When he awoke he had the odd impression that time had stood still. He looked around for the disk of the moon and upon seeing that it had begun its descent to the west, he realized he had slept for a long time.
The silence hanging over the campsites was oppressive. All that could be heard was the distant howling of wild dogs somewhere out on the edge of the desert.
Nour got up and saw that his father and brother were no longer in the tent. He could only make out the vague shapes of the women and children rolled up in the carpets on the left side of the tent. Nour started walking along the sandy path between the campsites toward the ramparts of Smara. The moonlit sand was very white against the blue shadows of stones and bushes. There was not a single sound, as if all the men were asleep, but Nour knew that the men weren’t in the tents. Only the children were sleeping, and the women were lying very still, rolled up in their cloaks and carpets, looking out of the tents. The night air made the young boy shiver, and the sand was cold and hard under his bare feet.
When he neared the city walls, Nour could hear the murmuring of men’s voices. A little farther on, he saw the motionless shape of a guard squatting in front of the gate to the city, his long rifle propped against his knees. But Nour knew of a place where the mud rampart had collapsed, and he was able to enter Smara without going past the sentinel.
He immediately discovered the men assembled in the courtyard of the sheik’s house. They were sitting in groups of five or six on the ground around braziers where large copper kettles held water for making green tea. Nour slipped silently into the gathering. No one looked at him. All the men were watching a group of warriors standing in front of the door to the house. There were a few soldiers from the desert, dressed in blue, standing absolutely still, staring at an old man dressed in a simple cloak of white wool that was pulled up over his head, and two armed young men who took turns speaking out vehemently.
From where Nour was seated, it was impossible to understand their words, due to the sounds of the men who were repeating or commenting on what had already been said. When his eyes had adjusted to the contrast of the darkness and the red glow of the braziers, Nour recognized the figure of the old man. It was the great sheik Ma al-Aïnine, the man he’d already caught a glimpse of when his father and older brother came to pay their respects after their arrival at the well in Smara.
Nour asked the man next to him who the young men beside the sheik were. He was told their names: “Saadbou and Larhdaf, the brothers of Ahmed al-Dehiba, he who is called Particle of Gold, he who will soon be our true king.”
Nour didn’t try to hear the words of the two young warriors. All of his attention was focused on the frail form of the old man standing motionless between them, with the moon lighting his cloak and making a very white patch.
All the men were looking at him too, as if with the same set of eyes, as if he were the one really speaking, as if he would make a single gesture and everything would suddenly be transformed, for the very order of the desert emanated from him.
Ma al-Aïnine did not move. He didn’t seem to hear the words of his sons, or the endless murmur coming from the hundreds of men sitting in the courtyard before him. At times he would cock his head slightly, look out over the men and the mud walls of his city toward the dark sky, in the direction of the rocky hills.
Nour thought that perhaps he simply wanted the men to return to the desert, from where they had come, and his heart sank. He didn’t understand the words of all the men around him. Above Smara the sky was unfathomable, frozen, its stars dimmed in the white haze of moonlight. And it was a bit like a sign of death, or abandonment, like a sign of the terrible absence that was hollowing out the tents that stood so still near the city walls. Nour felt this even more strongly when he looked at the fragile shape of the great sheik, it was as if he were entering into the very heart of the old man, entering his silence.
Other sheiks, chieftains of great tents, and Tuareg warriors came to join the group one after another. They all spoke the same words, their voices cracking from fatigue and from thirst. They spoke of the soldiers of the Christians who made incursions into the southern oases bringing war to the nomads; they spoke of fortified towns the Christians were building in the desert barring access to wells all the way to the seashore. They spoke of lost battles, of the men who had died, so many of them that their names could no longer be remembered, of swarms of women and children fleeing northward through the desert, of the carcasses of dead livestock strewn everywhere along the way. They spoke of caravans that were cut short when the soldiers of the Christians liberated the slaves and sent them back to the south, and how the Tuareg warriors received money from the Christians for each slave they had stolen from the convoys. They spoke of merchandise and livestock being seized, of bands of brigands that had forayed into the desert along with the Christians. They spoke also of troops of soldiers marching for the Christians, guided by the black men from the south, so numerous that they covered the sand dunes from one end of the horizon to the other. And the horsemen who encircled the camps and killed anyone who resisted them on the spot, and then took the children away to put them into Christian schools in the forts on the coast. So when the other men heard this, they said it was true, by God, and the clamor of voices swelled up and heaved in the square like the sound of a rising wind.
