Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  The well was no more than six feet deep. It stood beneath an overhanging cliff, with a deserted stone sangar on the opposite side. Clearly, no one had used the well for some time because the water was thickly coated in bird lime and had a putrid taste. We brought the camels up to be watered. Marinetta was standing close by Gurfaf, trying to take a photograph of the well, when he suddenly lashed out with his rear foot, missing her by inches. The blow could easily have broken her leg. An instant later, the other camels went wild, kicking out blindly right and left and stamping their hooves in the sand with crashing blows. We rushed to gather the headropes, afraid that they would roll in the sand and crush our gear. ‘It’s the ticks!’ Mafoudh said. ‘Look at the devils!’ The ordure-saturated sand around the well was coming alive with thousands of steadily advancing insects. They dragged their grey, leathery bodies out of the dust, making a beeline for anything that moved.

  They’re horrible!’ Marinetta shuddered as we quickly moved the camels on to stony ground. We stamped our feet so that the ticks couldn’t get a hold. They had a nasty bite.

  ‘Strange creatures,’ I said to Mafoudh. ‘They lie here in the sand for years just waiting for another meal of blood to come by.’

  ‘Ah!’ He shrugged. ‘Just another thing God made.’

  At dawn, we climbed out of the chasm and across the plateau of a rocky hill called Eji. The sand mist was on us again as thick as ever. The washed-out colours reminded me of English moorland in winter, but there was nothing remotely wintry about the heat. Near midday, we were travelling along what seemed to be a narrow cul-de-sac. We were marching due east. I looked at my compass again and again. Our direction never varied. This morning, we should have turned due south towards Walata. If we continued east, we would end up in the middle of the Mrayya, the Empty Quarter. I was reluctant to call to Mafoudh, remembering what had happened before. I felt sure that any moment, he would swing south. But time passed and he never did.

  At last, not long before noon, I shouted to him, ‘We’re going east, Mafoudh! My compass tells me that south is to the right!’

  ‘Your compass tells you!’ he scoffed. ‘South is this way!’ He pointed straight ahead, due east. We both looked up instinctively. The sun was almost at its highest point and was partially obscured by clouds of dust. Towards the end of the canyon was a thin rash of thorn trees. I suggested making camp there for the midday halt.

  After we had unloaded and drunk our zrig, Mafoudh said, ‘Now, which way is south?’ Again I took out the compass and laid it in the sand. The red needle swung to the left. South could only be to the right. ‘For me, south is straight ahead,’ he said, pointing along the canyon. ‘I can tell by the shadows.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ I said. ‘There are no shadows at midday. The compass has to be correct. It never lies. Not unless there’s iron in the ground.’

  ‘How do you know there’s no iron in the ground?’

  ‘I haven’t seen any. Have you?’

  ‘I tell you, it’s the other way,’ he insisted. Then he started to draw in the sand a crude sun compass in the form of a cross. ‘There! North-south-east-west. Those are my directions,’ he said, marking each direction and stabbing a twig into the ground between them. ‘When the sun starts to go down in the afternoon, there will be shadows. Then we will see who is right!’

  It was a challenge. I drew a second cross next to his, marking in my version of the directions, with my south in place of his east. Then we moved into the shade to wait for the sun to sink.

  Marinetta made lunch. The water we had taken from Tinigert was so foul that the evil taste permeated the food. I was very thirsty, but drinking the water was a torture. Marinetta seemed to drink it without complaint, however. ‘How do you do it?’ I asked her incredulously. ‘It tastes like rotten eggs.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the water of Rome is the best water in the world. It’s so cool and fresh that we don’t even bother to put it in the fridge. When I drink this horrible water, I repeat to myself, “The water of Rome! The water of Rome!” over and over. Then I don’t taste it.’ I was amazed by this feat of auto-suggestion, and I tried it for myself. The water still tasted like rotten eggs.

  We dozed off in the heat, but at about half past three, Marinetta woke me up excitedly. ‘Look!’ she said, pointing at the sun. It was going down behind us, and the shadow marking east clearly fell across where Mafoudh had marked south. It was a hollow victory. When Mafoudh said, ‘All right, you’re a better guide than me,’ I was so embarrassed that I almost wished I had been wrong.

