Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  As we lay there, a voice said, ‘Peace be on you!’ It was Mohammidu. He squatted next to us and asked where Mafoudh was. When I told him. he said, ‘Listen! Take me as a guide to Walata instead of Mafoudh. I know the way better than him. He hasn’t been there for fifteen years, and it’s all changed since then. I’ll go for less than you’re paying him.’

  ‘I’ve already agreed with Mafoudh,’ I said, ‘and Mafoudh is my friend. It’s not very honourable to come around here when he’s away, scouting for work.’

  ‘My wish is only to help you. You wait till you see the sands of Umm Hayjiba. No God but God, you’ll get lost in it!’

  ‘Thank you and goodnight!’ I said, in English.

  ‘Don’t call us,’ we’ll call you!’ Marinetta added as the Moor stalked away.

  The morning was very still. Our farewell party consisted of three slim Haratin girls with cheeky faces and perky breasts. They pounced on everything we had left, squeaking gleefully as they picked up empty cans and discarded wrappings. They even collected the date stones that we had thrown away in the sand, saying that they would crush them up for the goats.

  We walked across a sebkha of blue stones. The camels oozed strength and vitality, flowing along the flat surface like mercury. There were occasional bushes and clumps of grass cropped down to stubble like crew-cuts. As the morning wore on, the air was filled with pink sand mist. The landscape began to radiate heat and rainbow colours. To the north, I could make out the craggy line of the Baatin and, to the south, the faint glimmer of sand dunes. By afternoon, we were heading towards a folded drift of sand that seemed propped up against the cliff walls.

  Not long after we mounted, the sky filled with a fizz of cloud. It was cumulo-nimbus—raincloud. ‘Here it comes!’ Mafoudh shouted, and a second later, the temperature dropped several degrees and a cold wind hit us with an alarming thump. The sky was poised for action. Over the landscape, to the south, claw-shaped fingers of fog were clutching downwards. Thunder rolled above us like a broadside. Then there was a second’s silence, an eerie, expectant silence. We heard the rain slithering towards us, growing louder like some gigantic, invisible sand worm about to attack. Then the rain surged against us in freezing droplets, lashing the camels and drenching everything in moments. The sudden shock of the cold was awesome.

  ‘Come on!’ Mafoudh yelled, slipping down from his camel. He tied on his saddle blanket frantically. ‘We’ve got to get to that high ground,’ he shouted. I jumped down and couched Marinetta’s camel, helping her off. As we strung the camels together, heavy, slow drops of rain splashed around us. ‘Let’s go!’ the guide bawled, lurching off in bare feet. The wind struck with renewed violence. I put my arm round Marinetta and we both leaned desperately into it. Rain and grit slashed against us with hurricane force.

  It seemed an age before we reached the edge of the sand dunes. We climbed up the slope as far as we could and began to unload. The rain was now whipping at us with angry strokes, and there was a volley of scarlet lights in the sky. Down went the girbas and saddle bags. A large tin of dried milk crashed into the sand and broke open. A foam of creamy zrig spread out along the dune. Mafoudh grappled in the wet, milky sand to knee-hobble the camels. Marinetta was fighting to unravel the tent, which threatened to take off. Then Mafoudh began to pile wet sand around its edges, and both of us did the same. Finally, we covered it with a plastic sheet and elbowed our way inside.

  An hour later, I was dying to relieve myself and left the tent. The storm was almost finished; the last gloomy drizzle was shuddering out of the darkness. As I moved back to the tent, I met Marinetta coming the other way. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s Mafoudh.’ she said.

  ‘Did he touch you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He smiled at me. You know, like a man smiles at a woman.’

  Later, when Mafoudh had taken his sodden blanket to sleep by the camels, we got out our sleeping bags for the first time. We dived into them, revelling in the few unexpected moments of privacy. ‘It was nice the way you put your arm round me when the rain came,’ Marinetta said.

  ‘I’ll do it again if you like,’ I answered.

