Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  Now we were all confused. Should we move towards the camels? Should we continue on the previous day’s bearing? Adam was at a loss and said he would try anything. We retraced our steps and then moved east for a further hour. It was midmorning, and the sun was’ already burning, raising a gas haze from the sand and steaming out of the rocks. We came to the edge of the rocky maze and saw a smoother plain spreading east with a three-peaked orange hill rising out of it. I was certain I had seen that hill on my previous visit, coming from the east. That indicated that Abu Tabara lay somewhere behind us.

  We turned the caravan around and, with little real hope of finding the well, marched southwest. We traversed ridge after ridge, each time thinking, ‘Now we might see it!’, only to be met with the same blank rocks and lifeless shapes. We saw camel dung. Once, I was sure that I smelled wood smoke, but Adam shook his head. We saw sprigs of ferny tamarix among the crevices and fissures. I strode ahead with the binoculars. Marinetta pattered behind, holding her big zoom lens like a weapon. The towering, wind-moulded boulders looked down on us mockingly like giants and demons. Then the rocks disappeared, and we were on the edge of a grey plain stretching south. Abu Tabara could not lie in that direction.

  It was almost midday now. We had been on foot since dawn, without a break and without drinking. My mouth was sore and as rough as gravel. ‘That’s enoughl’ I said. ‘We’ll have to go back to Rahib.’ Adam turned the camels west reluctantly. I felt equally glum. This was only the second time in our journey that we had turned back. That Abu Tabara was our last well made it doubly infuriating. We moved over the sand haltingly.

  Then, without warning, Marinetta shouted, ‘Maik! Over therel’ I turned and saw, directly behind us, the faraway shape of a camel and the distant silhouette of a man drawing water from an invisible well. ‘It must be Abu Tabaral’ I said. ‘We’ve found it!’ Then I kissed Marinetta. It was the first time I had ever kissed her in front of the guide.

  The man drawing water stopped as he saw us coming, and as soon as we had shaken hands he held up the leather well bucket and poured the water so that we could drink. It was cool, cool, cool. It was the most delicious water I had ever tasted. The water spilled out of the bucket and ran in icy streams under my shirt. The sunlight caught it, dividing the liquid into priceless gems, dancing over it like a spirit. The Arab said that he had seen us passing and thought we were making directly for Rahib. That was why he hadn’t shouted to us. We had been going in the opposite direction, I realised suddenly. That chance look backwards by Marinetta had probably saved our lives. On such small chances do life and death turn.

  The Arab was black with a knobbly face. His shirt, sirwel, and headcloth were so close to the colour of the sand that he would easily have been camouflaged but for his black features. There were three other Arabs in a small tent nearby and an attractive woman with two small children. The tent was an oblong of camel’s hair just large enough for all five adults and two children to sit in, very upright, all together. There wasn’t a single tree on the horizon. The only other shade was to be found under some giant tilted boulders that trapped black ovals of shade around their bases. The woman’s camel litter stood outside the tent, with a few moth-eaten blankets and some ropes and waterskins. Other saddles and saddle bags had been crammed into fissures in the rocks. The Arabs were small and unkempt, with tangles of hair and stubbly beards. They carried rifles and daggers and wore wooden rosary beads around their necks.

  Two of them sat down with us in the shade of the granite chunk. I asked them why they lived in such a place, without even a tree for company. ‘This is the real place for the Arabs!’ one of them answered. ‘There are no people. It’s quiet. There’s no coming and going, and you don’t have to worry about thieves.’ The coarse grasses that grew here were good fodder, he said, and the Arabs didn’t even have to herd the camels. They merely let them wander. Every nine days, without fail, they would turn up at the well.

  Not long afterwards, the point was illustrated for us. There was a shout of ‘Herds! Herds!’ and the two men jumped up and rushed towards the well. We followed them, wondering why the sudden frenzy, and saw a picket of camels careening out of the desert and converging on the clay watering trough near the well head. The Arabs fought them back with sticks, afraid that they would break the fragile trough. Only two or three animals were allowed to water at once, and the Arabs dunked pieces of red rock-salt in the water as they drank. The rock-salt came from a secret place nearby. There followed two hours’ frantic work, during which the Arabs took turns to draw up the water and fill the trough. With the sun blazing overhead, it seemed monstrously hard work, but I remembered that it happened only once every nine days. The rest of the time, these Arabs needed their energy just to survive.

