Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  The only flaw in Moukhtar’s perfection was that he failed to find us a live well. We had followed the southern route for four days, and the seven waterskins we had filled in Walata were down to two. Moukhtar began to show signs of uneasiness. The camels were saved from thirst by the occasional green grazing, but the situation was becoming critical for us. We were all aware that it was Sheikh Ahmed’s last-minute advice that had prompted us to take this route. I couldn’t forget his ‘You’ll regret it!’ as he had stormed out of the shop that day.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, we saw a thick grey wall of dust moving ominously across the horizon. It was composed of tall, spiralling columns, like whorls of smoke from a raging fire. In a moment, it was upon us. The light was blotted out, and we were covered in a cindery swirl of dust. I knew that even Moukhtar could not navigate in this. We were on foot, and I told Marinetta to hang on to her camel’s girth belt whatever happened. Then I ran forward with my compass and asked Moukhtar to follow me. He agreed at once, and for two hours, we staggered through the blistering storm as the sand thrashed against our head cloths, stinging our eyes and choking our nostrils.

  The storm had burned out by sunset, and we made camp on a convoluted plain of parched amber in a brake of spiritless thorn trees. After we had eaten, we discussed the possibility of finding water the following day. ‘I can’t understand why Sheikh Ahmed told us this way was open.’ Moukhtar commented.

  ‘I can!’ I said and related the story of how I had rejected him as a guide.

  ‘No God but God!’ Moukhtar exclaimed. ‘I have heard stories about that man, but I never believed them. They say that when he lived in Zourg he used to go out into the desert and slaughter other people’s goats. They say he killed fifteen before they caught him. Then they drove him out of Zourg and he got work with the army.’

  ‘That sounds like him.’ said Marinetta.

  ‘He was trying to kill us,’ Moukhtar said with slow incredulity. ‘He knew how dangerous this mushla is! That man has the devil in him and no mistake!’ It was the only time I ever saw Moukhtar angry.

  Not long after we struck camp the following morning, we heard the dull report of a rifle. Then a second. I suddenly felt very vulnerable, but the sight of three antelopes scuttering away in the foreground convinced me that we were not the objects of the shots. A moment later, Moukhtar pointed out a solitary figure sitting under a bush and nursing a rifle. ‘It looks like a Nmadi,’ he said, ‘but he missed those antelopes without doubt!’

  When we approached him, the man stood up shyly. He wore no headcloth; nothing, in fact, but a very tattered shirt of greying cloth that was only marginally decent. Moukhtar asked him if the southern route into Mali was open. The man scoffed visibly. ‘The wells have been dead for months,’ he said. ‘And so will you be if you go that way.’ He advised us to turn north to the new frontier well at Umm Murthema. ‘If you ride fast, you can make it by sunset.’ he said.

  As we rode away, Moukhtar muttered, ‘God’s curse on Sheikh Ahmed! When I tell my father about this, he will want to throttle the devil!’

  We arrived at Umm Murthema as the sun was going down. It was in the middle of nowhere, only recently excavated by government engineers. A crowd of Haratin labourers trickled out of some ramshackle huts to greet us. They produced a rope and a giant-sized leather bucket, and Moukhtar harnessed his camel to the hawser. The well was over 250 feet deep and the water couldn’t be extracted without animal power. The Haratin gathered around us ready to help us water our camels and fill our waterbags. There was a pulley mounted on a steel frame over the well. One of the Haratin slung the rope across it and dropped the bucket in. There was a faraway thwack as the leather hit the water. The Haratin jiggled the rope about until he felt the weight of the full bucket. ‘Pull!’ he yelled, and Moukhtar led the camel forward. The hawser went taut. The pulley creaked as the great bucket came up. Two of the Haratin grabbed it and hoisted it over to an old steel wheelbarrow, which they used as a basin. The water was muddy, but the sound of its gurgling was pleasantly familiar. The bucket went back into the well. Time and again the camel heaved on the hawser.

