Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  They used to laugh at me because I didn’t have a boyfriend.’ she said, ‘and because I went on holiday with my parents. Most of them were married by the age of twenty. They’re not laughing now.’

  The book on which I had been working, A Desert Dies, was nearing completion, and my Saharan project was looming. I hated the thought of leaving Marinetta, but the dream of the desert crossing had been a part of me for so long that I could not abandon it. I suppose that sooner or later, I might have asked her to accompany me, without much hope of success. As it happened, I didn’t need to.

  One evening, having spent a particularly depressing day with GOBI, she said, ‘Maik, I want to cross the Sahara with you.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’m serious, Maik. I’ve thought about it for a long time. I think I could do it. I bet you wouldn’t even consider me. You’ll say I’m too soft, as everyone else does.’

  ‘It would mean leaving UNICEF,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t care!’

  ‘It will be very dangerous.’

  ‘I don’t care about the danger.’

  ‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘See how you feel about it in a few days.’

  A week later, she was still adamant. Nothing I said seemed to put her off. I felt that she had no idea what difficulties she would be taking on. ‘Over four thousand miles!’ I told her. ‘Riding on a camel through blazing sun, scorching wind, and freezing cold. Monotonous food and dirty water. Marching all day, every day, without even stopping to pee. No man has ever done it, at least no Westerner. It’s a longer journey than any of the old explorers of the past made.’

  ‘Who were all men!’ she scoffed.

  ‘They call the Sahara ‘‘The Land of Men”.’

  ‘Crap! I’ll prove them wrong!’

  I shrugged and hoped she was right. My conscience bothered me. The truth was that I agreed to take her on the expedition only because I was in love. Was it right to drag this petite mannequin into a devil’s cauldron, into the least hospitable environment on earth, for my own sake? How could she possibly survive? She wasn’t in the least the outdoor type. She had never climbed a mountain or carried a rucksack. She had never known thirst or hunger or physical exhaustion. She looked so small and vulnerable. What if our lives were threatened? What if she were raped or injured or mutilated?

  I was aware of some advantages in taking her. She spoke Arabic and French. There was no denying that she was an excellent photographer. And, as a woman, she could penetrate the harem side of nomad communities, something I had always failed to do. It would be a fascinating experiment, a man and a woman in the Sahara. I half persuaded myself that it was a good idea.

  I admired her obstinacy. That alone was an encouraging sign. And I didn’t realise then that I was dealing with Sardinian stubbornness at its most gritty. The Sards are a tough, mountain people, an island race like my own. For centuries, they endured drought and poverty, taking to their wild mountains and resisting all attempts at invasion by the Muslims. Sicily fell, Spain fell but Sardinia never. What better pedigree, I thought later, for someone taking on the earth’s greatest desert?

  I showed her some of the letters that I had received from Saharan experts. They demonstrated how slim our chances of succeeding were. One veteran of many vehicle-borne expeditions actually wrote, ‘If I had to bet money on it, I’d say it’s impossible.’ There was also a letter from Geoffrey Moorhouse. He was the English writer who had attempted to make the west-to-east crossing by camel in 1972. He had set out from the Mauritanian oasis of Chinguetti and, after a record-breaking trek of 2,000 miles, had given up in Tamanrasset, Algeria. Three of his camels had died, and he had been plagued by sickness on the way. I had read Moorhouse’s excellent book about his journey three times, with increasing trepidation. I understood why he had chosen to call it The Fearful Void.

  I had earmarked Chinguetti as our starting point. It stood near the borders of the Sahara and would be the ideal place to train with camels before undertaking the journey. From there, we would head southeast to the legendary caravan town of Tombouctou in Mali. Our next major stopping place would be Agadez in Niger, almost due east of Tombouctou and the centre of the Tuareg people of the Air mountains. The salt oasis of Bilma would be the third major port of call, across the featureless sand sea of the Ténéré Erg. After Bilma, we should have to find a way to cross war-tom Chad, then the Sudan, and to enter Egypt. Our major problem would be crossing Chad. The north of the country was the site of a fierce civil war between Chadian factions, one of them supported by Libya. The Chadian Ambassador in Khartoum warned us not to enter the country north of the sixteenth parallel, which made a long deviation necessary.

