In the Eye of the Storm

26. A Little Pebble is a Dangerous Thing

Over the next few days, a tacit agreement developed between Mr Ambrose and me. We did our best to detest each other during the day, me flinging examples of my ever-growing vocabulary of Arabic swear words at him, he building up a thick wall of silence. But in the night...

In the night, different things happened.

We would lie down next to each other again, and he would fold me in his arms, creating a small cave of warmth for me amidst the cold desolation of the desert around us. The whole night he would hold me like this – and not just for warmth, either. The taste of his lips on mine... Up until then, I hadn't thought it possible for anything to rival the savoury scrumptiousness of solid chocolate. I had been mistaken.

When, in the morning, he returned to his usual cold, standoffish, silent self, I sometimes asked myself whether I hadn't simply dreamed up his night-time alter ego. But then the sun would go down, and the dark shadow of a tall man would stalk towards me.

'Lillian?'

'Yes?'

'Come to me.'

The nights passed. I supposed the days passed too, but recently I had started paying a lot more attention to the former than to the latter. We travelled at a slow crawl through the desert, or maybe we were whizzing through it faster than a racing horse. I didn't really know. In a landscape where everything always changed, blown away by the wind, it was hard to say where you were at any given time and how fast you were moving.

How many days passed before it happened, I didn't know. I only knew that it was an excruciatingly hot day, and the sun was beating down on our heads with red-hot, iron hammers. In other words, a day like any other. That was the day on which it happened.

We were just moving up the side of a dune. Unfortunately, it was the side that lay full in the sunlight. Ambrose was struggling, making grunting noises with every step. I supposed he was having bowel problems. He hadn't produced quite as much shit to burn yesterday as usual. Unfortunately, I couldn't very well ask his namesake to step into the breach.

Suddenly, Ambrose stopped entirely. Blinking, trying to rouse myself out of my heat-induced stupor, I saw something black right in front of me on the glowing sand. It looked like a cross between a crab and a giant spider, with a huge, sharp tail at one end. Wait a minute... I had seen something like this in an encyclopaedia once, hadn't I? What was it called again? A scorpion! Yes, that was it! A scorpion! Wasn't its tail...?

I frowned. Somewhere at the back of my mind I was sure there was something important I had to remember about that tail. But it just didn't want to come to me right then. Was it used in native medicine? Was it a delicacy in French restaurants? Yes, that was probably it! The French ate all kinds of weird stuff.

The scorpion clicked its pincers menacingly. Ambrose took a step backwards.

'Oh, don't be a chicken!' I told the camel. Leaning down towards the scorpion, I told it in a very loud and clear voice: 'Piss off!'

The scorpion hesitated for a moment – then turned, scuttled away and dived into a hole not far away.

'There, you see?' I patted Ambrose's neck. 'No need to get spooked. I'll protect you.'

Only when I reached the top of the dune did I realise that there might be plenty of reason to get spooked. I also realized that I probably hadn't been the reason for the scorpion's sudden retreat underground. Far, far ahead to the southeast I could see a yellowish something, like a sickly bank of clouds, hovering close above the ground. Far too close for it to really be clouds. At first I thought the thing wasn't moving at all, but then I noticed that the distance between it and a solitary rock ahead of us was slowly shrinking. Finally, it reached the rock – and swallowed it up.