It would be easy to misread this. Foucauld was a man of his time, and not of ours. He did not abandon his earlier spiritualism, but faced with the threat of national annihilation in Europe, he widened his perception of the path to salvation.
During the war Foucauld continued to live in a zeriba in Tamanrasset. Sensing the new vulnerability of their colonial masters, certain factions of the Tuaregs rebelled. Foucauld felt personally betrayed: how could these people, his brothers, have forgotten the love and understanding he had shown for them? The French army had stationed soldiers in the plains below the Hoggar Mountains, about thirty miles from Tamanrasset. Foucauld began to send them reports of the rebels’ activity. He offered them military advice. As the rebellion spread, he employed the locals to build him a little fort in Tamanrasset, into which reluctantly he moved. He saw the desert now in terms of good and bad Tuaregs. He encouraged the soldiers to exile, and in one case to execute, the natives who had gone wrong. But he tried still to live the life of a good Christian.
On the night of December 1, 1916, he was alone in his stronghold when someone knocked on the door. Foucauld asked who was there. A muffled voice answered that it was the army mail. Foucauld opened the door, stuck out his hand. He was yanked into captivity. Catholic texts still go wild over this treachery. In an otherwise contemplative biography published in 1972, one author wrote, “The leader of these rogues was that El Madden who had been particularly well cared for by Père de Foucauld. This Negro had a diabolical, degenerate appearance, for his skull and face looked as if they had been crushed, and he had hardly any nose.”
Foucauld was bound, and forced to kneel by the door while the fort was looted. The rebels carried off food, weapons, and ammunition, and scattered Foucauld’s precious manuscripts. There are several versions of the final moments, all Catholic. One has Foucauld answering the Tuaregs’ shouted interrogation in biblical language: “I say to you, unless the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, itself remaineth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life doth lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it into everlasting life.” Another version has Foucauld staring ahead in silent forgiveness, preparing to die for his murderers as Christ died for him. This fits. But it is of course also possible that Foucauld was silent because he was angry and upset.
Just then two soldiers, Saharans working for the French, happened to ride up on camels. The rebels ambushed and killed them both.
Foucauld may have tried to warn them. In the excitement his fifteen-year-old guard shot him in the head. Foucauld toppled into the ditch at the foot of the walls, and drifted out of Tamanrasset on the way to sainthood, a formal status he has now nearly attained.
After the war, the boy who shot Foucauld was captured and executed, as were five of his accomplices. The French built a larger fort beside the first one, and settled in to stay. The Tuaregs never did convert. But Foucauld’s hoped-for monastic order, a self-sacrificing group called the Little Brothers of Jesus, was founded in the Sahara in 1933, and joined later by an equally austere order of Little Sisters. When ugly El Madden was an old man, he was finally court-martialed, in Libya in 1944. Tamanrasset got a telegraph and an airport, and grew into a town. When tourism still flourished there, Catholic pilgrimages accounted for some of Tamanrasset’s prosperity. I remember the frustration of the Saharans who liked the business but still thought of Foucauld as an agent and a spy.
Today the two forts flank the town’s main street. The street is crooked, shaded, and lined with adobe buildings stained ochre, and backed by the clear sky. Black stone mountains mark the horizons. Every evening when the high-altitude air turns cool, people meet to stroll and to sit and talk in the cafes. Traders trade over sweet tea. African women in colorful print dresses balance baskets on their heads. Drafted soldiers walk in twos and threes, holding hands. Small stores sell clothes, hardware, and Tuareg jewelry. There is a well-kept marketplace, a movie theater, and an arcade outside the post office.
The style of the street is not entirely spontaneous. During the tourist boom, a German architect was brought in to spruce up the place. He stayed five years. Citizens now criticize his intrusions. Particularly galling to them is a garish administration building in mock-Saharan style, and a public square with cement columns that cast no shade. The centerpiece of the square, in this town without water, is a fountain. It has never been connected, and has slowly filled with garbage.