Nour listened to the clamoring of voices growing louder, then subsiding, like the passage of the desert wind over the dunes, and there was a knot in his throat because he knew a terrible danger was threatening the city and all the men, a danger he was unable to understand.
Now, almost without blinking, he was watching the white shape of the old man standing very still between his sons in spite of the weariness and the cold night air. Nour thought that he alone, Ma al-Aïnine, could change the course of this night, calm the anger of the crowd with a wave of his hand or, on the contrary, unleash it with just a few words that would be passed from mouth to mouth and make the wave of rage and bitterness seethe. Like Nour, all the men were looking at him, eyes bright with fatigue and fever, minds tense with suffering. They could all feel their skin, leathered from the burning sun, their lips, blistered from the desert wind. They waited, almost without moving, eyes fixed, searching for a sign. But Ma al-Aïnine didn’t seem to notice them. In his eyes there was a steady remote look as he gazed out over the men’s heads, out beyond the dried mud walls of Smara. Maybe he was looking for the answer to the men’s anxiety in the depths of the nocturnal sky, in the strange blur of light swimming around the disk of the moon. Nour looked up at the place where he could usually see the seven stars of the Little Dipper, but he saw nothing. Only the planet Jupiter was visible, frozen in the icy sky. The haze of moonlight had covered everything. Nour loved the stars, for his father had taught him their names ever since he was a baby; but on this night, it was as if he couldn’t recognize the sky. Everything was immense and cold, engulfed in the white light of the moon, blinded. Down on earth, the fires in the braziers made red holes that lit up the men’s faces oddly. Maybe it was fear that had changed everything, that had emaciated the faces and hands and filled the empty eye sockets with inky shadows; it was night that had frozen the light in the men’s eyes, that had dug out the immense hole in the depths of the sky.
When all the men had finished speaking, each standing up beside Sheik Ma al-Aïnine in turn – all the men whose names Nour had heard his father utter in the past, chieftains of warrior tribes, the men of the legend, the Maqil, the Arib, Oulad Yahia, Oulad Delim, Aroussiyine, Icherguiguine, the Reguibat whose faces were veiled in black, and those who spoke the Chleuh languages, the Idaou Belal, Idaou Meribat, Aït ba Amrane, and even those whose names were not familiar, come from the far side of Mauritania, from Timbuktu, those who had not wanted to sit near the braziers, but who had remained standing near the entrance to the courtyard, wrapped in their cloaks, looking at once guarded and contemptuous, those who hadn’t wanted to speak – Nour observed each of them, one after the othe
r, and he could feel a terrible emptiness hollowing out their faces, as if they would soon die.
Ma al-Aïnine didn’t see them. He hadn’t looked at anyone, except maybe once when his eyes had fallen briefly on Nour’s face, as if he were surprised to see him amidst so many men. Since that barely perceptible moment – quick as a flash in a mirror, even though Nour’s heart had begun beating faster and harder – Nour had been waiting for the sign that the old sheik was to give to the men grouped together before him. The old man stood still, as if he were thinking about something else, while his two sons, leaning toward him, spoke in hushed tones. At last he took out his ebony beads and squatted down very slowly in the dust, head bowed. Then he began to recite the prayer he had written for himself, while his sons sat down on either side of him. Soon afterward, as if that simple act had sufficed, the muttering of voices ceased and silence fell over the square, a cold and heavy silence in the overly white light of the full moon. Distant, barely perceptible sounds from the desert, from the wind, from the dry stones on the plateaus began to fill up the space again. Without saying goodbye, without a word, without making a sound, the men stood up, one after another, and left the square. They walked along the dusty path, one by one, because they didn’t feel like talking to one another anymore. When his father touched his shoulder, Nour got up and also walked away. Before leaving the square, he turned back to look at the strange, frail figure of the old man, all alone now in the moonlight, chanting his prayer with the top part of his body rocking back and forth like someone on horseback.