  Marinetta and I unloaded the other camels and drove them to the wheelbarrow to drink. They gulped down the muddy water copiously. At last, the seven waterbags were filled and lay like saveloys in the grey sand. The camels had drunk their fill and their bellies had swollen to bursting point. I asked one of the Haratin how much we owed them for their work. He waved the offer aside with a stumpy hand. This is the last well in Mauritania,’ he said. ‘After this, you will be in Mali. The Malians are not like the Moors. There, you will pay. But here, for guests, water is free.’

  We spent the night in some fresh grass farther on. The camels tore at it greedily, their bellies now well lubricated. The night was moonless and very dark, but as we unloaded, a brilliant orange flash lit up the darkness. For a moment, it was like daylight. When it had faded, Marinetta said, ‘I thought someone had reconnected the electricity!’

  ‘It will rain tomorrow,’ said Moukhtar.

  The grass was full of insects and mosquitoes. Black scarab beetles scurried about everywhere. They made the call of nature an interesting experience. No sooner had you done your business than you would hear a drone like a helicopter as a scarab came skidding down to investigate. An instant later, there would be another drone, then a flurry of drones as the rest of the squadron homed in. If you examined the dark pile in the light of your torch, you would see that it had come alive with dozens of beetles, heaving off fragments, splitting them and dividing them like masons and wrestling with each other as they tried to push their bits away. In seconds, the pile had disintegrated and the scarabs would be removing chunks the size of golf balls with their back legs. Later, they would bury them in the sand and lay their eggs in them. It was the most efficient waste-disposal system I’ve ever seen.

  I was fascinated by the process and could watch the industrious little animals for hours. I focused on an epic battle between two well-matched contestants, a Hector and an Achilles of the beetle world (though they were probably heroines) as they struggled desperately over a fragment of dung. They grappled together, snapping powerful mandibles and flexing armour-plated legs. They sparred with excited feelers and turned somersaults over each other’s chitinous trunks. Once, Hector managed to escape with the dung ball, but Achilles caught him, pinning him down with his tiny claws. Again, the battle wavered back and forth until, after a final thrust from Hector, Achilles took to the air and buzzed away. Triumphantly, Hector wheelbarrowed the dung towards his castle in the sand, carrying before him the seeds of his posterity, when, with devastating ferocity, a grey mouse stuck his head out of a mousehole and, in a single audible scrunch, Hector was gone.

  Moukhtar’s prediction proved wrong. It rained that night. In the morning, we awoke to see the sky a frenzy of grey-blue cloud, coiling and billowing like a sea storm. There was no sunrise. Instead, a square hatchway opened in one of the clouds, and a single golden bolt of light shot through. In that light, we saw the desert transformed into bloom. The Sahara wore its richest royal livery. A million white sealilies had opened, as large and perfect as daffodils, and there were small yellow flowers on the stalks that criss-crossed the ground like tubers. Far across the plain, the sunlight was thrown back, atomised, and reflected in a billion diamonds of dripping moisture.

  But the moisture brought unwelcome guests. As we loaded, the most gigantic scorpion I had ever seen dropped from under the litter. It was a horrific creature, jade-green and almost translucent. Moukhtar crushed it with his stick and it thrashed back and forth with clutching pincers and whipping tail. There was another one, almost as big, under the waterskins. Marinetta froze with horror, gasping, ‘Kill it! Kill it!’ as I skewered the monster.

  ‘There’s nothing worse than the sting of a scorpion,’ Moukhtar said, ‘but they move very slowly. Once, you spot them they’re easy to kill.’ It was the ones we hadn’t spotted that worried me. Scorpion
s are very fond of dark crevices, especially under girbas and saddlery. The threat of their presence made us doubly careful as we loaded from then on.

  It was a new experience to walk through the desert and feel the wet dew on our feet. There were new signs of life wherever we looked. Many large hales had been dug in the wet sand. Moukhtar said they belonged to honey badgers. ‘The honey badger has very sharp teeth,’ he said. ‘It will run away unless you corner it. Then it will seize hold of your leg and never let go until you kill it. And killing it is not easy, mind you!’ He added that the badgers were known to attach themselves to camels’ legs and not to let go until they had toppled the animal. I passed their holes with greater respect after that.

