Islands of the Blessed

By Leigh Barrett

Lives connect in Egypt's remote Dakhla Oasis.

When Oxford anthropologist Pen sees Madison Watson; an American paleontologist; he is smitten--by her beauty and her uncompromising intelligence.

But the sands of the desert are not the only things shifting.

The arrival of Byron changes everything.

He may think of himself as a romantic; but he is a man filled with darkness--something Ib; hiding his sexuality from his conservative family; will soon discover to his detriment.

Lurking in the shadows is the naive but determined Shani; torn between her passion and her convictions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leigh Barrett
• Release date: Jun 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9780796178961

Book preview

Prologue

The sun shines with an inescapable brightness across the desert. It burns into every corner, and seems to even rise from the earth, blazing from every direction, blindingly bright, giving no quarter, no reprieve. Those who live here walk shadowless across the expanse, seeking a horizon that disappears in a shimmering mirage.

Even at night, as it reflects from the moon and the stars hang like suspended crystals against the black depth of the universe, it highlights the subtle shapes and shadows of the earth so even they cannot escape. Across the desert, mud-lions of wind-carved sandstone and rock rear up out of the vast fields and seas of sand, looking ominous as they cast their silhouette—until the sun radiates over the horizon and they stand as pale and ghostly sentinels, guarding the treasures that lie beneath. These guardians have seen ages pass and they point teasingly at the future.

In a period before humans started counting in ages, the planet moved and crashed and trembled, creating the base rocks and the lofty summits of a supercontinent. Tropical forests and fertile plains covered Pangaea, attracting life to its edges. And then the landmass broke apart like a massive jigsaw puzzle, dismantling into unique parts at the speed of a growing fingernail, sending the smaller continents off to find their own space to inhabit.

As Tethys, the goddess of Oceanid sea nymphs, forced her fingers of water through Pangaea and the age of ancient life began with an explosion of innumerable species of animals, much of northern Egypt was submerged. The lush gardens that grew on the southern coastline attracted creatures of all sizes, roaming and feasting on the abundant vegetation and smaller beings that inhabited land and sea. Throughout the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, the beasts grew larger, stronger, taking distinct paths as they found themselves on these new pieces of land.

If not for Tethys, Tyrannosaurus Rex may have dominated the entire planet as the sun set on the Jurassic period. But instead, they were stuck in North America—which was great news for the plant eaters of Gondwana, where Africa, South America, and India were considering their own separation during the Cretaceous period that followed. Africa retained a temporary archipelago bridge to Europe, so the beasts roamed freely, attracted by the abundance and expanse of the water that created a banquet of food choices.

This was the heyday of the dinosaurs. There was more diversity in the animal kingdom than ever before. It may have taken them 150 million years, but they were at the height of their success.

Nature, however, is an unending lottery of survival and they were unprepared to deal with the fall to earth of the Chicxulub devil.

It started as a normal morning for the creatures of the earth. And then, a split second of bright light flashed across the world, the earth rumbled, and nothing was ever the same again. Sound travels slower than light and it would have taken over three hours for the dinosaurs to hear it but, by then, many had died. In one blinding explosion that measured two million times any atomic bomb man might have created since then, everything changed.

The light burned the animals’ retinas. Those with burrows scurried to find safe haven from the earthquakes, and those without their own shelters were exposed to the full force of the horror. The ground shook and flowed with waves as the tremors pulsed through it. T-Rex bounced like a kid on a trampoline without springs, breaking necks, legs, and crushing skulls.

The sky turned the colors of a devastating rainbow until it rained chunks of glass and rock upon the earth and the planet heated, roasting anything that could not escape as fires swept across the American continent.

Across the rest of the world, thankfully separated from the worst of it, there was a slightly diminished convergence of earthquakes, glass rocks, wildfires, and tsunamis, but the devastation was still beyond preternatural.

After a few hours, the earth began to catch its breath. The heat dissipated, but the darkness caused by a rain of soot lingered, poisoning the breath, and heralding a nuclear winter. The darkness was pervasive, and any animal unable to survive the cold perished. Those who did survive faced another problem: the soot and dust blocked the sun. Plants need the sun to survive and without it, the food chains collapsed.

