Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  They appear to have taken place right across the northeastern United States. The President is in hiding and the country has virtually shut down. Though nobody has claimed responsibility, the finger of blame is being pointed at Arab terrorists and reprisals are said to be imminent.

  We eat later, under the stars, beneath a sky which, even out here, seems less friendly than it did last night. All of us are shell-shocked, turning over what we have heard, flailing around for explanations, repeating the facts and trying to fit them into theories, wondering what on earth might happen next.

  Day Fifty-Nine

  AGADEZ TO TABELOT

  A night of raucous air-con and bad dreams. When I come to write the day’s date in my notebook I pause. Yesterday I wrote ‘Tuesday, September 11th’ without noticing.

  Today I write ‘Wednesday, September 12th’ without conviction. According to radio reports, casualties in New York alone are said to be in their thousands. Thousands. Thousands of people, in a city which, apart from Sheffield and London, I probably know better than any other. I flick back the page of my notebook and look at what I scribbled before climbing into bed last night: ‘I can think of no parallel act of destructive violence in my lifetime aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’

  Out on the tiny courtyard breakfast is laid out. The sky is clear blue, the morning sunlight will soon be tipping over the wall and spilling onto us. I eat bread, two eggs, honey and tea, with which I swallow my malaria pill. The others begin to emerge from their rooms. John has heard the latest news on BBC World Service. Details it’s hard to deal with - mobile phone calls from those who knew they were going to die, people jumping eighty floors from the blazing Trade Center. Things you don’t want to hear.

  But our waiter is the same and the manager is the same and outside in the small square the same cast of characters rise to their feet as we appear, not to talk about terror attacks or the likelihood of a world war, but to sell, cajole and wheedle, exactly as they did when we arrived from Ingal yesterday. The short thick-set man with the rings and silver Touareg crosses: ‘I am good friend of the English. I have jewellery. You have come to Niger, you must buy something.’ The tall, imposing man with a craggy face and thin grey beard, who stalks me, repeating over and over again, ‘You must talk with me. I know Ginger Baker.’ A blind woman, hand outstretched, led around by a little girl. Two men on crutches, fleet and persistent. The children, as ever, wanting a gift or some money.

  Here in Agadez the world hasn’t changed. And why should it? Niger is not a player. It is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Its gross national product works out at $850 per person per year. There are no banks of television screens here pumping out the apocalyptic scenes they’re seeing back home. In Niger the literacy rate is barely 15 per cent, and I have not seen a single newspaper or magazine on the streets of Agadez. Life goes on.

  We have heard that there is a possibility of joining a camel caravan at Tabelot, a town 50 miles to the northeast as the crow flies, though more like six hours in a vehicle, as it lies deep in the Air (pronounced ‘eye-eer’) Mountains.

  I’m excited at the prospect, not just of joining a camel train, but of entering, for the first time, one of the three legendary mountain ranges of the Sahara, the others being the Tibesti in Chad and the Hoggar in southern Algeria.

  I’m not disappointed. This is a tortured, twisted, dramatic landscape, created by immense volcanic forces, which have swung the bedrock of the Sahara from the horizontal to the vertical, rolled it over and left it to shatter and splinter in the heat. Rock-fields stretch away into the distance, charred like the rakings from a furnace. Across this untamed surface runs a roughly cleared track. As we shake and sway along, the goatskin in which the water supply is kept, lashed to the side of the car to keep cool, occasionally swings round and taps ghoulishly at the window, as if the goat had come back to life and was asking to be let in.

  After five hours we run into Tabelot. It’s not much more than a large village, but significantly different from the villages on the plain. The mud walls of the compound are stout affairs, with stone foundations. The tents inside them are more substantial too, with heavy flanks hanging from a strong rattan spine. It all makes sense as soon as I step down from the four-wheel drive and feel the pleasant sensation of a fresh, almost cooling edge to the air. We’re in the mountains, 2000 feet higher than Agadez, looking across to a mountain peak that’s 3000 feet higher still.

