Waiting for the Barbarians Read online

  My plan is to follow this track till we have skirted the lake to the south, then to strike out north-east across the desert towards the valleys of the ranges where the northern nomads winter. It is a route rarely travelled, since the nomads, when they migrate with their flocks, follow the old dead river-bed in a vast sweep east and south. However, it reduces a journey of six weeks to one or two. I have never travelled it myself.

  So for the first three days we plod south and then eastward. To our right stretches a plain of wind-eroded clay terraces merging at its extremes into banks of red dust-clouds and then into the yellow hazy sky. To our left is flat marshland, belts of reeds, and the lake on which the central ice-sheet has not melted. The wind blowing over the ice freezes our very breath, so that rather than ride we often walk for long spells in the lee of our horses. The girl winds a scarf around and around her face and, crouching in the saddle, blindly follows her leader.

  Two of the pack-horses are loaded with firewood, but this must be conserved for the desert. Once, half buried in drift-sand, we come upon a spreading mound-like tamarisk which we hack to pieces for fuel; for the rest we have to be content with bundles of dry reeds. The girl and I sleep side by side in the same tent, huddled in our furs against the cold.

  In these early days of the journey we eat well. We have brought salted meat, flour, beans, dried fruit, and there are wildfowl to shoot. But we have to be sparing with water. The marsh-water here in the shallow southern fingers is too salty to be drinkable. One of the men has to wade twenty or thirty paces in, as deep as his calves, to fill the skins, or, better, to break off lumps of ice. Yet even the melted ice-water is so bitter and salty that it can only be drunk with strong red tea. Every year the lake grows more brackish as the river eats into its banks and sweeps salt and alum into the lake. Since the lake has no outflow its mineral content keeps rising, particularly in the south, where tracts of water are seasonally isolated by sand-bars. After the summer flood the fishermen find carp floating belly-up in the shallows. They say that perch are no more to be seen. What will become of the settlement if the lake grows into a dead sea?

  After a day of salty tea all of us except the girl begin to suffer from diarrhoea. I am the worst afflicted. I feel keenly the humiliation of the frequent stops, the undressing and dressing with frozen fingers in the lee of a horse while the others wait. I try to drink as little as possible, to the point even that my mind throws up tantalizing images as I ride: a full cask by the wellside with water splashing from the ladle; clean snow. My occasional hunting and hawking, my desultory womanizing, exercises of manhood, have concealed from me how soft my body has grown. After long marches my bones ache, by nightfall I am so tired that I have no appetite. I trudge on till I cannot put one foot in front of the other; then I clamber into the saddle, fold myself in my cloak, and wave one of the men forward to take over the task of picking out the faint track. The wind never lets up. It howls at us across the ice, blowing from nowhere to nowhere, veiling the sky in a cloud of red dust. From the dust there is no hiding: it penetrates our clothing, cakes our skin, sifts into the baggage. We eat with coated tongues, spitting often, our teeth grating. Dust rather than air becomes the medium in which we live. We swim through dust like fish through water.

  The girl does not complain. She eats well, she does not get sick, she sleeps soundly all night clenched in a ball in weather so cold I would hug a dog for comfort. She rides all day without a murmur. Once, glancing up, I see that she is riding asleep, her face as peaceful as a baby’s.

  On the third day the rim of the marshland begins to curve back towards the north and we know that we have rounded the lake. We pitch camp early and spend the last hours of light collecting every scrap of fuel we can while the horses browse for the last time on the meagre marshgrass. Then at dawn on the fourth day we begin the crossing of the ancient lake-bed that stretches another forty miles beyond the marshes.

