Impossible Journey Page 8

  Another asked where we were bound, and when I told him, ‘Egypt,’ he grinned and said, ‘You’ll never make it there either.’

  ‘Yes, we will.’ I said.

  ‘Yes, they will,’ said Mafoudh, ‘and we’ll make it to Ganeb before noon too!’

  After they had gone, Mafoudh said, ‘Bah! I don’t like the Rigaybat! You can’t trust them.’ He said that the Rigaybat had always been raiders and had stolen camels from his tribe for generations. ‘Now they’ve got new weapons and call themselves the Polisario,’ he said. ‘Now they kill women and children as well!’

  Within half an hour, we were down on the valley floor and the Baatin was towering above us like a vast, rocky shoulder. It was even hotter down here, out of the wind. We marched over more dunes, stumbling and sinking calf-deep in the sand. Marinetta had to stop frequently to relieve her diarrhoea, and we had to halt the caravan. ‘I’m sorry, Maik!’ she always said, hurrying back.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her, wondering how she managed to keep going. She was very thirsty but she never asked for water. We all knew that the little we had left had to be saved for emergencies.

  After two hours, Gurfaf suddenly sat down and snapped his headrope. It was the first sign of trouble from any of the camels. I knew that he must be in pain, but we couldn’t examine his back unless we unloaded. And we couldn’t unload until we reached Ganeb. We forced him up with kicks and thumps and pushed the caravan on desperately. Twice more, he sat down. Twice more, he broke his headrope, forcing us to knot it into shorter and shorter pieces. If it got any shorter, there would be no headrope left.

  The sun grew hotter, sailing up into its zenith. My throat and lips were so dry that I couldn’t speak, and there was a nauseating acid feeling in my stomach. Marinetta scrambled after the caravan, her face a mask of pain and discomfort. The deep sand sucked her slim legs, making her pant with effort. A sandstorm began, drawing a veil of white dust over the valley and obscuring our view of the Baatin, so that Mafoudh could no longer lead us in a straight line. For a while, I gave him directions from my compass. We went on like this for several hours.

  The dunes gradually gave way to a salty grey plain, which the Moors called sebkha. Almost at once, we collided with a herd of thirty camels being driven by two women. The camels’ bellies were comfortingly bloated with water. The women told us that Ganeb was a little farther on, and a few minutes later, we sighted the floating island of palms that marked the wells. What time is it?’ Mafoudh asked. It was two minutes to noon.

  Ganeb was a scene from Dante. Two Moors were digging out a shallow pit, around which stood a parade of upended water drums ready for filling. The well lay in the middle of a scree of stones, billions of strangely shaped grey pebbles, some of them like tiny human figures. About a hundred yards away, the untended palm grove stood like an atoll, its great tresses of fronds waving in the wind. The landscape around had the crisp sheen of rock salt, the red mirsal that the Moors fed to their animals. The sand was snow-white but spattered with pointilliste nodules of black grit. Here and there were lone trees, twisted and grotesque like a vision from some ancient legend. It was still scalding-hot, and the wind brought with it a thick rain of sand that rasped in the palm trees. Through the sand mist moved camel herds like apparitions, attended by ghostly human figures cowled in blue.

  While Mafoudh took the camels off to water them at a salty well, I filled six waterbags, standing knee-deep in the shallow pit that the Moors had dug out. Marinetta made lunch among the palms and dosed herself with Intertrix. When Mafoudh returned from the wells, we examined Gurfaf. There were two pustules of swollen flesh on his flanks, just below the withers, from the rubbing of the litter. Mafoudh took out his pocket knife, and while I held the camel’s nostrils, twisting his head backwards, the guide made three quick incisions on each flank until the blood streamed down. He explained that this would allow the poison to run out from the swellings. When I let go of Gurfaf’s head, expecting an explosion of rage, he gave out no more than a half-hearted growl.

  The following day, we camped near the well of Zig with some Nmadi. I had looked forward to meeting the Nmadi for some time. They were desert dwellers with a difference. They were said to live entirely by hunting and to despise nomadism. The only animals they kept were dogs, but they were supposed to borrow camels from the nomads in return for a supply of meat. The Nmadi we saw at Zig were very short and very spare. They were barefoot and wore shocks of wild hair instead of headcloths. Their dwellings were crude skin tents pitched among waves of sand, where clumps of halfa grass were growing. I noticed with interest that a few goats were browsing around the tents.