  There was a cool breeze blowing, drawing up the moisture from the surface and diffusing it through the air. Now and then, squalls of rain hit us. Many different beasts had been lured out by the desert’s new mantle. That day, we spotted five jackals, alone or in pairs, loping across the damp ground and occasionally pausing to sniff the breeze. ‘The jackal is a clever animal,’ Moukhtar told us. ‘He is always there, but often, you don’t see him. He hunts with his wife, and they have their own language. Just listen to it tonight. They will attack goats, sheep, and even young camels.’ We also found a medium-sized tortoise, scratching its way across the ground. We stopped to examine it and to take a photograph. It was light brown with a beautifully complex shell pattern. I picked it up for a closer look. ‘Careful!’ Moukhtar warned me. ‘The Haratin eat tortoises. We have a saying, “Come here, tortoise, I’ll eat you! Come here, slave, I’ll piss on you!”’ Right on cue, the tortoise left a spray of gluey urine on my hands.

  That evening, we camped in Mali. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever entered a country without showing a passport,’ Marinetta said.

  ‘You won’t find any police or customs until you reach Tombouctou,’ Moukhtar said. ‘Things are much easier than they used to be. In the past, there were border posts all over. I should know; my brothers and I used to smuggle grain from Mali. It was against the law, of course. They said it was like stealing from the government. But we did it anyway.’ He recounted how he and his brother had once, brought a caravan of thirty-five camels from Mali, each one loaded with five sacks of grain. His brother had gone to a village to buy provisions and had been captured by the police. Moukhtar had carried on alone with his thirty-five camels. He had been obliged to travel at night but had been afraid that the camels at the rear of the train would break away without his noticing in the darkness. ‘I hung a metal tin on the saddle of the last camel,’ he said, ‘and inside it, I put a metal mug. As long as I heard the tinkle of the mug, I knew all the camels were there. But I had to pass a police post, so I took the tin away. I was lucky. All the police were sleeping. Then I crossed the border and I didn’t have to worry.’ He said that his brother had returned after seven days.

  After dark, we were attacked by swarms of mosquitoes. Happily, I had always been little affected by them, but they plagued Marinetta. ‘Bloody mosquitoes!’ she winced, as she slapped at her face and hands. ‘I don’t know why they were created.’ Then, as she saw me grinning, she snapped, ‘I can’t understand why they don’t bite you. I’ll bet you have a bad smell or something.’

  ‘They like some people’s blood more than others,’ Moukhtar said.

  ‘They like mine most of all,’ Marinetta complained. All night, she was tortured by them as she rolled over and thrashed sleeplessly. Every half-hour, her torch would go on and she would wake me up to examine a large, angry red blotch on her skin. ‘Anything is better than this,’ she moaned. ‘Even the heat.’

  And mosquitoes were not the only unpleasant night visitors. There were blister beetles, which could cause a violent reaction from your skin just by walking over it. There were sand flies, which could cause fever. The worst creatures of all were the camel spiders. They had three-inch-long legs and giant mandibles that could give an excruciating bite, worse than a scorpion’s sting. In the mornings, Marinetta would wake up covered in stings, and even Moukhtar looked miserable while the mosquitoes were around.

  Occasionally, we saw people—nomads who had moved into the fresh grazing with their camels and goats and were busily erecting tents. Mostly, these were the familiar pyramid-shaped tents of the Moors, but increasingly, we came across the flattish, oval shelters of the Tuareg.

  I was looking forward to my first encounter with the veiled people of the Sahara, but Moukhtar dampened my enthusiasm with his tales. ‘You can’t trust the Tuareg,’ he told us. ‘They are well known for cheating. They’re not brave about it. They steal at night when you’re not looking. The black Tuareg are the worst, but the white ones are famous cheaters too.’ He related how he had once, been travelling back to Mauritania on a lorry that had stopped at a remote village. A white Targui had arrived and said that his truck had run out of petrol some way out of the village. He had asked for the loan of some money to buy petrol, saying that he had grain on his truck and would sell some of it when he reached the village and pay the money back. ‘Of course, I lent him the money,’ Moukhtar said. ‘He was a Muslim, after all. I waited for the truck to reach the village. I saw the lights coming towards us. The truck came right past the place we had stopped and I saw the Targui inside. He drove straight on and didn’t even look, by God! The Tuareg are not like the Arabs. They think it’s clever to cheat.’