  Later, after we had filled all our girbas, the Arabs made us tea. The woman emerged from the tent and collected a plateful of hard camel dung from around the well. Firewood was a luxury here, she explained. The fire required a surprising amount of dung and a great deal of puffing and blowing to keep it alight. But the tea that appeared half an hour later was excellent.

  We left the well in the late afternoon and rode for two hours across the plain. As we made camp, Adam said, ‘I told you we’d see people, didn’t I? I read it in the sands. If we’d followed your angle, we’d have been on our way back to Rahib by now. I said we’d see people today.’ This nettled me a little, though I had to admit that my compass bearing had not been as accurate as it might have been.

  ‘There’s only one person on this earth we have to thank for finding that well,’ I told Adam, ‘and that’s my wife. And she’s not a son of the Arabs.’

  We awoke with the sun a thickening pearl over the hills. The morning was still, with no hint of cooling wind. The time of heat was upon us. Adam looked terrible and told me his eyes had pained him all night. For most of the day, he rode with closed lids, obliging me to keep a steady watch on the compass. The hot sun seemed to bleach the colours out of the landscape till nothing remained but a chiaroscuro of grey and black. We moved through a science-fiction panorama of jagged, crumbling coxcombs of rock. Noon caught us on an endless plain where there was only a single, fungus-shaped pedestal a yard high. We couched the camels by the rock and ate our meal in the narrow rim of shade.

  In the afternoon, we continued across the plain. It was a moonscape, a timeless, eerie, twilight zone. Marinetta brooded silently in the simmering heat. I watched her anxiously knowing that the extremes of temperature could change your mood as easily as flicking a switch. In midafternoon, she asked me for some dates. They’re finished.’ I told her. ‘We finished them yesterday.’

  ‘I never had any yesterday!’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you save some for me?’

  ‘There weren’t many left,’ I said vaguely, remembering that I had given some to Adam. ‘Anyway, they’re finished.’

  ‘You miserly, greedy bastard!’ she shouted. This is how you are! I should never have married you!’

  ‘Ah, we’re back to that old white elephant.’

  ‘I know you only married me because you thought I had money. You want me to keep you in luxury after the expedition.’

  I knew by now that there was no point in talking to her during these obsessive moods. We hardly spoke for the rest of the day. The following day was our first wedding anniversary. It was exactly a year since those miserable days in Paris. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ Marinetta grumbled to herself. ‘Anyway, there won’t be any more anniversaries. All I want now is to be free.’

  That evening, some flat splodges of cloud formed at sunset. Adam said that this meant heat. His prediction proved true. The next day, the heat was thick from sunrise onwards. We laboured up a steep escarpment, picking our way over a surface gashed with small stones. The rocks cut and scratched the camels’ feet, and they were reluctant to go on. We scrambled over folds of hard ground and came into an area of low dunes, which closed in on us quickly, a glinting jigsaw of brilliant silicon. We tramped left and ri
ght to find a way through them, and the camels were further exhausted by the steep climb through the slipping sand. We struggled up a ridge and saw the desert stretching, before us, a weft of dazzling colours. It seemed impossible that a

  giant river could exist in this emptiness.

  We camped among dunes that night and in the morning reached firmer ground. We rode across a sandy plain decorated by blue volcanic lozenges and pieces of petrified wood. Millions of years ago, there might have been a jungle here—a jungle of hunting reptiles and mammals and insects fighting tooth and claw, destroying life for life in the ferocious struggle to survive. Those creatures were our ancestors.

  In the late afternoon, we crossed a trench that might once, have been a river. I remembered the strange formation from a previous journey. Or was it a previous life? I tried to remember, and my mind was filled with a cascade of images, the strange premonition in Tijikja, the stream of strange dreams that had followed me across the entire breadth of the Sahara. That place seemed to spark off a nebula of feelings and memories, to be a focus of all pasts and futures, a place where conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, came together.

