by John Harris
We slept on the sand alongside the lorry that night for the first time, wrapped in blankets among the scattered desert plants fighting for survival. Only Nimmo used a hammock in the lorry.
‘You want to get some desert time in,’ Houston advised him. ‘Get your head down on the sand. Scoop a hole for your hip. Sleep like a log.’
‘That’s all right, old boy,’ Nimmo said. ‘I’ll leave the hardships to you old sweats. I’ll have the air mattress.’
It was surprising how much harder the desert seemed than I remembered it. The hole I’d made for my hip didn’t appear to fit in quite the way it used to, and a rolled-up coat no longer seemed a very adequate substitute for a pillow. About midnight I heard Houston swear softly, and as I saw him stand up against the pale sky and shuffle into the lorry, dragging his blanket behind him, I couldn’t help wondering ruefully how long it would be before I threw up the sponge, too.
The next morning, long after we’d left the track and were driving entirely by compass, we came up to a group of Arabs working at feverish speed on the stony desert. We were surprised to see human beings at all, but they seemed completely unconcerned, digging little holes with picks and filling them with small cylinders connected by wires that led to a large truck a hundred yards away.
‘What the ’ell are they doing?’ Leach asked. ‘Laying mines?’
‘Seismologists,’ Nimmo said in a flat patient voice from the Land Rover alongside us. ‘They’re prospecting for oil.’
‘Oil? In the desert?’ Leach stared.
‘There are wells all over the Tunisian Sahara,’ Nimmo pointed out. ‘The French opened ’em up. Surveyed the whole place by air. It isn’t still 1940, man. They’re growing flowers here now.’
The seismologists, two Frenchmen and one American, all of them so young they seemed to be just out of school, allowed us to watch the explosion of the canisters and showed us the zigzag lines they were drawing on a chart of the area. They produced a couple of bottles at lunch, which we ate sitting under an awning near the truck, and their varied foods made our bully beef and biscuits seem very spartan.
‘Where are you heading?’ they asked.
‘Qalam Depression.’
‘Hope you enjoy it. It’s hotter there than it is here, and it’s going to be a scorcher later on.’
As the sun grew higher, a mirage began to form and as we travelled we could see black cliffs rising ahead, beyond what looked like a sheet of water that never grew any nearer. Then the going altered and the land grew more uneven, with large plate-like stones jutting from the ground and flat pebbles rattling away from under the wheels. There were a few low-topped hills too, now, that rose out of a mirage of mountains and floating terraces.
‘Two more days on this course,’ I said, as we stopped for a brew-up, ‘and we should be well below Breba. Then we turn due south. There ought to be some remains of the wire there. After that, Qalam and the well and then the Depression.’
‘Two days!’ Leach looked up from his mug of tea. His face was plastered with a grey mask where the dust had stuck to the sweat there, and he looked exhausted.
‘Two days,’ he repeated. ‘I never thought it was that far!’
‘You’ll be where no white foot ever trod,’ Houston said. ‘Remember that, mate. Apart from us and that Paymaster who got himself clobbered, there’ve never been any white people down there before.’
He wiped his face with a grimy handkerchief. ‘Does it seem to you,’ he asked, his expression changing, ‘as if it’s hotter than it used to be? I’ve got a sore coming on my back.’
‘Summers are changing even in England,’ Nimmo said sarcastically. ‘They say the whole of the Northern Hemisphere’s warming up.’
As he rose and moved away, Houston stared after him resentfully. ‘I don’t wish that bastard any harm,’ he said slowly, ‘but I’d just love to see him paralysed all down one side.’
During the afternoon we spotted a herd of Loder’s gazelle in the distance.
‘Fresh meat,’ Houston said as he stopped the Land Rover.
We had two rifles and a couple of revolvers, which we’d bought in France just as a precaution, and Houston reached slowly into the back of the Land Rover for one of the rifles.
‘Watch me knock him off,’ he said.
We saw the dust spurt up in front of the herd as the bullet struck the earth, and the animals bounded off at once, all except one, which seemed startled and stood with its head up.
