Impossible Journey Page 24

  I met an asthmatic Moor wearing a burnous with a hood and spoke to him in Hassaniyya. He had been in Niger three weeks, visiting his brother. When I asked how he liked it here, his eyes narrowed. ‘Everyone is a thief,’ he said. ‘You can’t trust anyone here. This isn’t Mauritania. Here, the blacks are proud to steal from a white man.’ I mentioned that I was English. He peered at me and said, ‘There aren’t any thieves in England, are there?’

  ‘Plenty,’ I said.

  ‘But the thieves are all blacks, aren’t they? I mean, white men wouldn’t steal?’ He introduced me to his brother, who had been a merchant in N’Guigmi for thirty years. He was leaving very soon, he said. He was as slight as the asthmatic Moor and with the same distorted face. He came from Atar and was anxious to know our opinion of it.

  ‘Aren’t you sorry to be leaving N’Guigmi?’ I asked him.

  ‘No, I’m looking forward to going home,’ he told me. ‘Everyone here is a thief.’

  The tout Musa told us to wait while he took the camels into the selling area. It wouldn’t do for the buyers to know that they belonged to a nasrani. We hung about, stamping our feet to dislodge the camel ticks that crawled up our legs from their burrows in the sand. The ticks were everywhere. They were small but particularly voracious. I noticed that everyone else in the market was stamping too. They were doing a sort of rhythmic shuffle, rocking to a silent beat. Even the camels were at it, slapping their flat pads in the sand. Men and animals were shuffling and stamping together around this little patch of desert. ‘It looks like a dance!’ Marinetta said.

  The only people who weren’t stamping were two Frenchmen of middle age. They were tanned and wore high jungle boots and the kind of peaked caps favoured by American oilmen. They worked for a French oil company prospecting in Niger. They were interested in our expedition and made a note of our names. Just then, Musa appeared and spoke to me in Arabic. When I replied, the Frenchmen looked up in surprise. ‘Of course,’ one of them said, glancing at his scrap of paper, ‘this isn’t your real name, is it? I mean, you must have been born in the Middle East.’ This reminded me that I was still wearing my gandourah and Moorish headcloth, unchanged since Agadez.

  ‘You can’t win.’ Marinetta commented later. ‘The Arabs think you’re a nasrani and the nasranis think you’re an Arab. What the hell are you?’

  ‘I don’t think I know any more,’ I said.

  We ran into the slim chief of the gendarmes who looked immaculate in his green uniform. He was wearing black shoes, highly polished, and was trying desperately not to stamp. He asked us if we had found a guide to Chad yet. ‘Don’t take a Chadian guide,’ he advised us. ‘Take a Nigerien. That way you’re more likely to survive.’ I thanked him for his advice. Suddenly, he stamped violently and even bent down to scratch inside his shoes. ‘Petrol!’ he declared. ‘That’s the only thing that gets rid of them!’ I looked down to see my own ankles covered in blood and alive with ticks. While talking to the chief, I had for some reason been standing at attention.

  We left N’Guigmi for Chad on 15th January with three camels and a guide named Jibrin. He belonged to the Gor’an and had been born in the Kanem region of Chad. His family had moved to N’Guigmi when he was a child, and he now had Nigerien nationality. He styled himself ‘Malam’ Jjbrin, in the manner of the Hausa. ‘Malam’ meant that he could read the Quran and write magical charms that would ward off the evil eye. He carried a copy of the Quran in a cardboard box slung from his saddle. I imagine that the Quran itself was intended as a charm because I never saw him reading it. I once, asked Jibrin if he understood everything in the Holy Book. ‘You don’t have to understand it!’ he told me, surprised. ‘It’s the words that are important, not the meanings!’

  Of all our guides, Jibrin looked the least like a camel man. He came dressed in a thick, elegant gandourah and shiny, black slip-on shoes. His hairless face was as shiny and black as the shoes, and his head was shaved as smooth as a cannon shell. When we made camp on the first night, a few miles outside the town, he took his food away and ate it alone. Then he went straight to sleep. When it was time to bring the camels in, I woke him up to help me. ‘I’ve got a bad leg,’ was his reply. ‘I’ve already put my ointment on. I’ll help you tomorrow.’ From then on, I knew how it would be.

