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‘It doesn’t seem quite so small anymore, does it?’ Came a sudden, all-too-familiar voice from beside me. I glanced to the side, and who should it be but my dear, lovely and very temporary wife. ‘What did you say again? 0.0024801 inches?’
‘0.0024803’ I corrected. ‘Not 0.0024801.’
‘Oh, of course, that makes a hell of a lot of difference!’
I didn’t deign to answer that.
‘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.’
Gritting my teeth together, I kept silent.
‘You are a stubborn son of a
bachelor!’
Ah, the sweet endearments of married life… It was really quite charming. ‘I thought earlier you told me that I was the son of a donkey?’
Out of the corner of my field of vision, I saw her eyes flash from between the folds of her burnoose. ‘That was before I ran out of Arabic insults!’
I turned to look at her. She was looking at me unlike any woman had before. All the other women I had known had either tried to smile at me, or had turned tail and run. She did neither. She met my gaze head-on, as if her harebrained notions were true and the two of us were indeed equals. So I injected an extra dose of steel into my voice when I said: ‘We can do this. No discussion. We’re going on.’
A bloody insolent gust of hot wind struck me in the face and ripped the top hat from my head. Before it could get farther than a foot or two, my hand shot out and grabbed it. Hm… with this so-called storm approaching, the wind really was getting somewhat stronger.
‘Tell me,’ she shouted. ‘Have you ever been in a sandstorm before?’
I didn’t reply. What was the sense? She would question me no matter what I said or did. It was her favourite pastime.
‘Well?’
I had to admit, she was insistent. I would have admired that trait, if she hadn’t been a woman.
Glancing up, I watched the storm with narrowed eyes. It had grown somewhat since my last inspection. And the way it looked, it was still growing, at a rate of approximately fifty-one per cent per minute. Too bad it was a storm and not my annual profits.
‘Have you?’ demanded a certain persistent female voice from beside me.
‘No!’ I told her. ‘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.’
Even if the storm is now growing at a rate of sixty-four per cent per minute?
I clamped down on that thought and continued on.
Soon, we had reached the bottom of the valley. In front of us rose a small hill, and down that hill the storm approached with a velocity that, even though I would never have admitted as much, was beginning to worry me. A blast of sand shot past us, swallowing a withered desert plant. It disappeared from sight, as if it had never been.
Maybe we should turn and…
Nonsense! Get a grip! You didn’t get where you are today by being afraid of a little bit of sand!
‘Please, Effendi!’ At the shout, I glanced around to see Youssef galloping towards us. To judge by the look on his face, he didn’t share my determination. ‘Please, let us stop! We have to stop moving! The storm isn’t dispersing, it’s headed right towards us! We cannot…’
Cannot?
Cannot?
That word did not appear in my vocabulary. Turning to face the storm again head-on, I urged my camel forward, heading straight for the heart of the howling maelstrom of sand.
