Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  ‘Which other nsara?’

  ‘The nsara of the film Fort Saganne!’

  It turned out that the previous year, a French film company had virtually taken over the oasis for the making of a desert epic called Fort Saganne. They had employed hundreds of the locals as extras, hired cars and planes and helicopters, imported horses and camels, and put on the payroll the entire operational strength of the Corps Mehariste. The oasis had enjoyed a ten-month festival. It had become transformed into the battleground of a fierce colonial war for possession of a fortress, the ‘Fort Saganne’ of the title, which had been built especially for the film and stood at the top of the waterless Amogjar pass, where no fortress could ever have stood. The real fort of Chinguetti had been used as a hotel by the film crews and supplied with a generator, electric lights, and a waterpump that now stood idle.

  The French had showered everyone with money, not least Sid’Ahmed, who had been given a walk-on part. ‘I’m not going to tell you how much they paid me,’ he said. ‘You’d never believe it anyway.’ His part had lasted fifteen minutes and he had played the ‘Chief’. I never discovered what he had been the ‘Chief’ of, but no doubt, they had cast him well. To the children, it must have seemed suddenly very quiet when the film company pulled out. Chinguetti was one of the oldest settlements in the Sahara, one of the seven holy towns of Islam and the former capital of Mauritania. I once, met two Belgian tourists there who said they had come only to see ‘Fort Saganne’. The irony was that the real Fort Saganne was in Algeria.

  Even the children would disappear in the searing heat of midday, when the shops closed and the streets cleared as if by magic. The heat lay like treacle on the sweltering afternoon, pressing in through the windows and bulging through the cracks in the door. You could feel the hot stones throbbing like oven bricks, and the heat seeped into every ligament and muscle, clogging up the motion of your body and dizzying your head. To walk just half a mile in that heat was a challenge. To travel 4,500 miles by camel over the world’s most arid terrain, to plan the longest trek ever undertaken by Westerners in the Sahara—that seemed like an impossibly arrogant dream.

  Despite the women’s interest in sex, the Moors did not follow the Mediterranean habit of sleeping with their wives in the afternoon siesta. It was too hot for that. Our sex life, already moribund after a few dismal failures, died the death in Chinguetti, what with the flies and the heat and the lack of privacy. Instead, we fought like caged dogs. ‘You only married me for this expedition!’ was Marinetta’s favourite line. She missed the carefree life of the single girl. She felt nostalgic for home. ‘I should never have got married.’ she said. ‘I’ve let my parents down. I should never have left them when they needed me most.’ She confessed that she’d always been shy of sex. Even in her late teens, she had blushed when people talked about pregnancy and having children. The bawdy jokes of the classroom had passed over her head like smoke. She had longed to be out of the lust-choked place by the end of the day. The others said she was living on pink clouds.

  She had always been determined not to marry an Italian. There had been boyfriends, of course, many of them. There had been the American anthropologist in Pago-Pago and the Austrian gynaecologist in India. In Somalia, there had been a Swede and an Iranian and a Frenchman and another American, but they were always shortlived romances. ‘When they got too serious, I dropped them.’ she said. ‘I loved dressing up and going out with a handsome man to a nice restaurant. I loved the idea of romance. But when it went any further, I ran a mile.’

  Often, she cried. Sometimes she screamed. ‘It’s a nightmare!’ she said. ‘I wish it was all a dream. I wish I could wake up and find myself at home in my own room in my parents’ house.’ It was security she longed for, I thought; an escape from the knowledge that she now had responsibilities that might last longer than our expedition. ‘My mother warned me,’ she told me. ‘She said that I knew nothing about the problems of life. She said all that was to come.’ There was no reprise of the romantic episode in Port Sudan. She seemed almost a different person now. ‘I realise that I did the wrong thing in getting married.’ she said. ‘It was a big mistake. We’ve made the biggest mistake of our lives. God, I don’t even think I love you!’

  ‘You mean you only agreed to get married to go on this expedition?’

  ‘Yes.’ she sobbed. ‘Only for a bloody expedition. How stupid I was to give up my freedom for this!’ Sometimes, when I became fed up with the tirade, I would escape and talk to Sid’Ahmed. His perspective was refreshingly different.

