Impossible Journey Page 25

  That morning, we came across a set of gnarled footprints in the sand. They were no more than hours old, and they were gigantic. It needed no skill as a tracker to see that they could belong only to an elephant. Jibrin began to gaze about him anxiously. ‘You get herds of ten or twenty elephants here sometimes,’ he said, whispering. ‘They’re all right, but an elephant on its own is dangerous.’

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Because they can hear your voice a long way off.’

  Now it was my turn to look around me. The landscape was still very arid. I was amazed that elephants could survive here. The previous night, I had taken my machete to chase off the hyena. I asked myself what you could do against an elephant.

  We reported to the gendarmes at Liwa, where dozens of screaming schoolchildren left off their games to pursue us into the brush. Jibrin paid out another 1,000 francs as tobacco fee. Outside the village, we found ourselves in a tropical landscape. There were deep dells full of fluted dom palms, tangled in thick undergrowth, dank and humid. Great siyal trees towered above the brush, with canopies like massive parachutes and boughs dripping with lianas. Arabs and Gor’an watered animals in clearings. There were places where elephant herds had moved, rooting up trees from the soil and splitting them like straws. Their enormous droppings lay everywhere. A pack of red baboons skittered across the track and dived into the foliage. We emerged from the forest into rolling prairies scattered with tiny villages. They were set above fields of golden stubble, where the millet had recently been harvested. The houses were domes of twisted cane, built on high ground above the floodwaters of the lake, small fortresses against wild animals, drought, and war.

  Some time during the afternoon, I was startled by a shout. I turned to see two soldiers charging towards us on camels. A third soldier, running across a field of stubble, was trying to head us off on foot. The soldiers surrounded us and regarded us with predatory faces. Two of them were young and the other old, but all of them were black, lean, and aquiline. They reminded me of weasels. The soldier on foot was pointing his rifle at us, saying, ‘You can’t be tourists. Tourists come by car. They don’t come by camel.’ We replied only in French, afraid to use Arabic. Libyans spoke Arabic.

  The other two troopers dropped from their camels. The younger one was wearing a pistol in a holster, which dangled heavily from his hip as he inspected our camels. ‘We’ll go through everything they’ve got,’ the older man said. ‘I bet we’ll find some nasties!’

  ‘Open all your baggage,’ the pistoleer said. ‘We’re looking for firearms or drugs. You’d better not have anything illegal.’

  ‘You can search us in Bol,’ I protested. ‘It’s not right to search us out in the bush.’

  The young soldier stood very close to me. I could see the red veins in his eyes. ‘We’ll say what’s right,’ he snapped. ‘Open your baggage!’

  ‘Better do as he says,’ said Jibrin.

  ‘So you speak Arabic,’ the older man cut in, noticing my nod of understanding.

  ‘Only a little,’ I said in French. Resentfully, I began to lay out our things on the ground. I realised that these men could steal anything they wanted from us. What worried me most was our emergency flare pencil. I thought that they might take it for a firearm. We were beyond the bounds of any protection, I knew. We had only ourselves. I was instinctively fearful that they might touch Marinetta. If they did, I found myself thinking, I hoped I would have the courage to fight.

  The young soldier was going through Marinetta’s personal effects. The bag containing the flare was in front of him. I watched as he held up some sticky pieces of soap, a dirty hairbrush, and the two pairs of socks, very soiled and unwashed for months. I watched the look of disgust on his face with something like satisfaction. He rubbed his hands on his sleeve. ‘Come on,’ he told the others. ‘There’s nothing here.’ Marinetta and I exchanged a look.

  The older man said, ‘Go straight to Bol. Don’t leave the main track.’ They watched us as we reloaded and set off.

  ‘I wish we’d never brought that flare,’ I said to Marinetta.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but can you imagine what would have happened if we’d brought a satellite navigation unit?’ We discussed whether we should throw the flare away, or bury it, but it occurred to me that if we should be seen, even by Jibrin, we would look very guilty.

