by Vi Grim
‘The fair trade salt makes money. We’ll carry some on the trip back. It sells for a fortune in little shops in London and Paris. Algeria will be the perfect spot for trading.’
‘Smuggling!’ Emily corrected him, giving him a poke in the ribs.
‘Trading,’ said Zula. ‘We love it. We’re the most important camel train ever. We could change the history of the world. If we cross the desert we’ll have our land in Algeria and all the camels we want.’
‘It’s that long skinny thing that was in the box, isn’t it? That’s why we have the Desert Riders for security.’
‘I’ve said too much,’ said Zula, looking sheepish. ‘Don’t ask again or say anything. Promise me. They’ll cut my tongue out, even if I am Son of Asharif.’
‘I don’t promise no one nothing,’ said Emily. ‘But I won’t say anything.’ While there were some people she’d love to see with their tongues cut out, Zula wasn’t one of them. She liked him. It was a good time to change the subject.
‘Are you Muslim?’ she asked.
‘Sort of, are you Christian?’
‘I suppose I am. We used to get dressed up in our tidy clothes every Sunday morning and go to church. It was really boring. We weren’t allowed to talk and had to sit on hard wooden benches for hours listening to a man droning on about heaven and hell. I went to Sunday school once and we made halos out of coat hangers and tinsel and ran around being saints and healing people and walking across the frozen puddles. It was fun. I fell in and got my tidy clothes all muddy.
‘Then something happened. There were stories in the paper about bad men in the Church doing the things they don’t talk about with the choirboys. They talked to a man on tele that said that his life had been ruined and wanted the priests to be locked up in prison. He lives just down the street and has gnomes. There’s one fishing and a fat one with his head broken off. We don’t go to church no more. Now Sunday mornings are fun; we sleep in and are woken up by sizzling and the smell of frying bacon. We have a big breakfast and all do the quiz in the Sunday paper together.’
‘What does bacon taste like?’
‘It’s yummy, we have bacon butties. You ain’t had bacon?’
‘Muslims don’t eat bacon, it’s not allowed. Not that we’re very Muslim, we don’t pray five times a day like the Desert Riders; only when it suits, like when we visit towns, or if we get lost and don’t know what to do. There’s magic in the desert; there’s spirits and gods, you can feel them, they’re watching.’
Emily got that feeling that she was being watched and looked around to see the purple blob of Gamel looking her way.
She shuddered; the hippo gave her the creeps.
15.
Emily was singing again. She sings when she’s happy; badly and out of tune! When hitting her didn’t work, Zula suggested that she did her poo picking somewhere else, like a good distance behind the caravan. So she dropped back a camel length, sung loudly and threw lumps of warm camel dung at him.
When she bored of this she walked along silently for a couple of hours thinking about all the things Zula said, then called out to him, ‘So you never went to school then?’
He dropped back beside her so they could talk, ‘Sometimes we do a bit when we stop in the hot summer months, but there were no proper schools in Azawagh; they burned them down. I did my schooling with the caravan, mathematics and verb tenses when we were going along then writing when we stopped.’
‘I love the writing here, it sort of flows.’
‘We don’t write backwards like you,’ he said, smiling. ‘So I learned to read and write, do mathematics and speak four languages. What else could school teach me that I don’t learn in the real world? The desert is a great teacher.’
‘But you’re only twelve,’ said Emily. ‘At home we go to school until we are eighteen, and then go to university.’
‘But what do they teach you?’
‘I’ve got no idea. Dad goes on and on about it. He says that when most people leave school they cannot add except on a calculator and can only speak one language badly - English! Then he grumbles about having to pay for them with his taxes.’
If you’d asked Emily to describe the Sahara Desert three months before, she would have said that there was nothing there but sand and camel dung. If she drew a picture of it, she might have drawn a dune and a small oasis with a palm tree. The reality was like a thousand times, the beauty, the incredible expanse, the nothingness of it all, yet at the same time it was full of life.
