Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Salem had grown up in the desert. He dared not to claim that he knew everything about the desert, but perhaps he knew at least 70 to 80 percent of its happenings. However, it was a vastly different story with the sea. He knew little about the sea. Yet he didn’t feel that he needed to know more. For Salem, as long as he could swim in the waters, he was satisfied. Under the guidance of his cousin, he’d learned to swim in a few hours. His cousin was extremely proud of his remarkable learning abilities.
Salem didn’t plan to work on an ocean liner and merely did surfing near the beach. That probably didn’t warrant a deeper understanding of the sea, did it?
Harmattan winds were not considered intense. However, they seemed to be full of vigor because they carried a large amount of floating sand from the Sahara and the Libyan deserts. Without these sands, a harmattan wind would not have its magnificent sand walls. If you removed these vast deserts, the harmattan winds would be no more ordinary than a typical monsoon wind.
Nevertheless, while not mega beasts of wind speeds, harmattan winds were still strong. When there was a sandstorm, the waves in the sea went crazy.
When Salem was surfing, he felt the sea getting choppy. It was clearly supposed to be time for low tide, yet the waves behaved as if high tide had returned once more.
Although the high tide in the Mediterranean Sea was not much different from the high tide in the open sea, with the help of the sandstorm, it had certainly gotten a lot more violent. The strange thing was that there was a small patch of sea that seemed relatively calm with small ripples on its surface. Compared with the choppy waters surrounding it, it was a slice of heavenly calm.
Salem did not grow suspicious of what he saw. Presently, he was only focused on getting there for his own safety.
He did not think that he would be in any danger. He could swim, and he had his surfboard. The board kept him floating. Even if he got tired and couldn’t continue swimming, he would not drown from merely lying on the board.
20 meters… 10 meters… Five meters…
The wind and the waves were now getting bigger and stronger, though not yet compromising his ability to stay in control. Although it wasn’t directly affected by the wind, he found that his field of vision was becoming increasingly limited. The shoreline became blurred and shrouded in the dim yellow of the sandstorm. Salem did not know if the man he’d met earlier on the beach, as well as the black-and-white cat, had left for safety.
Finally, after giving his surfboard one last hard push, the board slammed into the peaceful block of seawater. The waves here were much smaller, and he was able to relax after all that paddling. His arms were sore at this point.
He laid flat on his surfboard and gasped for air. He waited for his strength to return and wished that the storm would hurry and disperse. He wished to continue surfing.
This part of the sea was very calm, so calm that it could give a person the illusion of sunbathing at a luxury hotel, despite lying on a surfboard.
Salim turned his head and faced the horizon. This allowed him to breathe normally in the storm and not have his nostrils be filled with sand. He didn’t rest for too long, or at least that’s what he thought, before taking a deep breath and turning back to look at the shore to see if the storm showed any signs of stopping.
However, he was immediately shocked. He could only see a sea of dim yellow. The shoreline was no longer in sight. Even if it had been blurred, he had still been able to see the outline of the shore earlier on!
What was going on? His first thought was that the surfboard had been blown out farther by the wind. What he saw was actually the sea, and that the shore was in the other direction.
So, with squinted eyes, he looked forward, back, left, and right, but in each direction was the same scene—blue sea and the dim yellow air.
Stories of folk legends he’d heard when he was a child flashed through his mind. The travelers of the desert had encountered the harmattan winds but felt that the wind was not too strong to stop them. So they continued to move forward, but they quickly lost their way. Deep in the desert, they never came out, and they were never seen by anyone again.
Salem panicked. He’d always thought that this was the sea, not the desert, but now he realized that the sea was just a desert formed by drops of seawater.
He knew how to identify directions in the desert, how to find water, and how to survive in an emergency. Yet this was the sea, a new form of desert, and his previous experience all but failed him.
“Calm down! Don’t panic! Think of a way! There must be a way!” He silently told himself this, but it was useless. His breathing became fast and heavy, and his blood pressure and heart rate rose sharply.
He thought to himself, “You must find a way back to the shore, or you will become a lost traveler in the desert.” But where was the shore? And how had he gotten to where he was now?
Perhaps he was not too far from the shore and was still in the same position. It might be only the poor visibility that had led him to think that he was far from the shore.
Ironically, the part of the sea that was calm turned out to be a bane. Now, he could not determine which direction he was facing by observing the ups and downs of the waves.
At this moment, he seemed to hear something. It was very far away, very weak, and could easily be overwhelmed by the sound of the waves and the whistling of the storm. He held his breath and listened carefully.
