Sahara (2002)

by Michael Palin

  I take a swig of water, trying not to break step as I do so. Omar is even further away now, and I’m almost halfway down the camel train, alongside Izambar, who returns my smile but, for once, says nothing.

  I look down. The desert floor has changed yet again and is now covered in a series of crusty flakes, like fragments of eggshell. Like dew, dried and hardened.

  I look back at my footprints. They’re quite deep, much deeper than the camel prints beside them. Their broad feet work like snowshoes, distributing their weight and leaving barely a mark.

  The classic description of a camel is a horse designed by committee, but it’s not quite fair. I see it more as a horse designed by rival universities, all of whom got a grant for different parts. Technologically, it is far more interesting than a horse; it’s just that the whole lot could do with some co-ordinating hand.

  Time for some more water. I’ve almost drained my water bottle, but I notice none of the cameleers has taken a drop. We’re walking along a wadi and Omar is up on top of a low dune, scanning the land ahead. As we draw level I raise my bottle and he comes down towards me and fills it up again.

  Then he leads us out of the wadi and onto the dune, beautiful to look at but murderous underfoot. My feet slip down into the sand and for the first time on the walk I feel faint alarm. By the time we’re at the top of the dune I can hear my heart thudding. I slither down the other side and find myself in a long curving bowl between two ridges, dotted with tussocks of krim-krim grass and the bleached white branches of dead trees.

  Elias Abrokas, swathed in a multicoloured scarf, draws water from a green plastic container into a stainless-steel bowl and walks up the line with it. No-one seems to take more than a couple of gulps, and the camels don’t stop.

  The sight makes me thirsty and I take out my bottle. It’s nearly empty again, and by now I’m level with the last three camels. Tuck my bottle back in my bag, put my head down and concentrate on catching up. Mercifully, there is harder sand down here and my boots can get some grip.

  After a few minutes of concentrated effort I look up and see Omar as far ahead as ever. I redouble my efforts, setting myself a target to pass three camels in five minutes, but make no headway at all. I’ve lost the rhythm, the beat, whatever it is that moves camels so easily across the sand. If I pause for a breather I know I shall only slip further back. To shout for help seems pathetic. I look ahead of me. The camel train moves on remorselessly. Akide is still lying peacefully across his camel’s back; Izambar has nodded off. Omar is taking the same small, regular paces as when we started. So how have I got down here?

  The last camel comes level and passes me. My mouth is dry but I’ve no more water. The stories I’ve heard around the campfire spring, unwelcome, into my mind. Of vehicles breaking down and guides dying of thirst as they went for help; of the stranded French couple who gave their six-month-old baby their own blood to drink and still perished.

  In only two hours, the joy of solitariness and contemplation has become the fear of isolation and abandonment. Marine metaphors come constantly to mind. I’m out of my depth.

  Like a man overboard shouting after a receding ship.

  Then Omar turns and motions that there is something up ahead. I wave my bottle as high as I can, neck downwards. He doesn’t move but watches the camels pass until I reach him. He hands me what’s left of the water and enquires, wordlessly, how I am.

  ‘Tres bon, merci, Omar,’ I lie.

  There, in the distance, is a tree, and, below it, a ring of four-wheel drives and Pete cleaning the camera and, almost certainly, Mohammed Ixa lying on his back, listening to the radio.

  Day Sixty-Six

  THE TENERE DESERT

  A new arrival at the camp this morning. A baby gazelle, no more than a day old, has been found abandoned by its mother, possibly frightened by the arrival of the camel train. It is a tiny, spindly, shivering thing, with its coat all mussed up; confused, lost and breathing hard. Its legs are as thin as matchsticks, its eyes big, black and searching, its ears as long as a rabbit’s. The news that Amadou is to take care of it worries me initially. He is, after all, our chef. But I’m assured that this delicate little beauty will not end up in the pot like the two sheep and the goat, now one sheep and a goat, which accompany the caravan. Later, I see the gazelle being held in the massive hands of El Haj, whilst Amadou tries to get her to take milk from the end of his finger.