Two weeks out of Taoudenni, she saw huge three toed footprints. ‘What are they?’ she asked Ijju.
‘Ostrich and they’re fresh. Watch!’
Moments later a large gawky looking bird, like something from a cartoon, came striding over the dune being chased by the Desert Riders. One of the horsemen galloped up and jumped onto the giant bird’s back, clinging to its neck. It stumbled, looked around in surprise and shot off at full speed with the Rider struggling to keep his hold. He slipped and was dangling by one hand like he was going to fall off. The caravan yelled and hollered as the bird stopped and pulled back its head to peck him. The Rider flipped back up and swung his double bladed sword just as it struck. The bird dodged his blade and pecked him in the ribs sending him sprawling to the ground, then lifted its powerful leg to kick him.
Bang! Bang!
Feathers flew and the big bird toppled over.
‘Yes,’ cried Ijju. ‘The ostrich won!’
‘It didn’t look like it to me,’ said Emily.
‘It did, it did!’ said Ijju. ‘It would have killed him if they didn’t shoot it.’
There was a jingle of coins changing hands.
‘For the man to win he must cut off the bird’s head then stay on the headless ostrich until it runs out of steam. It’s very funny; they run willy-nilly all over the place.’
‘Yuck!’ said Emily. It sounded wonderfully horrible and gory.
‘Well,’ said Ijju, ‘at least the ostrich lives wild and free and has a chance. They would have let this one go if it didn’t go to kick the rider. What about the meat you eat, where does it come from and how did it die?’
Emily wondered; it was something she’d never thought about. Meat came all neatly wrapped in plastic in the fridge section of the supermarket. Old people went to the butcher’s shop and he cut up the meat with his chopper and wrapped it in paper then it bled in their shopping trundlers as they walked home in the rain.
The ostrich was chopped up; nothing was wasted, even the bones were boiled up for soup. Emily played with the big feathers, messing them up then zipping the little bits back up tidy again then she stuck them in her scarf and was an Indian.
16.
The nearer the caravan got to Timbuktu, the more plants, animals and people there were. Roosters announced the arrival of day, then stood guard over their hens as they scratched for bugs in the dust; birds twittered and chirped in tall prickle trees, flitting out to catch flies as the caravan passed; smiling herdsmen leaning on wonky sticks, watched over noisy flocks of goats; old women sat in the doorways of little red-brown houses that seemed to grow out of the ground they were built on.
There was an air of expectancy in the caravan as they headed back to civilization.
Saleem came to the back of the caravan where Emily was busy picking poo. With more food for the camels, production was up.
‘We’ll pass through Timbuktu. I’d like you to see it but you must behave. You have a choice, either we can knock you out with chloroform again, or we can gag you, wrap your tagelmust up tight to hide you face, and you can see the sights.’
‘Gag me.’
‘You must promise to behave,’ he said, looking Emily in the eye.
‘I will, I promise,’ she said. So much for not promising nothing to no one, but she really wanted to see Timbuktu.
What an arrival in Timbuktu it was. Being the first camel train of the season to arrive carrying salt, the wh
ole town had come to greet them. Chocolate people in colourful clothes lined the streets; hung out of windows and waved from rooftops. The town was made of low mud-poo houses with tall towers, prickly like hedgehogs, reaching up into the sky.
They passed the busy Kasbah; its stalls piled high with bright fruit and vegetables, and came to a halt in the salt market. While the men bartered over the price of salt with eager merchants, Saleem took Zula and Emily on a tour of the town to deliver salt blocks to the miners’ houses.
The caravan set up camp by the River Niger, planning to rest for a couple of weeks so the camels could regain their strength eating the lush grass. The Desert Riders with their swords and long rifles kept a close guard on the camp and called up by radio if a camel strayed or there were unexpected visitors. The river was busy. Beat-up ferries, belching smoke, putted across carrying people; fishermen standing in small canoes, deftly threw nets, then hauled them in full of wriggling silver fish; and trading boats with large patchwork sails sewn together from old sacks, carried away cargoes of fruit, fish and salt to unknown destinations.
