Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  ‘Hay is better than money in Ténéré!’ Udungu shouted back. ‘You’ll see! You’ll see!’

  We kicked and thumped at the camels until they got up and staggered into the eye of the storm.

  We walked for hours. My legs trembled with weakness. The day got no warmer. Udungu stomped on with his poor piece of blanket.

  Sometimes, he would sit down with his back to the wind, ducking under his covering to light a wretched cigarette from his glueless brown paper. In two puffs, it would be finished. His eyes were full of sand. Once, he sat down and clawed at them feverishly. ‘I can’t see anything! I can’t see anything!’ he repeated. He took from his pocket a phial of antimony and applied it delicately to his eyelids with a make-up brush. The black-circled lids gave him a momentary transvestite look. Then the sand began to stick to the antimony, building up into bushy growths like goggles on his face. Marinetta forgot the cold and laughed for ten minutes.

  The sabre edge of the wind soon slashed away her humour. The earth was flailing at us with elemental anger, trying to obliterate us from its face. The cold penetrated right to the marrow. Had we really run the gauntlet of that terrible heat only weeks ago? This desert was desolate, too desolate for human beings. We were on one of the most famous caravan routes of the Sahara, yet it was difficult to imagine anyone else being in this primeval land before us. But other Westerners had endured conditions even worse than this. In 1815, for instance, there had been the British sea captain James Riley. He had set out with a caravan of 4,000 camels and 1,000 men when a storm like this had attacked them. Hundreds of men and animals had simply disappeared. Desperate for water, the guide had ordered his servants to slaughter some of the camels so that the survivors could drink their blood. But no one had wanted his own camels butchered, and the cameleers had struck back viciously at the servants, killing them, and the guide. Then they had drunk the blood of corpses and camels. One of the drinkers had been Riley, who had thrust his head up to the shoulders in a camel’s open belly and swallowed the nauseating liquid. He was among the twenty-one men who survived.

  The camels were gasping with the cold. Dragging behind them, Marinetta was sobbing. ‘Shut up!’ I told her. ‘This is the challenge we came for. Crying won’t get you anywhere. When the going gets tough, the tough get going!’

  ‘You’re just a robot!’ she squealed at me. ‘You have no feelings for anyone!’ ‘You can’t afford feelings when you’re dead!’ I said.

  That day, we marched eleven hours without a break. By evening, we were dropping with exhaustion. We made camp in a sandy crack beneath the shark’s tooth of Azzuager Mountain. As soon as we unloaded, the camels pressed themselves together, shuddering. Udungu was shivering, too, and he quickly got into the shelter of the hay bales. I laid out some hay for the camels, while Marinetta piled the equipment into a windbreak. We cooked the evening meal with our legs stuffed into our sleeping bags. The wind and sand eddied out of the emptiness.

  Marinetta grumbled about my heartlessness and sulked. Unable to sympathise, I told her, ‘This is the challenge you wanted. Crying’s a disgrace. Where’s your stiff upper lip?’

  ‘That’s just your bloody British crap!’ she said. ‘You British think it’s wrong to show your feelings. I don’t feel any different from you, but to us Italians it’s not a disgrace to show it. Stiff upper lip! What rubbish!’

  I reminded her that if it hadn’t been for my insistence, she would be wearing the wafer-thin ski jacket she had brought with her for the Saharan winter. Only my advice had made her send to Rome from Nouakchott for the mountain jacket she now wore constantly. ‘Where did you think you were going?’ I asked her. ‘To a fashion show?’

  ‘If I was, you would be the last person I’d take with me!’ she stormed. ‘You look more like a dockworker than a gentleman!’ Then she turned over in her sleeping bag and refused to speak again till morning.

  When we awoke, we were half buried in sand. As I climbed out of my sleeping bag a bitter chill gripped me. I trembled violently, desperately trying to hold a match still enough to light the fire. Udungu’s face was a caved-in pelt of suffering. He looked a hundred years old. He had no down-filled sleeping bag to protect him; he had no more protection, in fact, than the ragged old blanket that covered his bones by day. He had no socks either, and his feet were almost blue inside their plastic moccasins. I gave him my spare socks and he pulled them on gratefully. But afterwards, he sat in front of the dying fire, mesmerised, half paralysed by the crippling wind. Marinetta stood watching me, shivering and unable to move. Even the camels were wretched, braying miserably as I attached the headropes. ‘Come on!’ I urged the others. ‘Let’s get moving! If we don’t move now, we’ll die here!’

