by Annie Hawes
Wrong move. The camel-man goes mad, first demanding the film, then demanding payment for the portrait. A large crowd gathers, enjoying the spectacle. The cameleer, between lengthy speeches to the gallery, keeps raising his eyes to the sky and making a noise like a child imitating a police car: lee-lah lee-lah lah-lah. I have noticed quite a few people doing this, in moments of stress. Habib, for example, did it whenever his gearbox gave him trouble. François goes over to try and sort the problem out. Abdelwahab has gone into a fit of depression about his supposed country, sulking and muttering to himself.
Gérard tells him not to worry: he is in good company. The great Auguste Renoir, Gérard says, also complained bitterly about the vast fees demanded by locals to sit for portraits in this part of the world. They had been spoilt by European patronage, Renoir said, ever since the Ouled Naïl fashion caught on. So, says Gérard, people round here naturally have great expectations from the world of Art: they have over a century of posing under their belts!
Money seems to have changed hands now, and all is well. Or somewhat better, at any rate. The cameleer is still glowering and doing the occasional police-car imitation. Abdelwahab is going on being mortified. He wishes he could speak Arabic properly. He can understand a lot of it, all right, from listening to his parents at home, but none of his generation has ever bothered speaking it. They’ve always just answered their parents in French. He would love to be able to give the camel-man a piece of his mind, but he would sound like a stammering idiot. He is going to start learning Arabic immediately, as soon as he gets back to France.
A sympathetic bystander, detaching himself from the crowd, comes over to apologize for the bad behaviour of the camel vendor. He is not usually so irascible, but he has been driven to distraction by the loss of not one, but three baby camels from his herd. Since privatization, foreign prospectors have, it seems, taken to roaming the countryside drilling unexpected test wells on public pastures. The abandoned crater fills with oil, creating a perilous, sticky quicksand: a bourbier. And baby camels, being curious little creatures, cannot resist going much too close to these black morasses of camel traps. We can imagine the rest! And it is easy, alas, to blame all foreigners, whether connected to the oil industry or not, for your sufferings. Abdelwahab does not find this explanation, casting him as it does in the role of foreigner, much of a comfort. The camel-man is still lee-lah-ing. Does anyone know what it means? Is he actually saying something?
Abdelwahab does. And yes, he is. He is saying ‘ashhadu an la ilah ila Allah’. There is no god but God. The declaration of faith: the First Pillar of Islam. He doesn’t mean anything by it, it’s just an exclamation. Abdelwahab is so entertained by my police-car-imitation theory that he gets over his cameleer-outrage at last. He can’t help looking at it all through European eyes, though, he says, and being embarrassed for his fellow countrymen. Gérard points out that we Europeans are enjoying every minute of it, and that Abdelwahab’s eyes, too, are European. What else could they be, when he has never before set foot in this country?
There may be no god but God, Abdelwahab says, but he has a hundred names. Did we know that? Every Muslim who is called Abd el-something, like himself, is really called ‘son of God’ – under one of the deity’s many aliases. Abd el-Kebir is son of the Great, Abd el-Wahab son of the Head, and so on. If you’re called Abd-Allah, though, plain ‘Son of God’, you don’t need the ‘el’ word, which just means ‘the’.
That’s one mystery solved at last, then. Uncle Kebir’s name must be short for Abd el-Kebir. He really is called Uncle Great.
On our way back to the Land Rovers a boy goat-herd is heading down the street towards us. He must be in charge of grazing the animals for the whole village, because his charges are dropping off from the herd one by one, under their own steam, as they arrive at the various doors and gates in the street. Some householders are evidently waiting eagerly for their goats, and let them in straight away. Others, more nonchalant, leave them waiting on the doorstep. The herd-boy, taking up the rear, is carrying a new-born baby goat in his arms. I steer well clear: once bitten, twice shy. But the innocent Abdelwahab goes right up and strokes it. It does not bite him. Evidently Algerian blood does count for something, after all.
