Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  ‘No, but what about you?’

  ‘We walk. You ride.’

  ‘You walk?’

  ‘This is normal.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. This is normal.’

  This is not what I had imagined. I had imagined three camels, three riders and a pack camel. A proper trek. Like a miniature caravanserai. I am worried. How far are they going to walk in the desert? It is hot. Bloody hot. And dry. And, I imagine, very deserty. Wouldn’t they be very slow and wouldn’t we have to keep waiting for them? Wouldn’t they get so thirsty that they’d drink all the water? Do we have enough water? Where is the water? Who is going to carry the water? Let alone the food? And where is the food? What is in those sacks? One of them looks like a sack of flour. Why are we taking a sack of flour?

  Nothing adds up. Now I am convinced we are going to be robbed. And left to die in the desert. The foolish tourists that we are. I remember The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz about an escape from a Siberian Gulag, when the seventeen-year-old girl, Kristina, was dying in the Gobi desert and how her leg went black first. And who would know? No one knows where we are. As usual, we have done no research, we know nothing about desert treks, we have just bought the cheapest flights and come. It is very possible that in all the guide books it says, Don’t go on a camel trek with a backstreet agency. Maybe it says, Watch out for conmen running suspicious Camel Raids. Maybe everyone knows not to go to a backstreet agency, except us. And now, because we are too cavalier and too lazy and haven’t got round to reading up about it, we are in mortal danger of falling foul of some heinous plot in the middle of the Sahara. The sign had said raid, after all. Couldn’t we even read? I try to flash a look at Jonathan, which I don’t want our ‘guides’ to see, but as usual he doesn’t notice.

  The camel driver meanwhile is busying himself with camel harnesses. Maybe everything is fine. These are honourable men, after all; men whose word is set in stone, whose unimpeachable moral standards put our debauched Western mistrust to shame. It would be unspeakably rude to back out now. Or then again, could we be about to die of politeness? I have been in trouble with politeness before. I look at Jonathan again. There is a plough mark down the middle of his forehead. I know that plough mark. He’s not sure either.

  ‘Do you think this is all right?’ I whisper.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He sounds tetchy.

  I believe his tactic is to make me feel it is ridiculous to worry about it, in order to make himself feel it is ridiculous to worry about it. My tactic is to make him worry about it.

  ‘What happens if it’s not okay?’

  The camel driver is speaking to one of the adult camels as he yanks on its bridle. He thwacks it. It bends its knees and sits down. Then he does the same with the other and both adult camels are crouched down, chewing.

  ‘Have you ever ridden a camel?’ Mohammed asks.

  ‘No,’ we say in unison.

  Mohammed laughs.

  The camel driver and the other man start to load up the two big camels. One by one they strap the huge sacks onto the large saddle panniers, over the top of which they tie rolled blankets. It appears the two camels are doubling as pack and riding camels, which looks uncomfortable for us and doesn’t seem quite fair on the camels. The camels chew thorns. The baby camel skitters about. Then the camel driver beckons us over. I am allocated the darker camel. I grab hold of the wooden pommel, navigate my leg across the saddle and inelegantly slide on board.

  ‘Lean back,’ Mohammed says. ‘Lean back!’

  Anyone who has ridden a camel knows what happens next. As the camel gets up, its back legs straighten and you are hurled forward ninety degrees while the front legs stay doubled up. There is nothing in front of you, for you are staring down the precipice of a long vertical scraggy neck that ends in a bony head full of long brown teeth that can chew thorns. You push yourself back against gravity with everything you can muster, because you don’t want to be falling anywhere near the teeth of a camel. Then, suddenly, you are hurled back as the front legs unfold. And the camel is standing up. I look down. It feels like I am a very long way up.

  I watch Jonathan hold onto his knackers as he makes a sort of cowboy noise while sticking his arm out like he’s surfing a wave. The three men smile. And off we sail. Our kindergarten caravanserai. Two and a half ships of the desert. Mohammed walks in front, his white djellaba fluttering out, then Jonathan on his camel, then me, with Zaid and Mansour behind us and the baby camel running about all over the place. And so we lollop away from the town, into the desert. Into the 3.5 million square miles of sand crisscrossed for centuries by caravans up to 12,000 strong, carrying their gold and slaves and kola nuts. Whatever we are carrying, it doesn’t look enough.

