There was absolutely no one about as we drove through the town, but given that the temperature was 46°, and the usual hairdryer wind was blowing, it wasn’t too surprising. From every other window came the tinny twang of Algerian radio; you can’t get away from it. We parked in the shade in a large, deserted square – the sort that the French would fill with pétanque players or market stalls – and ventured out to explore. Hugo thought we’d driven past a red Coca-Cola sign on the way and was keen to track down some cold drink. No sooner had Nina emerged from the Land Rover than half a dozen men materialized and sauntered past us and back again for a good stare. This is another thing I’ve noticed – you never see any women. The last time we saw a woman who wasn’t Nina was back in Souk Ahras when half a dozen black chadors emerged from a doorway, flapped down the street and vanished into another doorway.
After about ten minutes of dragging ourselves down the alleyways of Ghardaia, gradually accumulating a sizeable retinue of begging children, we found the shop with the Coca-Cola sign. It wasn’t so much a shop as a room containing an Algerian with a fridge. Needless to say there was no Coke available, so we bought twelve bottles of the only thing on offer – an orange fizzy drink called Smack, which tasted like Old English Spangles, and was so sweet it made you thirstier than you had been to begin with. Satan himself couldn’t have devised a worse torture: after three bottles each we were completely bloated and still gasping for water.
On the way out of town we passed the standpipe again. The rabid dogs had gone so we filled up our canisters and then took it in turns to stick our heads under the tap to cool off. Then we started to flick water at each other and it all got a bit raucous, until one of the gendarmes came out and started shouting at us in French, so we got back in the Land Rover quickly before we got ourselves arrested. I wasn’t sure if it was the noise he objected to or the waste of precious water. Thoughtless of us, really. As we drove off a muezzin on a minaret began to wail, calling the faithful away from their radio sets to prayer.
We covered more than four hundred miles today, swapping drivers every couple of hours to relieve the monotony. It didn’t work. The scenery changed gradually – far too gradually to be interesting, of course – from semi-arid farmland to completely arid rocky desert, with white sand and stones and brown xerophytic plants. If you had a pickaxe and the inclination you could dig rose sable out of the ground by the ton. For some of the journey the road ran alongside a north–south railway line linking the oil wells to the coast. We didn’t see a single train though. Every hour or so we might meet another truck coming the other way and exchange a salute of headlights, but that was it. I think we only passed two roadsigns all day: One said EL GOLEA 200 and the other was a red triangle with a picture of a camel. Martin thought it read EL GOLEA ZOO. ‘Why would anyone stick a fucking zoo out here?’ he said. For some reason we found this hilarious, and for the rest of the day all anyone had to do if it went quiet was to start singing, ‘We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo’, to set us off again.
We camped in the wilderness, about a hundred miles from El Golea, behind an outcrop of rocks. The ground was too hard to take tent-pegs, so we slept out. The night-time temperature falls to a blissful 30° – it’s about the only time I feel comfortable. The penthouse accommodation on top of the Land Rover seems, without any discussion, to have become mine. I did gallantly offer it to Nina, but she said she was quite happy down on the ground with the sidewinders. I said that was no way to talk about Hugo and Martin, and she laughed. She’s got a suntan already, and a little constellation of freckles on her nose. I didn’t think blondes were supposed to tan easily.
None of us had any appetite for supper, but it’s the only way to take on enough salt, so Hugo slaved over the primus and we had salty meatballs and Smash. I can’t think of any other circumstances in which I’d be prepared to contemplate this culinary adventure, but afterwards I did feel slightly better.
11th July
Awoken by the now familiar dawn chorus of dry retching. Hugo has caught up with the rest of us at last. One thing is becoming apparent: none of us shares the heroic fortitude of Scott and Co. – in particular Martin, who is an arch-hypochondriac and whinger. He seems to think he is uniquely afflicted by heat exhaustion and salt depletion, and the fact that he moans loudest is proof of greatest suffering. I begin to sense an edge to Nina’s expressions of sympathy. Honestly, listening to him complain, you’d think he was the only one producing shit the colour and consistency of Guinness.
