Declare

or granite. He had turned to historical records then, hoping to find mention of a meteor strike that might be said to have killed a djinn.
    It proved to be easy to find, in a book called The Empty Quarter , published by Holt as recently as 1933; and the very name of the author was intriguing—the book had been written by H. St. John Philby, the father of Kim Philby. In the book the senior Philby recounted his expedition into the Rub’ al-Khali desert to find the lost city of Wabar.
    Many passages in the Koran described Allah’s angry destruction of the city of the idolatrous A’adites, and Arab folklore recalled the city as having been called Wabar or Ubar, and placed it in the great southern Arabian desert. St. John Philby had trekked by camel caravan to the reputed site, but instead of ruined foundations he had found the black volcanic walls of two meteor craters; in his book St. John Philby described black pellets of fused glass which his Bedu guides had thought were the pearls of perished A’adite ladies, and he mentioned a Bedu legend that a big piece of iron lay somewhere in the area, though Philby had not succeeded in finding it.
    The elder Philby had assumed that the vaguely constructed-looking black crater walls must have been the only basis for the Bedu identification of the site as the legendary Wabar; apparently it had not occurred to him that the fabled city might actually have stood there, and literally have been destroyed by fire from the heavens.
    Several times during Hale’s research the old, half-welcome excited nausea had kept him fearfully reading all night, drinking contraband Scotch and wishing he could bring himself to follow Elena’s example and return to the Catholic faith.
    In the chapter on Wabar, St. John Philby had described the dreams he had had as his caravan had approached the craters— nightmares of the desert spinning around him in radiating rays of gravel, while he tried uselessly to take bearings with a surveyor’s instrument.
    And in the fragmentary Hezar Efsan , Hale was troubled to read the story enigmatically preserved as “The Fisherman and the Genie” in the Thousand Nights and One Night . In the ancient story, a genie tricked a fisherman into catching fish from a miraculously preserved lake in the desert; when the fish were put into a frying pan, a solid wall opened and a black giant described as “a mountain, or one of the survivors of the tribe of A’ ad” appeared and asked the fish, “O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?”—to which the fish replied, “Return, and we return; keep faith, and so will we.”
    Clearly, in his childhood end-of-the-year nightmares, Hale had been in touch with some hidden world—a disturbingly contrarational world, perhaps older than rationality, but still secretly alive and active.
    Hale was nervously certain that the A’adites had been fallen angels, and that Wabar had been a kingdom of djinn, destroyed by some kind of meteor strike—and he resolved to find the meteoric stone that St. John Philby had failed to find there.
    And so Captain Andrew Hale had quietly taken a vacation from the CRPO—while, as the Canadian Tommo Burks, he had flown to Al-Hufuf and begun outfitting an expedition to the Rub’ al-Khali region of Saudi Arabia, under forged authorization documents from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.
    In the Jafurah desert settlements outside Al-Hufuf he hired ten Bedu tribesmen for the expedition, including several from the ’Al-Murra tribes to act as guides and rafiq escorts, and he set his agent Salim bin Jalawi to assembling thirty desert-bred ’ Umaniya camels and purchasing enough rice, dates, coffee, first-aid supplies, and ammunition for a month-long trip.
    He had planned to leave at the end of January in 1948, and had applied to King Saud for permission to travel in the Saudi interior—but on January 6, his birthday, Hale had received word that the king had forbidden the trip. The ’Al-Murra tribes were at war with the Manasir, Hale was told, and the situation was complicated by the fact that the king’s tax collectors were in the area collecting the zakat tribute. But the ’Al-Murra tribesmen Hale had enlisted for the trip had not heard of any fighting with the Manasir, and Hale knew that the zakat was always collected in June and July, when the summer’s lack of grazing forced the Bedu to camp on their home wells.
    “He doesn’t want a Nazrani out in the sands,”