The co-pilot didn't like that. "Go back and sit down," he said, "or I'll take you back and cuff you to the bench."

"I don't mean any trouble," I said. "Nobody's told us a thing. Don't we have a right to know where we're going?"

The co-pilot turned his back on me. "Look," he said, "you and the old guy murdered some poor son of a bitch. You ain't got any rights anymore."

"Terrific," I muttered. I went back to the bench. Papa looked at me, and I just shook my head. He was dishev-eled and streaked with grime, and he'd lost his tarboosh when al-Bishah bashed him in the back of the head. He'd regained a lot of his composure during the flight, how-ever, and he seemed to be pretty much his old self again. I had the feeling that soon we'd both need all our wits about us.

Fifteen minutes later, I felt the chopper slowing down. I looked out through the port and saw that we'd stopped moving forward, hovering now over reddish-brown sand dunes that stretched to the horizon in all di-rections. There was a long buzzing note, and then a green light went on over the hatch. Papa touched my arm and I turned to him, but I couldn't tell him what was going on.

The co-pilot unbuckled himself and eased out of his seat in the cockpit. He stepped carefully through the cargo area to our bench. "We're here," he said.

"What do you mean, 'we're here'? Nothing down there but sand. Not so much as a tree or a bush."

The co-pilot wasn't concerned. "Look, all I know is we're supposed to turn you over to the Bayt Tahiti here."

"What's the Bayt Tabiti?"

The co-pilot gave me a sly grin. "Tribe of Badawi," he said. "The other tribes call 'em the leopards of the des-ert."

Yeah, you right, I thought. "What are these Bayt Tabiti going to do with us?"

"Well, don't expect 'em to greet you like long-lost brothers. My advice is, try to get on their good side real fast."

I didn't like any of this, but what could I do about it? "So you're just going to set this chopper down and kick us out into the desert?"

The co-pilot shook his head. "Naw," he said, "we ain't gonna set it down. Chopper ain't got desert sand filters." He pulled up on a release lever and slid the hatch aside.

I looked down at the ground. "We're twenty feet in the air!" I cried.

"Not for long," said the co-pilot. He raised his foot and shoved me out. I fell to the warm sand, trying to roll as I hit. I was fortunate that I didn't break my legs. The chopper was kicking up a heavy wind, which blew the stinging sand into my face. I could barely breathe. I thought about using my keffiya the way it was meant to be used, to protect my nose and mouth from the artificial sandstorm. Before I could adjust it, I saw the co-pilot push Friedlander Bey from the hatch opening. I did my best to break Papa's fall, and he wasn't too badly hurt, either.

"This is murder!" I shouted up at the chopper. "We can't survive out here!"

The co-pilot spread his hands. "The Bayt Tahiti are coming. Here, this'll last you till they get here." He tossed out a pair of large canteens. Then, his duty to us at an end, he slammed the hatch shut. A moment later, the jet chopper swung up and around and headed back the way it had come.

Papa and I were alone and lost in the middle of the Arabian Desert. I picked up both canteens and shook them.

They gurgled reassuringly. I wondered how many days of life they held. Then I went to Friedlander Bey. He sat in the hot morning sunlight and rubbed his shoulder. "I can walk, my nephew," he said, anticipating my con-cern.

"Guess we'll have to, O Shaykh," I said. I didn't have the faintest idea what to do next. I didn't know where we were or in which direction to start traveling.

"Let us first pray to Allah for guidance," he said. I didn't see any reason not to. Papa decided that this was definitely an emergency, so we didn't have to use our precious water to cleanse ourselves before worship. In such a situation, it's permissible to use clean sand. We had plenty of that. He removed his shoes and I took off my sandals, and we prepared ourselves for seeking the near-ness of God as prescribed by the noble Qur'an.

He took his direction from the rising sun and turned to face Mecca. I stood beside him, and we repeated thefamiliar poetry of prayer. When we finished, Papa recited an additional portion of the Qur'an, a verse from the sec-ond surah that includes the line "And one who attacketh you, attack him in like manner as he attacked you."

"Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds," I murmured.

"God is Most Great," said Papa.

And then it was time to see if we could save our lives. "I suppose we should reason this out," I said.

"Reason does not apply in the wilderness," said Papa. "We cannot reason ourselves food or water or protection."

"We have water," I said. I handed him one of the canteens.

He opened it and swallowed a mouthful, then closed the canteen and slung it across his shoulder. "We have some water. It remains to be seen if we have enough wa-ter."