  We watered at Akreyjit at a well among the tall stone houses there. They were windowless and looked like fortresses. A weathered little Moor at the well told us that they were very old. ‘They were built six generations ago,’ he said, ‘but half of them are empty. So many people have gone.’ He was a tiny man, almost a dwarf, one of the few white Moors left in the oasis. Those who had camels have taken them off to Ayoun and Tantan,’ he said. ‘Some of the men went to find work in Nouakchott. We still have good dates, but who wants them now?’

  We climbed the hill behind the village, picking up hand axes and arrowheads that had been exposed by the rain. There were an incredible number of stone querns and acres of smashed pottery with the usual striated pattern. We had been finding these objects since entering the Aouker valley. There must have been a large population here in Stone Age times, I thought. These cliffs were once, the shores of a vast lake, and the people who lived here had herded cattle. About 7,000 years ago, their ways had begun to replace those of the hunters as the dominant culture in this part of the Sahara. They lived on milk and meat, supplementing them with flour made from wild grasses similar to the ones that still grew in these regions today. It was only later that the people learned to plant and cultivate their own crops and changed from nomads to farmers. The descendants of these prehistoric farmers probably lived on in the Haratin.

  After we passed Akreyjit, Mafoudh became increasingly moody. ‘From here to Walata is the most difficult stretch,’ he said. ‘There are no more oases, and there won’t be any nomad camps either. We’re on our own from now on.’ Day by day, our progress was made more difficult by the sand mist that sometimes swallowed up the entire landscape, robbing us of landmarks and reference points. We were heading for the well of Toujinit, which was east of Tichit, but Mafoudh constantly wandered south. I was afraid we would wander off the hard sebkha and into the soft dunes along its edge, which stretched hundreds of miles. One morning, I checked my compass continually as Mafoudh turned farther and farther south.

  What’s up?’ Marinetta asked me.

  ‘He keeps going south.’

  ‘Do you think he’s lost the way?’

  ‘You’d need to be a genius to navigate accurately in this!’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him?’

  I shouted to Mafoudh to stop and explained. He regarded me almost mockingly with his big, coal-black eyes. ‘I know the way, Omar,’ he said calmly. ‘You think I don’t know my job? If we don’t find Toujinit by sunset, then you take over as guide.’

  When we stopped at midday, though, he disappeared into the mist on foot as soon as the camels were unloaded. ‘He must be worried,’ Marinetta observed. ‘He hasn’t even drunk his tea.’ Half an hour passed, then an hour. I was tempted to go out to look for him, but Marinetta persuaded me against it. ‘He knows the way back,’ she said.

  ‘I hope he does, or we’re really up the creek.’

  ‘What would we do if he didn’t come back?’

  ‘I bet I could think of something.’ I said, massaging her knee.

  ‘It might be quite nice after all,’ she said.

  Just then, Mafoudh materialised out of nowhere and, without a word, started to make tea. He gulped down one glass like a drinker taking his first snifter of the day and was slurping his way through the second when he saw us watching him. The big hatchet face cracked into a grin. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll find our well.’

  Within half an hour of setting off, we had blundered into the dunes. The sand mist whisked around, performing endless veronicas in front of our small caravan. The camels wheezed and grunted as they laboured up the soft slopes and nose-dived down again, tottering on valiantly through the dust. Mafoudh ambled forward with his shuffling pace, confidently testing the sand with his stick, adjusting
our direction, left and right, to find the easiest descent. The only time we halted was when Gurfaf sat down again. This time, the headrope held, but the steel ring was torn out of his nostril. It took ten bloody, cud-spitting minutes to replace it. Then we were off again, up and down the wave crests, heads down into the wind.

  There was no end to the dunes. The compass told me that we were going too far south. I was about to mention it to Mafoudh when the curtain of mist was swept back to reveal the solid wall of the Baatin almost on top of us. Beneath it was a grey plain of sebkha, and a little farther on, we found grooves made by the feet of countless camels over numberless generations. Farther on still was a dead camel, a twisted fuselage of hard skin and polished bone. We found the well of Toujinit just before sunset. Mafoudh beamed at me triumphantly.

  ‘Praise God!’ was all I could say.