  Our accompanying team, led by the imperious Mohammed Ixa, a tall, straight-backed Touareg swathed in a yellow robe, slings a plastic cover between acacia trees and vehicles to provide us with some shade. A groundsheet is laid, and as soon as the sponge rubber mattresses are arranged on top of it Mohammed selects one, lies down, closes his eyes beatifically and proceeds to listen to his radio through an earpiece for the next couple of hours. Meanwhile, his minions prepare a late lunch of all the things the guidebooks advise you not to eat - hand-prepared salad (but whose hands?), watermelon (who knows where the water’s come from?) - that sort of thing. Apart from French bread and hard-boiled eggs, it’s all there is, so we eat it anyway. A fierce gusting wind snatches at the plastic awning above us, which snaps and crackles but holds fast. This is the harmattan, someone says, the wind from the heart of the desert, hot and dry enough to split tree trunks.

  Around four the wind begins to drop, and I’m taken to meet Omar, who will be leading the camel train to Bilma. He is a Touareg, around forty years old. Square and almost stocky, he has a wide, friendly face, deep black skin and a thin black beard. He smiles readily, with a shy lowering of the head as he does so.

  He’s proud of his village and takes us a mile or so away to see the oasis on which Tabelot’s survival depends. The water table is close to the surface here and two or three wells feed prolific fields of onions, carrots, maize, millet, and orchards of orange, lemon, fig and pomegranate. In a shady clearing a young boy leads a docile white camel up and down a 30-foot pathway. The camel is harnessed to a rope, which is wound round a wooden pulley and drops down into a 50-foot well, from which it draws water in a glistening black goatskin bag. A funnel attached to the bag flops out like a great tongue, regurgitating the water down a wooden pipe into an elaborate system of mud-walled channels and conduits that carries it eventually into the fields. Every few trips the boy rewards the camel with a mouthful of maize leaves, which it despatches noisily, like a paper-shredder.

  As we walk back past freshly tilled onion fields, it’s easy to forget we’re anywhere near the Sahara. Doves are cooing, streams are gurgling and a balmy and benevolent humidity seems to seep up through the ground.

  Omar insists I try dates straight from the tree, which is not as easy as it sounds, for he has to find someone more athletically built than himself to shin up and get them. They appear to grow in white plastic bags. I’m reassured that this is not another GM food trial but a precaution to stop the birds getting at them. And there are birds everywhere: large black birds with white caps, small, noisy, bouncy wagtails, red-dusted firefinches darting in and out of the trees. We move on, munching the dates, which are disappointingly leathery, passing red peppers spread out to dry in groves of grapefruit, grenadine and mango.

  We end up at Omar’s house back in the village. He lives in a modest collection of straw huts and stone and mud buildings with his four wives and fifteen children, ranging in age from one month to eighteen years. I ask him if he’s rich.

  ‘No,’ he replies gracefully, ‘but in terms of children, yes.’

  When I enquire if there are problems with such a large family, he nods. Shortage of food, medicine, clothing. Wouldn’t it be better to have fewer of them, I ask, impertinently.

  He shrugs, head on one side. No, he says, with a coy half-smile, he likes a lot of children.

  And the wives, do they get on well?

  Before he can reply there is a loud guffaw from the youngest and prettiest of them. Judging by the blank looks of the others, she is the only one who understa
nds French.

  Omar, who doesn’t look like a ladies’ man, smiles bashfully and mutters something about ‘jalousie‘.

  Tonight we are entertained, as is the custom when strangers arrive, by an evening of dancing. In the moonlight, the young women sit together beneath a tree, singing and chanting, while the men form a line opposite them and either singly or in pairs approach the women to dazzle them with their dancing. The beat gradually increases, the movements become wild and flamboyant and inventive, the foot-stomping harder and faster, as each man tries to outdo the other, dancing themselves to the point of hysteria, arms and legs flying, robes stuck to their backs with sweat. The women remain sitting, chanting repetitively and gradually becoming obscured by the cloud of dust raised by their suitors. My eyes sting and a dry, rasping cough catches in my throat, but it’s impossible not to be drawn in.

