Impossible Journey Read online

  The first candidate arrived a little later. He had a clean-shaven, shifty face with very clear eyes; his hair was oiled and brushed. Both his gandourah and his sirwel were spotlessly white. Close up, he smelt faintly of perfume. That alone should have been enough to warn me. ‘So you’re the Christian who wants a guide to Tombouctou,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. It was a real cigarette, not one of the little brass pipes that most Moors used. I admitted that I was and he said, ‘Here I am. How much do you pay?’

  ‘Just a moment,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk about prices when I have chosen the guide.’

  ‘I’m the best guide in Walata,’ he said. ‘And I want 30,000 ougiyyas and the return fare.’

  ‘I don’t pay a return fare,’ I said. ‘That comes out of the guide’s portion.’

  ‘That’s stupid!’ he declared, his eyes flashing angrily. ‘Who ever heard of a guide not getting the return fare?’ He spluttered and muttered something under his breath. He seemed really annoyed, as if the job had been his by right and the conditions his to choose.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to agree, do you?’ I said.

  He dropped his cigarette, crushing it meaningfully with a heavy sandal. ‘You’ll regret it!’ he said and marched out of the shop, glowering.

  ‘That was Sheikh Ahmed,’ the big shopkeeper said apologetically. ‘He used to live in Zourg. Now he works for the army as a guide.’

  ‘The army is the best place for him,’ Marinetta told me acidly. ‘Face of vomit! You couldn’t take a man who loses his temper so easily, could you?’

  Later, Mulah Ali introduced me to another man. His name was Moukhtar Ould Sidi, and the merchant told me that he had just walked from his tent at Meya with some goats for sale in the market. At first sight, Moukhtar seemed a weak, diffident character. He was tall and very thin, and his huge, furled turban hung so low over his handsome, delicate face that it gave him the look of a simpleton. When he shook hands with me, he looked away, a trait I put down to shyness but was, in fact, good manners. Moukhtar was one of the most polite men I have ever met. When he stood up, though, you could see the lean, cable-muscled arms moving beneath the sun-bleached gandourah, the precise yet powerful gymnast’s step. He must have been about thirty-five. His was the sun-drawn, elongated face of the desert aristocrat, the eyes dark and thoughtful, the body the hunting greyhound frame of the hereditary nomad.

  He told us that he had started out from his camp at sunrise and had arrived in the town near sunset. When I checked my map later, I saw that Meya was 30 miles away. To have done that on foot in this heat and driving goats seemed an outstanding feat. It made me feel like an amateur.

  After a certain amount of pushing from Mulah Ali, who was evidently a person of some weight in Walata, Moukhtar said that he would be prepared to accompany us to Tombouctou. ‘There’s only one problem,’ he said. ‘I don’t know the way—that is, I haven’t done it all by camel. There’s no point in me lying to you. I’ve been as far as Ras al Ma by camel. The rest of the way, I’ve done by car.’

  I was doubly impressed by his honesty, and since honesty was always our first consideration, I invited him to visit our camp.

  Mafoudh welcomed the visitor and made tea. He had staunchly refused to leave us until we had appointed a new guide, and he had promised to interview the applicants and give his opinion of their character. He evidently liked Moukhtar. He questioned him closely about his tribe and discovered that he belonged to the noble Awlad Billa, a warrior tribe based in Zourg, south of Walata. I told Moukhtar that we had missed Hassi Fouini and saw him grin for the first time. ‘The water there isn’t much good anyway,’ he said. ‘It was salty from the beginning. I should know, it was my uncle who dug it out. Fouini was one of my family, and he was the governor of Walata when the well was sunk, so they named it after him.’ Mafoudh listened with eyes downcast.

  When Moukhtar had gone, Mafoudh said, ‘That man is one of the best. You’d be lucky to find a man more honest than that. My advice is to take him. From Ras Al Ma you can follow the shore of Lake Faguibine to Tombouctou. It won’t be a problem.’ Marinetta nodded in agreement. I knew we had found our second guide.