  The well was about nine feet deep. We fashioned a hawser out of our spare ropes and lashed on our homemade well bucket. It was actually a butter-oil tin with the lid removed and two holes cut in the side. We filled all our six waterskins and carried them, bloated, over to a knot of bushes about 500 yards from the well. Mafoudh said that the bushes were atil, a thorny species of acacia. I collected some deadfall for the fire, but he advised me not to burn it. ‘Atil smoke can send you blind and mad,’ he said. Instead, we set up the little butane burner that we had brought for emergencies, and Marinetta made rice. When it was ready, she poured a trickle of liquid butter over it, and we tucked in hungrily.

  Next day, we climbed up through the hills, crossing narrow gorges, where brilliantly green arak trees flourished. The leaves of the arak were bitter and an acquired taste even for camels. Mafoudh regarded them as poor grazing, saying that they were like ‘sauce on the pudding’. Arak stayed green when other trees withered, andthis, Mafoudh said, was because of their extra-long roots.

  Beyond the hills was an undulating plain, where the sand was piled around billions of clusters of woody grass. The Moors, who have a name for every gradation of desert, called this type farha. It stretched to the horizon, unbroken except for the faint shadow of what looked uncannily like a giant tree. The sand was criss-crossed by the stitch-like patterns of lizard tracks and the curvy indentations of snakes. We saw no snakes but plenty of long-toed lizards, leaping past with their curious sprinter’s gait, and the occasional couple of white skinks that chased each other helter-skelter around the clumps. Whether they were fighting or mating, I couldn’t make out.

  We made camp in the plain. The camels refused to eat the woody grass, so we fed them grain. Fodder was already running short, for they each ate about seven pounds of grain every night when there was no grazing. I hoped it would last until we reached Walata. Marinetta prepared to make rice again, but Mafoudh stopped her. He announced that tonight, he would make bread. ‘It’s the best kind of food in the desert,’ he declared, ‘because you waste nothing.’ We watched as he added a little water to the flour and pummelled it into dough. He fashioned it lovingly into a thick oval, then fetched some of the woody grass to make a fire. When the fire had burned down to glowing spills, he dug a shallow pit, laid the raw loaf inside and scooped sand back over it. He scraped together the remains of the fire and laid it carefully over the bread.

  Meanwhile, following his instructions, Marinetta lit another fire and began making a gravy of onions and seasoning to go with the bread. I watched as she struggled into the camp with three heavy stones for the fireplace, hardly able to balance them in her slender arms. By now, she was almost unrecognisable as the fashion-conscious mannequin I had met in Khartoum. Her skin was nearly black from the sun, and her big eyes and white teeth stood out like beacons. She had never had much spare flesh, but her body had taken on a more streamlined hardness. The muscles in her calves and arms stood out more distinctly, and her firm breasts had a new tautness. Most of all, there was a greater self-confidence and alertness in her manner. She still wore the same Arab shirt and baggy pantaloons, the original colour blotted out by succeeding generations of stains and the daily instalment of sand. They were torn and ragged so that, when she knelt over the cooking pot, an expanse of very brown thigh showed through.

  Twenty minutes later, Mafoudh brushed away the ashes and sand, and out came a dusty baked loaf, nicely browned with dust. He beat it with his camel stick until most of the sand fell away, then broke it into pieces and dropped them in the gravy. The bread was magnificent.

  The giant tree we had seen the previous afternoon turned out to be a huge, mushroom-shaped carbuncle of rock. It had detached itself from a massif of red granite, the base of which was so eroded into trunks and tap roots that it gave the impression of having grown out of the desert in a solid vegetable mass.

  Farther on was an even stranger sight. It was a gigantic berg of granite, cut through with great oval arches, so that you could see through its belly to the other side. From afar, clothed in mist, it looked like an ogrish castle from a childhood nightmare. Close up, it reminded me of the shell of a cathedral, somehow exposed to a mighty holocaust that had melted its façade, sending its noble arches out of true, crumbling its walls into fissures and crevices and distorting its high pillars and battlements.

