Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  The only exception to the general air of lethargy is the presence of a single swallow, darting and swooping above us.

  I assume this is the border between Algeria and Western Sahara, but no-one seems quite sure. Bachir, squinting into the wind and dust, says we must move on, we’ve many hours driving still ahead. Najim, who’s driving me and Basil, has wandered off and ambles back as the engines are being re-started, bringing wild dates for everybody, straight off the tree.

  There is no surfaced road of any kind, but we follow the piste, as they call it, and every now and then pass a black tyre half sunk into the sand. The sight of these markers, sometimes at 5- or 10-mile intervals, becomes immensely reassuring.

  At least someone has been here before us.

  For a while, the terrain turns viciously stony, as if all the sand cover had been sifted through, leaving only this underlay of sharp grey points, jabbing at our tyres and sabotaging our progress. Ironically, it’s on a much less hostile surface of soft white shells that we have our first puncture. Bachir kneels, scrabbles in the dust and picks out a handful of stones. He straightens up.

  ‘Look, you see. Shells, little fish. This was all sea bed once.’

  The desert as ocean again.

  A half-hour later we’re hurtling across a hard-baked gritty plain, flat as an ironing board, with nary a bush or a boulder breaking the surface as far as the eye can see. The drivers can at last put their feet down, and we fly across the desert, each vehicle swathed in its own dust, a string of small clouds chasing each other.

  It’s well into the afternoon before we find anywhere suitable to stop for lunch. A scattering of smoothly rounded boulders offers shade and there are a few dry and whitened trees for firewood. As the drivers gather wood, the cook, a middle-aged man with a broad, guileless face, thick moustache and greying hair, walks a little way off and falls to his knees in prayer. He picks up a handful of dust and rubs it up and down his forearms and on his brow, mimicking, I suppose, the act of purification in a waterless world.

  The meal is, surprise, surprise, camel stew, cooked in a pot over the fire, and accompanied by good sticky rice and washed down with Coca-Cola, our main treat in this world without alcohol and wistfully referred to as Coke du Rhone. Now we are indisputably in Western Sahara, Bachir is a changed man. He looks around at the rocks and the desiccated trees with proprietorial satisfaction.

  ‘Ours is the best desert!’

  I laugh. But he doesn’t.

  ‘It is known to be the greenest, Michael.’

  Greenest? I look around at the tawny undergrowth. This is chauvinism gone mad.

  ‘All the great desert poets come from this part of Western Sahara.’

  A woman laden down with possessions appears amongst the rocks, going apparently from nowhere to nowhere. When she comes closer the drivers shout a greeting. She nods amiably, comes over for a chat and carries on. It’s certainly a friendly desert.

  Hours later, the vehicles have stopped again. The sun has set and the horizon is a sand-stained yellowish rim. Our drivers have got out and are kneeling in a line in this desolate place, bowing to Mecca. Bachir, hands sunk deep in coat pockets, looks out ahead. He doesn’t join them.

  ‘I am not devout,’ he says matter-of-factly.

  An hour later, more mundane thoughts. Where are we going to eat and where are we going to sleep? We’ve been on the road twelve hours and Bachir has stopped the vehicles and is consulting with his driver. No-one appears to have a map, but there’s much pointing into the darkness.

  Then we’re all urged to get in again. They’ve missed a turning.

  Half an hour further on and out of the pitch blackness appears the outline of a long, low, grimly unwelcoming building on the crest of a hill. Built by the Spanish military, this decommissioned barracks is to be our home for the night. We’re billeted in two rooms with seriously dodgy wiring. Turning the light off involves physically pulling apart two wires to deactivate the current. No-one dares turn it on again.

  The cook is the only one who seems unconditionally happy to be here. With a real kitchen to work in, he sets to work on a vegetable stew, with just a little camel in it.

  WESTERN SAHARA

  Day Nineteen

  TFARITI

  Revenge of the camel. Plucked from deepest sleep, I just have time to stumble up from my mattress, grab torch and toilet paper, pull open the jarring metal door of our dormitory and race to the nearest lavatory. A strong wind has got up and I’m aware of how Gothic a scene this must be - white-T-shirted figure with disordered shock of hair, sprinting along concrete passageways open to the sky, as the wind howls after him, setting doors and windows banging.

