Impossible Journey Read online

  Marinetta and I had often discussed the ideal qualities of a guide. Finding the right man was crucial because once, in the desert, we would be dependent on him, as he on us. We had prepared for any potential guide a list of questions about his opinions and preferences. But when we were introduced to Mafoudh, we dropped it abruptly. Mafoudh was a good man. You could tell he was a good man by his face.

  He had the deep, black, watchful eyes of the desert. Standing beside Sid’Ahmed, you could see at once, that he belonged to a different class. There was none of our landlord’s spare tyre about Mafoudh. He had the rope-muscled leanness of a nomad and carried not an ounce of unneeded fat. His face was broad and hard, pickled brown by the outdoors, but it split easily into a smile. ‘I used to work on the caravans.’ he said, ‘but I haven’t been that way these ten years. Still, you never forget it once, you’ve been. The only problem will be the heat.’

  ‘Does the heat bother you?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ he answered. ‘It gets you down at midday, but by sunset, the worst of it is past. Everything passes. That’s the way of God.’

  Mafoudh said that he would be prepared to take us as far as Walata, on the Mali border. He reckoned we could make it in under thirty days. Then he asked for 60,000 ougiyyas. To me, the price seemed excessive, but after Mafoudh had gone, Sid’Ahmed said, ‘You can’t blame him for asking so much. It’s torture to travel in this heat, don’t forget. He’s got eleven palm trees to water, and that means hiring a Hartani while he’s away. Then he’s got his wife and children to provide for and his fare back to pay. You’ll be lucky to get such an honest man for less than that. And he is completely honest, I can guarantee.’ I said that we would consider it and spent the next few days searching for another guide. Either they asked for more than Mafoudh or their faces didn’t convince us. In the end, we made a contract with Mafoudh.

  The next day, I almost regretted it. I asked him to help me brand our camels with the symbol that Marinetta had designed. It was a configuration of the letters ‘WE’, which stood for ‘West to East’. Mafoudh turned up to help me but seemed very reluctant to do the branding. ‘You do it.’ he told me, ‘and I’ll hold the camels’ heads.’

  I had never branded a camel before, but Sid’Ahmed showed me how to heat the branding-iron on some charcoal. I applied it shakily to the camels one by one, while Mafoudh fought their wriggling heads. There was no smell of burning flesh, as I had expected. The iron was too cool and didn’t penetrate far. The result was some spidery squiggles of lines at the base of the animals’ necks.

  Those brands won’t last a week.’ said Sid’Ahmed after Mafoudh had gone away.

  ‘I wanted Mafoudh to do it, but he refused.’ I said testily. ‘I’m not sure he’s as good as you told me.’

  ‘It’s not surprising he refused,’ Sid’Ahmed chuckled. ‘He’s a marabout. Branding camels is a smith’s job. He’d have been laughed at all day if he’d done it himself.’

  Mafoudh

  We left Chinguetti on 6th August. Mafoudh turned up at first light, bringing with him nothing but a blanket, a camel stick, and a much-patched knapsack containing a teapot, a glass, and a spare gandourah.

  I envied him his simple gear. Ours seemed to cover every bit of ground outside the house: saddles, sacks, cushions, saddle bags, tent, poles, and waterskins. We had even exchanged one of our butterfly saddles for the more comfortable woman’s litter. Loading it was a marathon. A crowd of women and children gathered around to watch the spectacle. Sid’Ahmed made an appearance and started shouting instructions. Not to be outdone, Mafoudh shouted back, while every child who could walk tramped joyfully through our belongings, picking them up, putting them down, and arguing with any adult who tried to stop them.

  Slowly, the piles of equipment grew smaller as each item found a place on one of the camels. Miraculously, there was a place for everything. We got the animals to their feet, groaning and grumbling. ‘Isn’t it a bit heavy?’ I asked.

  ‘Nonsense!’ Mafoudh replied. ‘This is nothing. You should see what a real caravan carries, by God!’ Then he grabbed the headrope of the leading camel. ‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘the way is long. Let’s go!’