  I had been promising Mafoudh a meal of fresh meat since Tijikja, when in the rush, I had forgotten to buy any. It was almost a month since any of us had eaten meat, and I wanted to share some as a parting celebration. We scoured the market for a butcher but were told that meat was scarce in Walata. We were walking back disconsolately when a woman called us over to a mud house and showed us a tray of raw flesh. The woman was a Bambara from Senegal. She had the face of a witch, and her elongated earlobes hung down almost to her chin, supporting heavy, swinging pendants.

  As she began to cut up the meat, I noticed a young man lying on a mattress in the corner. He wore only a pair of white shorts, and one of his legs was plastered up to the groin in dung. The youth told us that he was afflicted with the ‘Guinea worm’. This dreadful parasite was apparently very common in Walata and came from the polluted wells. The worm could measure two yards in length and burrowed through the body, eventually surfacing through the knee, the ankle or the eye. The youth explaiped miserably that he had been like this for four months. ‘Haven’t you been to the doctor?’ Marinetta asked.

  ‘Doctors know nothing,’ he answered. ‘They can’t get rid of evil spirits.’

  We paid for our meat and left as quickly as possible.

  Mafoudh was delighted with the meat and at once, began to cook it on an open fire, flipping the pieces over with my knife and pressing them so that the succulent red juice ran out. When it was ready, he served it up on our plate. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘We’ve waited a month for this!’

  At that moment, someone said, ‘Peace be on you!’ We looked up to see two men from the Shurfa standing nearby. They had arrived in the wadi with their camels and families a little earlier. I looked at the meat, mentally dividing it into five. There wouldn’t be much for everyone.

  ‘Welcome!’ Mafoudh said, beckoning them over. But I noticed that his expression lacked enthusiasm.

  That night, I paid him the balance of his earnings. ‘What will you do with all this money?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s already spent,’ he said. ‘The money you gave me in Chinguetti went on provisions for my family, and the rest will go on debts to the shops.’ Then he thought for a moment and touched his faded headcloth. I remembered how he had tied the camels with it on that frightening morning in Umm Hayjiba. Already, it seemed a lifetime ago. ‘I think I’ll buy a new headcloth.’ he said. It seemed a pathetic reward for such a journey at such a time of year. Mafoudh had been like a brother to us. I was desolate to be parting from him.

  *

  A crowd of Moors gathered to see us off the next morning. Mafoudh was there, grinning through the waxy blue dye of his new turban, which had already spread across his face. ‘Never forget to fill all your girbas!’ was his parting advice. ‘If you have water, you can do anything. God go with you, Omar and Mariam!’

  Moukhtar took the lead rope. For a moment, it seemed strange to see his slim form there in place of Mafoudh. ‘In the name of God!’ he said as the camels started off.

  ‘The way is long!’ I shouted to Mafoudh.

  ‘Go in peace!’ he shouted back.

  Just before we left the wadi, another figure shambled out to meet us. It was Sheikh Ahmed, the would-be guide of the previous day. All rage seemed to have drained out of him now. He was all smiles and benevolence. He laid a hand on Moukhtar’s shoulder. ‘Take the southern way, not the northern one,’ he said. ‘The northern wells are dead. Keep to the southern way and you will find water and grazing. Go in peace!’

  ‘That’s odd,’ Moukhtar said as the man disappeared. ‘Someone told me that the wells were open on the northern route, not the southern. Still, he is a guide. He should know.’

  An hour later, Walata was out of sight behind us. We tramped through sticky heat up to the head of the plateau, where a cool breeze touched our
faces. Before us lay an endless vista of swelling, shallow sand hills. There were nests of withered grass stalks, and shattered trees stood grained and grey as stalagmites. The sparse vegetation had been razed to roughness and smothered in camel droppings. Prints of camels and goats covered every inch of ground, overlaying each other in billions. The earth was so compacted that nothing would grow. It was a picture of desecration, of nature spoiled and dirtied. ‘There are thousands of camels and goats near Walata,’ Moukhtar said in explanation. ‘Too many for the grazing.’

  For us, these shallow, undulating hills were a new type of desert. It was called mushla. Moukhtar said that travel here was more difficult than in the rock-and-sand desert we had just crossed. ‘You go on for days here, and nothing changes,’ he said. ‘Same trees, same grass, same sand hills. Rocks and mountains are good landmarks, but there aren’t any in the mushla. It’s like this almost all the way to Tombouctou. It’s easy to get lost.’