  We loaded and set off into the freezing wind. Marinetta, warmed by a mug of scalding coffee, slung her cameras around her shoulder, hoping to get some unusual shots of the caravan in the sandstorm. I was glad her pang of apathy had passed. Old Tromboney took the headrope and stamped on doggedly right into the heart of the storm. The desert was electric and alive, sobbing and wailing like a banshee demon. The cursing chorus of the wind was hypnotic. Water spilled, so the jerrycans had to be balanced. The hay slid forward. The walking haystacks sat down and turned out of the wind. The rest of the camels crowded round, chewing hungrily at the precious grass as we strained to lift it. Marinetta fought them off with a stick.

  Later, she lost another lens cap and ambled off into the dust to retrieve it. I turned to find her gone and was petrified with sudden terror. I glimpsed the puffy yellow pads of her jacket through the swirls of sand, and I told Udungu to stop while I fetched her back. I ran across the sand until I found her. ‘I’ve got to find that lens cap!’ she shouted.

  ‘To hell with the lens cap!’ I shouted back, dragging her forcibly to the caravan.

  That afternoon, we passed a mace-shaped marker of black steel, which showed that we had entered the great erg of Ténéré. An hour later, when the wind had already begun to thrash itself out, we saw our first salt caravan. There were 100 camels in two coiling silver strings like centipedes. Their tentacle-like legs seemed to flow out like sea plants in a current. Three men came dashing towards us across the sand. They asked for nothing but to shake hands. I understood their need for human contact in this dreadful void.

  At sunset, we made camp by the hulk of a burned-out car. As we unloaded, the wind stopped suddenly. Now the silence lay on us, heavy and unnatural after the searing noise of the sand. I could hear a phantom shooooosh! Shoooooosh! like the sea sound in shells. The stillness was complete. It was broken only by old Tromboney, who sat down and groaned, ‘Aaaah! God! These shoes are killing me!’ The cheap plastic shoes had brought up red blisters on his ankles beneath the socks. They were too small for his calloused feet. He borrowed my knife and slit the plastic on the heel and the uppers. Then he tried them on and beamed with satisfadion.

  After dinner, I asked him if he had any idea what had happened to the occupants of the car. ‘God knows!’ he said. ‘There are plenty like this in Ténéré.’ He said the word carefully, with reverence almost. ‘People have died here, oh, many people. Many die in Ténéré! The Ténéré is the worst desert in the Sahara. The government won’t let anyone go without a guide. They don’t let any car go alone, not after what happened to the préfet’s wife.’ Udungu related how, two years before, the wife of the préfet of Agadez had set off across the Ténéré in a Land Rover. With her had been a driver, her three children, and the best guide in the area. None of them was ever seen alive again. ‘Every guide in Agadez was called out to search,’ he said. ‘I was one of them. There were planes; there were army and police. It was nine days before they found the bodies—all dead. They had turned off the main route after passing Fachi, no one knew why. The Land Rover was kaput, and their water was finished. They found the guide’s body miles away. He must have gone off to look for water and died before he found any. The wife had written notes. She said she saw the planes passing, but they didn�
�t see her. That’s Ténéré—it’s wild, by God!’

  The story was awful, and I was glad suddenly for the low temperatures. In summer, this place would have been doubly terrifying. Udungu said that there had been similar deaths every year until the government had erected a series of markers, like the one we had seen earlier that day. Without them, he said, it was almost impossible to travel in a straight line.

  I soon understood the need for the markers. The desert we walked out into the next day was utterly featureless. It was a vast, endless sand sea, the largest in the central Sahara, larger even than the fabled ‘Empty Quarter’ of Arabia. The emptiness of it was suffocating. There was nothing at all to attract the eye but the metal flags spaced out every kilometre. It was like walking on a cloud, an unreal nebula that might cave in at any moment. Sometimes, its dappling ripples looked like water, a stilt untided ocean undulating to every horizon. In all that vastness, there was not a tree, not a rock, not a single blade of grass.

  In the afternoon, we passed another salt caravan. There were perhaps 200 camels this time. From afar, the columns of animals seemed to stand still. They appeared to remain motionless until we came abreast of them, then they sprang out suddenly into three dimensions. It was a strange phenomenon caused by the lack of anything to mark the distance between us. Tuareg in white robes rode among the laden camels. They looked like scanning machines, welded to their camels’ backs and periscoping out into the emptiness through the embrasures in their veils. Udungu called out something to them in Tamasheq, but the words fell back lifeless on the sterile sands, and the caravan flowed on unstoppably until it was swallowed by the maw of the Ténéré.

