But if I am an anomaly what was she?

Like myself she was neither one nor the other, neither from here nor from there ... An orphan brought up in a Christian convent, then adopted and sent to finishing school in Europe.

She used to do the circle of diplomatic parties and receptions, trading favours with information; her trump card always being her otherness and the uncertainty of exactly where her loyalties lay.

But that was before I arrived ...

She never really found out what I was up to. Was I just another romantic poet, searching in the East for what the West had destroyed in itself?

Or was I an agent searching for information that could be used to discredit and destabilise the affairs of her country?

Rumours abounded, not only about myself but also of changing alliances between politicians, government departments and the investors who dictated so much in the day to day running of the country.

Was she looking for an affair with me or I with her? In the confusion that followed, not even that question has an easy answer.

For that day everything began to change ...

One minute I was someone she was to find out about, the next I was someone she was not to have any contact with at all. I suspected some kind of bluff, to make me think that she knew something important.

Yet all she knew was that I had been to the desert and had in my room a map and a book in which strange verses were written...

...A poem describing the journey of a king searching in the desert for a queen, a mystical story of self-discovery and of a world being re-invented...

Holding the sand's eye out over a map I have drawn,
I focus its fiery gaze on the place marked "Malha."
Sure enough, as the appointed spot glows with white heat,
the wingèd being I saw in the sea of mirages,
appears, saying "I am the Spirit of the Desert,
descended from the Basilisk, who with fiery eye,
made the desert, burning and shrivelling all that lived
in half of Libya before lying down to rest.
Its unshed tears of unbearable loneliness are
the innumerable grains of sand you have traversed.
Your crossing these sands has transmuted its deadly gaze,
so that the eye you have forged of them will now lead you
towards that for which you have been searching for so long.

However there were those for whom my poem was not so much a mystical re-invention of the world but rather the encoded blueprint for plans of a much more material nature ... Though plans for a pipeline in the desert were losing credibility as a solution to the region's problems, there were still parties who had vested interests in its construction. The journey described in my poem not only followed the planned path of the
pipeline but in addition, was full of metaphors that could be seen as references to the project.

Under these circumstances it was not surprising that the discovery of the poem lead to my being seen in a new light.

Opinion about Sahar was also changing and she could sense that the system of alliances she had built up over the years was about to let her down. She was now much too closely linked to people who were losing influence and knew that they would not hesitate to implicate her in scandal if they thought it might save them from their own downfall.

Like myself, it was time for her to leave the world she had grown up in behind.

Plans for the pipeline had acquired a reality of their own, everyone using them as a weapon for discrediting rivals in the continual struggle to maintain power.

Understandably she felt angry and trapped. She was linked to so many people in so many ways and knew that everything she did would be misrepresented to fit whatever purpose her patrons needed.

But if a different scapegoat could be found and a trail of blame laid, that was acceptable to all parties, then the intrigue and scandal would cease and she would be free to seek for herself a new life in a new country.

Did not my poem describe a monster that had to be slain?

And so she follows the black snake of Tarmac through the desert, away from me and away from the clutches of a world that had so suddenly threatened to engulf her.