Breakfast consisted of porridge made with powdered milk and golden syrup, a handful of salted peanuts and a mug of peppermint tea – which we have discovered by trial and error to be the only thirst-quenching drink that masks the taste of Sterotabs. While Nina and Hugo were preparing this and I was jacking up the Land Rover to change over to sand tyres, Martin was still lying in the shade, groaning and refusing to move. As soon as the work was done, I noticed, he seemed to revive and drag himself across for his share of the food.
It’s funny how we seem to be taking it in turns to be the outcast. After the dope-smuggling incident we were all against Hugo. Now the tide of resentment has turned against Martin. I can’t imagine Nina becoming the focus of bad feeling – but maybe I’m biased – so it’ll probably be my turn next. Another scorpion in my boot this morning.
Today we had our first encounter with a sand dune, or barkhan, as Hugo insists on calling them. Since we left Ghardaia the landscape has been changing from stony desert (reg – another of Hugo’s words) to sandy desert (erg). I did query the likelihood of two parallel terms being anagrams of each other, but Nina and Martin assure me Hugo isn’t making it up.
On the road to El Golea – a straight strip of grey across an infinity of beige – we found our path blocked at one point by the progress of one of these advancing barkhans. It was only a few feet deep at its highest point, but still enough to rouse Hugo to a pitch of excitement not seen since our escape from Souk Ahras. Here was the raw material of his PhD in action. He immediately leapt out and started taking photographs from all angles, all the while enthusing about its perfect crescent shape, and the angles of its windward and leeward slopes. Fortunately we didn’t have to resort to demolishing it with shovels in order to drive on as the ground at the roadside was firm enough to hold us, so a minor detour was all that was required. And, as if this wasn’t drama enough for one morning, a few miles further on I saw a mirage: a shimmering disc of spilt mercury in the middle distance. Imagine my disappointment when everyone else claimed to be able to see it too; gradually as we approached, the image materialized into a roughly circular watering hole, cloudy white and about 150 feet in diameter, its cause and origin a complete mystery. At the far end a few wild camels were drinking, and it’s a measure of our overheated state that we thought it would be a splendid idea to wallow around in it ourselves and cool off. The others had stripped to their underwear and were wading in, while I was still picking at the knots in my bootlaces. By the time I’d caught up, they’d reached the middle and found the water was warm and still only thigh deep. We had to be content with kicking water over each other until we were soaking wet, and Nina’s brilliant-white bra and knickers had turned semi-transparent . . .
Then I looked down at my feet through the murk and noticed dozens of these tiny, bladder-shaped sacs floating up to the surface, and I thought of bilharzia and every other waterbome disease and made an undignified sprint for dry land. The others didn’t seem to share my concern, and continued to frolic around, while I crouched in the minute sliver of shade alongside the Land Rover and watched the drops of water evaporating off my skin, leaving behind a chalky deposit, rather like the streaks on our shower curtain back home. Within a couple of minutes even my hair was dry and I was hot and prickly again. I thought about those curious floating creatures, and started absent-mindedly writing my own obituary for the UCL Alumni magazine. I’d only got as far as my performance as the donkey in the school nativity (age 5) when Hugo waded back out, l
ooking ridiculous in a pair of purple underpants, his suntan stopping abruptly several inches above and below, describing the shape of his safari shorts in marble white flesh.
‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘Camel piss not good enough for you, all of a sudden?’
El Golea turned out to be an improvement on Ghardaia. In the middle of the town there was a ‘luxury hotel’ – not exactly five-star as we would understand it, but at least offering a bar area selling cold soft drinks, and somewhere to sit out of the sun, and a group of Londoners on their way north. Naturally, over a few bottles of Coke and that infernal Smack, we fell into conversation, and immediately bonded with them, in the way that you do in a foreign land with strangers from home. They had come all the way through Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria and lately Tamanrasset, and were heading for Marrakesh. When we told them we were off to In Salah to measure dunes on the Great Western Erg they just laughed. ‘You think it’s hot here,’ they warned.
I said goodbye rather wistfully: talking about London had made me feel nostalgic for home. The Test Match on the telly, Monty Python, country pubs, Beefeaters, the Bobby on his beat . . . Well, maybe not the last two. As a gesture of friendship we swapped one of our tapes for one of theirs, but when we came to play it, it turned out to be all this twangy Indian sitar music – not so different from the ubiquitous Algerian radio – so we jettisoned it pretty smartly.