  ‘So this is your better guide!’ Marinetta jeered when she heard what had happened. ‘“I’ve got a bad leg,” indeed! He’s the first guide who has ever refused to help with the camels. You must be mad or stupid to hire a man like him. We’d have been better off without a guide.’

  ‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘We haven’t made it into Chad yet, let alone through it. Jibrin is a Gor’an, and the Gor’an rule Chad.’

  ‘Huh!’ she scoffed. ‘All I can see is that we’re pouring money down the drain.’

  In the morning, when Marinetta started to make her simple ablutions, Jibrin hovered nearby, watching her. It made her very angry. All our other guides, even the uncouth Sidi Mohammed, had at least respected a moderate degree of privacy by turning their heads or busying themselves some distance away. Finally, I told him, ‘Give her some space, Jibrin. You know, women don’t like to be stared at.’ He moved away reluctantly.

  Instead of thanking me, Marinetta said, ‘This is your better guide! Don’t talk to me about guides again.’ She went into one of her sulky, silent moods and refused to talk for hours.

  We set off over the clay-powder bed of the old lake. A herd of ravaged camels fanned out among the brakes of salt bush. ‘All this used to be water as far as you could see,’ Jibrin told me. ‘There were crocodiles and hippos and elephants. You saw the skull at the cercle yesterday? Now, there’s not even enough grass for the herds here. Look how thin those camels are. At first, the water receded little by little, then all at once, it disappeared. Now it’s miles away.’ There had been no Gor’an in this area once, he said. The Gor’an were nomads from the north and east, and the lake was Beriberi country. The Gor’an had come here only when the grazing in the desert had started to die.

  Jibrin was a government guide. He had taken travellers to Chad dozens of times and knew the route backwards. Always, though, he had taken them in motor vehicles. The year before, he had guided a couple of heavy trucks through the sandy country around the old lake. ‘Germans,’ he said. ‘I told them they’d never get the trucks through. The country here is all deep sand. In trucks like those, you couldn’t do more than 15 miles a day. It’s all up and down. Very hard on the axles. After three days, the axle of one of them broke. They just left the truck out in the desert. I wonder if it’s still there.’

  On the way back, there had been an accident. Jibrin had been travelling in the back of a Toyota pick-up when the steering had gone. The pick-up had rolled over in the sand. Jibrin’s leg had been crushed and broken in several places, and he had not yet fully recovered. ‘I never got any compensation,’ he said mournfully.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’ I asked him, aware that in N’Guigmi, he had glossed over several important facts. ‘You must be mad to ride a camel after an accident like that.’

  ‘Yes.’ he admitted sorrowfully, ‘you’re right, patron. But I needed the money. I’ve got seven children, and not even a wife to look after them. My wife died last year.’

  At midmorning, we were challenged by three Nigerien soldiers hidden in the salt bush. They gawked at our camels, and they gawked at our Western faces. Why don’t you go by car?’ one of them asked. I thought of Jibrin’s smashed leg. ‘You know there’s a war on in Chad, don’t you?’ the soldier asked us. When we nodded wearily, he said, ‘Well, then, good luck!’ and walked away. Two hours later, we crossed the Chad border.

  For two years, I had been a teacher in the Sudanese town of Gineina. It stood on the Sudan-Chad border, on exactly the opposite side of the country from where we now were. Often during those years, I had heard the thunder of artillery from across the border and had seen thousands of refugees streaming over the frontier. They had carri
ed with them tales of massacre and rape, of torture, mutilation, and genocide. They had told of numerous political factions, armed and desperate, roaming the ranges and killing at random. These fearful tales had come back to me many times as we approached Chad but never more vividly than now, when I was suddenly inside the country with my wife and three camels. Chad had always reared like a poisonous serpent in our plans to cross the Sahara. Recently, Marinetta had been kept awake by a recurrent nightmare about it. She dreamed of a black man with ice-cold eyes looking at us down the barrel of a machine gun. I already knew that every step of the way inside this war-torn country would be like walking in a minefield. Always, we would be expecting the worst.