  The Saharan authority Theodore Monod advised me that five camels and three people would be the ideal caravan size for such a journey. Mostly, we would hire local guides for navigation, which was where our fluent grasp of Arabic would be essential. We would take maps and compasses but nothing in the way of advanced technology, which would spoil the spirit of the adventure. At the last minute we added a set of pencil flares for emergencies.

  Moorhouse had begun his journey in November, during the Sahara’s cool period. Travel was more comfortable then, but I reckoned that it was a mistake. That way, you ran the risk of getting stuck in the hyper-arid eastern Sahara during the following hot season, the heat coming on you just as you were at your weakest point. I thought we could average 25 miles a day with our camels. Allowing for a non-marching day of one in three for watering and bureaucratic delays, this meant that the journey would take about nine months in all. To finish before the summer in the east, we should have to start in August. It would still be seething-hot then, but the onset of the rains, if there were any, would bring occasional cool days. We agreed that it would be easier to face the intense heat at the beginning of the journey, when we were still fresh, than at the end, when we would be exhausted.

  Every day, we jogged and swam, preparing our bodies for the challenge to come. Marinetta excelled in the swimming-pool, but on the track, she was less than proficient. One day, after she had fallen behind for the fifth time, she bawled, ‘What’s the point of this? We won’t be running in the Sahara!’

  ‘You’re useless!’ I shouted back. ‘You’ll never even damn well make it to Tijikja—and that’s the first stop!’

  I took her to the least salubrious type of Sudanese restaurant, where they served raw liver and fly-blown sheep’s heads. They didn’t give you a knife and fork. ‘You’ll have to get used to eating with your hands.’ I told her. ‘It’s the custom in the desert.’

  ‘I’m not eating a mouthful until I get a fork.’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t I eat like a Christian?’

  ‘What will you do in the desert?’

  ‘We’re not in the desert yet.’

  Sometimes, I doubted if we ever would be. We still lacked what we needed most: money. We had tried everywhere to get support. An Italian magazine had expressed interest, and its director had invited Marinetta to his base in Milan during her leave. Then the director was mysteriously removed. We never heard from the magazine again.

  It was almost out of the blue that I received a telex from Penguin Books, offering me a reasonable sum for the rights to my bookabout the journey. We were in business. Wildly excited, I ran to Marinetta with the news. For the first time, I saw her worried.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘This means it’s no longer a dream.’

  ‘I know.’ she answered. That’s what I’m afraid of. Now we really have to make decisions.’

  My worst suspicions seemed to have been realised. It had all been talk. She had no intention of giving up her secure and well-paid job with the UN for a wild adventure in the Sahara. For days, she hovered, undecided, while I cursed the fickleness of women. Then, half way through November, she handed in her resignation. Four months later, we were married in London, and the same night we flew to Paris en route to Nouakchott, Mauritania.

  Our honeymoon in Paris was t
he most miserable five days of my life. Every day, the rain dribbled down the rue Kepler outside our dismal hotel room, but it was not the life-giving rain of Africa. Every morning, we woke on opposite sides of a giant bed, seeing each other as if for the first time, two strangers in a foreign land on the eve of a terrifying adventure. Perhaps it was fear that prevented us from making love. ‘I feel flat.’ was Marinetta’s way of expressing it. ‘The last thing I feel like is sex. I just don’t feel sexy at all.’

  By day, we wandered, exhausted and depressed, through the wet streets. Paris seemed cold, the architecture austere, the people overdressed and unfriendly. We visited the Mauritanian embassy in St Germain and found a dingy, dilapidated building with grease-smeared walls, where a gaggle of black men crowded around a desk.

  ‘What do you want?’ one of them asked rudely.

  ‘Visas for Mauritania.’

  ‘Why?’ came the aggressive response.

  ‘Tourism.’

