As the sun burst into the sky and rippled the sand with orange color, a wave of heat descended on them that was so oppressive Jayde thought it might just end up killing them by midday.
Even the wind had stopped, making the air thick and gelatinous. It sapped her energy and it slowed the camels. Jayde began to feel tense, edgy, delirious as they waded through the heat and sand. She tried to shake it off. But in each distant ridge of rock she saw monsters lurk. She couldn’t tell north from south anymore. She felt alarmed at the hostile vastness of landscape. She tried to tell herself it was the jinns playing tricks with her mind again.
But this time she could see David was edgy, too. He kept peering at the horizon to the right of their little caravan, as if expecting something.
Then she saw what he was looking for, what he must have been sensing all along. A clot of angry red cumulous clouds began to boil up high over the distant horizon. She caught her breath as it changed before her eyes into a terrifying monstrous black claw of sand and wind. She watched in horror as it roared toward them, covering miles in seconds. She glanced around in panic. There was nowhere to hide.
David moved fast.
He yanked her down from her camel, thrust the animal’s head rope into her hand. He yelled above the screaming sound as the wall of sand advanced. “Hang on to this no matter what! Pull that cloth over your face! Lean into wind!”
She couldn’t move. She was held prisoner, awed by the sheer scope the advancing, twisting, spiraling whorl of blackness.
David worked quickly to secure the camels. “There should be a deep wadi up ahead,” he yelled. “If we can find it in the storm, we’ll have shelter.”
The sound slammed into her head the same instant light was blotted from the sky. It was a sound so awful it seemed to emanate from the very bowels of the earth itself, screaming up from the core into the sky, sparking a primal terror deep within her.
Then the sand hit, instantly choking her nose, her throat, her lungs. She reeled back, then forced herself forward into the teeth of it.
It cut into her skin like a billion needles. She couldn’t see a thing. She staggered blindly forward, clutching onto the head rope knowing her life depended on it.
David steered them into the raging blackness. As they inched forward, the wind and sand filled her head with whispering voices, senseless moaning, screaming, in a thousand unidentifiable tongues.
She had no idea how long they battled against the storm. She moved like a dulled automaton, foot before foot. She no longer felt the pain. Then she felt his hands on her, pulling her, guiding her, forcing her down into a crevice of rock. She felt his solid body tuck in next to her. He pulled a blanket over their heads, held her into him, shielding her from the worst of the storm.
They huddled like that, breathing in each other’s hot air as the sound and sand tore at their senses for what seemed like hours.
Then as suddenly as it had come upon them, it was gone. An eerie silence filled the desert. David threw back the blanket, shaking out layers of fine sand. Jayde coughed and spluttered as she tried to wipe the grit of sand from her eyes and mouth.
She looked up at David. He stared at her. They’d made it. They were alive. Behind him Jayde could count all three camels present. And beyond the camels, she could see water, life-giving water gleaming in a depression in the dry riverbed.
Her body shuddered with a crazy sob. She felt as if she’d been stripped of everything in that sand, like she’d stared into the black maw of death. But they’d survived. And she was staring at a pool of water in a depression of snow-white sand fringed by a handful of straggling date palms.
She began to cry. And laugh. Crazily. Hysterically.
David grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her into him, held tight. And she could feel the force of fierce life flowing through his hands, his arms, his entire body. The same force seared wildly through her.
She laughed and sobbed into his neck until tears ran in muddied rivers down her cheeks, until every last bit of tension had been drained from her body.
She pulled back, stared up at him, and began to laugh all over again. “Oh, my God, don’t tell me I look anything like you do.”
He grinned, and his eyes twinkled fierce blue through the sand that caked his face.
He studied her. And he began to laugh, too, a sound that came from deep in his belly and burbled up through his chest. He laughed so hard it brought moisture to his eyes and it ran in streaky trickles down the sides of his face.
He took her hand and they ran down to the water like abandoned spirits under the dome of empty blue sky. They furiously shed their clothes, tossed them onto the white sand of the riverbed and plunged into water that embraced their hot and burned and raw bodies like cool silk.