  After we had made camp, one of the Nmadi came to greet us, bringing with him a young saluki bitch, very like a greyhound but with wide paws. The man was small and dignified. His name was Deh. There was nothing unusual about his tattered, patched gandourah. After the greetings, I handed him a bowl of zrig. I had heard that the Nmadi despised milk as the food of nomads, but this hunter drank it with relish. I asked him about the goats, saying that I had thought the Nmadi lived only by the hunt.

  ‘That’s all finished,’ he said with a bitter smile. ‘Hunting is illegal, and even if it wasn’t, there’s not much game to hunt any more. There’s only gazelle and bustard, and precious few of those. We never used to bother with them in the old days. Addax was our main bag, but we used to take oryx, antelope, moufflon, and even ostrich.’ He told me that the game had been virtually wiped out by Polisario hunting parties, which scoured the desert in motor vehicles, hunting at night with powerful searchlights that mesmerised the animals and made them an easy kill.

  ‘We used to track the game for weeks,’ Deh said. ‘We used to take the women and children with us, right into the Empty Quarter.’ He described how they would work in three-man teams, one with a rifle, one holding the dogs and the other taking charge of the camels. When we found a herd of addax, the man with the rifle would drop one or two, the fattest ones, then the dogs would chase the rest. We trained them to go for the ears, nose or legs, so that the animal was alive when we got to it. Then we’d butcher the meat and wrap it in

  the skin. We never sold it for money. What we couldn’t eat ourselves we traded in the town for sugar and tea. Some went to the tribes that lent us the camels. We never had any camels of our own.’

  The drought of the previous few years had finished the work that the mass hunters had begun. Scores of Nmadi families had left the desert and drifted to the oases. A few families had remained in the ranges, but they were no longer hunters. They had become herdsmen like the Moors. ‘The old life was best,’ Deh Sighed. ‘But that won’t come back. Not unless the game returns. And that won’t happen, will it?’ He patted the little saluki bitch, which had curled up next to him in the sand. ‘You know, I used to have six dogs, all good hunters. They were worth the price of a camel, each. Now all I have is this one.’ As he walked back towards his camp, with the dog frollicking around his heels, I thought he had the look of a deposed monarch. I knew I was seeing one of the last hunters of the Sahara, a man whose skills could be traced back, in a direct line, to the makers of that barbed arrow head I had found on our first day out. Those hunters had lived 12,000 years ago. That made the camel, with its mere 2,000 years in the Sahara, a relative newcomer.

  When the hunter had gone, Mafoudh lit a blazing fire. ‘I don’t trust those Nmadi,’ he declared. ‘They still have guns, you can be sure. We should bring the camels in tonight.’

  ‘Why don’t you trust them?’

  ‘They’re not real Muslims. They don’t fast or pray, I tell you. They have spells, and magic, and magicians who tell them where to find the game. They can put the evil eye on you as quick as anything, by God!’

  Later, we drove the shuffling camels into our camp. A cool breeze rose, and the camels turned sideways into it, letting it massage their bulky frames. As we drove them on, I thought of the Nmadi and how the era of the hunter had passed. ‘Everything passes,’ Ma
foudh had said the first time I met him. I wondered how long it would be before the era of the camel passed away forever. ‘There will be a time when all this is over,’ I said to Mafoudh.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Everyone will go by plane. It’s already too hard for camels.’

  My mind dwelt for a long time that night on the ages of man, the hugeness of time, the ever-changing nature of the planet. Man had bred these camels for his own use, and for hundreds of years, they had been a way of life for many societies. Yet some time soon, the diversity of life they had made possible would be gone.

