The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  She could not help but wonder: was Amastan another such monster? Had he, possessed by djenoun, killed his beloved? She did not want to find out; and yet she had to know.

  Rahma took her to her tent. It was a fine affair, made from more than a hundred goatskins.

  ‘I brought it with me when I divorced Moussa ag Iba,’ she said, before Mariata could ask. ‘That, twelve-year-old Amastan and one old donkey, long since dead. The damned marabout ruled that I must give my bride-wealth back, although it was my right to keep it. He told me it was God’s burden to me to endure Moussa taking a second wife, that I was in the wrong to divorce him over such a small thing. I showed him the bruises on my arms and legs; he just smiled and said sometimes men have to beat their wives to teach them proper behaviour. Since that time I have returned to the old ways. The marabout is dead now; and Moussa’s gut gives him great pain, I hear.’

  Mariata stared at her. ‘You cursed him?’

  ‘I cursed them both. It’s just that Moussa was always such a strong man. He’s held on a long time.’

  Something inside Mariata shuddered. ‘If you can manipulate the spirits, why can’t you save Amastan?’

  Rahma gave a bitter little smile. ‘There is balance in the universe: I think this is the spirits’ way of teaching me that.’

  For a little time each day over the next few days Mariata put on a white robe and head cloth that Tana lent her – for luck and to balance out the blackness inside Amastan – and went to sit with him, making quiet poetry at first in her head, and then out loud. He did not seem to mind her presence; indeed, he did not seem to take any notice of her at all. There were no tears, no heart-stopping glances and no sign of the spirits that possessed him. If he heard her poems and stories, he did not betray any response to them; after a while she found his presence restful; inspirational, even. Soon she was making some of the best poems she had made in her life, manipulating the words, forming them into intricate acrostics with the power to trap magic between their lines. Some she scratched on the ground with a stick, but mainly she kept them in her head. None seemed to have any effect on the patient.

  Each day, she took away untouched the food she had brought for him the day before. How could he live without eating? He must, she thought, be fuelled by other means, by something unnatural, maybe even unholy. Then one day she found the bowl overturned, the milk soaking into the earth. This was taboo and surely evidence of the spirits’ work. She scratched charms in a circle around the bowl to try to cancel out the malign influences.

  A few days later her period started. A marabout would have banished her to her tent, but Rahma laughed. ‘You’re at your most powerful now: blood is stronger than the power of the spirits.’ And indeed when she took Amastan that day’s bowl of milk and rice he picked it up from the ground and ate it. But he did so with the fingers of his left hand, which was an abhorrence.

  All the while he kept his right hand curled closed and she noticed that when she looked at it, the knuckles whitened, as if he clenched it harder.

  One day, inspired by the ancient inscriptions on the rocks where she and Rahma had passed the last night of their journey before entering the village, Mariata made this poem, and started to recite it aloud:

  Daughters of our tents, daughters of Moussa

  Think of the evening of our departure

  The saddles of the women lie ready on the camels

  The women are coming now, stately in their robes

  Amongst them is Amina, with her eyes shining

  And Houna, a new scarf upon her head.

  Beautiful Manta, as fresh as a seedling palm …

  ‘No!’

  His cry was ear-splitting, heart-rending. Mariata leapt to her feet, suddenly terrified to see Amastan’s face contorted in some terrible excess of emotion. She half expected to see fangs spring from his mouth, claws from his hands, fur to push through his skin, but once the cry had escaped him he seemed exhausted and sank in on himself. He opened his right hand and she saw a glimpse of the object inside it.

  ‘Manta, oh, Manta,’ he whispered, or at least that was what Mariata thought she heard. Eyes closed in anguish, he pressed the thing in his hand against his forehead.

  It was an amulet, she saw, a solid square of metal with a raised central boss embellished by circles of carnelian and bands of etched patterns. Something had dried all over it, like rust.