  I know things are bad as I have to do this twice more, on each occasion reaching the hole in the ground only just in time and holding my breath against the stench emanating from it.

  Five o’clock. Woken by the chimes of a grandfather clock. For a moment I believe myself to be safe and well in some ivy-covered country-house hotel, and then I remember that the sound is coming from John Pritchard’s alarm clock and I’m actually recovering from diarrhoea in a barracks in Western Sahara.

  Roger and Bachir try to cajole the reluctant, slumbering drivers into a six o’clock start, but they won’t move until they’ve lit a fire and brewed some tea. It’s nearer seven when we bounce and sway off down the hill, heading north and east for a privileged glimpse of the front line between Moroccans and Saharawis, one of the world’s best-kept secrets.

  In 1982, in an attempt to consolidate their military superiority over the Polisario, the Moroccan government began work on a system of fortifications stretching for over 1000 miles along the edge of occupied Western Sahara.

  This mighty Moroccan wall, longer than the Great Wall Of China, reportedly costs $2 million a day to maintain. As we brake, turn, twist and sway for mile after mile across a carpet of fractured stone slabs I should be feeling intrepid and privileged, but to someone suffering from camel poisoning the ride is slow torture. By gulping mouthfuls of air and staring fixedly at the horizon, I manage to hold out for three hours before the desire to shed last night’s stew becomes uncontrollable and I have to ask Najim to pull up.

  I retch violently, spewing potatoes and carrots on the desert floor (probably the most moisture to have fallen in that spot for years). When it’s over I feel a soothing hand on my brow. It’s Khalihena, tall, grave, the oldest and quietest of the drivers, who gazes down at me with wise concern through a pair of thick tortoiseshellrimmed glasses. He holds out a bottle of water and motions me to wash my face.

  I feel too ill to be embarrassed, and ridiculously touched that he should be the one to take care of me like this.

  Though the Moroccans and the Polisario have observed a ceasefire for the last eleven years, they have not become friends, and as both sides have troops in positions near to the wall, we have to approach with the utmost caution, accompanied now by two armed pick-up trucks. Then it’s a scramble up a slope dazzlingly rich in fossilised fish, plants and other evidence of the old once-fertile Sahara. From a ridge at the top we look down over a mile-wide no-man’s-land that separates the two sides. There’s no question of going any further, as the Moroccans have mined the border.

  I realise that this wall, an abomination to the Polisario, keeping them, as it does, from their own land, also defines them and inspires them and, in their eyes, legitimises their struggle. There can be no question of a contest between equals. The Polisario army numbers around 20,000 men, but despite the ceasefire it’s kept in readiness. To see them at work we are driven from the wall to the HQ of the Second Army District, in a cleverly camouflaged position protected by monumental rocks, strangely weathered and smoothed, like a hillside of Henry Moores.

  In the lee of these boulders are mud-brick huts, with corrugated metal roofs, and the occasional Russian-built tank pulled in close for safety. On a parade ground, marked by small stones laid out in neat rows and painted white, the flag of the Saharawi Ar
ab Democratic Republic flutters above three more tanks and four pick-ups fitted with anti-aircraft guns. A massive curved rock, resembling the head of a whale, juts out on a rise overlooking the parade ground, and beneath it a narrow entrance leads into the belly of the whale, a deep cave lined with carpets and cushions which is the nerve centre of this particular army post.

  I’m still in the grip of whatever microbe is ravaging my system, so I retreat to the coolest corner of the cave and sit out a lunch of salad, goat and oranges, thinking of the only two things that appeal in these circumstances, sleep and death.

  Unfortunately, neither is an option, as the commander of the Second Army District has made himself available for interview. He’s a man of dignified composure and stern, hawk-like eye, who gives nothing much away. How does he keep up morale when there has been no war to fight for thirteen years? No problem, he claims. They are all committed to the struggle for free expression for the Saharawi people. And they have sophisticated weaponry. When I press him for more details this seems to mean the ageing tanks from Eastern Europe and the fortified Toyota pick-ups drawn up below.

