The Strange Land

by Hammond Innes

  The first grey light of dawn found us grinding up the hairpin bends to the top of the pass. Julie was at the wheel and the bus swayed heavily on the incessant bends, the wheels skidding in the loose slush of melted snow that covered the road. And then at last we were at the top and there were the gaunt pylons of the teleferrique marching like Wellsian monsters through the cleft in the mountains. We drew in beside a big stone notice - tizi n tichka, alt. 2.250 m., and below were recorded the Army units who had slaved to build the road through the pass.

  We were at the top of the High Atlas. We were astride the shining white barrier of the mountains that hide the strange, desert lands of the south. I had never crossed them, but I knew that beyond lay a different world, a world of kasbahs and dusty palmeries set in a land of black stone hills, rounded with age. And beyond those black hills of the Anti-Atlas was nothing - only the limitless wastes of the Sahara, a sea of sand.

  We sat there and stared at the pale dawn sky ahead, conscious of a sense of the unknown, as though we were on a peak looking out across a strange sea. I was conscious, too, of a stillness within myself, and within my two companions. I glanced at Jan. His face was tense, his blue eyes fixed with a sort of desperate eagerness. He stood there upon what was for him the threshold of a Promised Land - the thing he dreamed of for himself and his wife, Karen - his last chance of a refuge from the nightmare in which he had lived.

  The sun rose and touched the first of the mountain tops. Without a word Julie started the engine and we began the long run down to Ouarzazate. Nobody spoke. Our eyes were fixed on the sky ahead and the road winding down through the mountains. Somewhere, down there among the black stone hills, was Kasbah Foum.

  PART THREE

  ZONE OF INSECURITY

  CHAPTER ONE

  The mountains changed abruptly the moment we were across the divide as though to emphasize that we were entering upon a wild, strange land. Where, on the northern side, there had been scrub and small trees and slopes of snow glimmering white in the dawn, there was nothing now but naked rock. The sky was pale, a duck’s egg, pastel blue, and above us to the left rose piled-up cliffs of sandblasted stone that flanked the valley in a long ridge, their battlements picked out in gold as the sun rose in the east.

  It was a beautiful, pitiless country.

  We stopped for breakfast where the road crossed the first big torrent of melted snow. It was bitterly cold with a chill wind whistling down the valley from the peaks behind us. Yet, by the time the tea was made, the sun had risen above the red rock fortresses of the ridge, the wind had gone, and it was suddenly hot. The abruptness of the change was startling.

  It was then that Julie remembered she had some letters for me. There were two from England - a Bible Society tract and an offer of old clothes from some association I had never heard of. The third was postmarked Tangier and was from Karen Kavan. As we had agreed, she had written to me, not to Jan. It simply announced that her employers were taking a trip south and would be staying at the Hotel Mamounia for Christmas and then going on to Ouarzazate and Tinerhir. She was travelling with them and she gave the telephone numbers of the hotels they were staying at. The number of the gite d’etapes at Ouarzazate was 12. It was the same number that Wade had noted down in the back of his log against the name of Ed White.

  I was still thinking about this as I handed Jan the letter. ‘It’s from your wife,’ I said. He scanned it eagerly and then asked the date.

  ‘Today is the twenty-third,’ Julie said.

  He folded the letter slowly and put it away in his breast pocket, staring out through the side window along the grey ribbon of the road leading south towards Ouarzazate.

  ‘Is she all right?’ Julie asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded quickly. ‘Yes, she’s all right. She’ll be in Ouarzazate on the twenty-sixth.’ There was a sort of wonder in his voice as though he couldn’t believe it was true.

  ‘Then you’ll see her.’

  He looked across at Julie and smiled. ‘Yes. Yes, I hope so. It would be wonderful!’

  He was thinking of his wife, stopping there at the gite d’etapes. And I was thinking of this man White. If Wade had planned to phone him there… ‘You remember you mentioned a man called White,’ I said to him. ‘When you were telling me about Kasbah Foum.’ He nodded. ‘Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘No, nothing. Except that he’d tried to contact me through the lawyers.’