THE LOCAL ARCHITECT chosen to protect the city from such mistakes in the future is at thirty-eight one of the most admired men of Tamanrasset. His name is Salah Addoun. Tall and athletic, he has close-cropped black hair, dark Berber skin, and a charm that wins him many friends. He is not, however, a flexible person. Call him a traditionalist. By Western standards, he is a Muslim fundamentalist. I have known Addoun for years, and have listened carefully as he has grown more convinced with age.
I found him now with friends on a street near the center of town. We embraced, and he insisted that I stay with him at his uncle’s compound, as I had in the past. He asked neither why I had come to Tamanrasset, nor how long I would stay. I mentioned that I had arrived on the Safari. He made nothing of it. He hurried me to a wedding feast, where with other old acquaintances we talked through the night, waiting for word of the marriage’s consummation.
In the morning, as Addoun and I walked through town, I mentioned that I needed his help. I was headed south along the Trans-Saharan to Niger, but wanted first to make a side trip to the east into the remote deserts along the Libyan border, where the cliffs and overhangs hold one of the world’s great collections of Neolithic rock art—a half-million etchings and paintings chronicling 8,000 years of Saharan history.
Addoun looked worried. “I’ll take you instead to the rock paintings here, close by, tomorrow.”
I insisted on the east. “I thought you might know of someone headed over there.”
“You’ve heard about the Tuareg troubles?”
I nodded. “But in the other direction—toward Gao and Timbuktu.”
“We’ve had raids right up to the edge of Tamanrasset.”
“Who do they hit?”
He shrugged. The violence was opportunistic. Someone had been murdered out behind the airport. Someone had been robbed on the way out of town.
I said I did not intend to wander alone.
Addoun agreed to ask around for my ride.
It had been nearly two years since my last visit. Addoun was still waiting for the licenses that would allow him to open the town’s first independent architectural studio. In the meantime he worked for his uncle’s construction firm. He took me to his office to show me the drawings of a house in Tamanrasset he had designed for the Algerian consul to Agadez, Niger. The office was the same cement cubicle he had occupied before—a noisy, dusty room, with an inclined school desk, and a bare bulb. Interrupted often by questions from the yard crew, Addoun labored there without complaint. His designs were works of art—well proportioned, austere, built of stuccoed adobe, suited to the desert in which they stood. I sometimes thought he would succeed in Arizona or New Mexico—but then I thought better of it. We walked up the street to the house in progress, where he showed me a floor plan whose main purpose was gently to keep men and women apart.
Addoun was hardly a prude. In his younger years he had mixed with many women, romantic Europeans who used to fly to Tamanrasset to make love in the desert with desert men. “Ah,” he said to me, laughing, “if the stones could talk!”
But he had since become sterner. Late in the afternoon, we brewed tea in the desert outside of town. The marriage of the night before was working on him. He said, “These weddings are not trivial affairs.”
“You look concerned, Salah.”
He studied the horizon. “There is always the worry that the bride has already lost her virginity. No matter what the families believe, you can never be sure until the wedding night.”
“Does it sometimes happen that
she is not a virgin?”
“Oh yes, it happens.”
“And then?”
“It’s very serious. The marriage may be off. Did you see how nervous the bridegroom was last night?”
I said I had not. “He was worried about his bride?”
Addoun nodded. “His friends spent the ceremony trying to keep his courage up. He had other worries too, of course. For the bridegroom there is also the pressure to please his new wife, to perform before the night is over.”
“Does it happen that he can’t?”
“There are weddings where the families have to wait for two or even three days.”
Addoun had all that to look forward to. He had found a future wife for himself, a distant cousin who lived with her parents in In Salah, and he had gone through the difficult business of negotiating a formal engagement, but as a proud man he wanted to start his own studio and build a proper house before the wedding. He kept waiting for the architectural license.
