Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  This is my son: so small, so helpless, so dependent. She had often faced death in the desert, where existence was fickle. A father lost to treachery, a mother to disease, brothers and a sister to accidents and war. Life there was neither easy nor kind. If death was never welcome, it was never a stranger. It came when it would. But this was a completely new feeling for her, terrifying and different.

  This is my son. She had carried him in her womb. She had nursed him and watched him grow. She saw Henri in his deep blue eyes and herself in his high cheekbones and smile. His laugh came easily and brought joy to her heart. She had pushed him for hours in a swing and emptied rocks from his pockets and helped catch insects for his collection. She had tended torn knees and elbows and watched him learn to walk and to eat by himself. She taught him to speak Tamashek, her native tongue. She had sung him nursery rhymes, and comforted him when the other children made fun of him. He was only five the first time it had happened. She had never dreamed it would begin so soon.

  “Maman, what’s a half-breed?” His eyes had been so puzzled, so wide, so hurt. Of course none of the children had the slightest idea what a half-breed might be: just words picked up from parents. But in the manner of children they could use words cruelly, playing happily with him one moment, making him feel isolated and alone the next. This had been a double insult, for the child had called him demi-sang, a term reserved for horses, not men. One of the children discovered that he could make a rhyme of it, and the rhyme caught on and all the children except Paul joined in.

  Moussa burst into tears and ran away.

  Later he climbed into Serena’s lap where she stroked his hair and searched her mind for words of comfort, but the words would not come. She knew it would not be the last time he would feel the sting of disapproval, the agony of being different. She felt it herself every day, had felt it ever since coming to France with Henri. People stared at her and laughed and whispered and pointed. They made fun of her accent and touched the long locks of her hair as though she had crawled from under a rock. She was strong, stronger than they, strong enough to stand straight and stare back, and so could only tell her son that which she knew: “It doesn’t matter what they say. You must ignore them. You must be strong.” Her words fell on the uncomprehending ears of a five-year-old. He was not consoled.

  “I don’t want to be strong, Maman,” he sobbed bitterly. “I want to be like them.”

  This is my son: her firstborn and only child. Born so high and yet so low. A noble half-breed, indeed. In the Sahara he would be a prince among his people, for among the Tuareg nobility passed through mother to son. The amenokal was the leader of the Tuareg, and he was her brother. One day Moussa might be the amenokal, in spite of the French blood flowing in his veins. And in France he would one day be count and inherit his father’s mantle in spite of the Tuareg blood flowing in his veins. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what his life might be. She saw darkness and turmoil and pain. Emotions ran deep where blood was concerned.

  This is my son. He wore an amulet around his neck. A present from the amenokal, a leather pouch whose contents were secret. A verse from the Koran, perhaps, or a fragment of bone, or a piece of paper covered with magic squares. The amenokal would nod and say it was the amulet that thwarted the boar. Serena didn’t know. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it held the luck of generations and the power to promote and heal and protect. Moussa had worn it and survived a childhood fever that killed scores of children his age. Today he had worn it and survived the boar. The doctor had started to remove it as he had bound Moussa’s broken collarbone with a cloth that wound round his shoulders and under his arms.

  “You must leave it be,” she had told him, covering his hand with her own. She was not religious or superstitious, so the firmness with which she stopped him surprised her, but she did it anyway. Maybe it was just because the charm was from the amenokal and reminded her of home. Maybe it was because Moussa had worn it from the day he was born. It belonged on that little chest. It fit. It was comfortable and right, something she was used to. And maybe, she allowed herself to think, maybe this day it had made a difference. It would not be disturbed.

  This is my son. He stirred in the candlelight and whimpered in pain. She hushed him, and brushed the hair from his forehead. The hours passed and the candle burned out and the night became dawn. At last she slept, to dreams of the desert.

  CHAPTER 2

  He fell to her from the sky.

  Henri had launched the balloon from the village of Bou Saada, intending to follow the winds that blew along the high plateau skirting the range of Atlas Mountains that ran parallel to the coastline of northern Africa, winds that would carry him, he hoped, to Morocco. He and Gascon had waited weeks for the right conditions, each day watching the sky, each day turning away disappointed. There had been no wind, only utter stillness. Patiently they tended their supplies and tested their gear, checking and rechecking to make certain that all remained ready. Even though Henri expected to be aloft only a few days, the balloon was loaded with water and food enough for two weeks. He was an adventurer, but he was never casual or careless.

  And then at last one morning he walked outside and a strong breeze ruffled his hair and he knew it was time. He and Gascon hurried to the compound where their airship lay waiting. They inflated the balloon to the delight of the astonished swarms of curious Arabs who had come to watch them each day and who squatted in circles and drank tea and chattered noisily as the fabric billowed up and out, straining against the tethers that held it to the ground. Finally the great contrivance was ready. Henri and Gascon clambered into the basket, much to the consternation of the French prefect of the district, who had reminded Henri a dozen times over the weeks – politely, of course, for after all the man was a noble of the empire – that he was a perfect fool. The prefect was beside himself with worry that the count should be lost in Algeria from his prefecture. It was madness! No European had ever tried such a thing. The inquiries from Paris would be never-ending. So he had implored the count: Could he not begin his voyage from Algiers? From Aïn Sefra? Would a journey by camel to Morocco not satisfy his needs? But the count would not listen, and the prefect was miserable and drank too much absinthe and imagined his career soaring away with the balloon. He looked beseechingly at Henri one last time as he cast off the land lines.