  ‘Wade told you that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t know why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Weren’t you curious about it?’

  ‘Yes. I asked Wade. But he wouldn’t tell me. Why do you ask?’

  I didn’t say anything. I was thinking that perhaps it was White who had started this whole chain of interest in Kasbah Foum. He had been down to the south here. He might even have been to Kasbah Foum. Was that the reason Ali had instructed Wade to purchase the deeds from Jan? ‘Was White ever at Kasbah Foum?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head, staring at me with a puzzled frown.

  ‘Wade told you nothing about him?’

  ‘No, nothing. Only what I’ve told you.’

  I hesitated and then said, ‘What about Wade? Had he ever visited Kasbah Foum?’

  ‘No.’ He said it slowly and then added, ‘But I think he intended to.’ He paused for a moment before saying, ‘As I told you, Wade was a crook. I have an idea he didn’t intend to play straight with Ali.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I think, if he had got the deeds, he would have gone straight to Kasbah Foum. When he discovered I wouldn’t sell, he tried to persuade me to go into some sort of partnership with him. He said there was money in it. I think he knew about the possibilities of silver. Right up to the end I think he believed that when we reached Tangier I would agree to his proposition. I didn’t discourage him. I wanted that passage out and I didn’t trust him. If I had definitely refused…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s time we went on.’ He said it almost brusquely, as though he didn’t want to think about what had happened on the boat.

  The road ran gently down the valley of the Imini and emerged on to an arid, stony plain. The mountains dropped behind until I could see them in the mirror as a long, brown wall topped with snow. I was driving. The others were asleep - Julie in her own compartment at the back of the caravan, Jan sprawled out on the berth behind me. I was alone at the wheel with the road reeling out ahead of me and the blazing sun and the blue sky and the parched earth stretching brown to the horizon - just the two colours, blue and brown, and the grey ribbon of the road. I had an odd sense of space coming down out of the mountains. It was as though I could feel by the lie of the land that the way was open to the south. Ahead were the humped shapes of a range of low, dark hills. Beyond them was the Sahara.

  It was strange and a little frightening. This was the most recently conquered part of Morocco. Barely twenty years ago Marshal Lyautey and his troops had still been fighting there. The whole area was run by the military - by Les Officiers des Affaires Indigenes. There were few Europeans and until quite recently it had been known as the Zone of Insecurity.

  We passed the turning to the manganese mines of Imini and then we were running through Amerzgane and El Mdint. The white kasbah of Tifoultout stood like a fairy castle on a little rise on the far side of the river and after that the road was straight and tree-lined, ending abruptly in a hill with a fort on it. We were driving into Ouarzazate. The town was largely French, a single street pushed between two small hills. On the right was the Military Post. The road leading up to it was signposted territoire. And then I saw a second signpost - gite d’etapes. I turned up a sharp hill, climbing to a long, low building with a tower built like a kasbah.

  ‘Why have you turned up here?’ Jan asked, roused from his sleep by the change in the engine note.

  ‘I want to phone Frehel,’ I said. �
�Also, your friend Ed White stayed here.’

  I told him about the telephone number noted down at the back of Wade’s log as we went into the hotel. The place was centrally heated and very warm. Beyond the reception desk was a bar and on either side were two big glass cabinets, one displaying Berber jewellery - silver bangles and coin headdresses, blanket pins and long necklaces of intricately-worked silver and beads - the other filled with specimens of minerals found locally. A French officer seated at a table reading a magazine glanced at us idly. Then Madame appeared and I asked her whether she knew a Mr White.

  ‘Mais oui, monsieur. An American. He has stayed here several times.’

  ‘On holiday?’ I asked.

  ‘En vacance? Non, non, monsieur. He is a prospector.’

  ‘A prospector!’ Jan’s voice was suddenly interested.

  ‘Is this Monsieur’s first visit to Ouarzazate?’ Madame asked. And when Jan nodded, she said, ‘Ah, well then, you must understand that all this country south of here is very rich in minerals. We have many prospectors who stay — ‘

  ‘Is he staying here now, madame?’ Jan asked her.

