Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  We came into a wide, sandy wadi, which meandered out of the plateau, and made camp under a shady talha tree. Sidi Mohammed was unusually quiet as we unloaded, and afterwards took a little water and stalked off to a bush nearby. A moment later came the unmistakable sound of bad diarrhoea. He walked back clutching his stomach and sulked moodily until it was time to eat. After lunch, he clutched his stomach and lurched off again towards the bush.

  In the afternoon, we broke out of the wadi and entered a plain of great, oscillating wave crests. In places, there were patches of thistle-like heskanit grass, the spiky seeds of which attach themselves to anything that passes. An enormous jackal, wolf-grey and as muscular as a racing dog, dashed in front of us and disappeared into the range. After that, we saw two Tuareg riding north on fast camels. Sidi Mohammed went off to greet them and returned a while later, saying that we must turn south to reach the waterpool at Ouritoufolout, where we would water the camels before crossing the hills of Sakarezou.

  Sunset came. The sun was a huge glob of orange going down on our right. At the same instant, the moon rose directly to the east. It was full, but it looked as if someone had taken a bite out of the upper edge. When we stopped to unload, the bite appeared to get bigger as the silver light diminished. I suddenly realised that I was seeing the earth’s shadow cast on the screen of her satellite. It was an eclipse. I stood there, spellbound, as the moonlight drained away, leaving only a thin sliver on the lower rim. After months in the Sahara, travelling so close to the earth, I had started to acquire an intuitive feel for the size of the planet, its vastness and its smallness, in a way I could never have done in a distance-shrinking motor vehicle. Now I was reminded of the endless clockwork motion of the universe, circular, a cycle of endings and beginnings, births and deaths, the beginning of the journey no more than a point on the way to its end. The motion ticked on to infinity, our tiny, vast journey a minute part of the gigantic works.

  My metaphysical musings were brought abruptly to a halt by the sound of bad diarrhoea. Soon, Sidi Mohammed limped out of the darkness and asked for medicine for his stomach. ‘It’s that powdered milk,’ he moaned. ‘I drank too much of it. It doesn’t agree with me.’

  ‘It’s not the milk,’ Marinetta said. ‘It’s all that meat you stuffed yourself with. It’s a fitting punishment, by God!’

  The waterpool was in a deep cleft between the sand hills, screened by trees and thick undergrowth. There were pied crows and ibis in the branches, and the nests of weaver-birds hung down from them like fruit. A Targui youth was watering about fifteen camels there when we arrived, and he told us that the water was good. Our camels seemed nervous and edgy, leaping up and shying as we loaded the girbas, throwing off blankets and saddle bags. I hadn’t seen them behave like this since they had been attacked by ticks at Tinigert and wondered if they were being eaten by flies. ‘They’re afraid of something,’ Sidi Mohammed said. ‘It’s not the flies. But when they behave like this, they’ve got another three months’ work left in them at least.’ It seemed a marvel. They had already covered a phenomenal distance, in the hot season, and were still going strong. No wonder the Arabs called this animal ‘the gift of God’, I thought.

  The Targui boy pointed out the best route towards the mountains, and we rode on through the ruins of the rainy season. The heskanit had changed colour from mellow green to yellow, its portable thistles hanging ready on the tips of swollen ears. The tribulus, so green and succulent a few weeks before, had dried into grey rats’ tails like rotten sting, the bright yellow flowers fading into the cruel caltraps of thorns that would remain in the sand long after any trace of the plant had disappeared. There were brakes of salt-bush, the waxy leaves frayed and nibbled by locusts, and white butterflies that still played around in their shadows.

  Sidi Mohammed announced that his stomach had recovered from ‘the milk’, and at lunchtime, he asked, ‘Where’s the dried meat? I’ll cut it up for you.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ Marinetta told him curtly, ‘because you’ll eat more than you cut.’

  Several pieces of meat were writhing with maggots. When Marinett a made a disgusted face Sidi Mohammed said, ‘I’ll eat them! There’s nothing wrong with a few maggots. You just clean them out with your knife!’ He ate the maggoty bits raw and then a large helping of rice and cooked meat. Afterwards, he burped loudly.

