Empires of Sand

by Empires of Sand (retail) (epub)

  El Hussein climbed into the carriage, and set off down the drive.

  She was standing in the garden, helping Father Jean to right a small peach tree that had leaned too far in the wind. She was tying a cord around the trunk when she saw him. He stood on the far side of the wall, watching, just distant enough that she couldn’t see his face clearly, but close enough that there was no question who he was. She recognized his posture and the color of his hair in the sun. She felt an awful sick feeling in her stomach, and her knees sagged. She had to steady herself against the tree. Father Jean saw him then. He looked at Melika and excused himself quickly and disappeared into the chapel.

  Melika did not move to greet Paul. She turned away from him, kneeling to clear one of the little channels that carried water through the gardens. While she worked all the anger and the hurt welled up, and she told herself that she must not weaken. She prayed that he would just leave.

  But he didn’t leave, and soon he stood behind her. “Melika,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. It sent a shiver through her and she dug more deeply in the channel.

  “Go away,” she said without looking at him. She wiped her cheek. “I didn’t want you to come back. I have nothing to say to you.”

  “I know—” Before he could finish she stood and hurried down the path, and disappeared inside the mission.

  He returned the next day, forlorn but determined. She had thought it over through a long sleepless night, and this time when she saw him her anger flared. “How could you come back now? How could you? Just go away,” she said. “I do not want to feel that way again.”

  “Melika, please, if you’ll just let me explain. I am sorry I hurt you before. I’m not here to hurt you now. I want all the hurt to be gone.”

  “So easily as that! It will never be gone, Lieutenant deVries.” She fled again, leaving him standing alone in the garden.

  He made a little camp outside of town, in the garden of a palmerie where he could sit in the shade and listen to the birds and ruin simple meals on a fire. He avoided the garrison and wandered the souks of the town, where he looked for gifts. He bought a djellaba from Morocco and a silver necklace from Tunis. He wrote a note and left it with the gifts on the low stone wall near her room. The next day he saw the gifts were still there. The note had fallen into one of the water channels and all the ink had run. She hadn’t read it.

  Every day he came back to the mission. Once he thought he saw her looking at him through a window, but then she was gone. The next day he rode a horse into the compound, leading another behind him, wanting to take her for a ride. She loved horses. She sent him away.

  Paul had expected her to be angry, but he had expected her to soften. Now his own pain was just beginning to teach him how deeply he had hurt her. He went to see Father Jean. “I know I have no right to ask,” he said to the priest. “But I must. Please talk to her for me, Father. Please help her. Please help me.”

  Father Jean agreed to try. But she waved him away too.

  “Perhaps with more time,” Father Jean told Paul. “Pray, my son.”

  Paul felt his desperation mounting. He waited a few days without visiting the mission, trying to give her time. Finally when he could stand it no longer he tried once more. He brought a picnic basket and knocked at the gate. The look on his face tore at Melika’s heart. His eyes beseeched her. But she could not bring herself to relent. Her memory of the ache was too strong, and the ache had come from allowing herself to feel something for the man who now stood before her. She wanted him to go.

  “Please,” she said, looking into his eyes. “Do you care for me, at all?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Then you will honor my wish and leave me alone. Go back to France, Paul deVries.”

  Her words crushed him. There was nothing left to do. Defeated, dejected, he left the mission. He opened a bottle of brandy, intending to drink it all. But he poured it into the sand.

  He started another note that soon became a letter.

  Melika—

  I cannot hurt you further and will honor your wish. I am leaving in the morning. Nothing in my life has been as hard as this. But I cannot leave without telling you the whole of what happened, why I had to leave when I did. I am not certain I know how to explain, but I must try.

  He dipped his pen into the ink reservoir and poured himself into his words, holding nothing back. He had brought only six sheets of paper and soon filled both sides. He went to the souk to find a letter writer’s stall, where he bought more. When he finished it was late afternoon and he delivered his letter to the mission. She wasn’t there. He found Father Jean, and put the letter into his hands. “I haven’t sealed it, Father. If it’s already open maybe she’ll feel more inclined to read it. Give it to her for me.”

  “I’ll place it in her hands myself,” he promised.

  Paul turned to leave when he stopped. “I almost forgot, Father,” he said, taking a thick envelope from his pack. “I won’t be back again. After I’m gone, open this.”

  The priest took the envelope, a look of curiosity on his face. “What is it?”

  “Something for the mission from someone who didn’t need it anymore.” Father Jean would never again want for supplies or medicine.

  Paul took a blanket from his camp and spent the night on the dune that overlooked the vast desert beyond Wargla. The December wind blew cold off the Sahara. As he drew the blanket around his shoulders he realized it had been a year since he had first stood there, with Remy and Floop. Nearly six months had passed since he had stood there again, with Melika. Now they had all gone from his life and he stood there alone, defeated.

  How the world has changed in a year.