  We saw nothing else moving until sunset was near. Then we heard the boom of engines and pinpointed two trucks in the sand. Like the salt caravan earlier, they appeared not to be moving. Not until we passed them did they seem to accelerate into action, roaring by a mile away. Or was it two miles? Or even 10? There was no way to judge distance or scale in Ténéré. I remember only the grating gears ricocheting over the dark sand, the trucks creeping like caterpillars and the spirals of smoke from their exhaust. I recall old Udungu saying, ‘Trucks are no good in the Ténéré. Camels are better, by God!’ I remembered having read somewhere that goods could be moved by camel here at one-seventh the cost of motor transport. That was why the great caravans still existed.

  We walked on in the deep sand, and the shadows of our camels spread out before us, horrific crane-fly shapes on the unblemished surface. Far away was an object bigger than a marker but unidentifiable in the vastness. We plodded towards it for hours. Udungu said, ‘I can’t walk any more. I’m an old man.’

  ‘Ride, uncle,’ I told him.

  Stalking up on her slim legs, Marinetta muttered, ‘Sons of the Wind! More like Gone with the Wind!’ Poor Udungu must have wondered what we were laughing at.

  I quickened my step towards the object, but it was not until I was right beside it that I realised it was a curious metal structure. It looked like a science-fiction robot, a column of iron growing out of some oil drums, with lamp post-like branches and two huge crystal eyes that gazed vacantly across the erg. Marinetta said it looked like a totem pole. There was a mud-brick wall near it and beyond it a hut of Sodom’s Apple stalks. Udungu told us that this was l’Arbre de Ténéré—‘the Tree of Ténéré’. On this spot had grown the only tree in the whole vast erg until it had died in 1975. One story, probably apocryphal, was that it was hit by a truck. For generations, the tree had guided caravans to a brackish well nearby, now hidden by a mound of ordure. The steel monument stood as a tribute to the last ancient life of this sand sea and as a marker of the place where the old Bilma caravan track met the new route to Libya.

  It was bitterly cold again that night, but Marinetta stole some pieces of Sodom’s Apple wood from the hut as we passed it and picked up some ends of talha wood left by a lorry crew. In the morning, it was frosty but clear. It seemed to take old Udungu longer to get his old bones cranked up now that the cold had set in. He would make his own tiny fire and sit staring into the flicker of flame, his leathery face reflecting the orange firelight until the sun, leaping up from behind, stirred him into action. The camels would be blubbering in a knot five yards away, and we would spread out a few sheaves of hay among them as an early-morning snack. They refused to eat the grain we had brought. As the guide had predicted, I felt very grateful for the hay.

  All day, we saw not a single feature. The effects of the lack of scale were curious. I watched Marinetta once, as she ran away from our caravan trying to get a shot of us from the front. She zig-zagged crazily over the sand, looking so ridiculous that I laughed. When I tried it myself, I realised that without anything to fix on, it was impossible to run in a direct line. Any ripples or shadows on the surface gave the impression of relief. We found ourselves moving towards what appeared to be a mass of dunes only to find them dissolving into sandy waves a few inches high. A piece of discarded firewood could be mistaken for a camel or a tent, a blackened sardine can for an abandoned car. Once, that afternoon, Udungu said, ‘There’s a campfire ahead of us, by God!’ We moved towards a red-gold spot some distance away. It was the sun’s reflection on the surface of a rusty marker.

  Early the next morning, we came to the beginning of the great dune chain that stretched unbroken as far as the oasis of Fachi. The colour of the dunes was insubstantial, made fuzzy by a fine drift of sand over them, producing a shiny effect of silver, gold, and metallic blue. They shimmered like the colours of a Persian carpet, altering constantly with the sun, a dynamo of change, a mobile display of shape, shade, and texture. All the dunes were formed parallel with the prevailing northeast wind, which meant that we were travelling along with them and rarely crossing them. The sand looked like an ice-cream dressing; the dunes were perfectly made icing-sugar scallops. The sand was sensuous, undulating, curving voluptuously like smooth, creamy female flesh. The sand hills were like Reubens models, full-bodied beauties stretching naked on an endless beach.

