We drank our desert tea to the song of running water.
‘It’s like home,’ I whispered to Sophe.
The oldest of the Tuareg asked her what I’d said.
‘There is a spring in my village,’ I explained. ‘Its water was once sweet like this.’
‘Once?’
I told them an Aboriginal legend I’d only recently heard, Sophe translating. The story of a tribe camped by the spring, one of the women scratching her head by the fire for lice, collecting them in her hand. Suddenly a gust of wind blows them into the fire, and a celestial vengeance comes down upon the woman’s tribe. Her entire people are killed and buried in that place, by clouds. The place becomes known as ‘Woo-urra-jim-igh’ – place where the clouds fall down – and the water that emerges from the burial place from that day on is clear, and pure . . . According to the legend it had healing powers for those who bathed there – it made the weak strong and the strong even stronger – but it was forbidden to drink the water. That was the legend, the lore.
They didn’t understand.
‘It is a strange story,’ I said. ‘I don’t really understand it myself.’
‘Perhaps it’s not yours to tell,’ Sophe smiled.
‘But you do drink the water, yes?’ the oldest Tuareg persisted.
‘No longer . . . no.’
I recounted how people had once bottled it and sold it and how it had made the town famous: the medals it won at the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1881, and the Franco-British Exhibition in London in 1908, and the Medal of Honour at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, and then gold in 1925 at the British Empire Exhibition. How we’d built a Spa Park where the sick would come to be healed; people with all sorts of infirmities who’d spend weekends at the spa, taking the waters, and who’d leave with their bladders cleansed, their polio-tightened limbs loosened, their gout or their arthritis gone for good. I told them about the recreation camp for soldiers during the Second World War, and how in the 1960s the pool was dug out and concreted to become the largest man-made pool in the entire country. How there was water-skiing, and open-air concerts, and paddle boats and rounds of mini-golf.
Sophe patiently translated it all.
Then, in a slow, painful decline, came the salinity problems that meant the bore had to be redrilled and re-cased. Algal blooms grew on the banks of the open pool, fed on the nitrogen run off from local farmers. Testing lead to fears about radium levels – higher than the government scientists said was acceptable in drinking water. Headline after headline. The Spa Park is deserted now, I told them, a ghost town at the edge of a ghost town.
The oldest of the three stood, and gestured for me to give him my water-bottle. I watched him fill it from the spring, and return it to me.
‘He wants you to take it home with you.’
*
We stopped again at dusk. There was no spring this time, no eucalypts, no date palms. No crumbling buildings. Only sand and falling sun and four men and one woman stopping for the night. The neck of the goatskin – head and hooves severed, the limbs tied off in knots – was loosened, opened, and spring water poured out of the animal’s throat into the white enamel teapot. We drank tea again and ate. We laid out mats, and crawled into our sleeping bags or drew blankets over ourselves and nestled into the sand.
At some point in the night I woke. It was the rising moon. When I opened my eyes the dust had been swept away, and above was the night sky in all its nakedness. It was too bright for me to sleep, star upon star. I rolled over and saw Sophe curled like a crescent into the night beside me, her cheek glistening with minute flecks of quartz and moonlight, her day’s sweat transformed. She was the stuff of stars and of sand.
TEN
The Tuareg delivered us to the other side of the sand-sea, and dropped us at the edge of an ancient oasis town shadowed by vast red dunes. From here we would turn south again for the final stretch to Tamanrasset and the mountains, the last, long step down to the hermitage at the end of the world. A wisp of sand crept across the road where we waited by an oued, seeming to move of its own accord, with a will, patient and determined. As if the progress of the dunes was inevitable, and the road and the collection of habitations, the date palms and the oasis were, when all accounts were settled, doomed.
Beside us was a newly erected road sign, the word for what must be Tamanrasset, 692 kilometres away. Just off the tarmac an older sign lay abandoned on the ground. The same Arabic script, but a different number, 684, as if the distance had increased with the passage of time.
‘Why do they use our numbers, but not our letters?’
Sophe laughed.
‘The numbers are theirs. It is we who’ve adopted them.’
I looked at the Arabic on the sign, the grace of the lines, the dancing flow.
‘It’s a beautiful script,’ I said.
That’s what I thought back then, the more I was exposed to it, the more time I spent with Sophe. And though for a long, long time since, a thought like that would have provoked something in me I couldn’t control, I’m beginning to think that way again.
Sophe pointed to a stop sign not far from where we stood, the universal red octagon with the Arabic word for ‘stop’.
‘It is wonderful isn’t it? The simplicity of the calligraphy.’
‘It looks like two people on a toboggan,’ I said. And I told her about a caravanning holiday Jack and I had at the beach when we were kids, a week of doubling down dunes on a sled like that.
‘Do you miss him?’ Sophe asked softly.
It was not a question I was ready for.
‘I’ve never thought about it like that.’
‘How then?’
‘He left a long time ago, Sophe.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He left home to join the army a year before he left Australia to come here.’
‘Did you miss him then?’