  We reached Bol before sunset the following afternoon. It was built on a peninsula surrounded by the glinting blue waters of the lake. We had only just entered the town when a narrow-faced youth shouted out that we were Libyans. Other youths and children crowded around us, looking ugly and firing questions. One of them, a barefoot adolescent with a skeletal face, stared at Marinetta and rubbed himself on the groin. We managed to get away from them and marched on through the sandy streets. Children pointed at us out of barred windows, and people scurried past, whispering.

  The brigade headquarters was set on a bank above the lake in some trees. A line of men in uniforms, all different, were sitting on a bench outside. They carried clubs and pistols. Their faces were unpleasant mahogany masks, and I saw mockery in their eyes as they looked at our camels. A big, pot-bellied man with yellow teeth told us to come back in the morning.

  We were leaving our camels back out of the town when someone bawled at us to stop from the open door of what was obviously a bar. He was of the young, thin-hipped, weasel-faced type that had already become familiar to us. His civilian clothes were unkempt, and he lurched over to us on unsteady legs. The odour of beer followed him. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he demanded. I told him that we were heading out of town to find a place where the camels could eat. ‘No, you aren’t,’ he said. ‘Not unless you hand over your passports.’

  ‘And who are you?’ I asked.

  He fixed me with an evil stare, as if the question were unthinkable. Then he showed me a pistol stuffed into his belt. ‘I am in charge of passports, that’s who I am,’ he said. ‘Police. You don’t leave this town till I get your passports.’

  ‘Where’s your I D card?’ asked Marinetta.

  ‘I don’t need an I D card. I have this.’ He gestured at the pistol. ‘Now, you give me those passports or you’ll be in trouble.’

  Jibrin volunteered nothing. I looked at the pistol and at Marinetta. Reluctantly, I handed over our precious documents. I dared not think about what might happen to us in a country like Chad if our passports were stolen. They were our only way of proving that we were not Libyan spies.

  We made camp in a field of stubble. It was infested with mosquitoes from the lake. Jibrin had a personal mosquito net but was too tired or lazy to cut wooden supports for it. Marinetta and I had only our tent. To cap it all, Jibrin told me, ‘This place is well known for camel thieves. You’d better watch the camels well tonight.’

  ‘How about you watching them for a change?’

  ‘I wish I could, patron.’ he said, ‘but my leg, you know.’

  At that moment there was an ear-shattering explosion. All three of us jumped. A Jaguar aircraft flew over us, so low that I could see the pilot in his cockpit. The noise of the machine shook our raw nerves, but it reminded me that this was a country at war. Our journey was a war, too. Now we had to gather every ounce of courage and endurance to keep going.

  I thought of Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveller. He had covered 75,000 miles in his lifetime, all without benefit of the internal combustion engine. He had visited every Muslim state then in existence. I remembered how he had been captured by Negroes, who had forced him to sit down and placed a rope in front of him. ‘That is the rope they will tie me with when they kill me,’ he had said to himself. Things had never been easy in the Sahara. Not even in his day.

  We were amazed to find other tourists at the brigade headquarters when we arrived there the following morning. Two Land Rovers and a Toyota were parked outside. One of the Rovers belonged to some students from Edinburgh University. They had been heading down into Central Africa but had f
ound the Nigerian border closed.

  The four male students all wore olive-drab safari suits, like uniforms. The fifth member of the group was a woman, rather attractive, with a full figure and black hair. She sat in a folding chair, looking sick. The men had fresh, earnest faces. ‘I pairsonally didnae want to come this way,’ one of them told me. He was a short Scotsman, a little shy, with an angular face and a fluff of golden beard. ‘I knew this soft sand would ruin the vehicle.’ He showed me the sadly cracked chassis of the Land Rover, saying with affection, ‘She’s thairteen years old. Now we’ll have to leave her here.’

  The gendarme chief was the same yellow-toothed man we had seen the previous night. With him was the ragged youth who had confiscated our passports. He was sober this morning and smiled at us nicely when we entered the office. We smiled back in relief. The chief asked to see our bills of sale for the camels, to which he applied his rubber stamp. Then he charged us 250 francs for each camel and 1,000 francs for our guide. I presumed it was a tobacco fee.