The Scorpions fished in the river for huge carp and played football with a ball that arrived floating down the river. Emily helped with the washing and did her usual duties of poo picking and drying.
At night, there was music and dancing, and stories were told around the fire, the storyteller’s face lit up orange by the flickering light of the flames as she described every little detail, transporting Emily into a world of legends and fables. There were tales of desert spirits and of Zerzura, the lost oasis city that stood dazzling white in the desert sun, a carved bird guarding its gate. Emily’s favourite was the legend of the desert, about a pyramid hidden in the shifting sands that housed the Book of Light. Legend had it that there was a key to the book that gave the holder power to do good or evil, power to control the oceans and the weather, power to wipe out civilizations. Two mythical creatures, a Suez dog and a cagoon cat were linked to the book and each other. Like good and evil they couldn’t exist without each other yet were caught in an eternal battle, each one fighting for his corner.
The pyramid was lost in the sands in Gweni-Fada, a meteorite crater in the hills of northern Sudan. Sometimes the very top was uncovered by the desert winds and paw prints seen in the sand. Those who had tried to reach the book had been swallowed up by the quick sands or whisked away by tornadoes, never to be seen again. ‘I’ve seen the cagoon paw prints with my own eyes,’ said the old lady telling the story.
‘It sounds like all darkness and no light,’ Emily said to Ijju.
‘The book is not all bad. If you opened it with good intentions in your heart you could make great things happen, the trouble is that it’s only evil people who have sought it.’
Yuba arrived back at the camp one evening with a beautiful book of colour photos of the desert. The guards suspected he’d stolen it and bought him to see Saleem.
Saleem asked, ‘Yuba, did you steal this book?’
‘Yes and no,’ answered Yuba, scratching his ear.
‘Yes or no?’
‘Well, yes.’
Saleem batted Yuba flying with the back of his hand. ‘You know the punishment for stealing is to have your right hand cut off. You won’t be much use to the caravan with one hand. You take the book back and offer then some salt for good will.’
Saleem flicked through the book. Emily glimpsed wonderful photos of ripples in the sand and golden camels with long shadows crossing the dunes.
‘They don’t see the best of it,’ said Saleem. ‘Those photographers fly down for a week, click, click, click, take a few snapshots and are gone. You have to live in the desert, be here twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year to capture the really magical moments.’
‘Well,’ said Emily. ‘Why don’t you get a camera and capture those moments!’
‘Will you teach me to use it?’
‘Deal!’
The next day Saleem had a camera, a top quality weather and dust proof camera. Tough is not tough enough for the desert so a housing was bought and extra batteries, memory cards, a tripod and a solar charger. Apparently it cost Saleem one of his best camels; he’s not a man to do things by half measures. Emily read the manual and practiced taking photos of crocodiles hiding in the reeds and the riverboats with their sails billowing in the wind.
Saleem loved the solar charger. ‘This,’ he said, caressing it with his hand, ‘is the future of the Sahara. This is our future: energy, electricity, power!’
Zula arrived back from town with two little packets all wrapped up in crinkly red paper. ‘Merry Christmas!’ he said with a beaming smile, giving one to Emily and the other to Ijju.
‘Thanks!’ said Emily. ‘Is it really Christmas?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Zula. ‘I think it’s in a few days’ time.’
Ripping off the paper they found small leather pouches, each containing a lovely little diary and some colour pencils and pens. Zula had written something in Tuareg script inside the front cover of Emily’s but wouldn’t tell her what it said. Ijju and Emily sat by the river and sketched the birds and boats. Then they sewed little pockets on the inside of the tents they were wearing to keep their diaries safe.
Zula bought himself a cell phone.
‘Who are you going to call?’ asked Emily.
‘My mum. When we’ve finished the trip I’ll have enough money to buy her one too. Then we can talk.’
