Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  ‘Omar!’ the old man croaked. ‘Do you know the way? Are you a guide? What were you thinking of to split up like that? Listen, it’s splitting up that makes all the trouble in Ténéré. Splitting up kills people in Ténéré. There are jinns in Ténéré, Omar, bad spirits. If a jinn gets into your head, you don’t know east from west. The jinn spins your head around. They make you think you know the way when you don’t. Why did the préfet’s wife die? Jinns! Why did her guide leave the road he knew? Jinns! Why have so many died here? Jinns! The jinn was inside you today, Omar. Don’t laugh at the jinns. You can’t see them, but they’re there. They can kill you easily, the jinns!’ He looked at me over his veil with unsmiling, ancient eyes. ‘This Ténéré is the worst desert in the Sahara, Omar,’ he said. ‘The Ténéré is wild!’ I didn’t argue. However you expressed it, the jinn had been in me all right.

  On 24th December, two big, black crows settled in the sand as we struck camp, waiting to pick at our discarded tins and grains of spilt rice. A little later, we saw the smudge of pencil-black along the horizon that marked the cliffs of Fachi. We dawdled on, lulled by the sound of the camels’ pads. Marker after marker went by. Suddenly, one of the markers read: ‘Fachi’. At almost the same moment, I saw a smoky line of palm trees like a dark parade of Zulus by the cliffs. We descended out of the sand sheet towards a cluster of buildings on a mound. The green of palms and acacias and gardens was miraculous in this sterility. The contrast was complete. We made camp on the tilting slope, and a uniformed gendarme came out to welcome us. Our departure from Agadez had been announced on the radio, he said.

  The gendarme settled down with Udungu to drink tea. Darkness closed in. It was Christmas Eve, a night linking other times in my life, the parts left behind and the parts yet to come. Christmas. It had a homely ring. But I knew that, more than anywhere else, I would rather be here, with my wife, with this old Targui, in this miraculous green island in the earth’s greatest desert.

  Camels woke us, grumping and keening, hundreds of camels. A salt caravan had crept up on us in the night, and its camels were couched 500 yards above us on the sand sheet. Another caravan, an outward-bound one, lay couched by the palm trees below us, amid a Himalayan range of salt packs, pack saddles and hay bales.

  As I opened my eyes, I found a bulky stocking lying across my sleeping bag. It was an instant reminder of all those Christmases past. It was a childish, yet touching, symbol of Western culture. Inside the stocking were biscuits and dates, a new toothbrush, a tiny notebook, the rounded cap of a sugar cone, and a piece of soap in a box, saved from the far-off Hotel Azalai in Tombouctou. At the very bottom, my fingers closed on some pieces of charcoal. Marinetta laughed as I brought them out. ‘In Italy, Papa Noel brings charcoal for the badly behaved children!’ she said.

  I kissed her and said, ‘Happy Christmas.’ Then old Udungu surfaced, a beardless, nut-brown Santa Claus. We gave him a bag of tobacco, and he beamed at us. I wished that I could have given him a box of Rizla cigarette papers.

  Fachi was the best present of all. It was the jewel of the sands. For centuries, its diffident Beriberi inhabitants had been plagued by the rapacious camel men of the Sahara. They had been pillaged by hawk-faced Tuareg from Air and Arabs from the Fezzan. Toubou raiders, the black terror of the eastern Sahara, had come striding out of their stronghold in Tibesti to besiege the place. Little wonder Fachi was built like a fortress. Its houses were very close together along febrile, winding alleys, twisting and snaking left and right, opening suddenly into an unseen courtyard shaded by a green tree, then closing up again and jerking out of sight. The houses were entered by very tight slit-openings, too narrow for a man to pass through without turning sideways. Little Beriberi women stood at them as we passed, wearing many-coloured blankets. The fortified labyrinth of streets was crumbling and dissolving, the palm beams standing out through cracks in the clay. The great bastion that stood over the town was crumbling too, and blocks of masonry littered the passageways beneath it. Beyond the honeycomb of buildings lay the screen of the palm groves, and through openings in them was visible the vast yellow erg of Ténéré, rearing up like a tidal wave.