‘Too short,’ Houston said, working the bolt of the rifle. ‘I’ll get him with the next one.’
This time the spurt of sand was beyond the gazelle, and it turned slowly and I knew that at any minute it would be off after the others.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Leach said urgently. ‘Gimme that rifle! I’ll get ’im!’
They were still struggling for the weapon when we heard the other rifle fire from the lorry, and the gazelle, which had just started to move, leapt into the air and rolled over, head down, and lay still, and we saw Nimmo running towards it.
‘Did he shoot it?’ Houston asked, startled.
‘You certainly didn’t,’ Leach said.
I was glad Nimmo had shot the gazelle. It seemed to restore him to favour in the eyes of the others. He seemed to know what to do with it, too, and he thrust his knife expertly under the skull to make sure it was dead and slit it up the stomach and disembowelled it. Then he hoisted it to his shoulders and trudged back to the lorry with it, while we were all still walking towards him.
‘Who taught you to shoot like that?’ Houston asked.
‘My old man. In Kenya.’
‘What was he doing in Kenya?’
Nimmo grinned, that same brash grin his father had had.
‘Bit of trouble,’ he said. ‘It seemed wisest at the time.’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Money?’
‘Did he lose some?’
‘Somebody else did.’
Nobody made any comment because it came as no surprise.
‘Were the police after him?’ Houston asked cautiously.
Nimmo grinned. ‘Wasn’t the first time,’ he said.
‘Lots of people get mixed up with the police,’ Leach pointed out heavily.
The way he said it made us all look quickly at him, but he didn’t enlighten us further and we climbed back into the vehicles. Almost immediately we ran into a patch of soft sand and the lorry stuck, its rear wheels up to the hubs in smooth yellow dust.
Long before we’d got it out, Leach was gasping for breath and Houston was complaining about the raw spot on his back. Young Nimmo worked like ten men, yet when he’d finished he was the only one who seemed untouched by the hard work, sitting in the sun with a mug of scalding sweet tea, indifferent to the heat, slipping into easy immobility, relaxed and unworried with the confidence of a young man sure of himself.
‘If we had to dig out once getting back to Alamein,’ Houston said slowly, ‘we had to do it a dozen times.’
‘We shouldn’t ever ’ave gone back,’ Leach said heavily, gesturing with the slow movement of an overweight man to whom everything was an effort. ‘It was a good job Monty came. All them tanks and guns and aeroplanes.’
‘Nothing to do with Monty,’ Nimmo said quietly, not moving, not even lifting his eyes. ‘They’d all been ordered beforehand.’
Their heads turned towards him and I saw Houston’s eyes glow, sharp and unfriendly at once.
‘Were you there?’ he asked with immediate truculence, as though he’d been waiting for the comment to pounce on it.
Nimmo smiled, still not moving. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Were you ever a soldier?’
‘No.’
‘Then you don’t bloody well understand.’
Nimmo grinned. There’d been plenty of better soldiers than Houston, and Nimmo knew it. Somehow, the fact that he talked so much about the things we’d done made them seem dreary and cheap and even to me his stories had begun
to have the nagging effect of a stone in the shoe.
‘We did our bit,’ he was saying now, pressing the point a little too hard, as though he, too, secretly realised that Nimmo had the measure of him. ‘We didn’t dodge anything. We got the lot.’
Nimmo said nothing, but began to sing softly, ‘We’re the soldiers of the Queen, my lads, we’ve been, my lads, and seen, my lads…’ and Houston couldn’t resist turning on him again.
‘Three years we were in the desert,’ he said, staring at Nimmo and speaking sharply, deliberately, as though to rub it in. ‘We were chewing on a tough tit in those days.’
Nimmo stared back at him, not saying anything, then he suddenly stood up and slashed the rest of his tea down, and it was swallowed up at once by the greedy sand. Nobody spoke for a moment, then Leach looked up.
‘What’s up with you?’ he asked.
Houston shifted restlessly and I was surprised at the vehemence and dislike in his tones. ‘He’s like all the bloody rest of his generation,’ he said. ‘Knocking everybody who did his bit. It’s something to laugh at now and write plays about on the telly. It was just a bloody game to his lot. His generation’s dead jammy.’