As dusk is falling, we pass through El Golea, the last town before our road starts to curve westwards along the southern border of the Erg and into the uninhabited zone. Real, sand-dune desert from now on, all the way to Timimoun. Soon we are rolling through an eerily empty moonlit landscape. I check the map under the dashboard light. No humans at all live between here and Timimoun: the map shows three places in the middle of nothingness where, if we really need it, we will find water at between twelve and fourteen metres below ground. The fourth, a place called Fort Mac Mahon, has a well. The water is bonne, abondante, légèrement salée – slightly salty. That, François says, is where we’ll be camping tonight. But don’t get excited: it’s not much of a fort.
I stare at the map, wondering why anyone would bother to mark those other water-places on it. How likely is anyone to start digging twelve metres in the desert heat? Idiotic thought. If you were on foot, lost, car broken down, you would have nothing better to do, would you – and no other way to save your life – than to dig all those metres. That’s why. We roll on through the night, the car vibrating horribly. On a desert road, the sand forms itself into corrugations, just the way it does under the sea. You must never drive at less than sixty kilometres an hour for any length of time, François says. The frequency of the vibrations, at low speeds, will shake loose every nut and bolt in the engine.
Unfortunately, at that speed, you don’t have time to spot upcoming patches of loose sand, which send you veering wildly, and may well conceal rocks that will smash your undercarriage as the wheels sink in. Our convoy comes to a halt half a dozen times, while we drag out one or other of the Land Rovers whose wheels are hopelessly stuck in sand. The prospect of digging for water starts to seem a lot less unlikely.
Fort Mac Mahon in the darkness is scary and deserted. A ruin: not a romantic red-mud-brick ksar, though, but a French-colonial concrete bunker, its front wall collapsed, bent and rusting girders exposed, slab of roof leaning crazily; around it skeletons are strewn, bones gleaming white in the moonlight. Not as sinister as they appear, though: only the bones of sheep and camels that have died in transit, crossing the desert from the grasslands of Mali – or have been slaughtered and eaten by their drivers. We get a fire lit among the ashes of many others and settle down among the scattered skeletons to tins of sardines, smoky toasted baguette and cans of warm beer. Skeletons never go away here, in this dry air, says François; and he tells us, sitting round the camp-fire, of a caravan that vanished in the desert, somewhere south of Timimoun, in eighteen-hundred-and-something – a thousand men and as many loaded camels – to be found a whole century later, everything intact, except, of course, for the flesh on their bones.
The air, unlike the beer, is freezing cold. The stars are stunning in a huge pitch-black sky. Once you’ve sat by a fire all night on the edge of the desert you realize that there is nothing surprising in the fact that the desert nations should have been the first to chart the movements of the planets. That is all there is to look at once darkness has fallen, as you eat, drink and rest. There is nothing else. No lights, no buildings, no trees, no people. Nothing but the red glow of your camp-fire, tiny and insignificant, dwarfed by brilliant stars in a massive black velvet sky, filling 360 degrees of skyline.
In the morning I discover an unexpected inconvenience of that 360-degree skyline. How are you supposed to get a bit of privacy for a pee? It’s impossible. You could walk for miles, and when you finally crouched down, it would still be plain as a pikestaff what you were at. Thank the Lord I’m wearing a skirt.
I return to the camp, if you can call it that, to find that a pair of vultures has come visiting. Enormous, horrible, bald-headed creatures as big as dogs that spread their wings when they see me, but are so sure of thems
elves that they can’t be bothered to fly off. They just lumber along the ground, wings outspread, till they’re out of reach, flapping half-heartedly. Their wingspan must be double the span of my arms, their beaks are pointed flesh-ripping tools. My hair stands on end. I’m glad I know they only want dead things, or they would be utterly terrifying. They’re just hoping we’ll throw them another dead sheep, I suppose. Suddenly I can’t stand their beadily staring presence. I take a run at them. They still don’t fly away, but stump a few lurching feet off on their scaly talons, flapping in slow motion. I try shouting and running combined. Several times. Same effect. Now I am hot and sweaty; the vultures, on the other hand, still look cool and sleek, taking it all in their stride. Oh well. At least they’re a good way off now.
I crouch down to get the fire lit. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see them waddling slowly back my way, beady eyes gleaming evilly. I give in. I’ll just have to learn to put up with them. I want my coffee.