In the following days anxiety began to mount again in the Smara camp. It was incomprehensible, but everyone could feel it, like a pain in the heart, like a threat. The sun burned down hard during the day, bouncing its brutal light off the edges of rocks and the dried beds of torrents. The foothills of the rocky Hamada shimmered in the distance, and there were always mirages over the Saguiet Valley. New bands of nomads arrived each hour of the day, haggard with weariness and thirst, coming in forced marches from the south, and their silhouettes melted into the horizon along with the scintillating mirages. They walked slowly, feet bandaged with strips of goatskin, carrying their meager loads on their backs. Sometimes they were followed by half-starved camels and limping horses, goats, sheep. They set up their tents hastily on the edge of the camp. No one went to greet them or ask them where they came from. Some bore the marks of wounds from battles they had fought against the soldiers of the Christians or the looters in the desert; most were on the verge of collapse, spent from fevers and stomach ailments. Sometimes all that was left of an army arrived, decimated, bereft of a leader, womanless, black-skinned men, almost naked in their ragged garments, their glassy eyes bright with fever and folly. They went to drink at the spring in front of the gate to Smara, then they lay down on the ground in the shade of the city walls, as if to sleep, but their eyes remained wide open.
Since the night of the tribal assembly, Nour hadn’t seen Ma al-Aïnine or his sons again. But he distinctly felt that the great clamor of discontent that had been assuaged when the sheik had begun his prayer had not really stopped. It was no longer a matter of words, now. His father, his older brother, his mother said nothing, and they turned their heads away as if they didn’t want to be asked any questions. But the anxiety was still mounting, in the sounds of the camp, in the bleating of the livestock that were growing impatient, in the sound of the footsteps of newcomers arriving from the south, in the harsh words that men spit out at one another or at their children. Anxiety was also present in the sharp odors of sweat, of urine, of hunger – so much acridity seeping up from the ground and from the hidden recesses of the camp. It mounted as food became scarcer, a few pepper dates, sour milk, and oatmeal to be swallowed hastily at the crack of dawn, when the sun had not yet risen from the dunes. Anxiety was in the murky water of the well that the tramping of humans and beasts had disturbed and that green tea could not improve. Sugar had been rare for a long time, and honey too, and the dates were as dry as rocks, and the tough pungent meat came from camels that had died of exhaustion. Anxiety was rising in the dry mouths and bloody fingers, in the weight that bore down on the heads and shoulders of the men, in the heat of day, and then in the cold of night, making children shiver in the folds of worn carpets.
Each day as he walked past the campsites, Nour heard the sound of women crying because someone had died in the night. Each day people edged a little further into despair and anger, and Nour felt his throat growing tighter. He thought of the sheik’s distant gaze drifting out over the invisible hills in the night, then coming to rest on him for a brief moment, like a flash in a mirror that lit him up inside.
All of them had come to Smara from so far away, as if it would be the end of their journey. As if nothing else could be lacking. They had come because there was a lack of land under their feet, as if it had crumbled away behind them, and now it was no longer possible to turn back. And now they were here, hundreds, thousands of them, on land that could not provide for them, land without water, without trees, without food. Their eyes endlessly scoured every point in the circle of the horizon, the jagged mountains to the south, the desert to the east, the dry streambeds of the Saguiet, the high plateaus to the north. Their eyes were also lost in the empty cloudless sky, in which the blaze of the sun was blinding. Then anxiety turned to fear, and fear to anger, and Nour felt a strange ripple pass over the camp, an odor perhaps that rose from the tent tops and circled around the city of Smara. It was also a light-headed feeling, the dizzy feeling of emptiness and hunger that transformed the shapes and colors of the earth, that changed the blue of the sky, that generated great lakes of fresh water in the scorching bottoms of the salinas, that brought the sky to life with clouds of birds and flies.
