Page 7 of Under the Arabian Sky

The rusty oldgangway rattled and bounced as I tried not to get in the way of one crewman wheeling a trolley of supplies and another with a heavy sack over both shoulders, a tear in the hessian leaking a trail of grain. On the dock at the foot of the gangway was a throng of port workers, ship’s crew and merchants selling cigarettes and dates and cold sodas to the sailors, all of them pushing and shouting and haggling in the heat.

I clutched my suitcase tightly while the heat from the sun and the dust from the city and the fumes from the ship’s stack made me cough and splutter.

Before I was even down the gangway I wanted to turn around and go home.

Suddenly I missed the rain.

I missed my leaky office at Oxford.

I missed Andrew’s fiddleleaf fig and his orchid and the safety of our little flat.

That’s when I heard my name through the crowd on the dock. “Professor Somersby? Professor Arthur Somersby?”

I scanned the bustling throng and spotted the small man calling my name. Like almost everyone else on the dock he wore the traditional Arabic gown and headpiece, but one exception made him stand out from everyone else, and that was the umbrella he waved frantically to get my attention.

It was black with a curved wooden handle, the type of umbrella a British gentleman would cherish.

Instantly I had a feeling the brolly belonged to Cavendish.

I waved back. “Yes. Hello? Yes, I’m Arthur Somersby.”

I negotiated my way as best I could to the foot of the gangway where the man squeezed passed a street vendor with a crate of flustered chickens, then greeted me with a bow of his head.

“Professor Somersby?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I’m Arthur Somersby but I’m not a professor. Are you Cavendish’s assistant?”

The man gave a stoic nod. “I was. I am Akbar. Welcome to Muscat. Let me take your luggage.”

He guided me along the dock, zigzagging through the heaving, shouting crowd until we reached the street that ran along the waterfront. A short distance away he stopped at an old army-green Land Cruiser, covered in scratches and dents and looking every bit the safari vehicle it was intended to be.

Akbar unlocked it with a turn of the key, then put my suitcase in the back seat and opened the passenger door for me. “Sir.”

“Please, you can call me Arthur.”

* * *

The car jumped and jerked while Akbar crunched his way through the gears. I wondered if the Land Cruiser was about to break down, but the rockiness of our journey through the streets didn’t seem to faze Akbar. He handled every grind of the transmission and every shotgun blast of the backfiring exhaust pipe with sheer grace and calm. In fact, he seemed altogether removed from the situation, as though he had numbed himself to the world around him.

“Is this your car?” I asked, trying to make polite conversation.

“No sir. This vehicle belongs to Professor Cavendish. At least it did. Now it is yours.”

“Mine?”

“You can drive stick, yes?”

“Um… yes? Sort of. I think so. It’s been a while.” A ‘while’ was twenty or so years ago when my grandfather taught me how to drive the tractor on his sheep farm in the Yorkshire Dales. The vehicle gave another lurch. “Are you sure this car is safe to drive?”

“Professor Cavendish had this car for twenty-one years and never had a problem.”

Another clonk and spatter gurgled up from the gearbox. “Yeah, she really purrs along.”

“Just don’t ride the clutch too hard. Once you get up some speed, you’ll be fine.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Can’t I just get you to drive me? You seem rather at ease behind the wheel.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, sir.”

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