  And my camel isn’t walking properly. It’s getting its stride all mixed up. Its legs are locked into the wrong order, and my insides are getting churned up. I try to correct it by putting all my weight over to one side, to make him change legs, like you do with a horse. But he just continues, his legs moving in parallel, front-right and hind-right together, front-left and hind-left together. This is ridiculous. Four legs work in a diagonal: front-right, back-left; front-left, back-right; and so on. My camel must have got out of sync getting up, and now he can’t sort his legs out. I shunt and shift and sway. My spine is undulating like a charmed snake. The cartilage is probably already popping out. Then I notice Jonathan’s camel doing the same thing. And the baby camel. Ah . . . My camel doesn’t walk in a diagonal like a horse, I slowly realise, because it walks like a camel. And so my mind is taken away briefly from our impending fate by the distraction of my spine getting accustomed to becoming a jellied eel.

  The camels are slow. Astonishingly slow. Each step is deliberate, as each great camel foot splays out, taking the shifting sand in its stride. There is a meditative quality about this. I watch the feet of the camel in front of me. I ponder that it might make a good metaphor for a character in a novel, as supple and tough as the foot of a camel, as pliant and as unremitting.

  ‘What’s my camel’s name, Mohammed?’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Yes, name.’

  Mohammed asks the camel driver. Mansour laughs, gesticulates. The white of his eye flips over. The camel doesn’t have a name. It’s a camel.

  We continue to walk into the cool of the evening with the dunes giving way to patches of scrub. Our minds begin to stretch out like the landscape and the sky. The name Sahara is an English pronunciation of the word for desert in Arabic. Freya Stark, the first Western woman to travel through the Arabian deserts, lived for one hundred years. My first love was half-Egyptian, his family name, Badawi, meant Bedouin, he told me; his father gave me a book to read called The Road to Mecca, by Muhammad Asad. It was the story of a Jewish scholar converting to Islam in the 1920s, but the only bits I remember involved travelling in the desert, smoking hookah pipes in tents, the camels and the stars.

  When we stop to make camp, we scout amongst the scrub for sticks for a fire. There’s a surprising amount of plants growing in this desert, plants with very small leaves on dry silvery branches covered in thorns. Mansour hobbles the camels and unloads the provisions. One of the sacks is a large sack of flour. Mohammed lights the fire and we feed sticks into the crackling flames. Another sack is opened and it is full of raw lamb! Mansour undoes a saddlebag and gets out a large bowl. He piles handfuls of flour into the bowl, sits cross-legged, his white turban shining against the darkening sky, mixes the flour with some water and begins to knead. You can tell by the deft movements of his hands that he has done this many times before. Then he pummels the dough into a thick pancake. He rakes out some glowing charcoal embers from the fire and puts them in a small hollow in the sand. Then he simply places the dough on top, heaping sand over until he’s made a small mound. We sit around the fire. Expectantly. We make small talk with Mohammed, a little English, miming, hand movements, a little French. Zaid appears to have come along just for the walk, for he doesn�
��t seem to do anything. The amethyst twilight deepens.

  Mansour cuts up vegetables, a carrot, onions, some lamb. The first stars pop out into what is now a royal velvet sky, pinpricks of light, one by one, more and more, until soon we are under a giant colander.

  Mansour points to the mound of sand. It is rising. We watch. I place my hand lightly on it. Warm, rising, surreal, like the pregnant belly of a friend. It is breathing. We smile. The fire hypnotises us, its small flames leaping up like snakes dancing, and the sky grows deeper and darker and more velvety. We move in closer. Our faces glow copper. Then Mansour sweeps the sand off his breathing hill and scoops out the unleavened loaf. It’s hot, he holds it on the points of his upturned fingertips, brushes off the grains from the crust, flicking at it with a rag. Mohammed dishes out the stew; Mansour breaks the bread. We are eager. We bite into the crust, releasing the sweetest, nuttiest aroma. We dip it in the broth of the stew. The lamb is the most tender, the carrots are the most sweet, the onions the most pungent.

