Declare

to use the wells and gather dates from the hundreds of date palms, which no one ever tended anymore.
    Butterflies fluttered around Hale’s face as he ate—little orange and black painted ladies—and bin Jalawi nodded somberly when he saw Hale brushing them away.
    “You know better than to inhale one of them, bin Sikkah,” he said, using Hale’s Bedu name now that they were in the sands, rather than the city name Tommo Burks. “But don’t crush them, or needlessly knock them into the fire.”
    “Poor ghosts,” agreed one of the ’Al-Murra tribesmen. His gaunt face was sculpted into chiaroscuro gullies and prominences by the firelight as he too glanced around at the horizon notches that were the old forts. He wrung his hands for a moment as if washing them, then spread them to the sides, palm down. “At least they’re the ghosts of men. South of here will be ghosts of other things.”
    Hale had read in the Hezar Efsan about ghosts of the A’adites. “The walking stones,” he said.
    “Uskut!” the man exclaimed; the Arabic word meant shut up! “Name them not!”
    One of the butterflies had landed on bin Jalawi’s palm, and he breathed softly on it, ruffling its wings but not dislodging it. “If you can hear,” he said to it, “and think, remember us in your morning prayers; even the Nazrani .”
    Hale smiled sourly, but he was sure that if the butterflies were indeed ghosts, they were fragments of identity too minimal to be capable of thought. He sniffed the stone-scented wind and thought that there was no sentience at all in the miles of dark desert surrounding them; far away to the north and south might be hidden isolated clusters of warm Bedu tents, with perhaps overhead in the dark sky the astronomical distortions that indicated the passage of djinn through the Heaviside Layer, but the Jabrin region felt empty.
    He knew that the desert south of them would not be empty; and he tried to pray, but in spite of his best efforts he found that his mental Pater Nosters quickly degenerated into a sterile recitation of the London Underground stations. Once again he envied Elena her faith.
    “Bug,” he said in useless English to the fluttering nullity on bin Jalawi’s palm, “in your orisons, be all my sins remembered.”
    When he had finished the rice and scoured the plate with a couple of handfuls of sand, he wiped his hands on his dishdasha robe and then unzipped the longer of the two leather cases he had carried from the jeep; he lifted out of it a slim Mannlicher 9.5-millimeter carbine and a canvas bag of loaded stripper-clips, and another canvas bag that contained four custom-machined iron ankhs, wrapped in linen cloths to prevent clinking. Doubtless his Bedu companions imagined that the second bag contained spare cartridges on clips like the first—they would be scandalized by the sight of the devilish ankhs—and Hale decided not to trouble them with an explanation of the Egyptian looped crosses until the party had reached the regions where their protection would be necessary.
    Hale didn’t have to goad his Bedu companions to ride hard during the cool January days; his only worry was that one or even all three of them might be missing at prayer time one dawn.
    The wind was steadily at their backs from the north. When the sun was bright and there were high dunes to be crested—with the wind casting long dazzling streamers of sand from the topmost ridges, and the camels plunging single-file down the lee slopes to expose streaks of lighter-colored sand under the dark tan top layer—Hale dizzily felt that somehow they had climbed up into the sky and were plodding across the top surfaces of clouds. And when they crossed the desert’s gypsum stone floor between dunes in thrashing rain, with the camels’ hooves clattering among primordial seashells, he imagined he was in the vanguard of the Pharaoh’s army, pursuing Moses across the floor of the Red Sea in the moments before the unnaturally sustained walls of water would break and crash back in.
    And he came to appreciate the expertise of his guides; most of the covered wells were mounds identifiable by the camel tracks that led to them and the camel dung and date-stones that paved their surroundings, but several times he saw one of his guides ride directly to an anonymous sand hummock in a trackless landscape and confidently dismount and kick away drifted sand to expose the hides and timbers that covered a hidden well. Some of the wells they