  This didn’t end our arguments about direction, though. By late afternoon, we were at it again. Mafoudh said that a teacher in Chinguetti had told him that the earth was round and that if you travelled in a straight line, you would come back to where you started from. The man had also told him that the earth went around the sun. When I said, tentatively, that this might be true, he released all the pent-up temper that he had held back from the morning. ‘That’s rubbish!’ he said. ‘Lies of communists and unbelievers! It says in the Quran, “The sun and the moon run across the sky!”—that means that it is the sun that moves, not the earth. It says so in the Quran. And nobody can argue with the Quran.’

  ‘So what would happen if you travelled in a straight line for ever?’

  ‘You would come to the place where the earth ends and the sky begins, and if you went on farther still, you would fall off.’

  Often, when the bleak, lunar landfall disappeared abruptly into a cloud or over a sheer rock gorge, I could almost believe it myself.

  Near Oujaf, we found some shallow pools of rainwater, clinging to the rocks like quicksilver. This put us all in a good mood. ‘The bounty of God!’ said Mafoudh. ‘There’s nothing better than finding water in the desert when you don’t expect it.’ It was the last such bounty that we were to find.

  The days were a battle with the moisture-devouring wind. The camels got thirsty, we got thirsty, and the waterbags got thinner from dehydration. The temperature was still in the hundreds. Every few hours, we had to stop and pour out a bowl of water to ease our parched throats and bloated lips. The metallic tinkle as the water splashed into the bowl became the most welcome sound I could imagine, but the skins began to look dangerously flabby. There were no more convenient rain pools, not even traces of them. Trees were few. There were no tracks of men or goats or camels. The only movement we saw on the wind-dried earth was three gazelles. They were snow-white and skipped across the sebkha kicking up little puffs of dust. ‘We should be like the gazelles,’ Mafoudh said. ‘They drink only on Fridays.’

  We were searching for the well of Tagouraret over a desert floor as flat and red as a tennis court. On one side of us was the familiar frontier of the Baatin and, on the other, the chilling hugeness of the sand sea. As the sun drifted down, the colours of the earth fluctuated steadily from red to apricot, umber, brown ochre, and salmon-pink. The surface was puckered with veins of granite. A seam of low dunes lay across our path, then a black sebkha, then dunes again. There was no sign of a well. There were no tracks or droppings, no camel bones, none of the familiar camel grooves cut into the surface rock. We scanned the horizon right and left. Nothing moved out there. By sunset, Mafoudh admitted that we had missed Tagouraret. We were down to our last skin of water.

  Mafoudh reckoned that there were two wells in front of us, Ayoun al Khudr and Hassi Fouini. I thought of taking bearings on them with my compass, but it was impossible, since I wasn’t sure of our exact position. All we could do was preserve our water and hope we would find traces of the wells. We woke up thirsty and we stayed thirsty all day. By midmorning, we were bent over our saddles with severe kidney pains. The heat poured down like boiling oil. The dust kicked up by the camels choked us and made our eyes smart. My mouth felt swollen and shapeless, and my lips were starting to crack. Mile after weary mile, the camels shuffled along, yet there was not a hint of a nearby well. I looked up once, to see a man riding a camel in the desert farther
south. I pointed him out to Mafoudh, thinking how slow the guide was not to have noticed.

  ‘That’s not a man. It’s a tree,’ said Mafoudh.

  ‘It’s a man, I tell you.’

  ‘There are no people in this area. You find people only where there has been rain, and there hasn’t been any rain here.’

  ‘It could be a traveller.’

  ‘No. It’s a tree.’

  It seemed an age before we got near to the man on the camel. It seemed strange that he never moved. When we came up to him, I saw that Mafoudh had been right. It was a tree.

  At midday, we halted in a large wadi, where there were some shreds of atil and a few arak trees. In the distance, the wall of the Baatin appeared to end. Instead of cooking, we made foul-tasting zrig. Then, for the second time on this journey, Mafoudh left the camp before taking tea. I climbed a sandbank nearby and tried to identify some of the surrounding knolls on my 1-to-1-million-scale survey map. It was impossible. Mafoudh and I almost collided as we entered the camp. I saw from his face that his recce had been no more inspiring than mine. ‘So what did the mighty compass tell you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ I admitted. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘You shouldn’t interfere with the work of the guide,’ he said.