  As he led the caravan off, there were cries of ‘Go in peace!’, which struck me as comically inappropriate amid the clamour. Sid’Ahmed walked us down to the bank of the wadi, saying. ‘Omar is the boss, Mafoudh. When he says go, you go, and when he says stop, you stop.’ Then he shook hands with us and said, ‘Send me a letter when you reach the Nile. God go with you!’ We left him standing there, a solid, proud old warrior on the edge of his domain.

  Moments later, we had crossed the wadi and plunged over the ridge of dunes, which for three months we had seen on waking. Now we were among them, and Chinguetti was blotted out, gone forever. ‘I feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale.’ Marinetta said. ‘We’ve just entered the whale’s belly.’

  All morning, we trudged through the dunes. They were the visible expression of the unseen force of the wind, delicately moulded, rippled, and coloured with watery pastels. There were places where the sand had been scooped out of the desert floor and layered over the rocks so that the sharp edges showed through the smooth carpet like ground-down teeth. We crossed bridges of sand where the surface cracked like ice and fell away. The camels stumbled down at incredible angles, drifting into narrow corridors where the dunes towered above us, dwarfing our tiny azalai with its arrogant mission of conquering the great Sahara.

  Once, I stopped to pick up a barbed arrow head. It was just like the ones that the people of Chinguetti had tried to sell us so often. I wondered how many thousands of years it had lain there, waiting for me to pick it up. It had belonged to a hunter, some time long ago, when this desert was a forest. The forest had gone, and the hunters had gone with it, but men had survived in this desolate land by changing their ways and adapting to the new order. Change was certain, but man survives by adapting. If we adapted to the ways of the Sahara, we, too, could survive.

  At midday, we reached the palm groves at Aghayla, where Mafoudh owned some young trees. The dates were red and squashy, ripe for the cutting. A host of people helped us to unload and set our gear down in the shade. Marinetta took the cooking things and went off to make lunch. Four old men came to talk, sitting cross-legged on our blankets, and I invited them to eat with us. They looked pleased, but I wondered if they would remain so when they saw the standard of the cooking.

  Half an hour passed. The men shifted restlessly. Then the unmistakable smell of burnt rice drifted through the palm trees. A few moments later, Marinetta appeared and slapped in front of us a tray of the familiar scorched pellets. Lost within the desert of rice were a few oases of dried meat, now reduced to lumps of charcoal. The men looked at the dish, and I saw their faces drop. Mafoudh grinned at me cheerfully. ‘It’s the wind,’ he said. ‘It makes the fire too hot. Come on, everyone, eat!’ The old men each took a small amount with their fingertips and began to chew. They chewed and chewed, and the tension mounted as I wondered if anyone would take another handful. None of them did. One by one they whispered thanks and got up to leave. Before we departed, though, they brought us a gift of ripe dates. Was there a touch of pity in their eyes as they handed them over?

  The afternoon was steaming-hot. Every half hour, my mouth became so clogged with mucus that I had to take a sip of water from one of our canteens. Marinetta had the same problem. ‘This water tastes like honey,’ she gasped. ‘I never knew water could taste so good.’ For hours, we stumbled on through one band of dunes after another, but before sunset, we had emerged on to a plateau of black stone that allowed us to ride for the first time. We couched the camels and I helped Marinetta into her new litter. I had chosen to ride the red camel, Shigar, even though he now carried an uncomfortable pack saddle with almost all the provisions. Mafoudh climbed aboard the smaller Li’shal, carrying a butterfly saddle, and led the way. We rode on silently until the last sparklers of the sun burned out and left
the plain in thick darkness.

  It was all confusion in the camp that night. It seemed strange to have a third person with us, and neither of us knew quite what to do. Mafoudh took everything in his stride, however. He collected firewood, lit a fire, and made tea while we were still sorting out our equipment. ‘I have to drink tea first,’ he explained apologetically, ‘or I get a tight feeling in my head. It makes me feel angry.’ We all felt better after we had drunk tea and eaten a plate of macaroni and sardines. We sat back in the warm sand to watch the last flux of the fire. The dark screen of the night was awash with the familiar pattern of the stars. The camels, unseen in the darkness, made shuffling sounds as they hunted for shoots of grass. ‘There may be some rain tomorrow,’ Mafoudh predicted, sniffing the air. ‘It’s been hot today. The rain follows the heat at this time of year.’

