Men in the Sun

As darkness fell, Abul Khaizuran drove his lorry away from the sleeping city. Pale lights trembled along the side of the road, and he knew that those lampposts that were retreating in front of the window would come to an end shortly, when he had left the city far behind him. The darkness would be unbroken. The night was moonless, and the edge of the desert would be silent as the grave.

He turned his lorry off the asphalt road and drove along a sandy track that led into the desert. He had made up his mind at noon to bury them, one by one, in three graves. Now he felt consumed with exhaustion, as though a drug had been injected into his arms. He had no strength to work, and he wouldn't be capable of wielding a spade for long hours to dig three graves. Before he went to take his lorry out of Haj Rida's garage, he told himself that he wouldn't bury them. He would throw the three corpses into the desert and return home. But now he wasn't pleased with the idea. He didn't like to think that his companions' bodies should be lost in the desert, at the mercy of birds and beasts of prey, and that there would be nothing left of them after a few days except white bones lying on the sand.