  ‘It’s my life and my wife’s too,’ I said. ‘It’s not just yours, you know.’

  ‘Then you’d better ask your wife how to find the well, because that’s the only way we’re going to find it.’

  ‘Why don’t you both shut up and save your energy?’ Marinetta snapped suddenly.

  We both did.

  In the late afternoon, we came to the place where the cliff wall appeared to end and found instead that it angled sharply east. Mafoudh halted his camel and turned to look at me. His face expressed exhaustion and utter defeat. ‘I thought the well was here, Omar,’ he said, ‘but I was wrong.’

  ‘You mean we’ve missed Ayoun al Khudr?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he panted. ‘We’ve missed both of them. Ayoun al Khudr and Hassi Fouini. Both of them.’

  Both of them. Now I was worried. Marinetta looked as scared as I felt. Mafoudh’s knowledge had failed us. So had my compass. We had missed three wells, and the next one—ironically called Bir Nsara, the ‘Christians’ Well’—was a day’s ride away. We had about 6 pints of water left. That would mean a drink each tonight; tomorrow, there would be nothing. Our only chance was to find people, but since leaving Akreyjit, we hadn’t seen a single living soul. Akreyjit lay nine days behind us.

  We pushed on with the thirst rasping in our throats. As the camels padded on, my thoughts wandered far away, across the desert sands to the River Nile that was our goal. I thought of the deep, fast-running water, the sunlight playing over the cool ripples, the white water gurgling through the cataracts. I thought of the river people carrying pots of the stuff and laying them in the shade for passers-by. My thoughts followed the river upstream to Khartoum, where Marinetta and I had met. I thought of her sleek, tanned body plunging into the blue swimming pool, bottles of frothing Sprite on the tables. Then I

  thought again of the Nile and how I desperately wanted to reach that river. It was still more than 3,000 miles away. I was jerked out of my reverie by Marinetta shouting, ‘The people! The people!’

  I looked up to see figures among the thornbush, women in sweeping blue and men with camels. There were donkeys hobbled in green grass and a horde of goats whose bodies glinted in the scrub. We couched our camels not far from a woollen tent. An old man with long teeth limped out and shook our hands. ‘Eh? Going to Walata?’ he asked. ‘You’re nearly there now!’ Almost before we had unloaded our camels, he was pressing on us a giant bowl of fresh goat’s milk. As the bowl was handed to me I whispered, ‘Thanks to God!’ There was never a time in my life when I meant it more.

  When we reached Bir Nsara the next day, we found it encircled by a carpet of green grass as smooth as a billiard table. Mafoudh rode up to the well and looked inside. ‘Thank God again that we found those people last night!’ he said. When I joined him at the well head, I understood why. Bir Nsara was dry.

  We watered at a hidden gelta to which the nomads had directed us and rode towards Walata at a leisurely pace. ‘What would you like most in the world now?’ I asked Marinetta.

  ‘I’d like a big salad, a giant ice-cream, and an orange juice, and after that, I’d like to lie on a clean, sandy beach with the water lapping over me,’ she replied.

  Walata was invisible behind a ridge, but the ground around it was churned up and covered with tracks. As we approached, we heard the sound of drums and stringed instruments wafting into the desert. It was so strange after the long silence that I thought my ears were playing tricks. Just before sunset, the town came into sight. Its grey, crumbling maze of stone houses hugged the torso of a rocky hill, looking down into a wadi furnished with trees like Japanese miniatures. It was dark when we made camp there, but now the sound of the instruments was flowing out of the town, a swaying, erotic rhythm. It sounded like a party.

  When we had set up our tent, Mafoudh made tea. Marinetta and I couldn’t keep our eyes off each other. Every time she moved, she seemed to brush me with her hands or feet. The touch sent a tingling sensation down my spine.

  The music came solidly out of the town. ‘Do you think that’s a wedding?’ I asked Mafoudh.