  ‘Monsieur White? NoŤ, monsieur. He has not been here for several weeks now.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Un moment.’ She went behind the desk and picked up a notebook, running her finger down the passages. ‘Ah, oui. He left instructions for us to forward his letters to the office of Monsieur le Capitaine at the Military Post of Foum-Skhira.’

  So, Ed White was at Kasbah Foum!

  ‘I suppose he didn’t say what he was prospecting for?‘Jan asked.

  ‘Non, non.’ Madame laughed. ‘Prospectors do not talk about what they are searching for. But probably it is uranium.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Always they dream of uranium now.’

  ‘Did a Monsieur Kostos stay here last night or the night before?’ I asked her.

  ‘Non, monsieur.’

  I phoned Frehel then and told him where he could find us. And whilst I was doing that, Jan wrote a note for his wife. He left it with Madame and we went back to the bus, driving out of Ouarzazate by a road that forded the river not far from the great Kasbah of Taourirt. Everything was very still in the sunlight and as the wheels splashed and bumped over the stones of the river bed, we could see the kasbah reflected in the water. It was a completely walled town, crowding up out of the palmerie in tower after tower, standing out against the blue of the sky like a part of the desert country in which it was built.

  And then we were clear of the water and climbing the narrow, ploughed-up surface of the piste, climbing up through a long valley that led into the foothills of the Anti-Atlas. All about us were dark, sombre hills, shadowed by the stones that littered their slopes, closing up behind us and hemming us in so that we could no longer see the clean, white wall of the High Atlas. A little wind rose and drifted dust between the stones. Gaunt skeletons of heath and tamarisk marked out the drainage courses in dusty green.

  ‘Marcel called this country Le Pays Noir,’ Jan murmured. ‘He said it was geologically much older than the High Atlas and full of undeveloped mineral resources.’ He was dreaming of Kasbah Foum again.

  All afternoon we struggled through those dark, satanic hills. Dust seeped up through the floorboards in choking clouds from the fine-ground powder of the piste. It got in our clothes and in our nostrils. It powdered our hair grey. Once a jeep passed us, and for an hour after that we caught glimpses of it, a little cloud of dust far ahead. We climbed steadily upwards and then dropped down to a rocky basin in which a lonely kasbah stood subsisting on a few dusty palms and the herds of black goats that roamed the stunted vegetation. After that we climbed again, up a steep escarpment to a lonely watch tower and the pass of Tizi N Tinififft, more than five thousand feet up. Here we were in a land of sudden deep gorges, dark in shadow, that descended in shelves of rock. For an hour we wound round the tops of these gorges until, as the sun set, we came out on to a hill-top, and far below us saw the Draa Valley, a green ribbon of palm trees. And there, on a little hill, was the Military Post of Agdz.

  We had a meal then and slept, and at two in the morning we drove through the sleeping Post of Agdz and down the valley of the Draa. The piste was white and ground as fine as talcum powder. It followed the line of the river, winding along the edge of the palmerie, past kasbah after kasbah, and in every open space the kasbah cemeteries showed as patches of desert littered with small, upended stones, mute testimony to the countless thousands who had lived and died here over the centuries. We came at length to a fork: a little-used piste turning off to the right and running south over low hills. There was no signpost, but we took it, relying on the map.

  Julie was driving again. I could see her face in the light from the dashboard; an intent, serious, competent face. Her black hair was grey with dust, her eyes narrowed as they peered ahead along the beam of the headlights. The stony, desert country ground past us, always the same - an unchanging yellow in the lights, and then suddenly black as it disappeared behind us. Her hands were brown and slender on the dusty ebony of the wheel and every now and then she beat at her knees to restore her circulation. A bitter wind blew in through the chinks in the windscreen, but our feet were warm in the heat of the engine, which came up from the floorboards with a musty smell of dust mixed with engine oil.