  9

  I had a lot of vacation days to take: I’d not used up my holiday allowance in over three years. In some trepidation I went to the senior partner and asked if I might take a six-week sabbatical, three weeks unpaid. To my shame, I used the excuse of my father’s death as my reason for wanting such a long break: there was so much to do to get the house ready for sale, and after that I would need a change of scene.

  Richard agreed with an alacrity that was almost insulting.

  I felt guilty; but then I would look at the box and feel the anticipation rising up inside me again. I was going to Africa, following what my father had called ‘waymarkers’ on the path of my life: I was going to take the amulet back to the continent from which it had come and stir up that sleeping beast. I had looked up Abalessa in an atlas and found it marked as a tiny place in the south of Algeria. Morocco–Algeria; Tafraout–Abalessa. On the grand scale of the dark continent the distance between these places didn’t look too formidable. With three weeks at our disposal Eve and I could head south into the Sahara on the road trip to end all road trips.

  I was impatient to get started; but impatient in the same way I had been when faced with exams. I wanted them to start, so that I could stop worrying about them, wanted to be in the midst of the experience instead of building it up into a worse nightmare than it needed to be. In truth, all I wanted was to stop thinking.

  I threw my untapped energy at the problem of getting the house sold and devoted myself to the reams of red tape, the endless useless reports, guarantees and documents that new legislation had made necessary. I had the collectibles valued and taken to be auctioned, and a clearance firm came in and took the rest. I appointed an agent and listened to her tales of woe about the state of the housing market, about the need to ‘dress’ the house in a more modern style to attract the ‘right sort’ of buyer, to hire in furniture and pot plants and spray fake coffee and bread smells about the place before viewings. ‘Is there a sun-warmed cut grass scent we can spray about the garden?’ I asked sarcastically, as we stood in drizzle gazing out over the bramble-grown wilderness that had once been the site of the vegetable patch, and watched as she digested this suggestion. ‘What a good idea,’ she said thoughtfully, and got out her notebook and wrote it down, oblivious to my incredulous stare.

  On the day we were due to fly I awoke at five in the morning, sweating and crying out because I had been left under the burning desert sun, too weak even to crawl towards the far-off gleam of water. I sat up in bed, my heart thudding. Now, where had that come from? Was it a displacement dream prompted by my fear of flying, or something even less explicable? I tried not to think about either possibility, and by the time I had packed the amulet and the other contents of the box carefully into my handbag alongside my passport the sensation had been replaced by a distinct sense of anticipation.

  We were not the only climbers heading for Morocco, it seemed. In the check-in queue at Gatwick, punctuating the usual mixture of sun-seeking tourists and families with wailing children, there were four or five teams porting climbing sacks, rope-bags, even a bouldering mat or two. They were mostly in their twenties and looked painfully young to me, in their frayed Fat Face jeans and colourful fleeces, the girls with pale, dreadlocked hair, the boys with leather bracelets. We manoeuvred our trolley into line and Eve’s sack promptly tumbled off with a rich clank on to the concrete floor. All the gear was in it, packed down tight: it weighed a ton. She hauled it upright and was trying to muscle it back on to the cart when a young man swooped in and effortlessly swung it up into place, then turned and smiled at us. He had a
broad, pleasant face, sandy hair and a lazy eye, yet the combination was somehow piratical. ‘Hiya, I’m Jez,’ he said in a broad Sheffield accent. ‘We saw you arrive and said: climbers! Just like that. Could tell from the way you moved. Didn’t we, Miles?’

  His companion was a year or two older and more smartly turned out. He nodded, a little shy, not much wanting to engage. ‘The rucksacks were a bit of a giveaway.’

  Jez had obviously taken a bit of a shine to Eve. ‘Going to Tafraout?’

  Eve grinned, and you could see he was dazzled, and why. ‘Sure. Are you?’

  ‘Of course. Best place in the world to climb at this time of year, and a lot less of a hassle than the rest of Morocco.’

  ‘Well, there were those carpet touts,’ Miles reminded him. ‘Desperate to get us in their shop, they were. Chased us up the street!’