  ‘Mahjouba’s my eleventh wife.’ he told me. ‘A man’s got to have a change. When a woman’s no good, just get rid of her and get another. There’s plenty of hares in the desert, by God!’ He said that although Islam allowed you four wives at once, he’d sooner have one at a time and change her often. Two can make your life hell.’ he said, ‘especially if you don’t treat them the same.’

  ‘Even one can make your life hell.’ I said.

  ‘We have a saying.’ he went on. ‘Nothing hurts like a toothache and a bad wife. If you have a bad tooth, you pull it out, don’t you?’

  According to Sid’Ahmed, it was a woman’s duty to conceive as soon as possible. Marinetta’s dereliction in this respect must have worried him because he asked me, ‘Isn’t she pregnant yet?’

  I thought wryly of the number of times we had actually made love and said, ‘No.’

  ‘What if she gets pregnant in the Sahara?’ he asked. ‘What will you do?’ I sighed, not wanting to start on the juggernaut question of the Pill. ‘The desert is hard for a woman.’ Sid’Ahmed said. ‘Look at Mahjouba. She was born a nomad and even she finds it hard to get on a camel.’

  I felt like commenting that this was hardly surprising considering her size. Instead, I told him, ‘I thought you were townspeople, not nomads.’

  ‘There are no townspeople in Mauritania,’ he scoffed. ‘Not unless you count the Haratin. Every white Moor comes from a tent. Ours is still rolled up there in the store with Mahjouba’s camel litter. I’ve got camels, too. They’re grazing in the south near Tichit. If we get any rain this year, they’ll be brought up here and we’ll go and camp with them.’

  ‘On camels?’

  He looked shamefaced. ‘We usually hire a Land Rover now,’ he admitted. He explained that you needed at least five camels to move a household like his, what with the tent, two massive poles, waterskins, cooking stuff, bedding, rugs, and carpets, and a sort of table that supported everything once, the tent was erected. In Chinguetti, he had only two female camels with their calves, which he kept for milk. They wouldn’t even have carried the tent poles. ‘Ah, but it’s not the same in a car,’ he sighed. ‘You can keep your cars and your planes. Give me a camel and a cool, moonlit night, a skin of milk, a pouch of tobacco, and nothing before me but the emptiness. That’s freedom! The Arabs are camel men. They always have been.’

  Things had changed since Sid’Ahmed’s youth, when Chinguetti had been full of camels, and raiders had come hunting for them from as far away as the Spanish Sahara. You had to be a man in the time of raids!’ Sid’Ahmed said. He would whip back his gandourah and display a grey bullet scar on the arm. ‘Nineteen forty-three that was,’ he would say. ‘Some Rigaybat came up from the south, driving 500 camels and some slaves they’d taken from the tribes. We went after them and caught them at Aghuedir. What a battle there was, by God! We killed thirty Rigaybat and got all the camels back!’ Those were the days Sid’Ahmed longed for. Now the Rigaybat had been recruited into the popular resistance movement, the Polisario,_ and the Spanish Sahara had become the Western Sahara. The Polisario were armed with rocket-launchers and machine guns. Now they played for different stakes. The Polisario had attacked Chinguetti a few years before, and the oasis walls still bore the scars. The power station had never worked since they had punched three neat shell holes in its side. The Libyans built it, and the Polisario finished it.’ Sid’Ahmed said. ‘No God but God, what a world we live i
n!’

  I had already asked Sid’Ahmed to find us some camels in Chinguetti. After a few weeks of searching, he told me, ‘It won’t be easy now, Omar. So many camels died in the drought. There are only about forty left in the oasis now, and most of those are females kept for milk.’ He advised me to go to Atar. ‘There’s a daily market there,’ he said.

  But even Atar was suffering from a camel shortage. Camels were brought there from the south and prices were high. We visited the market twice and found nothing but calves and females and untrained bulls. They were of no use to us. The Moors trained only geldings to be ridden. They were easier to handle than bulls because they weren’t bothered by the mating instinct, which could transform a docile male into a frothing, demonic man-killer within days. We found what we were looking for at last in a butcher’s yard. They were two big geldings, one red, the other white. They were lithe and tall and supple, with well-padded humps and well-muscled legs. They were the camels that would take us to Tombouctou and perhaps even Agadez. We paid over £500 each for them, which made them easily the most expensive camels I had ever bought. The red one, we named Shigar, which denoted his colour, and the white Gurfaf’ or ‘hyena’, because he was bad-tempered and greedy. ‘He wasn’t gelded until after he had matured and mated,’ the butcher told us. ‘No wonder he’s bad-tempered. Wouldn’t you be?’

