by Annie Hawes
Habib parks the lorry on the edge of town, so he’s ready to leave the moment the first call to prayer sounds tomorrow. There are plenty of people about here wearing the burnous, I note, now that we’re in the Land of Wool, and Guy is, at last, blending rather well into his surroundings.
When Habib was growing up here in the 1950s, he tells us as we walk towards the centre, Bou Saâda was a favourite weekend resort for pieds-noirs from Algiers. The place would fill up with French families, who would go off to frolic by day at the Ferrero mineral springs a couple of kilometres outside town. Habib would rather not guess what the fathers of those families got up to by night! Though by then, he says, their choice was starting to get a bit restricted. A lot of the girls had taken the nationalist side and refused to have any truck with Frenchmen – however much they were willing to pay.
The street of ill fame is only just down the road. Come, says Habib. Before we go to eat, he will show us the house of Fatima el Coptana – Fatima the Captain – one of the greatest madams of the town in the old days, who recruited almost every one of the girls in her village to the trade, and died a rich woman!
A few yards on, we are among those high-walled streets. Down by the river stands a row of houses that look – well – like ordinary Algerian town houses. Certainly not my idea of a rich madam’s place, though I suppose, compared to a drystone village or a stripey tent, they are the height of luxury. Habib’s eyes have lit up at the memory of the scenes he and his playfellows witnessed, peeping round corners, in this part of town. They would always be spotted and chased off, he says – but they would be back soon enough, by hook or by crook! Some of the girls would throw sweets or coins out of the windows to you if you were lucky. You might witness a thrilling drunken brawl, or a woman running out into the street in her house-clothes, her naked hair flying!
Something about the way Habib now bites his tongue tells me Gérard and Guy would be hearing some good scurrilous tales if I wasn’t here to poop the party. I forge on ahead to give them a sporting chance.
Further along the road is the house of Yamina, who, rather than turning to her neighbours for new apprentices, got her sisters and nieces into the game instead. And every last one of them did well, Habib says, bought houses and palm groves for their families, while Yamina’s two sons administered the family fortunes. Yamina and Fatima were both widows: that is how they came to have the independence to engage in their nefarious activities. And they were hardly bothered at all when the French were thrown out of the country, and their old trade was banned. Their finances were in fine shape; they could afford to retire. When Yamina died, at a great old age, she left instructions that she should be buried on a bed of henna leaves and rose petals, and have powdered amber sprinkled on her grave. She had lived as a flower of Allah, she said, and now she wanted to die as one.
We set off to find a bed for the night, pondering the weird role reversal that has taken place over the last seventy years. The once-prudish West has become eroticized beyond measure; only a few tiny corners of the body still taboo. Meanwhile, the once-tolerant Maghreb – partly, it seems, in protest against Western impositions of every kind – has taken to a Victorian-style morality of its own.
As we take our bags upstairs, I hear from the boys that Habib did manage to pass on a small piece of scurrilous information in my absence: it seems that, while Muslim punters did not wish to encounter bodily fluff of any kind, Europeans were disappointed if they did not find a full head (as it were) of pubic hair during their amorous encounters. Many of the girls, not wishing to lose the patronage of either group, resorted to pubic wigs. Can this be true? How on earth would they have kept them on? The mind boggles.
The hotel has a beautiful overgrown courtyard garden, but apart from that, there is not a lot to be said in its favour. In the lobby hangs a fly-blown print of an Etienne Dinet painting – a line of beturbaned men outside a mosque entitled The Day after Ramadan which reminds me of a high-class Boys’ Own Stories illustration: though chicken or egg, who can say? The name Etienne has been replaced by ‘Noured-dine’, the artist’s Islamic-convert name, glued over the original on a scrap of paper. The map of Bou Saâda hanging next to it is a 1942 French military one. And I would say that it must have been about this date that the bathrooms in this place were last cleaned. Old hands now, we decide it doesn’t matter – we can use the hammam. Maybe that’s why they don’t care about cleaning the bathrooms – people here would hardly bother with the low-level cleanliness attainable without lashings of steam and a good strong bell of baling twine?
No women’s session till tomorrow morning, though, says Habib, and we’ll be leaving too early for that. He will take us to wash in the mineral-water pools of Ferrero in the morning, instead. So we all go for a scruffy walk out towards the palm groves and are much consoled by how beautiful the place looks at sunset, the hills violet in the evening light, the almond trees trailing over the river, the dark green mass of feathery palms behind their golden mud-brick walls . . .
