As long as they traveled through forest and farmland the trail, even after two and a half weeks, remained plain enough to follow—but when they reached the edge of the Kholaj Desert, the tracks of the prince’s entourage were swallowed up by the shifting sands. There was no way to know which direction the travelers had gone through the desert.
Abdel ibn Zaid checked his maps and plotted the course the prince’s group had taken so far. Assuming they had a definite destination in mind when they left the forest road, they would probably have moved toward it in the shortest possible route. Following a straight line path from the spot of battle and extending it forward, ibn Zaid saw that the line passed right by the oasis of Sarafiq, home of a famous shrine and a noted prophet. That was indeed a
