Dune Time Read online

  “Salaam,” murmured Tariq. Ali switched off the connection and his image withdrew five hundred miles to the north.

  Tariq sat back glumly and let the heat soak through his shirt. From up here he could see long fingers of sand reaching out from the dunes toward the distant road. Someone had erected little palm leaf fences to slow the desert’s advance, but they were already half-buried. There were a few tooth-like clouds in the sky now, drifting aimlessly out into the erg.

  With a pang of conscience, Tariq tapped out a short email to his family: Doing well, getting on with Hasan, etc. Then he halfheartedly browsed for another hour until the Internet stuttered out, and he became aware of just how dehydrated he was becoming. He rolled to the edge of the roof and lowered his head below the awning.

  Hasan was kneeling at his prayer mat again, bowing to the western dunes. Tariq hopped down beside him.

  “Miss me?”

  There was no response for a moment, then Hasan turned his head slowly and looked up at him, squinting against the glare.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I’ve just been on the roof for two hours,” Tariq said. “Where did you think I’d been?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Sure,” said Tariq. “You know, Mecca is that way,” he added, pointing east. Hasan blinked up at the sky, then shifted his prayer mat around.

  “You know, if I have to be here, I can at least help maintain the camera.” Tariq said. “You’re crap at the tech stuff anyway.”

  Hasan nodded vaguely, not really listening.

  “You’re sandcracked,” Tariq told him, and retreated to the hammock to await the coming of another night.

  * * *

  The weeks stretched out interminably as the days bled into each other. Tariq learned to distinguish the hiss of a sand eddy from the scrape of grains rustling through the thorns of the acacia trees. He took to dozing in the afternoon heat and staying up into the cool night, illuminated by the blue glow of the laptop as he clicked back and forth through the photos of the dunes.

  There were enough photos that Tariq could run about ten seconds of film now; the pockmarked sand hills undulating across the screen like a caravan of ghosts. In the foreground the desert surface bulged and rippled like muscle flexing beneath skin. It gave him chills.

  The photos were designed to be grouped in their respective time blocks for morning, noon, or afternoon footage, but he preferred to run them all together so that the alternating lines of shadow flickered back and forth like strobe lighting. He looped them to songs, obsessively updating the makeshift music videos every few days to add in the latest footage.

  On nights when the hypnotic film had lulled him into a half-sleep, Tariq often thought he saw Hasan pacing the crest of the dunes in the moonlight. Those moments, detached from the time around them, flowed seamlessly into dreams of home. Dreams of his family, of girls, of the terror and exultation of the square. Or worse. He walked through an endless nighttime desert like the bottom of a vast deep sea; the dunes frozen waves poised to crash over him and drive him down among the creatures swimming the depths below. Above him the stars whined like feedback from a broken speaker.

  Fatima …

  Tariq woke with a start into choking heat, his skin prickly and goose-pimpled, as if his body didn’t know if it was cold or hot. A tinny rendition of a dated pop hit was sounding out across the sand; Hasan’s ringtone. His brother was prostrate in the heat a few meters away, head bowed toward the dunes.

  “Hasan. Your phone.”

  Hasan remained deep in prayer. Fatima … Fatima … Je me souviens de vous, moaned the stupid ringtone.

  Tariq heaved himself out of his nest and ran across the sand, nudging Hasan in the backside. “Hasan!”

  No reply. Tariq could hear him whispering something to the ground. The phone began its kitschy little loop again, and Tariq fished it out of his brother’s sun-bleached robe. The caller ID read Michael BBC. Shit. He answered.

  “Hello, Hasan?” came a man’s voice speaking English. Young, confident, impatient.

  “No, this is Tariq … I’m his brother. I am assisting on the project.”

  There was a doubtful silence from Michael BBC. Tariq clamped a hand over his free ear to block the whistling of the wind and tried to think of what he could say next to prove his professionalism. “I do the IT work,” he hazarded.

  “Is Hasan there?”

  Tariq covered the mouthpiece and crouched by his brother. “Hasan!” he hissed, giving him a savage poke in the ribs. Hasan straightened slowly and gave him a blank, sleepwalker’s stare. There was sand encrusted on his cheek.