  We chew over and over. The crunchy crust, the soft rough dough, masticating slowly, like the camels with their thorns. Our world shrinks to the fire’s circle. We sit on Mansour’s blanket, sipping tea, while he crouches on the cooling sand. He pulls over a saddle to shelter us from the desert breeze. Our talk is simple, a lot of smiling, a lot of nodding, I hug my knees. We eat the sweetest, stickiest, most voluptuous dates I have ever tasted. And the desert surrounds us, the silence surrounds us, only the camels chewing, and the whispery fire. Slowly we forget ourselves.

  We sleep around the fire arranged like the numbers of a clock. Mansour covers us with blankets. I feel like a child being tucked in. Weighed down by the blankets, I lie awake for hours watching the stars. So many it looks like a soup, or the light of an exploded eye, a fractal roundabout, a quillion tiny bubbles of silver light in a fizzy sky; no line could be drawn from one to the other, no unicorns, no crabs or bulls or huntsmen here, only the unending view of a billion billion years. In Spanish there is no word for heaven, only cielo, which we would translate as sky. Or Paradiso, of course, which is different, loaded. Or maybe I have got it wrong and they have no word for sky, only for heaven.

  Next morning, after sweet coffee and dates, we set off before the heat builds up. Then Mansour suddenly runs off, his great strides kicking up the sand, his djellaba flowing out. He dives on something. Then comes back to us with cupped hands. We peer down. A pink nose peeks out from a halo of brown fingers. A jerboa. A kind of large mouse with long legs. He lets it go. It bounds away on its big hind legs over the sand. He laughs. A flash of crooked dolmens.

  Mansour collects ‘desert roses’, the crystal spirals of amber petals formed by the wind and salt and sand, and puts them in our hands. He picks up fragments of Berber pottery. He asks Mohammed something in Arabic, Mohammed translates: Very old, Mansour says, very old. We gravitate towards Mansour. He sees things. Creatures. Needs. Moods.

  At a desert well amongst some scrubby bushes we encounter a Berber group watering their sheep. Mohammed talks to them and they invite us to their camp for tea. We sip politely. Smiling, nodding, yet I feel voyeuristic, uncomfortable. An old man lies on a cradle. He is worried by flies. Mohammed asks if we have any paracetamol. Jonathan has a couple of aspirin. The old man swallows them straightaway.

  The next day Mansour points to four tall palms in the distance. ‘Oasis!’ we hail excitedly, and make our way towards it. There is no visible water, but Mansour has spotted something. He climbs up one of the palms, unencumbered by his white flowing robe, and plucks from its heart a great big chick. An enormous chick. Fluffy and dishevelled, with long talons and a strong curved beak. He climbs down and passes the dazed thing up to me. There is a photograph of me on my camel holding this eagle chick, both of us startled, the chick’s tufty down haloing its dinosaur face, my face smeared in white zinc, my battered broad-rimmed hat pinning down a thin red sarong decorated with Pacific Island dancing girls, which shields my neck from the sun. I look like the offspring of Miss Havisham and Steptoe. I don’t know how I got to be so filthy. The horrified chick stares straight ahead. I pass it down and Mansour puts him back. But as we leave, a furtive discussion between Mansour and Mohammed breaks out. I ask what they’re saying. Mohammed says Mansour wants to keep the chick to train him. It’s worth money, Mansour says. Jonathan and I are devastated. For me, to take this lone chick would seed disaster for something much bigger. It would be an inauspicious portent which would stir up the gods. I see the parent bird’s distress returning to an empty nest. The baby eagle in a cage in a dark room. Everything is so conspicuous here.

  ‘Please Mansour. Don’t take the chick,’ I implore him. I am passionate. ‘Please Mansour. Please promise, Mansour, you won’t take the chick.’

  I ask Mohammed to make sure he understands. I beg Mansour to promise he will not come back for the chick. He promises. I ask him to promise again. The chick must be free, I say. It would be bad luck, I tell him. I am suddenly full of gloom. I cannot bear that our camel ride should spell captivity for the wild infant bird. I tell Mansour it is very important to me. I press him to promise on Allah, on his children’s lives. He seems unfazed by this. He promises. We head off. I look at him. He promises again.

  We walk for four days. The undulating stride I’ve become accustomed to, a rough but regular passage; the dunes rising and falling away, rising and falling. The grilling heat. The brilliant blue that we’d longed for is almost monotonous now. At midday we hide from the sun. Mansour rigs up a shelter and hobbles the camels who browse the scrub. Zaid rarely speaks. He fetches kindling. Eats. Walks. As thin as a shadow. In the evenings we make camp. Mansour bakes bread in the sand and cooks lamb and peppers on the fire.