  The next day, we rode across a rolling plain of stubbled grass with the hot wind chasing us. It was the hottest day of the hottest season. The land seemed to be burning. The wind blew in flame-thrower blasts. It was hotter than Chinguetti in June, hotter than anything I had experienced in the eastern Sahara. Everything was glaring hot—the saddle, the stick in my hands, and the folds of my shirt. My hands and feet were swollen from the roasting, my throat felt like emery paper, my gums were choked with a paste of mucus. The wind rose and fell in gusts. When it hit us, it was like being braised with hot, dripping fat. When it fell, the stillness of the air brought beads of sweat to our heads at once. I was glad of the protection of my thick headcloth, swirling shirt and pantaloons, which allowed the circulation of cool air beneath, but nothing could ease my parched mouth or the nausea in my stomach.

  As midday approached, we searched vainly for a tree. In the whole of that vast landscape, there was none. Instead, we had to put up our tent. The sand was too hot to stand on. Even in sandals, you could feel the heat cutting through. ‘If you broke an egg on this, it would fry,’ Marinetta said. Inside the tent, it was stifling, but just better than the inferno outside. Marinetta made zrig in two minutes. As Mafoudh drank, my eyes were riveted on the bowl. He seemed to drink and drink. I could see his Adam’s apple working up and down as he swallowed. It seemed he would never pass it to me. When he did so, I thought, He drank so much! Then I tilted it to my lips, noticing Marinetta’s suspicious, beady eyes tracking my every move. It was indescribably wonderful to feel the thick, sugary milk slip down my throat, easing the raw skin of the mouth and reinflating my shrunken stomach. I passed it to my wife. She almost snatched it from me and glared at me accusingly when she saw what was left.

  Our bodies were already streaming with sweat as the liquid rehydrated our cells and was flushed out by the cooling mechanism of the sweat glands. For an instant, there was an intensely pleasant sensation of coolness. But the feeling soon passed, to be replaced by the beginning of another nagging thirst. It was too hot to cook, so Mafoudh made tea. Then we just lay there in wet heaps, praying to God to take the heat away. I couldn’t believe that any conditions, whether those of the Poles or of the jungles or of the open sea, could be worse than the Sahara in summer.

  ‘We ought to get a medal for this,’ Marinetta said.

  As we lay there, riddled with perspiration, I noticed that the camels weren’t eating. They had sat down without even bothering to sniff at the green clumps of haifa all around them. ‘See!’ said Mafoudh. ‘The food is right under them, and they’re too hot to eat it.’

  ‘I keep seeing that advert for Sprite,’ Marinetta said. ‘You know, the one with the tanned woman in the tiny bikini. She plunges into the blue, blue swimming pool and the lemonade bursts out of the bottle. And I see the big, fresh salads my mother used to make. I can even smell them.’ And I laughed because as soon as she said it, I could smell them too.

  It was still hot when we set off that afternoon, and it remained hot. During my research, I had come across many books that waxed romantic about the ‘perfect cool’ of the Saharan night. That ‘perfect cool’ was a myth created by Westerners who had only ever seen the Sahara in winter. I wished that some of them could have been present to see the nights when the temperature hardly seemed to drop at all, when the cloud cover prevented the daytime heat from dissipating and the maddening fever stayed with you till dawn.

  We moved on slowly. The plain of haifa clumps gave way to a barrier of sand dunes. To the north, the shield wall split into canyons and corries. The sand beneath us was ivory-white at first, changing quickly to coffee-cream, then to slate-blue. Each successive colour remained pure and unblemished, as if it had been painted. When we reached the top of the dunes, we were treated to a stunning view.

  The rocky wall of the fault was weathered into stumps of towers, machicolated battlements, and giant blue buttresses, washed over by orange sand. Beneath it, the blue-grey floor of the valley was straddled by the palm groves of Tichit.

  I awoke from a deep sleep to the sound of raised voices and saw Mafoudh arguing with three policemen. They were standing over him in poses of exaggerated aggressiveness, two tall troopers in green berets and drab denims and a grizzled little sergeant wearing a peaked cap that was too small for his square head. I shut my eyes again quickly, hoping they would go away, but it was too late. The grizzled man spotted me and shouted at me in fractured French, demanding to know why we hadn’t reported to the gendarmerie the previous night. ‘We didn’t arrive till late,’ I lied.

  ‘Here,’ said the grizzled man, ‘there are serious problems of sûreté.’