Cute!
‘Can I play games on it?’ asked Emily, coming up with a plan.
‘No!’ he said, shaking his head, and running away.
Emily sat by the river and thought of her mum and dad, Danny and Julie, and Annie. She thought of Christmas and of how the house would look with all the twinkling lights around the windows and in the garden, and of the Christmas tree with its decorations and the presents piled up under it. She wondered if there was one with her name on it. Did they miss her like she missed them?
I bet they do. I’ll escape and turn up for Christmas and surprise them. I’ll walk across the front lawn, making footprints in the soft snow, and peek in the window and see them all sitting around the table eating yummy Christmas things. Then I’ll knock on the door.
A tear rolled down her cheek and splashed into the water, making little circles.
17.
The hippo had bought a cell phone too. He sat down next to Emily under the jacaranda tree and played with it. Much as she loathed him, she wanted the phone. Craning her neck to see what he was doing, she touched up against him. It gave her the willies. He was playing snakes. She watched the little snakes squiggling around on the screen and wondered how she could get the phone.
It was spooky, almost as if the gods were reading her thoughts. His other phone rung, the satellite phone he usually used.
Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring.
He took ages to answer it then started talking in rapid Arabic. He handed Emily the mobile and gesturing wildly, stomped away yelling into his phone.
She sat down behind the jacaranda, out of sight. She wasn’t interested in snakes; she wanted to send a text.
Tap, tap, tap, beep, beep, tap, tap, beep, beep!
She wrote a quick message.
Tap, tap, beep, beep, beep, beep, tap, tap, beep!
She punched in her mum’s number.
Tap.
She pushed send.
Dear Mum and Dad, in Timbuktu. Happy. Miss U. Love M xOx.
The phone rang back two minutes later.
It was her mum.
‘Oh hi Mum. How are you? Lovely to hear you,’ said Emily.
Swoosh!
There was a rush of air and golden wings bashed against Emily’s head. Sharp claws ripped the phone from her grasp and the bird was gone.
Bash!
A big hand smashed across Emily’s face, sending her sprawling. It was Saleem. She’d never seen him so mad.
‘If you do that again, I�
��ll cut your throat!’ he yelled, glaring down at her, his nostrils flaring.
Emily had thought that he was a nice person, a gentleman.
She hid behind the tree, shaking all over and bawling, feeling sorry for herself and missing her mum. Blood dripped from her chin, making little patterns in the sand.
‘Maybe I can help,’ said Gamel’s husky voice. ‘Do you want to see your mum and dad? They want to see you. I can help you escape.’
Emily didn’t trust him a bit, not one little tiny bit. ‘What’s in it for you?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Lots,’ he replied, smiling slyly. ‘You’re worth a fortune. I hand you over and I get a million pounds, no questions asked. I get rich and you get to go home. All thanks to The Sun newspaper. You could be home tomorrow.’
I could. I will!
‘How?’ she asked.
He whispered into her ear, filling it with gooey spit.
When she arrived back at her tent there was a small roll of black cloth tucked under her blanket, a jet-black tent and scarf. She tried it on for size and wrapped the black scarf around her head over the top of her indigo one. Having two scarves on was like wearing a motorbike helmet. She rolled it back up and used it as a pillow. Not that she could sleep; she was so excited at the thought of having Christmas at home.
Finally she heard cocks crowing. Being careful not to wake up Ijju, who shared the tent with her, she pulled the black outfit over the top of her maroon one, hid under her embroidered blanket and waited.
As Gamel had warned, pandemonium erupted in the camp.
Bam! Bam!
The Desert Riders raised the alarm.
Naaaa, Naaaa, Naaaa.
She heard the bleating of hundreds of goats.
Ijju jumped up and ran outside.
Naaaa, Naaaa, Naaaa.
The goats got closer. One came into the tent, chewing on someone’s sandal, followed by another one, all black and white blotches. It stood and looked at Emily quizzically.