  Looking at her, I wondered what she’d do now that her brother was dead. She’d have to do something, for I was pretty sure that George would have left her nothing but a few pictures. George hadn’t been the saving type. He’d spent money as he made it - always travelling, always painting.

  I was remembering how I had first met them. It must be seven years ago now, when I was in Tangier. Their mother had died and left them some money, and they’d come out to Tangier because in Tangier there are no taxes. I had helped them get their money out. That was how I’d met them. Julie had been little more than a schoolgirl then, wide-eyed, excited by everything, deeply concerned at the poverty she saw side-by-side with the rich elegance of the crooks and tax-evaders who occupied the villas on La Montagne. They had stayed for a few months, and then they had gone to Greece and on to Turkey and Syria. Occasionally Julie had sent me a postcard - from Baghdad, Cairo, Haifa, and one, I remember, from Lake Chad after they had done a trip from Algeria right across the Sahara. It wasn’t difficult to understand why Julie had stayed with her brother. He had given her all the excitement and colour she had wanted. And it had suited George, for he was interested in nothing but his painting.

  She glanced at me suddenly and our eyes met. ‘What are you thinking about, Philip?’ she asked. ‘About what an odd trip this is?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was thinking about you.’

  ‘Oh,’ Her mouth spread into a smile and the corners of her eyes crinkled with laughter. But she didn’t say anything further, just sat there, her gaze on the faint track of the piste.

  ‘I was wondering what you were going to do now,’ I said after a while.

  She shrugged her shoulders. It was a very Latin shrug. But she didn’t answer my question and I was conscious of the stillness between us, It was as though we had suddenly touched each other and then as quickly withdrawn. I felt a softening in the marrow of my bones and I sat back, watching her face, absorbing the straight line of her nose, the smallness of her ears, the way her hair curled at the back of her neck. I’d never thought of her quite like that before. When I had first met her she had seemed very young and then, when they had descended on the Mission three months ago, she had just been George Corrigan’s sister. That was all.

  And now… Now I didn’t quite know.

  ‘What’s that? Up there.’ Jan’s voice cut across my thoughts, tense and excited. He was leaning forward over my shoulder and pointing through the windshield. We were climbing now, and far ahead, high up where the dark shadow of a hill cut across the starry velvet of the sky, the yellow pinpoint of a fire showed.

  Our radiator was boiling by the time we reached
it. It was a petrol fire flickering ghostlike out of a pile of stones beside a battered jeep. Four men were huddled round it. Three of them were town Arabs, but the fourth was a Berber and behind him his two camels stood motionless, hobbled by the foreleg. I signalled Julie to stop and called out to them, enquiring if the piste led to Foum-Skhira.

  The Arabs stared at us nervously, whispering together, the whites of their eyes gleaming in the headlights. It was the Berber who answered me. ‘lyyeh, sidi.’ Yes, Foum-Skhira was beyond the mountain. The piste had been washed away by the rains, but it was almost repaired now. The souk at Foum-Skhira had also been washed away. He shook his head gloomily. ‘Thanks be to Allah I have left that place.’

  The three Arabs had got to their feet. They were moving nervously towards their jeep, which still carried the American Army star. ‘I’m going on,’ Julie said.

  ‘No, wait…’ But already her foot was pressed down on the accelerator and as we moved off she said, ‘I didn’t like the look of them. I’m sure that jeep wasn’t their own.’

  I had been thinking the same thing, but I didn’t say anything and we climbed steadily up the mountainside. Out on the top it was bitterly cold. There was nothing between us and the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas, and the sense of space was immense. We stopped where the road dipped down on the other side. The sky was already paling in the east. We made some tea and watched the sun rise, turning the dark hills first pink, then gold, then a hard, arid brown.

  I took over the driving then and we started down the mountain, which was black in shadow and cleft by the start of a deep gorge. Below us lay a brown valley broken by the green of a palmerie, which was shaped like a fist, with the forefinger extended and curving towards the base of the mountain away to our right. From the centre of the fist rose the sun-baked walls of a kasbah. It was Kasbah Foum-Skhira, and close by were the forts of the French Post.