‘No.’ Nimmo laughed, undisturbed by Houston’s sudden smouldering hostility. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that your generation always liked to do it the hard way.’ Like his father, he enjoyed tormenting people, and this time his words had a curious jabbing effect on me, too, like a probe touching a raw nerve. ‘Bikes, instead of scooters. Crystal sets instead of transistors. That sort of thing.’
Morena looked up, his face expressionless. ‘It helps,’ he said slowly, ‘if you remember those things were developed during the war to stop men dying.’
Nimmo turned to him and his smile faded. ‘OK,’ he said, nodding, as though Morena with his long silences impressed him far more than Houston with his quick arguments. ‘Take off your girdles and relax, girls. I was only pulling your legs.’
The following day was a scorcher, and the mirage rose long before the sun had reached its zenith.
The land around us was brown and lifeless, without any trace of vegetation, and the bully we ate at midday was tepid and almost poured out of the tins, greasy and uninviting, while the sun beat down on us, searing and breathtaking, as we crouched in the little strip of shade alongside the lorry.
‘The oasis this afternoon,’ I said. ‘The Depression tomorrow. I suggest we go straight on down and get started. We can always send the Land Rover back to the well at Biq Qalam for water. It’s not far.’
They nodded, and I noticed they were glad to accept leadership in decisions of this sort.
‘Convoy will get under way at 2 p.m.,’ I said, trying to sound gay and breezy. ‘Troops will wear full kit and carry side arms. Hats will be worn back-to-front and shirts will be worn outside braces.’
They grinned and Houston slammed up a caricature of a salute. The foolishness seemed to inject a little life into him and we rose briskly and began to stuff away the equipment into the van.
We were working from the map now, skirting the little patches of red crosses where I’d written ‘Mines’, and not long after we set off we came across the remains of a couple of vehicles. They were so old and blackened with rust it was hard to tell what they’d been. Their wheels had gone, together with anything else that had been detachable, so that only the chassis remained, doorless, seatless, wheelless, like the statute of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem.
We stopped alongside one of them and prowled round, our feet scuffing the sand.
‘Austin. Six-cylinder Austin,’ Morena said, stalking round the metal skeleton.
He crossed to the other vehicle about twenty yards away, half covered in drifted sand.
‘Humber,’ he said. ‘Staff car, probably.’
‘Something clobbered ’em,’ Houston said, poking his finger into a hole in the curve of the body. ‘Bullet-hole here. Two, in fact.’
During the afternoon, with the mirage growing worse and the cliffs curtseying away from us all the time, we came across a few rusty coils of blackened barbed wire.
‘Right on course,’ I said. ‘This is the fence. The Ities put it up. All the way down from Sollum to Siwa.’
‘When will we be at Qalam?’ Nimmo asked sharply, interrupting. I could hear the impatience in his voice and I let the clutch in again quickly.
‘Two hours,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
The curtain of the mirage started to dance again as we set off once more, the flat-topped glassy hills moving and swaying. We reached Qalam by late afternoon, but even Qalam was different after twenty years. There were white houses there now and small irrigated fields to which the water was fed by a petrol-driven pump attached to the well. There was a car there, too, belonging to a Unesco official, and a police post to which we reported because they liked these days to know where desert travellers were. We’d already been reported by radio from the last police post we’d passed and they were expecting us.
The sergeant in charge, as he took down our route, told us that Qalam had been opened up since the war and that even one or two farms that had belonged to Italian colonists up to 1940 and had been allowed to fall into ruin had been started up again. There was a school and, with radio, they didn’t feel cut off from the rest of the world any more.
But there was still the old village with its endless wail of barbaric music, and there were still the thin hands of children stretched out towards us and the cries of ‘Baksheesh’, and the old man in the sunshine blind from trachoma. It wasn’t so different, in spite of what he said.
After all the dust and the sunshine it seemed strange to see shade, and coarse grass between the palms, and smell the stink of rotting vegetation near the small pool full of brown muddy water where a couple of moth-eaten camels stood with their heads down.