  Tariq straightened again and said, “Hasan is on-site, examining the equipment. We’re getting some lovely shots here. Panoramic views.”

  “Panoramic?”

  “Very panoramic,” Tariq emphasized, walking back to the house. “We don’t have much Internet out here, but I’d be happy to bring them into town and email you the pictures. Or to Mr. Attenborough—is he there with you?”

  The voice was amused. “No, Mr. Attenborough is in London. Yeah, if you could get Hasan to send some footage my way, that would be great. No other problems at your end? You don’t need more crew?”

  Tariq glanced back at Hasan, who was whispering something to the horizon. “Uh, no. Thank you. Things are tip-top.Tip. Top.”

  “All right, great. Tell Hasan that I’m not going to be able to swing by as planned, but we’ll try to schedule something for next month. Cheers, mate.”

  “Cheers,” said Tariq rotely. The phone went dead, and he wiped the sweat from his forehead. After his panic subsided he felt a surge of fury at his brother. He grabbed a water bottle and strode back outside. Hasan was sitting cross-legged on the mat, eyes unfocused.

  “What’s wrong with you, donkey?” demanded Tariq, handing his brother the water. “You leave me to do the business? You want them to think we’re amateurs? That you’ve brought your family down to squat here?”

  Hasan rubbed his faced and took a slow gulp. “I was praying, Tariq. Something you should do a bit more of.”

  “Praying?” Tariq glanced at his phone. “It’s 3 p.m.!”

  “There are some things more important than money,” Hasan said dully, staring out at the horizon. “Can’t you feel God’s presence here?”

  “Weren’t you the one who told me we needed this job? Hasan? Hasan!”

  Hasan didn’t answer.

  “I don’t think you should sleep out here anymore,” Tariq said. He looked at the sun. It balanced on the distant line of dunes, poised to roll away into night. “I don’t think either of us should.”

  After a lengthy pause, Hasan said slowly, “Thank you, Tariq. I’ll come back inside soon.”

  * * *

  BANG.

  The cursor flickered.

  His lips were dry. So dry. The roof of his mouth felt scoured and ribbed. When he breathed the inside of his throat shrank from the hot air.

  Forcing numb legs into action, Tariq staggered to their stash of water bottles. He drained one, opened another and sipped it. How long had he slept? His phone was dead, but outside the sun was only just past its height.

  BANG. BANG.

  It was the screen door, swinging on its hinges in the wind. A dented line in the paintwork marked where the frame was hitting the table. Long fingers of sand reached across the step, brushing against Tariq’s sneakers. On the table, the pages of Hasan’s Quran ruffled back and forth.

  BANG.

  Tariq stepped gingerly outside, fumbling in his pocket for his sunglasses. He pulled the door shut behind him, scraping a wave of sand back onto the porch. More sand weighed down the wipers of the jeep.

  “Hasan?”

  The camera tower shimmered in the distant heat. Tariq jogged over to it and looked for a sign of his brother. He found something half-buried in the sand and nudged it with his foot—it was Hasan’s phone. There were no footprints and if there had been the dancing grai
ns would have obliterated them in minutes. The dunes swirled and hummed.

  The camera lens reflected his own frightened image back at him. In the reflection of his sunglasses was a miniature image of the camera again reflecting him reflecting it, tumbling down through eternity.

  Tariq shouted Hasan’s name until he was hoarse, but the wind whipped his cries away. His nerve broke and he turned to run back to the hut, childishly terrified to peer back over his shoulder.

  Back in the hut he felt dizzy. He had to lean against the table to steady himself. He couldn’t call the police; he was on their hit list. And how did he even know how long Hasan had been gone?

  The BBC camera. The photos were time-stamped. Thankfully, the laptop was still plugged in and charged. Tariq blew the sand from its keyboard and opened the photo folder.

  He clicked incredulously through the series. He’d fallen asleep on the evening of the 11th. There were eight photos since then, the latest stamped for midday on the 13th. He’d been unconscious for forty hours.