What goes up must come down, and the soot and poisonous air finally seeped through the atmosphere, allowing the sun to break through. It wasn’t good news. It came with rain: toxic, gaseous, highly acidic rain that burned the earth’s surface. No amount of it could cleanse the earth of the trillions of greenhouse gases that the soot had carried into the sky. 

The time to recover was more than the largest beasts could manage: It takes a dinosaur a lot of food and many years to develop into adulthood—and the calendar had just run out.

It was a bad time to be alive.

Extinction was abrupt.

When Tethys left Gondwana, the shores receding to where modern maps now show the Mediterranean Sea, beaches became desert. The Great Sand Sea, a vast landscape of the remnants of rock beaten down by wind into fine granules, move south to the beat of the wind, piling up bank against bank of waves. Should the wind blow in a single direction, the sand piles up against itself in parallel lines. They climb over each other to summit mountains and plateaus, falling over the edges in wavy patterns, and then continue marching like soldiers in a chain. Vast sand fields linger between the sand seas—great expanses of dead rocks stretching into a nothingness beyond human imagining.

In the spring, the hot Khamsin wind appears as a bloody orange-red tint on the horizon, choking and suffocating and blinding anyone caught in it. While it blasts, destroys, and redesigns the landscape, it brings more sand and choking dust from the Sahara, dragging cold air behind it and the relief of rain. The desert is heavily saline and water is attracted to salt, creating blankets of fog on the sand for any small life form to use. It seldom rains but when it does it either plummets with a force that can surprise, or it can spit down at the earth in a frustrating promise of more.

Petrified wood from ancient forests lies everywhere, a reminder that the area was once lush and tropical. Dig deeper and one finds other remnants of life, memorialized in fossilized stone six hundred million years old. The harshness of the area has retained its ancient secrets: things that were once there forever remain in place. Successive periods and epochs and ages have seen animal and human settlements come and go as the terrain changed. Evidence of prehistorical life that once settled in place provides a wealth of information for researchers and adventurers to dig up, to brush away the strata of rock and sand to find where humankind came from and, perhaps, where the future lies in a world that continues to change.

As Tethys departed, she left behind depressions in the sand, where water continues to live deep underground, bubbling up in natural springs and wells. These water sources attract the survivors of the cataclysm, who were followed by the earliest humans. Across the Western Desert of Egypt, there are several of these depressions, surrounded by steep, nearly inaccessible escarpments that protect and shelter the inhabitants.

The land is colorful. Shades of orange and blonde and beige sands contrast the vibrant green of the lush fields and orchards of the sixteen oases. ‘Oasis’ comes from the Arabic word, ‘wah’, or dwelling, and they prove isolated, yet abundant, places to do just that. The three southernmost oases offer the sweetest, cleanest, and most plentiful water supplied from the over 500 springs that live in the Nubian aquifer, far underground. Perhaps this is just as well for any adventurer who would risk their lives to travel further south into the expansive nothingness of the Great Sand Sea before arriving in Sudan. Some deliver cool refreshing water, others bubble up from deeper in the planet with water hot enough to scald. Even more are brackish, providing gases and medicinal minerals. In the desert, everything but the sand is useful.

The southernmost wah is Dakhla, just over 300km west of the Nile Valley city of Luxor and 740km south of Cairo. It is the remotest of the oases and, if not for the tarred road that runs through it, would feel like a planet on its own. Surrounded by gently sloping hills and protected in the north by the jagged Abu Tartur Plateau, it is a place of unimaginable beauty, wild solitude, offering protection from the harsh realities of the desert climate, and giving shelter to farmers and explorers. The escarpment rises steeply, slowly revealing a trove of fossilized fish and other ancient secrets to remind us that the region was once underwater.