  ‘You think it’s a mistake to travel at this time?’ I asked him.

  ‘In some ways, the rainy season is better than winter for travellers,’ he said, ‘because although it’s hot, the rain leaves pools of water in the desert. When you’ve got water, you don’t need to be afraid of the heat. Water is God’s blessing.’

  It was soon time for sleep, and I worried about the sleeping arrangements. It seemed ridiculous to concern myself with this in the middle of the world’s greatest desert. There was no lack of space, but I felt protective about Marinetta. I was wary even of leaving the camp to relieve myself, afraid that Mafoudh might take advantage of her in my absence. Mafoudh solved the problem by taking his blanket and going off to sleep in the sand a good distance away. Marinetta and I spread out our blankets among the saddles and gear. We cuddled up close in the darkness, more contented with each other than we had been for weeks. ‘Well, that was day one,’ I commented. ‘Do you think we’ll make it to the Nile?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. A few minutes, later she was asleep.

  We saw the first signs of the storm the next afternoon as we crossed Illey. Before us was a vast line of grey cliffs stretching as far as the horizon. The base of the valley was a serpent of black powder on which lay a school of small, humpy dunes that reminded me of jellyfish washed up on a beach. The sky suddenly filled with a scud of cloud, and the wind carried a touch of dampness. Sloughs began to squirm across the ground, and we heard the distant boom of thunder. The sky was a ragged quilt of grey and blue, and there were places around us where the clouds seemed to be reaching down into into the desert. The wind began to buffet us in waves that rose and fell successively. Suddenly, there was a shocking crack of lightning directly in our path. For a split second, I saw the distant flash pattern, like a many-branched, electric-blue tree as it forked down into the earth. It was followed by a shell blast of thunder, which made us jump. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Marinetta said. ‘We’ll all be fulminated!’ We waited for the rain to come.

  ‘We’d better make camp,’ Mafoudh advised.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Let’s risk it and go on till sunset.’

  That evening, we erected our Arab tent in case the rain started. It didn’t begin until the next morning at about 5 a.m., but when it came, it hit us like an explosion. The wind railed through the camp, knocking down the tent with a single blow. The violence of the storm was frightening. Every few moments, the darkness was slashed by brilliant streaks of lightning, and the thunder growled overhead like a barrage. Then the rain came gushing out of the night, roiling into the sand, soaking everything, dripping cold down our necks and running three inches above the ground, so that we sat like ducks in the current. Every time the thunder boomed, Marinetta let out a gasp and tried to crawl closer to me. We were already completely entwined in each other’s arms, and it was somehow very comforting to feel her small, damp, warm body close to mine. How many times had we watched storms like this from the cosy safety of my flat in Khartoum? How different it was to be out in it.

  ‘My God, the cameras!’ Marinetta said suddenly. I pulled the cotton sheet of the tent aside and rushed out, barefoot, from its spurious protection. Mafoudh’s body was a wet sausage under his blanket. He was lying on a hillock of sand, above the running water, and he had moved the most vulnerable of our equipment up there with him and had covered it with a plastic sheet. His narrow, drenched features peered at me through the night. We laughed at each other. ‘God is generous!’ he said. But it didn’t sound as though he meant it.

  The dawn came, bleak and freezing. The rain stopped and was replaced by the cutting edge of the wind. We shivered uncontrollably in our wet clothes as Mafoudh tried to make a fire for the morning tea. The rain had washed off the light topsoil and liberated the colours beneath, which showed in a mandala of patterns across the plain. Our tea was soaked; our loaves of sugar had dissolved into a damp mass mixed with sand and grit. Marinetta’s flip-flops had been carried off, and my leather sandals were so wet that they folded up as soon as I put them on. Mafoudh said that we should dry out everything well before we started, as the saddles would fall to pieces if we tried to use them while they were wet.

  ‘I’ve never seen a night like that!’ Marinetta said, and laughed.

  ‘God is generous!’ Mafoudh repeated, then he laughed, too. ‘But the rain is hell, isn’t it?’ he said.