  But he’d found Hasan.Twelfth September, nine a.m. Hasan was kneeling on his prayer mat, looking out across the erg. His arms were raised in supplication; he teetered as if the camera had caught him at the moment of falling into his own shadow.

  Click.

  Three hours on, the shot was almost identical. Hasan was still frozen in exactly the same position. But his shadow had pooled around him now and he was shrunken, a dwarf.

  Tariq cupped his face in his hands, breathed deeply, then looked again. Hasan wasn’t smaller, he had just receded from the lens—he had moved into the background. There were no tracks in the sand behind him.

  Click. Click.Six p.m. Now Hasan knelt on the lip of a background dune, a tiny shadow against the setting sun. His silhouetted arms still flung wide as the desert sucked him outward.

  Click.

  That was it until this morning, a gap of twelve hours. The desert in the photo was empty. Tariq had to magnify the image to its maximum to find what he was looking for—a tiny, bright cross in the distance. Hasan, swept far out across the sand sea.

  The most recent photo showed only the dunes.

  “There is no god but God,” Tariq whispered, and began to cry.

  He pressed the arrow keys back and forth, scrolling hopelessly through the few frames. Hasan had been lost for more than a day. He could already be dead from dehydration.

  They had no printer. There were no features in the photos from which to take a bearing except the curves of the sand, and Tariq wasn’t going to put any trust in that. He could only make the most general estimate as to which direction Hasan had vanished.

  He opened the desk drawer and rifled through old food wrappers and loose playing cards until he found Hasan’s compass. He pocketed it, snatched the rifle, and ran back to the tower.

  In approximately the spot where the first image of Hasan had been visible, facing the dunes, Tariq laid the compass on the swirling sand. The needle spun idly once or twice and he felt a fresh surge of nausea. But at last it settled on north.

  Sweat trickling down his temples and sides, Tariq dragged the butt of the rifle in a wide arc where it would be visible from the camera’s nest. Once the line was distinct, consulting the compass, he carefully crossed it with dozens of lines radiating out at all angles to the west. Beneath each line he marked its bearing. 255 degrees. 260 degrees. 265 degrees.

  The heat and exhaustion dried his tears and his breath was ragged by the time he was done. When he was satisfied that the marks were clear, Tariq sprang up the ladder to the camera aerie and opened its case. Then, with his finger on the button, he manually photographed the scene.

  The wind chased him back to the house, lashing sand across the back of his calves. Back at the computer desk, he refreshed the folder and opened the new file. It had worked—he had an identically positioned photo of the erg, but with rough compass bearings like a child’s writing scratched into the foreground.

  Now, at least, Tariq was in control. He opened Photoshop and layered the frames of Hasan on top of each other, with the compass shot uppermost. A few tweaks of the fade and transparency settings gave him an eerie multiple exposure of four Hasans, shrinking like babushka dolls toward the horizon. He dragged a red line through them. They aligned perfectly, and he had his bearing: 266 degrees.

  Water. Hasan would need water. Tariq filled a backpack with bottles, wrapped a scarf around his head, and froze. Something had changed while he’d been working.

  It was the silence. The door hung still, the wind dropped.

  He crept out into the bleached landscape. The sand was pristine again, his compass lines vanished.

  He stalled the jeep in under thirty seconds, its wheels spinning uselessly against the slope. There was no hope of getting it over the dunes. Compass and rifle in hand, the water bottles bouncing against his shoulders, he chased the sun into the desert.

  * * *

  The stillness was absolute. Not a grain of sand stirred across the erg, and the whispers of Tariq’s footsteps floated up into the azure sky as he threaded his way between the great dunes.

  Coming to rest in the shadow of a long, low hill, Tariq heard the tiny clicks of individual sand grains rolling against each other. A lone scarab beetle was marching lengthwise along the dune. Its wavering six-footed track extended as far along the sand as he could see. Tariq watched it pass and then lifted his gaze to the wall of sand towering above him. He had to climb it. He’d never be able to find Hasan without a proper vantage point.

