The glare of the desert sun outside the windows was dazzling to the eyes even from within the hotel, and the three of us sitting in the reception area were glad of the relief offered by the hard-working air conditioning. Dave, an American executive in his early forties, was waiting for a Land Rover to pick him up and take him on a two-day inspection tour of his company's locations, further south into the deep desert. His wife Estelle, mid-thirties (like me), friendly and quite delightful, had come along on the trip hoping to see something of the great sand sea that, having been brought up on Hollywood epics, she believed covered the whole of North Africa. And me? I was the English pilot of the small, fast Beechcraft Twin Bonanza that Dave's Tripoli office had chartered to fly the two of them the 400 miles south to the small desert town of Sebha.
Estelle was disappointed that on the flight down the previous day she had seen a lot of featureless gravel plain and very little else of interest at all. Over dinner I told them that Libya has several large sand seas. Two of them, the Murzuq and the Ubari, were close to Sebha, and Dave agreed that while he was away I could take Estelle to see one or the other of them, and he would square it with his head office when they went back home to the States.
His Land Rover was late arriving so it was mid-morning before he got away. I had planned on taking Estelle on a sight-seeing trip round town first thing, but the already blistering temperature outside was going to rise even higher over the midday period, and a walking tour was going to become very uncomfortable. Since she was leaving all the arrangements to me I suggested spending the morning by the hotel pool, having a late lunch, and then going out towards the evening when it would be getting cooler.
At the poolside I slid a couple of recliners into the shade and ten minutes later Estelle joined me, wearing a simple one-piece swimsuit cut very low indeed at the back, with a halter top tied in a bow under her hair. Her chunky little body had curves in all the right places, with a combination of nicely pushed-up boobs, good firm legs, and a deliciously trim waist that gave me an instant hard-on as I imagined getting my hands round it. As she settled on the recliner she caught me looking her over, and with a cheeky grin asked me if I liked what I saw.
Well, I have to admit I was embarrassed she had caught me in a lapse from my usual excellent English manners, so all I could come out with was 'yes, very much indeed' and was relieved when she smiled broadly and said 'why, thank you Jim', making it plain that she regarded my appreciation as a compliment. Which it was - my taste has always been in women who are shaped like women, not like some size zero stick insect.
We had a swim and in the heat were dry almost as soon as we got out of the pool. Estelle produced a bottle of sun cream and applied some to her arms and legs, and then asked me if I would do her back. She passed the bottle over to me, lay face down on the sunbed and undid the halter, and believe me when I say that I enjoyed every single second of running my hands over her smooth firm shoulders and back, right down to the two dimples just visible above the edge of her swimsuit.
We chatted for quite a while that morning, the first time we had been on our own since leaving Tripoli the previous afternoon. She was very interested in the Sahara and the way we flew light aircraft in desert conditions, and I was fascinated by her account of small town life in the States, apparently totally insulated from happenings in the real world. After another swim she offered to apply suncream to my back - which I found rather enjoyable - and then she gave me the bottle and lay face down again on her recliner, giving me a second chance to enjoy feeling up that soft warm body. Indeed, I was so slow and took so long this time that after a while she turned her head to one side and without opening her eyes said ' you're enjoying this, aren't you Jim?'
Well, hell, yes I was! I was speechless for a few seconds and then decided to make the best of it. 'We poor hardworking desert pilots' - I was interrupted by a noise from her that sounded suspiciously like a snort - 'we poor desert pilots don't get much in the way of perks, so if anything good comes along we like to make the most of it'. She openind her eyes and looked straight at me, stretching her arms right out above her head and wriggling a bit under my hands, and said with a grin 'it's OK Jim, I'm enjoying it too', and just about then I realised that I was in what we English would term 'a bit of a pickle',
Under normal circumstances I would have taken such words and actions coming from a very attractive woman as a signal that she was ready to move our relationship up to a new level and was expecting me to do something about it. But the circunstances were not normal. To be blunt I was, when all was said and done, merely what Americans would call the hired help. I was contracted to fly the two of them round for another couple of days. and any mis-interpretation of her very pleasant and outgoing personality could easily lead to a most uncomfortable time together. I decided that my best course of action was to play along and follow her lead, so I smiled, touched her shoulder gently, said 'so am I' and settled down next to her on my own recliner.
After a late lunch I excused myself and left Estelle in the air conditioned comfort of her room while I walked down to the airstrip. I moved the plane into the shade and had a word about my evening plans with the duty air traffic controller and then went back to the hotel. Late in the afternoon the two of us, both wearing shorts and short-sleeved sports shirts, looked around the souk and the few shops - just opening again after the long afternoon siesta - and laughed together about some of the items on display, and by the time we had arrived at the airstrip in the early evening it seemed quite natural for us to be walking hand in hand.
Twenty minutes later we were airborne, level at 1,000 feet, trimmed into the cruise and heading southwest. I had some ideas in mind for the evening and there was a place I remembered in the Murzuq that would suit them better than the closer Ubari. This Twin Bonanza had a three-abreast bench seat at the front of the cabin and a couple of fully reclining executive seats in the back. I was sitting in the pilot's position at the left of the bench and Estelle was in the middle, right next to me. The control yoke on the Twin Bonanza is designed to be swung up, across and down in front of the middle section - effectively a second pilot position - so I did just that, saying that it was about time she learned to fly. At first, like most people, she didn't dare touch the yoke in case she immediately put the plane into a terminal dive, and when I talked her into trying it she gripped it tightly, expecting to have to use strength to overpower the aircraft and keep it under control. I reached across, prised her hands away and showed her how to fly the plane with just her fingertips, and after a while she relaxed and started to enjoy it.
She had been concentrating so much on the flying that when I swung the yoke back to my side and told her to look out in front of us, all she could say was 'oh my gaaaard'. The massive sand dunes of the Murzuq were opening up ahead, not just scattered around anyhow but formed up in lines with the underlying desert floor visible between each row. I eased the plane into a long descent and by the time we crossed the near edge of the sand we were down to 300 feet. Skimming the first crest we dropped into the long valley between successive lines of dunes, and then up and over the next crest and down again, and Estelle grabbed hold of my bare thigh and squealed with excitement.
A couple more ridges and then I saw what I was looking for. I pulled the Twin Bonanza up into a climbing tund and put down the undercarriage. Estelle looked around for an airstrip and I pointed to a large white patch in one of the valleys, a long wide dry lake bed laid down by water many millennia ago that I knew from a previous trip with some of my geologist passengers was both flat and firm. After touchdown I taxied up to the nearest dune, turned the plane to face down the length of what would later in the evening be the take-off run, and then shut down the engines and the flight systems.
I leaned across Estelle, opened the cabin door and let her out, putting my finger to my lips to motion her to silence. The crackling of the cooling engine exhausts and the hum of the slowing instrument gyros gradually died away, and as she looked at me with a question in her eyes I said 'listen'. And what she heard, for the first time in her life, was the utter, deadening, total lack of sound of the deep desert.