Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  ‘No,’ the General said. ‘None whatsoever.’ I let my bated breath out slowly. Nothing could ever be quite that hard again, I thought.

  The camels shuffled on across the interminable erg. There was silence. My mind flexed back and forth across the terrible dimensions of the Sahara. It seemed that we had been here forever. I could visualise no end to this journey. I could imagine nothing but a life of constant movement, searching for the next grazing, the next water. I reminded myself of my responsibility to this woman. She was my own small family now. The hundreds of miles I had travelled with her had made me far more like the nomads than I had ever been when I lived with them. They were family men, not lone travellers and explorers. The Sahara was not only a ‘land of men’ but also a ‘land of women’. A man’s first responsibility was always to his own. I remembered how Marinetta had showed me into her own room. It was the room in which she had grown from childhood to womanhood, the room she dreamed about when she was homesick. There was her bed and a desk and a bookcase of photographic books. The shelves were inhabited by woolly toys—a turtle, a camel, a monkey—and various teddy bears. We sat down on the edge of the bed, and she gave me a peck on the cheek and said, ‘You are the first man I’ve ever brought into this room.’ I felt almost that we were married already.

  We rode on till sunset. A cold breeze chased away the last shreds of heat. The sun sank into a net of translucent clouds like angry scratches on the sky’s belly. In a moment, it appeared to balance uncertainly on the edge of the dunes. I thought suddenly of the tiny planet we were travelling on. An umbilicus bound us to it. It was not separate from us. We were as much manifestations of the earth as the rocks and the sand, the grass and the trees, the insects and the birds, the clouds and the rain. Our ancestry ran back into the unfathomable ages, through branches and junctions of the tree and down into the taproot of the mother plant. From this moment, our kind would spread out into the future, through more billions of branches, plugging into eternity, colonising the distant time to come. But the earth was the mother of all. Such feelings came to me often, together with a deep sense of the unity of everything around me. It was primitive, even pagan. Or perhaps I was only relearning what I and everyone else had always known. I can only say that these intense feelings of the oneness with nature were the nearest to a genuine religious experience that I have ever come.

  The sun tilted and the streaks of cloud burned with purple fire. Then the day was gone.

  In the morning, we were crossing the Modjigo erg when a sandstorm began. Grey dust stirred along the clear horizon to the south. ‘A wind is very bad here,’ Mu’min grumped. I could understand why. We were heading for the oasis of Agadem, which was marked by a long crag. In a sandstorm, the crag couldn’t be seen, and we ran the risk of marching straight past it. When we halted for lunch, the sand filled the pot as soon as we opened it. Mu’min groaned and lifted the wing of his cloak to protect the food. But after I had eaten, I could feel the grit lying on my stomach for the rest of the day.

  As we rode on, I was attacked by a severe migraine. It was probably the result of staring into the sun every morning for so long. Jewelled snowflakes shimmered before my eyes, and when I closed them, pinpricks of light glimmered inside my head. I could no longer focus properly. When I tried to talk, the wrong words came out. The sand mist swirling about us mixed with the whorls behind my pupils. My hands started to go numb, as if the circulation had been cut off. I clung grimly to my camel. Within an hour, the sensory effects had passed and were replaced by a pain like a hot needle across my head.

  The tempest grew more intense. The sand whipped against us and piled up in miniature drifts in the folds of our clothes and on our saddles. The grit penetrated everything. Worse than the stinging sand was the maddening roar of the wind. Even the camels seemed unnerved by it. I was startled by a shout and turned to see Marinetta’s camel disappearing into a nebula of dust. I had been towing the camel behind me, but the headrope had broken. I shouted to Mu’min to stop, and while he held my camel, I ran off to find her, my heart thumping. Her camel was uncontrollable without a headrope, and in a storm like this she could be lost in minutes. After that, death would be almost a certainty. It took me only a short time to find her; I retied the headrope and led her back to the caravan. As we moved on, Mu’min peered constantly into the distance through the white shands of mist. The cliffs of Agadem were nowhere in sight. At about five, the guide couched his camel and called me over. ‘I think we should make camp,’ he advised me. ‘We’ll never see the cliff tonight. In the morning, the wind doesn’t begin until after sunrise. Then we’ll have a chance of seeing it.’