Beep beep! Ah yes, it was a car horn! Someone was pressing their car horn to guide him towards the shore! He was relieved. A sense of direction was the most important thing in the desert, be it a desert of sand or one of water.
Even though the sound of the horn was weak, as long as it could still be heard, it proved that he was not too far away from the shore. He tried not to have pessimistic thoughts. Thoughts like how the sound of the horn was carried to him by the sandstorm and that it was in fact very far away.
“Okay, let’s go!” He adjusted the direction his surfboard was pointing in and aligned it with the direction of the horn. He used his hands and feet as paddles.
The horn had not stopped blaring. The good Samaritan must have known that he had encountered danger and was offering him hopes of help.
He was not expecting the good-hearted person to call the police. The efficiency of the police force in Egypt was low, and it was much better to help yourself than to wait for them to arrive.
However, after three or five minutes of paddling, his hands and feet were getting tired and the horn was not getting any closer. It seemed to be farther away from him and became intermittent.
What was happening? Was this the wrong direction? No—if the direction was wrong, he would not have heard the horn.
Salem thought for a moment and felt that he had found the reason—he was like a piece of wood floating on the water, and the storm was blowing him into the sea. Hand paddling on the surfboard was not efficient, and the power of each of his strokes could not overcome the strength of the storm.
What if he jumped into the water and swim to the shore? With only his head bobbling on the surface of the sea, would he be shielded from the effects of the storm blowing him farther from the shore?
He didn’t think too much, but he didn’t have much time to think anyway. Once the storm was over, there might be high tide, and that would further accelerate his drift outwards. If that happened, he would be trapped on his surfboard. Then he could only wait helplessly for a great period of time to be rescued.
Even if rescue was coming soon, he did not want to wait and alarm the police. He would probably end up on the news and made a laughingstock, and he might even lose working opportunities. Then his father would bring him back to the village, and he would be stuck there for life, just like his ancestors. He would have nothing to face but the yellow sand and sky. He would probably have a few wives and a ton of babies, and he’d grow increasingly dim-witted and would never be able to set foot in the big city ever again.
With that thought, Salem, without much hesitation, undid the rope that tied him to the surfboard, took a deep breath, and jumped into the sea. He could swim, but when he surfaced, he felt something was wrong. The surface of the sea was still so calm, but under the surface, the currents were moving rapidly.
The undercurrent that carried a lot of sand was like an invisible hand. It pulled on his calf and dragged him in the direction of the open sea. It was extremely powerful and stronger than the storm. It was not a power that ordinary men could resist.
He suddenly understood that it was this invisible undercurrent that had quietly taken him and the surfboard out from the coast. It was like…the sand dunes flowing in the desert, or perhaps something more terrible than that.
Salem was aware of the approaching danger and used all his strength to desperately paddle away. Yet the more anxious he got, the more disoriented his paddling got. It got harder for him to gasp for air.
His heart was beating so fast it felt like it was about to explode. His chest felt like it was on fire and like his internal organs were burning to ashes. Because he was so anxious and he’d overexerted himself, his leg muscles started shaking uncontrollably.
The horn sound had slowly been reduced to almost nothing, and he might not even be hearing it anymore. Whatever sound that he thought he was hearing might simply be an illusion at this moment in time.
Salem regretted his decision to dive into the water and turned back to find his surfboard. He would settle for wherever the surfboard brought him. It didn’t matter if he drifted to the other side of the Mediterranean. Even if the police were called in, even if he had to return to his village, even if he could never ever leave the desert in the future, those things mattered no more. As long as he could continue to live.
As long as he was alive, there was hope. However, the surfboard had all but disappeared.
As he stopped paddling while finding his surfboard, his legs sank deeper into the sea. The force dragging him downward got stronger, despite his best efforts to stay afloat.
Cough! A wave of water slammed down hard on his face and he drank his first sip of water, followed by a second…
Driven by the desire for survival, his hands and feet tried hard to keep his head above water. Yet his efforts proved to be useless. The turbulent waves were simply too forceful. As though by a pair of strong invisible hands, he was pulled into the bottom of the sea. The air quickly escaped from his lungs and emerged in the water as a string of bubbles.
He eyes narrowed in desperation as the light on the surface of the water gradually weakened and his body sank into the boundless darkness.
Just as he was about to completely lose consciousness, a black shadow passed over his head.
What…was that thing?
Within seconds, his hand was caught by an unknown hand, and with that, Salem lost consciousness.
