Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  That night, we made camp on a hillock with a flat, sandy top, like a small fortress in the rolling plain. We hobbled the camels and sent them off to graze. There was a weak sliver of moon, already waning, and the light was poor. While Moukhtar made bread, Marinetta sat on her bed and moped, silently swatting mosquitoes. Moukhtar was talking about animals again, saying, ‘There used to be leopards in these parts once. The leopard is the most dangerous animal there is, by God! It’s more dangerous than the lion even. It’s so fast that it can kill you at once. The lion plays with you first, and that gives you a chance to pick up a weapon.’ From somewhere across the mushla came the weird, piercing call of jackals. ‘There they are!’ Moukhtar said. ‘See how they talk to each other!’ I listened intently, then I suddenly became aware of something else. I could no longer hear the champing of the camels. It was already late. I suggested that we should go and coiled them for the night, as we had done since entering Mali.

  Moukhtar volunteered to go off alone and soon disappeared into the darkness. The moon had set and the night was black as pitch. Thirty minutes later, he came back without the camels. ‘They’ve gone!’ he said.

  ‘You mean they’ve been stolen?’ I asked him, aghast.

  ‘I don’t know. They’re nowhere near the camp.’

  ‘Is it possible a thief could have taken them while we were talking?’

  ‘It’s possible. But perhaps they’ve gone to find better grazing. I can’t find any tracks.’

  Marinetta was sitting up attentively. Moukhtar asked for my torch. ‘You stay here and keep the fire going,’ he said. ‘I’ll look for them.’ After he had gone, I fetched some more firewood and stoked up the fire. Across the range, I could see the faint glimmer of the torch zig-zagging this way and that. I felt grim. Grimmest of all was the feeling that someone might actually have been watching us with malicious intent from out of the darkness.

  Suddenly, Marinetta broke her silence. ‘I’m scared, Maik,’ she said. ‘What will we do if they’ve been stolen? We’re in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘There are some nomads about who might help us. It’s better than being lost in Umm Hayjiba.’ There was a pause, and she said, ‘Maik, my headcloth fell off. I didn’t remove it on purpose.’

  ‘And you don’t fancy Moukhtar?’

  ‘He’s attractive. Didn’t you ever look at the attradive girls in Chinguetti? That’s as far as it goes. You’re my husband.’ It was the first time I ever remembered her using that word.

  It was more than an hour before the guide returned. ‘The ground is too hard for tracks,’ was all he said. ‘We’ll have to search in the morning.’

  When I opened my eyes at sunrise, Moukhtar had gone. My first thought was, ‘It is a trick!’ But then I saw that he had left his sandals and gone off in bare feet. I knew he must be intending to come back. Marinetta got up and made coffee. We sat near the fire scanning the horizon. There was no movement, no trace of animals or human beings. There was nothing but desolation, and infinite emptiness, and the vacant breath of wind dragging across the wasteland. The sun rose higher. Our fire burned down. I wondered if we should ever be able to reach the Nile if we lost these camels. I wondered how we would survive. ‘Whatever happens,’ Marinetta said, ‘we won’t give up. Not now. We’ve endured too much already.’ I felt a sudden shock of warm admiration, which spread slowly through me. It was the bravest thing I had ever heard her say. The arguments and the acrimony were forgotten. I draped my arm around her shoulder. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Out there!’ Far away, on the edge of the plain, it seemed, was a black dot. Then it became a figure leading three camels. I waited with bated breath until I made out the unmistakable form of Moukhtar.

  ‘He got them!’ I yelled. Marinetta threw her arms around me. A big tear trickled down her chin.

  We reached Ras Al Ma the following day. I had been looking forward to it since we started. It was at the head of Lake Faguibine, a wedge of blue water on the map that stretched for many days east towards Tombouctou. But I was disappointed. Ras Al Ma was a bleak, grey settlement of mud houses, set among desolate thorn bush. It had stood at the head of the lake once, but now the lake had gone. Faguibine, so attractively blue on the map, was completely dry. Some Tuareg who helped us get water from a well in the old bed of the lake said that there had been no surface water there for eight years.

