Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  Caillie had fared a little better—perhaps because he had disguised himself as an Arab. On arriving in Tombouctou in 1826, he had been sorely disappointed that the place bore no resemblance to the legendary ‘Golden City’ of European imagination. He had travelled north to Morocco with a caravan of 1,400 camels carrying ostrich feathers and, after many privations and narrow escapes, had made his way back to France.

  None of the West’s first visitors to Tombouctou had met with a hospitable reception. It seemed ironical to me that these houses, like shrines, should become important tourist attractions, a source of revenue for the descendants of those who had treated their first tourists so badly. As we re-entered the hotel that evening, a gigantic poster beamed down on us: ‘Mali, Land of Welcome’.

  Sidi Mohammed told us that there were still Tuareg in Mali who were as forbidding as they had been in Gordon Laing’s day. Only the previous year, a French couple had been murdered in the Adrarn-Ifoghas. They had been travelling by Land Rover and had stopped to talk to some nomads. The Tuareg had seized the man and murdered him. The woman had locked herself in the car and had managed to write a description of the killers, then she, too, had been taken. ‘How were they murdered?’ Marinetta asked.

  ‘They were strangled with a headcloth,’ Sidi Mohammed said.

  He tried to persuade me to buy a shotgun, saying that there were bands of Tuareg on our route who were in opposition to the government and who would attack strangers. ‘I’m not afraid of thieves,’ he said, ‘but these people are different. They will follow you into a lonely place and then murder you.’ He said that there were often battles between the Arabs and the Tuareg in Mali. Both of them were nomadic races, but while the Tuareg herded cattle and goats and a few camels, the Arabs were principally camel herders and ranged farther afield. Just the week before, he said, there had been a fight between them, quite near Tombouctou, in which five Tuareg had been injured and two Arabs killed. The Tuareg still languished in Tombouctou hospital.

  Tombouctou may never have been the golden place of European legend, but at sunset, the streets and the tall stone houses took on a rich aura of gold. The streets were an arabesque of wynds and alleys feeding into each other like tributaries and merging with the wide avenues that had their confluence in the central square. The avenues were uneven and littered with the bones of slaughtered animals and sherds of pot. The pot-sherds might have been there hours or centuries. I saw an old lady dump a cracked pot in the street; it was used as a football by a gang of children and quickly smashed to bits. Over the years, the fragments would get smaller, mashed, and ground under the feet of people and the hooves of donkeys, stamped into the grey dust until they merged with the fabric of the place. Dust to dust. From the square, the oily blue snake of a road ran out past the new power palaces of the city, the headquarters of UNICEF, U S A I D, C A R E, and O X F A M, each with its radio antenna like an imperial flag and its stable of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Beyond them and interspersed with them were the elongated domes of Tuareg tents, matting skins of palm fibre stretched over timber frames. They, too, might have been there for centuries.

  Far from being the predatory bandits of Sidi Mohammed’s stories, the Tuareg of Tombouctou seemed cowed and vanquished. Many of them were refugees from the desert, driven into the city by the Great Drought. If they made a living at all, it was by selling daggers, swords, or silver rings to tourists. Like the Moors in Chinguetti and Nouakchott, many of them were kept alive by American grain. Just before starting our journey, I had read an article about the Tuareg of Mali entitled ‘Sons of the Wind’. For the Tuareg we met in Tombouctou, at least, it seemed the wind had changed.

  After only a few days, we began to feel a sense of oppression in the town. It was awkward being the only guests in the hotel plus the staff were unhelpful now and even hostile. Adolescent youths followed us in the streets, silently watching from doorways and street corners, always hovering in the background like a bad conscience. Our room was no longer the refuge it had seemed on the first day. Once, they got to know it, groups of Tuareg took to standing outside our window, knocking on the shutter and offering us miscellaneous items for sale. The caretaker did nothing to stop them.