  After we had inspected the old town, we walked down to watch the salt caravan loading. There were about 200 camels, formed into squads, among which men rushed about tightening ropes, balancing salt packs and stringing camels together. Each animal carried several pillars of salt wrapped carefully in sheets of woven palm fibre. The salt packs hung high on the camels’ backs, and above each saddle was a cylinder of tightly packed hay, which would feed the animals on the return journey. The camels were slung together in tens or dozens, and most of them were muzzled with straw masks to prevent them from eating the hay. Scores of Beriberi women from the oasis were bustling about the caravan with bowls and trays. They were collecting the tons of fresh camel droppings that were valuable for making bricks and for fuel. We stood and watched the caravan as it moved out into the erg on its way back to Agadez, section after section, column after column, like a great legion, until laden camels and walking men seemed to fill the landscape. I wondered what the old salt caravans must have looked like. Here, there were 200 animals. In 1908, there were supposed to have been 20,000 in a single caravan. Once, in the Sudan, I had travelled with a herd of almost 1,000 camels, which had dominated the desert for miles. Twenty times that number seemed unimaginable.

  We bought a new load of hay from the incoming caravan, and some firewood. Some Toubou tribesmen sold us two of their saddles with wide wooden frames and tails of wood. I was familiar with this type of saddle from my days in the Sudan and knew it was far superior to anything used in the western Sahara. The presence of these Toubou—short, slim, black-featured men—reminded me that in a few days, we should be out of the world of the Tuareg and into the bleaker, wilder and more dangerous region of the eastern Sahara.

  Before leaving, we had to refill our water set. The only water available was in a palm garden, at the base of a steep incline that our camels were unable to descend. The garden belonged to a Beriberi who was using a sweep well—a weighted mast of wood on a pivot, which drew up the water from a shallow pit. These sweep wells were very ancient, dating back at least to the time of Pharaonic Egypt. I had to carry the four jerrycans up the steep slope, collapsing breathlessly as I reached the top each time. Udungu was fussing over the saddles, and Marinetta kneeled down to take shots of my agonised features as I battled with the slope. ‘Brilliant shots!’ she said.

  ‘Thanks a bloody million!’ I gasped.

  We led our camels off through the palm trees and past the white crusts of salines, where the newly arrived caravan was filtering in. We turned through a pass in the cliffs, and a few hours later, we were out once, again in the unsullied sands of Ténéré, passing into dunes like whipped cream. The grey massif of rocks fell far behind, veiled in a wash of dust. Fachi was no more than a green memory, but that Christmas had been one that would stay with me always.

  The next morning, two cars growled quietly past like shining, mechanical spiders crawling along the raw crust of the sand. One of them stopped ahead, and a man and a woman got out. They were German tourists who were visiting Bilma for Christmas. They were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, though we were muffled in our turbans and jackets. The door of their Toyota fell open, and the smell of cosy Christmas warmth drifted out. As we rode away, the man took some shots of us with a video-camera. ‘Plenty of Christians come to Bilma at Noel,’ Udungu said. ‘The people in Agadez and Hilma make plenty money from the Christians at Noel. I used to travel with the Christians in their cars. You do nothing but say, “Go right!” “Go left” and “Straight on.” There’s no cold in a car. This cold is getting too much for an old man like me.’

  I smiled at him, but I knew that for me, this journey would have been meaningless in a car. I would have watched the desert go past as if on a TV screen, living within the safety of an artificial environment and separated from the desert by speed and tremendous range. I knew that
motor travel was not without its risks, and I appreciated the expeditions of pioneers to whom vehicles presented technical problems that were challenging and interesting to an enthusiast. But vehicles cut one off from that sense of unity with the earth that was almost a religious sacrament for me. The slow march of our camels allowed us to see and feel everything around us. We saw the tiny sand-skippers that hollowed out minute crevices in the surface, and the small burial mounds of jerboas. We saw the tracks and spoor of caravans, which told the detailed story of their progress. We saw the power, beauty, and primitive sensuality of the sands, felt the fluctuations of heat and cold, experienced the cycle of day and night unhindered by the presence of artificial light. A car could cross Ténéré in two days, when it took us seventeen, but after two days, the magnificent sand sea would be no more than a blur in your memory. For us, there was no contact with the outside world, no easy route to safety. We were in the Sahara and of it, as we had always wished to be.

