CHAPTER

27

OMAR SAID, “You know guys, Wadi Rum is massive, right? To try to find one person? Shouldn’t we, like, call the police or the American embassy or somebody?” They’d turned the car around and driven due south. It would take another three hours to get there.

“Police like the ones at Petra?” Gabe asked. “The ones who lost him in the first place?” He had tried calling Hafez’s mobile again: a message answered that the voicemail at this number was full.

Samir said something in Arabic, shaking his head.

“But I mean—he isn’t lost,” Amani said. “Hafez had to have taken him somewhere. We just have to figure out where they went.”

Still, she felt urgency in her gut, in her bones. She told herself that Hafez wouldn’t let anything happen to him, but she kept imagining Musa’s body buried in the desert or picked apart by raptors, the bones carried away. She let her head tip against the seat back and fell into an overheated doze, the words raptor, rapt, enraptured, vibrating in her thoughts. When she woke, the car windows were blazing. Sun-struck mountains rippled across her vision, so close they seemed about to spill into the car. They had turned off the highway. Her father offered her a bottle of water and a shawarma sandwich rolled up in pita: they’d stopped for gas and food while she’d slept. She gulped down the water then devoured the sandwich, licking the garlicky sauce from her fingers, staring out the windows. The ground looked like coppery satin. Horsetails of sand flickered before the car and a sound like ticking needles sprayed across the windshield. Samir cursed and turned on the wipers, clearing waves in the film that instantly filled in.

They came to a small compound of concrete and sandstone bricks, a sign overhead in English and Arabic: Wadi Rum Visitor’s Center. Drivers leaned against a row of jeeps; in the distance, Bedouins with wrapped heads led camels across the stony earth. Stepping out into the wind, Amani held the side of the car and surveyed the palatial rocks and crimson sand. The wind dashed shrouds of dust off the mountains, currents of it twisted into the sky like immense ghosts.

The entry area listed different prices for Jordanians and foreigners. A man in white trousers, blazer, and a waist-length keffiyeh trimmed with white tassels sat at a ticket counter. Gabe spoke with him; at first, the man scowled fiercely, shaking his head. He seemed to be trying to dismiss them. Then Samir started speaking, touching his sternum, and the man’s eyes lifted. He nodded several times, glancing at Amani and Gabe. Amani realized that Samir and the man—who said his name was Daleel—were comparing family trees. Omar leaned over and whispered: This guy knows something. The man turned to Gabe and said in English, “I didn’t think you are Hamdan family. My mother’s sister is married to Toufik Hamdan.”

Gabe nodded, “Sure—I know Toufik!”

“Second cousins,” Omar murmured to Amani. “And that’s how it’s done.”

Daleel hesitated, as if about to say something when another man joined them: he wore an ankle-length dishdasha and a red keffiyeh wound like a turban around his head. Gabe and Omar spoke to him in rapid Arabic, moving their hands. Amani could hear them describing Hafez and Musa, but the second man clicked his tongue. “No one here like that,” he said in American-accented English. “We can check the registry, but we know everyone who comes in or out.” Amani saw the first man look at her, then away. Four then five others drifted over, conferring in Arabic, shaking their heads; a few of them held cups of tea. They offered tea to Gabe and Amani, who declined. Two desert officers joined the group. “They have no record of these people. When do you think they come?” one asked.

“Someone would have seen them,” another said.

“Probably they have gone home already.”

Gabe and Amani gave as much information as they had. The officers disagreed with the ticket merchants, saying that someone coming after the ticket office closed could enter the monument fairly easily. “Only the stars are watching then,” one officer said, pointing to the deepening blue light in the sky. “And scorpions.” The other officer smoothed his mustache with the flat of his thumb.

A man holding a demitasse cup gestured with it to the sky. “There’s supposed to be another windstorm coming. They’re not letting tourists in right now anyway.”

They asked where Gabe and Amani were from, who these missing people were, why they were missing. They had a lot of questions, but offered very little information—just theories and more idle speculation. After a while, Amani wandered away from the group, almost certain they were withholding something. She walked into the center courtyard, ringed by souvenir shops selling bright scarves, embroidered linens, and pottery. The wind had settled for a moment and the air looked gauzy. Holding both hands to her forehead like a visor, she squinted at a rock formation in the distance that reminded her of smokestacks.

“That one is the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” It was Daleel, the first man they’d met at the ticket counter. Daleel’s face was so tanned and etched it looked like dried leather; his mouth had a thin, bitter curve. He stared at the red-rock mountain.

“I only see five,” Amani said, again shielding her eyes, deliberately not looking at him. She felt as though she were trying not to frighten off something wild.

“That’s right,” he said. Then his gaze ticked back: she could feel him studying the side of her face. “You remind me by someone,” he said at last. “Very much.” After a few moments, he murmured, “There is people here I think who will know more.”

