to take this risk, prepare your things and we will leave before sunrise. I am sorry I cannot be more helpful, but at least we will have some more hours together before we part.”
Henry tried to sleep in the brief time before dawn, but images of his family assaulted him. The guilt he felt at being absent for so long in their time of need was sharp and ceaseless. He should never have come to Saudi Arabia. What good had he done, after all? The infection would have spread its inevitable course in any case. It was like trying to stop a tsunami. There was nothing to be done but to huddle with loved ones and pray.
He was shocked that the thought of praying had leapt into his mind—a sign of his helplessness. Everyone he deeply cared about was in danger. They were suffering. They needed him. And he was so far away.
Majid knocked on his door a little after four in the morning. Henry’s few belongings were packed in the suitcase that Jill had sent—was it only six weeks ago? Majid wore a military uniform. Once again, he seemed like a different man entirely from the doctor in Western clothes Henry had first met years ago or the prince in his robes with whom Henry had worked day and night in the kingdom. Now he was a soldier. “I do not go to fight in the war, I go to fight against war itself,” Majid said, as he drove an open jeep to the National Guard base, where a small battalion, in Humvees and armored personnel carriers, was already formed up. “I will do what I can to stop this great folly. But in the end, this is my family.”
By the time the sun appeared on the eastern horizon, the convoy that Majid led was deep into the voluptuous desert. Danger lay ahead of them, and they were rushing toward it, each man for his own reasons. Hours of anxiety drew stories out of the two friends that had been held back until now.
“My mother was a slave,” Majid confided. “A better word is ‘concubine,’ but because my father was pious, he married her when she became pregnant. She was the fourth of my father’s wives, and despised by the other three. He soon lost interest in her, but by then I had been born, so he provided, even after the divorce. When I speak of him now, it sounds as if I resent him, but in truth, I loved my father. He was a man of our culture, no more nor less. I might have become like him except for my education. Those years at Cambridge and Swansea not only taught me medicine. I learned other ways of seeing life, and I saw what the world outside of the kingdom thought of us.
“I tell you, Henry, many times I considered that I would never return to Arabia. To live again on the sand with nothing but a flat horizon between you and eternity—why go back to that when I had finally escaped? I could live in Mayfair and practice internal medicine, with amusing and sophisticated friends who knew more about the world than I could ever have conceived. Whereas here”—he gestured to the empty sands—“minds are as barren as the desert, and yet we believe that we are uniquely favored by God. Why is this? We educate ourselves in religion, rumors, and folklore, and despite our ignorance God rewards us with the greatest prize in all the world! Three hundred billion barrels of oil! What did we do to deserve this wonderful gift? Only one answer: We have been rewarded for our piety. And so we become even more pious. The Qur’an instructs us that true piety is believing in God, caring for those in need, freeing those in bondage, and being patient in the face of misfortune, but for the fanatics piety becomes a contest. It’s not enough to take care of others, to work for freedom. No. We must annihilate those who believe differently or less than we. Those we call heretics must be punished. And so we squander this great gift, using our wealth to cleanse the world and make it as empty as the minds of these fanatics.”
After this outburst, Prince Majid fell silent. Bitterness had taken over his mood, an aspect of his friend that Henry had never seen. “Why, then, did you return?” he asked.