Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  After this incident, we used our gas cooker as much as possible. It gave out little light and could be concealed behind our baggage. Before and after our evening meal, I would be coming and going with the camels. Watching them was a constant problem, especially when there was no moon. I tried to keep them always in view, which meant following them and driving them back to the camp if they wandered too far. They would be awkward, meandering this way and that or dipping their heads under the branches of very thorny trees. Often, one of them got his nose ring caught in the thorns and would stand their wailing until I released him. In bright moonlight, though, I was afforded a little rest. I could watch the camels from our camp with a pair of binoculars, a generous present from a friend in N’Jamena.

  When our meal was ready, Marinetta would call me over to eat. We always ate rice or macaroni, with the same old sardines or dried meat. We ate with Tuareg spoons, which we had acquired in Niger, scooping the food from our pot, which had been with us since we had left Chinguetti. It had been used as a drinking bowl, a washtub, a well bucket, and a watering trough for the camels as well as a cooking utensil. The original shining silver had long since matured into a smooth patina of fire-black, yet after the thousands of miles, it still maintained its shape. That pot was more than just an old friend to us; it was home.

  After the meal, we would spend half an hour writing up our diaries by torchlight. When that was done, we would both drive the camels into the camp and knee-hobble them for the night, near enough for us to touch them. They made the fourth wall of our little redoubt in the wilderness. We would crawl exhausted into our sleeping bags, and only then, as the last act of the day, would I light my pipe. Those few puffs of tobacco, as I sat in the sepulchral silence listening to the belching of the camels as they chewed the cud, seemed to make the whole day worth while.

  We had been instructed never to leave the track, but when villages appeared on the horizon, we often made a detour around them. Most small villages had a gendarme or two, some of them illiterate, whose fear of us could be a greater obstacle than our fear of them. There were few vehicles on the road, but once, a military convoy rumbled past us, ten or a dozen heavy trucks, each with a complement of guards riding shotgun on top. The guards looked ferocious with their headcloths across their faces and their combats bleached with dust. The convoy halted somewhere ahead, and we left the road at once, making a semicircle and rejoining the track farther on. The last thing we needed was to be mixed up with the military. Another time, we heard gunfire and saw some jeeps parked along the track. A squad of soldiers were firing across the road and into the bush on the other side. I had no wish to find out what they were shooting at, though the middle of the road seemed an odd place for target practice.

  Occasionally, we were forced into the villages to find water. On 3rd February, we sighted the settlement of Ngoura. It lay among some languid thorn trees, squatting under a nugget of flinty grey shale. A wooden barrier blocked the track with a sign reading ‘Stop’ in squinting letters. Nearby stood a blockhouse, where a Chadian tricolour flapped drowsily. A teenage boy with a rifle and wearing the uniform of a gendarme came out to meet us. He wore broken sandals and a wiry undergrowth of hair instead of a cap. His eyes were wide and shiny with fear as he moved towards us. I produced our passports, and the boy clicked his fingers for them, keeping us at arm’s length. Then he disappeared again into the blockhouse. At once, a mob of tribesmen came stampeding out as if someone had lobbed a grenade among them. They circled us like vultures, a sea of grey faces and dirty gandourahs, gabbling, ‘Are they Arabs or Christians?’ Eventually, a more responsible-looking gendarme pushed his way through, carrying our documents. He spoke to us in French. ‘You are going to the Sudan?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, but we need water for our camels.’

  ‘The camel is a very sturdy animal,’ the man said. ‘It can go without water for a very, very long time.’

  Marinetta caught my eye for a fraction of a second. I looked away. ‘Are there any wells around here?’ I asked.

  Water was pumped up from a deep bore well and fed into some concrete basins nearby. The water was too bitter for us, but the camels swallowed it thirstily. There were some Arabs there, watering a brace of plump ponies. The men had brooding, brown faces and carried giant spears and arm daggers.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ one of them asked.

  ‘From Mauritania,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t that the country of Moukhtar auld Dadda?’ he asked. ‘The people there are Arabs, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but my own country is Britain,’ I said, fearing confusion.