  We unloaded the camels. They were tired and in poor condition now. The saddles had already left bald patches on their skin. Shaybani had the beginnings of a gall on the withers. Abu Sanam, the hay carrier, was bleeding from the feet. All of them were hungry. After we had fed them some chaff, Mu’min asked for medicine for his knee. I massaged it with analgesic balm, but by the time I had finished, the wind had plastered the sticky ointment with sand and straw. At sunset, the wind dropped. I felt sick from the migraine and all the sand I had swallowed. I worried about finding Agadem and about the possibility of being turned away from the Chadian frontier. Later, Mu’min listened to his radio, and said, ‘The French have bombed a radar station at Wadi Doum. Habri’s men have dropped poison gas on Zouar. More than eighty Libyans have been killed.’ In the darkness, he seemed to be smiling.

  Mu’min woke me the next morning to show me the cliff of Agadem cutting across the erg like a grey wall. It took us four hours to get there, but the camels perked up as if they could already smell the vegetation. We passed through a gap in the rock and saw below us a perfect saucer of green. Beyond the oasis, the sand was bright red, tunnelled through by enormous worms of gypsum-white, which stood out like veins. There were drops of green arak on the valley floor, amid a purl of magenta and streaky blue. The dunes that swept down into the oasis looked dangerously steep. Mu’min dismounted and at once, his leg collapsed. I watched him as he desperately tried to hop down the steep slope on one leg. His black cloak flopped comically around him as he hopped. Abu Sanam pulled back from the slope, and we had to tie him by the jaw. The next time he pulled, the headrope broke. We had to unhitch all the camels and ferry them down the dunes one by one. Mu’min worked up and down, pogoing madly on his one leg like a dark flamingo and spluttering to himself. When all the camels were safely down, we rehitched them and led them into the oasis.

  There was little sign of life other than the arak bushes. There was a brooding silence to the place. We moved through the bushes noiselessly, searching for the single well. In the distance stood the ruins of an old French fort, crumbling and full of sand. Two yellow-headed Egyptian vultures buzzed around it.

  I heard the roar of a camel and looked up to see four men riding towards us. Their faces were veiled in white cloth but tied in a style quite different from that of the Tuareg. They halted around us in a semi-circle. They did not shake hands. The men carried arm daggers, and thick clubs hung from their saddles. I inched instinctively nearer to the handle of my machete, which protruded from a bale of hay. Their saddle gear was unfamiliar, and their camels wore strange headdresses of painted leather thongs. The men looked at us silently through the gaps in their headcloths. Mu’min began speaking to them in Toubou, very calmly. While he talked, they eyed us suspiciously and weighed up the state of our camels. Then one of them pointed to an arak grove not far off, and without another word, they rode away.

  There was a Toubou family living in the arak grove. The men were not wearing veils like the others we had seen, and without them, they looked friendly and ordinary. Yet I marvelled that they could live permanently in this desolation. They were small, ragged men with black faces, narrow and finely boned. Their tents were made of dom-palm fibre, woven into sheets and stitched together to form an oval igloo with an opening at one end. By the tents stood a shelter of loose palm fronds, where some wo
men in brilliantly coloured dresses were playing with tiny children. There was a rusty oil drum for storing water, and a rickety frame of Sodom’s Apple stalks held old saddles, rolled-up mats, water pots, and stiff well buckets.

  The Toubou owned some camels, which were grazing among the arak trees. Their herder was a girl of fifteen who swished about cheerily with a stick, her flowery dress billowing behind her. Her face was broad and pleasant, her tightly braided hair covered with a thin rag of cloth. I knew how tough these black nomad women could be. I had often seen women of the Gor’an, the eastern branch of the Toubou, when I was living in Gineina, in the Sudan. I remembered how they had ridden into Gineina market on their camels, carrying clubs and arm daggers and looking as dangerous as the men.