  All seeking appeared to culminate here. I half expected to drop dead in the middle of the trench but, instead, as we climbed out of it, I heard the low wind-bag moan that announced the start of a sandstorm.

  A blast of hot air pressed us sideways, and we dropped out of our saddles and tied the camels together. The rasp and whoosh of sand filled the air. There was a whine like the expiration of tortured lungs. Coils of dust flamed out of the desert, scourging us with cat-o’-nine-tails claws. A web of seething grey sand clamped down upon us, and we fought through its folds like drunken men. Marinetta clutched her compass tight, eyes riveted on the bouncing needle, while I led the camels. The net of dust drew tight around us, numbing our senses like abrasive cotton wool. I wrenched the headropes left and right,

  forcing the camels to walk in true. Adam followed on with his camel, a few yards behind.

  We gritted our teeth to fight our last battle with the desert, trying its hungry best to cast us off its surface. We moved like warriors with every muscle tense, every sense alert, until night blackened the thick strands of flailing dust to darker shades. We thumped our baggage down. Adam took a blanket and went straight to ground like a burrowing creature. Marinetta and I plunged into the torrent of blown sand, tying the camels down and erecting our shelter. The cotton rattled, whipping out of our hands. ‘Jesus!’ Marinetta yelled.

  ‘It’s the wildest storm I’ve ever seen!’ I held the leather ropes in my teeth, straining on the cotton to make it reach. The lash and roar of the sand was exhilarating. It was as if all the savage forces of the earth had been unleashed. The lashing wind made us gasp. We threw ourselves into our poor shelter, holding on to each other, feeling the same forces flowing through our veins. We scrabbled under each other’s clothes, ripping them away, joining our bodies in the wild night. We rolled over, sobbing and grunting and crying in the maelstrom, two black demons wrestling in the darkness of the world.

  Fierce obsession drove us on, uncaring, as we released the pent-up

  frustration of 4,000 miles of hardship. A searing flash of crimson lighting ripped across the belly of the night, but no rain fell.

  All was quiet at first light as we rolled from beneath drifts of sand. We loaded and climbed a stony bank. From the top, Adam pointed a bony finger to a line of green where none should have been. Then there was the miraculous quicksilver flash of water. Yellow cakes of hills stretched beyond the silver water to a far-off horizon. ‘Those hills are in the Nubian Desert,’ Adam said. ‘This is where the Sahara ends.’

  I can hardly remember how we dragged the camels down the escarpment, through the noise and smell and bustle of Ed Debba. I recall that I took Marinetta’s small hand and led her and our tiny caravan through streets where people stopped to stare at us. I remember someone shouting, ‘Hey, those camels will bite you!’ and a posse of children chanting, ‘Christians with camels!’ I remember vividly the great, cool stream of the Nile, silent, grey, and ancient, flowing in soothing flood through the harsh throat of the desert. The camels broke the rippled surface and the air was filled with the sounds of their drinking. Marinetta and I held hands and stared at the incredible sacrament of water. I took off my Moorish sandals. They were the ones I had bought in Chinguetti, 256 days, another lifetime, away. Those sandals had walked across the greatest desert on earth.

  I looked at them once, then cast them into the swirling waters.

  The Belly of Stones

  We had reached the Nile, but our journey was not yet over. Our original plan had been to reach Cairo. That was impossible now, for the hot season was already well advanced, but we were determined not to give up until we had crossed the Egyptian border.

  The police in Ed Debba did not share our enthusiasm. ‘Your visas have expired,’ said a fat, sour-faced security man who accosted us by the Nile. This was incorrect, I pointed out. The visas were valid from the date of entry, not the date of issue. This made him really mad. He marched us off to the tumble-down police station on the waterfront. He raged at us, and demanded, ‘What are you doing with this girl?’

  ‘This is my wife,’ I said, ‘so please speak with more respect.’