  To grunts of approval I’m led forward hand in hand with the man who is going to introduce me to the dance. He watches apprehensively as I improvise a routine that owes less to classical dancing and more to the Ministry Of Silly Walks. Not only am I asked to reprise it, but later I’m paid a high compliment by my sponsor.

  ‘All the forty-year-old women say they have never seen a non-Touareg dance so well.’

  Day Sixty

  TABELOT

  Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Despite accolades from forty-year-old Touareg women, my dreams are more Sunday morning indigestion than Saturday Night Fever, and, waking before dawn, I reach for my head-torch, toilet paper, garden trowel and matches and extricate myself as swiftly as I can from the tent. This is never as easy as it should be, and as I corkscrew my way out into the surrounding darkness I imagine this is what it must be like being born. The sky is clear and dense with stars and the temperature has plunged 20 degrees. It’s a good walk to the nearest patch of cover, and as I crouch over my excavations it occurs to me that these are the only times when I’m truly alone in the desert and should be savoured. By the time I’m home and dry, as it were, I have to pull on a sweater to keep warm.

  An hour later, the deep lilting cry of Tabelot’s muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. Check my clock. It’s five. Soon there are sounds of life, soft footsteps passing my tent, grunts of goats and bleats of sheep. There’s no such thing as a lie-in in the desert.

  Some thirty camels are assembled on a stony stretch of ground surrounded by low houses. Mohammed Ixa, glass of tea in hand, points with languid admiration at the white camels, peculiar to this part of the Sahara.

  ‘Le chameau d’elegance,’ he purrs, in a Maurice Chevalier sort of way.

  For some reason, I’ve been allotted the most non-white of them. Indeed, his name, Ekawik, evidently means Blackie. There is much laughter from the camel team as I try to pronounce the name, so I’m probably saying something rude by mistake.

  Meanwhile, Omar moves quietly amongst them, inspecting a harness here and there and helping one of his eight-strong team to heave baggage, bedding, food and water aboard. The camels endure all this with permanent expressions of weary disdain, as if the whole of the rest of the world is a bad smell they have to endure.

  The salt pans of Bilma lie 350 miles to the east and the journey will take almost two weeks.

  Omar’s plan is to set off this morning and get ahead of us. The first two days will be along mountain trails so narrow and precarious that we shall be unable to get our filming equipment anywhere near. He will rendezvous with us at the point where they emerge from the mountains into the desert proper.

  To the accompaniment of rumbling groans and one or two angry roars, the camels are brought to their feet and the tethering ropes removed from their front legs. As Omar hands me the guide rope I’m reminded how big these creatures are. Ekawik’s head rises several feet above mine and he observes me through the luxuriant lashes of his heavy-lidded eyes. I smile back with what I hope will convey both friendliness and confidence and pat his flanks, which he doesn’t like at all.

  As far as camel trains go, ours is modest. In 1922 a Captain Angus Buchanan saw a caravan leave Tabelot with 7000 camels and 1100 men. The train stretched 6 miles from front to back. We have twenty-eight camels, nine men and stretch about 200 yards.

  There are no emotional leave-takings and, as far as I can see, none of Omar’s four wives or fifteen children turns up to say goodbye. Gingerly attached to Ekawik, I accompany the caravan out of the village and over the first hill. There I hand over the reins and watch them snaking their way off through the rocks, nodding and swaying as if in slow motion.

  The Air Mountains form such an impenetrable barrier to the north and east that to link up with the camel train we must retrace our steps back to Agadez and take the Bilma road, which skirts the high ground and heads straight across the desert. Mohammed and the drivers are anxious to be on the move, as the clouds grow thicker and greyer above us. In the rainy season one downpour can easily turn roads into rivers. They pack up the camp at speed and we set off at the faster end of safe, stones spinning off the track behind us.

  Though the rain holds off, Mohammed keeps an anxious eye on the clouds massing around the 3500-foot summit of Mount Taghouaji, halfway between us and Agadez.

