The Great Sand Sea

Chapter One: Chandler & Son

The yard behind the citadel took the afternoon sun like a frying pan takes butter, and Ruby Chandler lay underneath a Ford lorry in four inches of hot dust, listening to a man's shoes come toward her across it.

Good shoes. She could tell by the sound. Cairo was full of men who could not afford good shoes and full of men who could, and the ones who could always walked as though the ground had been laid for them personally.

"I'm looking for the proprietor," the shoes said.

"You've found the whole staff." She reached up and back, felt for the drain plug she had dropped, and closed her hand on it. "If you want tyres, they're stacked by the gate and the price is chalked on them. If you want credit, the answer's no."

"I want an engineer."

"Then wait."

She took her time. The lorry was a 1930 AA with a chassis that had been bent in the Qattara scarp country and straightened twice, and she had spent two days persuading its back axle to live another season. It belonged to a cotton factor in Minya who paid slowly and complained quickly. She fitted the plug, wiped her hands on her thighs, and slid out into the glare.

The man standing over her was tall and dried out, sixty or near it, with white hair cropped close and skin the colour of a saddle. He wore a linen suit that had been very good three years ago. His shirt collar was frayed where it went into his tie, and he had shaved that morning with a blade that was past it — she could see the little nicks along his jaw. He was holding his hat in both hands like a man at a graveside.

Ruby had never seen him before in her life. She knew him at once.

There had been a photograph in the illustrated papers in the spring of 1932: five cars in line on a hard gravel plain, and eleven men, and one of the men had his hand on her brother's shoulder. That hand had been on Peter's shoulder in the picture Ruby kept in the drawer under her bed. She had looked at it so often that she could have drawn the shirt cuff from memory.

"Miss Chandler," said Clive Braithwaite.

She wiped her hands again, more slowly, and did not offer one.

"You've come to the wrong yard," she said.

"I don't believe I have. There are eleven motor workshops in this city that will sell an expedition a spring leaf. There is one that knows how to build a car that survives soft sand, and it is this one, and it is because your father built it and you learned it off him." He looked around the yard: the roofless shed, the row of stripped chassis, the eight-foot heap of worn tyres, the two Sudanese boys asleep in the shade of the water butt. "I knew Joseph. He sold me my first set of Dunlops in 1926 and told me they wouldn't do, and he was right, and I bought them anyway."

"He mentioned you." She heard her own voice go flat and let it. "He said you were the sort of man who spends other people's luck."

Braithwaite's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "He said worse than that to my face."

"My brother went out with you and he didn't come back."

"He did not." The old man's eyes were pale, and they did not slide off hers, which she had not expected. "I have thought about it every day for two years."

"Have you." Ruby crossed to the bench, picked up a wire brush and began cleaning a set of plugs she had already cleaned. Her hands wanted something to do so badly that they shook. "Because the account you gave the Survey took up eleven lines. Heat exhaustion. Wandered from camp during the night. Search of four days, unsuccessful. Eleven lines for a man who could shoot a star to fifteen seconds of arc and never once in his life wandered anywhere without writing down what time he left."

"Miss Chandler—"

"He kept a notebook when he had a fever of a hundred and three in Assiut. He wrote down the temperature. He wrote down the doctor's name and what it cost. And you'd have me believe he got up in the dark in the middle of the Sand Sea and strolled off without telling anybody or writing anything."

The two boys had woken and were watching from the shade with great interest. Somewhere beyond the wall a donkey was being beaten and objecting to it, and the muezzin's call started up thin and enormous over the roofs, and the light came off the whitewashed wall like a slap.

Braithwaite turned his hat around in his hands.

"I need a mechanic," he said. "I can pay eighteen pounds a month."

"You can't pay eighteen shillings. Your Fayoum venture went down with everything in it, you owe the Continental for four months, and Barclays have got a charge on your house in Kent." She held a plug up and looked through the gap at him. "You'd be astonished, Mr Braithwaite, how much a woman hears in a yard where nobody thinks she's worth lowering their voice for."

He took that without flinching. She had to give him that.

"Then you know what I'm doing," he said.

"I know you've been buying petrol drums on ninety days, which means you're going west, and going soon, before the money you haven't got runs out. Which season? February?"

"The cars leave Dakhla on the sixth."

"To do what?"

And there it was: the thing she had not been able to see in his face until she asked. It came up out of him like water out of a cut. He was not a man who had come to hire a mechanic. He was a man who had come to talk about the only thing that still made him breathe properly.

"To cross it," he said. "North to south is nothing, anyone can crawl the eastern edge. I mean the width of it. Four hundred and thirty miles of dune, on wheels, from Dakhla to the Libyan side, and in the middle of it, if the caravan men have not been lying to each other for six hundred years, there is a sink with palms in it and a stone well and grass. They call it the Two Palms. Bir en-Nakhlatain. Three separate camel men have told me they have drunk there. Nobody has put it on a map. Nobody has photographed it." He stopped. "I have a cinema company paying for the film. I have five vehicles. I have a wireless set, a doctor, a man from the Egyptian Survey with a theodolite, and a guide out of Jaghbub who knows the western wells the way you know this yard. I have everything except somebody who can keep the cars alive when the sand goes soft, and I have four weeks to find them."

Ruby put the plug down.

She had wanted, for two years, to be able to hate him in a plain, clean way, the way you hate a bad drain or a customer who does not pay. It would have been so much simpler if he had been stupid, or a fraud, or drunk. Instead he stood in her father's yard with a frayed collar and told her about grass and a stone well and she felt the same thing move in her chest that had moved when Peter, aged twenty-four, had come home at two in the morning with a fossil sea-urchin in his pocket and shaken her awake to look at it.

"Get out of my yard," she said.

Braithwaite put his hat on.

"I am at the Bristol," he said. "A small room at the back. The cars are at the Mena garage and I am taking them up the Saqqara sand hills on Thursday to load-test them. If you should care to come and laugh, the wire fence is down at the western end."

He walked out. His shoes crossed the dust, unhurried, and the gate shut behind him.

Ruby stood for a while with the brush in her hand. Then she went into the office, which had been her father's office and still had his handwriting on every shelf label, and she took the tin box out from behind the ledgers and sat down with it on the packing case that served for a chair.

Peter's letters. Twenty-two of them, from four years of survey work, and the last one written from Dakhla in March 1932 in pencil, on paper with a smear of engine grease in the corner that she was certain he had put there on purpose to annoy her.

She knew the last one by heart and read it anyway.

He had been happy. That was the thing that could still take the legs out from under her, thirty months on. He had been so happy about the work. He had written that the leader was vain and brave and "about as safe as a boy with a razor," and that the sand had a shape to it if you looked long enough, and that he had begun a private list of every place in the western desert where a man could reasonably expect to find water, and that when he had finished it he would bring it home and they would go and look at all of it together, in her lorries, with her driving, and Ruby was on no account to marry anybody dull in the meantime.

She had answered that letter. He had died — they told her — nine days before her answer reached Dakhla.

Ruby put the letters back in the tin. Outside, the light was going and the yard had turned the colour of a new penny.

Thursday, she thought.

She went out and started putting a spare set of eight-inch balloon tyres onto the good Ford.