  The Arab wrinkled his face. ‘Where’s that?’ he inquired.

  In the village, women with slim, black bodies sat at the doors of one-roomed huts of mud. Along the main street, a line of little girls were selling drinking water in earthenware jars. A man was frying a very flat chicken on a charcoal grill. We bought the chicken and the water, and while we squatted down to eat, the little girls formed a procession to fill our jerrycans.

  Such villages punctuated the monotony of the arid landscape through which we plodded hour after hour, day after day. It was bushland of red sand, sparse yellow grass, dumps of greying gorse and brambly trees, and the curious double trunks of dom palms like enormous, fluted flowers. Once, we ran into a herd of kudu cattle driven by Arabs on horses. The cattle flowed across the track like a many-coloured oil slick, brown and tawny, black and white. The men were small and dark, wearing knotted turbans, and sheaves of assegais swung from their saddles. We saw men riding camels, schools of five or six of them sweeping along in a bolus of dust, their faces intent and dark under their cowls of cloth.

  There were whole families on the move: strings of camels carrying old, worm-eaten saddles and crude, cowskin saddle bags. There were children riding on bullocks with strings through their snouts and women sprawling on cohorts of grey donkeys—-handsome, muscular women, naked from the waist up, displaying sleek breasts and lean shoulders of copper bronze.

  These people were mostly nomads of the Baggara cattle Arabs, who were spread across Africa from Lake Chad to the Nile. Their tents, made of woven palm fibre like those of the Toubou, dotted the landscape like igloos and could be identified by the helixes of smoke from their campfires.

  As the days passed, the constant corrosive fear of both authorities and bandits whittled us down to the level of pure survival. We were like commandos behind enemy lines to whom every move is potentially hostile. After a twelve-hour march each day, we would hug each other tightly in silent celebration of having survived. But the evening brought little relief. There were the camels to be watched against thieves and the cooking to be done in secret. There were a thousand and one jobs to be completed: restitching torn sacks, repadding saddles, tightening ropes, and repairing hobbles. Always, our ears would be scanning the night for the slightest sound, the softest footfall, a momentary halt in the camels’ chomping. Our senses became as sharp as those of hunted beasts. We smelled woodsmoke long before we saw the flash of fire. We picked out the tiny shapes of camels in the landscape long before they came near. When selecting a camping place at sunset, we would search the surrounds for the tracks of men and animals and would even examine the environment methodically with binoculars to make sure that no one was lurking nearby. If we heard voices as we were drinking tea or eating, as we did several times, we would stop and try to pick out the figures in the darkness. We would not relax until they had gone by.

  At night, we slept on a hair-trigger with our poor weapons by our sides. The slightest sound would wake us instantly. Often, the camels got hungry and crawled off as far as a hundred yards away. I would be forced to get up and bring them back to the camp by torchlight. We rarely enjoyed a full night’s sleep, yet we would be on our feet before dawn, loading the camels for another day’s march. Marinetta endured it all without complaint now. Her red-raw face set itself into a new mould of weary determination. We both knew that we had to make it to the Su
dan.

  When we stopped for our midday meal, we were plagued by ticks. Marinetta had a special loathing for the leathery little mites. They were very cunning. If you inspected the area around the base of a tree, you would see nothing of them. Then, just as you sat down to your food, the earth’s crust would crumble and out would troop a detachment of blood-suckers. Nothing seemed to deter their kamikaze raids. They would crawl up our legs and dive into the joins of our sandals. They would scale the sheer wall of the cooking pot and abseil down into the food. They were always a mystery to me. I knew that they could live for years between meals. But why were they found under some trees and not others? How did they sense a warm-blooded presence? I reasoned that it could only be by vibration of a certain magnitude, but in that case, why the delay before they appeared? Very often, they drove us out of the shade into the hot sunlight, and some persistent individuals even followed us there.