  ‘Ahh! Don’t tell me you’re married!’ the fat man jeered. ‘She looks young enough to be your daughter!’ I bit my lip. The Sudanese are the nicest people in Africa, but this was an example of what happened to perfectly nice people when they became ‘security men’. ‘You must report to the police in Dongola, the regional capital,’ he told us. ‘Explain your story to them.’ He sent us off with our passports and without a guard.

  ‘Like hell we will!’ said Marinetta.

  We sold Calil Al’Agl in the market and paid Adam the 800 Sudanese pounds we owed him. It must have been the most anyone had ever paid him for riding across the desert on a camel, but his face registered no pleasure.

  He put the money away quickly. ‘Don’t tell anyone, Omar,’ he begged me, ‘or they’ll all be asking for a loan.’ Later he came back from the market with nothing but 2 pounds of tobacco in a plastic bag.

  ‘Is that all you’re going to get?’ asked Marinetta. ‘Why don’t you buy a blanket or a new pair of shoes?’

  ‘If I buy a new blanket, they’ll say I’m rich and take money off me,’ he moaned. ‘And these shoes have still got plenty of life in them.’ He looked down at his odd sandals, one blue, one red. ‘I want to get out of this place as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘I don’t like all this coming and going, all these people ready to take your money.’ He had not been in a town for twenty years. I wondered if he would ever see one again.

  We left for Egypt on 21st April, exactly one year after that near disastrous day when we had landed in Nouakchott, Mauritania. We spent a tranquil week riding through the adobe villages of Upper Nubia, where fat, green wheat waved in the fields and thick palm trees overshadowed the track. ‘We filled our waterskins with river water and camped out in the desert at night. We made a wide circle around Dongola, concealing our camp fires in rocky crevices in the darkrless. At the village of Mosho, we sneaked into the market at the dead hour of late afternoon to buy a sack of sorghum for the camels. None of the villagers seemed surprised that we were going to Egypt.

  North of Mosho, the Nile enters the twisted series of ravines and canyons called the Belly of Stones. The character of the land and the people changes. The villages are remote, hemmed in by peaks and buttes of granite, separated from each other by narrow paths among the hills. Often, it is difficult to get within 15 miles of the river by camel. Instead, we followed the old stock route along which Sudanese camel men exported herds to Egypt. The track was well marked with camel grooves and with scores of bones of camels that had expired on the way.

  The village I wanted most to avoid was Hamid. This, the last sizeable village on the west bank of the Nile, was where the Sudanese border police had their base. I h
ad had trouble at Hamid before and wanted to take no chances this time. A few miles south of the village, we headed our camels out into open desert. Only moments later, two donkey riders emerged from the palm groves and began trotting north towards Hamid. I saw them turning their heads towards us as they rode. People riding out into the desert just south of the border post must look suspicious to anyone, I supposed. I imagined word being passed to the police sergeant in Hamid.’ ‘Two strangers riding out into the desert on camels!’ I imagined the Land Rover engine churning, the constables jumping in excitedly with their old rifles. I imagined the vehicle roaring across the desert to intercept us.

  For an hour, we travelled inside a deep groove in the rock, invisible from the village. Then the groove suddenly fell away, and we saw the tower of Hamid mosque hovering over the desert like a periscope. It was easy to imagine hidden eyes watching us from within. Our only advantage was the sun going down behind us, which would blind any observer with its glare.

  Darkness brought us invisibility. We found a depression carpeted with sand and couched our camels there. A triangle of firestones was waiting for us, and a few pieces of unburned firewood, like a thoughtful present from the previous occupants. As I lit a fire, I hoped no nosy tribesmen would spot it and report us to the police.

  Our sleep was undisturbed, and in the morning, we headed back to the river at Sagiet Al’Abd. We needed to fill our girbas before pressing on into the rocky country ahead. On the riverbank was a lump of shapeless mud brick that had once been an ancient fortress. A sign saying ‘Antiquity Area—Please Preserve’ was lying flat on its face in the dust. The wood-and-wire fence around it had also collapsed. Marinetta wanted to use the posts as firewood.