  An hour later, we were searched by the gendarmes. Three troopers went through our baggage with a mixture of curiosity and greed. Marinetta and I held our breath as they came to our emergency flare. This is a pistol,’ one of them said. My heart missed a beat.

  ‘No,’ Marinetta said, smiling sweetly, ‘it is a flare in case we get lost in the desert.’

  ‘It looks like a pistol,’ the trooper repeated, but already he was laying it down again disconsolately. Our sighs of relief must have been audible.

  Another soldier was fingering one of our water bottles. ‘This is military equipment,’ he declared. ‘It’s illegal in Chad.’

  ‘It’s just a water bottle,’ I said. ‘And it’s not in very good condition.’

  The third soldier was already gazing towards the Land Rovers, where the pickings looked more tempting. ‘Ah, what do people with camels have?’ he said. Later, they confiscated two pairs of ‘military’ boots from the students.

  Outside the commissar’s office was a fat man in a long, blue gandourah who addressed me in Arabic. He said that he was a Sudanese and came from Darfur, in the western Sudan, a region I knew intimately. He worked in Bol as an Arabic teacher, he said. He didn’t look like a Sudanese. I had never heard of the village he claimed to come from. I must have looked puzzled because he said quickly, ‘I was brought up in Khartoum.’ I told him that I had lived in Khartoum and knew the city well. He changed the subject very rapidly.

  The occupants of the second Land Rover were a cheerful French couple with two small children. The children were both suffering from conjunctivitis. The couple were addicted to travel and were driving to India; they expected the journey to take two years. When they came to wait outside the commissar’s office, the fat ‘Arabic teacher’ asked me, ‘Don’t you think this French woman has some Arab blood?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I told him.

  The commissar was a youngish, handsome man. He was very silent. After a few moments, he pointed to the picture of Hissein Habri on the wall. ‘Do you know who that man is?’ he asked. He told us that he had been a refugee with Habri in the Sudan. ‘That’s all history now,’ he said. ‘We were on the run then. Now we’re back.’ He tried to get us to talk about the relative conditions of Chad and the other countries we had passed through. Sensing danger, we both went silent. He went quiet, too, and I guess he was wondering what profit could be made out of a pair of camel riders. Then a man came in and told him, ‘Orders have just come through, sir. No one is allowed in or out until tomorrow.’

  The commissar tried to look upset, but his ‘Merde!’ didn’t sound convincing. It looked as though he was enjoying himself. ‘I don’t know if we can allow you to continue,’ he said before we left. ‘This is a country at war, you know.’ He told us to return the next day.

  We marched out, feeling confused. In Niger, we had been held for six days but had never doubted that everything was official. Here, though, you had the feeling of being the victim of a cat-and-mouse game, the object of which was exploitation. I had the uneasy sense that these people were capable of stripping me of everything, camels, money, even my wife. That night, we resolved that we would refuse to be separated, whatever happened. We would refuse to give an inch. We would not abandon our plans. We would not relinquish our camels. We would not pay a penny in bribes. The only way forward was to fight.

  The following morning, the commissar called for me alone. I made sure Marinetta was sitting with the French couple before I entered his office. I had noticed the fat ‘Arabic teacher’ hanging around like a vulture.

  The commissar had one of the British students in his office. The man was sitting nervously on a stool, lean and aesthetic-looking with bright blue eyes. On the desk between them was an ordinary cassette deck with a separate amplifier, which had obviously been removed from the students’ Land Rover. The commissar asked me to translate his Arabic into English for the sake of the student. I sat down next to him, feeling equally nervous.

  The commissar began to explain the situation. At sunset the previous day, he said, someone (could it have been the ‘Arabic teacher’?) had seen the British students listening to a radio with an antenna. Then one of them had been seen speaking back into the radio. When the ‘someone’ had approached them, the students had quickly hidden the apparatus. The gendarmes had searched them later but had not found it. He wanted to know where the transmitter was. I listened incredulously. The story was an obvious fabrication. Still, I was obliged to translate.

  The student, whose name was Graham, listened to me with increasing discomfort. ‘It’s not possible!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but I’m only translating what he said.’

