Well, fuck.
The good news was she had gotten away from the kidnappers. The bad news was that she was in mountain berber country now. Not a good place for a lone jill to be. Not really a good place for anyone from the coast to be.
The quickest way away was to the north, where she had come from, but that was also where the kidnappers were. If they were still looking for her she’d have a hard time getting past. She could of course also go west and hope to catch a ride with a passing boat. But that involved getting through a long stretch of sand, and losing your way when climbing the dunes was easy.
She squatted for a moment in the sand, gathering her thoughts. In a few hours it would go from unbelievably hot to more believable temperatures, but by then she only had a few hours before nightfall and the ice cold darkness of west Sahara. There was very little she could do to survive then. In fact, getting captured and questioned by mountain berbers was a pretty exciting proposition by comparison.
Her head spun a bit from the heat, and she found herself lost in thought about being kidnapped by savages from the hills inland, taken to a hidden oasis and… she snapped back to reality. North was probably her best option. There was no guarantee that there would be any boats along the coast and even if there were, there would be no guarantees they would be friendly.
She’d rather take her chances with the kidnappers. She’d gotten past them once, she could do it again.