  The afternoon wound on; the unchanged and unchanging landscape drifted by. ‘How good it would, be to be clean, well dressed, and comfortable.’ Marinetta said wistfully, ‘It seemed an attractive proposition, but I knew it was false. No matter how bright the life of comfort seemed when you were-deprived of it, the reality was an illusion that faded like fairy gold as soon as you left the desert. Then you would dream restlessly of being back there, I thought of Wilfred Thesiger’s words: ‘He will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent, according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell no temperate clime can match.’ Marinetta had read those words, but she didn’t yet feel their meaning. One day, I thought, when all this was over, she would. Meanwhile, our lives were caught up in a cycle of movement, a machine-like routine. Nothing could be achieved without that routine, not writing a book, nor running an empire, nor crossing a desert. I remembered again how I had first seen the Sahara from the banks of the Nile and how I had longed to find out what the land looked like beyond that horizon, how all my life had spread out before me then like a premonition, and my heart had thumped with a mysterious excitement. That had been more than seven long years ago. I wondered, as all men have wondered, about the bigness of time and the smallness of human beings. The desert seemed to spring these thoughts on you constantly. How did it all fit together in the eternal jigsaw, man with woman, woman with man, mankind with earth, earth with space? The sunset caught me still wondering.

  We made camp on a platform of hard rag. Sidi Mohammed was his talkative self again. ‘All the Arabs need is green grazing, water, and a beautiful face,’ he said. Then he stared at Marinetta. ‘Ah, God, there’s one of that here!’ he said. This, I thought, was revenge for Marinetta’s remarks about the meat. In case she hadn’t caught on, he pressed the point. I heard a discussion on the radio about who were the world’s most beautiful women,’ he said. ‘They said it was between the Indians, the Sudanese, and the Arabs. I reckon the Arabs are the most beautiful.’

  ‘It’s a pity there wasn’t a discussion about the world’s most impolite people,’ Marinetta said acidly. ‘The Arabs would easily have won that!’ In the rice that evening, there were two bones covered with flesh. Sidi Mohammed grabbed them both.

  The following morning, we crossed the wadi Azouagh. It was the largest watercourse in the southern Sahara, draining water from the mountain massifs of Hoggar and Air. Now it was waterless, but the bed was cut into a series of deep troughs, where the mud had dried rock-solid and had cracked into deep, brittle blocks. It took an hour to negotiate a route through the channels. On the opposite bank, we found the skeleton of a Tuareg camp, abandoned quite recently. Beyond it lay a featureless plain extending to the foot of the mountains. Before we mounted our camels, we discovered a ripe growth of sweet melons and sucked their moisture gratefully.

  We crossed the plain and clambered into the hills. The hillsides were a rubble of tarry blocks, but the guide found a sandy path through them, leading us up to another shady wadi, where we halted for midday. Marinetta prepared rice, and Sidi Mohammed went off down the wadi to relieve himself. After he had gone, Mannella grinned at me and said, ‘He’ll get a shock when he grabs for the bones today!’ She took three joints out of the stock of dried meat. One was large and the other two much smaller. Which one will he go for first?’ she asked.

  ‘The biggest, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Right!’ she said, and began to scrape all the meat off the largest joint. She had them all in the pot by the time Sidi Mohammed returned. When she served the plate, I saw she had cleverly disguised the meatless large joint so that a very tempting e
dge showed above the rice.

  We sat down to eat. Sidi Mohammed’s eyes lighted at once, on the promising joint. His big hand shot out and seized it. As he lifted it out Marinetta and I casually took the smaller joints, leaving Sidi Mohammed staring wistfully at the polished white surface of a bone devoid of the smallest fragment of meat. His face was almost painful to behold. He threw the bone viciously into the sand, muttering with disgust, then looked enviously at the meaty joints we were now chewing with great relish. ‘What’s up?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘The meat’s gone!’ he said, eyeing our foints murderously and pawing round in the rice with his hand. The hand came up with rice only. When he went off to fetch the camels later, we collapsed and rolled about, clutching our sides. It was the funniest thing I had seen since leaving Chinguetti.