Late this afternoon, about an hour the other side of El Golea – at least sixty miles from the nearest settlement – I was driving and Martin and Nina had fallen asleep in the back, when Hugo suddenly said, ‘Look!’ and pointed out of his window. In the far distance, and quite alone, was a Tuareg in a blue jellaba and turban, striding across the sand.
‘Where’s he going?’ I said.
‘Where’s he been?’ said Hugo, and we kept glancing out of the window at his receding figure until it eventually became indistinguishable from the surrounding grains of sand.
‘Perhaps we should have tried to wave him over,’ I said. ‘Offered him a lift.’
Hugo pulled a face. ‘I don’t think hitch-hiking is part of the nomadic tradition,’ he said drily.
‘How long do you reckon we could survive out there in this heat, just walking?’
‘You and me? A couple of hours, maximum. Nina: half an hour. Martin . . .’ he glanced over his shoulder to check they were still sleeping . . .‘five minutes.’ I laughed, but didn’t pick up this cue to begin the full-scale character assassination that Hugo would clearly have relished. The idea of talking about Martin while he was asleep didn’t appeal: he might have been shamming.
Morale reached a bit of a low today. Meeting up with those other Londoners and watching them head off north while we turned south, deeper into the desert, didn’t help. And the milometer on the Land Rover has packed up – probably got sand in it like everything else – so we can’t tell how many miles we’ve done, or how much further we’ve got to go. Every time we reach a new crest in the road we keep hoping to get a glimpse of In Salah, but we never do. There’s just more and more of this relentless moonscape – dust, sand, wadis, and endless empty road. At one point a mobile muezzin passed us in an open-topped jeep, broadcasting his eerie cries through a megaphone.
Around six o’clock I was starting to feel a bit sick again – early evening is always my worst time, so when Martin woke up I asked if he wanted to drive for a bit, but he said he was feeling ‘a bit funny’. Nina said, rather sharply, ‘I don’t suppose Guy’s feeling a hundred per cent either, Martin. That’s why he’d like a break.’ So we stopped for a quick puke and a changeover and Martin made a great point of heaving and hawking and wiping his eyes, so I felt like a total shit for asking him to swap.
I sat in the back with Nina amidst the luggage. There seems to be less and less leg-room every day. Originally whoever was responsible for reloading the Land Rover after breakfast would do it properly – stacking the food and utensils in boxes, and stowing the beds and rucksacks neatly away. Now it all gets hurled in loose with the sleeping bags stuffed in the gaps so there’s no room to stretch out in comfort. I couldn’t face tackling the job while we were still moving, so I just closed my eyes and was asleep almost immediately.
Something disturbed me a while later – I thought it was an insect in my hair, and I twitched violently and found that in my sleep I must have slumped over sideways and was now resting my head on Nina’s knee. She was brushing my fringe out of my eyes.
‘Sorry,’ she said, swimming into focus as she withdrew her hand. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you, but it looked so uncomfortable.’ I could have stayed there like that, pretending to drowse – she didn’t move away – but as soon as I let myself think about it the muscles in my neck tensed up and I had to move slightly. That infinitesimal adjustment must have communicated my self-consciousness to her, because we both sat up abruptly and shifted apart. Perhaps I’m inventing nuances which weren’t there. Perhaps she just had pins and needles. She certainly hasn’t shown me any special favours, and if Hugo hadn’t told me she was about to ditch Martin, I don’t think I’d have guessed.
It was getting towards dusk at this stage and a suitable stopping place still hadn’t presented itself We couldn’t pull too far off the road because we’d have been into soft sand and stuck, but there was nothing remotely serviceable in the way of shelter as far as the horizon. I think Hugo would have been quite happy to keep going all night, if necessary, until we reached In Salah. The closer we get to our destination the more he resents any delays. While the rest of us are wilting and dying he calmly sits in the front seat reading the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and making notes in the margin. He doesn’t even get car sick! I could tell Martin was keen to stop as soon as possible – he kept fidgeting and looking at his watch, and sort of hissing – but Hugo was absorbed in his journal and missed or chose to ignore these hints. Neither Nina nor I came to Martin’s rescue. It wasn’t pure malice on my part; more a lack of energy. I couldn’t have swatted a fly. Finally Martin said, ‘I’m not going any further,’ and just pulled up in the middle of the road.