  “You will die!” he predicted with grave certainty as the balloon lifted away from its moorings.

  “Not today!” Henri shouted back cheerfully, and he waved good-bye and was gone.

  They gained altitude quickly, soaring away from the throngs of Arabs below. As the magical ascent began, the crowd gave out a great roar of approval and delight. The balloon moved silently to the west. Henri and Gascon watched as the forms of people in the fields grew tiny and their donkeys became toys and their houses little boxes. When the shadow of the balloon passed overhead the people on the ground looked up and saw it, and a commotion would inevitably occur. A great cry would follow – sometimes of alarm, sometimes of wonder – and the balloon was too high for Henri and Gascon to hear but they could see as the little people bound to the earth gesticulated and waved and raced in circles on their donkeys and pointed to the sky. Some damned the apparition and some danced with joy, and some fell to their knees in prayer.

  For several hours everything went perfectly. They saw Djelfa, then Aflou and Aïn Madhi, checking off each on the map as they passed. They settled into the quiet business of flight, gazing in awe at the earth passing beneath them, marking the lakes and streams they saw on the maps they carried, identifying animals and birds and trees, tending to the drag lines and rigging and other equipment of the balloon. The count meticulously recorded atmospheric conditions, wind speeds and currents, and variations in temperature and pressure as they flew. The sky was cloudless as far as they could see, perfect and deep blue. But late in the afternoon the wind shifted its direction and began blowing from the north. The change was subtle at first, then grew stronger as the wi
nd thrust them toward the mountains. It would soon carry them over.

  “We need to make a decision, Gascon,” Henri said. “We can keep going that way” – he pointed to the south, toward the unknown – “or we can set it down on this side and wait for a safer wind.”

  Gascon looked out over the mountains. He had been with the count for years and knew without asking what the count wanted to do. He liked it that his master asked his opinion, and treated him more as an equal than a servant. That was what made the count so special, so different. Others of rank would simply command or demand. The count always asked, even though he didn’t have to.

  On that day high above the Atlas Mountains, it was not a difficult decision. He shared the count’s love of adventure, and they were well prepared. Gascon had no family, nothing to hold him back.

  “We never learned anything setting it down, sire,” he replied.

  Henri smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Yes, sire. I know that.”

  “Alors, we’ll need more altitude.”

  Gascon dropped ballast and the balloon soared upward, to where the obliging winds increased in speed and carried them across the Atlas Mountains, over the Djebel Amour and into the unknown beyond. There was a transition startling in its intensity, as though a great line had been drawn between the green, fertile northern slopes of the mountains and the reddish brown rocks and barren hillsides of the southern side. The mountains melted away to a plateau, the plateau to a sudden and brilliant golden range of dunes. They floated between heaven and earth, the wind at their backs, the great expanse of the Sahara before them. They ate dried meat and sipped from their water flasks and watched the world pass silently beneath them. The maps they carried were reasonably accurate up to the mountains, for thousands of Frenchmen had explored and settled there. But few Europeans had ventured to the south of the mountains, and fewer still had returned. There were a thousand legends but little reliable information about what lay in that vast region, which the Arabs of the fertile north called the Land of Thirst and Fear. It was a much-storied region to which they floated, inhabited by a mysterious race of men who were said to be giants. The Arabs called them the Tuareg, the abandoned of God, the people of the veil, and when they spoke of them it was with a mixture of fear and dread and respect. They were known to be superb fighters who were masters of the desert and ruled the great caravan routes along which flowed steady streams of salt and slaves and gold.

  Onward they flew toward the legends before them; and as the sun dipped to the horizon they saw a simultaneous sunset and moonrise, and it took their breath away, the moon coming up gold and full and glorious, the sun blazing red as it dipped through the sand haze of the horizon. They stood spellbound in their basket, looking from east to west and back again so as not to miss a moment of the heavenly display.

  Henri had a brass sextant made in London that he carried in a worn leather case. He used it to plot their position, sighting carefully on the stars as the dusk turned to night. He marked his estimates on the special paper he had brought to make maps. The moon was so bright he barely needed the light of the small gas lantern that sat on the floor of the basket. They could see the desert below almost as clearly as during the day. “We’re here,” he said to Gascon as he marked their coordinates with a small X on the paper. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

  When he had finished with his work Henri pulled a small recorder from his pocket, a wooden flute-like instrument he’d found in a market somewhere. He wasn’t formally trained at music, but had a good ear for copying what he heard. Sometimes he would make up a melody to suit his mood. That evening he found the notes to float in the air with the balloon, velvet notes that captured the freedom and tranquillity of their passage and settled over the sleeping desert below. Gascon propped himself contentedly against the ropes and listened with his eyes closed.