Nour would go and sit in the shade of the mud wall when the sun was going down and watch the spot where Ma al-Aïnine had appeared that night in the square, the invisible spot where he had squatted down to pray. Sometimes other men would come, as he did, and stand motionless at the entrance to the square to see the wall of red earth with narrow windows. They said nothing, they just looked. Then they went back to their campsites.
Then, after all those days of anger and fear on the earth and in the sky, after all those freezing nights in which one slept very little and awoke suddenly for no particular reason, eyes feverish, body soaked with rank sweat, after all that time, the long days that slowly killed off elderly people and infants, suddenly, without anyone knowing why, the people knew that the time to depart had come.
Nour heard about it even before his mother mentioned anything, even before his brother laughed and said, as if everything had changed, “We’re leaving tomorrow, or day after tomorrow – now listen, we’ll be heading north, that’s what Sheik Ma al-Aïnine said, we’re going far away from here!” Maybe the news had come in the air, or in the dust, or else maybe Nour had heard it as he was gazing at the tamped earth in the square in Smara.
It spread through the whole camp very quickly, and the air was ringing as if with music. The voices of men, the shouts of children, the sound of copper clanging, camels grumbling, horses farting and pawing the ground, and it was like the sound rain makes as it approaches, sweeping down the valley and sending the red waters of the torrents rolling along with it. Men and women went running down the alleyways, horses stamped, tethered camels bit at their leads, for there was a great deal of impatience. Despite the burn of the sky, women remained standing in front of their tents, talking and shouting. No one could have explained how the news had first come, but everyone kept repeating the words that elated them, “We’re leaving, we’re going north.”
Nour’s father’s eyes shone with a feverish kind of joy.
“We’re leaving soon, our sheik has spoken, we’re leaving soon.”
“Where?” Nour had asked.
“North, across the Drâa Mountains, around the Souss, Tiznit. Up there, there is water and land for all of us, just waiting for us. Moulay Hiba, our true king, the son
of Ma al-Aïnine said so, and so did Ahmed al-Shems.”
Groups of men walked down the alleys toward the city of Smara, and Nour was caught up in their wake. Red dust rose under the men’s feet and under the shuffling hooves of the livestock, it formed a cloud over the camp. Already the first rifle shots could be heard and the acrid smell of gunpowder drove out the odor of fear that had prevailed in the camp. Nour moved forward blindly, pushed along by the men, bumped against the sides of the tents. The dust made his throat dry and burned his eyes. The heat of the sun was unbearable, shooting white flashes through the thick dust. Nour walked on like that for a short time, blindly, arms outstretched. Then he stumbled to the ground and crawled into a tent for shelter. In the half-light, he was able to regain his bearings. An old woman was there, sitting against the lower part of the tent, wrapped in her blue cloak. When she first saw Nour she took him for a thief and screamed curses at him and threw stones at his face. Then she drew nearer and saw that his cheeks were smudged with dust in which tears had left red streaks.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick?” she asked more gently.
Nour shook his head. The old woman crawled over to him on her hands and knees.
“You must be sick,” she said. “I’ll get you some tea.”
She poured the tea into a copper goblet.
“Drink this.”
The unsweetened, scalding tea made Nour feel better.
“We’re going to leave here soon,” Nour said in a slightly hesitant voice.
The woman looked at him. She shrugged her shoulders.
“Yes, that’s what they say.”
“This is a very memorable day for us,” said Nour.
But the old woman didn’t seem to think it was all that important, maybe simply because she was old.
“You might reach the place they speak of, up there in the north. But I will die before.”
Desert Page 3