  He climbed slowly, leaning on the rifle for support. The crust held firm under the compression of his tread, then collapsed into shallow holes as he lifted his foot away. He wanted to run, but as soon as he tried his legs sank up to the ankle, so he toiled step by slow step. His thighs burned and his sneakers grew heavy with sand. He was still just in view of the camera, and he imagined himself as it saw him, a scarab-sized speck inching up an orange wall.

  At last he reached the knife-like rim. It disintegrated as he grasped it, running like liquid gold between his fingers. From here he could see that the dune was a crescent, its arms reaching out ahead of him to the desert. Its moon shape repeated itself endlessly to the horizon. Unchanging.

  Tariq closed his eyes, willed himself to remember his schooling. “And He withholds not a knowledge of the unseen,” he whispered. He looked again to the west.

  Far away, a few solitary pixels of white against the yellow. A flaw in the image. Hasan.

  Tariq sat like a child on the corrugated ridgeline and pushed off with his hands, sliding diagonally downward in a shower of sand. Around him, a whole sheet detached from the dune. The cascade of grains sang him down its slope and moments later the nightmare hum echoed back to him from the surrounding ridges.

  The sound cocooned him. Like the picture of the impossible staircase, it climbed and climbed in intensity without ever changing. Or were there patterns there, but too slow for him to notice? Even as he thought it the pitch seemed to rise—a hysterical sustained whine that blanked his mind and pulled him onward.

  The next line of dunes was far, and then it was close. The rifle was a heavy burden on his shoulder, then it was a distant mark in the sand behind him. His big brother was lost, and then Tariq was beside him.

  Like an ancient statue, Hasan knelt half-buried in sand, head bowed across outstretched arms. His skin was blistered from sunburn. Sand had piled in waves around him, sucked down his legs, submerged his fingers. Only his face was free, breathing into the hollow made between his arms.

  “Hasan!” Tariq grabbed his brother by the shirt and hauled. The material tore like paper, but he managed to heave Hasan’s head up. His beard glinted with crystalline grains.

  Tariq forced Hasan’s mouth open, splitting his cracked lips. He jammed a water bottle into his brother’s mouth and poured until Hasan choked and spluttered it back onto the sand. The moisture instantly vanished between the grains. He looked up at Tariq, recognition flaring in his bloodshot eyes
.

  “It’s not God,” he croaked.

  “We’re going home,” Tariq told his brother, lifting him to his feet. “Lean on me.”

  Climbing the dunes by himself had been bad. Trying to walk with Hasan’s weight on him was almost impossible. Once he reached the first slope, each step plunged his legs calf-deep into shifting sand; it was like trying to crawl the wrong way up an escalator. He climbed in a dream. He moved in Dune Time.

  His shadow wavered, then began to elongate in front of him. It stretched out, staining the sand like a stream finding its bed. Afraid to watch it, Tariq turned his gaze away, and behind him saw the sun fall to the horizon like a stone.

  “So verily, I swear by the planets that recede, by the planets that move swiftly and hide themselves, and by the night as it departs and by the dawn as it brightens.” Hasan whispered hoarsely.

  “Shut up!” groaned Tariq, trying to quicken his pace up the crumbling slope. But above him the cold sky darkened, and moments later the stars burst out in their full radiance, the dunes around him now only visible by the void they cut in the starlight.

  Tariq grew disorientated. Beneath his thin cotton T-shirt, he felt like he’d been doused in ice water. His mouth felt full of glass, and his skin was raw from the scouring of the sand. Sinking to his knees, he couldn’t stop himself from draining another full water bottle while ahead of him the sky lightened again. The gap in the dunes he’d been aiming at was gone—the sand had closed around them in the night.

  Hasan stirred against him, and turned his head to look behind. “They are moving,” he whispered. “The Ghaib. The smokeless fire. The djinn.” He gave a gasp. “They’re beautiful.”

  Tariq turned.

  They swam through the sand like ripples through a lake. Faces boiled from the dunes, and sand ran from their sockets as they turned their gazes to the seven heavens.

  “Don’t look,” Tariq begged, hauling them forward another step. The horizon flickered and the dunes shrieked. He fumbled in his backpack for the last water bottle, and his hands closed around something small and hard. His phone. Sanity.