  They spelled each other through the night, one napping while the other kept a watchful eye on their progress. It was a night of peace and awe as the moonlit earth passed beneath them. The air was cold and crisp and they huddled under heavy robes. The morning sun rose over dunes as rich and golden as the moon had been. The slopes of the dunes that faced away from the sun were covered with a silver layer of frost, and looked like snowdrifts glistening in the soft light of dawn.

  Henri peered intently at the map. “We’re over the Grand Erg Occidental,” he said. The Erg was one of the few sand oceans in a desert that had a thousand faces. Henri was aware of its existence and general location, but not its extent. The map was useless. An Arab trader in Bou Saada had told him that beyond the Erg lay a busy trading route. They could not set down until they were past the Erg, as they would never be able to escape on foot from the dunes. It was better to keep flying and hope that the wind would shift direction again and carry them to the west, for the Atlas Mountains swung in an arc in a southerly direction. With the right winds they would then cross the mountains once again, to Morocco. But the wind had its own plan and blew strongly all that day and night – to the south.

  The dunes were undulating and endless and ran away into the distance as far as the eye could see. The heaps were laid out in great rows, one after the other, methodically, as though by some gigantic shovel of the gods. They were smooth and feminine and looked gossamer soft and pure. Sometimes gusts of wind would carry away gentle wisps of sand from their summits, like snow from the tops of mountain peaks. One range was gold, another reddish brown, the next yellow, the sand ever-changing in the light and shadows. The dunes had dimples and swirls and graceful long lines. Between them the land was flat but not always barren, occasionally sprouting scrub and bushes that clung to life.

  Sometimes between the rows of dunes they could see small herds of gazelle grazing on the sparse tufts of grasses and weeds. A lone jackal ranged along the base of the dunes in search of mice. In the afternoon, Gascon spotted two ostriches, whose gangly legs were much exaggerated by the long shadows of the sun until they looked twenty feet tall, strutting and bouncing along like animated giants. The animals were oblivious to the silent passage of the balloon overhead.

  Henri took careful notes, marking the features of the land. The balloon drew farther away from the Atlas, until with field glasses they could just make out the faint outline of mountains against the horizon. In his stomach, deep down inside, he felt an old familiar tingling sensation of fear mixed with anticipation as he watched the world he knew disappear.

  And he loved it.

  It was what he had always done. He had been born to a life of privilege. He had disappointed those, including his father, who had expected him to go into the military as countless generations of deVries men had done since the time of Louis IX. He left the military to his brother, Jules, whose temperament was vastly more suited to it than his own, and spurned the easy life to which his wealth and position would have entitled him. Instead he traveled, going places and doing things other men could not or dared not. He explored the wondrous caves of Cappadocia in central Turkey and the deserts of Arabia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. He wandered the markets of Macau and the streets of Tashkent. He had been shipwrecked in the Celebes Sea off the coast of Borneo and had seen whirling dervishes in Sudan. In order to travel to Marrakesh, where it was forbidden for Christians to enter, he had masqueraded as a Jew from Damascus, wearing a red skullcap and turban. He relished his life and cherished his freedom and wrote of his travels for the Société Géographique in Paris, where his journals were eagerly awaited by readers from Paris to London to New York.

  So it was that floating into the unknown reaches of the Sahara did not strike terror into his heart, but rather gave him a familiar surge of adrenaline that gnawed at his belly and enlivened his senses and made colors brighter and smells sharper – made him want to laugh out loud with the delight of it all. He needed the feeling and fed it with his travels. It was a sort of ecstatic fear that dwelled near his sternum and radiated outward in a dull, hot rush. It was an a
lmost mystical obsession, the passion of adventurers to penetrate the mysteries of the world, to see places never seen, to do things never done. It was a longing that would never be fulfilled, for as quickly as one horizon was reached another beckoned, and he was off again. Many years earlier, a soothsayer in a Delhi market had read his palms and told him he would die an old man. He laughed with all the self-assured conviction of a skeptic with a scientific mind. But he believed her and had spent his life since in a gray area somewhere between folly and inspiration.

  On the morning of the third day the wind died at dawn. Seeing only more sand, they decided to increase their altitude so that they could look farther. Gascon dumped ballast, and they rose until they could see past the dunes to a great plateau that lay beyond. Henri peered through the field glasses. Between the dunes and the plateau there was a vast depression filled with wadis and deep canyons. Beyond that were more dunes, an infinite expanse of gold stretching away to the southwest. To the northwest, at the upper end of the depression, he could see the outline of a lake bed. It looked dry, but from the distance he couldn’t tell for certain. If it was a sebkha, a seasonal lake, it would suggest the presence of wells and people.

  “We’ve come far enough south,” he said, not wishing to unduly tempt fate. “I think we’d better land and wait for favorable winds.”

  Gascon nodded. “I agree, but we may be waiting a few days.” There was a gentle sloping riverbed that was lined on both sides by bushes and large boulders. “The rocks in that wadi will give us shelter. If the winds don’t come we can leave the balloon there and make our way out on foot back to the northwest.”

  Henri pulled on the rope that opened a vent in the top of the balloon, and they began their descent to the valley below.