19
It’s a hundred miles and more since we left behind the last few gnarled and worried-looking shrubs. Earlier the shadows were sharp on every tiny fold of the terrain. Midday now, and the heat is crushing, the shadows gone, the glare magnifying the flatness all around us. With the endless dunes of the Erg to the north now, the road runs on south-west through an iridescent plain of gravel, polished and blackened by millennia of oxidation under this harsh sun. There is still nothing to take your bearings from, no inkling that we could be nearing any such unlikely thing as an inhabited place, when, all of a sudden, a battered road-sign stands pointing in absolute emptiness. A large, hand-painted road-sign of sand-blasted metal, announcing the capital city of distant Mali: ‘BAMAKO 2685 kilometres’. And for Timimoun, take a right turn. But where on earth is Timimoun? Surely, in all this flatness, we should be able to see it?
But, as Habib told us, the desert is never as flat as it seems. Timimoun is set on a gentle dip that falls away to a massive sebkha, a low-lying plain that was, some millennia ago, the bed of a salt lake. And you come upon it by surprise. A small, dusty petrol station, a wide, dusty right turn, and the endless grey-brown gravel suddenly gives way to bare red earth. Ahead of us is more red earth – but in vertical mode, fashioned astonishingly into crenellated city walls with tall, tapered buttresses rising above them, dark green palms beyond, red minarets dominating the scene. The portal of the town is a great archway, also of red daub, chunky and square, massively ornamented. The Sudan gate, says François.
Past the gateway, the luscious green of palm trees, lining the road; and more red. The ground is compacted red earth, the buildings are red earth, and, up ahead, behind more palm trees, are red walls within walls: the ramparts of the old town, the ksar. They look as if they were moulded from the red clay by some giant child’s hand, roughly smoothed and irregular. A small market is going on among all this terracotta as we pull in and park, a market attended by a most amazing array of inhabitants. A crush of people in every conceivable combination of skin tone and dress style, swathes of brilliant white and bright colour, going about the business of life. There are the pale haiks and the fringed Berber headgear, the white jellabas and twisted chèches. The chèche here, though, is tied with a long tail to one side, to be draped over the neck or the lower face, depending on taste and weather conditions, while the men’s jellaba often gives way to the sleeveless gandoura. Among the now-familiar Maghreb faces are tall, thin men of narrow features and hawk-noses with dark chèches and the blackest of skin, or broad-featured afro-haired men in the bright robes of Black Africa. There are, most striking of all, the exuberant bare-faced smiles of the first black women we have seen since we started our travels, their hair braided and beaded in a way that wouldn’t look out of place on a music video, and about as far from the modest khimar as you could possibly get. After so many hours of empty, dead land, of stony beige nothingness, the effect is overwhelming. Timimoun seems impossibly busy and impossibly colourful. And positively cosmopolitan.
Wait here, says François imperiously, heading off into the small market round the side of the post office, also of red mud-brick, though it must be French-colonial. So we sit down on the post office steps, also a popular spot with the local inhabitants, and gaze around us gobsmacked until François comes back with paper cups of flavoured buttermilk – one gold-coloured, mixed with pureed dates, he says, and the other, a pale pistachio, with fresh green barley and honey. So welcome and refreshing that we have to have another one right away before we decide what to do next. Naturally we have already drawn a small crowd and soon we are chatting to two teenagers who have won the battle to take ownership of the fascinating foreigners – they are Moussa and Moulay, two open-faced, afro-haired youths with infectious grins. Moussa is soon leading Gérard and Guy off to find Jean-Pierre’s friend with whom we are supposed to be staying, Hadj Mouloud, while Abdelwahab and I sit on the steps with François, Moulay and our luggage, taking in the amazing ethnic mix around us.
What a relief ! I feel more at home in this multicultural haven than I have anywhere else in the trip so far, I say. Abdelwahab agrees: he is gazing happily around him, a broad grin on his face. It’s just like being back in Paris! Except that, unlike Paris, there’s no traffic, the air is amazingly clean, the sun is shining, and nobody looks in much of a rush.