  ‘Fantastic!’ Marinetta shouted when she saw it, and she ranged Mafoudh in front for a photograph. It was viciously hot already, but she couldn’t get the shot right and forced poor Mafoudh to march back and forth with the camels in the stinging heat. He was shy of the camera and with each new shot pulled his headcloth more tightly around his face.

  We spent the midday halt in a smaller natural arch farther on. In the afternoon, we entered the dunes of Umm Hayjiba. As Mohammidu had warned us in Tichit, this was the most dangerous stretch of the journey to Walata. Here, the wall of the Baatin was out of sight, twisting far to the north before curving back south towards Walata. Instead of following the fault line and adding an extra day to the journey, we had decided to head directly across the sands.

  As we rode on that afternoon, Marinetta started telling me about a film she had once, seen. ‘It was the story of a woman and three handsome men who had crashed on a desert island,’ she said. ‘The woman was married to one of the men, but she got fed up with him. She wanted to find out which of them was the strongest, so she decided to make love to all of them.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘She made love to all of them, and they ended up fighting each other. It reminds me of this situation. Lost in the middle of the desert, with two handsome men!’

  ‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘We’re not lost yet.’

  There was no grazing for the camels again that night, so we fed them grain and left them sitting on the dunes nearby. Quite early in the morning, before dawn, I was woken up by something large and warm crawling up my leg. I reached down instinctively to find Marinetta’s hand. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘That film,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do about it now,’ I said.

  The hand resumed its path up my leg. ‘Yes, we can,’ she said. ‘Mafoudh’s asleep.’ I put both my arms around her. She felt very warm and cuddlable. I was just about to kiss her when there was a shattering clap of thunder. Mafoudh’s blanket whipped back, and our guide rolled out. A gash of brilliant electricity tore across the sky. In a second I was up and we were feverishly piling everything under the cover of our plastic sheets. The wind sprayed sand across the dunes, but no rain fell. Suddenly Marinetta said, ‘The camels have gone!’

  Mafoudh and I looked at each other in dismay. We hadn’t even noticed. ‘I thought you’d knee-hobbled them!’ I shouted at the guide.

  ‘I thought you had!’ he shouted back.

  We scouted around the dunes with our torches. The wind had already demolished their tracks. Even in daylight, the interlocking dunes limited visibility to a few yards.

  At first light, Mafoudh took a canteen of water and went off to search for them. While Maririetta made mugs of coffee on the butane c
ooker, I climbed the nearest dune and tied my blue headcloth on a pole as a sign for the guide. Below me, our things looked like a tiny island in the sea of sand. The dunes rippled away for miles, all of uniform height and colour, without the least distinguishing feature. Mafoudh was already out of sight among them. I knew that in his place, without my compass, I’d have been lost inside ten minutes.

  I climbed down and found Marinetta staring into the sand. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘I was just thinking.’ she replied, ‘what I would do if you and Mafoudh were killed and I was left alone.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘I’d head back to the last well by compass, then I’d wait there until some nomads came.’

  ‘What would you do with our bodies?’

  ‘I’d load you on the camel and take you with me.’

  ‘And Mafoudh?’

  ‘Well … it sounds bad, but Mafoudh doesn’t belong to me.’

  We drank our coffee. More than an hour had passed since Mafoudh had gone off. I hardly dared think of what might happen if the camels weren’t found. Suddenly, there was a whistle, and I looked up to see the guide coming back over the nearest dune with the three camels in tow. He had somehow managed to tie their noses all together with his old headcloth. ‘Whew!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thank God they didn’t get too far. We’d have been dead for certain.’

  By that evening, the sands of Umm Hayjiba lay behind us, and we were back in the belly of the Baatin. We made camp near the well of Tinigert, in a narrow chasm full of arak trees and birds. The walls of the chasm were covered in rock pictures.: cattle, camels, oryx, addax, and matchstick men. There were inscriptions in tefinagh, the Tuareg script, and other more recent ones in Arabic. I wondered if the Tuareg had once, occupied this region. ‘Impossible!’ declared Mafaudh. ‘You won’t see any of those barbarians until you get to Mali. This is the country of the bidan.’ My own Western culture had left its marks here too, in the form of fragments of an old motorcycle littered across the sand.