“My fiancée understands,” Addoun said. “I’m lucky. she is very patient, and writes to me regularly.”
“I’m sure,” I answered carefully.
To my surprise he took out his wallet, and plucked out a snapshot of her—a young and pleasant-looking woman, with curled hair and an open smile.
I nodded without comment.
Addoun put the picture away and mentioned that he had never showed it to anyone before. He called me his brother, and invited me in advance to his wedding. I accepted awkwardly, knowing I might never meet his bride or learn her name.
He called me his brother, but knew I was not. My awkwardness may have sounded like criticism to him. He was a sensitive man. He wanted to admit our differences, but on safer ground. So he told me the story of a political scandal that had rocked Tamanrasset when the provincial government, in a belated attempt to encourage tourism, had commissioned a statue of a Tuareg warrior for the entrance to town. Addoun and others on Tamanrasset’s architectural committee had objected to the plan. The government had built the statue’s foundation anyway. Rallying support from the citizens, the committee had taken to the streets. Faced with more serious rebellions, the government had backed down.
Addoun knew I would ask why he had bothered. He explained it was because of the Islamic proscription of statues—a tradition whose origin is Mohammed’s crusade against idol worship in heathen Arabia.
“But this was a statue of a Tuareg,” I said. “What connection to idolatry did it have?”
Addoun answered, “You understand, our traditions run deep.”
ADDOUN AND I spent the evening with friends, watching television in the open courtyard of his uncle’s compound. We sprawled on pillows and chewed oranges. An American movie, dubbed in French, showed a bikini-clad actress on a California beach. I asked Addoun what he thought, was she a whore to exhibit herself?
He grinned at me. “Why, because of the bathing suit?”
“Your Islam would ban them.”
“For our women, not for yours.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference, my dear friend, is purely cultural.”
Later, maybe to change the subject, he said, “You can tell an American movie by the cars.”
I pointed to the screen. “That’s a Volkswagen.”
“It’s how they show the cars—they advertise them. You wait, there’ll be a car chase.”
There was.
He said, “In French movies, they advertise food. There’s always a scene where they’re eating dinner.”
He thought for a while. “In Arab movies, they show weddings.”
It was not a happy evening. Addoun’s neighbor had died in the desert. He was a young man named Boucenna, who caught a ride with a driver heading south down the Trans-Saharan for Niger. Near the border, the car broke down. The driver hitched a ride with a passing truck and returned to Tamanrasset to fetch a part, leaving Boucenna to guard the car. Boucenna knew the desert. He had water, and should have been comfortable. But after only a few hours alone, he set off on foot. He walked twelve miles before he collapsed of thirst and died.
“He must have panicked,” I said.
Addoun shook his head. “Boucenna was not a coward. And he was not stupid. But for every man there are two times that are inescapable—the time of birth and the time of death. Boucenna walked because his time had come.”
I balked. “You mean death is everyone’s destination.”
“I mean there is a time, and it is predetermined.”
We left it at that, unresolved, because faith defies argument. The world is not as small as it appears on television.
Addoun’s own father died in the desert. He was a native of In Salah, an Air France ticket agent who turned against the French and was imprisoned by them during the war for independence. In 1962, as a free man again, he set off from In Salah with five friends, all experienced desert travelers, to drive to an oasis two days away. The route was unmarked; they missed their destination, realized they were lost, and kept driving until they ran out of gas. Addoun’s father wrote farewells on his chèche. He survived a month, and was the last to succumb to his thirst. The next day the bodies were discovered. Addoun was six.
So Addoun was the desert’s child. He grew up in an overwhelming land, and began to travel himself. Once he set out on a trip at sunset, to avoid the heat of day. After a full night of driving he came to some lights, and found himself back where he had started. He concluded that God did not choose for him to die just then. If that seems hard to understand, you might try substituting the word Sahara for God.
