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Hale was nervously certain that the A'adites had been fallen angels, and that Wabar had been a kingdom of djinn, destroyed by some kind of meteor strike-and he resolved to find the meteoric stone that St. John Philby had failed to find there.
And so Captain Andrew Hale had quietly taken a vacation from the CRPO-while, as the Canadian Tommo Burks, he had flown to Al-Hufuf and begun outfitting an expedition to the Rub' al-Khali region of Saudi Arabia, under forged authorization documents from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
In the Jafurah desert settlements outside Al-Hufuf he hired ten Bedu tribesmen for the expedition, including several from the 'Al-Murra tribes to act as guides and rafiq escorts, and he set his agent Salim bin Jalawi to assembling thirty desert-bred 'Umaniya camels and purchasing enough rice, dates, coffee, first-aid supplies, and ammunition for a month-long trip.
He had planned to leave at the end of January in 1948, and had applied to King Saud for permission to travel in the Saudi interior-but on January 6, his birthday, Hale had received word that the king had forbidden the trip. The 'Al-Murra tribes were at war with the Manasir, Hale was told, and the situation was complicated by the fact that the king's tax collectors were in the area collecting the zakat tribute. But the 'Al-Murra tribesmen Hale had enlisted for the trip had not heard of any fighting with the Manasir, and Hale knew that the zakat was always collected in June and July, when the summer's lack of grazing forced the Bedu to camp on their home wells.
"He doesn't want a Nazrani out in the sands," said bin Jalawi philosophically, sipping coffee at a sidewalk cafe in the Al-Hufuf town square. "Not when the spirits have got everybody stirred up in this way. Even the yakhakh are animated. Perhaps, Tommo Burks, it is the end of the world."
Yakhakh were locusts, and in fact a net had been draped over the cafe's awning poles to keep the flying grasshoppers off the tables; every three or four years the insects migrated up from Abyssinia, and today the sky was actually darkened by clouds of them passing overhead toward Kuwait, as if the sun were eclipsed.
Hale drummed his fingers on the wooden table. "National Geographic he treats this way!" he said angrily. "I wish I were a journalist, I'd write a story about him." He frowned at bin Jalawi. "Can you...sell off the supplies we've bought, and the camels, and dismiss the men we've hired? I think I'll be buying a plane ticket back to Kuwait."
"Certainly." Bin Jalawi cupped his hand and rubbed his thumb across the inside of his index finger in a universal gesture. "The men will want pay for the time they've waited-I can distribute it."
I'll bet you can, Hale thought. "But could you secretly hold back some of the supplies, after making a big scene with trying to get the best prices in returning the rest of them?-and quietly keep a couple of the best guides on our payroll, after noisily firing the rest?"
"Alahumma!" said bin Jalawi; the phrase meant to be sure or unless possibly. "This would be in order to disobey the king-to be subject to arrest, in the company of an infidel Nazrani in the sands. A greater pay-scale would be required from the Creepo."
"'You limpin' lump o'brick-dust,'" sighed Hale, quoting Kipling's Gunga Din at him, as he often did. "Yes, double the pay-it'll still be cheaper than hiring all ten of them at the old rate. And keep back six or eight of the best camels. Eight. I'll get somebody to board the Kuwait plane as Tommo Burks. And then I'll meet you and the camels and the two guides at the Jabrin oasis in...what, a week?"
"If we ride hard. And how are you going to get to Jabrin?"
"I'll drive a jeep there. The camel route from Hassa to Jabrin would be navigable in a jeep."
"The journey will destroy the jeep."
"Well, I haven't got to drive it back, have I? I'll ride one of the unburdened supply camels on the return trip, and just abandon the vehicle at Jabrin. And when you sell back the supplies, don't sell the sled, understand? Nor the ropes and shovels."
Hale had bought a sand sled that could be pulled by camels, and he was hoping the meteorite could be dragged to a gravel plain where an RAF aircraft could land.
