deputized to search for her, as she had expected. In fact
the expedition sent nobody at all, since they never
realized she was missing, not even after they had
reached Medina. In the hubbub of arrival—the hundreds
of camels being unloaded and stabled, the throng of
warriors being greeted by wives and kinsmen—her
absence went unnoticed. Her maid assumed she’d slipped
down from the howdah and gone perhaps to see her
mother. Muhammad himself would have been far too
busy to think of her. Everyone simply assumed she was
someplace else.
So it was Aisha’s good fortune, or perhaps her
misfortune, that a certain young Medinan warrior had
been delayed and was riding alone through the heat of
the day to catch up with the main expeditionary force
when he saw her lying under that acacia tree.
His name was Safwan, and in what Aisha would
swear was an act of chivalry as pure as the desert itself,
he recognized her immediately, dismounted, helped her
up onto his camel, then led the animal on foot the whole
twenty miles to Medina. That was how everyone in the
oasis witnessed the arrival of the Prophet’s wife just
before nightfall, hours behind the main body of the
expedition, sitting tall and proud on a camel led by a
good-looking young warrior.
She must surely have sensed that something was
wrong as people stared in a kind of stunned