Sie befinden Sich nicht im Netzwerk der Universität Paderborn. Der Zugriff auf elektronische Ressourcen ist gegebenenfalls nur via VPN oder Shibboleth (DFN-AAI) möglich. mehr Informationen...
The sun had barely surfaced over the pearl-grey dunes of the nearby desert when the Land Cruisers, Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols began to arrive in the barren lot in front of the prison, and Jebel Hafeet, the rhomboid mountain that rose behind the city like a bookend, was the colour of rust in the dawn light when I saw the three prisoners being led out of the whitewashed fort by nine guards in graphite-grey uniforms, probably Moroccans, who without haste tied the condemned men to three stakes against a wall topped by turrets and barbed wire, and already the locals clumped around their cars simmered with expectancy and excitement, the men in freshly pressed white dish-dashas, nightshirts to my eyes even after eight years in the Gulf, and the boys clad in the same, but with headcloths twisted like turbans instead of their elders' gutras held in place by ropes of black silk, while the women, who were mostly veiled, wore black from head to toe, like ninjas, as I had often heard young Emiratis joke, and the small girls wore knee-length party dresses of taffeta and lace in hot, bright colours, and ribbons and make-up, and hopped and jumped and tumbled and shrieked while their fathers and uncles and older brothers smoked and shouted pleasantly at each other and their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and older sisters rolled carpets onto the sandy, stony ground, then began laying out breakfasts of rolls and cheese, milk and dates and other fruit, by which time the hawkers from Pakistan and Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka had arrived on bicycles with their wares, paper twists of peanuts and seeds, newspapers and magazines, cold sodas, candy floss, popcorn, sunshades (it was early October, still a hot month, and Sami, our meteorologist at The Abu Dhabi Times, had forecast a high of 37 Celsius, close to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit), and by ten a crowd large enough to fill a football stadium had gathered, a multitude, it occurred to me, which made me notice how biblical the city beyond looked, with its domes and date palms and flat-roofed houses, like some opulent but accursed town in the Old Testament, and over Jebel Hafeet, the monolith that had already darkened to burnt sienna, Egyptian vultures were hanging in the dusty blue sky, black rectangles, stiff as boards, a sight that didn't strike me as macabre or ominous because I knew the scavengers often hovered over the lower slopes of the table-topped mountain near the zoo, where they could snatch meat from under the noses of the overfed lions and hyenas, but all the same I sensed an undercurrent of impatience in the crowd, to which I was not immune, for in spite of the repugnance I felt for the idea of a public execution, I recognized that my curiosity was piqued, besides which I had no desire to spend all day broiling outside when I could look forward to returning to my white villa in the capital, with its swimming pool and air conditioning, where my dainty Filipina wife and my books awaited me - so that at length I found myself speculating with the other men in my vicinity when the firing squad would appear, and a venerable white-bearded Bedu muttered that it was about time the family of the murdered man started throwing the rocks, as was their right - he pointed out the pile about thirty feet from the condemned men, just inside the rope barrier that kept the crowd away - but his son told him in the harsh Arabic of southern Arabia that the security guard had been a Syrian, like one of the killers (the other two were Iranians, I knew), so it was likely that his kin were not even in the country and couldn't avenge him in the proper manner, to which the old man replied that in that case the jailers ought to dispatch the curs before everyone was tired and hot, and I dare say everyone agreed except the three men who sagged at their posts, their bearded heads drooping, their bony shoulders bowed, their yellow prison issue dish-dashas...