  For the next three days, we crossed a landscape where water had taken over the job of sculptor from the wind. The black plain had become a blotch of blood-red, amber, orange, and gold, overlaid in places by slicks of mud as smooth and creamy as milk chocolate. The rain had excavated narrow canals that fed into pools among the rocks. We never lost an opportunity to fill our girbas from them. Mafoudh reckoned that rain water was far better than well water, since it was never salty or sulphurous. That it tasted of camel urine and was full of camel droppings didn’t seem to bother him.

  ‘In fifteen days, there will be grass everywhere,’ he informed us. ‘That rain was enough for all Adrar.’ We heard later that the wadi in Chinguetti had been awash like a river, and in Atar, the flood water had boiled through the market, demolishing buildings and drowning four people. ‘You can’t win in the desert,’ Marinetta commented. ‘Either you get too little water or too much. We were lucky the lightning didn’t strike us.’

  ‘That all depends on the will of God,’ Mafoudh replied. ‘I once, knew a man who was just sitting inside his tent and the lightning killed him. Burnt a hole through the roof as clean as a bullet, by God! Another time, I saw seventy sheep killed by lightning while they were sheltering under a tree. Killed the lot! You never know when your time has come.’

  As we travelled, we gradually got used to each other’s ways. Mafoudh had a great deal to put up with. He sometimes watched me tying on the luggage in the morning, shaking his head sorrowfully as I tried to tie knots as secure as his. ‘You’ll have to learn to tie knots better than that if you want to travel in the desert,’ he told me once. ‘When I was a boy working on the caravans, the custom was that anyone whose knot came undone had to buy a goat or a cone of sugar. That’s what we should do.’ I agreed and threw myself into the knot-tying with new vigour. By the end of that day, I owed two goats. ‘Don’t worry, Omar,’ Mafoudh said, smirking. ‘Everyone has to learn.’

  The following day, a girba that he had tied came undone and showered water across the sand. Later, we almost left one of the camels behind when the headrope came unfastened. Mafoudh had tied that one, too. ‘I think that’s two goats each,’ I said smugly.

  He looked as though he regretted having mentioned it. ‘Goats were a lot cheaper in those days,’ he said.

  We generally walked for the first three hours, then rode until noon. As midday approached, we would start looking for a tree around which we could build our shelter of ropes and blankets. There were few trees that were more than brittle skeletons, yet still we argued about which was the best. ‘That one’s no good,’ Mafoudh might comment. ‘It’s got no branches to hang the waterbags on.’

  ‘We can’t camp there,’ I would respond. ‘There’s not enough shade.’ When the intense heat finally drove us to
accept one or the other, we couched the camels near it. Tired, thirsty, and very hot, we had to spend long minutes picking at the knots that had slowly tightened during the morning. Even Mafoudh, his head already throbbing from the lack of tea, would get angry and swear like a trooper as he struggled with the rope. We drank zrig, and then Mafoudh would make tea. He always looked tense and harassed until he had downed his first glass. Then he relaxed and a smile spread across his face. We drank the tea, nibbling dates or biscuits.

  Marinetta made lunch, choosing from our menu of rice, pasta, couscous, tinned sardines, and dried gazelle meat. It was usually too hot to eat much at midday, and often, we ended up tipping the remains of the food into the desert. Mafoudh would shake his head and declare that this was ‘forbidden’. It was worse when Marinetta threw away excess water from the cooking pot. ‘Getting water is hard work in the desert,’ he told her. ‘It’s a crime to throw it away.’

  We ate from a communal steel plate with our right hands, in the Arab fashion. Although the Moors didn’t generally eat with women other than their wives, Mafoudh never turned a hair at eating with Marinetta. He told me once, that it would have been a disgrace to refuse. What did cause him to raise his eyebrows was her appalling manners. The rice was invisibly divided into ‘territories’, and it was as impolite to reach into someone else’s ‘territory’ as it would have been for us to take food off someone else’s plate. Marinetta constantly dived into Mafoudh’s portion for tasty morsels of dried meat or sardine. ‘Keep to your own bit!’ I had to tell her several times before she understood.