  We spent the rest of our time in Atar buying saddles and equipment. An entire section of the market was given over to the stalls and workshops of the smiths. They made everything from saddles to jewellery and were another distinct caste in Moorish society. The other castes, the white Moors and the Haratin, regarded them with a mixture of fear and distrust. No self-respecting Moor would have let his daughter marry one. ‘You can’t trust a smith.’ Sid’Ahmed told us. ‘Don’t pay him anything until you get what you ordered. Otherwise, you’ll never get it!’

  In Chinguetti, Sid’Ahmed advised us to hand the camels over to the keeping of a man called Mohammed. He was a Hartani built like a wrestler, with the biggest calf muscles I had ever seen. He was the town herdsman who took charge of the forty or so camels left, picking them up from each house before sunrise and driving them far out into the plateau to feed during the day. At sunset, he would drive them back into the oasis for the night. Sid’Ahmed said that Mohammed had acquired his muscles in the salt quarries at Kedyet Ijil, where he had worked with the azalais, the great caravans that had transported salt to the West African states for centuries. There were few azalais left now. Most of the salt trade had been taken over by lorries. They used the new main road of asphalt that went via Nouakchott, by which they could make Nema, on the Mali border, in three days instead of thirty. Mohammed had grown tired of the work and had come to Chinguetti looking for a job and a wife. He had married Dada’s sister, and they lived in one of the makeshift tents that surrounded Sid’Ahmed’s house.

  Mohammed told me that there had been very little grazing on the plateau since the Great Drought and advised me to supplement it with camel cake. This was someone’s bright idea for making use of peanut shells. They were ground up, mixed with oil, and churned out as hard slugs an inch long. The cake was cheap and nutritious, and you had to soak it in water and serve it as a mash. The camels loved it. They fought to get at it in the evenings, when Sid’Ahmed and I fed our camels together. It was a messy business, which Sid’Ahmed could easily have got his Haratin to do. But Sid’Ahmed was a simple man beneath the bluster and, like me, he enjoyed it.

  We became accustomed to the slow rhythm of life in the oasis. Our visitors no longer seemed like intruders. The children seemed just children. The only things that got worse were the heat and our arguments. The afternoon was a prison in the suffocating darkness of our room. The heat seemed to eat away at us. We lay prostrate on our mattresses and argued about the past.

  ‘I can’t understand why you agreed to marry me.’ I told Marinetta.

  ‘It seemed so romantic at the time.’ She sighed. ‘It was the idea of adventure with a writer, an explorer. What girl wouldn’t have been excited by it?’ She had never wanted a real relationship, she said. Real relationships gave you problems. The idea of love and marriage was romantic, but in reality it was just a trap. Now, all she wanted was to be free.

  Sometimes, the blackness of despair covered me, and I longed to escape. All the love I had felt drained out of me. I almost shivered with apprehension when I thought of the vast distance that we had set out to cover together. ‘When you get to the Nile, you can do what the hell you like,’ I said. ‘But until we get there, let’s at least pretend we’re friends.’

  ‘Friends!’ she scoffed. ‘We’re not even friends. Friends like each other.’

  In the evenings, though, these battles were forgotten like a passing dream. We moved our beds up to the roof and basked in the cool of sunset as peace settled among the houses. The oblongs of shade moved around the buildings, swelling then dissolving into the sand. The grey sky was threaded with the last ribbons of rose-pink and the settling half-light gave new purpose to the moving figures. First, the goats would troop out of the desert, marching in grim order, each squadron with its leader and the weaker stragglers bringing up the rear. Finally, the camels would come into view, appearing like a rash of black spots against the white sand of the wadi, getting closer until the individual animals were recognisable, followed by the dark, lonely form of the herdsman Mohammed. As they passed each house, two or three camels would peel off and make for the place where their evening mash would be served. Sid’Ahmed’s blunt figure would be seen performing the sunset prayers on the dunes, and from somewhere, the sonorous voice of a muezzin would sound.