Things are a lot less peaceful as we head back into town. The streets are suddenly full of flags, drums, firecrackers, roaring jam-packed cars, jubilant men of every age. Bou Saâda has won a football match against some nearby town, and the whole town is in ecstasy. We take to the back streets, following our local expert, and end up in a gargotier, an Algerian greasy spoon restaurant, encountering, on our way, a faded remnant of Bou Saâda’s erstwhile tourist industry: a fly-blown sign in a tailor’s window offering made-to-measure Ouled Naïl costumes, ready to wear in twenty-four hours.
The gargotier is the perfect way, we discover, to get around the problem of my being female. It is all very well deciding to boldly face out the glowering old men and the staring younger ones in the men-only tea-shops of this land, striking a blow – I hope – for Algerian womanhood; but in the end it is extremely unrelaxing. In a cheap eatery like this, low on the scale of respectability, nobody seems much bothered about a woman’s presence. The poorer people are, here in Algeria, the more likely they are to have travelled abroad to find work – maybe it is thanks to this that they aren’t too perturbed at finding a female in a public place?
No sooner have we eaten and moved on to the three-glasses-of-tea course, than Gérard, Guy and Habib are nobbled by local fans and made to talk about football all night. Every man in Bou Saâda seems to possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of French football teams, and especially of any players of Maghreb origin, so there is a lot to be said. The name of a certain Zinedine Zidane crops up a lot: a local boy, they say, a Kabyle – his family originally from some godforsaken hamlet up in the Djurdjura hills. So brilliant that the president of his Cannes club made him a present of a brand-new car for his first competitive goal!
Shortly after dawn, here we are at the Ferrero springs, splashing gingerly about in the mineral-water pools among the rocks, which would certainly be a great pleasure to bathe in if only they’d had a little more time to warm up under the morning sun. Habib stays up on the road while we wash, sitting in his lorry and smoking, in order to preserve my modesty. A ridiculously picturesque spot, with a waterfall running down a rugged cliff face, a half-ruined building clinging to the rocks at its side. A water-mill once, it looks impossibly romantic in its riverside setting, scattered palm trees above and below it, vegetation sprouting from its ruined façade, its windows blind and empty. The mill was built by one Antonio Ferrero of Turin, who arrived in Bou Saâda in 1867 – attracted here, who knows, by the charms of the Ouled Naïl? – and came up with a wizard money-making scheme of his own, Italian-style. The first ever pasta factories had recently been set up in Italy, saving Italian housewives many hours of laborious impasto-making. It would be the work of a moment, Antonio realized, to switch the new technology to producing, not long thin sticks, but little round granules. Soon, here it was – the first ever mass-produced couscous! And over the next century, many generations of Ferreros grew up here in Algeria, mingling so closely with their Algerian hosts that they had no n
eed at all to do a runner in 1962, along with the French settlers. Antonio’s descendants still live in the area. And, thanks to his ground-breaking work, these days we can all buy our couscous ready-made in packets, and no longer have to wear our fingers to the bone rolling all those little bobbles from scratch.
18
Next stop, where Habib’s way and ours must part, is a town called Djelfa. It lies high on the eastern end of the Saharan Atlas, the range of mountains that runs parallel to the Mediterranean, separating fertile land from desert, all the way back to the Moroccan border. Here it mellows into gentler hills, allowing Mohammed the father’s alternative trail to Timimoun to pass across the plains of the Tafilalet, heading south-east through the southern Moroccan oases and the ruins of Sijilmassa. But whether you travel towards Timimoun from the Moroccan north-west or, as we are doing now, from the Algerian north-east, your road will start by heading due south for a couple of hundred miles. It has to skirt the massive oval sea of sand dunes, uninhabited and impassable, that presses all along the southern flank of the Saharan Atlas: the thousands of square miles of the Grand Erg Occidental.
So from Djelfa our road heads south, keeping the sand-sea to our right. Then it will curve back towards Morocco along the Grand Erg’s southern edge, the plains of the Gourara, a long narrow east–west strip, marking the bed of the long-dead water course, described by Jean-Pierre, that divides the Grand Erg from the main body of the Sahara. Here, sandwiched between the two great sand deserts, lies the string of oases we’re aiming for, at the head of which sits Timimoun.