  It took us two days to cross the mountains. Afterwards, we came down into sweeping prairies of dried heskanit grass. Walking through it was a nightmare. The prickly burrs sprang off the plant as soon as you touched it and embedded themselves firmly in any soft surface. Within moments, our sandals and sirwel would be so heavy with burrs that we would have to stop to remove them. But this was also a delicate operation because the burrs then stuck in your hands, leaving tiny spines which could be removed only with tweezers. At the end of the day, our hands would be raw and red and swollen from the embedded spines. One morning, after half an hour of heskanit, Sidi Mohammed stopped and rolled up his sirwel, right to the groin, revealing for the first time a pair of legs that were hairless, white, and very bandy. He looked a comical figure, holding up his pantaloons with one hand and the headrope with the other, cursing as he tried vainly to find a path through the seams of vicious grass.

  The heskanit did not prevent Sidi Mohammed’s regular absences. They were becoming longer now, and for several days we had been forced to wait for him to catch up. He never offered any explanation for his departures, and it tortured us to know what he might be doing. If I asked him, he would mutter and snatch the headrope, stalking off in an obvious bad temper. Once, while we were waiting for him to catch up, Shigar’s nose ring got caught up in a thorn tree and was ripped out. The ring tumbled into the sand, and while I was desperately searching for it, the camel started to wander off. I rushed after the beast, not knowing how I could possibly control him without ring or headrope. Marinetta held the other camels and watched me getting farther and farther away. It took me many minutes to herd the animal back to the thorn tree. When I arrived Sidi Mohammed was back, grinning and saying, ‘There’s no problem, is there?’

  I felt the anger boiling through me. ‘I hired you as a guide,’ I said. ‘And you mentioned nothing about these disappearances. Now you tell us where you get to every morning and afternoon or we don’t shift from this spot!’

  He looked at me challengingly, uncowed. I thought for a moment that he would ignore the threat. Then he shrugged and said, ‘It’s not your business, but I’m a Tijani.’

  ‘A Tijani!’ I knew the word at once. Tijanis were a secret fraternity, a kind of Freemasonry of the Islamic world. Founded in Algeria in the eighteenth century, membership had burgeoned throughout the Sahara and into the Sudanic lands beyond. It included heads of state, holy men, respected teachers, as well as wandering dervishes. ‘But what do you do?’ I asked him.

  ‘I have to do my meditations twice a day,’ he said. ‘We repeat holy words and count them on our rosaries.’ It struck me suddenly that I had seen him putting away his beads on several occasions after his absences.

  ‘But you already say your prayers five times a day,’ Maririetta said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘No,’ Sidi Mohammed smirked. ‘You see, those prayers are said by every Muslim. It’s laid down in the Quran. Those prayers are your capital. The extra meditations are like your interest on the capital. The more you do, the better your chance in the afterlife. That’s why I do it. I’ve got little enough in this world. I want to make sure I have plenty in the next.’

  *

  There was no easing of the heat. A hot wind blew almost constantly. We found no waterpools and no people, and the border seemed deserted. We were hoping to hit the wadi Tillia, which I thought marked the Mali-Niger frontier. My Michelin map and my 1-to-1-million survey showed the border in different places. The strip along its eastern side had recently been claimed by Mali, and the frontier had been redrawn. Water was short, and the camels seemed as tired and spiritless as we were. Once, when we stopped at midday, Sidi Mohammed said, ‘I’m worried about the water. The camels are thirsty, and there’s no one around. This wind can kill us, too.’ I had never heard him sound so gloomy.

  It was impossible to travel in a straight line. We were climbing interlocking sand hills, one after the other, up and down like a rollercoaster. As we staggered up to the summit of one hill, expecting the plains of Niger to unfold beneath us, we would be met with the sight of yet another hill obscuring the horizon. A grey, salty mist hung in the air and made eye navigation difficult. We were forced to ride more often to avoid the terrible heskanit, and the camels became exhausted. I could think only of reaching Agadez now. The Nile was a hazy dream, somewhere beyond the bounds of the world. Rest and good food were what I craved, an asylum from the endless heat and the vicious heskanit.

  Time passed but we came to no wadi. The folds of sand that we were crossing opened like the riffling pages of a book. The tiny watercourses between them were steep and bone-dry. Then, one afternoon while we were still on foot, the mist cleared. We saw below us a sandy hillside falling away to a plain of purple rag that cut between the hills. ‘That’s our wadi!’ I said.