  Our first Tuareg came into the camp one day at noon. There were three of them, all quite young. The first thing that struck me, of course, was their veils. They wore indigo headcloths exactly like those of the Moors, except that the cloth was tightly bound over the lower part of their faces, exposing only the eyes. They were whippet-slim and wore yellowing shirts and black cloaks. One of them carried a shotgun and had a bandolier of cartridges around his waist. They spoke no Hassaniyya, although their extended hands and their gestures towards our tea and sugar left us in no doubt that their visit was not purely social. I felt that wearing veils like this was somehow not playing the game. You can tell so much about a man from his facial expression that to hide it seems like a deliberate attempt to disguise one’s true nature. When we left them, they were examining some Lipton’s teabags that we had discarded. They were holding them up to the light curiously. ‘It’ll take them a long time to work that one out!’ Marinetta said.

  All that afternoon, Marinetta ran about taking shots of Moukhtar leading the caravan. She seemed spellbound by his lithe figure, and several times, she asked me to get out of the way. I refused, saying that we had no time for foolishness. It was a measure of her feeling for the guide that she rarely spoke to him as she had to Mafoudh, who had evoked a more brotherly response. Her zoom lens bridged the gap created by her shyness, and she could examine his face and body closely under the pretext of photography. In turn, Moukhtar puffed up in front of the camera, aware of his attraction. He never covered his face as Mafoudh had done. ‘Come on, Maik!’ she told me again. ‘Get out of the picture! I want to take the guide and the caravan!’

  ‘You’ll have to take the picture as it is or not at all!’ I replied furiously. ‘I’m sick of taking pictures of your bloody stupid face!’ she yelled. A few minutes later, she sulkily put her cameras away.

  During our noon halt the following day, Marinetta suddenly took the cameras and went off to get some shots of Moukhtar who was herding the camels 50 yards away. When I looked round, I saw her pointing the camera at him as he posed proudly in front of the grazing animals. Then I noticed that she was no longer wearing her headcloth. It had fallen around her neck and she was making no attempt to replace it. Her dark halo of hair flowed freely in the breeze. Moukhtar changed position, and she angled her slim body round for another shot. The sunlight caught the supple muscles of her bronzed arms and legs. I was sure this was a deliberate revenge, and I felt livid.

  When she came back to the camp, still faintly smiling, and said, ‘I got some brilliant shots,’ I bawled at her, ‘Put that bloody headcloth on! Cover your ha
ir up! You know that women never show their hair in Moorish culture!’

  ‘Why should I wear that thing all the time?’ she shouted back. ‘You take yours off. I don’t belong in this culture. I can do as I like.’

  ‘No, you damn well can’t! You’re a married woman, and you can bloody well behave in a respectable way!’

  ‘In the Sahara?’

  ‘Especially in the Sahara. You shouldn’t go off alone with the guide.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s it?’she said. ‘You’re jealous!’

  ‘I’m not jealous. I want this expedition to succeed, and you’re doing everything you can to ruin it.’

  ‘Jealous!’

  ‘Just put your headcloth on.’

  She put it on, but it was the last time she spoke to me for two days.

  All afternoon, she sulked silently, and even when the heat subsided, she refused to talk. She spoke not a word all evening. Moukhtar commented that she must be tired. ‘It’s a hard journey for a woman,’ he said. The next morning, she dragged behind the camels as we walked. At first, I made no comment. Then she got farther and farther behind until it became dangerous. I had to tell Moukhtar to stop and let her catch up. It was the first time she had ever fallen behind. She walked up with an insolent waddle, but as soon as we started, she fell behind again. ‘Marinetta!’ I shouted at her. ‘For God’s sake make an effort! If you can’t keep up, you’ll have to ride.’ She stared back at me contemptuously. A few minutes later, I had to tell Moukhtar to halt again. Then I couched her camel and told her, ‘Get on that camel!’ She refused to budge. ‘Get on that bloody camel!’ I raved, really mad now. I grabbed her by the arm. Moukhtar was looking at us strangely from the front of the caravan. At last, she mounted the camel. But she didn’t speak all afternoon.