  Sometimes Mansour sings, cross-legged, his body rocking, the broken ivories of his teeth bridging plaintive notes, desert notes that coil upwards. This is our life now. Walking, sleeping, walking, sleeping under the stars. Yet I am no wiser to the geography of the place. It slopes away from us, throwing out its own shadows, it shifts, and the only constant is where the sun rises and sets.

  On the last day of our journey, the afternoon sky turns brown. A sickly cankerous glaze. Mohammed and Mansour walk on ahead. A light wind worries at their white cotton djellabas and flicks around their ankles. Mansour points to the east. The temperature drops quickly. Mohammed tells us we have maybe an hour before a sand storm kicks up. We find a hollow behind a ridge. Mansour and Mohammed work quickly, their keffiyehs wrapped over their whole faces, barely a slit for their eyes. Mohammed blue. Mansour white. They stack the saddles and provisions high to form a small wall. Zaid hobbles the camels. No supper this night. We get into our sleeping bags and bed down behind the saddles. Mansour puts his cloak over me. No, no, I say, for you. He shakes his head. Then covers us with blankets. We are completely cocooned. The wind begins. Slowly at first. Then louder and groaning. Sand blowing in, its fine dust everywhere. In our eyes. Ears. Noses. We pull a blanket tighter over our heads. The dark noise building, louder, relentless. And there we remain, a small huddle under blankets in the desert, being covered steadily by sand. A tiny dot on the globe in the vast ocean of desert, sand blotting out the sky, swirling and driving in. We are covered head to toe but still it gets in, the finest grains, rock dust, everywhere; small drifts build up over our eyebrows, around our ears, in our hair; even though we shut our eyes, it gets in, finds its way, scratching the lenses, collecting in the corners. Fine as ash, more and more, each wind-breath carrying the minute grains into our noses, restricting the air passage so we can hardly breathe. We cannot speak. We cannot sleep. Will the sand bury us? Where is Mansour? The sand keeps coming. The noise constant. All the long night, the sand. And the only noise the wind.

  As suddenly as it came, it leaves us. We rise like moles. Blinking into the morning light. Heaving off the heavy blankets, tipping away the sand. Shaking the granules from our lair. Re-entering this world as if we had somehow been away. We look around and everyone is here. The ca
mels dug in. Mansour dug in. Mohammed and Zaid dug in. We wake to a changed topography, to a hill that wasn’t there before, and the buried scrub bushes. A dirtier sky.

  On the last day, in the last hours, swaying on top of my great beast, I feel an unspeakable loss. When date palms appear on the horizon, I am silent. Everything that had been open and unprotected and borderless will be closed and protected and bordered. Our state of ceaseless wandering was about to cease. Our week – normal for Mansour, Mohammed and Zaid, but not normal for us. The wandering had become a connectedness. Our spines had settled into the camels’ rhythm. We have been wrenched out of our familiar lives, and something has been soothed by the desert, by the silence, by the dependence on strangers. But now our no-man’s-land is about to be full of people again. I know the town will be jarring. Everything will become more complicated. I ride behind the walking Mansour and watch the fluttering folds of his white cotton djellaba, his padding feet. We stop. The camels fall to their knees. We dismount. I have the hang of it by now, but I keep my eyes cast down because they are full of tears. We pat our camels as a jeep, in uncanny timing and like the enemy in victory, hurtles towards us.

  We take Mansour’s hands and embrace. His one eye bright, the other with its curdled yellow sheen. Mansour who had looked after us, caught us a jerboa, gifted us desert roses, baked our bread, put his cloak over me and put the eagle chick back.

  ‘May God give you long life,’ Mohammed translates for Mansour.

  ‘May God give you long life,’ we say back to Mansour.

  Uncomfortably we press notes into his palm, swap addresses, promise to write. This time I will, I swear to myself. The jeep pulls up, spins round. Out steps the director of the agency to greet us, wearing a professional smile. We clamber in.

  Three months later, back in London, the fax machine rings, and then groans into action. A handwritten message flops out.

  Hallo my Dear Keeg