  There was a bull-camel among the herd, strutting about, blowing out a pink air bladder, slobbering, lifting his head arrogantly and displaying his swollen neck. I had once, seen an Arab boy whose arm had been almost ripped off by a bull-camel in this state. I told Marinetta to keep clear of him. The Toubou girl showed no fear of him, however, and shouted at the bull harshly when he came too near the females.

  The Toubou brought us mugs of warm camel’s milk and helped us to fill our containers from the well. They told Mu’min that there was just enough grazing here to keep their camels fat. The oasis had once, been a French base, and many Toubou had camped here, grazing their animals and tending the palm trees. Now almost everything had gone but the arak. The ground between the bushes was a sebkha of scorched earth, scattered with the sherds of trees like bones. Of the original date palms, only a few were left.

  These Toubou were one branch of the black Saharan nomads whose homeland lay in the mountain massif of Tibesti, lying on the borders of Libya and Chad. It was this area that was now being fought over by the Chadian government of Hissein Habri and the Libyan army. The nomads of the mountains were called Teda, while the southern and eastern tribes were known as Gor’an. In Niger, the black nomads were called Toubou, a name probably given to them by the French.

  The black nomads were among the hardiest people of the Sahara. By nature quarrelsome, independent, and prone to family feuds, they never managed to present a united front to resist the Turks and Arabs who had conquered them or, later, the French. Once, they had been the most feared raiders in the eastern Sahara, riding thousands of miles across the open desert, striking as far east as the Nile. Now, half of the Toubou were fighting on the side of the Libyans, and the other half were fighting for Habri. That evening, Mu’min told us that Habri’s soldiers had captured seventy-five Libyans in Tibesti. A third of them would be shot the following day.

  As we moved nearer to Lake Chad, the temperature rose steadily and the signs of vegetation increased. The dunes of the Grand Erg were left behind us, and we moved instead through a graveyard of thornscrub. The trunks were smashed and bent and grotesquely twisted, as if hit by a tornado. Yellow gashes had been ripped across their dull, grey skin, and fantails of fragile fibres hung out where they had snapped and keeled over. The husks of acacias lay crushed and shattered, trampled into the lifeless, salt-grey earth. There was no speck of green among them. A monochrome confusion of deathly pale shapes and shadows stretched to every horizon. It was a landscape of hell in which the lifeless trees took on the forms of devil creatures from the edges of imagination. They were like the giant carcasses of insects, eaten from inside by unnameable parasites and left to stiffen in the scorching sun.

  This kind of desolation was infinitely worse than the empty, featureless erg. It induced depression. Mu’min stared about him as if he were constantly lost. Marinetta said, ‘It’s the kind of place in which you imagine an assassin behind every bush and tree trunk. I keep thinking that Mu’min has led us this way to murder us.’ I felt exactly as she did. In the clean, open desert, you could see enemies approaching. The sudden closing in of the landscape after months in the open brought paranoia. It made you feel suddenly vulnerable. Once, I sensed inside me a submerged pulse of unreasoning terror, the terror that makes you panic for no obvious reason, prompts you to yell out madly and run away. It was the first time I had felt such terror since Tijikja, five months before.

  It was very hot now. The camels were hungry. There was no longer any hay to give them, and among this lifeless shell of a landscape, there was nothing for them to eat. Abu Sanam left spats of blood in the sand as he walked. Abu Nakkas fought and whined constantly. My feet were blistered for the first time, and Marinetta’s ankle was still swollen. Mu’min’s knee was so inflamed that he could hardly walk at all. We lurched on silently through the desolation, our minds blank and empty. We were walking and riding more than twelve hours a day.

  I could think of nothing but resting in N’Guigmi, but beyond it, I knew, lurked the deadly shadow of Chad. I wondered if they would turn us away at the border. I wondered if, once, inside, we would be attacked by murderous political factions. The Royal Geographical Society had warned us against passing through this unstable region.

  Quentin Crewe, writing in 1983, had declared Chad a ‘closed country’ and said that the Chad-Sudan border was mined. It was a disappointment to have to enter the country so far south, in what was really the Sahel belt. If we were turned back now, our attempt to cross the Sahara from west to east would have been in vain. Marinetta and I were determined that we should try to get through Chad whatever the cost. But when I thought of the pitfalls that must surely await us, I felt bilious and sick.