  The old argument reappeared between Marinetta and me. Her dress seemed to get more blase each day. She no longer wore her headcloth, and her Arab clothes had been replaced by a figure-hugging salopette. Youths whistled at her, and children whispered obscenities that they looked too young to understand. I noticed that Sidi Mohammed’s greedy eyes followed her and remembered the look of surprise on Moukhtar’s face when he had first seen her dressed like a Westerner. The day before we were due to leave, I advised her to wear the headcloth in the market. ‘At least it will spare us the whistling and leering,’ I said.

  ‘Why should I?’ she answered. ‘This isn’t the desert. Tourists don’t wear headcloths. What about that Belgian girl?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Some Western women come here only for male attention. They think that they can behave as they like because they are free of the restrictions of their own countries. They don’t realise that African societies are even stricter than their own.’

  She refused to change, and in a rage, I left without her, taking the Soninke boy Sanaa to help carry the provisions.

  We had been in the market only a few minutes when a clot of angry, red cumulus formed over the buildings, turning into a claw of black dust. The market erupted. Women picked up their babies and wrapped up their meagre wares. ‘We’ve got five minutes before it hits us!’ Sanaa said. Everywhere, people were leaping for the shelter of mud walls in apparent terror. I saw one woman, with a baby on her back and carrying a bowl of milk on her head, knock down a little boy in her hurry to get away. Instead of picking him up, she cursed him, then charged onwards, all without spilling a drop of milk. Sanaa and I ran back to the hotel. We had almost reached it when the rain began. A crowd of youths sheltering under the gate told me that Marinetta had left the place a few minutes earlier, heading for the market. I knew I had to find her.

  As I turned back, the rain hit me with the surging crash of a waterfall. In the winding alleys, it was boiling in grey bubbles. It swept off the roofs through the spouting, gushing in a torrential stream through the market. The stalls were deserted. Every doorway, arch, or covered passage held a scrum of people. Faces stared at me from behind the bars of windows or from shop entrances. Marinetta’s face was not among them. The dark stream was up to my calves. Bits of wood, paper, and excrement floated in it. Filthy water from the roofs poured down my back. The dark cloud hovered over the canyons of the streets, the thunder seeming to shake the stone walls.

  My sandals turned soggy and made me slip and slither in the mud beneath the torrent. I staggered into the large covered market, and there was Marinetta. She smiled at me, sitting calmly among some Soninke women. Every time, the lightning crackled and thunder boomed, half of them dived under their blankets and screamed. Marinetta pointed to a pretty Soninke girl next to her. The girl was about eighteen, her hair coiled and braided into intricate ringlets. Like Marinetta, she was not wearing a headcloth. I asked the girl what this exotic hairstyle was called. ‘Rasta,’ she replied.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘You must have heard of Bob Marley!’ she said.

  All traces of the storm had disappeared when Moukhtar brought the camels back the following day. This time, he had with him an Arab who had for sale a magnificent white camel belonging to the prestigious mayneg breed. The Arab agreed to take the injured Gurfaf in part exchange. The new camel was called Seb’i, ‘the Seventh’. As the Arab led Gurfaf away, I felt as if I had parted with an old and faithful friend.

  We removed all our equipment and the new sacks of provisions from the hotel store and annoyed the manager by filling our waterbags from the hotel kitchens. Moukhtar told me that he had arranged to buy a she-camel with the money I had paid him. ‘She’s not very pretty,’ he admitted, ‘but she’ll make a profit in Walata.’
I asked him if he wasn’t worried about riding back alone. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve bought a special charm from a marabout. No bandits will see me.’

  When Sidi Mohammed arrived, Moukhtar harangued him mercilessly about his duties. The older man listened with slightly bowed head. Then we loaded the camels together and led our caravan out of the town, going east.

  Rain had fallen along the valley of the Niger river. Thousands of nomads were moving back into the fresh pastures with what remained of their herds after many years of drought. Wells that had been abandoned were being dug out and used again. The ropes creaked again, the pulleys trundling round as the heavy buckets swung up to the well-head. Camels, goats, donkeys, sheep, and even oxen were pawing thirstily in the dust around the watering troughs. The rolling plains were scattered with the camps of Arabs and Tuareg, their goatskin tents like giant tortoise shells. Their camps looked pitifully poor, and Sidi Mohammed said that most of these nomads had lost much of their livestock in the drought. They stay here only because they’re used to it,’ he said. ‘It’s just habit, that’s all.’