‘Did I miss him then?’ I looked at the ground and pushed sand over the toe of one boot with the other. ‘I . . . I felt he’d . . . left me behind. Even though he was always his own man. Even though I always knew that . . . that he wasn’t bound to us, that he was always going to leave. In some ways was never really with us. But still. . . . Still, when he left home, things did change.’
‘How?’
The gentleness of the question. I would have answered it if I could.
‘I was the only one there to deal with Em . . . with Dad. It fell on me. I was angry. Even though Jack and I never . . . Anyway, they missed him. And, well . . . I was a very, very different person. I was not Jack.’
I bent to retie my bootlaces, which had come loose – but a man appeared suddenly beside us.
I straightened, startled. His eyes swung wildly.
He began burying me with sound – not English, not French, and not, I could tell from Sophe’s face, Arabic.
I shook my head. Je ne comprends pas. I don’t understand.
He grew more frantic, as if I’d sided against him. He pressed closer, his arms beginning to thrash around, the long, crooked fingers of his hands scratching at the air, closer and closer to my face, as if trying to claw understanding out of me.
I had raised my arms to ward him off, when a woman joined us. She too was distraught, yet there was something compelling about the movement of her hands, the intensity with which she pressed her fingers against Sophe’s forearm, woman to woman.
Sophe followed her gestures and we saw, some distance off the road, a clump of half-stripped gums. There was more sun than shade beneath the ragged branches, and under the tree we could see some bags, and a sleeping body. Somehow through the woman’s pleadings Sophe apprehended that a fever had taken hold of her daughter. Could we give them medicine?
I placed the palm of my hand on my chest,
a gesture of regret I’d observed. I thought I understood its courtesy, its reasonableness. I shook my head.
‘No,’ I said, gentle as I could. ‘Non.’
It was neither the man nor the woman who responded to me, but Sophe, the look on her face an immense incomprehension of the soul. Her lips opened, but then she shook her head, appalled. She turned her back on me and left – crossed the dirt towards the trees and the body of the girl, the man and the woman hurrying after her. I remained beside my bag. Though I watched.
Sophe knelt. The man and woman hovered either side, allowing her to lean close to their daughter, giving her space, freedom, trust. Tenderly, Sophe placed a palm on the girl’s forehead. After a while she rose and turned, stepped away from the weathered three and returned to me.
‘She is very sick.’
I nodded.
‘We need to give her something.’
‘We don’t have anything.’
‘What have you got in your bag?’
‘Not much. Aspirin, Panadol.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Well, amoxicillin, but there’s just the one course of it,’ I said uncertainly.
‘Antibiotics! Excellent.’
‘It’s all we’ve got.’
‘It’s all we’ve got to give then.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘We don’t know when we’ll need it, Sophe.’ Not explanation, not even plea. ‘If one of us were to fall ill –’
‘We’re strong. We’re healthy,’ she said. ‘We don’t need it.’
‘But tomorrow? The next day? The day after?’
‘There is only today. We are healthy. She is sick.’
But I couldn’t retreat.
‘No,’ I said.
Sophe folded her arms and looked at me. She swept the scarf from her head, and refolded her arms. Her hair was wild from the sand and the sun and the camping in the dunes. She breathed through flared nostrils, once, twice, then seemed to harden before my eyes, or rather, to withdraw. A process that might take a lifetime seemed to happen in moments.
‘Give me the biscuits then.’
She’d stripped herself clean, and only words were left. I opened my duffel bag and handed her one of the packets. She looked at it, and then looked at me and said:
‘And the bread. And the cheese.’
I did not resist. I took out the loaf we’d bought that morning for our journey and the packet of La Vache Qui Rit.
‘A bottle of water.’
A third time I reached into my bag.
‘Thank you,’ she said, the politeness of a stranger.
She walked the food and water across the dust and squatted, as if shielding the girl from me.
*
When eventually a semitrailer stopped I was relieved. Something to break the awful silence that shrouded us. I was quicker to my feet than Sophe and called up to the two drivers high in the cab of their truck, repeating the name of our destination, Tamanrasset, over and over until they understood me. They talked between themselves for almost a minute before motioning us – reluctantly it seemed, as if they had no real choice – to climb into the back of their truck with its cargo of commercial-size refrigerators. We squatted low in the tray as the truck pulled away from the red town. Behind us, light sand swirled on the dark surface of the asphalt road, patterning and settling in the truck’s wake.
For the first hundred kilometres the road held. Then, as the distance from the red town grew, it began to break up. Cracks appeared, then holes where chunks had come loose. Finally the road became rubble, and the truck pulled off the ruins of the asphalt, and joined the piste, a more flexible, more durable route running parallel to the collapsed bitumen. Eventually small cairns of broken asphalt appeared as markers every few kilometres, the remains of the road itself lost beneath the sand.
The truck pounded southwards.