  At midday, we halted as usual. We were so accustomed to loading now that we had our saddles off in moments. Moukhtar seemed agonisingly slow and clumsy. It was annoying that he seemed not to know the order of things, that his ways were different from those of Mafoudh. We had become used to a certain routine, and it had taken on the form of a sacred law. Any variation in the routine seemed simply wrong. Here was the natural conservatism of the human animal, the reluctance to change, already ingrained after only a month of travel. Already, we had become as chauvinistic as the nomads, the Moors, the Tuareg, the Toubou, and the Arabs, all of whom had different customs and all of whom insisted that their customs were right. Such certainty helped them to survive, and if they adopted new ways, they did so with halting reservation, until eventually, the new ways replaced the old and became as unchangeable as the old ones had been.

  Moukhtar lacked the fire of Mafoudh. He was more self-possessed. There were no bursts of impatient cursing as he grappled with knots in the sickening heat, looking forward to his tea. Sometimes, though, I missed Mafoudh’s endearing explosions of temper. Moukhtar and I never argued. Sometimes I missed that too. When Marinetta passed him the zrig on that first day, he shocked us both by saying, ‘Thank you.’

  After we had eaten, Moukhtar seemed keen to talk. He asked if it was true that I was English, and when I said yes, commented, ‘I’ve heard the English ruled the world once.’

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘Not now. Now the Americans rule the world, but they rule it with money, not by colonisation.’

  ‘It wasn’t colonization that ruined us,’ Moukhtar said. ‘It was

  independence.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘The French were our bosses, but we bossed everyone else. We had our slaves and our vassals, and they paid tribute to us in return for protection. The French left us alone. Now we’re independent, you can’t call a slave a slave or a vassal a vassal. You can’t even call your camels your own because if the government wants to take them, that’s the end.’

  ‘But the government is made up of your own people, the bidan, isn’t it? I mean, you’re not the minority?’

  The government is a new tribe made up of bits of old tribes. When you join the government, you forget which tribe you once, belonged to.’

  Moukhtar went on to say that he had personally known the country’s first president, Moukhtar Ould Dadda, who was now in exile.

  ‘Was he from your tribe, too?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Ould Dadda was a marabout, not a warrior.’ He explained that after the coup in which Ould Dadda had lost his power, the ex-president had been imprisoned at Nema, the only prisoner in a house of twenty-six rooms. The authorities had needed someone to keep him company, someone from a good family who was not political. One of Moukhtar’s relations had been in charge of the prison and had recommended him for the job. He had been the ex-president’s companion, his duties being to fetch and carry his letters, make him tea, and chat to him when he felt inclined. They treated him well,’ Moukhtar said. ‘Every day, they slaughtered a sheep for him. He could have any food he wanted, and his room was always full of books and papers.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was a very clever man. Very well-educated. Very friendly and polite. He was married to the daughter of General de Gaulle, and they had some children. His family wasn’t with him in prison, though. They escaped to Senegal before the coup.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Everything. Sometimes he asked about my life. He talked about politics and about different countries, things I didn’t know about. I learned a lot, though. He was the most intelligent man I ever met. That’s why he was president.’

  I was hazy about recent Mauritanian history, but Moukhtar told me that Ould Dadd’s downfall had come about over the Polisario issue. The story, as so often in Africa, had begun with a colonial power pulling out of its former colony, in this case the Spanish out of Spanish Sahara. Ould Dadda and the Moroccan King Hassan had agreed that the liberated territory would be ruled jointly by both of them. But the inhabitants of this strip of desert had thought otherwise. They had formed the popular resistance movement called the Polisario and had gone on the offensive, which had resulted in the attacks on Chinguetti and Wadan and even on Nouakchott itself. The Moors sympathised with the Polisario, and Ould Dadda lost popularity. A military coup by Colonel Mu’awiyya had toppled him from power.

  ‘They let him go in the end,’ Moukhtar concluded. ‘He joined his family in Paris, and I went back to my goats and camels.’ I looked at our new guide with fresh respect. It was a surprising and unexpected story from a desert nomad.