  He burrowed a niche into the dune where he could sit and rest his back and spend the night watching the stars. The cold deepened with the darkness and he heard the sand sighing softly in the wind. He didn’t sleep. When the dawn light was bright enough he pulled his father’s letter from his pocket. He opened it carefully. The paper was already beginning to tear along the creases, and the corners were fraying. He read it through and his eyes lingered on the same haunting lines that they always did. I have never faced an enemy like hatred. It was stronger than I am, and I yielded to it. And only when I yielded – not before – did I lose my honor.

  He had met the same enemy, and like his father he had yielded. They had both paid an awful price.

  He could stand it no more. Prolonging things only made the hurt worse. It was time to go. He didn’t know where, or to what. For now he would return to the north, and decide when he reached the sea.

  He stood and shook the sand from his clothes and the cold from his soul. He took one long last look at the desert. He picked up his blanket and turned to begin the long journey home.

  And he saw her, walking up the dune to meet him.

  AFTERWORD

  This is a work of fiction, but many of the events depicted occurred much as I have described them.

  There are many more accounts of the Flatters expedition than there were survivors. Where conflicting historical accounts exist – as they inevitably do – I have reserved the right of the novelist to make matters suit the story. The fate of the expedition shocked the French nation and managed to accomplish precisely what the Tuareg had hoped: foreign intrusion into the area was halted for more than twenty years. But it was not halted forever, and inevitably the blue men of the Sahara were overwhelmed. In battle after battle they were brutally slain, bravely but vainly using swords and spears and shields of hide against the modern weapons of war. Sporadic revolts against the French continued through World War I, fueled by the Turks and Senussi intrigue. The uprisings were met with stunning cruelty as the French “subdued” the desert.

  Ahitagel remained amenokal until his death in 1900. He was succeeded by Attici, whose role in the poisoning of the Flatters expedition was for years a source of shame to those Tuareg who considered such an act beneath the dignity of desert warriors. Attici
was amenokal at the time of the final military defeat of the Hoggar Tuareg by the French.

  During the twentieth century, successive governments – first French, later Algerian, Nigerian, Libyan, and Malian – have taken from the Tuareg the very things that once made them kings: their land, their freedom to move, their slaves, the caravans they once controlled. Frontier lines were arbitrarily drawn, and borders closed where once no borders existed. The Tuareg were doomed, in part, by their own medieval civilization, destined to see their way of life perish before the relentless onslaught of colonialization and nationalism.

  Their life, like the desert in which they dwell, retains a terrible and stark beauty. They remain unbowed, among the more noble and spirited people of the earth. But if their women are still strong and their men still proud, if they are still a race of poets and romantics, they now cast but a small shadow of their former magnificence. Their existence is one of poverty and drought, their heritage lost dreams. To this day, isolated rebellions occur, but the ancient Tuareg ways have passed forever into history.

  The trans-Saharan railroad was never built.

  The foggaras, a system for water collection of Persian origin, are still in evidence in many parts of the Sahara, although they are no longer maintained by slave labor. For centuries, however, countless slaves lived and labored and died clawing precious water from beneath the oases of the northern desert. The Algerian Sahara at the foot of the Tademait Plateau has huge subterranean stores of water, making a particularly productive area for this system.

  * * *

  During the siege of Paris more than sixty balloons were launched over the Prussian lines. Five fell into Prussian hands, while two were lost at sea. Little of military value was accomplished with the flights. Nonetheless they were, after the humiliations of the battlefield, a stirring symbol of French bravery, determination, and ingenuity that inspired the world.

  The labyrinth of catacombs, sewers, tunnels, and old quarryways beneath the city of Paris remains today, a haunt of old skeletons and the rats that were hunted and cooked when food ran short in the winter of 1870-71. During the civil war after the siege, a number of National Guardsmen sought sanctuary there and managed to escape from opposing forces by fleeing through the tunnels.

  The diocese of Boulogne‐Billancourt and St. Paul’s Cathedral are fictitious.

  * * *

  In matters of spelling and vocabulary I have taken certain liberties in the interest of clarity. There are multiple spellings for every name, Arabic and Tuareg alike. Belkasem can be Belcaçem or Bel Kassim; Attici is seen as Tissi or Tichi; Ahitagel as Aitarel. I used Wargla instead of the more common Ouargla.

  There are a score of Tuareg names for camel, from akhelkhali (a simple pack camel) to amekkalu (a pack camel walking in a caravan) to taletmot (a very fast riding camel). They are all impossible for the Western ear. I have settled on mehari, which is, in fact, an Arabic word, used widely throughout the desert.

  The name Algeria, as it is used in this novel, applies to only a relatively small area along the north coast of Africa and does not, as it does today, encompass great parts of the Sahara.

  First published in the United States in 2001 by Dell Publishing

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © David Ball, 2001

  The moral right of David Ball to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788634991

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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