Page 57 of Under the Arabian Sky

The more I thought about it, the more my heart ached.

I hadn’t even given myself a chance to think about the prospect of boarding a plane.

Funny how a broken heart can distract you from what you thought was your greatest fear.

Dressed in jeans and a shirt, I grabbed my battered old suitcase and refused to think about my fear of flying on top of everything else that was pressing on my mind.

In fact, at that point I was trying to shut down just about every emotion, every fear, every ounce of remorse I had.

As I opened the door to leave Cavendish’s place, the chubby, hairy Arab who had confronted me in the shower days earlier was suddenly standing in the doorway shouting, “Aghliq alnaafidha! Qafl alnaafidha!”

Utterly confused, I shrugged and shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Aghliq alnaafidha!Close the window! Lock the window!”

Without bothering to wait for me to do it, he barged passed me, stormed through Cavendish’s tiny living area and pulled the windows and the shutters closed. He did not give me an explanation. He didn’t even look at me as he left the room. He simply went to the next door and hammered his fist against it, shouting once again, “Aghliq alnaafidha! Qafl alnaafidha!”

I chalked it up to another crazy incident at the old dormitory before tightening my grip on my suitcase and leaving the place for good.

On the street I hailed a taxi. The wind whipped up the dust on the road in small gusts. I heard banging and looked up to see people leaning out of windows and pulling their shutters closed.

I climbed into the backseat of the cab and asked the driver to take me to the airport.

Along the way, the sight of more and more people closing the doors and windows to their houses unnerved me. “What’s going on?” I asked the driver.

He didn’t answer, but instead turned up the volume on the radio. An announcement was being made in Arabic.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand that.”

He pointed up through the windscreen to the hazy sky above and said, “Storm coming.”

“A storm? You mean, it’s going to rain?”

He shook his head. “Not rain. Sand.”

A sinking feeling filled me with a sense of dread.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.

When I reached the airport, an overwhelming feeling of anxiety and mild panic rippled through the terminal. On the departures board, letters and flight numbers were flickering madly asFlight Cancellednotices began to fill the board.

I saw my flight to London switched fromOn TimetoBoarding Now… half an hour early.

I hurried to the check-in desk to collect my boarding pass.

“You’re very lucky,” said the woman behind the counter as she punched in my details. “It looks like yours will be the last flight out before we close the airport. You can take your suitcase onboard as carry-on, there’s no time to check it in. They’re rushing everyone through the gate now. You’ll make it if you run.”

I took the woman’s advice and ran through the terminal, jogging at first. But as more and more people either made a hasty exit from the airport or hurried onboard their planes, I soon found myself sprinting. The closer I got to my gate, the more deserted the terminal became.

Yet all the while, all I could think about was Tariq.

Did he know about the approaching storm?

Had he ventured into the desert to set Mahir’s falcon free, completely oblivious to the weather warnings?

Were his normally rational thoughts clouded by a heart so broken that he had ignored the heavens, the winds blowing harder and harder by the minute.

I reached the gate and reluctantly handed over my boarding pass.

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