Hugo put his book down and said, ‘God, you people have got no stamina, have you? I didn’t bring you on this trip for your looks, you know, Martin. Just drive the bloody Land Rover will you, or we’ll never get there.’
‘Why didn’t you learn to drive yourself then, you lazy bastard?’ Martin replied.
There was an awkward silence while he remembered exactly why it was Hugo had never learned: driving had killed his mother. Nina and I cringed on Martin’s behalf, but Hugo didn’t say anything for a while, and Martin drove on, staring straight ahead, white knuckled and rigid.
I left it to Nina to be the peacemaker. Women are so much better at that sort of thing. I’d have been tempted to recommend Hugo and Martin slug it out in a fist fight, or a Scrabble head-to-head. Anyway, she blethered on for a while about the need for us all to recuperate before we got too tense and irrational, and, without appearing to take sides, managed to negotiate a cessation of hostilities and an overnight stop without anyone having to backtrack or apologize. We pulled just off the road, far enough not to be obliterated by a passing lorry, but keeping to the compacted, stony sand so we wouldn’t sink. We pitched the tent in the lee of the Land Rover to avoid being flayed alive by the hot, gritty wind, and sat on our sleeping bags, eating water biscuits and baked beans straight from the tin, and a bar of Toblerone which Nina had bought on the cross-Channel ferry and which had melted and reset several times since.
‘I bet you’re missing your haute cuisine, Hugo,’ Nina said, breaking him off a warped segment of chocolate, which was covered with a fine white bloom.
He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t normally choose to eat tinned food.’ Even the words seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. ‘But I knew what to expect, so I don’t complain.’ He couldn’t resist this little dig.
I’m writing this in the Land Rover. Hugo and Nina are lying on their stomachs with their heads stickin
g through the tentflaps, enjoying the last cigarette of the night. Martin has headed off downwind for a squat. I can just see the torch beam swaying across the sand. Tomorrow, surely, we’ll reach In Salah.
What a night. It’s early: the others haven’t moved yet and I’m taking the opportunity to get this down on paper before the usual morning scrum begins. I don’t want to forget the details.
I couldn’t get off to sleep last night – it must have been that afternoon nap. I sensed the others dropping off to sleep one by one. Hugo was the last, still trying to read Annals of the Association of American Geographers by the light of a torch-pen. Then I lay there for at least another two hours, listening to their breathing and the rustling of the nocturnal insect life outside, trapped in that insomniac’s no-man’s land between alertness and exhaustion. I’ve never felt so lonely. I could have been the last man alive, or an astronaut lost in space. Rather than succumb to an attack of agoraphobia I pulled on my boots, and shuffled out of the tent in my underpants into the warm empty desert. Above me the sky was blue-black and sprayed with stars: fat blots and the fine white dust of emulsion flicked from a brush. They seemed to be only just out of reach, and yet at the same time receding, drawing me upwards. As I stood there, swaying dizzily, with my head tipped back as far as it would go, peering into infinity, I had what I can only describe as a religious experience – an overwhelming sense of joy, dissolution and perfect affinity with the creative force – God – whatever. It was palpable. It seemed to well up from beneath my feet like fire spreading through my veins. Tears leapt to my eyes, and at this great moment of epiphany I looked down and realized I was standing on an ants’ nest. Hundreds of black soldier ants, half an inch long, were swarming over the rim of my boots and up my legs, attacking me with their acid-tipped daggers. I let out a yell and started dancing about, brushing and swatting in a frenzied attempt to dislodge them, and transferred several dozen to my arms in the process. The burning pain intensified: in sweeping the little fuckers away I had merely decapitated them, leaving their pincers firmly embedded in my flesh. My grunts and curses finally roused Nina, who emerged through the tent-flaps in a long T-shirt and dogs, looking scared. I could have been murdered out there and the other two would have slept through it. ‘What is it?’ Nina asked, strafing me with the torch beam.
A Dry Spell Page 22