Page 265 of The Black Trilogy

The next day passed interminably slowly. As a guest and also a woman, I wasn’t allowed to do much to help, although Salah did take me out into the desert to show me his new falcon. I wished there was some way to hurry things along, but unfortunately, life didn’t work that way out here. The name of the game was insha’Allah, which meant “if Allah wills it,” more commonly translated as “things will happen when they happen, if they happen at all.”

So I had to wait.

The night in the desert dragged on forever. As the temperature dropped, I huddled under the extra blanket Salah found for me, grateful for the double layer of warmth. A group of kids woke me up at daybreak, and I spent the day sitting in the shade while they crowded around, asking questions about everything from England to elephants. Once they realised I didn’t bite, they couldn’t resist the novelty of a stranger. Then after another meal of delicious, if unidentifiable, food, the time came to leave. I had another camel trip to endure.

We set off as the sun dropped. Salah rode beside me until we reached the outskirts of the town, and then we said our goodbyes.

“Thanks for everything. I’ll send you a new phone as soon as I get home. Same drill as last time, yeah?”

He nodded and grinned at me, displaying his lack of dental hygiene. “Next time, don’t leave it so long before you come back.”

Just before midnight, I crawled into the bed of a pickup truck and hid myself under a pile of blankets and some animal feed. At each checkpoint, the driver explained he was returning to his family after a trip to Petra and paid over the requisite bribes while I stayed silent in the back.

My muscles stiffened and my back ached as we bumped over the desert for a couple of hours. Finally, the truck stopped at a desolate section of coastline, and I smelled the sea air. I stood and stretched as the driver proudly pointed out the boat waiting for me down below.

I couldn’t hold back my groan.

Because when I said down below, I meant down below. The boat was anchored at the bottom of a cliff that had to be almost a hundred feet of sheer drop.

I turned back to the driver. “Isn’t there a way to drive round?”

He just shrugged. “Salah said you are good climber. This was best place to land boat.”

“Can’t it move a little?”

“No, you climb.” He backed towards the truck, key at the ready.

Thanks, Salah. It wasn’t like I loved my fingernails anyway.

I worked out the kinks in my back and tied the small bag containing my camera and other bits around my waist. I’d wrapped it in plastic and tape to keep it dry.

Then I started down.

It was a horrible descent, and I say that as someone who loves climbing. The cliff had plenty of handholds, but many of them gave way when I touched them, and I needed to be super careful not to cause a landslide that would take me with it to the bottom.

I somehow reached the beach safely, thanking Black, once again, for all those painful hours he made me spend scaling rocks with him, then clambered into the tiny boat. More of a dinghy, really, with a single outboard motor and a hard bench seat. Not particularly quick. Thankfully, the blue waters of the Gulf of Aqaba were calm that night, and with only a light breeze, we made the crossing in less than four hours, arriving just before sunrise.

Well, sort of.

We stopped a good distance offshore, and the boat driver wasn’t keen to get any closer.

“No passport. You get out now,” he told me.

Oh, for goodness’ sake. I tried explaining to the guy that the police would still be tucked up in bed at that time, but he kept shaking his head. Eventually I gave up, stripped down to my underwear, and dove off the side of the boat. I’d endured a week with no water. Now I had plenty of it.

My shredded hands stung as the salt hit them, but I gritted my teeth and set off. A mile of swimming brought me to the small spit of land that guarded the mouth of the lagoon in Dahab. I hauled myself onto the beach, skirted in disgust around a pile of discarded cigarette butts, and started off on the short trek back to civilisation.

A twenty-minute walk brought me to Dahab City, which wasn’t a city by any stretch of the imagination. It didn’t even have a Starbucks. Most of the buildings were high-end hotels and apartments set right next to the Red Sea. Keeping to the shoreline, I skipped the first two hotels before making my way up the private beach of the third: the Black Diamond. A red brick path wound its way through tropical gardens. Even in this arid climate, lush grass abounded, surrounded by fragrant trees and colourful bougainvillea. When I reached a white, two-storey villa with a traditional domed roof, I hopped over the low wall surrounding it and knocked on the door.

A minute later, the lock clicked and a sleepy-looking guy in his late fifties glowered at me. He rubbed his eyes, no doubt hoping that if he did it hard enough, I’d disappear and he could go back to bed.

“Morning, Bob.”

“Emmy, it’s not even five o’clock, and you’re standing on my doorstep in…is that your underwear? Actually, you know what? I’m not surprised.”

Bob was Captain Bob Stewart, a former Navy captain I’d trained with during my early years with Black. When Bob left the service, declaring he’d had enough of cold and wet, he managed to put up with two months-worth of DIY and decorating in the Virginia home he’d shared with his wife before declaring himself bored. While he may have had enough of cold, wet was too big a part of his life, so he and Sondra upped sticks and moved to hot. Hot being Dahab, where they ran the Black Diamond Hotel and dive centre.

How did I know this? Well, firstly because Black and I were friends with them, and secondly because when they announced their plans, we’d invested in the business. Hence it being badged as the seventh hotel in our Black Diamond chain.

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