  He becomes increasingly concerned when we come across evidence of a recent deluge, and progress is reduced to a snail’s pace as our drivers feel their way through flooded ruts and potholes. We narrowly avoid a dried-up riverbed that has turned into a fast flowing stream, 50 yards wide and rising all the time. The sudden power of a desert flood is an awesome sight and Mohammed is persuaded to stop and let us take some film. Then we’re back into the cars and racing the last few miles to Agadez, which is, amazingly, dry as a bone.

  Back at the friendly little Pensione Tellit, I run into its owner and founder Vittorio, a sixty-five-year-old ex-bank employee from Rome, who first came to Agadez in 1970, fell in love with the place, married a Touareg girl and set up the only Italian ice-cream parlour in the Sahara. He’s quietly spoken and looks not unlike an expatriate Roman emperor, with close-cropped white hair and a toga-like African robe. Besides this tiny hotel he has a restaurant called Le Pilier on the main road to Algeria. It’s beautifully designed in the Soudan style and serves a very fine spinach and ricotta ravioli.

  It’s not a great time to be in the tourist business. The economy of Niger is in a parlous state. Income from uranium found in the Air Mountains has dried up and the area is only just beginning to recover from the Touareg rebellion of the 1990s. Though the uprising is over, the situation remains volatile. Only two years ago the president was assassinated and most Western governments still warn travellers against going anywhere north of Tahoua, 200 miles south of where we are right now.

  When I ring home tonight, however, it sounds as if the rest of the world is much more dangerous than Niger. American airports are still closed. There is talk of war and warnings of further attacks, perhaps on London and Paris as well. Now that the terrorists are known to be Muslim, people back home are worrying that we must be especially vulnerable, here amongst the mosques and muezzins.

  In fact, we are, right now, in probably one of the safest places on earth.

  Day Sixty-One

  INTO THE TENERE DESERT

  ‘How are you, Britisher? I show you something.’

  ‘I must talk with you. I know Ginger Baker!’

  ‘Donnez-moi un cadeau!’

  As we appear at the door of the Pensione the usual suspects waiting in the shade of the Hotel de l’Air across the street leap to their feet. Today I do not totally ignore the street cries of Agadez. Mindful of what is to come - prolonged exposure to the hottest part of the desert - I negotiate for a turban and am now the proud owner of a 15-foot length of indigo cotton. It seems an awful lot to wrap round a size six and seven-eighths head, but they tell me some turbans are 20 feet long.

  As we shall be camping for the foreseeable future, our departure from Agadez is delayed to enable everyone to repack, reducing bags and baggage to the minimum, and to
spoil ourselves with an early lunch of penne arrabiata with aubergine and a glass of wine or three at Le Pilier.

  A couple of hours later, the memory of the meal and the cool, airy courtyard of the restaurant is a distant dream. The Bilma road is a bleak and uncompromising strip of desert dust, defined only by the imprint of vehicles that have passed this way before. The rains have not reached this far south, nor does it look as if they have done so for many years. The ground is hard and hot. Fine green lines, the only hint of decoration in a landscape of sombre browns and blacks, follow cracks in the rocks where a residue of moisture has been trapped. Unbelievably, there are people living here, on the very edge of survival. A thin straw hut bends with the wind. Outside it, children with wild hair and torn blue smocks watch us pass, standing barefoot on the stones, a donkey stock-still beside them.

  There are army checkpoints. Whilst Mohammed presents our papers I get out for a breather, only to be hit by a wall of heat unlike anything I’ve yet experienced. Whatever is the opposite of wind chill, this is it. Air stoked up to 55degC/131degF and driven on by the harmattan rakes the desert like a blast from a flame-thrower.

  I’m told that in desert as hot as the Tenere, the human body loses 2 gallons of water a day, which is 9 litres, and 4 gallons if you’re on the move, so one should really keep drinking constantly. We have bottles of water with us but they heat up quickly and warm water is so much more difficult to gulp down. J-P has come up with an ingenious answer. He drops a couple of mint tea bags into a plastic bottle, which he wedges on top of the dashboard. The head-on sunlight heats it, the bounce of the vehicle stirs it and the near boiling infusion that results is a lot more palatable than lukewarm mineral water.