The morning sun bathes the escarpment in pastel pinks as it rises, metamorphosing to a pale blonde in the day until night falls, bathing it in a haze of deep golden light. Falcons wheel overhead, dark specks in the sky, peering down at the mud-lions. Dark, cone-shaped hills punctuate the area, and the occasional dune marches to join the Great Sand Sea to the west. But mostly, the sand is hardscrabble stone, covering millennia of rock, in which ancient treasures hide. The pebbly sand reveals tracks made generations ago, while the dunes shift and move in a constantly changing landscape.

The natives are friendly in Dakhla, the Arabic word for ‘inside’, and the largest town of Mut is appropriately named ‘mother’. It is one of the oldest inhabited places in Africa and remains untouched as a tourist destination. The people have been watching the migratory patterns of travelers and explorers since the first hunter-gatherers pursued prey through the area 500,000 years ago.

The area surrounding the Dakhla Oasis is arguably the richest in fossils than any other on earth, and it has long been a place of fascination to scientists, explorers, and academics. They arrive in the late fall, after the heat of summer has subsided, intent on digging, discovering, and occasionally finding renown in their field of expertise.

The people who have always lived here are unique and untouched by these incursions. Women walk by with heavily accented eyes reminiscent of the ancient paintings adorning Egyptian tombs, and the elderly cover their gray hair with orange henna. It is the same henna used to ward off evil spirits and is visible in handprints on doors and walls, and on the occasional donkey. There is also something that is only true of Mut: The people wear straw sombreros. It is, after all, wise to not solely rely on the folding of a cotton scarf to ward off the ball of fire that reigns over all.

Farms nestle together in a patchwork of green, offering an abundance of cereals, oranges, dates, olives, and nuts. It is the breadbasket and the watering hole of the south. The farmers still harvest by hand, wielding sickles as daughters walk behind, collecting the sheaves. Boys load the donkey wagons and lead them to the village. Cave decorations from 10,000 years ago depict much the same pastoral scenes. Little has changed with time.

Most of the residents no longer traverse the desert in a nomadic lifestyle that once drove the colonials to distraction as they tried to control the natural movement of people as climates and opportunities changed. History is no longer held in the memories of the older people instead, it resides in books. And, as the younger generations rediscover their land’s history, they now lead caravans of Jeeps and Land Cruisers in search of adventure.

And some learn the ancient ways through science.

Chapter 1

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The road from Mut to the medieval town of Balat in the east runs through the valley created by the Quseir Formation, a depression that once formed the freshwater shores of the Mediterranean Sea’s ancestor. Halfway between the towns, a large campsite has developed to accommodate the multiple disciplines of academics, scientists, and researchers who have been studying every part of the region since the 1950s.

The similarity of the camp to the television series proved too much to resist for one student, who created a hand-painted ‘M*A*S*H*’-style sign, pointing the way to the camp. A closer examination reveals smaller lettering that reads: ‘Many Asshats Study Here’.

A dusty track runs through the middle of the camp, separating the lines of pale beige-colored tents that provide temporary shelter and a base of operations in the oasis. Their light color, at least theoretically, reflects the heat of the sun and the open flaps allow the cool winter breeze to flow through them. The desert doesn’t care about tents, and their layout proves no match for the regular sand storms that deposit silty grains in the technical equipment and laptops, rendering them useless. Despite any human effort, the fine dust will still find its way into everything.

Most tents serve as temporary offices as teams work at recording and cataloging their finds, grueling hours occasionally requiring them to bunk down in sleeping bags on the floor to avoid the lengthy treks back to either town. In the middle of the camp sits a large communal tent, usually a hive of activity and a popular gathering place to share findings with academics from other disciplines over mugs of coffee or meals.

Dr. Pendergast stood in the shadowed opening of his tent, his hair turning lighter as it dried from the sweat of the sun-drenched day. Loose khaki pants, stained with desert dust, hung around his slim hips in search of a belt, and he had changed into a thicker cotton shirt, its narrow mandarin collar falling open to each side of his neck. The top four buttons were undone, revealing a tan line where the sun had been prevented from going any further by the t-shirts he usually wore. The arrival of the evening brought with it the aroma of dates and chicken curry from the communal tent, and his stomach growled.