  Sidi Mohammed himself had once, lived in these ranges. ‘I used to live in a leather tent just like these,’ he said, ‘and I used to have some camels and goats. But then there was independence and the drought. It went bad for the Arabs. I lost everything and moved to the town.’

  ‘Did you get any help from international aid?’ Marinetta asked him.

  ‘Gah!’ he said. ‘We got a bit, right at the beginning, but after that, nothing. The government took most of it and sold it to the big merchants. That’s why you see it all in the shops, Italian oil, Japanese sardines, grain from the United States. The government are all flying to Switzerland in aeroplanes—whooooosh! Or they’re driving cars and sitting in air-conditioned houses with the fans going swiiiishsh! Swiiiishsh! It’s a story everyone knows, by God!’

  Sidi Mohammed was a camel man by experience but a labourer by training. He had taken caravans as far as Morocco, trading camels with the Rigaybat in Spanish Sahara and bringing back copper and blankets from Goulimime. He had worked in Morocco four times, the last time as a labourer constructing a road. ‘The Moroccans are the best people in North Africa,’ he said. ‘They ask no questions. They don’t bother you as long as you give them no problems. But if you cause trouble, gah! Then you have trouble!’ He said he would like to return there but that the caravan route was now blocked. ‘The Polisario messed it up,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame the Polisario. The Rigaybat are good people, but no one can cross that border easily now.’

  He seemed to have an instinctive feel for the camels, always selecting a camping site that would afford them the best grazing. He pointed out several mistakes in our loading technique, adjusting my pack saddle to make it more comfortable. He lapped the leather neck straps with doth so that they wouldn’t rub on the camel’s skin and showed us how to place the litter farther forward so that it would not cause swellings on the flanks. He tut-tutted over the state of our girbas and oiled them thoroughly inside with butter. If we had hobbled the camels near the camp at night, he would always be up before dawn to loose them and let them graze a little before we loaded. He never cooked but produced within minutes of unloading a large enough pile of wood of the right size and type for that night and the morning. He would inquire solicitously of Marinetta where she would like the fire to be placed. As a guide, he was confident and unerring. He would make a point of stopping anyone we passed and eliciting current information. Was such-and-such a well open or closed? Had rain fallen here or here? Was there trouble from bandits ahead? He would go out of his way to visit a camp or talk to a traveller, often sprinting off on foot and catching us up later.

  On the other hand, there was a darker, more mysterious side to Sidi Mohammed. He was sulky and would often refuse to answer my questions, saying, ‘Even a child knows that!’ And why, for instance, did he always disappear for half an hour every morning, just after we set off? Why did he do the same in the afternoon? At first, I thought he must be answering the call of nature and was suffering from some stomach complaint that he was reluctant to tell us about. But when I offered him some medicine, he replied, ‘Gah! There’s nothing wrong with my stomach!’ Every day, he would absent himself at the same time and would catch us up, panting breathlessly, without a word of explanation. Once, or twice, I looked back to see him squatting behind a bush.

  Then there was the mystery of his sack. He had with him a bulky fibre sack, which he opened rarely. When he did so, it was with great circumspection, always carrying it well away from us and turning his back. He opened it with nervous deliberation and retied it at once. We were never able to see what he took out of it.

  Once, when we were riding, I noticed a slight protrusion in the back of his gandourah. When the breeze blew the garment up, I saw that it was a vicious little stiletto in a bronze sheath, designed to be hidden in the waistband. Many nomads carried knives, but the nature of the weapon and its concealment seemed characteristic of Sidi Mohammed. He was a man who harboured secrets.