  For three days, we rode across the wasteland. Where there had once, been water were now acres of Sodom’s Apple trees with their waxy leaves like plastic and their poisonous grapefruit-like fruit. There were low thorn trees among the mass, but the Sodom’s Apples towered over them, 10 feet high and showing a craw of white roots. In places, the trees formed tight corridors, where our camels would hesitate, frightened by the creaking of the cadus-like leaves and the rattling of the dried, empty husks of fruit. The earth of the lake floor was grey and dusty, littered with the shells of molluscs. ‘There used to be plenty of fish here,’ Moukhtar told us. ‘There were boats on the lake and they would catch fish with nets.’ The lake shore was still lined with the huts of fisher-folk, but behind them, the dunes of the Sahara rose up menacingly. Here, I thought, was the history of the Sahara in miniature. In Stone Age times, this entire area, from here to Baatin, had been well watered with lakes and inhabited by fishermen hunters. Over the ages, the area had become more and more arid, and the desiccation had driven away the fishermen or turned them into nomads who left their villages, now stranded on what had been the shores of vast lakes, to die or to adapt to the new conditions.

  On 16th September, we saw the towers of Tombouctou on the horizon. Within an hour, the whole expanse of the city lay in a great sprawl across the skyline. ‘Is that really it?’ Marinetta asked. ‘After all this time!’

  We had made it in forty-two days.

  The first of my tribe ever to see Tombouctou was Alexander Gordon Laing, in 1825. Laing had never lived to tell the tale; he was murdered by his guides somewhere in the desert to the north. In the following year, a young Frenchman named Rene Caillie had visited the place and had survived a harrowing journey back across the Sahara to tell the world of his discovery. It was 161 years since Laing had first laid eyes on Tombouctou. From where we sat now, it could have been yesterday.

  We arrived among the sand dunes outside the town in the late afternoon. As we unloaded, some Arab women with lovely oriental faces came out to greet us. Moukhtar said that they belonged to the Berabish, the large Arab confederation of western Mali. The women were followed by gangs of children who slid down the dunes and shouted, ‘Donnez-moi un cadeau!’ The city walls looked forbidding, and we were strangely reluctant to leave the familiar safety of our camp. The desert had already become part of us. The city lay in another country, where we needed passports and visas, where we were subject to yet another set of rules.

  We camped in the dunes that night. After dark, the town took on the appearance of the twentieth century. We sat drinking tea and watching the squares of miraculous electric light from the new Hotel Azalai, perched on the edge of the town. The sound of a generator drummed across the sand. From somewhere came the blare of pop music.

  At first light, we were saddling the camels as usual.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Marinetta asked, still fuzzy with sleep.

  ‘T0 the hotel,’ I said. ‘

  ‘With the camels?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Camels made this city.’

  But as we led our tiny azalai towards the distant walls, it felt somehow like the walk of the condemned.

  Sidi Mohammed

  The Hotel Azalai seemed appropriately named for us but was, in fact, a three-star international establishment. It was quite out of place in Tombouctou, designed exclusively for the affluent tourists coming by plane. No doubt, we were the first travellers ever to arrive there by azalai. We marched right into the hotel forecourt with our camels, and there, we unloaded our disgusting equipment: the saddle bags stained with grease and camel sweat
, the broken sacks and hold-aIls, the blankets smeared with the oozings of camel sores and caked with Moorish dust. The entire staff of the hotel turned out to help us move our saddles and belongings into the store. As it happened, they had little else to do. There were no other guests in the hotel.

  It was a bastion of comfort on the edge of the Great Desert, set in a neatly kept garden of bougainvillaeas. Through the shuttered window, though, you could see the real Tombouctou: tall, thirsty streets, a collection of tents made of dom-palm fibre, bony Tuareg camels, and little boys driving donkeys. The Tuareg caretaker told us that there were no guests because the flights from the capital, Bamako, had ceased. The previous year, there had been a serious aircrash in which hundreds of tourists had died. The airline no longer functioned.