An old man in black rags sitting on a donkey watched us drive past.
‘Wotcher, cock,’ Houston shouted. ‘Long Range Desert Group. Doyle’s Boys reporting back for duty.’
The old man didn’t move and his expression didn’t change.
‘Looks browned off’ Leach commented.
‘What do you expect?’ Houston grinned. ‘He knows what happened last time. All his dates got pinched, someone peed in the well and he caught his wife offering jig-jig to the troops.’
The oasis had fallen away behind us now and everybody’s spirits seemed to have lifted. There was some good-natured shouting backwards and forwards between the Land Rover and the lorry, but it soon died away and there was a curious tenseness that didn’t come just from excitement, and then we began to see scattered fragments of white along the track.
‘Bones,’ I said. ‘This is the old camel trail. How much further, Wop?’
Morena’s face was set and excited now, his eyes staring ahead of him. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, I reckon,’ he said. ‘We’ll be south of the well at Biq Qalam tonight and reach the Depression tomorrow.’
We reached the Depression on schedule, with the horizon growing hazy as the sun dropped. In the distance we could see yellow mounds, faint and far away, like the fleshless backbone of a gigantic skeleton.
‘Dunes,’ Morena said. ‘The Great Sand Sea.’
Nobody said anything and I saw Leach and Houston and Nimmo exchange glances with each other. There was something about them that had me worried, something that had been growing steadily all the way down from Qalam, a sort of controlled, suppressed excitement that somehow didn’t include me, and it worried me because I couldn’t put my finger on a reason for it.
We entered a stony defile, where the land dropped away in front of us, with angular tilted slabs of white rock like tombstones on either side. The evening shadows were rising to blot out the purples and the greens as we went lower and lower, bumping and clattering over the rocky path. Half-way down we stopped and gazed at the mysterious hazy flatness below us, surrounded by its limestone walls and eroded sections of cliff in prehistoric pillars and columns that were re
ady to collapse to the valley floor at a shout.
We were all staring when Nimmo pointed. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘That black thing.’
‘Rocks,’ Leach grunted. ‘That’s all.’
‘I’ve never seen rocks move.’
I raised the binoculars and began to focus them.
‘There’s a fire or something down there,’ Nimmo said. ‘I can see smoke.’
Something seemed to have dropped away from me and I stood there with a hole in my belly as big as a house, empty feeling and suddenly tired.
‘It’s a lorry,’ I said flatly. ‘There’s another one further on – and a jeep.’
We all stared, and I could see the disappointment written all over Houston’s face. Leach’s brows had come down and his stare was almost a glare, then I noticed that Morena was watching them, his eyes narrow, and I realised that I wasn’t the only one who was shut out and that the closed little secretive compact lay between the other three alone.
Nimmo had taken the glasses now and was peering through them, frowning heavily, his mouth drawn down in a hard line.
‘They’re Arabs,’ he said. ‘No, hang on! There’s a white man there, too! And – and–’
He lowered his glasses and stared round at us, then his taut face relaxed and split into a broad derisive grin, as though what he’d seen had overcome his anger in its appeal to his sense of humour.
‘Where no white man’s ever trod before, eh?’ he said slowly, triumphantly staring at Houston. ‘You marvellous bloody desert rats! You wonderful wonderful wonderful warriors! One of ’em’s a woman – a white woman!’
Four
We spent the night there, half-way down into the Depression on a flat patch of ground off the road against the rocks, the vehicles under the cliffs, the five of us crouching round the petrol stove and none of us saying much.
There was a look of glee on Nimmo’s face that infuriated Leach and Houston, but somehow I didn’t think it was only Nimmo’s jeers that angered them. Morena sat on his own, his face thoughtful and unemotional as usual, eating his bully beef in silence, and I watched them all while there was light enough, wondering what was in their minds. It had been impossible to see down into the Depression, so we couldn’t tell what the lorries were doing there, but the knowledge that white people had got there before us when we’d expected nothing and nobody jarred against our enthusiasm. It was this more than anything else that seemed to infuriate Leach and Houston.