"I've heard there's water underground in even the dri-est deserts." I think I was just talking to keep his spirits up -or my own.

Papa laughed. "You remember your mother's fairy tales about the brave prince lost among the dunes, and the spring of sweet water that gushed forth from the base of the mountain of sand. It doesn't happen that way in life, my darling, and your innocent faith will not lead us from this place."

I knew he was right. I wondered if he'd had any expe-rience in desert survival as a younger man. There were entire decades of his early life that he never discussed. I decided it would be best to defer to his wisdom, in any case. I figured that if I shut up for a while, I might not die. I also might learn something. That was okay, too.

"What must we do, then, O Shaykh?" I asked.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and looked around himself. "We're lost in the very southeastern portion of the Arabian Desert," he said. "The Rub al-Khali."

The Empty Quarter. That didn't sound promising at all.

"What is the nearest town?" I asked.

Papa gave me a brief smile. "There are no towns in the Rub al-Khali, not in a quarter million square miles of sand and waste. There are certainly small groups of no-mads crossing the dunes, but they travel only from well to well, searching for grazing for their camels and goats. If we hope to find a well, our luck must lead us to one of these Bedu clans."

"And if we don't?"

Papa sloshed his canteen. "There's a gallon of water for each of us. If we do no walking at all in the daylight hours, manage our drinking carefully, and cover the great-est possible distance in the cool of the night, we may live four days."

That was worse than even my most pessimistic esti-mate. I sat down heavily on the sand. I'd read about this place years ago, when I was a boy in Algiers. I thought the description must have been pure exaggeration. For one thing, it made the Rub al-Khali sound harsher than the Sahara, which was our local desert, and I couldn't believe that anyplace on Earth could be more desolate than the Sahara. Apparently, I was wrong. I also remembered what a Western traveler had once called the Rub al-Khali in his memoirs: The Great Wrong Place.

4.

According to some geographers, the Arabian Desert is an extension of the Sahara. Most of the Arabian peninsula is uninhabited waste, with the popu-lated areas situated near the Mediterranean, Red, and Arabian seas, beside the Arabian Gulf-which is our name for what others call the Persian Gulf-and in the fertile crescent of old Mesopotamia.

The Sahara is greater in area, but there is more sand in the Arabian Desert. As a boy, I carried in my mind the image of the Sahara as a burning, endless, empty sand-scape; but that is not very accurate. Most of the Sahara is made up of rocky plateaus, dry gravel plains, and ranges of windswept mountains. Expanses of sand account for only 10 percent of the desert's area. The portion of the Arabian Desert called the Rub al-Khali tops that with 30 percent. It might as well have been nothing but sand from one end to the other, as far as I was concerned. What the hell difference did it make?

I squinted my eyes nearly shut and looked up into the painfully bright sky. One of the minor advantages of being stranded in such a deadly place was that it was too deadly even for vultures. I was spared the unnerving sight of carrion birds circling patiently, waiting for me to have the courtesy to die.

I was pretty determined not to die. I hadn't talked it over with Friedlander Bey, but I was confident he felt the same way. We were sitting on the leeward side of a high, wind-shaped dune. I guessed that the temperature was already a hundred degrees Fahrenheit or more. The sun had climbed up the sky, but it was not yet noon-the day would get even hotter.

"Drink your water when you're thirsty, my nephew," Papa told me. "I've seen men dehydrate and die because they were too stingy with their canteens. Not drinking enough water is like spilling it on the ground. You need about a gallon a day in this heat. Two or three quarts won't keep you alive."

"We only have one gallon each, O Shaykh," I said.

"When it's gone, we'll have to find more. We may stumble across a trail, inshallah. There are trails even in the heart of the Rub al-Khali, and they lead from water hole to water hole. If not, we must pray that rain has fallen here not long ago. Sometimes there is damp sand in the hollow beneath the steep side of a dune."

I was in no hurry to try out my Desert Scout skills. All the talk of water had made me thirstier, so I unscrewed the cap of my canteen. "In the name of Allah, the Com-passionate, the Merciful," I said, and drank a generous quantity. I'd seen holograms of Arab nomads sitting on the sand, using sticks to make tents of their keffiyas for shade. Thereweren't even sticks in this landscape, how-ever. The wind changed direction, blowing a fine curtain of grit into our faces. I followed Friedlander Bey's example and rested on my side, with my back to the wind. After a few minutes, I sat up and took off my keffiya and gave it to him. He accepted it wordlessly, but I saw gratitude in his red-rimmed eyes.

