SHAIKH-DOWN: The castration of Colonel Qaddafi

Extract from "THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS", the final chapter of SHAIKH-DOWN, in which we see what might happen if just one of the 'feudal' Arab states experienced a revolution. It seems timely to post this in view of what's happening right now in Libya and Bahrain (Bahrain is very much the basis of my fictitious Belaj, although what's happening there right now is nothing like the swift and "surgical" transition to a kind of Democracy outlined in SHAIKH-DOWN).

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A recent Sunday supplement which Mrs Muriel Lawrence in Bexhill posted to her exiled son featured on its cover an aerial photograph of the Belaj Intercontinental Hotel, dusty windows shining patchily in the sunlight, sand-drifts blocking its doors, swimming pools and gardens submerged beneath the encroaching desert. The abandoned ziggurat of yesteryear Belaj looked every bit as mysterious as the ancient pyramids of Egypt, now lost to mankind. The world is commemorating another anniversary of Armageddon.

Inside were photos of radiation victims and refugee camps in Greece and Turkey; of the ruins of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran; of the former oilfields of eastern Saudi Arabia and southern Iran where sand and soil, rock and rubble have fused into mile after mile of dark glistening glass.

There were close-ups, again taken from the air, of the cracked Kaaba in the Grand Mosque and the shattered stump of the Wailing Wall, surviving fragments of the destruction of Mecca and Jerusalem which remain the focus of their two irreconcilable faiths although centuries will pass before any follower is able to lay a reverent hand on their hallowed stones.

There were eerie panoramas of the Emirates’ ghost towns with their exotic skyscrapers and disintegrating palm-shaped islands, spared by the bombs but uninhabitable because of radiation. As Ernest McBride once predicted, the cities of the Gulf are vanishing back into the sand from which they sprang.

One picture showed the Belaj-Ras-Al-Khaimah Causeway, intact, sand-swept, deserted, a billion-dollar bridge between a depopulated island and a mainland where, amazingly, a few disfigured nomads still roam the Northern Emirates, Oman, Yemen and Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, now emptier than ever.

The accompanying article rehashed the familiar litany of events leading up to Israel’s ‘thermonuclear Masada’. The author, like most current historians, fixed on the fall of the Shah and the wars with Saddam Hussein as ‘the beginning of the end’, with the explosion in the UAE Council of Ministers, the sacking of the Sultan’s Palace in Muscat and the mass beheadings of the Saudi royals as landmarks in the revolutionary process that slowly united Israel’s discordant enemies into a single overwhelming orchestra, all playing the same tune.

The so-called ‘peaceful transitions’ in Belaj, Qatar and Bahrain were once again dismissed as merely punctuating the more spectacular changes of power. Despite the prominence of the Causeway and the more-than-ever fabulous hollow of the ‘Incontinental’ Hotel in the illustrations, the island barely merited a mention in the text.

No one has ever hinted that the coup in Belaj was anything other than bloodless. Shaikh Masood, occasionally photographed at casinos and nite-spots around the world, the exiled Amir of an extinct country, has kept his silence, just as Eddy has – until now.

And yet refugees from the Gulf often question whether the Amir of Qatar (like his near-neighbour in Belaj) really suffered a stroke during his mid-morning majlis. The execution of Saddam Hussein was, thanks to the Al-Jazeera news channel, prime-time ‘living history’, but it didn’t come out until months after Muammar Qaddafi’s death that he had been castrated by one of his female bodyguards. And was the King of Bahrain truly crushed by driving his Mercedes into a camel on his way into voluntary exile?

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Eddy, now a chronic insomniac, is obsessed by the thought - clearly preposterous - that all the Arab rulers died and the Holy Lands turned into radioactive dust simply because .... (I'VE DELETED THE REST OF THIS SENTENCE, WHICH GIVES THE WHOLE PLOT AWAY! BUY THE BOOK to find out more OR DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE - see below).

Are there others like Eddy with hitherto untold tales of Arabian nights and the death of princes?

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He didn’t show the article to his wife or to Beryl or their other neighbours.

The Spanish parliament’s decision to make foreign residents ineligible for petrol rations is forcing many expatriates to re-appraise their position on the Sunshine Coast. Life is not so easy in Spain now that the Fascists, as in Portugal, Germany (where they use a more emotive word) and France (where they use a euphemism) have returned to power. Eddy’s wife advocates returning to that not-quite-last bastion of post-Feminist Social Democracy, the England of Good Queen Anne and the other Ann, the redoubtable ‘Churchillian’ Ann Widdecombe and her austerity government.

Why leave Spain, says Eddy. Yes, it’s hard work shopping and socializing on bicycles, but the sun still shines, fruit and vegetables (and wine) are cheaper this year than last - and almost within safe levels of radioactivity.

We digress. Let's get back to our story.

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Read some more Extracts from SHAIKH-DOWN on my website and my blog:

http://www.shaikh-down.co.uk

http://www.shaikh-down.blogspot.com

For a FREE DOWNLOAD of the complete novel onto your Kindle, iPad etc, email

davidgeebooks@gmail.com

and I'll send you a Voucher Code to use at

www.smashwords.com/books/view/58399