  ‘Ah, tourism!’ Was the inscrutable look on his face mockery or surprise? The Malian embassy next door was more stately, but inside, there was no reception, only a maze of doors without labels. In desperation, Marinetta pushed one of them open and discovered a huge room with a man in an immaculate suit sitting behind a mahogany desk. ‘Is this the room for visasf?’ she piped up.

  ‘No, it’s not!’ the man snapped. ‘Now get out and shut that door.’

  ‘Do you think that was the Ambassador?’ she whispered, giggling as she closed it.

  In the evenings, we walked down the boulevard des Italiennes, through the pools of light cast by the crowded cafes. Everywhere, there was the bustle of life and good spirits, a joy that we were unable to share. Already, we felt like aliens on the way to a far-off planet. Yet the worst was that we felt alienated from each other. It was as if the magic had somehow been washed away like the glitter from a Christmas star. ‘Jesus!’ Marinetta said once. ‘I thought it was bad when all the girls I knew got married because they were pregnant. We only got married for a bloody expedition!’

  When we returned to the hotel at night, the desolation covered us like a blanket. We had loved each other once, but now the fever had gone. I began to regret having wanted Marinetta with me on the expedition. I saw that weakness and my own selfishness had ruined me. I would have been far better off alone, after all.

  The only relief of those days was our meeting with Professor Theodore Monod, the octogenarian who was considered the world’s leading expert on the Sahara. He was a small man, slightly bent but very active for eighty-five. He had penetrating blue eyes, a manner that was cool but not impolite, enthusiastic at moments but not effusive. I wondered how many hopeful Saharan explorers had come and gone in his small office in the rue Cuvier. He showed us maps and geological specimens, holding them up to the light. When I mentioned Moorhouse, he sighed. ‘Ah, Moorhouse. He sent me a postcard from Tamanrasset saying, “I have seen enough of your beautiful desert!” But Moorhouse was a good man.’

  An hour later, I felt refreshed. After all the warnings and discouragement, here was someone, and the leading expert at that, who believed that we could succeed. On our way out, I thanked him for his confidence.

  ‘Listen,’ he told me paternally, ‘nothing is impossible. Only, some things are difficult.’

  I looked at my new wife. It was the best advice I could have been given.

  Later, the night before we were due to fly to Nouakchott, we lay awake, afraid and excited, until the bleary light of dawn came crowding in. We were on the verge of not one but two adventures: the Sahara and marriage. In the chalky dawn of our last day in Europe, I wondered which of them would prove the more dangerous.

  The Atlantic lay beneath us, deep Prussian blue and frayed at the edges by a white spume of spindrift. At midday, we passed the Atlas mountains, looking like giant, upturned scallops of grey and ochre veined with pale streaks of snow and plumed in mist. Beyond them lay the desert, an umber plain crisscrossed with wadis like coiled brown snakes. Nothing and no one moved down there. I wish I could describe how the sprawl of Nouakchott looked from the air; how through the porthole we saw the Sahara coming closer and closer, stretching on forever and ever until it reached the Nile. The truth is that after passing the Atlas range, the aircraft was enveloped in fog, and we saw nothing more until it came to rest outside the terminal.

  We stepped out into the oppressive April heat and queued up for the immigration procedures. The airport was crowded and claustrophobic. Beyond the bars that separated ‘Arrivals’ from the multitude, a current of faces bobbed, peering through at us like those of prisoners. The faces covered the spectrum of African shades: khaki, coffeecream, brown, and black. Some of them were wrapped in brilliant-blue headcloths that displayed only the eyes. They gave the impression that their owners had stepped out of the desert that moment. (More likely, they had come from the local shanty town on bicycles.)

  The first character whom we met in Mauritania was a bored-looking official in an ill-fitting uniform. He stamped our passports and thrust a pair of green forms into my hand. They were currency declaration forms on which, according to instructions, you had to declare all the foreign currency you were carrying. This gave me a problem. I had about £5,000 in French francs and dollar traveller’s cheques, almost all of which were in a money belt under my shirt. I wasn’t sure of the exact amount, but neither was I keen on opening my belt and counting the notes, displaying to that sea of inquisitive faces how much I had and where it was kept. Making a quick estimate, therefore, I wrote a sum down on the form. I made a small error, one that almost cost us the expedition.