  The stillness brought harmony. The camels floated along with effortless grace. The fear had gone with the savagery of the storm, and we were no longer numbed or frightened by this vista of emptiness. ‘The sand makes you feel free,’ Marinetta said. ‘It gives you a strange feeling—you want to throw your clothes off and run through it naked, then lie down in the middle of it and make love. It would be really fun to lie in the sand and roll down the dunes and to feel the softness of the sand all over my body.’ I caught her feelings instinctively. The void of sand touched off something deeply sensual, set something very ancient stirring in your loins. It was a kind of freedom, the liberation of an essence repressed and savage, the beast at bay in the shadows, the tiger burning vicious, bursting, beneath the skin. It was the reptile left behind us in the water, the dog-shark basking in the deeps, the slinking wolf-bitch lurking in the forest, all beckoned and drawn here now to the shadowed surface by this savage wilderness of Ténéré.

  That evening, as we were making camp, Marinetta said, ‘Let’s put the tent up tonight.’

  ‘It’s not so cold,’ I said. ‘It’s no colder than usual.’

  She removed her glasses and looked at me steadily, challengingly, with her big, child’s eyes. ‘Who mentioned anything about the cold?’ After we had eaten, Udungu went off to his shelter of blankets and hay bales, and I doused the fire. A few minutes later, Marinetta called me from inside the tent, and I crawled in to find her curled up with her sleeping bag pulled up to her chin. She wore neither glasses nor headcloth, and in the darkness, her white teeth shone faintly. ‘Now I am cold,’ she said. I slid my hand into the downy warmth of the sleeping bag. Inside, she was totally naked. ‘Have you forgotten?’ she asked, as I looked at her in surprise. ‘This is our honeymoon.’

  The next day, we topped a rise and saw a Cessna aircraft in the sand. For an instant, I thought it had just landed. Then I noticed that its doors had been flung off and the creeping sands had coiled into its belly. I w
ondered how long ago it had fallen out of the sky. Had its passengers died or survived? ‘That’s been here eight years,’ Udungu said. ‘Sandstorm.’ It was amazing. The hull was so shiny that it might have been there only a day. I guessed that the abrasive desert sand had polished it and kept alive its colours. ‘When it’s your time, down you go,’ Udungu said. ‘Camel, car, or plane, it’s all the same.’

  ‘It makes you feel humble,’ Marinetta said. ‘All the most advanced machines we’ve made can’t stand against a desert storm. People always talk about conquering nature, but it can’t be conquered. We’re part of it, aren’t we? How can you conquer something that you’re a part of? It’s all so well balanced, life and death, famine and plenty, rain and drought, that there must be a guiding mind behind it. It’s all too perfect. You can see it so clearly in the desert. The desert is really the place to find God.’

  I remembered Mafoudh saying, ‘Anyone who thinks there is no God must be blind! Who do they think made all this?’

  Time’s passage was marked only by the wax and wane of the sun. It was universal time, whole and unfragmented. Dunes overlapped dunes. Sand washed like water over camel tracks, camel dung, human tracks, tyre tracks, the litter of engine parts, hulks of vehicles, the shell of an aeroplane: ice-cream sand, unblemished sand, sand with sulphur-yellow beneath it, sand of crimson-red. We followed our markers, travelling on the side of a slope where the valley was hidden by the chiffon veil of sand. It was like travelling on the edge of the world. Was this Mafoudh’s place where the earth ended and you stepped off into the abyss?

  Suddenly, there was no marker ahead. The sand sea seemed at once, more threatening without the familiar black flag. Udungu forced his camels down into the low ground without a word. I felt sure the marker must be farther up and did not follow him. I had followed our guides for thousands of miles; why this sudden obstinacy filled me, I shall never know. An instant later, Udungu was out of sight behind the dunes. I carried on with Marinetta behind me. Then the headrope broke. Old Shaybani refused to go any farther up the slope. Perhaps the old camel sensed that something was amiss. I had to dismount and grab his jaw with one hand while hanging on to the rope with the other. My own camel wouldn’t keep still, and finally I had to unhitch the rope and retie it. When I remounted, Udungu was still nowhere in sight. We shuffled on for a few more minutes. A faint sound, vaguely human, drifted across the desolation. A nag of worry crossed my forehead. It had been wrong to split up. I had no choice now but to keep on going, with Marinetta following on silently. The next ten minutes were a lifetime, then I noticed some camel droppings in the sand. They must have come from a salt caravan, which meant there must be a route here. I followed them for a few moments and cleared a low dune. From there, I saw the next marker, standing out like a monolith, magnified by the emptiness. Old Udungu was moving towards it on his camel. He was waiting for us when we reached it.