  We arrived at the village of Dabua just after sunset. I wanted to make camp outside and report to the border post at sunrise. I was unwilling to approach the place at night, knowing how trigger-happy Chadian soldiers were supposed to be. Jibrin advised us to report to them immediately, however. He said that hanging back would make it look as if we had something to hide. The village looked poorer and more ramshackle than any I had seen in Niger.

  A young black soldier in combat dress came out to meet us, clutching his rifle. After him came a security man dressed in a gandourah-like an ordinary tribesman. Both of them were Shuwa Arabs. ‘Christians with camels!’ the soldier said. ‘The world is truly a strange place. You are the first Christians I have ever seen with camels.’ Another young man wearing a gandourah came puffing up. The soldier introduced him as the ‘chief’. ‘You will leave your passports with me tonight,’ he said, ‘and tomorrow, we will take steps to help you on your way.’ After the months of worry, this politeness made me feel like laughing.

  The village looked almost derelict in full light. Outside the chief’s office, there were no flags or symbols of statehood. The office didn’t even have a door, just a dirty blanket to keep out the cold wind. Inside, there was a bench and a desk. The plaster was coming away from the mud walls. A picture of Hissein Habri hung tenaciously by a piece of tape. I had once, seen Habri in Gineina while he was a fugitive. I was glad that he was back.

  We had been expecting an interrogation or at least a search. Instead, the chief inspected our visas and entered the details in a school exercise book. He shivered with cold as he wrote. ‘You are the first Christians ever to come this way by camel!’ he declared. He was wrong, but I was chary of correcting him. Two Christians had come this way by camel in 1899. They were Frenchmen, and one of them was called François Lamy. He had led a column of Algerian soldiers around Lake Chad and had attacked the stronghold of the previous ruler south of it. The opposition slaughtered, the French had added Chad to their list of colonies. They had founded a new town named, after their leader, Fort Lamy. It was now called N’Jamena.

  The chief instructed us to report to the brigade headquarters at Bol, where our passports would be stamped. Then he told us to send in Jibrin. The guide emerged with a face of misery, muttering, ‘He took 1,000 francs off me. They say it’s a “passage fee” but I call it a tobacco fee.’

  We led our camels up the main street of mud-and-wattle buildings. It was like a film-set cowboy town. ‘We passed the first obstacle so easily!’ Marinetta said. ‘Can you believe it?’ Before we had walked 10 yards, a voice shouted, ‘Hey! Where do you think you’re going?’ We stopped dead and saw a lean and hungry-looking soldier in soiled combats looking at us over the barrel of a sub-machine gun. His eyes were icy. ‘We’re going to Bol,’ Jibrin told him diffidently. ‘We’ve just passed the chief.’ The soldier took Jibrin aside, and there was some furtive whispering. Then Jibrin handed over a further 500 francs. He looked dejected when he rejoined us. ‘Tobacco fee again,’ he said. ‘It’s always the same. By the time you’ve finished, it’s not worth your coming.’

  A few minutes later, we were back in the desert. The day was very hot. The ground alternated between spits of soft sand that had once, been the lakeside and the hard, empty bed of the old lake. You could see where the lake bed had been moulded by the water into troughs and shallows. I tried to imagine this place as it had been then, with the steel-grey, licking waters underfoot. Change had come quickly and completely. Earth’s great machinery trundled on incomprehensibly. Our lives were no more than a breath of wind that spun the sand across the desert’s surface.

  At prayer time, Jibrin would select a shady tree and couch his camel under it. He would clear a space around him fastidiously with a twig, then remove his shoes and socks and make his ritual ablutions with water. He took far longer over his prayers than any other guide we had had. Before mounting, he always asked me to hold his camel. He was understandably afraid of falling and breaking his leg again. His injury made him too static to be a good rider. His camel went its own way at its own pace. This camel won’t go straight,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s afraid of the bushes.’ Often, he would place a hand gingerly on his side and say, ‘Riding this camel gives me a pain in the liver. It’s killing me, by God!’ If we descended a hill, he would lean so far back in the saddle that he was almost horizontal, holding his side with his free hand and groaning. It looked so comical that we couldn’t help mimicking him. We must have looked a mind-boggling sight to an observer: three camel riders descending a hill, one after the other, all leaning back with their hands on their sides and groaning miserably.

