visions of doom

The passage of time seems to have bleached out man's stains
T E

That afternoon, I had refused to believe that the two birds of prey that had hovered occasionally above were there by coincidence, a chance encounter over their territory that must have stretched across horizons of endless sands. I believe they were there for me, waiting for me to die like some horrible cliché in a Western that had turned terribly wrong, the hero crawling desperately in the desert, a symbolic vulture in the background. I made sudden movements with my hands as I lay in the sand, showing I was alive and strong. They called out, settling on the next dune, five stories high.

They hadn't helped my mind, which had turned to thoughts of dying very quickly. I was on a suggestion of a road that no one seemed to use, the only vehicle in the 70km that I had travelled from the Omani army camp near the Saudi Arabian border, now stuck hopelessly in the sand. I had eaten breakfast there, invited by soldiers taken aback by the appearance of a lone civilian in an area so remote even they weren't sure what lay around the next dune formation. And when they did venture out it was always in a convoy, armed with automatic rifles and jerry cans of fuel and water. They hadn't thought that driving to the border was a good idea ~ the Saudi soldiers were unfriendly, they hinted, and the actual border seemed a little vague in the landscape of shifting sands and nothingness. I left them my business card and said I'd be back in an hour for breakfast ~ and to come after me if I wasn't. Thirteen kilometres later I was there, at a lone pole by the side of a sandy road that went on further, with a plaque on either side naming its country. An hour later I was back on safer ground, eating chappatis and daal for breakfast ~ they had a Bengali cook, a dark, bent-over leathery old man who would later be full of visions of doom.

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