He took a deep breath, fidgeting with a trio of colored pens as he squinted against the sun, watching the light start to change. Black-rimmed glasses covered his eyes as the lenses slowly transitioned in the shade. He shoved the pens back into his pocket and pulled off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose as a passing couple immediately blurred. They waved a greeting, and he gave a quick nod, his heart pattering too much to manage a smile.

The sun was still high enough to distribute warmth, but he could see they carried heavy jackets for that moment when it would sink below the horizon and leave them shivering in the desert’s winter night. As the passing traffic died down, he walked over to the big tent, moving with quick grace through the throng as they found their seats. The lectern loomed. He placed his notes down, wiping his hands on his pants, trying not to look too closely at the crowd that had gathered to hear him speak. His thumb flipped the corners of the papers as he flexed his shoulders to release the tension, before drawing in a deep breath and faced them.

Thank you for coming.

He cleared his throat to kill the tremble in his voice. He wouldn’t flatter himself that they were fascinated by whatever he had to say: this presentation was the most entertaining thing to happen in the oasis in months.

For those who don’t know me, my name is Professor Pendergast. If you’re not looking for a grade, you can call me ‘Pen’. I have also been known to answer to ‘hey you’, on occasion. Welcome to the dead center of the Western Desert, he said with a small chuckle, relieved to hear bemused groans in response. Since I was a boy in Newquay, Cornwall, the history of this oasis has fascinated me. In his Lonely Planet tour guide, Herodotus, that well-known purveyor of historical Egypt, tells us the Greeks called the oasis, ‘Isle of the Blessed’. Granted, this may have been the only oasis they were aware of.

He allowed the ripple of appreciation for his wry humor to pass. His confidence grew as he spoke, his palms drying, his eyes lighting as he delved into the subject that had consumed so much of his life.

"I prefer the description by Harry Thurston, who wrote, ‘In this tiny island of green—with its shifting border of deadly sand, verdant farms, and buried water—rests the whole of human history and its future.’ As those of us who have been here long enough to appreciate the mysteries it offers can tell the newcomers, it is quite a remarkable place.

"Where we sit right now tells the story of humanity and civilization like no other. The early hunter-gatherers evolved, replaced by the Ancient Egyptians who planted crops and developed modern farming practices that made full use of the numerous springs that feed the oasis. Then, the Romans arrived in the first attempt to colonize the people, establishing towns with infrastructure that remains to this day. The religious settlers of the Christian and Islamic eras built upon that foundation into the medieval period, and beyond. From prehistoric times, humans have been leaving their imprint in the area for us to discover.

The Ancient Egyptians considered this remote southern oasis as land ruled by Osiris, the god of the dead, and mostly ignored it except as a burial place. In multiple sites across the oasis, tombs have been discovered that date back over 2,000 years. Prior to the focus of people like us who have resolved to protect the area, looters and grave robbers have taken treasures likely to be used as paperweights in a random home and donated to thrift stores generations later.

A slight chuckle greeted that quip, and he looked around the tent with a grateful smile. He removed his glasses, rubbing the lenses against the hem of his shirt. A movement at the back caught his attention, and he replaced them to see what was happening.

He didn’t want to stare, but the woman who had walked in took his breath away. She always did. Since her arrival at Dakhla Oasis four years ago, he had admired her from afar, their interactions rare and far too brief: a handshake at one of the few parties he had seen her attend or a polite greeting in passing. This was the first time he had ever seen her at any of the presentations at the dig site.

Long hair the color of the desert’s sunset fell over broad shoulders, and her face glowed from hours in the sun. She had left the buttons on her white shirt open just far enough to distract the eye. The shirt was tucked haphazardly into the khaki pants that hugged her slim hips, and was starting to come loose from its moorings. At some point, she’d rolled up her sleeves, but they were now coming undone, showing off tanned wrists and an exposed forearm, unadorned with jewelry.

Pen realized he had stumbled over his words and looked down at his notes, giving himself a moment to refocus