  ‘Sounds like it,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about us if you feel like going to join in,’ I told him.

  Catching on, Marinetta said, ‘Yes, it might be good. Plenty to eat and drink!’

  I saw the temptation in his eyes. ‘But you would be on your own,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, Mafoudh. You go and enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Perhaps I will,’ he said. A few minutes later, he had washed and put on his spare robe. Then he disappeared into the night.

  Marinetta watched him go. ‘At last!’ she said. ‘We’re alone!’ Her eyes shone. Her brown thighs showed through the splits in her pantaloons. I put my hand on one of them. She pulled me into the tent, and in moments, our stinking clothes were off, and we were lying naked on the sandy floor with our arms clasped round each other.

  ‘We’ve waited a long time for this!’ I said.

  Just then, we heard the sound of footsteps and a voice called, ‘Omar! Where are you?’ We scrambled frantically for our clothing, and seconds later, I looked out to see Mafoudh grinning sheepishly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.

  ‘I couldn’t go,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it was right to leave you. Not after all we’ve been through.’

  Moukhtar

  When the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta arrived in Walata, he was invited to the house of the Mandingo inspector, who fed him on millet porridge and honey. ‘Was it for this that the blacks invited us?’ he asked his friends after the meal.

  ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘and this is considered the highest form of hospitality here.’

  ‘This convinced me that there was no good to be hoped for from these people,’ he wrote, ‘and I made up my mind to return to Morocco at once.’

  That was in 1352, when Walata was a desert outpost of the Mandingo empire of Mali; 634 years later, when we visited the oasis, it had long ceased to be a Mandingo town. Appropriately, however, its préfet was of Mandingo origin. He was a gentle, friendly man who preferred to speak French rather than Arabic but lost no time in telling us, ‘My people built this place.’ Like the préfet of Chinguetti, he was one of a new generation of political appointees, installed to give the black minorities a greater role in running the country.

  Like Wadan’s and Tichit’s, though, Walata’s days were evidently numbered. The caravan trade that had made it important had finished, and the new lorry trade now went south to the thriving border town of Nema, 50 miles away, leaving the oasis stranded in the Sahara to struggle on as best it could.

  Half of the houses that crawled up the granite cliffs were in ruins. Th
e intestines hung out of them. The narrow alleys that snaked between them were so clogged with crumbled masonry that there was hardly room to walk. The walls had lost their smooth skin of orange mud, revealing their jagged underflesh of raw stone. The crowded buildings gave the impression of having mushroomed haphazardly out of the rock and, in places, were in the process of melting and merging into it again. The roofs were gone. The doorways blinked down on us like blind caverns. Piles of rubble had spread out across the hill and become indistinguishable from the native rock.

  But not all the houses were dead. Along the neater corridors were magnificent doorways, decorated with intricate woven patterns like writhing maggots. Others were painted more finely with curving cross symbols coloured brown and blue. Some of the doors were left open to reveal other doors inside, also open, like an array of facing mirrors, a tunnel reaching deep into the belly of the town. Children’s features looked out on us from the shadows. A little girl giggled, sitting on a decayed doorstep chewing biscuits. The disjointed head of a donkey peered down nosily from a high window.

  Some Moors from the Shurfa shook hands with us and invited us inside an immaculate courtyard. There were more maggot-like paintings and a massively rotund woman sprawling on a bed of wooden laths. She looked as if she couldn’t possibly get up. The young men were students on vacation from their college in Nouakchott, and were delighted with our Hassaniyya. They made us tea, then without warning, brought us a dish of millet porridge to eat. It was delicious.

  There was a square of shops beneath the hill, some of them so blocked with sand that we had to scramble over high dunes to get to them. Blue-robed men sat in huddles outside, smoking little brass pipes. A few camels with pack saddles were being loaded with sacks of American grain. No children pursued us. No one shouted ‘Nsara!’ In the largest and cleanest of the shops, we met a merchant called Mulah Ali. He was a big bulldog of a man with drooping black jowls and a ferocious expression that made his mild manners all the more of a pleasure. He had everything in his shop, from Nescafé to tinned peaches, and he charged the correct prices. He also promised to help us find a guide to replace Mafoudh.