  One morning, we met some nomads making camp. They were Shuwa Arabs with cheerful red faces. Their camels carried wooden litters like the ones I knew so well from my years in the Sudan. They greeted us in Arabic—not Hassaniyya, but the good, clear Arabic of the east. The familiar style, the familiar faces, the full, unclipped language at once, lifted my melancholy. Chad lay ahead of us, but beyond it lay the Sudan, the country where Marinetta and I had met. Reaching the Sudan would be like coming home.

  Two hours later, we were walking through N’Guigmi towards the sweeping flag of the gendarmerie. The town looked like a French colonial base, with its villas and tin-roofed verandahs of mosquito mesh. A group of small boys sat under a tree, chanting verses from the Quran in an ecstatic burble. They stopped chanting to watch us go past. Farther on, a thick stream of reggae music poured from the window of a villa. It contrasted strangely with the Quranic chant that had resumed behind us. The reggae streamed on in the stillness of the morning: Cha-bunka-cha! Cha-bunka-cha! Cha-bunka-cha!

  Jibrin

  A massive elephant skull stood at the entrance to the town cercle like a mute guardian. It was a souvenir of the time when N’Guigmi really had been on the shores of Lake Chad. That time of crocodiles and elephants was long gone now. Throughout history, the lake had expanded and contracted like a concertina. It was now in a phase of contraction.

  We were received sombrely by the gendarmes. The slim young officer in charge asked us, ‘Doesn’t it bother you that two people were killed last week entering Chad?’ I told him that it bothered us but that we were still going. He shrugged as he stamped our passports, as if to say, ‘Thank God, it’s not my lookout!’

  Then a drunken man escorted us to the town camp site. He kept trying to put his arm around Marinetta and crying, ‘Madame!’ in a loud voice. I sincerely wished he would go away.

  The camp site, a rectangle of desert with a wall around it, was unoccupied except for a gang of small boys who perched on the wall like crows. They jeered at us while we erected our tent. Mu’min took his camel and went off to buy some hay. As soon as he had gone, Marinetta said, ‘Can’t we go to Chad alone? I’m sick of guides.’

  ‘And who’s going to lead us into Chad?’ I asked sarcastically.

  ‘You?’ Why not?’ she replied. ‘We can handle the camels ourselves. Why should we pay so much money to useless people like Mu’min?’

  ‘The next guide will be better,’ I promised.

  ‘No,’ she sulked, ‘I don’t like it. I hate having a third person watching all the tim
e. I have to behave in a different way, and so do you. You treat me as if I’m a second-class citizen.’

  ‘You have to respect the culture,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s not respecting the culture,’ she countered angrily. ‘That’s just being a chauvinistic pig!’

  Then Mu’min returned and left me to spread out the new hay while he threw himself into the shade, muttering, ‘Thank God, I can rest! I’ve done what I promised to do.’

  We sold Abu Sanam and Abu Nakkas in the camel market the following day with the help of a tout called Musa. He claimed to be a Targui but didn’t bother to cover his rodent-like front teeth with the tagelmaust. He said that he had lived in N’Guigmi so long that he had forgotten Tamasheq. He spoke only Arabic now, he said. The market was held in groves of Sodom’s Apples on the edge of the town. The camels were packed in like sardines. Caravans wormed out of the scrub in all directions escorted by tribesmen in nicotine-yellow shirts who rode on little ponies. The men had faces of charcoal-black, haloed with brilliant white headcloths. They belonged to the Toubou, the Gor’an, the Beriberi, and the black Shuwa Arabs of Lake Chad. Their camels looked dumpy and lethargic beside our sleek Tuareg geldings. Merchants and butchers and touts marched about with white gandourahs flying. Women sat in snug lines, selling wedges of peanut cake and packets of chick-peas. One woman was churning out maggots of pasta from an imported machine. Coffee sellers balanced trays of mugs and kettles on their knees, next to men selling blankets and belts and whips and saddles.