  The camel train moves into spectacular desert today. ‘Desert absolu’, as my Guide Bleu describes it. The krim-krim grass, acacia scrub, even the ubiquitous desert melon bushes, whose fruit is tempting but inedible, have all disappeared. This is landscape reduced to its barest essentials, a rippling, rolling, shadeless surface purged of every living thing.

  The immense emptiness quietens everyone. Progress is slow and steady, although such is the lack of distinctive landmarks it sometimes feels as if we’re walking on the spot.

  In the middle of the morning, several hours out from the camp, there’s a sudden commotion up front, voices raised, a quite un-desert-like sense of urgency and emergency. The camels have come to a halt, so it must be serious. I hurry up the line to find Moussa and Amadou skipping round, shouting and pointing down at the sand, as Izambar runs in with a stone and proceeds to beat at something in the sand. There’s great excitement, halfway between fear and fun. Eventually, to gasps of mock horror, Izambar raises above his head a small, white, and, by now, entirely lifeless snake, about 18 inches long. He moves it sharply towards me and I duck back involuntarily. Encouraged by the response, he pretends to eat it, provoking howls of delighted disgust.

  Omar, who has been watching all this clowning with the mildly indulgent smile of a teacher on a school outing, tells me that this is the much-feared vipere du sable, the sand viper, whose bite, relatively harmless for humans, can cripple a camel. The desert is clearly not as empty as it looks.

  As if to rub this in, Mohammed, normally so languid and laidback, gives a sharp cry as we lie on the mats after lunch. He’s been bitten by a scorpion. I’m lying next to him and move pretty smartly out of the way, as someone grabs my boot and deals the scorpion a fatal blow. Like the snake earlier, the scorpion looks a pale defenceless little creature, the last thing in the world to cause trouble, but even after the poison is sucked out and sedatives administered Mohammed is clearly in serious pain, and says he will be for another four hours.

  The excitements of the day are not yet over. Shortly after darkness has fallen, distant headlights stab the gloom and soon we hear a rapidly approaching vehicle and, at the same time, a high-pitched drone in the sky above us. There is some nervous speculation that we have been mistaken for Osama Bin Laden and American Special Services have come to deal with us, but the reality proves to be a pair of French paragliders. First the ground support arrives and minutes later, once signal lights have been set up and vehicle headlights switched on to pick out the landing strip, an Icarus appears, strapped to a motor attached to a wheel-like frame and swinging on the end of a yellow mattress parachute. After two or three low passes over the camp this surreal figure hits the ground to a burst of spontaneous applause.

  Renaud Van De Meeren is the flyer and Francois Lagarde the ground crew. As they join us around the single lamp it’s hard to distinguish features, but Francois is clearly the older man. Wiry, tall, with a boyish flop of fair hair, he has flown his machine all over the world but still regards the Sahara as his favourite desert.

  ‘It’s still alive, you know. There is authentic life, here.’

  He talks about the paraglider like a boy with a new toy. The whole kit folds down into two bags and can be carried with them as accompanying baggage. Yesterday they were in Paris. And the experience of flying it? Smooth and solid.

  ‘Like swimming in oil.’

  Their theatrical arrival is upstaged by the clutch of Western newspapers and magazines that they have brought with them. These contain the first pictures we have seen of the attacks on America eight day
s ago. Since then we have all carried our own separate mental pictures of the destruction, made up of descriptions from families and friends at home, BBC World Service reports and individual imaginings. Now, by the light of a flickering lamp in the heart of the Sahara, we share with the rest of the world, for the first time, the classic images that will come to define the tragedy; bodies falling through the air, black smoke blotting out Lower Manhattan, dust clouds racing down the streets.

  By the time I climb into my tent it’s nearly eleven. This is very late for the desert, where darkness rules and we’re usually in bed by half past nine, yet for once I can’t get to sleep. The arrival of the paragliders, with their papers and their magazines reminding us of where we came from and what we shall soon have to go back to, has broken the spell, compromised our isolation, drawn us back into the wider world just as it was becoming soothingly irrelevant. Much as we might want it otherwise, life in the desert is a diversion and the blazing skyline of New York is the reality.

