Epilogue

When I woke up I was in bed in what appeared to be a hospital but what I learned later was the back room of the police post. It was cool, with a fan in the ceiling, and overlooked a deserted courtyard full of geraniums and Ali Baba jars. Bougainvillaea grew in at the window under a striped blind that was faded with the sun, and it was glitteringly bright outside and the flies were making the room loud with their buzzing.

They’d set up beds in there, and Morena was alongside me, smiling weakly, fresh bandages on his body, looking as though all the moisture had been dried out of him by the sun. There was another bed just beyond, but it was empty.

A policeman came in later and told me I’d slept for forty-eight hours. He was a Libyan, with a dark skin and a mouthful of teeth like gravestones, and it was a joy just to see his smile. He told me in halting English that the others had been found. They were all well, he said, and gave me water that was cool and tasted like wine. I could see my reflection in a glass-fronted case that looked absurd against the bare white wall because it was the sort of thing my mother had used to hold her china, and was probably some sort of loot from the desert war where Italian generals had always carried around everything but the kitchen sink.

I seemed to have lost stones in weight and was starting a lovely beard, but my eyes were hollow and the lines that had long been forming on my face seemed to have been etched deeper by the sun.

After a meal of tough old mutton and cups of intolerably sweet mint tea the man in uniform whom I’d met when I’d first staggered into Breba appeared again. He seemed to be some sort of official and for an hour or more he badgered us with questions.

‘What happened?’ he kept asking with desperate earnestness, as though he sensed some tragedy. ‘What happened to your transport? Why were you off the road?’

‘Because it was safer,’ I said, shaking my head with weariness at the nagging questions. ‘If we hadn’t got off the road none of us would have reached here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of Ghad Ahmed.’

‘Ghad Ahmed?’ His brows came down. ‘Who is this Ghad Ahmed?’

It took a little doing to remember all that had happened, but slowly, prompted by the police, we went through the whole story, right from the beginning, right from the moment we’d first reached the Depression and seen Crabourne’s party there in front of us and caught the first scent of something wrong. It took me all my time to give them instructions where to find Houston and Leach and Selinski and all the others we’d left behind on the way, and, as I spoke, the uniformed man’s face grew horrified.

‘There will have to be an enquiry,’ he kept saying. ‘There will need to be an investigation. This is serious.’

‘You’re damn right it was serious.’

‘But all this shooting! All these lives lost! This isn’t wartime!’

‘You’d never have noticed the difference,’ Morena commented dryly.

The man in uniform straightened up. ‘I shall have to inform higher authority,’ he said. ‘I think this is too important for me to handle.’

After that they left us alone for a while and I was able to sleep some more, and when I woke up again Nimmo appeared. He looked well while I knew I looked like hell, and I experienced a moment of childish disappointment at the knowledge. After all my worries I’d proved nothing except that he could recover faster than I could.

He was in borrowed clothes and seemed a little embarrassed and shy with us, but there seemed no enmity as he asked how we were – as though, as his exhaustion had dropped away from him, so had his bitterness.

‘They’ve been in touch with the coast,’ he said. ‘The Embassy’s sending someone down to go into it. The old boy out there’s worried silly by what’s been going on.’

After a while he went away and came back with Phil. She, too, was wearing borrowed clothes, but, apart from the dark rings under her eyes, she looked as though she’d never been out in the desert.

She also seemed embarrassed and shy, and stood near Nimmo all the time. She told us that the American Ambassador had got permission for them to leave before any enquiry was held and had even advised them to go. They’d been offered a lift in a police car to the coast and they’d decided they might as well accept.

She stood by the bed for a moment, staring at the glittering brightness outside. The afternoon sun seemed to have paralysed all activity, regulating life like an unwritten law as it always had, driving everyone indoors until it sank towards the horizon and the doors opened at last and the shops woke up and the veiled women appeared in the streets. For a long time she said nothing, standing awkwardly, devoid of friendship or dislike, but merely depressingly neutral, then she thanked us haltingly.

‘We owe a lot to you both,’ she said slowly. ‘The drawings are undamaged. They’ve gotten them out. We shan’t have to do them again.’

When they left, moving out together, her hand in Nimmo’s, they looked so heartbreakingly young I felt as old as God and probably just as weary.

