The Casablanca Cruise

"What do you mean, 'They're gone'?!"

Monica gripped the edge of the watering trough and leaned over it, not for intimidating effect, but just to keep herself upright as all the bones melted out of her legs. The trough was a lion-legged bathtub, rusty around the edges now, but it stood up admirably under her shaky weight and made her seem, if not relaxed, at least taller and that was something. She stared at the back of the Waterman's head with the gape-mouthed incredulity that, in America anyway, would have demanded explanation.

Here in the desert, on the other hand, another slack-jawed American tourist was of no interest to the natives, certainly not to the Waterman. He did not give her a better answer. He did not even look around. He simply sat on the ancient wooden folding chair that was the water station's only furniture, paring his nails and contemplating the sand of the Sahara.

Monica wanted to argue. For the matter, she wanted to grab the Waterman by his ears and shake him until his hair fell out, but she restrained herself. Panicking, although attractive, was not a good idea for a woman alone in another country. She squeezed the rim of the bathtub even harder and tried to think back on what the tour guidebook said to do if you got separated from the bus.

"Do you have a phone?" she asked.

"No," said the Waterman.

"A radio? C.B." Smoke signals? Anything?!?" Her voice cracked and she forced herself to calm down again before she asked, "If you need to talk to someone, what do you do?"

The Waterman lifted his knife and pointed with its blade along the hard-baked desert to the very distant mountains of Morocco. "I wait," he said, in his detached, gravelly voice. "Someone will come, and I will talk to them."

"Well, what if you get hurt?" Monica was leaning over the tub again. If she got any more frightened, she was likely to fall in. "What if you get sick, or break your arm or something horrible happens to you, like an angry American tourist breaks a bathtub over your head?"

The Waterman moved his head just enough to slide an eye back at her. "Then I will die," he said. "Allah alim." And after a meaningful pause, he added, "The desert does not forgive fools."

That stung. Monica did not consider herself a fool; what had happened to her was sheer bad luck. She was just one of the twenty tourists who had signed on for the month-long Arabian Holiday, which had promised to safely bear its living cargo from Casablanca to Cairo, with lots of time-outs called for shopping, eating, and sleeping in hotels. And up until now, it had been worth every penny of Monica's last three Christmas bonuses, but now this had to happen!

Morocco had been delightful, and their guide and driver both insisted that Egypt would be even better, but between them was two thousand miles of bad road through the Tropic of Cancer. Although there were small, clay villages dotting the harsh landscape here and there, the guide had sadly admitted that they would be driving through the desert for several days and at times forced to stop at tiny water stations to take on fuel and water.

The first water station had been a fascinating cultural hallmark. The second had been intriguing. The third was boring. And so on.

The bus had come with little curtains set on ceiling tracks so that any passenger could make a private little compartment whenever he or she wanted to sleep, and Monica had spent much of this leg of the journey with that curtain pulled, trying to sleep so that she could wake up in amazing Egypt and start having fun again. She had a dim memory of the bus stopping and one of her fellow passengers shaking her awake to ask if she wanted to come out and stretch her legs or "something", and an even dimmer memory of her refusal.

But once the bus was empty and Monica had a little more time to pull her senses together, she had fuzzily realized it would probably be quite some time before the next toilet presented itself and she'd gotten up after all. She hadn't made any attempt to sneak around; indeed, she'd walked right past a number of chatting American mini-groups on her way to the baked clay wall that pretty much was the bathroom. Thinking that a little freshening up was in order, she had lingered there in relative privacy, rummaging through her purse for her little baggie of baby wipes and travel-size deodorant. She never heard the bus start up. Her first realization that she'd been abandoned was when she'd stepped around the lavatory wall and found only the Waterman and empty desert.

The curtain on her seat was still pulled. She didn't know how long it would be before anyone noticed she was gone. She wasn't even sure anyone would think to come back here for her when they did.

"What am I supposed to do?" she asked now, and her hands finally lost their strength so that she sank down onto the burning ground, hard as concrete beneath her jeans.

"Someone will come," the Waterman said indifferently, and returned his attention to his fingernails.

"It could be days!"

The Waterman pared his nails.

"Weeks!" Monica stared owlishly at the empty desert, neither expecting nor receiving an answer. "What do I do until then?"

The Waterman reached into his belt and removed a small dagger with a thick, pitted blade. He passed it back to her without looking, and returned to his nails.

Monica was sitting in the shade with her back against one leg of the Waterman's folding chair paring her nails when she heard the camel. She looked up, then sprang up, and then had to restrain herself from flying madly across the desert and kissing the first camel in the vast caravan full on its spitting lips. "Camels!" she cried, hugging her knife instead.

The Waterman did not answer, but he did thunk his knife into the arm of his chair and rise to start the water flowing into the bathtub.

The camels came at camel-pace, and the robed figures who rode or walked beside them seemed content to share their plodding speed. There were dozens of camels, dozens more goats and sheep. Perhaps a hundred animals all together and half that many people. Many of them seemed to be watching her as they drew nearer, but when they reached the water station and dismounted, no one but the children showed any signs of interest and the children restricted themselves to giggling and pointing from a distance. The men ignored her, conferred briefly with the Waterman, and then set about refreshing their supplies.

Monica had been at the water station for two days. She was not about to be ignored. She went boldly up to the first man to reach the trough and said, "I need help."

The man looked at her closely as she explained her full situation. His dark eyes never left hers, not even to blink, although his hands continued to work, removing goatskins from the netting slung over his camel's neck, filling them from the water pipe, and fastening them to the saddle again. When she finished speaking, he continued to stare for a long while, clearly pondering her circumstances, and finally spoke two words:

"No English."