  The terrain is more desolate than anything we have yet seen. Nothing grows on this salty lake-floor, which in places buckles and pushes up in jagged crystalline hexagons a foot wide. There are dangers too: crossing an unusually smooth patch the front horse suddenly plunges through the crust and sinks chest-deep in foul green slime, the man who leads it standing a moment dumbstruck on thin air before he too splashes in. We struggle to haul them out, the salt crust splintering under the hooves of the flailing horse, the hole widening, a brackish stench everywhere. We have not left the lake behind, we now realize: it stretches beneath us here, sometimes under a cover many feet deep, sometimes under a mere parchment of brittle salt. How long since the sun last shone on these dead waters? We light a fire on firmer ground to warm the shivering man and dry his clothes. He shakes his head. “I always heard, beware of the green patches, but I never saw this happen before,” he says. He is our guide, the one man among us who has travelled east of the lake. After this we push our horses even harder, in a hurry to be off the dead lake, fearful of being lost in a fluid colder than ice, mineral, subterraneous, airless. We bow our heads and drive into the wind, our coats ballooning behind us, picking a way over the jagged salt-shards, avoiding the smooth ground. Through the river of dust that courses majestically across the sky the sun glows like an orange but warms nothing. When darkness falls we batter the tent-pegs into cracks in the rock-hard salt; we burn our firewood at an extravagant rate and like sailors pray for land.

  On the fifth day we leave the lake-floor behind and pass through a belt of smooth crystalline salt which soon gives way to sand and stone. Everyone is heartened, even the horses, which during the crossing of the salt have had nothing but a few handfuls of linseed and a bucketful of brackish water. Their condition is visibly deteriorating.

  As for the men, they do not grumble. The fresh meat is giving out but there remain the salt meat and dried beans and plenty of flour and tea, the staples of the road. At each halt we brew tea and fry little fatcakes, delicious morsels to the hungry. The men do the cooking: being shy of the girl, unsure of her standing, unsure most of all what we are doing taking her to the barbarians, they barely address her, avoid looking at her, and certainly do not ask for her help with the food. I do not push her forward, hoping that constraint will disappear on the road. I picked these men because they were hardy and honest and willing. They follow me as lightheartedly as they can under these conditions, though by now the brave lacquered armour the two young soldiers wore when we passed through the great gate is strapped in bundles on the pack-horses and their scabbards are full of sand.

  The sand-flats begin to modulate into duneland. Our progress slows as we toil up and down the sides of the dunes. It is the worst possible terrain for the horses, which plod forward a few inches at a time, their hooves sinking deep in the sand. I look to our guide, but all he can do is shrug: “It goes on for miles, we have to cross it, there is no other way.” Standing on a dune-top, shielding my eyes, staring ahead, I can see nothing but swirling sand.

  That night one of the pack-horses refuses its feed. In the morning, even under the severest flogging, it will not rise. We redistribute the loads and cast away some of the firewood. While the others set out I stay behind. I can swear that the beast knows what is to happen. At the sight of the knife its eyes roll. With the blood spurting from its neck it scrambles free of the sand and totters a pace or two downwind before it falls. In extremities, I have heard, the barbarians tap their horses’ veins. Will we live to regret this blood spent so lavishly on the sand?

  On the seventh day, with the dunes finally behind us, we make out against the dull grey-brown of the empty landscape a strip of darker grey. From nearer we see that it stretches east and west for miles. There are even the stunted black shapes of trees. We are lucky, our guide says: there is bound to be water here.

  What we have stumbled on is the bed of an ancient terminal lagoon. Dead reeds, ghostly white and brittle to the touch, line what were its banks. The trees are poplars, also long dead. They have died si
nce the underground water receded too far to be reached by their roots years and years ago.

  We unload the animals and begin to dig. At two feet we reach heavy blue clay. Beneath this there is sand again, then another stratum of clay, noticeably clammy. At a depth of seven feet, with my heart pounding and my ears ringing, I have to refuse my turn with the spade. The three men toil on, lifting the loose soil out of the pit in a tent-cloth tied at the corners.

  At ten feet water begins to gather around their feet. It is sweet, there is no trace of salt, we smile with delight at each other; but it gathers very slowly and the sides of the pit have continually to be dug out as they cave in. It is only by late afternoon that we can empty out the last of our brackish lake-water and refill the waterskins. In near dark we lower the butt into our well and allow the horses to drink.

  Meanwhile, now that there is an abundance of poplarwood the men have dug two little ovens back to back in the clay and built a roaring fire on top of them to bake the clay dry. When the fire abates they can rake the coals back into the ovens and set about baking bread. The girl stands watching all this, leaning on her sticks to which I have fastened discs of wood to help her in the sand. In the free and easy camaraderie of this good day, and with a day of rest promised, talk flows. Joking with her, the men make their first overture of friendship: “Come and sit with us and taste what men’s baking is like!” She smiles back at them, lifting her chin in a gesture which perhaps I alone know is an effort to see. Cautiously she sets herself down beside them to bathe in the glow from the ovens.

