The sun set and the blue welkin above turned a nameless colour – the same as the dunes around us. The lowing of cattle and the dong-dong of their bells died down. And so too the bleating of the goats. Only the occasional harsh bray of an ass broke the silence. But even an hour after sundown, it did not go completely dark for the stars above shone with a passion as though this was the last night they were ever going to shine. In the flat, featureless (low dunes are hardly features) desert the stars became visible just as they cleared the eastern horizon. And if one had the patience, one could sit through the night to chart each star's arc clear across the velvet dome above. As evening progressed, spotted owls began to sound their churring calls as they swooped about after the various kinds of insects that prowl the desert at night. Still later, the little yelps of foxes, muted by the distance, could also be heard. Earlier, on the drive through the desert, we had surprised a couple of sand-coloured foxes en route. But without my Roberts' book of mammals, I was unable to identify them. Above us, the wind soughed through the kundi tree under which our charpoys lay. The crisp evening turned even cooler and due east the horizon glowed with the lights of some Indian town across the border.
We had motored a hundred and twenty kilometres southeast across the Cholistan Desert from Derawar Fort to Bijnot. The Indian frontier was another twenty-five kilometres away and a hundred and fifty kilometres to the east lay Bikaner. Someone said the glow on the horizon was from the lights of that city. But that obviously was not true or we could also have seen the lights of Bahawalpur an equal distance to the north. Outside the little compound where we were bedded down, rose the ruined turrets and shattered walls of Bijnot Fort – one of the dozen or more dotted across the grey dunes of Cholistan. The annals of Jaisalmer, as recorded by James Tod, tell the story of a Bhatti prince called Tunno. In the course of his various adventures that do not concern this tale, Tunno acquired a vast hidden treasure with which he built a fort. Since the goddess Beejaseni had led him to the treasure, he called his fortress Beejnot after her. The year of construction is recorded in the annals as CE 757. The fort was held by the Rajputs for a full one thousand years until the 18th century. That was when the rising power of the Abbasi chieftains of Bahawalpur, began to eclipse that of the Rajputs in Cholistan. One by one, the fortresses of the desert fell to this doughty clan that claimed Arab descent. Bijnot was one among the last of the many that were taken by the Abbasis. Like the magnificent Derawar, Bijnot too must have been a mud-brick fort when it was built in the 8th century. Indeed, many ruined hulks sprinkled across the desert show that was how they built them in those...
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