  At nights, we were so shattered that we could hardly move. Since leaving Agadez in December, we had ‘rested’ for a total of eight days. Almost every other day, we had marched for between ten and twelve hours. The constant work, even on ‘rest’ days, had drained the strength out of my muscles. My skin glowed charcoal-hot from exposure to the sun. Often, I suffered crippling migraines accompanied by nausea and palpitations, as if the working parts of my head had slipped out of gear. A mesh of glittering lights would form before my eyes, inducing disorientation. At those times, I couldn’t do anything but ride or walk, and Marinetta would take over leading the caravan. When I came to write my diary, the events of the day had already become a pot-pourri of dislocated images. One village blurred into another, lost in a landscape that was bleak, hot, and comfortless, spreading over everything and dwarfing any feature that man had made on its surface. The one act of significance each day was when I marked our position on the map and worked out the distance that still remained between us and the Sudan.

  The Sudan became our promised land, and Chad dissolved into an endurance test. As the exhaustion ate at us like poison, we grew paranoid. Any figure or group travelling behind us was following us. A shepherd with a spear asked us for water; while I filled the bowl from our waterbag, I told Marinetta to watch him, imagining that leaf-headed lance being plunged between my shoulder blades at any moment. When we moved on, the man followed us, his spear balanced over his shoulder like a rifle. When we moved faster, so did he. When we shifted to another track, he shifted with us. When we stopped, he stopped. In our paranoia, he was an enemy to be thrown off at any cost. We mounted our camels and drove them on relentlessly. Still, the persistent figure remained behind us, striding doggedly with his spear. The camels were panting as we whipped them forward. Trails of dust like muslin layered the air behind us. Each time I turned my head, Marinetta gasped, ‘He’s still coming!’ I heard the urgency in her voice. I felt the same near panic inside. The man had been tried and condemned as a bandit in our own minds, and nothing seemed so important as getting rid of him. An hour before sunset, we found ourselves in a forest of dom palms. We ploughed along beneath fluted foliage. It reminded me of Malaya rather than the Sahara desert. The man finally dropped out of sight. We continued until the sun was sinking through the trees in the background. We turned far off the track and made camp in a hidden place behind some low palm shrubs.

  Just as we sat down to drink tea, I heard voices. They seemed very near. ‘Ssh!’ I whispered to Marinetta as I put my tea down. There were the voices of two men, and I could hear the creak of a camel saddle in the darkness. I took the binoculars and leopard-crawled out of the camp. Marinetta lay silently in our concealed baggage. Our camels were grazing in the bushes a hundred yards away. I scanned the forest. Two camel riders were moving stealthily through the groves of palms, apparently looking for something. I could see the pale moonlight gleaming on their gnarled faces and the hafts of the spears slung across their saddles. I wondered why they weren’t on the track. Suddenly, one of the riders couched his camel and slipped off. I thought they might have sighted our animals. Then, as I watched, the man squatted down and urinated. Afterwards, he led his camel by the bridle and they passed within a few yards of our camp. I watched them disappear into the palm fronds with relief.

  Our camels were thirsty and in poor condition. Their feet had cracked from the hard ground, and old Shay bani had a bad gall on the withers, which had become infected and smelled revolting. There was little for them to eat among the dom palms, but I dared not let them wander far. In those trees, they would have been lost in minutes. I had to tighten their hobbles and watch them constantly. After a short time, I would have to unhobble them, attach their headropes, and move them to another place, then hobble them again. It was a painstaking process, which seemed to last hours. All the time, I was longing to lie down on my blanket. Once, I stopped to watch Marinettta working at the fire. She was making bread, pummelling the dough into flat loaves and cooking them on our steel plate. The delicious smell of baking bread filled the night. The flickering firelight played over her face, absorbed with the job, set with incredible patience and determination. No one, I thought, could be tougher than this small, ordinary, extraordinary woman. I was suddenly, irrevocably, glad she was my wife.

  We arrived in the town of Ati in the early morning. It was the regional capital, from where we needed yet another stamp if we were to proceed east into the province of Wadai. The town was wreathed in new mesquite trees. The troopers at the barriers smiled at us and shook hands as we arrived. We moved through a wide boulevard, shaded with giant canopies of trees, until we came to the state security office. The security men checked our authorisation and passed us on to the commissar of police.

