mile away, it began to slow down. Suddenly, I noticed the shape of its radiator. It was a Rolls-Roycel! I raised an arm and kept it raised, and the big green car with a man at the wheel pulled in off the road and stopped beside my Lagonda.
I felt absurdly elated. Had it been a Ford or a Morris, I would have been pleased enough, but I would not have been elated. The fact that it was a Rolls - a Bentley would have done equally well, or an Isotta, or another Lagonda - was a virtual guarantee that I would receive all the assistance I required; for whether you know it or not, there is a powerful brotherhood existing among people who own very costly automobiles. They respect one another automatically, and the reason they respect one another is simply that wealth respects wealth. In point of fact, there is nobody in the world that a very wealthy person respects more than another very wealthy person, and because of this, they naturally seek each other out wherever they go. Recognition signals of many kinds are used among them. With the female, the wearing of massive jewels is perhaps the most common; but the costly automobile is also much favoured, and is used by both sexes. It is a travelling placard, a public declaration of affluence, and as such, it is also a card of membership to that excellent unofficial society, the Very-Wealthy-People's Union. I am a member myself of long standing, and am delighted to be one. When I meet another member, as I was about to do now, I feel an immediate rapport. I respect him. We speak the same language. He is one of us. I had good reason, therefore, to be elated.
The driver of the Rolls climbed out and came towards me. He was a small dark man with olive skin, and he wore an immaculate white linen suit. Probably a Syrian, I thought. Just possibly a Greek. In the heat of the day he looked as cool as could be.
'Good afternoon,' he said. 'Are you having trouble?'
I greeted him, and then, bit by bit, I told him everything that had happened.
'My dear fellow,' he said in perfect English, 'but my dear fellow, how very distressing. What rotten luck. This is no place to get stranded in.'
'It isn't, is it?'
'And you say that a new fan-belt has definitely been ordered?'
'Yes,' I answered, 'if I can rely upon the proprietor of this establishment.'
The Arab, who had emerged from his shack almost before the Rolls had come to a stop, now joined us, and the stranger proceeded to question him swiftly in Arabic about the steps he had taken on my behalf. It seemed to me that the two knew each other pretty well, and it was clear that the Arab was in great awe of the new arrival. He was practically crawling along the ground in his presence.
'Well - that seems to be all right,' the stranger said at last, turning to me. 'But quite obviously you won't be able to move on from here until tomorrow morning. Where were you headed for?'
'Jerusalem,' I said. 'And I don't relish the idea of spending the night in this infernal spot.'
'I should say not, my dear man. That would be most uncomfortable.' He smiled at me, showing exceptionally white teeth. Then he took out a cigarette case, and offered me a cigarette. The case was gold, and on the outside of it there was a thin line of green jade inlaid diagonally from comer to corner. It was a beautiful thing. I accepted the cigarette. He lit it for me, then lit his own.
The stranger took a long pull at his cigarette, inhaling deeply. Then he tilted back his head and blew the smoke up into the sun. 'We shall both get heat-stroke if we stand around here much longer,' he said. 'Will you permit me to make a suggestion?'
'But of course.'
'I do hope you won't consider it presumptuous, coming from a complete stranger ...'
'Please ...'
'You can't possibly remain here, so I suggest you come back and stay the night in my house.'
There! The Rolls-Royce was smiling at the Lagonda - smiling at it as it would never have smiled at a Ford or a Morris!
'You mean in Ismailia?' I said.
'No, no,' he answered, laughing. 'I live just around the corner, just over there.' He waved a hand in the direction he had come from.
'But surely you were going to Ismailia? I wouldn't want you to change your plans on my behalf.'
'I wasn't going to Ismailia at all,' he said. 'I was coming down here to collect the mail. My house - and this may surprise you - is quite close to where we are standing. You see that mountain? That's Maghara. I'm immediately behind it.'
I looked at the mountain. It lay about ten miles to the north, a yellow rocky lump, perhaps two thousand feet high. 'Do you really mean that you have a house in the middle of all this ... this wasteland?' I asked.
'You don't believe me?' he said, smiling.
'Of course I believe you,' I answered. 'Nothing surprises me any more. Except, perhaps.' and here I smiled back at him, 'except when I meet a stranger in the middle of the desert, and he treats me like a brother. I am overwhelmed by your offer.'
'Nonsense, my dear fellow. My motives are entirely selfish. Civilized company is not easy to come by in these parts. I am quite thrilled at the thought of having a guest for dinner. Permit me to introduce myself - Abdul Aziz.' He made a quick little bow.
'Oswald Cornelius,' I said. 'It is a great pleasure.' We shook hands.
'I live partly in Beirut,' he said.
'I live in Paris.'
'Charming. And now - shall we go? Are you ready?'
'But my car,' I said. 'Can I leave it here safely?'