François and Moulay start giving us the who’s who of the Timimoun population. Much too much information to take in at one go; my head is soon spinning. Those dark-skinned men over there are Haratine, and that’s a Cha’amba Bedouin, the one with the black headdress; those two fairer women are Berbers, and that other one in the pale haik is an Arab, of the shurfa: direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammed. The black men in colourful gandouras are just passing through, they’ll be migrants from Mali or Niger; now two more Haratine – of course they look different from the Black Africans, what do we mean? The two tall, elegant men holding hands, or rather, fingertips, are Tuareg, or maybe Ait Atta – Berber nomads, anyway, not like the Cha’amba, who are an Arab people, though most Cha’amba are not nomads any more these days, but merchants. That scruffy man with the hoe is another Haratine, on his way back from work in the palm groves. The turbaned man leading a donkey, its panniers filled with three-foot-long spears of spectacular fluffy dried flower-heads, is a Berber farmer, a rich m’rabtin landowner, bringing date-palm flowers to sell at the market from his own palm groves.
I give up. So does Abdelwahab. How many tribes can you fit in to one small town? So which variety, we ask, are Moussa and Moulay?
Moulay is certain we must be able to tell by looking at him. He and Moussa are Haratine, he says. Right from the bottom of the pile. The labouring classes. Isn’t it obvious?
Abdelwahab and I soon put him right. It’s going to take a lot more than one quick outline before we start to get the hang of Timimoun and its many-splendoured inhabitants. And dressed in Western-style pants and T-shirts like that, Moulay and Moussa aren’t giving us a lot to go on, are they?
But, speaking of Berbers, does Moulay know anybody called Kebir? A Berber, with nephews called Mohammed, Sayid, Karim, Rashid, Hassan, who were all away working in Paris, once upon a time?
Moulay laughs. There are over 20,000 inhabitants in this town – more if you include all the outlying villages – and those are not exactly the most unusual names! Moulay will go and make enquiries for me, he says, in the café up the road – the only one in town, we’ll soon discover. We follow in his wake, passing a butcher’s shop outside which is displayed, on a piece of matting by the doorway, the severed head of a camel: four long, thin camel shins lean against the door like meaty walking-sticks. On a hook in the doorway hangs a very odd-looking cut of meat, which François identifies as a section of sheep’s pelvis, carefully cut to include a single testicle. A butcher will only slaughter a couple of animals at a time, here in the heat of the Sahara: meat won’t last more than a day. And he sets an identifying section out as an advertisement. Ram stew today, then, or camel kebabs.
Moulay soon reappears, unsuccessful so far in the hunt for my old friends. But he’s put the word about for us – there’s bound to be some news by tomorrow. Though we might bump into them tonight, if we’re lucky – there’s a big wedding on all week, and there’ll be an Ahellil, a night of singing, up in the old market square later; almost everyone in town is bound to pass through there at some point.
Now here comes Moussa, with Gérard and Guy following behind, talking animatedly with a man about their own age, bare-headed in a snowy white gandoura: Abdallah, son of Hadj Mouloud, come to escort us to the family home. Moussa and Moulay now disappear pretty sharpish, but we make little of this, busy making our adieux to François and Abdelwahab, who are off now to join the third member of their convoy at Reggane.
Abdallah leads us off towards the ksar, the old town within its high walls. It is blissful to dive into this labyrinth of cool shady passageways and out of the dry heat. Inside the ksar, the buildings are not just close together, but built right on top of one another, red clay interlocking with red clay, angle on angle, the flat roof of one house the terrace of the next; the alleyways below almost entirely covered. So powerful is the desert light that there is no need to let the sky in: a few dusty rays from the entrance are enough to illuminate the whole street. We step along the deep alleyways, floors of beaten red earth, loose golden sand around the doorsteps blown in off the desert, and I feel my eyes begin to relax and open wide for the first time in days. I must have been squinting against the brightness all this time. Further on into the ksar, the streets open out. There are head-high walls around little gardens, more palm trees rising above them; a narrow stone channel along the alley’s side trickles water to them. Back into narrow alleys again, and Abdallah stops at an unassuming wooden doorway in the red walls, roughly outlined with whitewash. We step into a hallway that is floored with cool, soft sand.