  He was a shy man, dark enough to be a southerner, who spoke French and pretended not to know Arabic. He was sympathetic and talked with affection of the three UNICEF nurses who worked in the town. He stamped our passports almost at once, and was about to hand them back when his face clouded over. The hand with the passports in it halted in mid-flight across his desk. ‘You’d better have a word with the préfet,’ he said. ‘It’s only a formality, but he likes to know what’s going on.’

  As soon as we entered the préfet’s office, I realised that we were in trouble. He had a broad, dark face and was fastidiously dressed in a safari suit and a stiff collar and tie. A severe pince-nez decorated the end of a slightly aquiline nose. He winced at the effort of shaking hands with us. As we sat down, the hooded eyes raked us from head to foot. He unfolded our authorisation carefully. He seemed unimpressed. ‘We cannot allow you to go farther by camel,’ he said. ‘There is the problem of sûreté. This is a country at war.’ A cold flush of fear fizzled down my spine. The man looked as though he meant it. The Sudanese border lay only twelve days’ march away. Was it possible that, after all we had endured, we would be stopped now?

  ‘No,’ he went on. ‘What if you were captured by the enemy and held hostage? Then there is the problem of robbers on the way. No, it’s impossible!’

  ‘We’ve had no such problems up to now.’ I said.

  ‘You weren’t in Chad,’ he answered, then he peered at our filthy clothes more closely. ‘I think you are a couple of intellectuals. You think all this is a game.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’ve got permission from the Minister of the Interior himself to travel as far as the Sudan.’

  He scrutinised the authorisation again, holding up the pince-nez with an effete hand. ‘This authorisation,’ he said triumphantly, ‘does not mention the word “camel”.’

  The commissar blinked at us apologetically in his office. He must have been guiltily aware that we had already seen our passports stamped. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but my hands are tied.’ Then he dropped the bombshell. ‘You’ll have to go back to N’Jamena,’ he said.

  I flushed. I tried hard to control my anger. I just couldn’t believe it. My instinct was to fight. ‘What if we refuse to go?’ I asked him.

  ‘That would be unfortunate,’ he said, ‘but there won’t be
any question of that, will there? You’ll be going with a guard.’

  So this was it, I thought, after such a distance, after seven months of travel. This was the end of the road.

  *

  There were no passengers on the truck except ourselves, a soldier called Musa, and three goats tied to the chassis by string. Each time the truck lurched over a rut, which was every few minutes, the goats fell sprawling over one another, almost strangling themselves. ‘At least they’re worse off than we are,’ Marinetta declared, bouncing a foot off the roll of matting that was our only seat. The only difference I could see was the string.

  The three days of that journey back to N’Jamena convinced me, if I had any last doubts, that motor vehicles are not the ideal means of travel in Africa. We were jolted and shaken like rattles until our bones ached; we were blasted by the sun and strangled all day by the exhaust fumes. Our guard, Musa, was a disarmingly friendly Arab with very large ears and prominent teeth, which gave him a humorous appearance. Marinetta quickly named him Topogigio after the Italian equivalent of Mickey Mouse. There was little that was comical about the submachine gun he carried though, except perhaps that it was badly pitted with rust. Each time we halted in a village that we had passed through, people would gather round us asking, ‘Where are your camels?’ Then they

  looked at Topogigio and his submachine gun and were confirmed in the belief that we had been, after all, dangerous foreign spies.

  At the state security headquarters, the man in ragged clothes and unlaced boots was sitting by the gate. He leered at our small cortege.

  We waited two hours, sitting in a corridor, then we were tailed into the presence of the Director of National Security. He was a young, handsome, expansive type. He wore a red-and-black shirt or batikh. He smiled at us over the desk. ‘There’s been a message about you from Ati,’ he said. I showed him our authorisation indignantly. His dark, handsome mouth split into a wide grin, and he threw his head back and laughed. ‘Il n’a pas bien compris!’ he chuckled. ‘He didn’t understand! There has been a mistake. When would you like to go back to Ati? At once! Why don’t you stay here the weekend? Don’t you like dancing?’ He must have read the answer in our grim faces, for he called in a shaven-headed police superintendent and instructed him to write a letter to the commissar in Ati.