  Jibrin found it difficult to walk for more than ten minutes in the morning, especially in the deep sand. He complained loudly that we never rested in the afternoon. This isn’t the way the Gor’an travel’ he said.

  ‘This is the way the British travel,’ I told him.

  ‘The British don’t breed camels.’

  ‘The Gor’an don’t make cars, but they still drive them.’

  I never criticised Jihrin for his infirmity, but I felt cheated. He hadn’t mentioned his injury before I hired him, and a journey like this could cause him harm, I thought. Our guides had been steadily less effective as the journey continued, and for the first time, I seriously considered crossing Chad alone. I had hired Jibrin only to take us as far as N’Jamena, where we had to obtain visas for the Sudan. After N’Jamena, we decided, we would not hire another guide unless it became essential.

  Jibrin tried to compensate for his weakness by giving orders. ‘Make rice with sardines tonight,’ he told Marinetta. ‘Keep those camels away from the arak trees,’ he said to me. Another time, he instructed me to hang an empty waterskin high in a thorn tree. ‘So the jackals don’t get it,’ he said. Such remarks made me doubt his full sanity. And we were not the only victims of Jibrin’s instructions. He was inclined to give them to anyone we passed. Once, for instance, we met some Arabs with a herd of camels feeding across the track. One of the animals was a bull-camel, blubbering and blowing out his mouth bladder. I noticed that the bull was hobbled by the knee. ‘Keep that beast out of the way, you Arabs!’ Jibrin ordered. ‘Don’t let it come near human beings!’ The Arabs ignored him.

  Another time, a woman with a little boy begged us for water. She said that her husband had stormed off in a temper after an argument and left them to walk home. ‘Don’t ever argue with your husband,’ Jibrin ordered her. As we passed some villagers later, he called out to them, ‘There is a woman coming along this track who has had a row with her husband. Look after her and take her to your village.’ Like the Arabs, the villagers showed no signs of having heard. Perhaps one of them was her husband.

  Jibrin used a piece of twig as a camel stick. He never struck his camel with it but constantly flailed around with it in the air, extending his arm forwards and back and twirling it around his head. As he did so, he hummed to himself. ‘Either he’s doing arm exercises or he’s practising to be a conductor,’ Marinetta said. Whenever he saw a dog, he would point at it with his stick and recite something in a loud voice. The dog would watch us go past in bemused silence.

  We made camp in a bald patch among some heskanit grass. After we had unloaded, Jibrin said, ‘I feel tired and a bit sick.’ He uncovered his paunch of belly an
d asked me to feel it. It was fat and flabby. It was not the belly of a desert man. I thought of the rope-muscled Mafoudh and Moukhtar and of the powerful Sidi Mohammed. ‘I’ve got a bad stomach,’ he said. ‘The doctor told me not to drink coffee or tea or eat kola nuts.’ He lay down while I made a fire. Then I went off to watch the camels a little way from the camp. From where I stood, the fire was the only bright spot in the pitch darkness, and my eye was automatically drawn to it. I saw Jibrin get up and approach the fire slowly. He looked round furtively, and I guessed Marinetta must have left the camp. He began to remove his shoes and socks. He dangled one bare foot over the flames, then the other. Then he lifted his gandourah and let the flames warm his bulging belly. Finally, he squatted over the fire, pulled down his sirwel and warmed his backside. Then he retired into the shadows. When I returned to the camp he was already asleep.

  The moon came up later, and I brought the camels in and hobbled them nearby. At an early hour of the morning, I was woken up suddenly by a terrifying scream. I jumped out of my sleeping bag, startled. My first thought was that Marinetta had gone out and was in trouble. Then I realised that she was lying next to me. ‘What is it?’ she gasped as she woke up. We peered into the moonlight. Just beyond the place where the camels were hobbled, I caught the sinister glimmer of yellow eyes. The camels had stopped chewing and were shifting nervously. I took the machete and went to investigate. Suddenly there was another ear-piercing scream and a great blunt animal shambled away into the shadows. It was a hyena with an ungainly head and a fat, bloated body. It was the first time I had ever seen a spotted hyena close-up. In the morning, I asked Jibrin about the animal. He said that he hadn’t even heard it.