  I myself sit further away sheltered from the wind in the mouth of my tent with one of the oil-lamps flickering beside me, making the day’s entry in the log-book but listening too. The banter goes on in the pidgin of the frontier, and she is at no loss for words. I am surprised by her fluency, her quickness, her self-possession. I even catch myself in a flush of pride: she is not just the old man’s slut, she is a witty, attractive young woman! Perhaps if from the beginning I had known how to use this slap-happy joking lingo with her we might have warmed more to each other. But like a fool, instead of giving her a good time I oppressed her with gloom. Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers! Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets! I blow out the lamp, sit with my chin on my fist staring towards the fire, listening to my stomach rumble.

  * *

  I sleep a sleep of utter exhaustion. I barely emerge into wakefulness when she lifts the edge of the huge bear-fur and snuggles against me. “A child gets cold in the night”—that is what I think in my befuddlement, hauling her into the crook of my arm, dozing away. Perhaps for a while I am fast asleep again. Then, wide awake, I feel her hand groping under my clothes, her tongue licking my ear. A ripple of sensual joy runs through me, I yawn, stretch, and smile in the dark. Her hand finds what it is seeking. “What of it?” I think. “What if we perish in the middle of nowhere? Let us at least not die pinched and miserable!” Beneath her smock she is bare. With a heave I am upon her; she is warm, swollen, ready for me; in a minute five months of senseless hesitancy are wiped out and I am floating back into easy sensual oblivion.

  When I wake it is with a mind washed so blank that terror rises in me. Only with a deliberate effort can I reinsert myself into time and space: into a bed, a tent, a night, a world, a body pointing west and east. Though I lie sprawled on her with the weight of a dead ox, the girl is asleep, her arms clasped slackly around my back. I ease myself off her, rearrange our covering, and try to compose myself. Not for an instant do I imagine that I can strike camp on the morrow, march back to the oasis, and in the magistrate’s sunny villa set about living out my days with a young bride, sleeping placidly by her side, fathering her children, watching the seasons turn. I do not shy at the thought that if she had not spent the evening with the young men around the campfire she would very likely not have found any need for me. Perhaps the truth is that it was one of them she was embracing when I held her in my arms. I listen scrupulously to the reverberations of that thought inside me, but cannot detect a plunging of the heart to tell me I am injured. She sleeps; my hand passes back and forth over her smooth belly, caresses her thighs. It is done, I am content. At the same time I am ready to believe that it would not have been done if I were not in a few days to part from her. Nor, if I must be candid, does the pleasure I take in her, the pleasure whose distant afterglow my palm still feels, go deep. No more than before does my heart leap or my blood pound at her touch. I am with her not for whatever raptures she may promise or yield but for other reasons, which remain as obscure to me as ever. Except that it has not escaped me that in bed in the dark the marks her torturers have left upon her, the twisted feet, the half-blind eyes, are easily forgotten. Is it then the case that it is the whole woman I want, that my pleasure in her is spoiled until these marks on her are erased and she is restored to herself; or is it the case (I am not stupid, let me say these things) that it is the marks on her which drew me to her but which, to my disappointment, I find, do not go deep enough? Too much or too little: is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears? For a long time I lie staring into what seems pitch blackness, though I know the roof of the tent is only an arm’s length away. No thought that I think, no articulation, however antonymic, of the origin of my desire seems to upset me. “I must be tired,” I think. “Or perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put.” My lips move, silently composing and recomposing the words. “Or perhaps it is the case that only that which has not been articulated has to be lived through.” I stare at this last proposition without detecting any answering movement in myself toward assent or dissent. The words grow more and more opaque before me; soon they have lost all meaning. I sigh at the end of a long day, in the middle of a long night. Then I turn to the girl, embrace her, draw her tight against me. She purrs in her sleep, where soon I have joined her.