  When it was time to move, Moukhtar said he would fetch the camels alone. After he had gone, I asked Marinetta what she thought of him. ‘I think he’s interesting and very handsome,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Interesting, yes; handsome, I don’t know,’ I said, but it was a lie. He was handsome. He was a fine, dignified, intelligent man, as near to the myth of the noble desert Arab as any I had met, and I had met plenty. Yet his obvious attraction for my wife sent a pang of jealousy through my head. It was an unfamiliar emotion. I had never expected to feel jealous of an illiterate nomad in the middle of the Sahara.

  The mushla went on and on. The horizon was always the same distance before us, always the same distance behind. The camels shuffled forward like robots with their monotonous, placid, unstoppable pace. They had become characters to us now: Gurfaf, greedily nipping the other camels at feeding time; Li’shal, the little camel from Adrar, whining and spitting constantly; and the noble Shigar, the best of the three, with his wide step and his patient manner. Only Gurfaf gave us trouble. The blisters on his flanks had not healed properly. Moukhtar cut them again, as Mafoudh had done, and squeezed out a good pint of pus. ‘You should exchange him in Tombouctou,’ he advised me. ‘I doubt if these wounds will heal while he’s being ridden.’

  Occasionally, the inflamed earth was punctuated by hollows where rain had fallen and where green shoots were nuzzling up from the sand. The trees were in leaf, and the camels moved haltingly, browsing in the luscious grazing.

  There was no confrontation with Moukhtar. He soon did everything so perfectly, and with such good grace, that we could hardly recall when he had not been with us. He was never tired. He never slept in the afternoons. He was the first up and the last to go to bed. His energy seemed boundless. He performed his prayers with lingering deliberation rather than whipping through them to get to the tea. He made bread with meticulous attention to detail. In the mornings, when we set out to track the camels down, he usually found them while I was still casting around for their prints. Moreover, he possessed all the skills of the nomad. He could make hobbling hoops out of the roots of the spiny talha trees. He demonstrated how to make fire, twirling a pencil of hard wood on a plate of soft. He knew the names of all the constellations that indicated the change of seasons. There were twenty-eight of them, he said. He carried with him no possessions, not even a knife or a blanket
, like a man who is supremely confident of being able to live off his environment. He was a superb tracker and would point out tracks as we rode, reading them like a book, saying, ‘These belong to a female camel. They are one day old,’ and ‘This is a jackal. He passed here only moments ago.’ Occasionally, I grew unreasonably tired of his perfection. I suppose it made me feel inadequate. Yet I couldn’t repress the feeling that he was playing ‘the bright boy of the class’ for the sake of Marinetta.

  She was evidently fascinated by him. Often, I thought I noticed her regarding him with more than a friendly interest. I couldn’t blame her. I admired the man myself. Yet this interest inspired in me an instinctive urge to compete with him. I recited the names of the constellations. I tried to pick up the camels’ tracks more quickly. I demonstrated the rudiments of compass navigation. I even tried to make a hobbling hoop but found my fingers too clumsy for the job. Sometimes, I felt so futile that I grew cynical. Once, he pointed out some camel tracks and said, ‘These are three days old.’

  I heard myself saying, ‘Are the camels brown, red, or white, and when are their birthdays?’

  He looked at me seriously. ‘No one can tell you that,’ he said. ‘Anyone who says he can is crazy.’

  One day, as we sat down to drink zrig at midday under the spreading arms of a talha tree, Marinetta removed her headcloth. It was the first time she had done so in front of the guide since we had started. Her hair, cut short at the beginning of the journey, had begun to grow. Now it spread out in a glorious swirl around her pretty face. The sudden revelation was as provocative as a striptease. I hadn’t until that moment fully realised how sensuously erotic hair could be. I felt angry. The anger increased as she squatted down to offer the milk to Moukhtar. It seemed a deliberate display. The guide looked away shyly, but the action only emphasised the jealousy I felt. I was about to tell her stiffly to replace the head cloth when I noticed the sweat running down her face. It was an exceptionally hot day. Perhaps, after all, she had removed it only because she was hot. Then Moukhtar distracted me, saying, ‘These talha trees are the best trees God made. We use every part of them. We use the big roots as tent supports and the smaller ones for hobbles and ropes. Animals can eat the leaves and ‘the carobs, and you can also make medicine from the leaves. You can eat the gum, and the wood is the best kind of wood for fires. That’s what I call a useful tree!’