“That is some western trick of the Saud family. The Sauds make themselves kings and say we are a country and the West believes them. But we are Bedu. We submit to none save Allah and those who prove themselves as leaders. The king has forgotten this.”

“Western tricks!” Nick asked mockingly, but he was uncomfortable. He felt guilty because lately he had been thinking more and more about his lost past. Where did he truly belong? he wondered.

They laid down in their clothes to sleep. Just before dropping off, Nick noticed a faint ripple in the winking of the stars, as if the air was a guitar string which had been plucked. He felt a vague uneasiness. He sensed the coming of a sandstorm. God help them if it caught them before they reached the well at Wadi er Rumna, he thought.

If it had been an ordinary sandstorm they might have found the well. But it was no ordinary storm. For five days the wind had raged. The air was filled with stinging particles of sand driven by the wind, lancing into their skin like millions of needles. It was impossible to see. By day a vast ochreous cloud surrounded them, shutting out the light. By night, the wind howled on and everything was darkness. The stars could not be seen and the air was a heavy black mass of stinging grains, which swallowed them whole, voraciously flaying their flesh. It was like the end of the world.

Nick’s heart fluttered. It was like a supreme test of which Sheikh Zaid spoke and he remembered the terrible prophecy of the Holy Koran:

When the sun shall be darkened,

when the stars shall be thrown down,

when the mountains shall be set moving,

when the seas shall be set boiling,

when the heavens shall be stripped off,

when Hell shall be set blazing,

when Paradise shall be brought nigh,

then shall every soul know what it has done.

The two youths lay snuggled against their kneeling camels under a tent formed by their bishts half-buried in the sand. During the first day they chattered, for conversation is as natural as breathing for an Arab; but at last they ran out of things to say and each of them was alone with his thoughts. The grinding rumble of the wind thundered in their ears.

Nick’s mind wandered. He thought of the politics and the changes that the West had brought to Arabia. Was that part of Allah’s plan? He wondered where his kismet would lead him. Was he of the West or the East? He gazed for days at the particles of sand clinging to his hand. Their crystalline structure fascinated him. It reminded him of the arabesques on the walls of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.