As Monica stared, the Arab turned away and walked back among the caravan.

The urge to punch a camel was rising, but the Arab appeared again almost at once, this time with another man at his side. They came to Monica, and the first man spoke in the swift, musical language of the natives. The second man listened, and then turned to Monica. He spoke.

In Italian.

Monica blinked rapidly as her brain leapt at the opportunity to learn a second language and tried to make sense of the gibberish coming out of the second man's mouth. She backed away, shaking her head violently, and yelled, "English! I speak English! Someone here speaks English!" She pointed an accusing finger at the Waterman, who was sitting again in his chair and tending to his personal hygiene. "I know you speak English, I saw you talking to him and he speaks English!"

The second man glanced at his companion and shrugged. The first man walked back into the caravan and returned a second time with a third man. This newcomer looked Monica over without a lot of apparent interest, but listened to the other men speak and finally turned to Monica and said, without a trace of an accent, "What do you want?"

"Thank God!" Monica cried.

The man turned to the others and spoke. All three raised their hands, intoned, "Allah!" and then turned to go.

"No!" Monica screamed. "No, don't leave me, I've been abandoned here and I've got to find a phone!"

The Arabs turned back, and the translator looked her over again, obviously considering his answer. "Do you know where you are?" he asked, perfectly politely.

"Of course I know where I am!"

"Then you must know there are no telephones."

"You don't understand, I'm lost! No one knows where I am! They could be in Cairo by now! I need to get out of here!"

The Arab spoke to his companions and the three men all nodded and looked thoughtful. None of them gave any sign of having helpful advice for her.

Monica looked around helplessly, and was not comforted to see that she was attracting a pretty good-sized crowd. It wasn't just the children now; virtually the entire caravan was now in a loose half-moon around her, watching. Some of the women were whispering or gesturing animatedly, but the men were uniformly stoic. As Monica gazed at them, willing sympathy, a boy of about eight years detached himself from his group and came running up to the three Arabs standing before her.

The boy did not speak and none of the men acknowledged him. He was just one more set of staring eyes.

Monica turned resolutely back to the one who spoke English. "You've got to help me!"

He translated this, considered it, and finally nodded. "We will locate a telephone," he said at last.

Monica's heart leapt.

"And inform the Americans of where you are," the Arab concluded.

Monica's heart smashed. "No!" she moaned, grinding the heels of her hands into her temples. "No, take me with you!"

The man translated but did not wait for a conference before saying, "That cannot be done."

Monica took her hands from her face--the eight year old had disappeared--and said, "I can pay you!"

Quiet Arabic flowed, and a stoic shake of his head. "It cannot be done."

"I have--" Monica tore open her purse and fumbled through it's contents. "Almost two thousand dollars! Traveler's checks, but they're good, they're Visa!" She found them and held them out.

The man did not take them. "It cannot be done."

"I have credit cards!" Monica jumped back into her purse. "I have Mastercard and Discover and, well that's my Blockbuster, but ... American Express and ... and gum!" She thrust the entire purse at the unblinking Arab.

"Gum?" The eight year old was back.

Monica blinked at the boy, hearing his elders swiftly admonishing him, and slowly took out her half-package of spearmint. She handed it to him, feeling hopeless, and watched the boy scamper back to the caravan.

When she looked back at the translator, he was waiting with the same mask of indifference.

"It cannot be done," he said.

The eight year old ran up to them again, his sandaled feet slapping the hard ground. He was grinning and his breath was minty fresh. He jabbered at the other men, waving one arm, then giggled and turned to stare at Monica with excited glee.

Monica's translator, without altering his expression in the slightest, said, "It can be done."

"Oh, thank God!" gasped Monica, hardly daring to breathe.

The three men exchanged a glance and dutifully repeated, "Allah!" Then the English-speaking Arab said, "The sheik has a daughter who is in need of a servant to do things which she cannot, due to her great station. You would agree to this?"

"Oh yes!"

"We are traveling to Baghdad. We will take you to Cairo. It is agreed?"

"Yes!" Delirious with relief and joy, Monica had to hug her purse to keep from leaping into the air and dancing around. "Agreed!"

The man turned and beckoned to the group of woman whispering nearby. "Israt!"

One of them, young and slender, detached herself and came forward. She listened as the man instructed her and then turned and gave Monica an ominous look of pure pity.

"Israt will see that you are made fit to serve your mistress," the Arab said simply, and without another glance in her direction, returned to the task of watering the camels.

The other girl, Israt, took Monica's hand and led her to the caravan. She opened one of the saddlebags and began to take out colorful robes. She would hold these up to Monica's shoulders with a critical eye--an eye that often turned dark with sympathy when it met Monica's--and then whisk them away and search for others. The other Arabs had broken up and gone about their business once more; no one seemed to be watching them or interested in Monica in the slightest degree.

"Um," Monica ventured. "Do you speak English?"

"Little," Israt admitted, and gave her another of those pitying glances.

"Why do you keep looking at me like that?"

Israt handed her a rolled bundle of clothing, brilliantly-patterned and stiffly embroidered, and nibbled at her lower lip as she shook out a sheetlike length of fabric and held it up as a curtain so that Monica could change. "I know," she said at last, after many aborted attempts at speech.

Monica stopped in the act of struggling with her dress. "Know what?"

"I ... I was you," Israt said, and gazed at Monica with all the liquid-eyed empathy of a funeral director. "I know."