  Tichit was the last place I would have expected security problems. It seemed half abandoned, a collection of stone shops and houses hemmed in between the cliff wall on one side and the palm groves on the other. It was tiny and isolated; there was no main road to anywhere and, from what Mafoudh told me, it was almost moribund. The sergeant explained everything on the way up to the gendarmerie. He said that the préfet was away on tour and had left him strict instructions to deal, all alone, with problems of sûreté.

  We were shown into an enormous room that contained absolutely nothing but a tiny desk in one corner. The desk and the floor were so thick in dust that you could have tracked the progress of every beetle and cockroach that had ranged across them in the previous few weeks. The security office of Tichit was hardly a whirlpool of activity. When the sergeant placed his cap on the desk top, it left a precise mark in the shape of a cap.

  He demanded our passports and scrutinised them closely. ‘One British, one Italian,’ he commented slowly. ‘That is very strange. How come a British and an Italian travel together?’

  ‘We are married,’ I told him. He looked at me with obvious incredulity.

  ‘Married? How come a British and an Italian are married? That is very strange.’

  ‘I’ve got the certificate if you want to see it.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. But, tell me, why do you travel by camel? It is odd for a married couple to travel by camel with a guide. I mean, there’s no privacy, is there? What do you do when you want to, well, I mean, where do you all sleep? Together?’

  ‘My wife and I sleep together, and the guide sleeps on his own.’

  ‘It’s the first time I ever saw a married couple travelling together by camel. Very strange.’

  Then, apparently satisfied that we were not dangerous spies, he called to one of the troopers to scribble something in our passports. When that was done, he searched about the desk, muttering about a rubber stamp. Finally, he added his signature instead. Then, the effort over, he replaced his cap, leaving the precise mark in the dust as evidence of the day’s work, and smiled. He invited us to take tea and dates with him.

  We sat on a rug outside and went through the ritual three glasses of tea. A Hartani came up with an enormous tray of dates, and the sergeant insisted on choosing and stoning each date before handing it to us. There was a threadbare Moorish tent folded up on a rotten frame of wood and bits of old saddles straggling along the top of the wall. A scrawny desert chicken hurtled, cackling, around the yard. A Moor in a rich, blue gandourah came in and sat down next to us. He was upright and clean-cut and called himself Mohammidu. He belonged to the Shurfa, he said. Then he offered to accompany us as guide to Walata. When I replied that we already had a guide, he took a different tack and asked us wh
at provisions we required. I said that we needed grain for the camels, and he beamed and said, ‘I know just the place.’

  Half an hour later, we were inside one of the stone shops, arguing with a dark-faced shopkeeper over a sack of wheat. The man could have been a Hartani but was, in fact, a black Moor of the Masna tribe, whose oasis Tichit was. I knew that the price of the wheat should have been 1,200 ougiyyas, but the merchant adamantly and nastily refused to let it go for less than 1,700. Tired, irritated, and sick with the heat, I finally agreed. When he heaved it over to us, I saw the familiar legend, ‘Furnished by the People of the United States of America. Not for sale or exchange’, printed clearly on the outside. ‘You’re a villain,’ I said. ‘Your country gets this stuff free from the nsara, and you sell it back to the nsara for twice what it’s worth.’ The shopkeeper and Mohammidu laughed uproariously.

  Mohammidu explained severely that we must hire a Hartani to carry the sack to our camp. He called one over with a lordly wave of his aristocratic hand.

  ‘I won’t take it for less than 500,’ the sinewy, black man said.

  ‘I’ll take it myself before I pay that!’ I said.

  ‘You cannot take it yourself. You are a Christian,’ Mohammidu said. Almost before he had finished, I had hoisted the huge sack across my back and was staggering away with it. It was incredibly hard work, but I was still furious at having paid so much for it. The two men watched us go incredulously.

  That afternoon was an inferno. Mafoudh donned his spare gandourah and sloped off to lunch with the police. No doubt they wanted to ask more questions about our sleeping arrangements. Marinetta and I lay in the shade of the palms, covering ourselves with blankets against the blast of the wind. We had been planning a two-day rest in Tichit. It was like planning a rest in Purgatory. We had already acquired the same distaste for towns that nomads feel. Towns were complicated and confusing. Only the desert was simple. We wanted to get back to its tranquillity as soon as possible.