‘The drawings are undamaged,’ I repeated slowly. ‘We shan’t have to do them again. That’s a bloody relief I must say.’

 

After that, Migliorini and the newspapermen came down from the coast, and we were photographed together. Later we saw pictures of the drawings Crabourne had done and the headline said ‘TREASURE FROM THE DESERT’. Then an Englishman came to see us who, it seemed, was on the staff of the British Ambassador. He was a languid young man, not much older than Nimmo, with dark glasses and a lazy manner and a limp handshake like a warm wet fish.

He was bored with the whole affair, and it was obviously a bloody nuisance to have to drive all the way from the coast to Breba on a hot day. He reminded me of some of the specialist half-colonels who used to come up from Cairo to give us pep-talks before operations and got medals for sitting at desks – smooth young men with good connections who were always too intelligent to risk their own necks and preferred to do the talking to dimmer people like me and Morena, while they stayed themselves where it was cool and there was plenty of pink gin.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right. They’ve picked up the last of the jeeps. They’ve found the men who stole it. They’ve got the whole story. Confirms what you said. No trouble now. This chap Ghad Ahmed’s known to the police at Qahait and Qalam as a bit of a troublemaker.’

‘A bit of a trouble-maker,’ Morena said. ‘Christ, they should have seen them in action!’

‘Yes, well’ – the young man shrugged – ‘you know how it is. Anyway, it’s all over now and we got the money all right. Hell of a long way to go, though. Pity you couldn’t have brought it with you.’

Morena glared. ‘Pity we didn’t let that bastard Ghad Ahmed have it in the beginning,’ he said bitterly. ‘It might have saved us all a lot of trouble. I don’t suppose anybody gives a damn, anyway.’

‘’Fraid that’s true,’ the young man said easily. ‘HM Government won’t miss it when you consider what a penny duty on cigarettes brings in, in the course of a year.’

 

We got a lift to the coast in a car belonging to a couple of oil men, both of them so young they seemed to be children, and the aircraft we caught at the coast was full of more of them coming out, so full of hope and youth and energy they made me feel ancient.

We got a letter of thanks from the Ambassador and another from some vague department in London who said there’d eventually be a reward. But the department that had rustled up the money in 1942 had long since disappeared, they said, and the file had been passed around so much in the years between they’d almost forgotten about it, and it would take some time.

I never saw Phil again, though later I saw a picture in the paper of her, dressed in virgin white, getting married to Nimmo. ‘EXPEDITION HERO MARRIES’, the paper said. ‘DESERT BROUGHT THEM TOGETHER’. Not half it didn’t. So bloody close you couldn’t have got a fig leaf between them.

Nimmo wasn’t so different from his father, I thought. In fact, we’d all acted according to character in the end. Houston hadn’t got what it took, and probably never had had, and Leach, the prize scrounger, had gone on scrounging to the limit and couldn’t stop. Morena was still Morena and I was still me, in just the same way, only more so. Nimmo had come out expecting to get a share of the loot and because he hadn’t managed it he’d done just what his father would have done in the same circumstances and run off with somebody’s girl instead.

As Morena said with a smile over the last beer at London Airport before we parted, me for Fleet Street again, him for his garage in Reading: ‘It was always the same poor bastards who copped it and always the same clever sods who got all the credit.’

Which, when you come to think of it, was right all down the line.

Nothing had changed. We’d been arrogant enough to think we might be as good as we’d been twenty years before. But we weren’t. We weren’t. Only in the desert had time stood still. Only the desert remained the same, hiding everything, shrouding the good and the bad alike with its advancing sand, covering Crabourne and Selinski as it had the Paymaster and Houston and Leach, and Ghad Ahmed with his fervent ambition.

As we’d moved, the desert had closed behind us, the lonely wind obliterating the marks we’d made with our tyres, the sparse trampled grass taking fresh root, the shifting sand covering the ashes of the fires we’d built, so that anyone coming afterwards could never tell who’d gone before – so that there was nothing left except the limitless spaces and the timeless quality of the nights and mornings.

Only the young men with their instruments and energy knew how to deal with it. For men like us, working by the old methods, using wheels instead of wings and navigating by the seat of our pants, for us there was no going back, after all.