'Have no fear about that. Omar is a friend of mine. He's not much to look at, poor chap, but he won't let you down if you're with me. And the other one, Saleh, is a good mechanic. He'll fit your new fan-belt when it arrives tomorrow. I'll tell him now.'
Saleh, the man from across the road, had walked over while we were talking. Mr Aziz gave him his instructions. He then spoke to both men about guarding the Lagonda. He was brief and incisive. Omar and Saleh stood bowing and scraping. I went across to the Lagonda to get a suitcase. I needed a change of clothes badly.
'Oh, by the way,' Mr Aziz called over to me, 'I usually put on a black tie for dinner.'
'Of course,' I murmured, quickly pushing back my first choice of suitcase and taking another.
'I do it for the ladies mostly. They seem to like dressing themselves up for dinner.'
I turned sharply and looked at him, but he was already getting into his car.
'Ready?' he said.
I took the suitcase and placed it in the back of the Rolls. Then I climbed into the front seat beside him, and we drove off.
During the drive, we talked casually about this and that. He told me that his business was in carpets. He had offices in Beirut and Damascus. His forefathers, he said, had been in the trade for hundreds of years.
I mentioned that I had a seventeenth-century Damascus carpet on the floor of my bedroom in Paris.
'You don't mean it!' he cried, nearly swervin
g off the road with excitement.' Is it silk and wool, with the warp made entirely of silk? And has it got a ground of gold and silver threads?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Exactly.'
'But my dear fellow! You mustn't put a thing like that on the floor!'
'It is touched only by bare feet,' I said.
That pleased him. It seemed that he loved carpets almost as much as I loved the blue vases of Tchin-Hoa.
Soon we turned left off the tarred road on to a hard stony track and headed straight over the desert towards the mountain. 'This is my private driveway,' Mr Aziz said. 'It is five miles long.'
'You are even on the telephone,' I said, noticing the poles that branched off the main road to follow his private drive.
And then suddenly a queer thought struck me.
That Arab at the filling-station ... he also was on the telephone ...
Might not this, then, explain the fortuitous arrival of Mr Aziz?
Was it possible that my lonely host had devised a clever method of shanghai-ing travellers off the road in order to provide himself with what he called 'civilized company' for dinner? Had he, in fact, given the Arab standing instructions to immobilize the cars of all likely looking persons one after the other as they came along? 'Just cut the fan-belt, Omar. Then phone me up quick. But make sure it's a decent-looking fellow with a good car. Then I'll pop along and see if I think he's worth inviting to the house ...'
It was ridiculous, of course.
'I think,' my companion was saying, 'that you are wondering why in the world I should choose to have a house out here in a place like this.'
'Well, yes, I am a bit.'
'Everyone does,' he said.
'Everyone,' I said.
'Yes,' he said.
Well, well, I thought - everyone.
'I live here,' he said, 'because I have a peculiar affinity with the desert. I am drawn to it the same way as a sailor is drawn to the sea. Does that seem so very strange to you?'
'No,' I answered, 'it doesn't seem strange at all.'
He paused and took a pull at his cigarette. Then he said, 'That is one reason. But there is another. Are you a family man, Mr Cornelius?'
'Unfortunately not,' I answered cautiously.
'I am,' he said. 'I have a wife and a daughter. Both of them, in my eyes at any rate, are very beautiful. My daughter is just eighteen. She has been to an excellent boarding-school in England, and she is now ...' he shrugged ...'she is now just sitting around and waiting until she is old enough to get married. But this waiting period - what does one do with a beautiful young girl during that time? I can't let her loose. She is far too desirable for that. When I take her to Beirut, I see the men hanging around her like wolves waiting to pounce. It drives me nearly out of my mind. I know all about men, Mr Cornelius. I know how they behave. It is true, of course, that I am not the only father who has had this problem. But the others seem somehow able to face it and accept it. They let their daughters go. They just turn them out of the house and look the other way. I cannot do that. I simply cannot bring myself to do it! I refuse to allow her to be mauled by every Achmed, Ali, and Hamil that comes along. And that, you see, is the other reason why I live in the desert - to protect my lovely child for a few more years from the wild beasts. Did you say that you had no family at all, Mr Cornelius?'
'I'm afraid that's true.'
'Oh.' He seemed disappointed. 'You mean you've never been married?'
'Well ... no,' I said. 'No, I haven't.' I waited for the next inevitable question. It came about a minute later.
'Have you never wanted to get married and have children?'
They all asked that one. It was simply another way of saying, 'Are you, in that case, homosexual?'
'Once,' I said. 'Just once.'
'What happened?'
'There was only one person ever in my life, Mr Aziz ... and after she went ...' I sighed.
'You mean she died?'
I nodded, too choked up to answer.
'My dear fellow,' he said. 'Oh, I am so sorry. Forgive me for intruding.'
We drove on for a while in silence.
'It's amazing,' I murmured, 'how one loses all interest in matters of the flesh after a thing like that. I suppose it's the shock. One never gets over it.'