  For two days, we ploughed on through a freezing wind. It cut across the erg like a scythe, droning from sunrise to sunset with the deep notes of an engine. Often, we looked behind, thinking a vehicle was coming, and realised it was only the wind. The sky remained blue and cloudless, yet the wind whipped at us with freezing breath. It blew in gusting oscillations lasting two or three seconds. Between bursts, you could feel the steaming heat of the sun scourging down. Then the heat would be obliterated by a reprise of the freezing air. We were crossing through an expanse of dunes like a ladder in the smooth nylon of the erg. Marinetta wore two blankets and two pairs of trousers, and still, she shivered with cold. The camels took every opportunity to tum away from the avenging fury, sitting down and shaking so violently that several times, I was almost flung out of the saddle. Their eyes dripped mucus tears as we forced them on into the cold.

  When we sat down to eat now, we would gobble enormous amounts of rice and couscous, shovelling the food into our mouths like starvelings. The cold isn’t so bad,’ Udungu said once, ‘as long as you have plenty of food. In the winter, it’s food you need, not water.’ I felt hungry almost constantly. There was a nagging ache in my stomach all morning, and often, I would look at my watch, saying to myself, ‘Not long now till we eat!’

  The relief came when the wind dropped. Then, we would roll up our jackets, and Udungu would break out of the cocoon of his blanket and beam again through his broken teeth and his big, warm eyes in the wrinkled walnut face. At those moments, he would talk about his life smuggling camels to Libya and about his experiences with the different peoples of the Sahara. ‘The Arabs and the Christians are brothers,’ he said, ‘but the Tuareg are different. They are an old people, who were here before the Arabs and the nsara. But the Tuareg are better than the Toubou. The Toubou are devils. They don’t fear God. They kill without mercy. Don’t take a Toubou guide from Bilma, Omar. Take a Beriberi. The Beriberi are honest people.’

  On 29th December, we crossed a ridge and saw the grey tip of the Kawar cliffs with the oasis of Bilma standing beneath them. In the old days, the people of Bilma had learned of the approach of a salt caravan by the ‘singing’ of a nearby mountain peak which reverberated whenever a caravan was within two days of the place. Nobody listened to the peak any more. Now they had the radio.

  The oasis announced its presence to us in subtle ways as we traversed doldrums of sand. There was a rusty bollard from a previous generation of markers, toppled over and lying in the dust like an unexploded bomb. There were clumps of grass, the occasional palm tree. Then the whole grey-green vista of the oasis leapt into perspective below us, with those same steel signposts that had led us across the erg ushering us down to the well-defined track. It led into the belly of the settlement like a drawbridge. We passed a rusted tower that might once, have been a lighthouse but was now covered in graffiti. Then the walls of mud brick and salt slabs closed in on us. The erg was out of view behind us. The icy wind from the north was blocked out. The streets were wide and still and lined with nim trees. We had crossed the great Ténéré. We had made it to Bilma. The gendarmerie loomed up like an ancient citadel among the pattern of mud brick. Outside its broken gates, a vehicle was parked, and three Westerners in swimming trunks were being searched by police.

  Mu’min

  The Westerners were Italians who had arrived the previous day from Ojanet in Algeria, coming across the desert on a forbidden piste. One of them was a surgeon from Genoa, a man who might have looked dignified wearing anything else but swimming trunks. He was slim and streaky-blond, with an even poolside tan. The other two were engineers, both dark and bearded with pasta paunches overhanging their trunks. The surgeon paced up and down like an expectant father, smoking cigarettes and fuming to himself. The others unloaded mounds of cardboard boxes under the supervision of a gendarme. The boxes were labelled ‘mayonnaise’, ‘tinned salmon’, ‘tinned pineapple’, ‘chocolate’ and other things I would rather not have thought about.