  When we fed, he would grab the food with his big, calloused hands before Marinetta and I were even seated. He would shovel the rice or couscous into his mouth, swilling it down with water. He kept the water bowl in his left hand while pawing at the food with his right. He would continue to shovel until every grain was finished, then he would push the plate away sullenly, muttering, ‘There wasn’t enough butter, Mariam!’ or ‘That rice wasn’t cooked properly!’ Then he would pick up the water bowl again, hawk, and spit into the sand in front of us, burp and belch loudly in our faces, pick his teeth, hiccup, swill the water round and gargle it and, finally, throw the water bowl down contemptuously. Then he would deliver another instalment of burping and spitting. The only rude sound his repertoire lacked was a fart.

  He complained long and continuously about the food. He hated sardines. The diet was monotonous. There was no fresh meat. The dates weren’t of the best type. In Tombouctou, he had assured us that he ate everything, including sardines. He would wait till Marinetta was obviously preparing rice and say, ‘Why don’t you make couscous today, Mariam?’

  Then she would go red and answer, ‘Get lost! The rice is already prepared.’

  ‘But you don’t cook it properly.’

  ‘If you don’t like it, make it yourself!’

  Now it was Marinetta’s turn to be disgusted by the guide’s manners. She detested his spitting and burping. ‘Do you think he does it on purpose?’ she often asked me. It was a difficult question. Sidi Mohammed was an intelligent man, but the circumstances of his life seemed to have made him bitter, uncouth, and resentful. Marinetta hated the way he would brush her backside with his hand when taking the water bowl from behind her litter, and the manner in which he stared at the arm-slits in her shirt, though which her bra was clearly visible. She mostly avoided taking photos of Sidi Mohammed and answered his criticism with shrewish rejoinders.

  Sidi Mohammed’s main complaint was the lack of fresh meat. Once, in the first few days, we met an Arab boy leading a goat, which he intended to sell in the market. He offered it to us at a reasonable price, and Sidi Mohammed implored me to buy it. I told him frankly that I had only a small amount of cash to last us to Agadez, nearly 1,000 miles away. I considered fresh meat a bad investment this early in the journey. Sidi Mohammed muttered, ‘It’s just like prison. No fresh meat!’

  ‘When were you in prison?’ I asked him.

  ‘Last year, in Libya.’ he said. ‘The Libyans caught me crossing the border by camel and threw me into jail.’ I was intrigued and, over the next few days, managed to extract the full story from him. When the Moroccan route had closed, Sidi Mohammed had found employment in Libya, first as a shepherd, then as a caretaker. Things had gone well until he had returned to Tombouctou on vacation. During that time, the Libyans had tightened the entry regulations, as their country was swamped with seven million foreign workers, when the native population was a mere two million. Unable to enter
the country legally, he had crossed the desert border from Algeria by camel and had been stopped by Libyan border guards. ‘I did it three times,’ he said. ‘The first time, they just sent me back to Algeria, and the second. The third time, I went with twelve others. We had only one camel between us, and each of us had two jerrycans of water. We must have been 200 miles inside the country when the helicopter spotted us. We knew it was the end. Some soldiers came to arrest us, and the border guards remembered my face. They threw me into prison.’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘How do you expect a prison to be? It was tough, that’s how it was! They gave us only bread and coffee and some macaroni and rice. You had to work all day on the roads. If you slowed down, they beat you with a rubber pipe. It was no joke, I can tell you!’

  ‘Were you convicted by a judge?’

  ‘Judge! In Libya! Don’t make me laugh! I was just thrown into jail. No one asked questions. I told them, ‘‘I’m not a criminal.” And they said, “You’re a thief of the route.” That’s what they call you if you enter illegally.’

  ‘How did it end?’

  ‘I escaped, by God! I ran away from the work party, and they didn’t see me. The prison was in Ghat, near the Algerian border, and once, I crossed the border, they couldn’t do anything. Then I got a truck back to Tombouctou. Now I can’t go back to Libya. Perhaps they’d shoot me next time.’

  Often, he would recite bitterly, ‘I’m forty-eight years old, and my life has been nothing but fatigue. I had eight years knowing nothing and forty years of fatigue. It never ends, by God! Nothing but fatigue, that’s my life.’