Her Encounter | Islamic Story

Chapter 29

"It's the right direction. Right?" I asked, following behind Aiza as she made careful paces through the clumps of trees, pulling behind the branches for easy walk. Almost nothing was visible. Heavy drops fell on us, while the occasional lightning gave us the view of our surroundings which wasn't much help but in our state, we needed every last bit of help we could cling on to.

"Yes, it is, I'm sure," she turned around a bit to reply but her voice hardly reached my ears as our surrounding was quite noisy. Heavy drops, lightning, our feet on wet ground and occasional splashes in muddy puddles made a lot of noise.

I followed Aiza closely. Thank heavens, I didn't wear a gown of hers or I would have slowed us down considerably by tripping every now and then. Also, it is hard to walk in that cloth. Aiza was surprisingly doing fine. Practice, I suppose.

"How much longer?" I asked loudly for her to hear amidst this natural chaos.

"A few more minutes if I'm not mistaken," she exclaimed loudly, this time without turning around.

Another streak of lightning came and lit the space around us. The tree line was thinning. The ground was filled with the puddles. Aiza's gown was all muddy and soaked. I looked at my clothes just in time to see my white jeans turned all brown, and wet.

The only thing I managed to carry of my disguise in such a situation was wearing Aiza's scarf and it was dripping profusely now as the shower had increased considerably.

Now that there were less trees around, Aiza's pace increased and after a minute of splashing water with our feet and heavily breathing under the rain, Aiza spoke up, "Stop." I did. "Just a few more steps and we'll be on the road. It will be very hard to find a cab at this time of the night so we'll have to walk but since we wouldn't know the directions, it will be all too useless, but we can't sit on the footpath, so we'll simply idle around the road until we get some help. And when I say idle around, it could mean, roam around the same road for hours. Hope you're ready for that."

I could barely see her face, the little of light coming from God knows where only showed her silhouette though she hardly stood a foot from me.

What Aiza was demanding wasn't an easy undertaking. Especially since we had woken up early in the morning and it was well past midnight by now. But knowing that she was right, I nodded, only to realize she couldn't see, so I spoke up, "Okay. Let's move."

She turned around and started walking. The surrounding grew wider, so now we could walk side by side. Soon, the streetlights came in our view and my eyes finally began to fully see around, which wasn't easy especially after hours of being accustomed to the darkness.

"Finally," I exclaimed.

"Yes," Aiza said meeting my eyes, whilst pulling up her veil. Of course, she need not wear it while we were in the woods.

Just before making our way to the footpath which was visible from where we stood now, Aiza and I helped our looks as best as we could, for we really did look like hell.

Aiza's clothes were dripping, and since the rain wouldn't stop nothing could help it. She tried cleaning up the muddy splashes that marked her gown with the aid of the rain water.

Whereas me, I removed the scarf, twisted it to remove the excess water and did the same with my hair, then wore the scarf again, quite badly I must say because Aiza stifled a smile.

We only had our backpacks with us as we had hidden every leftover and junk of ours in one of the deep clumps of the bushes on the way after our departure from the cabin. We couldn't have left any junk behind so as to not leave a track, just in case. We also removed and threw our handmade door and windows at random places.