  Marinetta and I were last in the queue. Between us and freedom lay a dingy cabinet like a changing booth at a third-rate swimming pool, into which, one by one, the passengers were disappearing with a slit-eyed soldier wearing a beret. It occurred to me only as my turn came that they were being searched for foreign currency. The man allowed Marinetta through without searching her. Then I was thrust up against him, in a few feet of space behind a filthy curtain, while he slowly and ham-fistedly counted the notes in my belt. He examined my declaration form, then counted the notes again. Finally, he said in broken French, ‘There are over 6,000 francs here not declared. That’s bad. Very bad.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but already, I was being marched like a convict through the mob outside and into a small office, where a narrow-featured supervisor sat.

  ‘You have failed to declare 6,100 francs,’ the supervisor said, after listening to the story. ‘We do not like currency smugglers in Mauritania. Now, not only are we entitled to confiscate the amount you have tried to smuggle, we can also charge you a fine of five times the amount. That will be 30,500 francs.’

  Staring at him incredulously, I almost gagged. Three thousand pounds! My head spun dizzily. My mouth dried up and my heart thumped. For a moment, I thought I would faint. I tried to explain that I couldn’t possibly have made such a big mistake, but no articulate sentence came out. I had to cling to the desk to steady myself. ‘What if I don’t pay?’ I finally managed to stammer.

  ‘Then you’ll go to prison.’ he snapped. ‘And I’ll keep your passport here until you do.’

  We stood outside the airport like refugees with our bits of luggage scattered around us. I still couldn’t believe that I’d made such a mistake. All the years of dreaming and planning were wasted, terminated on our first day in Mauritania by a stupid error and intransigent officials. I have never, before or since, felt so useless.

  Marinetta had a friend in Nouakchott. His name was Charles Habis, and he was consular officer at the US Embassy, responsible for health projects. A phone call brought Charles and his lovely Ecuadorian wife, Mariana, to our rescue. Later, in their house in the suburbs, I had a chance to explain the problem. At the same time, I re-examined my copy of the currency form. I noticed that something was amiss. I had clearly written 25,000 francs on the form. They had found 26,100 francs on me. There was certainly a discrepancy but nothing like as large as the
amount they had mentioned. The larger mistake had been theirs. The difference that this made was the difference between success and humiliating failure.

  Charles and Mariana were sympathetic. Charles was a stocky, fit-looking man with a black beard and a serious, friendly face. He had led an interesting life. Born a Roman Catholic in Jerusalem, he had emigrated with his parents to Ecuador when his father had foreseen the emerging problems in Palestine. He had grown up speaking Spanish like a native and, after finishing school, had emigrated once, again, this time to the United States. He had been a social studies teacher and had run a drugs-abuse programme. Then he had been enlisted by the State Department for their USAID projects in Somalia, where he and his wife had met Marinetta. It was our great, good fortune that Charles and Mariana happened to be in Nouakchott when we arrived.

  ‘This kind of thing happens all the time here.’ Charles said. ‘Never saw a country like it for bureaucracy. Everything can be worked out, though. It just needs diplomacy and patience.’ Charles said that everything in Mauritania worked by personal acquaintance. One of his staff, a Moor called Abbas, was a fixer who generally handled delicate diplomatic problems for him. ‘Abbas is a white Moor,’ he explained, ‘and from a noble tribe. They say all that stuff about nobility is in the past, but, believe me, it still works wonders. Abbas knows everyone who’s anyone.’

  We met Abbas the following day. He was a tall, young man, nutbrown, with a dignified face and a graceful bearing. Like most Moors we saw in Nouakchott, he was dressed in a flowing gandourah of bright blue and extremely baggy Arab trousers, or sirwal. ‘It’s not difficult.’ was his opinion when he’d heard the problem, ‘but it will take some negotiation. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up.’

  For the rest of the day, we worked our way up, starting with the airport supervisor who had confiscated my passport and walking or driving from office to office, each one representing a grade higher in the pecking order of officialdom. At last, in the afternoon, we were granted an interview with the Director of Customs himself.