More recently Addoun was a passenger in a desert taxi heading across the sands, southwest bound from El Golea to a village called El Homr. After a while one of the passengers said to the driver, “Where are you going?”
“To El Homr.”
The passenger said, “No, El Homr is toward that star there.” He pointed to the left. The driver was unsure. The passenger took the wheel and followed the star to safety.
These are the skills of the nomad, and they require an encyclopedic knowledge of the land and stars. An old Saharan explained it to me this way: “Yes, by the stars at night. In daylight, by local knowledge of the desert—this soil, this tree, this ruin, these tracks, these shadows before sunset. It is passed down from father to son, and spoken of among friends.” We were discussing the way across a thousand miles of open desert, where a compass is of little help, and mistakes are all the more dangerous because they are not obvious at first.
Even along the main desert routes, navigation is a worry. The tracks are braided, eroded, obscured by dirt and sand. The braiding occurs when one driver gets stuck, and other drivers detour around the signs of softness, making new tracks. Still others follow, mire down in turn, and pick new ways through. The Oregon Trail once braided the same way. In the Sahara every truck, every car, every motorcycle leaves its trace. People take shortcuts. People take long cuts. People go wildly wrong. This repeats itself over the years until the routes consist of ill-defined bands of crisscrossing tire marks, perhaps twenty miles wide. Bandits, smugglers, and army patrols leave their tracks, too. Intersecting routes lead off to unknown destinations. Seen from the air, the tracks might make sense; on the ground they can become hopelessly confusing. People follow them until they die.
Concerned about the number of drivers lost in the desert, the Algerian government marked the main routes with metal pylons every ten kilometers. Ten kilometers is about six miles, a long way, and drivers still get lost. For marking the Trans-Saharan south of Tamanrasset the government decided on something more certain, since this is the route that causes the most trouble. It is where Addoun’s neighbor Boucenna died. For 260 miles it descends across infernal badlands to the border with Niger. There are no wells, and few natural landmarks. Drivers take days to negotiate it.
During my first visit to Tamanrasset, the route had just been marked with 451 white concrete pillars, one for every kilometer from Tamanras
set to the border. Addoun’s uncle won the contract, and gave the project to his nephew. It was spring. Addoun left Tamanrasset on foot, followed by a three-man crew in a Land Cruiser carrying supplies and topographic charts. Over two weeks he walked the entire distance, surveying thirty kilometers a day and driving stakes at the prescribed intervals. He did this as casually as others might go for a weekend stroll, without photographers or expedition flags. After driving the stakes he returned to Tamanrasset, gathered a larger crew, and set off in trucks carrying steel molds. Pouring the concrete took an additional three months.
Thinking of his father, I asked him then if the walking had been a pilgrimage of sorts.
He smiled and said he had needed the exercise.
I asked if his markers would make the driving easy.
He said no, he was not a dreamer. Smugglers and adventurers would still get lost. People would take shortcuts, break down, and get stuck. The tracks would braid.
THOSE WERE TAMANRASSET’S last tourist years. For a while there was even a once-weekly flight directly from Paris. Most of the visitors were French. Addoun quietly resented them. He told me that the memories of the war were still too fresh. But in fact he had more recent reasons: he read back copies of Le Monde, and watched French television, and saw the French loathing of Algerians. He heard panel discussions in which his religious beliefs were openly despised and feared. He read accounts in which Algerian immigration was depicted as an assault on the French soul.
In bitterness he said to me, “The French occupied us for a hundred and thirty-two years. We’ve had only thirty-two years since independence. That gives us another century to occupy them.”
As an army officer, he had gone to visit friends in Paris and Marseilles. I saw pictures of him on the trip, standing upright in a jacket and tie, looking like an Arab sophisticate. He told me about staying with Parisian acquaintances on Isle St. Louis in an elegant town house with linen napkins and fawning servants. The luxury offended his Spartan tastes. “What do they do in those bathrooms?” he asked me.
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