  Later, he and I walk out to inspect the troops. They are a ragged band, small in number, an assortment of ages wearing an assortment of uniforms. One has green espadrilles instead of army boots. Unless the Polisario is hiding some crack force from us, their military potential, even for guerrilla fighting, seems negligible.

  The heat rises and my system continues to reject whatever is in there that it doesn’t like. Once outside the cave, there is no escape or comfort. The skies are cloudless. The heat and the constant dusty wind scour my skin and turn my throat to sandpaper. There is no toilet but the desert, and as I crouch behind boulders feeling utterly miserable I am filled with desperate admiration for the soldiers who have endured conditions like these for years and a formless anger at those who make it necessary for them to do it.

  It’s a two-hour drive back to the barracks in Tfariti. I have to ask them to stop once again but this time I’m bent double with nothing to show for it. Everyone else turns their back, but Khalihena comes over to me once again, pours me some water, motions to his mouth and repeats in his soft French, ‘Mange, mange‘.

  When I get back to the barracks, I take his advice, and thanks to a combination of Pepto Bismol, acupressure recommended by Basil and fresh bread and cheese, I steady the system and fall into a long deep sleep.

  Day Twenty

  TFARITI TO MEJIK

  Though in my memory the fort on the hill will always be a sick room, I leave Tfariti with the optimism that always attends a departure and the prospect of a new destination.

  Bachir aims to travel another 200 miles to the southwest, setting up camp for the night before moving on tomorrow to the rendezvous with our Mauritanian team at a place called Mejik.

  Through the cracked glass of our windscreen we can see the relatively green landscape around Tfariti revert rapidly to stony desert. Despite the lack of cover, there always seems to be something out there, a solitary tree, a trotting herd of wild donkeys, even a skeletally thin dog that sniffs at us as we go by. And always the wind, sweeping across, sifting the sand, smoothing the rocks, leaching the rough ground and exposing the fossilised remains of a previous, very different Sahara, which, as recently as 10,000 years ago, was a grassland full of wild animals.

  We stop for lunch in the shade and cover of a fallen acacia tree. Bachir rubs some resin off the bark and tells me to taste it. A sharp, cleansing, minty freshness.

  ‘Arabic gum. Very good for all kinds of intoxication.’

  I know the name well. Over the centuries, fortunes have been made from gum arabic, and it’s still high on any list of West African exports. A preservative for food, it’s also used for pharmaceuticals and making inks. It’s rather satisfying to find something so precious in the wood the chef is gathering to make our fire.

  The fire is started by rubbing twigs together, then larger branches are laid on. Mohammed Salim, one of the drivers, face old and weathered, cheekbones cantilevered out, skin pulled tight as a drum, is sifting through the sand for camel droppings. So good is the camel at absorbing and re-using what it eats that these come out as small, regular-sized, dark brown pellets, referred to by the experts as nuggets. Quickly hardened by the sun, they make ideal pieces for a board game. Mohammed marks out a grid of squares in the sand and lays the pellets out like draughts. Najim, who he’s challenged to a game, breaks twigs to use as his men. So the game of dhaemon, a sort of desert draughts, begins. As it warms up, Mohammed Salim becomes more and more excited, emitting a string of cries, shrieks, theatrical screams, imprecations and histrionic submissions to Allah, occasionally catching our eye and cracking a conspiratorial smile. Najim plays the straight man, not that he has much option, and wins the game.

  Lunch is far behind us when, amongst swirling dust, tussocky grass and severely decreasing visibility, Bachir brings his lead vehicle to a halt and consults, rather anxiously, with Haboub, the most dashing of the drivers. There’s much kneeling and peering off into the soupy dust clouds. Are we lost? Bachir’s reply, intended to be reassuring, rapidly becomes one of our favourite sayings, to be used often in times of deep crisis.

  ‘No we are not lost. We just cannot find the place.’

  He suggests that we drive on after dark and try to reach Mejik. No-one complains, but there is an unspoken anxiety amongst us. Given the combination of dust clouds, pitch darkness and lack of any identifiable road or track, how good is our chance of finding Mejik?