  ‘There’s no radio,’ Graham said shakily.

  I translated, feeling just as shaky. Another man with an aggressive, bull-like face came in and stood next to the commissar, regarding us both threateningly.

  ‘If that radio isn’t found, you will be in big trouble!’ the commissar said.

  Graham went red. ‘All we have apart from this,’ he said, gesturing at the cassette deck, ‘is a Sony Walkman.’

  The commissar ordered him to go and get it. ‘I really don’t think they’ve got a radio,’ I ventured, after he had gone out.

  ‘What about these two?’ the bull-faced man said. ‘Shouldn’t we confiscate one of their camels?’

  Graham returned with the small Walkman. ‘This isn’t what we mean,’ said the commissar. ‘I’ve already got one like that.’

  ‘There’s nothing else,’ said Graham. ‘Only this car stereo.’

  ‘Ah, yes!’ said the commissar, as if noticing the stereo on the table for the first time. ‘I think this is too powerful to be an ordinary stereo. It could be used for other purposes.’

  ‘It’s powerful because a Land Rover engine is loud,’ said Graham. ‘It has to be louder than the engine.’

  ‘Listen,’ the commissar said, ‘four hundred tourist vehicles came through here last year, and not one of them had a stereo as powerful as this. What’s this “graphic equaliser”, for instance? That’s no ordinary stereo! It could be used for Morse Code—telegraph, you see!’

  I watched the game that he was playing with tight insides. I watched Graham struggling, dying to tell him not to give in. I felt a natural sympathy for him, a member of my own people. A man must look after his own. But my immediate responsibility was to myself and my wife, and I was afraid that our own journey would grind to a halt here in this gloomy room on the banks of Lake Chad. I was reminded of my resistance to interrogation training in the S A S regiment. The bullying, the pressure, the disorientation all seemed very familiar. These people were using cold-blooded threats to steal this piece of equipment. I knew it, and Graham knew it. The commissar knew it, but he didn’t care.

  ‘I’ll tell you what!’ the commissar said suddenly. ‘We’ll let you keep the little Walkman. That’s the important one for you. But we’ll keep this big one. Either it stays here, or y
ou stay here.’

  Graham thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said, summoning as much dignity as he could. ‘I didn’t realise that the rules were so strict.’

  ‘Now, don’t you go telling bad stories about us when you get home,’ the commissar said, crowing in triumph.

  ‘I’ll tell only the truth.’ Graham answered bravely.

  And so will I, I thought as we went out.

  Marinetta was waiting for me in the sunshine outside. She said that the fat ‘Arabic teacher’ had tried to get her alone and had asked where she had slept the previous night. Just then, Jibrin called us over and introduced us to an elderly man dressed in a smart gandourah. Much to my surprise, the man turned out to be the préfet of Bol. He asked us interested questions about our journey, then inquired, ‘What’s the delay with your passports? You shouldn’t have been here for two days.’ A few moments later, the commissar emerged from his office, and the préfet called to him. The commissar saw us standing with the préfet and perhaps thought that I had reported the story of the car stereo. He looked a guilty man as he sidled up. ‘What’s all this business about the passports?’ the préfet asked him. Before answering, the commissar sent us to wait outside his office. Half an hour later, we were given our passports back.

  Just before we left, I saw the chief of gendarmes remonstrating with the French couple, who had tipped the entire contents of their rubbish bags in a pile outside the commissar’s office. Normally, I detested litter. But on this occasion, I thought it a fitting comment.

  For another five days, we prowled around the edge of Lake Chad. We travelled through cultivated country, where the bulrush millet stood as tall and stately as a Guards battalion. The crops were full of people, rattling tin cans and shouting hoarsely at the attacking flotillas of birds. Between the fields were neat hamlets, four or five mud houses angled around a square. Huge, old trees covered the smooth ground with black shade. In other places, tangled jungles of dom palms and acacias stretched to the horizon, like equatorial rainforest. There were merikh and tundub trees, with fat juicy shoots, red berries hanging like grapes among the branches. Golden heskanit grass sprouted along the crevices of fractured clay that gradually replaced the sand.