We entered a long narrow valley, granite ranges close on either side of us, parallel ridges of darkness. Suddenly we turned off the piste and headed west, following tyre-tracks across the valley floor. Ahead of us, at the foot of the black range, a building appeared, squat and whitewashed. Its roof was rimmed with small, stepped turrets, and flags hanging limp at each corner. The building seemed small, humbled by the towering wall of rock behind it. Within its orbit was the distinct shape of a Kombi van. Even from a distance we could see the van was slumped broken upon the earth, a carcass discarded to the sun.
The ground grew rougher as we approached, the truck swaying and banging its way across the stony pan of the ancient valley floor. My kidneys jarred. It seemed there was not a rock missed, or furrow avoided as we lurched forward, each jolt transmitted directly into our wretched bodies.
With the building upon us we slowed, and were glad of the respite. It had a rectangular base, and rose three metres high. There were two doors, blue-painted wooden frames set into the mudbrick. One of the men wound down his window, leant out and back towards us, said something brusquely, then withdrew.
‘It’s the tomb of a famous marabout,’ Sophe said, ‘one of their saints. He says we should pray.’
The truck began circling the shrine: it was blinding beneath the overhead sun, each of the four walls flat and white and compelling. Nothing broke the light, nothing varied the texture. Through the window I could see the driver fingering prayer beads with his right hand. His left remained on the steering wheel, holding it to a steady turn as the truck bumped slowly round the mausoleum. Once, twice, three times, the voices of the drivers and their incantations louder than the truck’s engine.
When the rite was completed, the truck straightened, and lumbered away. Passing the Kombi, it stopped. The driver leant out his window once more, pointing with his hand at the charred remains of the van.
I didn’t try reading his face, but looked to Sophe instead. Watched as she leant forward to receive the message, then pulled back as her brow knitted.
‘What did he say? Sophe?’
She tried waving me away.
‘No, Sophe. What did he just say?’
She looked ahead, out over the cab of the truck, a reluctant witness.
‘He says it was an infidel’s vehicle,’ she sighed. ‘He says Allah set it alight because the infidels didn’t circle the shrine correctly. He said Allah punishes the wicked.’
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to draw Sophe in so the two of us could laugh together at their ignorance and the dark cave of their unreason, the comedy of it. But after what had happened that morning, I didn’t risk it. I looked back at the mausoleum, small against the mountainside, and the rocks and the scree, and the rounded boulders resting so precariously on layered platforms high above the fragile mud construction, no breeze to stir its limp flags.
*
When the truck stopped suddenly on the easterly side of a heavy-bouldered ridge it came as a surprise. We were dazed from its violent lurching along the rutted road, the slamming of our bodies against the cabin with every new pothole, the constant hammering of our kidneys, the ache in our fingers from gripping the rails so tight. It had become a condition of existence. The sick girl and her parents and Sophe’s nobleness and my smallness seemed such a long time ago.
As I climbed down the semitrailer was letting off waves of heat. I joined the drivers at the rear wheel. One of them crawled under the truck before rolling over so he was lying on his back, looking up at its workings. A glob of oil hit the ground beside his head. I squatted for a better look, but the second man placed a restraining hand on my shoulder.
‘Non,’ he said sharply. This was theirs.
So I withdrew, and Sophe joined me on a large rock nearby. The sun cast soft shadows on everything it couldn’t reach, deepening all things.
‘Can it be fixed?’ she said.
&nbs
p; ‘A hole, that’s all.’
Eventually the two men stepped back to consider the truck, to gesture at it with open palms, to look across at us, back to the truck, and at us once more, their voices growing increasingly agitated until one of them strode over to where we were sitting, armed with some accusation.
‘What?’ I said when he’d returned to the truck.
Sophe shrugged her shoulders.
‘They want someone to blame.’
‘It’s our fault?’
‘We’ve brought bad luck. Infidels, you see.’
‘Of course.’
And so we waited as the men went about the repair. I left the road and climbed among the boulders, higher and higher. There was stone and there was dry air, and there was the hazy ridgeline and the buzzing sun.
In the shimmering light I saw what appeared to be a figure on the ridge. I stopped and blinked, but the apparition was gone. I climbed higher, feeling the mountain in my hands, boulder by boulder. Mountains have character. Even as kids we wanted to divine the spirit of our own mountain, Table Top. Her crest is scythe-clean and flat, and only grasses grow there – not a single tree or boulder mars that flatness. Yet even as kids we’d seen her different faces, and on nights when lightning jagged earthwards, our mountain illuminated in fierce shards as if to reveal her true self.
In that name ‘Table Top’ we knew our own inadequacy: we’d been told none of the Aboriginal myths as kids, nothing of the Dreaming. Our parents and theirs, and theirs before them had heard none of the stories either, or judged them not important enough to remember. But while we didn’t know the creation story of our own mountain, we knew about rock gods and river gods. Barefoot on her slopes we became Aborigines climbing towards corroboree. Jack on a rock, poised, still as death on one thin leg, the other raised, his arms out to either side, some solitary bird on the verge of flight. Hand over foot we scaled the rock-slides, our palms pressed into sharp scree, our hands filled with mountain imaginings.
Closer to Stone Page 14