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He gave me a look. One of those looks. ‘Do you know the size of an average grain of sand?’
‘No,’ I had to admit.
‘It is between 0.0024803 and 0.08 inches. Now, think carefully for a moment. Do you think I am going to let myself be stopped by something smaller than the tenth of an inch?’
‘Um… no.’
‘Indeed, no.’
And that was all he deigned to say on the matter. Maybe he was even right. Maybe it was silly to get anxious just over a bit of sand. But whenever I looked down towards the increasingly fast-approaching clouds of dust in the valley below, I couldn’t help getting the impression that it was more than just ‘a bit of sand’.
We had just reached the bottom of the hill when the rumbling started.
‘What’s that?’ I called, turning back towards Youssef. ‘Thunder?’
‘Yes, Hanem,’ he replied grimly, glaring ahead. ‘Out of a thunderstorm that doesn’t need lightening to kill.’
The rumbling grew, and soon it evolved into a continuous roar, like the sound coming out of the maul of a dragon too hungry to ever shut its dreaded jaws. Wind began to slap and batter against my thobe, and I had to grip my headscarf to hold it in place. The wind didn’t bring any relief from the heat. On the contrary, it was so hot it might make you think the gates of hell had opened.
‘It doesn’t seem quite so small anymore, does it?’ I yelled over the racket. Mr Ambrose was riding only a few paces beside me, but still I had to raise my voice to make myself heard. The cloud in front us was growing larger by the minute now. From where we stood, it looked the height of a small house. A few moments ago it had only seemed to be camel-high. ‘What did you say again? 0.0024801 inches?’
‘0.0024803’ he called back. ‘Not 0.0024801.’
‘Oh, of course, that makes a hell of a lot of difference!’
No answer.
‘If you haven’t noticed yet, there seem to be rather a lot of these 0.0024803-inch obstacles which you think are so easy to overcome. Maybe we should stop after all.’
No answer.
‘You are a stubborn son of a bachelor!’
‘I thought earlier you told me that I was the son of a donkey?’
‘That was before I ran out of Arabic insults!’
He turned his head to look at me. I would have said there was a stubborn set to his chin - only, it wouldn’t have been the truth. He didn’t need to set his chin in a stubborn way. Its mere shape, hard and angular like a block of granite, was already more stubborn than others could ever hope to be.
‘We can do this. No discussion. We’re going on.’
A gust of hot wind struck us and ripped his top hat from his head. Shooting out, his hand grabbed it just in time before it was driven away over the dunes.
‘Tell me…’ The roar in my ears had reached such a volume now that I had to roar myself to be heard at all. ‘Have you ever been in a sandstorm before?’
Silence. Or rather the absence of speech. With the storm winds wailing all around us, the very idea of silence was unthinkable.
‘Well?’ My heart started hammering faster. In front of us, the storm was towering higher than the tallest houses of London, now. It seemed like a cloud no longer, but a solid wall of sand, waiting to bury us. ‘Have you?’
‘No! But I’ve been in plenty of snowstorms.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that snow makes you freeze. Sand doesn’t. So it can hardly be more dangerous.’
I threw another apprehensive glance ahead. Personally, I wasn’t entirely sure about that.
We had reached the bottom of the valley beyond the dune now. In front of us rose a small hill, and down that hill the storm came, buffeting, bashing, slashing, thundering. To my left, I saw a column of sand roar past and swallow a cactus whole. It disappeared from sight, as if it had never been.