  Jez laughed. ‘Yeah, dressed as Tuaregs. They were no more Tuareg than you or me. Still, it was a nice carpet. Put it in my room: reminds me of Morocco every day.’

  They were easy company; we sat and had a coffee in one of the cafés in Departures and swapped tales of climbs we’d enjoyed, crags we liked, epics we’d had and avoided, falls taken and held. In no time we were on the plane and I’d had no opportunity to obsess over my horror of flying.

  A short-haul flight may pass in the blink of an eye to the seasoned traveller who isn’t terrified of falling out of the sky in a blaze of aviation fuel; but for those of us who play this image on an unending loop, time becomes torturously subjective, minutes stretching out into infinite panic with every lurch and bump; and, whatever airlines may believe, the truly flight-phobic remain undistracted by the relentless round of drinks and duty-free trolleys. ‘Honestly,’ Eve said, watching my knuckles whitening as I alternately flexed and balled my hands, ‘how you can nervelessly tackle an unprotected 5c slab and get so terrified just sitting on a plane is quite beyond me. Here, read the guidebook: it’ll take your mind off things.’

  As Jez and Miles had said, there were acres of rock to be climbed around Tafraout, thousands of routes and thousands more waiting to be charted. I distracted myself by working through the guidebook, selecting likely targets, but time after time I came back to the photograph of the crag known as ‘Assgaour; or, the Lion’s Head’ with its strange, iconic face. The route up the nose of the Lion would have to be done: I could feel it in my bones. It kept staring back at me, a challenge, a rite of passage into the heart of Africa. I touched the amulet in my pocket and the fears receded. Even when I heard the crunch and grind of the landing gear as we began our descent into Agadir, I did not immediately think of freefall and fireballs, but tucked the climbing guide calmly into my bag and did not tense at all when the wheels hit the tarmac.

  At the airport everyone else’s hire cars appeared to have turned up except for mine and Eve’s. Disorientated after the long immigration check, we stood outside the terminal building in the baking sun while Eve called the number she had scribbled in the back of her diary, got a series of loud beeps and no dial tone, and had to experiment several times with codes until eventually she managed to get a response and explained in her mangled French that our car had not turned up. The woman on the other end of the line said something back to her and her face contorted with horror. ‘Plus lentement!’ she wailed, and thrust the phone at me. In the course of a long and convoluted conversation it transpired that somehow when making the booking, by phone, long distance, Eve had managed to order the car for midnight, rather than midday. Midi, minuit. I sighed. Eve thought it was hilarious; except that it turned out they had no cars available until the evening. Eve looked at me, stricken and remorseful, as I relayed this piece of unwelcome information.

  ‘Hey, girls!’

  A silver-blue Peugeot 206 had pulled up below us. Miles was driving it; Jez had wound down the window and was grinning at us.

  ‘Come with us!’

  I waved them away. ‘No, honestly, it’s fine. We’ve got a car, it’s just going to be a bit late arriving.’ A bit late … as in eight hours away.

  But Jez was already out of the Peugeot, stowing Eve’s rucksack with some difficulty in the already laden boot, and Eve was climbing into the back seat.

  ‘Hey!’ I called to her. ‘We’re going to need our own vehicle, you know, for the Sahara.’

  She looked back over her shoulder. ‘We can always pick one up later in Tafraout.’

  I shrugged, apologized to the woman at the hire car company and followed Eve into the crush of rucksacks in the back of the tiny car.

  ‘It might be a bit cosy,’ Miles said reluctantly, sounding as if he wasn’t entirely thrilled at the prospect of being lumbered with us, but he soon warmed up as we drove through a small town thronged with every imaginable sort of traffic: buses, cars, scooters, bicycles, donkey carts, all travelling at variable speeds and unpredictable trajectories, with hundreds of pedestrians thrown into the mix, all trying to cross the road at unsuitable points, even stopping and chatting with drivers and donkey carters en route. There were men in long robes with characterful faces of walnut-coloured skin and a mass of wrinkles; veiled women; children in pastel-coloured playsuits; girls in white school overalls or jeans and colourful headscarves. Horns sounded constantly; people shouted, laughed, whistled; donkeys brayed. Arabic music blared out of a rusty Mercedes that veered perilously close when it overtook us on the inside, the high-pitched voice of a female singer threading reedily through a thump of drums.