  After we had lugged our equipment inside, I sent Moukhtar off to graze the camels. He had already agreed to look after them for an extra daily sum. Then, without changing or taking a shower, we went off in search of the police. Our entry visas from the Paris Embassy, valid for only ten days after entry, had already expired, and we were afraid the authorities might send us to Bamako to renew them. At the dilapidated police headquarters in the town square, we were received cordially by a large black officer wearing a gaily coloured cotton suit. He looked at our passports and said, ‘Your visas have expired.’ I was about to pour out the passionate plea for clemency we had prepared when he said, ‘Don’t worry. We can renew them here.’ He smiled smoothly at our account of our journey and asked where we were heading for next.

  ‘Agadez, Niger,’ I told him.

  ‘I know the best guide in Tombouctou,’ he said.

  Afterwards, we entered the nearest shop. There was electricity. There was a fridge. There were piles and piles of tins and packets and boxes of all sizes and attractive colours. There were things we had dreamed of in the desert: chocolate, mayonnaise, evaporated milk, cheese, tinned tunny, lemonade powder. We ordered two cans of fizzy orange. As the shopkeeper opened the fridge door, I felt an icy waft of air. The orange was as cold as polar water, as delicious as the most precious nedar, drinkable only in sips. After we had finished, Marinetta said, ‘It was worth a thousand miles just for that! Now I can feel the circulation going again.’

  We wandered back to our hotel in a kind of exhausted delirium, dimly aware of the twining alleys and the flux of people: rascally Tuareg, blue-jowled Arabs, Songhai women in dresses of foaming colours. We had a meal of meat and potatoes in another flyblown hotel, where we met two American tourists. They were clean-cut college boys in neat bush shirts and khaki shorts, complete with desert boots. They were disarmingly enthusiastic about their first visit to Africa.

  ‘There was no one else in town till you came,’ one of them said. ‘We had the place to ourselves. It was great! We try to take an interest in the people’s lives. Betcha they don’t get many tourists who ask questions about social conditions. Most American tourists just take pictures and fly out.’ They were proud of having come down the Niger river on a steamer.

  ‘The only problem is the water,’ the second youth told me. ‘Two doctors back home told us not to drink it. We always sterilise our water.’ Each of them carried a water bottle from which they sipped, rather guiltily, now and again.

  Before we left, they presented me with two books. The books were Cervantes’s Don Quixote and The African Queen by C. S. Forester. It was the best present I could have imagined.

  Back in our hotel room, I examined myself in the mirror. I was a tramp. My hair and beard were long and unkempt, my face wrinkled and leathery, beetroot-red from the sun, and ravaged by dust. My body was whittled down to refugee thinness by the heat and the austerities of the journey. We peeled off our filthy clothes and turned on the shower. The water flowed out, clear, cool, and abundant, swirling and eddying around the porcelain before it drained away. Stepping into it was an almost blasphemous act. It felt sinfully luxurious to stand in that endless flow for minute after minute as the accumulated muck of forty-two days was washed away. I was content with a single shower, but Marinetta went back for a second and a third after I had finished.

  Afterwards, we lay on a soft bed, on gleaming white sheets. It was superb luxury. Now there was no Mafoudh, no Moukhtar, no squalling children to interrupt us. At last, we were alone. That evening, we left our room only for dinner.

  Sidi Mohammed was sitting on a wooden bench at the police headquarters when we arrived there the next morning. He was a short man with a slight stoop and powerful limbs. His hands and feet were rough and as calloused as a labourer’s, his movements jerky and awkward. He was dressed in a long, ragged gandourah and a blue headcloth, lapped about his face in semi-Tuareg style. The smooth-faced police officer of the previous day told us that he was an Arab of the Berabish. Hassaniyya was his mother tongue, but he had spent some time among the Ifoghas Tuareg and spoke fluent Tamasheq. His experience had done nothing to improve his liking for the Tuareg, though. ‘Only the Arabs are good,’ was his opinion. ‘The Tuareg are a bad lot. They’re like animals when it comes to sex. They only have to see a woman and they go for her. Their women brazenly talk to men. Disgusting!’