  Haboub shrugs, flashes a big white-toothed grin, flicks open a leather pouch and fills his pipe.

  We reach Mejik a little before nine. Though there is a well-lit UN compound near by, we are booked once again into a barracks, set in a crumbling concrete-walled enclosure. Someone has at least made a stab at brightening up the place. The narrow, unroofed strip of passageway outside our rooms has been laid with crazy paving, and along it runs a dried-up garden bed decorated with Russian shell-cases. The accommodation, consisting of two large unfurnished dormitories, a lavatory and washroom, is much the same as at Tfariti, except that, instead of a plastic jug, this lavatory has a luxury attachment, a flush.

  I pull it. Nothing happens.

  Day Twenty-One

  MEJIK TO ZOUERAT

  Slept soundly and am now packing to make ready for the crossing into Mauritania.

  The border is only 15 miles away. Bachir says that we will be the first foreigners ever to cross it at this point, after negotiations made possible because of the currently cordial relations between Mauritania and the Polisario.

  Over a last meal of bread and coffee he expands on this.

  ‘We have nothing in common with the Moroccans. We have everything in common with the Mauritanians - culture, language, songs, dance.’

  The UN mission here, frustrated by both sides in its attempt to organise a referendum on the future of Western Sahara, has run up costs of $250 million and may well lose patience. Doesn’t he think there will come a time when they will have to reach a compromise?

  Bachir doesn’t hesitate.

  ‘There can be no compromise. We will be like a camel’s thorn to the Moroccans.’

  He is smiling, a little grimly perhaps, but not without some relish.

  ‘The more a camel tries to get a thorn out of its foot, the deeper it goes in, and the harder it is to get rid of it.’

  At eleven, a line of vehicles emerges from the swirling sand to the south and soon we’re shaking hands with a new set of escorts. Compared with the Saharawis, the Mauritanians, marked out by their billowing pale blue robes, which they call boubous, carry with them a worldliness, a touch of confidence and panache, which comes, I suppose, from having a country of your own.

  Cassa is dark, attractive, in his thirties, I should imagine, and seems to be in charge of the operation, alongside an Englishman, Bob Watt. Abdallahi, pale-skinned, more Arab than Berber, is our official helper from the Mauritanian Ministry of Communicatio
ns. Rumour has it that he’s the Minister himself.

  Mohammed Salim, so ebullient at desert draughts yesterday, is subdued. He has some problem with his eye and we’ve left him medicine from our filming kit. Nevertheless, he hugs me with surprising force as we begin our long farewells.

  The fort at Mejik and the waving Saharawis are quickly obscured by a violent sandstorm. I still have my dry desert cough, which the sand hissing against the windows and squeezing in through the floor isn’t doing anything to improve. Visibility drops to a hundred yards. It feels as if we are in limbo, and the lack of any point of reference increases the unreality of anything we glimpse outside. Did we really pass a new-born camel, still wet from its mother, lying on the sand? Or a UN border patrol in four immaculate white Land Cruisers, their aerials swinging and bending in the wind like fishing rods?

  Then, three short, sharp shocks in rapid succession - a line of concrete houses, a railway line and a hard-top road. Never mind water in the desert; after days of being thumped and jolted and flung about, it’s tarmac in the desert that sends the spirits soaring.

  The controversial Mauritanian border is not marked, and there is nothing to indicate a change of country until we reach a checkpoint, a metal rondavel, clanging violently in the wind. Two tall, loose-limbed guards peruse our passports, with more bewilderment than suspicion, and then we are free to enter the town, nay veritable metropolis, of Zouerat, where there are bicycles and motorbikes and cars and garages and shops and sports grounds and, at last, a hotel, the Oasian. The Polisario camps were much cleaner than Zouerat, and young boys there did not flock round, hands out for money or presents, as they do here.

  But, for now, the promise of cold beer and a hot shower makes up for everything.

  There is no hot water, owing to a problem with the boiler, but the beer is awfully good and I’m able to get through to Helen on the satellite phone and tell her I was dying but survived. She tells me that last night she dreamt I was in bed beside her, sent back home by the BBC for being physically not up to it. I’m quite touched by the fact that we should be having the same anxiety dreams.