  We passed rows of lock-up shops: grocers and paint shops, mechanics, hardware stores, bakeries, carpet shops; shops with mattresses, rolled mats, white plastic garden furniture or tyres piled up outside on the pavement; and one shop that apparently sold only painted blue metal wheelbarrows. I turned to point this oddity out to my companions, only to spot on the opposite side of the road a mule drawing a long cart bearing the eviscerated, cut-down carcase of an old Dacia car. A man sat on the bonnet, on some sort of makeshift seat, twitching the reins; behind him, sitting in state within the body of the car, were three black-robed, veiled women. I half expected them to wave formally to the crowds, revealing long white gloves, like the Queen.

  ‘Look!’ I cried, but Miles had his eyes fixed on the road ahead, trying to avoid hitting the myriad obstacles in our path, and Jez and Eve were engrossed in a heated debate about a band I’d never heard of. By the time they looked away from one another the hybrid carriage and its occupants were far behind us, replaced by a parade of municipal buildings, a sentry point manned by armed, uniformed men and the long ochre walls of a fort that managed to look both ancient and modern at the same time.

  After this, the countryside began to roll past: acres of agricultural land devoted to crops grown beneath polytunnels and bird-netting; fields of chilli plants and banana palms, olive groves, orange and lemon trees, palms bearing heavy clusters of dates. The landscape opened out, became drier and redder. A group of women in robes of purple, yellow and black stood out vividly against the dusty orange of the soil they worked. Prickly pears, cactus and thorn bushes formed natural hedges between fields where shepherds sat in the shade beneath solitary trees, watching as flocks of skinny sheep and black-haired goats foraged for whatever they could find. A ghostly interzone, where everything – trees, rocks, road and fields – was covered in white dust, marked the transition between the seaboard and the uplands. Just after a sign for the Atlas Quarry, where a huge hill of white stone had been eaten away on two sides as if by two rival giants trying to scoff the lot, we took a turning off the main road and started the long climb towards the haze of blue mountains on the horizon.

  In first and second gear the Peugeot ground its way through a series of narrow and vertiginous switchbacks. The views were so stunning and the potential for disaster so great that at last everyone stopped talking except to remark on the dizzying drop falling away to our right. ‘How on earth do cars pass each other on a road like this?’ Eve asked, appalled, and at that moment a tall, unsteadily laden truck garlanded with good l
uck charms and painted with garish scenes of palm trees and camels came careening around the corner towards us and we quickly found out: you veered off the road into whatever nook in the cliff face you could find in order to avoid oncoming traffic, or you were likely to find yourselves in a head-on collision with someone who believed more in fate than in careful driving. In the back of the car, my foot stamped down hard on a phantom brake pedal.

  ‘Eh, that were fucking close!’ Jez turned to survey us.

  I tried to divert myself from doubts about my life being in Miles’s hands by devoting myself to correlating the landscape with the map of the area I had bought from Stanfords in Covent Garden. It had been printed in Morocco and looked nothing like the Ordnance Survey maps I was used to. The scale was off, the colours different, the roads hard to make out against the contouring of the terrain, and some of the Berber place names were so exotic that I could not even begin to form the sound of them in my head: Imi Mqourn, Ida Ougnidif and Tizg Zaouine. After a while the sheer bleak romance of the landscape and the luxury of being able to pay attention to its jagged skyline, eroded massifs, stone-walled terraces and dry watercourses lined with almond trees, instead of having to concentrate on the road, began to seduce and calm me. I had not expected Morocco to be so beautiful – although its beauty belonged not to the lexicon of soft green curves and planes of the English countryside but to a harsh, wild, rugged idiom. The people who lived here would be harsh and wild and rugged too, I thought then; they would have to be in order to survive in such a place.