  Sidi Mohammed was one of a small elite of professional guides in Tombouctou, and one of very few who knew the route to Niger. There was little call for camel guides that way now, he said. There was a perfectly good road south to Gao and Niamey, Niger’s capital, and you could easily go on the bus. Even tourists with their own vehicles wouldn’t cross the country that we wanted to cross. It would mean travelling parallel with the Niger as far as the bend, then carrying on in the same direction across the great wadi Azouagh and the Sakarezou hills. That country was very wild and desolate, he said, and he hinted darkly that there were some very evil Tuareg living there. ‘Why don’t you follow the road down to Gao and Niamey?’ he asked. ‘It’s much easier that way.’

  ‘If we went that way, we wouldn’t need a guide, would we?’ I said. Sidi Mohammed saw which way the wind was blowing and capitulated.

  Before finally agreeing to take Sidi Mohammed as our guide, I wanted him to meet Moukhtar, who was due to return that evening with our camels. We collected our freshly stamped passports from the police and went in search of a bank to change our traveller’s cheques to C F A francs. There was another Westerner in the bank, a freckle-faced Belgian girl. She wore embarrassingly tight jeans and a shoulderless T-shirt, through which the nipples of well-proportioned breasts were clearly discernible. Her auburn hair was splayed out in a fiery mass. ‘Can you give me a lift to Gao?’ she asked us.

  ‘Not unless you want to go by carnell,’ Marinetta said. We saw her later walking through the market holding hands with a handsome young African, while two others followed on behind.

  Moukhtar arrived outside our hotel with the camels just before sunset. We were both happy to see him. I wished suddenly that he was travelling with us to Agadez. I asked him if he had spent the night alone. He said that he had found an Arab camp but that the Arabs had offered him no food and hadn’t even come out to welcome him. ‘They sent a boy out with a mat,’ he said. ‘That’s their idea of hospitality. What a disgrace!’

  Just then, a young Targui appeared and offered to sell us a camel. His Hassaniyya was poor and he spoke with some effort. ‘Is the camel fat?’ asked Moukhtar.

  ‘No, it is not fat.’

  ‘Is it big?’

  ‘No, it is not big.’

  ‘Is it strong?’

  ‘It is not very strong.’

  ‘It’s not much good then, is it?’

  The Targui touched Moukhtar on the arm. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you are an Arab and I am Tuareg. You know camels and I know camels.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And … Tuareg camels are better than Arab camels!’

  Moukhtar let out a delighted peal of laughter and the Targui followed suit.

  At that point, Sidi Mohammed arrived. He shook hands with Moukhtar, and they squatted down together in the sand. We looked on. The two Arabs were
curiously different. Sidi Mohammed appeared an uncouth barbarian beside the aristocratic Moukhtar. He was as squat and powerful as Moukhtar was tall and wiry. His head seemed large and ungainly, his big eyes slightly bulging, the mouth wide with a suggestion of vulpine greed. He laughed nervously and poked Moukhtar constantly on the leg as he talked. Yet his manner was humble, almost as if he were desperate for acceptance. He was a good ten years older than Moukhtar, but their ages seemed reversed. There was, I decided, something faintly tragic about Sidi Mohammed.

  After he had gone, Moukhtar said, ‘He’s very experienced, there’s no doubt. He knows camels. He’s been to Mauritania, Niger, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, all by camel. I don’t see any harm in the man, but you can’t tell until you get into the desert.’

  I knew, as always, that taking on a fresh guide was a gamble. Marinetta commented, ‘He’s experienced, but he’s not what you call an attractive type, is he?’ Perhaps it was for that reason that I decided to hire Sidi Mohammed.

  We stayed in Tombouctou long enough to buy provisions and to exchange the ailing Gurfaf. Meanwhile, I had promised myself a pilgrimage to the houses of Alexander Gordon Laing and Rene Caillie. Gordon Laing’s house was almost derelict, but his forty-day stay there in 1825 was recorded on a plaque. I asked our guide, a Soninke lad called Sanaa, why Gordon Laing had been murdered. ‘He came dressed as a soldier,’ the boy said. ‘And the Tuareg thought he had come for war. So they followed him and killed him. They strangled him with a headcloth.’