  And that’s not all that’s keeping me awake. There are persistent scratchings on the side of my tent, as if the wind is blowing something against it. But there is no wind.

  Heart beating a little faster, I pull the zip open and peer out, but there’s nothing there, and indeed what could be there, in the middle of the Tenere? Apart from camels. Oh, and snakes. And scorpions. And gazelles. And paragliders.

  Day Sixty-Seven

  THE TENERE DESERT

  The noises in the night prove to have been the work of little black beetles, and judging by the network of tracks around my tent they had put in a full night’s work. There are over 350 species of black beetle in the Sahara, but I haven’t seen so many in one place since we watched the camel train come into Timbuktu. They bustle around as I pack, full of curiosity, wanting to get into everything, as they had presumably wanted to get into my tent last night. Nor was I the only one to have been kept awake by them. J-P, dark-eyed and dishevelled, became convinced that hyenas were prowling around and has barely slept a wink. I can understand it. In such a soundless environment the slightest noise can become weirdly amplified. And he had had a brandy or two.

  Renaud, whose speciality is aerial photography, is also up early to take advantage of the light at sunrise. Lashed to the wheel of his paraglider like some mediaeval penitent, he runs into the wind, but there isn’t enough to fill his parachute, and he has to keep on running, trying to find the elusive lifting breeze. He disappears behind a dune, engine revving away. There’s a pregnant pause, and a moment later the sound of an engine cutting out, followed by a short splintering crash.

  Renaud is fine, but his machine is a write-off. Later, Francois manages to get his craft airborne and the morning’s travelling is enlivened by his appearances over the dunes, sweeping down across the camel train, filming with one hand, steering with the other.

  To get the right pictures the camels have to be led backwards and forwards over the same ground, which emphasises how, in a way, things have changed. Omar and his team are following us instead of us following them. Whatever relationship I might have assumed I was forging with the Touareg has been subsumed by Western technology.

  In the evening I have one last meal with the cameleers. In a recklessly generous act of hospitality they cook the remaining sheep, preceded by a tasty mix of crusty-topped goat’s cheese and dates. We sit round the fire and go through my Touareg vocabulary for the last time.

  ‘Tagel-la.’ (Roars of laughter.) ‘Izot!”Issan!’

  As we raise our glasses of mint tea I teach Izambar some useful English in return.

  I advise him that the English say ‘Bottoms Up’ when they raise a glass.

  Izambar is a very quick learner, though his first faltering attempts - ‘Bott-erm erp’ - give me a chance to get back for all the Tagel-las.

  The main thing is that we laugh a lot. Almost like old friends.

  Day Sixty-Eight

  OUT OF THE TENERE DESERT

  Breakfast on the side of a long stony slope with no cover other than a few boulders. Ekawik, perhaps sensing my imminent departure, is very frisky and when Elias has finished loading him he breaks away, scattering his cargo and skipping about with joyful abandon. For his pains he gets a ticking off and a very severe kick up the bottom (not an easy thing to do to a camel).

  ‘Mediant. Tres mechant,’ mutters Omar, but he can’t help smiling.

  I want to give Omar something for his help and good company, but all he will take is my bottle of eye-drops. Eye problems are the most common complaint in his village and he will keep these till he gets back. It feels a pathetically inadequate thanks, but I think he has enjoyed himself. We have been on the move with the camel train for five days. They have adapted their movement to our own and would normally, by now, be over halfway to Bilma. As it is, we have moved only about 100 miles from the mountains. We must leave them to go on at their own pace and I must strike off, north, to the Algerian border.

  ALGERIA

  Day Sixty-Nine

  I-N-GUEZZAM

  I approach Algeria with a certain amount of trepidation. The second largest country in Africa, and the tenth largest in the world, has, since 1992, been sidelined to the fringes of the international community, a nation synonymous with trouble. Information is hard to find. My Lonely Planet guide apologetically devotes only ten pages to it. ‘Due to its continuing problems,’ they explain, ‘Algeria was the one African nation we were unable to visit.’