  We were on a platform among the stars with only the desert beyond. The Sahara was everywhere around us and everywhere across the horizon of the closing darkness. Sitting on the roof was like sitting on the quayside of a vast ocean of nothing stretching halfway across the world. Its far shore was the bank of a river 4,000 miles away.

  A week after our camels arrived in Chinguetti, we decided to make our first training run. We chose as a goal the mysterious crater of Guelb Richat. It stood on the very edge of El Jouf, the great eastern emptiness that stretched 1,000 miles until it merged with the gloomy gravel plains of the Tanezrouft. It was now high summer, the worst time of year for such a journey.

  Sid’Ahmed seemed horrified. He did his best to put us off. ‘It’s forbidden to travel in the Sahara at this time of year!’ he exclaimed. ‘No Moor who knows the desert would do it. You should wait till the Pleiades rise.’

  I knew that the Arabs gauged the changing seasons by the rise and fall of the constellations, and that the rise of the Pleiades announced the onset of the rains in late July. We intended to be on our way to Tombouctou by then.

  The day we set off for Richat, I did something else no Moor would have done, at least not in Chinguetti. I went down to the well and, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Haratin, I stripped off my shirt and began to water my own camels. The Moor women gathered in the shade, pointing and gesticulating as if scandalised. It was deeply satisfying to hoist up the cool, clear water from the bowels of the planet and to watch my own camels slurping it up with relish. It was good to mix with these lean Haratin at the well and hear their cheerful banter, to feel the blood flowing fresh through my muscles, and to be in tune once, again with the heartbeat of the earth after days of hiding from the heal. I knew that the well was a Haratin place, and I was flouting convention. But the children of Chinguetti had never let us forget that we were nsara, and everyone knew the nsara were half crazy.

  When he realised that we couldn’t be dissuaded, Sid’Ahmed laughed and said, ‘It will be a real test for you, and especially for Mariam. If she survives this, no one will say she is weak!’ Then he showed us how to strap on the peculiar Moorish saddles that we had bought in Atar. They were like miniature armchairs, painted in garish colours, yellow and scarlet, with upthrust wings like those of a giant, wooden butterfly. He demonstrated how the brillia
ntly coloured saddle bags fitted on behind and how the furry girbas dangled down on either side. These waterskins were our most precious pieces of equipment. ‘You’d last about a day without water in this heat,’ he said. ‘Remember, always hang the girbas up. Never leave them on the ground, or your water will run out very quickly.’

  When his demonstration was finished, he walked with our small azalai as far as the dune barrier on the edge of the town and showed us the direction of Wadan. It was the last oasis in the region, and the Richat crater lay a little beyond. ‘Go in the safekeeping of God,’ he told us and shook each of us solemnly by the hand. Then we were alone with the desert.

  The journey to Guelb Richat lasted nine days. Never have I seen the desert so violent, so numbingly hot. We travelled over a landscape desolate and deserted. At midday, the torrid sun flamed across the dunes, setting the sand ablaze with blinding light. The rocks glittered like steel over the broken plains, and the far horizons vaporised into a mist of scorching dust. Along the wadis, the trees stood lifeless. Not a foot of shade remained in the thornscrub. The dread wind called the rift began its oppressive progress south, searing the desert with its furnace blast, withering the plant life left on the open scree sides and eddying into the valleys, tearing at the nomad tents and the shelters of the Haratin. Most of the nomads had fled from the high pastures, driving their flocks down below and rolling up their heavy tents and stashing them in the thorn-tree branches. They had abandoned their shelters in the wadis, leaving a scattering of twisted tins and broken girbas, seeking refuge among the palmeries and in the clefts in the valley floor.

  Each day, we were up before sunrise, struggling with the heavy equipment and the waterbags. I was used to the easier Sudanese system, by which you just slung everything over the saddle horns. Moorish saddles had only one horn, and the gear had to be tied on with a series of intricate knots. If you got one of them wrong, the whole rig came crashing down as soon as the camel rose to its feet. This happened to us several times in the first few days.