"If the tribes get word of a Nazrani in the sands, it will be all they will talk about. Ibn Saud's men will hear of it."
"We'll be fast," said Hale confidently, "and if we meet any Bedu I'll speak only in order to return greetings, in Arabic with some northern accent like Ruwala-"
"And not get off your camel," added bin Jalawi. He had often told Hale that his huge English feet left monstrous footprints in the sand.
The 150-mile camel route from Hasa to Jabrin was mostly polished tracks slanting across gravel plains, but a number of times Hale did have to drive the commandeered RAF jeep over dunes, with the big 900-x-15 tires spinning heavily and sand thumping like deep water in the wheel wells. He had left Hufuf in the frosty dawn, but by the time he drove the jeep around the last sand ridge and finally saw below him the palm plantations of Jabrin, the sky was red with twilight, and a bandage from the jeep's first-aid kit was wrapped tightly around a splitting radiator hose, and the radiator itself had been patched by a helpful Bedu family at the last well, with a paste of flour and camel dung. The generator had been screeching for the last hour.>"And of course the DGSS bullet didn't affect your angel at all. So I went back and studied the djinn. I read the oldest fragments of the Hezar Efsan, which was the core of the Thousand Nights and One Night; and in the Midian mountains of the Hejaz I found communities of Magians, fire-worshippers, and traded gold and medical-supply whole blood and thermite bombs for the privilege of witnessing their distressing mountain-top liturgies. And I found that in all the very oldest records, djinn are described as being killed by...trivial-seeming things: someone carelessly throwing a date-stone at one of them, or accidentally hitting one with a misaimed fowling arrow, or even by taking a sparrow out of a hidden nest. Eventually I decided that the way to kill a djinn was to change the shape of its animated substance in a particular way."
"I am glad we stopped you on Ararat fourteen years ago," said Mammalian, lifting his own glass and draining it in one gulp.
"I decided that a Shihab meteorite would comprise the death of a djinn-not in the stone's internal structure, but in its melted and rehardened shape. The meteorites are always pitted with round holes, like bubbles, uniform in their dimensions but of all sizes, even down to microscopic; I concluded that the concavities in the surface of the meteorite are the imprint of a djinn's death, repeated at every possible scale, and that if I could summon the djinn down from the mountain peak to the stone in the gorge, and then explode it in the midst of them, the pieces would be propelled into the substances of the creatures, forcing their stuff to assume the complementary convex shape."
Hale paused. For the last several seconds he had been hearing a telephone ringing in some nearby room; but Mammalian hadn't paid any attention to it, and now Hale realized that it had stopped.
"The djinn are supposed to have existed before mankind," Hale went on, "and in many ways they are a more primitive sort of life, more crude. Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events, wind and fire and sandstorms, gross and literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are things, things in motion, and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference-wedding rings and gold teeth looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose-"
He jumped in his chair then, for he had clearly heard a British man's voice shout, "Shut her up!"
It must have come from the beach outside, and Mammalian was simply waiting for him to go on.
Hale wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve again. "To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience-which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite's imprint, is death."
Mammalian's eyes were wide, and he was shaking his head mournfully. "In 1948 your people brought a big chunk of meteoric iron to the mountain and set it high in the Ahora Gorge, with explosives under it. The meteorite is still on the slope there now, rusting-though as soon as we finish talking here I will radio instructions that it be retrieved and ground to dust. Where did you get it, and how do you know it has killed a djinn?"
Ground to dust, thought Hale dully. This is all part of your plan, Jimmie?-that we lose the meteorite that poor Salim bin Jalawi and I worked so hard to find, worked so hard to retrieve-
"We got it," he said, "at the site of an ancient city that had been wiped out by a meteor strike-it's mentioned in the Koran-south of the well at Um al-Hadid in the Rub' al-Khali desert-the A'adite city of Wabar."