She turned toward him, uncertain. “I—I’m sorry, I don’t have any money.”

He put one hand on his chest and lifted the fingers of the other as if taking an oath and Amani felt embarrassed for having mentioned payment. “You wait here. If you’re ready now, I can bring you.” The man trotted to the line of parked vehicles and brought around a jeep with only a windshield and bars where a roof would be. Amani stopped at the door, looking back over her shoulder.

“We must go—right away. I’ll be in trouble if anyone sees I help you.” The man gestured vigorously.

“Let me just run and tell my father.”

The man made a slashing movement with his hand. “No—no! The others will see. I’m sorry—it has to be now. You have to go with me. Or I can’t help.”

There was a lift in his eyes like a promise that she thought she could trust. She felt braver in Jordan—there was less crime in Amman than in the little college town where she lived. If this man was her only chance to find Musa, she was going to take it. “I’ll just be a second. I can—” Amani craned to look back over one shoulder, but felt the jeep begin to roll. “Wait! Fuck!” She jumped in and the man accelerated, looking around anxiously. “Where are we going?” she asked. He shouted something, but she didn’t catch it over the rush of wind, her hair whipping back.

They rumbled by strings of camels, a child walking before a herd of horses, a small group of men squatting together above a campfire. Approaching a compound of concrete buildings bordered by faded red walls, the driver shouted that this was Rum Village—the source of tour guides, drivers, and camp cooks. Amani saw disemboweled cars and flapping laundry. A camel nosing a bag on the ground. The road turned to powdery sand tracks. They drove around a rock tower, the jeep’s engine pulsed, stones pinging and banging against the undercarriage. A boy stood outside a row of tidy striped tents with flat tops, waving as they passed. Once they’d slowed enough to hear each other, Daleel said over the car’s roar that he’d heard someone had been found in the wilderness area the other day: he would take her to some guides who knew where he was.

“Why is it such a secret?” Amani asked, lifting her voice.

“They are protecting him. It’s their culture—the guest is higher above all others. And the authorities are not trusted.” He brought his fingertips together with one hand, steering with the other, and shouted, Stenna. Wait. Almost there.

They drove into deeper sand and the engine noise became a low churning. The sun had gone beneath the horizon and the temperature dropped. Amani wrapped her arms around her ribs. The driver reached into the back and gave her a long cloak. She was grateful for its warmth. Her thoughts swung back and forth: she wondered if she should feel afraid.

The jeep rounded another imposing Mesozoic rock and pulled up to an encampment hidden at the base of the massif. The tents made a clapping sound in the wind. Light glowed through the stitched, woven panels. The cold air smelled like juniper and stone, as if the mountain had exhaled. Daleel called out as they walked to the encampment, then he bent to the tent flap and pulled it back, revealing a small table with a kerosene lamp, men huddled around a card game. Two of them stooped to come outside: they murmured with Daleel, casting evaluative glances at Amani, and again she wondered if she’d acted too rashly. It felt as if they were very far from other people. Finally, the men approached: one wore a skull cap, the other a keffiyeh that he wore folded in a tail down his back. Amani pulled her hair behind her shoulders, feeling exposed and uncertain. One of them beckoned. “We’ll go to their horses,” Daleel said.

They followed the two men along the foot of the rock until they reached a crevice in the rockface. They gestured for Amani and Daleel to continue. Amani followed Daleel, turning sideways to squeeze through the rock opening into a wide canyon. Swallows darted through the air, snatching insects. It was hard to see, the evening rapidly darkening. Amani’s feet slid over the dimpled sand and she felt residual warmth through the soles of her sneakers. She touched the side of the butte for balance, it was cool and rough. In the distance, a voice seemed to rise out of the rocks; the wind had grown into a rumble and the song was so faint it might have been imagined, but then Daleel sang along for a few bars. He glanced at her with a quick flash of a smile. The men had moved ahead and vanished around a corner. Daleel was many paces ahead too, but she hung back, startled and distracted by the sky.

Overhead, stars had already started to emerge; they were impossibly close and so bold and so many, the night was crowded with them, shooting and pulsating, like nothing Amani had ever seen before. Arrested by the dial of constellations, she stopped to stare, stepping back, turning, eyes lifted. She craned, looking all the way up, and the depths enveloped her. “My God, just—just look at that,” she whispered, spellbound. “My God.” She watched a star appear to flash red and streak across the sky. “It’s all so much closer here.” She stared and lifted her fingers to the refracting light as if she might actually touch it. “God, I wish my mother could see this.” She trailed her fingers back and forth. “I wish . . .” She stopped then, listening. She lowered her eyes. “Daleel?”

Turning slowly in a circle, she realized she was all alone.