He put on the head cloth, covered his face, and lay back to wait out the sandstorm.

I'd never felt so exposed to the elements before in my life. I kept telling myself, "Maybe it's all a dream." Maybe I'd wake up in my own bed, and my slave, Kmuzu, would be there with a nice mug of hot chocolate. But the broil-ing sun on my head felt too authentic, and the sand that worked its way into my ears and eyes, into my nostrils, and between my lips didn't feel at all dreamlike.

I was distracted from these annoyances by the blood-curdling cries of a small band of men coming over the shoulder of the dune. They dismounted from their camels and ran down on us, waving their rifles and knives. They were the scruffiest, most villainous-looking louts I'd ever seen. They made the worst scum of the Budayeen look like scholars and gentlemen by comparison.

These, I assumed, were the Bayt Tabiti. The leopards of the desert. Their leader was a tall, scrawny man with long stringy hair. He brandished his rifle and screamed at us, and I could see that he had two snaggled teeth on the right side of his upper jaw, and two broken teeth on the left side of his lower jaw. He probably hadn't celebrated occlusion in years. He hadn't taken a bath in that long, either.

He was also the one we were supposed to trust with our lives. I glanced at Friedlander Bey and shook my head slightly. Just in case the Bayt Tabiti felt like murdering us where we sat instead of leading us to water, I got to my feet and drew my ceremonial dagger. I didn't really think that weapon was of much value against the Bedu's rifles, but it was all I had.

The leader came toward me, reached out, and fin-gered my expensive robe. He turned back to his compan-ions and said something, and all six of them broke up with laughter. I just waited.

The leader looked into my face and frowned. He slapped his chest. "Muhammad Musallim bin Ali bin as-Sultan,"

he announced. As if I was supposed to recognize his name.

I pretended to be impressed. I slapped my own chest. "Marid al-Amin," I said, using the epithet I'd been given by the poor fellahin of the city. It meant "the Trustwor-thy."

Muhammad's eyes grew wide. He turned to his bud-dies again. "Al-Amin," he said in a reverent tone. Then he doubled over with laughter again.

A second Bayt Tahiti went over to Friedlander Bey and stood looking down at the old man. "Ash-shaykh," I said, letting the stinking nomads know that Papa was a man of importance. Muhammad flicked his eyes from me to Papa, then back again. He spoke some rapid words in their puzzling dialect, and the second man left Papa alone and went back to his camel.

Muhammad and I spent some time trying to get an-swers to our questions, but their rough Arabic slowed down our communication. After a while, though, we could understand each other well enough. It turned out that the Bayt Tahiti had received orders from their tribal shaykh to come find us. Muhammad didn't know how his shaykh knew about us in the first place, but we were where they expected us to be, and they'd seen and heard the military chopper from a long way off.

I watched as two of the filthy rogues pulled Fried-lander Bey roughly to his feet and led him to one of the camels.

The camel's owner prodded the knees of the beast's forelegs with a stick, and made a sound like "khirr, khirr!" The camel roared its displeasure and didn't seem willing to kneel down. Papa said something to the Bayt Tahiti, who grabbed the animal's head rope and pulled it down. Papa placed a foot on the camel's neck, and it lifted him up where he could scramble into the saddle.

It was obvious that he'd done this before. I, on the other hand, had never ridden a camel in my life, and I didn't feel the need to start now. "I'll walk," I said.

"Please, young shaykh," said Muhammad, grinning through his sparse dentition, "Allah will think we are be-ing inhospitable."

I didn't think Allah had any misconceptions at all about the Bayt Tahiti. "I'll walk," I said again.

Muhammad shrugged and mounted his own camel. Everyone started off around the dune, with me and the Bedu who'd given his camel to Papa walking alongside.

"Come with us!" cried the leader of the party. "We have food, we have water! We take you to our camp!"

I had no doubt that they were heading back to their camp, but I had serious misgivings that Papa and I would arrive there alive.

The man walking beside me must have sensed my thoughts, because he turned to me and winked slowly. "Trust us," he said with a cunning expression. "You are safe now."

You bet, I thought. There was -nothing to do but go along with them. What would happen to us after we ar-rived at the main camp of the Bayt Tahiti was in the hands of God.

We traveled in a southerly direction for several hours. Finally, as I was reaching exhaustion-and about the time my canteen ran out of water-Muhammad called a halt. "We sleep here tonight," he said, indicating a narrow gap between two linked chains of sand dunes.