  The BBC advised against operating there, and the Foreign Office insisted that if we go we should take armed bodyguards. Even the artesian well at the border, marked so hopefully in blue on my Michelin map, has the word ‘sulfureuse’ alongside it.

  The country that fought a bloody civil war to win its independence from France in 1962 is currently involved in another, just as bloody, which began in 1992, when the military-dominated, socialist regime cancelled an election which they feared was going to be won by an Islamist opposition party. The opposition militarised itself as the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), and it is estimated that in less than ten years more than 100,000 people have died on both sides.

  Everyone tells me, however, that the worst of the trouble is confined to the north, where 85 per cent of the population lives. Everyone, that is, but the driver who is at this very moment carrying me across a swathe of flat, gritty desert (reg as opposed to erg) towards the border town of I-n-Guezzam.

  His small talk features mouth-drying accounts of the extreme lawlessness of the Sahara. Smuggling is a way of life. Mostly cigarettes, made illegally in Nigeria and brought north by the truckload. Governments have little influence in isolated areas still controlled by local warlords.

  Had I not heard of Mokhtar ben Mokhtar, alias Louar, the One-Eyed One?

  I shake my head, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il fait?’

  My driver can’t believe his luck. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il fait!’

  He’s stockpiled thousands of illegal weapons, stolen several hundred four-wheel drives and shot down an aircraft. He has a fleet of vehicles equipped with satellite navigation, armed with AK-47s and refuelled from dumps deep in the sand. An entire Dakar Rally had once been diverted to avoid going through his territory.

  ‘Which is where, exactly?’

  My driver gestures, a circular motion of the right hand that leaves little room for doubt. Wherever it was that Mokhtar ben Mokhtar operated, we’re in the middle of it.

  ‘I was told it was Islamic fundamentalists that stopped the Rally.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Mokhtar works for himself. And for the freedom of the South.’

  ‘South?’

  ‘Of Algeria.’

  The car slides to a halt.

  ‘There it is!’

  My driver points to two metal posts stuck in the sand.

  There always seems something faintly absurd about borders. One stone belonging to one government and the stone next to it belonging to another. In the immense void of the desert, marks of sovereignty seem gloriously
irrelevant. Yet here they are, confirmed in a plinth at the base of a 6-foot-high oval steel tube.

  ‘F. Algero-Nigerienne 27/11/1981’

  The clipped inscription has been crudely applied, picked out by a finger whilst the concrete was still wet.

  Next to it is a shorter triangular steel post, which my driver tells me is an upright for the palissade, a fence which the authorities hope will one day make this a serious border and stop the likes of Mokhtar ben Mokhtar treating Algeria’s desert like his own private fiefdom. This could be the fencing contract of all time. Algeria’s Saharan border is nearly 2000 miles long.

  There is one other marker at this desolate spot. It’s a small concrete trig point left behind by the French. Detailed measurements and the words ‘Nivellement General’ are inscribed in a clear, legible and ornate inscription. This was the work of people who intended to stay in Algeria for a long time.

  Near by, the shells of two abandoned cars lie in the sand, as if, like marathon runners breasting the tape, the effort of getting to the line was all they could manage. Jettisoned tyres, a carburettor and an un-rusted cylinder head are scattered about.

  Across the border our Algerian hosts wait to greet us. Said Chitour is a journalist from Algiers who has worked tirelessly for this day. He’s a stocky, busy man in his early forties, anxious and exuberant at the same time. With him is our security man, Eamonn O’Brien, with a broad smile and the reassuring physique of Action Man, and an assortment of uniformed attendants. Gendarmes in green, border police in black. All are armed. Said reminds us that no walkie-talkies or satellite phones are to be used while we are in Algeria. Security, he says, with a quick shrug and a smile, before turning to the drivers.

  ‘Come! We go!’ he shouts, a touch manically. Engines rumble into life and, accompanied by our substantial entourage, we head across the two or three miles of no-man’s-land that separates the end of Niger from the first town in Algeria.