  The Italians sniggered at our awkward jackets and turbans. One of the engineers laughed outright. Old Udungu glanced at them once, then pulled his veil up to his nose. The chief of the gendarmes came out to welcome us, saying that he had expected us two days earlier.

  Before we left, the surgeon complained that the police had kept them there a whole day. These Africans don’t understand what time means to a Westerner,’ he said. He looked miserable when I said that we had been held for six days in Tillia. Six days was all it had taken them to drive from Genoa, he told us. They only had ten days left in which to motor across the Ténéré and back through Algeria to Italy. Udungu asked me to inquire if they wanted a guide to Agadez. ‘We don’t need a guide,’ the surgeon said. We’ll cross Ténéré without a guide, you’ll see.’

  We made camp in some thornscrub outside the village. The day warmed up, and the camels stretched and shook their humps, shuffling about and nibbling among the thorn trees. A young Toubou called Abba Kelle arrived and offered to be our guide as far as N’Guigmi. He was very clean-cut and earnest and spoke fluent French, yet I sensed something insincere beneath the simpering smile. ‘I’ve taken plenty of tourists to N’Guigmu,’ he said. ‘I like the tourists, the men and the women.’ He smiled charmingly at Marinetta. ‘The route to N’Guigmi is no problem. I can even tell you how many sand dunes there are.’

  ‘I don’t want to know how many sand dunes there are,’ I said, irritated by his know-it-all manner. ‘Have you taken tourists by camel or by car?’

  ‘Mostly by car,’ he admitted, ‘but it’s no problem. Camels and cars are all the same.’

  That night, I dreamed about Abba Kelle. I dreamed that we were sitting by a campfire under a brilliant full moon. As I watched, the young man’s features dissolved and decomposed. Steadily, they changed into the features of a wolf. ‘It’s no problem,’ the wolf told me mildly. ‘I like tourists!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but we really can’t take anyone who changes into a wolf!’

  A man called Mu’min was waiting for us at the gendarmerie the next morning. The chief said that he had been recommended as a guide by the town’s headman, the sarki. Mu’min was a Beriberi, one of the settled people of the oasis. He was a lanky, lonely, silent man who seemed reluctant to talk. His face was as scored and weathered as salt brick, and mahogany-black. His mouth was a nest of broken teeth. He wore a coil of white turban and a long black cloak, and his eyes were shaded by dark glasses. When he did speak, it was in snatches, between puffs at the fat rolls of Gauloises cigarettes and coughs and vicious spitting. The young Abba Kelle was there too, sitting some distance away and looking quite normal this morning. I asked the chief which of the two guides was the better, and he told me, ‘Mu’min is more serious than the other one.’ I would rather not have taken either, but the chief said it was forbidden to go without a guide. In the end, I took Mu’min.

  While the new guide collected his belongings, I sat down with Udungu. He had been to the market and showed me a bag of Bilma dates he had bought for hi
s children. They didn’t want me to come,’ he said. ‘They cried when I left. They said, “It’s too cold, father!” They were right. It’s too cold for an old man like me. I won’t come to Bilma again by camel, not this year anyway.’ I paid him his due and a small bonus, and his old eyes beamed over the tagelmoust. The walnut-hued skin puckered into a million wrinkles, like a dried-up girba.

  ‘It’s like parting from your grandfather,’ Marinetta said.

  In the afternoon, Mu’min arrived with a mattress, four thick blankets, two canvas windbreaks, a radio, a flashlight, a Tuareg sword, and a huge sack of dates. I told him that the dates were too heavy for the camels, but he protested that they would be useful to us. ‘We will give them to the Toubou we meet on the way,’ he said. ‘It will help us to get through.’ I made him cut the sack down by half. In the twelve days it took us to reach N’Guigmi, he never gave anybody one of those dates.