I was glad that the day's exertions were over; but as I sat beside Papa and watched the Bedu tend to their ani-mals, it occurred to me that it was strange they didn't push on to rejoin the rest of their tribe before dark. Their shaykh had sent them out to find us, and they arrived only a few hours after we'd been dumped out of the chopper. Surely, the main camp of the Bayt Tabiti couldn't have been far away.

They went about their chores, whispering to each other and pointing at us when they thought we weren'twatching. I started toward them, offering to help unload their camels. "No, no," said Muhammad, blocking me off from the animals, "please, just rest! We can see to the packs ourselves." Something was wrong here. And Fried-lander Bey sensed it, too.

"I do not like these men," he said to me in a low voice. We were watching one of the Bedu put handfuls of dates in wooden bowls. Another man was boiling water for cof-fee. Muhammad and the rest were hobbling the camels.

'They haven't shown any outward signs of hostility," I said. "At least, not since they first ran down on us, yelling and screaming and waving their weapons."

Papa gave a humorless laugh. "Don't be fooled into thinking that we've won their grudging admiration. Look at that man dividing the dates. You know the packs on the camels are loaded with far better food than that. These Bayt Tabiti are too greedy to share it with us. They will pretend they have nothing better to eat than old, stone-hard dates.

Later, after we're gone, they'll prepare them-selves a better meal."

"After we're gone?" I said.

"I don't believe there is a larger camp within a day's journey from here. And I don't believe the Bayt Tabiti are willing to offer us their hospitality much longer."

I shivered, even though the sun had not yet set, and the heat of the day had not yet dissipated. "Are you afraid, O Shaykh?"

He pursed his lips and shook his head. "I'm not afraid of these creatures, my nephew. I'm wary-I think it would be wise to know what they're up to at every mo-ment. These are not clever men, but their advantages are that they are more than we, and that they know this terrain. Further discussion was interrupted when the Bedu we'd been watching came to us and offered us each a bowl of rancid-smelling dates and a dirty china cup filled with weak coffee. "These poor provisions are all we have," said the man in a flat voice, "but we'd be honored if you'd share them with us."

"Your generosity is a blessing from Allah," said Fried-lander Bey. He took a bowl of dates and a cup of coffee.

"I am quite unable to express my thanks," I said, tak-ing my own supper.

The Bedu grinned, and I saw that his teeth were just as bad as Muhammad's. "No thanks are needed, O Shaykh,"

he replied. "Hospitality is a duty. You must travel with us and learn our ways. As the proverb says, Who lives with a tribe forty'days becomes one of them.' "

That was a nightmarish thought, traveling with the Bayt Tabiti and becoming one of them!

"Salaam alaykum," said Papa.

"Alaykum as-salaam," the man responded. Then he carried bowls of dates to his fellows.

"In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful," I murmured. Then I put one of the dates in my mouth. It didn't stay there long. First, it was completely coated with sand. Second, it was almost hard enough tocrack my teeth; I wondered if these dates had been the downfall of the Bayt Tahiti's dental work. Third, the piece of fruit smelled as if it had been left to decay under a dead camel for a few weeks. I gagged as I spat it out, and I had to wash away the taste with the gritty coffee.

Friedlander Bey put one of the dates in his mouth, and I watched him struggle to maintain a straight face as he chewed it. "Food is food, my nephew," he said. "In the Empty Quarter, you can't afford to be fastidious."

I knew he was right. I rubbed as much sand as I could from another date, and then I ate it. After a few of them, I got used to how rotten they tasted. I thought only about keeping my strength up.

When the sun slipped behind the ridge of a western dune, Friedlander Bey removed his shoes and got slowly to his feet. He used my keffiya to sweep the sand in front of him. I realized he was preparing to pray. Papa opened his canteen and moistened his hands. Because I didn't have any more water in my own canteen, I stood beside him and extended my hands, palms up.

"Allah yisallimak, my nephew," said Papa. God bless you.

As I executed the ablutions, I repeated the ritual for-mula: "I perform the Washing in order to cleanse myself from impurity and to make myself eligible for seeking the nearness to Allah."

Once again, Papa led me in prayer. When we finished, the sun had completely disappeared and the sudden night of the desert had fallen. I imagined that I could already feel the heat leaching out of the sand. It would be a cold night, and we had no blankets.

I decided to see how far I could push the false hospi-tality of the Bayt Tahiti. I went over to their small fire of dried camel dung, where the six bandits were sitting and talking. "You pray to Allah," said Muhammad with a sarcastic grin.