He nodded sympathetically, swallowing it all.
'So now I just travel around trying to forget. I've been doing it for years ...'
We had reached the foot of Mount Maghara now and were following the track as it curved round the mountain towards the side that was invisible from the road - the north side. 'As soon as we round the next bend you'll see the house,' Mr Aziz said.
We rounded the bend ... and there it was! I blinked and stared, and I tell you that for the first few seconds I literally could not believe my eyes. I saw before me a white castle - I mean it, - a tall, white castle with turrets and towers and little spires all over it, standing like a fairy-tale in the middle of a small splash of green vegetation on the lower slope of the blazing-hot, bare, yellow mountain! It was fantastic! It was straight out of Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm. I had seen plenty of romantic-looking Rhine and Loire valley castles in my time, but never before had I seen anything with such a slender, graceful, fairy-tale quality as this! The greenery, as I observed when we drew closer, was a pretty garden of lawns and date-palms, and there was a high white wall going all the way round to keep out the desert.
'Do you approve?' my host asked, smiling.
'It's fabulous!' I said. 'It's like all the fairy-tale castles in the world made into one.'
'That's exactly what it is!' he cried. 'It's a fairy-tale castle! I built it especially for my daughter, my beautiful Princess.'
And the beautiful Princess is imprisoned within its walls by her strict and jealous father. King Abdul Aziz, who refuses to allow her the pleasures of masculine company. But watch out, for here comes Prince Oswald Cornelius to the rescue! Unbeknownst to the King, he is going to ravish the beautiful Princess, and make her very happy.
'You have to admit it's different,' Mr Aziz said.
'It is that.'
'It is also nice and private. I sleep very peacefully here. So does the Princess. No unpleasant young men are likely to come climbing in through those windows during the night.'
'Quite so,' I said.
'It used to be a small oasis,' he went on. 'I bought it from the government. We have ample water for the house, the swimming-pool, and three acres of garden.'
We drove through the main gates, and I must say it was wonderful to come suddenly into a miniature paradise of green lawns and flowerbeds and palm trees. Everything was in perfect order, and water-sprinklers were playing on the lawns. When we stopped at the front door of the house, two servants in spotless gallabiyahs and scarlet tarbooshes ran out immediately, one to each side of the car, to open the doors for us.
Two servants? But would both of them have come out like that unless they'd been expecting two people? I doubted it. More and more, it began to look as though my odd little theory about being shanghaied as a dinner guest was turning out to be correct. It was all very amusing.
My host ushered me in through the front door, and at once I got that lovely shivery feeling that comes over the skin as one walks suddenly out of intense heat into an air-conditioned room. I was standing in the hall. The floor was of green marble. On my right, there was a wide archway leading to a large room, and I received a fleeting impression of cool white walls, fine pictures, and superlative Louis XV furniture. What a place to find oneself in, in the middle of the Sinai Desert!
And now a woman was coming slowly down the stairs. My host had turned away to speak to the servants, and he didn't see her at once, so when she reached the bottom step, the woman paused, and she laid her naked arm like a white anaconda along the rail of the banister, and there she stood, looking at me as though she were Queen Semiramis on the steps of Babylon, and I was a candidate who might or might not be to her taste. Her hair was jet-black, and she
had a figure that made me wet my lips.
When Mr Aziz turned and saw her, he said, 'Oh darling, there you are. I've brought you a guest. His car broke down at the filling-station - such rotten luck - so I asked him to come back and stay the night. Mr Cornelius ... my wife.'
'How very nice,' she said quietly, coming forward.
I took her hand and raised it to my lips. 'I am overcome by your kindness, madame.' I murmured. There was, upon that hand of hers, a diabolical perfume. It was almost exclusively animal. The subtle, sexy secretions of the sperm-whale, the male musk-deer, and the beaver were all there, pungent and obscene beyond words; they dominated the blend completely, and only faint traces of the clean vegetable oils - lemon, cajuput, and zeroli - were allowed to come through. It was superb! And another thing I noticed in the flash of that first moment was this: When I took her hand, she did not, as other women do, let it lie limply across my palm like a fillet of raw fish. Instead, she placed her thumb underneath my hand, with the fingers on top; and thus she was able to - and I swear she did - exert a gentle but suggestive pressure upon my hand as I administered the conventional kiss.
'Where is Diana?' asked Mr Aziz.
'She's out by the pool,' the woman said. And turning to me, 'Would you like a swim, Mr Cornelius? You must be roasted after hanging around that awful filling-station.'
She had huge velvet eyes, so dark they were almost black, and when she smiled at me, the end of her nose moved upwards, distending the nostrils.
There and then, Prince Oswald Cornelius decided that he cared not one whit about the beautiful Princess who was held captive in the castle by the jealous King. He would ravish the Queen instead.
'Well ...' I said.