Women of Sand and Myrrh Read Free Page B

the desert that I saw, and I found myself in the middle of what amounted to a vast building site.
    Trucks were unloading or loading up. Huge drums stood with electricity cables and telephone cables coiled around them. A crane that looked big enough to move mountains and cities grumbled and creaked as it lifted its load. A cement mixer turned constantly. There was a string of lorries and a petrol tanker, the sort that people stop and stare at in the street because of its size. It was like a giant that had eaten a lot of people; each of its four compartments was bigger thana car, and its driver hovered in the sky as if he was about to make a parachute drop somewhere in the desert.
    I watched the men putting up a hoarding in the sand advertising the opening of a new supermarket that would sell tens of thousands of different brands, and I marvelled at the way that, while old hoardings look as if they’ve been built along with the city surroundings, these new ones here looked as if they had appeared by magic.
    Some of the streets had no names, but there were buildings in them where a few weeks before there had only been steel girders, and they had filled up rapidly with occupants coming to work on other building sites. Interspersed between the real palms were plastic ones and green-painted metal ones planted in tubs down the middle of the streets in an attempt to beautify the place, and ornamental paving stones laid edge to edge around them as if conducting a dialogue with one another. Tools and pieces of machinery lay abandoned where they had been for the past three years, and a black-and-white goat was jumping around on them. After only a few moments she bounded off on to the dusty ground to escape the burning metal.
    Then Said took me to the seashore where there were huge water-purifying plants, some already completed and some still being built. A white bird poised on a wire and fluttered its wings. There was a man wearing a white headcloth, his white robe flying out in the breeze as he supervised work at one of the plants. In the distance on top of that enormous steel building he looked like Superman.
    The markets were a hive of building activity: they were knocking down the old buildings whose walls were riddled with the effects of heat and damp, buildings with little ornamental stonework or wooden latticework considered lacking in artistic value. In their place rose buildings full of air-conditioners, neon lighting and garish, over-ornate tiles. Everything was unattractive except the calligraphic design of the expression ‘What God wills’ which was adorning onewall in a contrasting colour.
    A strange smell wafted into the car and small murky black clouds swirled around me at street level. A vehicle drove slowly along spraying the people and the empty air with germicide.
    Asian workmen swarmed everywhere, on foot, in cars, and up the high ladders, the Yemenis in their skirts and loose jackets and platform shoes, stumbling at every step. Periodically the sand was sprayed with oil to immobilize it but it renewed its attack with fresh vigour over the cultivated parts of the desert and the asphalted roads, against windows, and against the few trees trying to bloom and the luxurious cars jostling for place with the lorries and trucks.
    I was a little disconcerted: the feeling I’d started out with of losing my sensitivity to the life going on around me was growing stronger, as was my awareness of the complete absence of women, at least from the world outside. Most of the houses seemed to be devoted to men and their affairs with the signs announcing offices and companies for this and that, and the one house built of red brick with Spanish windows had a sign stuck in the middle of it saying, ‘Adli. Attorney at Law’. None of the houses had balconies, and everything was enclosed by high walls.
    I found myself asking Said to take me to see Ingrid. Although I felt tired and nauseous from driving round and round in the car, I