Prologue

  It would be Eid tomorrow, or so the mullah predicted, praying fervently for a new moon to prove him right, but neither smuggler had yet shown up with their usual gift of a goat for the communal pot. Empty dhows floated on the placid creek, and the local men had nothing to do other than fret for supplies. It was hot and bothersome, quarrels frequent, and it was all the sheikh could do to keep the menfolk from murdering one another. Indeed, it was all he could do to keep himself from murdering them, as he irritably heard a great variety of petty disagreements and routinely dispensed whimsical justice.

  He squatted on the sand, in a small open tent beside the creek, gazing towards its mouth, willing the Indian outlaws to turn up, while regularly and petulantly cross examining their resident agents, who grinned at him and urged him to stay calm.

  The thieving party he had despatched had returned empty-handed when its supplies had run out, having scouted no less than three neighbouring tribes, without chancing upon unguarded camels or unwary lads. It looked like it would be a bleak Eid.

  He certainly would not run the generator; the little diesel remaining in the barrel on his rundown motorboat would be just about sufficient to give chase to one vessel. Perhaps the pickings would be better this time around, although piracy was in itself getting riskier by the day. Last month, the British Agent had come by and warned them he would string the whole lot up if they ever again attacked European or American vessels. That had been a close shave; had the motor not malfunctioned just when in grappling range, all would have now been dangling by their necks. Why did they not fly flags? British and American he could recognise, and the rest would be fair game.

  The sheikh batted at flies hovering over his meal - a handful of dates, dry bread and a mug of camel milk - brought by his youngest wife. The smugglers had promised him a teen girl, but a dozen visits later, no girl had materialised; perhaps God would send an angel to oversee their next buccaneering venture, and they would chance upon some women.

  A new squabble was brewing, off to one side, and he resolved to cane the disputants, but before it could reach its climax, and they dragged each other to him, the lot were diverted by the drone of an aircraft as it slowly flew overhead. The only aircraft that ever landed in their tiny settlement was a Dakota piloted by two Englishmen, who took payment for diesel in cash and kind, enjoying their women while cursing the shoddy pickings.

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  They counted themselves the poorest and most misbegotten people on earth, though with little idea of how the planet looked or what it was. All they knew was that they lived on unyielding sand, on which nothing grew, and that it stretched for hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles about them.

  Their poverty and ignorance would have been legendary, except that there were no legends about them; their cares, longings, hopes and desires would have made the stoniest hearts weep, but none cared to hear - for they were an utterly irrelevant people.

  And so they sat daily on the sand, while time did its thing with them, from birth to death, as it had ever done through the millennia, fretfully waiting, hoping and praying for trifles counting as fortune, and wondering, as generations of forebears had done, what it took to get a slice of the unattainable pie constituting easy living.

  But their trial was almost over - great change brewing, as the world began moving on their case - and their little plot of sand was to become part of a new country the British were conjuring up. Luck was headed their way, and the days when aircraft merely flew by would end, spectacularly too, for, as they scratched about in the dust of their wretched lives, the world would fall into their laps and they would become its wealthiest people.

  It would lead to no good, evil multiplying throughout the earth. These devils of the dunes would run child kidnapping rings, enslaving uncountable thousands of children for entertainment, abusing them rampantly and mercilessly. They would facilitate the smuggling of narcotics, trade nuclear components, launder illegal money, cheat workers, hunt protected wildlife, mastermind global terrorism, and commit novel crimes as could never have been imagined, becoming the vilest people the world would ever know, being beastly without compulsion.

  Instead of thrift, they would confirm poverty’s lesson to have been wastefulness. There would be no intermediate stage from being beggars to becoming the proudest and most arrogant swaggerers, instantly commencing to compete in displays of wealth, as though the thousand years of poverty had never been, as if the prior days of their lives had not been lived.

  But the most astounding aspect to be embraced by these devils, would be a feeling of innate superiority over their betters. It would be remarkable, that people of the very generation that once were beggars - with neither history nor culture, without literature, with not an invention to their credit, knowing not how to extract their own oil, illiterate, ignorant, and still largely irrelevant, and suffering every handicap other than penury - could presume to feel superior to anyone else. These were people who would forget themselves.