  * *

  We rest on the eighth day, for the horses are now in a truly pitiable state. They chew hungrily at the sapless fibre of the dead reed-stalks. They bloat their bellies with water and break wind massively. We have fed them the last of the linseed and even a little of our bread. Unless we find grazing in a day or two they will perish.

  * *

  We leave our well behind us, and the mound of earth we dug, to press on northwards. All of us walk except the girl. We have abandoned whatever we can afford to lighten the horses’ burden; but since we cannot survive without fire they must still carry bulky loads of wood.

  “When will we see the mountains?” I ask our guide.

  “One day. Two days. It is hard to say. I have not travelled these parts before.” He has hunted along the eastern shore of the lake and the periphery of the desert without having reason to cross it. I wait, giving him every chance to speak his mind, but he seems unperturbed, he does not believe we are in danger. “Perhaps two days before we see the mountains, then another day’s march before we reach them.” He screws up his eyes, peering into the brown haze that veils the horizon. He does not ask what we will do when we get to the mountains.

  We reach the end of this flat pebbly waste and ascend a series of rocky ridges to a low plateau, where we begin to meet with hummocks of withered winter grass. The animals tear savagely at them. It is a great relief to see them eat.

  I wake up with a start in the middle of the night, filled with a dire sense that something is wrong. The girl sits up beside me: “What is it?” she says.

  “Listen. The wind has stopped.”

  Barefoot, wrapped in a fur, she crawls after me out of the tent. It is snowing gently. The earth lies white on every side beneath a hazy full moon. I help her to her feet and stand holding her, staring up into the void from which the snowflakes descend, in a silence that is palpable after a week of wind beating ceaselessly in our ears. The men from the second tent join us. We smile foolishly at each other. “Spring snow,” I say, “the last snow of the year.” They nod. A horse shaking
itself off nearby startles us.

  In the snowbound warmth of the tent I make love to her again. She is passive, accommodating herself to me. When we begin I am sure that the time is right; I embrace her in the most intense pleasure and pride of life; but halfway through I seem to lose touch with her, and the act peters out vacantly. My intuitions are clearly fallible. Still, my heart continues its affectionate glow towards this girl who so briskly falls asleep in the crook of my arm. There will be another time, and if not, I do not think I mind.

  * *

  A voice is calling through the slit of the tent-mouth: “Sir, you must wake up!”

  I am dazedly aware of having overslept. It is the stillness, I think to myself: it is as if we are becalmed in the stillness.

  I emerge from the tent into daylight. “Look, sir!” says the man who woke me, pointing north-east. “Bad weather on the way!”

  Rolling down upon us over the snowy plain is a gigantic black wave. It is still miles away but visibly devouring the earth in its approach. Its crest is lost in the murky clouds. “A storm!” I shout. I have never seen anything so frightening. The men hurry to take down their tent. “Bring the horses in, tether them here in the centre!” The first gusts are already reaching us, the snow begins to eddy and fly.

  The girl is beside me on her sticks. “Can you see it?” I say. She peers in her crooked way and nods. The men set to work striking the second tent. “The snow was not a good sign after all!” She does not reply. Though I know I should be helping, I cannot tear my eyes from the great black wall roaring down upon us with the speed of a galloping horse. The wind rises, rocking us on our feet; the familiar howl is in our ears again.

  I bestir myself. “Quick, quick!” I call out, clapping my hands. One man is on his knees folding the tent-cloths, rolling the felts, stowing the bedclothes; the other two are bringing the horses in. “Sit down!” I shout to the girl, and scramble to help with the packing. The storm-wall is not black any more but a chaos of whirling sand and snow and dust. Then all at once the wind rises to a scream, my cap is whirled from my head, and the storm hits us. I am knocked flat on my back: not by the wind but by a horse that breaks free and blunders about, ears flat, eyes rolling. “Catch it!” I shout. My words are nothing but a whisper, I cannot hear them myself. The horse vanishes from sight like a phantom. At the same instant the tent is whirled high into the sky. I hurl myself upon the bundled felts, holding them down, groaning with fury at myself. Then on hands and feet, dragging the felts, I inch my way back towards the girl. It is like crawling against running water. My eyes, my nose, my mouth are already stopped with sand, I heave to breathe.