  In moments, the heskanit had disappeared, and we were making our way across a hard carapace of rock. We saw that the wadi was alive with hundreds of goats, the white parts of their skins reflecting the sunlight brilliantly.

  ‘Thanks to God!’ Sidi Mohammed said. ‘Where there are goats there are people!’

  The sky was pure blue now, with wisps of cloud. As we descended into the valley, a school of about twenty ibis careened above us, wheeling and banking like aeronauts. A few minutes later, they landed in the wadi and presented themselves like a welcoming guard of honour as we approached. We sighted a herdsman. He was a black Targui, wearing an old shirt of faded red, black pantaloons and homemade sandals. He carried only a stick and an old skin bag and had a fat she-donkey without a saddle. Sidi Mohammed spoke to him in Tamasheq, and the man replied in a soft drawl. ‘I can’t make out his Tamasheq,’ Sidi Mohammed said. ‘He calls it Tamajegh.’ But he understood enough to take directions to the nearest well, In Ghouma. We followed the procession of goats and reddish sheep out of the wadi, crossing an elbow of sand. There were suddenly many signs of life. There were human figures collecting wild grasses. There were the small, faraway forms of white camels. A troop of jet-black cattle came tromping over the hillside, quite unlike the humped cattle we had seen previously. They had great silver-white horns, four or five feet in span, which they carried like heavy crowns as they moved. They were the ancient long-hom stock of the Sahara, beasts whose ancestors had lived here before any camel.

  Four skin tents were perched on the hillside. They were inhabited by black men in ragged clothes. The nomads were friendly. Their manner held no trace of hostility or aggression. One of them, a tall, gentle-mannered man, led us to the wells. There were many shallow, hand-dug pits, which yielded water very slowly. Some young children were filling girbas and slinging them under the bellies of their donkeys. After the suspicion we had grown used to, there was a palpable sense of peace here. I guessed we had already crossed the border.

  As we moved towards the border post at Tillia, Sidi Mohammed grew visibly nervous. He advised us not to enter the village. ‘They’ll think we’re Polisario for sure,’ he said. ‘Look at these foreign saddles.’ He told us that the Nigerien police were far stricter than those in Mali. ‘They’ll prevent us from going on,’ he said. He seemed really scared, and I imagined he was remembering his capture by t
he Libyan police the year before.

  His fear set off a nagging doubt in my own head. We had no permission to travel in Niger by camel. Over a year before, I had written to the Nigerien Embassy in Brussels to apply for it but had never received a reply. I had no idea what kind of reception we would get in Tillia; I knew only that if they stopped us here, it would be a humiliating end to our journey, which was only in its second stage. Finally, we agreed with Sidi Mohammed that we would bypass the border post and present our crossing of the western plains in Agadez as a fait accompli.

  We worked our way around the settlement, keeping it just below the horizon. No sooner had we left it behind than we spotted four Moorish-style tents on the brow of a dune. Sidi Mohammed grew excited, saying, ‘Those are Arabs for sure!’ He insisted on visiting them. ‘I haven’t spoken to my own people for weeks,’ he complained. I hesitated, thinking that the camp was too near the village for comfort. ‘They might slaughter a goat for us!’ Sidi Mohammed said. I knew then that there would be no stopping him.

  As we approached, a crowd of men and boys came out to greet us. They looked like Tuareg, but they wore no veils and spoke Hassaniyya. They were Kunta Arabs, and their chief was a man called Sid’ Amer, a sullen-looking man with a shaven head, a goatee beard and a very dark skin. They pressed us to stay, shouting, ‘Welcome! Welcome to the guests! Couch your camels and unload!’ Sidi Mohammed had couched before I could stop him and was smiling and shaking hands. The Arabs were pointing at our saddles and saying, ‘These people have come a long way!’

  Sidi Mohammed’s eyes were already alight with the thought of meat when I took him aside to show him something I had noticed before we couched. It was the fresh imprint of a Land Rover track going through the camp. I guessed that the only people who had Land Rovers in this area were the police. ‘They will tell the police we were here,’ I said.