Djelfa is on our map all right, but there is no mention of its existence in the Petit futé. Guy is not surprised. Djelfa’s only claim to fame, as far as he knows, is that it housed one of the first European concentration camps on African soil. Vichy France, collaborating with Hitler, imprisoned hundreds of Jews, Poles and Czechs in this unlikely spot, along with many Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War. A strange parallel with Algeria’s situation today, that of the Spanish Republicans: another elected government that did not meet the approval of the Great Powers. This one was too left-wing, though, rather than too Islamic. Britain and France debated the matter, and decided not to lift a finger to help when Franco launched his anti-democracy coup from Morocco. And, it seems, those Republicans desperate or foolhardy enough to flee across the French border seeking safety ended up – bizarrely – here instead, imprisoned in Saharan concentration camps. There was even some crazy plan, Guy says, to use their inmates as forced labour to build a railway across the Sahara: an ancient French dream resurrected. That’s what Monsieur Eiffel had been doing down here in the desert, long ago. Having finished building the Statue of Liberty for the Americans, he was now testing out sand-bridges for an Imperial fantasy railway: one that would link all the French colonies of Africa to the Motherland.
Here in Djelfa we say farewell to Habib, who is now heading for the high sheeplands, and go off to hunt down some lunch. The local inhabitants having, alas, no habit of dining out, there is nowhere to eat in town but a horribly expensive hotel, in whose echoing restaurant we bump into two other travellers, the only other customers here, with whom, naturally enough, we soon get talking. They are François and Abdelwahab, who have driven here all the way from Paris with a small convoy of three Land Rovers, to be sold, on the other side of the Sahara, at vast profit. Or at any rate, at the bearded François’ vast profit. Abdelwahab, not long out of his teens by the look of him, is just a hitch-hiker, he tells us, temporarily promoted to trans-Saharan driver.
This, François says, is his own special method for recruiting drivers for his Afro-European second-hand car business. He simply drives around the ring-roads of Paris, stopping for every hitch-hiker he sees, and asking if they have a driving licence – and a job. If he gets a yes to the first, and a no to the second, then voilà! He simply offers them, in place of their intended destination, an all-expenses-paid trip across the Sahara. It has never, he says, taken him more than a day to assemble the team he requires. Abdelwahab, for example, was only going to Marseilles to visit his family, and now look where he’s ended up – checking out his Algerian roots, for the first time ever! The third member of their team, and the third Land Rover, are miles ahead, but our dining companions have got stuck here, waiting to get a tyre fixed.
Naturally, within minutes we are agreeing to travel on with them. Soon we are riding in style – classical British style, at that – towards our first true desert town, Ghardaïa. A few miles on, a convoy of army lorries overtakes us, klaxons blaring: five of them, headed south. Abdelwahab, in whose car Guy and I are travelling, suspects that they are carrying some of the army’s FIS prisoners to the new prison camps near In Salah. He doesn’t think we’re being told the half of what’s going on. As he was leaving France two days ago, there were reports of the army firing on the police somewhere near Oran. Or was it vice versa? There’s some kind of power struggle going on within the ruling elite, probably between the pro- and the anti-free-marketeers. The Islamists, ferocious though they may be on their own account, are being manipulated. Abdelwahab thinks there may well be a blood-bath. Worse still, fatwas have been proclaimed from the muezzins, along with the call to prayer, on a good dozen writers, journalists, musicians, women in public positions – and any number of ordinary people not newsworthy enough to mention by name. They are now fair game to any mad intégriste who wants to go for them.
The road rolls on, and our first real dunes appear, far to the west. Closer by, perched on rocky outcrops against a glaring sky, among endless plains of stone, stand the remains of ancient red-earth ksars, fortresses and grain-stores, some built as defence against nomads, a safe retreat in times of war, others by the nomads themselves, to stock merchandise or supplies for their travels. Some have been abandoned for centuries, others for just a few decades, maybe. There’s no way to tell.
Abdelwahab is getting desperate for something to drink. Nothing all around for miles, though, but stones, emptiness, the occasional tormented thorn-bush. At long last we see a sign of human activity: low cubes of buildings by the dusty road, and some kind of market going on, goats on sale, sheep, chickens, carpets – and camels! Our first ever Saharan camels – and Abdelwahab’s too. There’s bound to be something to drink here. We pull in, François and Gérard behind us, and buy some freshly squeezed orange juice from a roadside stallholder who has set up in the shade of a handy palm tree. Double rations each go straight down our parched throats – much better! – and we head off to check out the camels. Ridiculously long baby-doll eyelashes on otherwise ridiculously uncuddly creatures. The cameleers fold back one of their front legs at the knee and slip a rope round it to keep it bent up, so they won’t suddenly take off on those great long lolloping legs. They hobble gently about, three-legged, looking extremely foolish and absent-minded. There are people – or men, rather: I’m getting so used to the absence of women by now that I hardly notice it any more – sitting and standing all round the square to the back of the buildings, an auctioneer on a wooden-box dais, robes flying, roaring away, intent, intense expressions around us. He is selling carpets, but the auction is not as gripping to us three as it is to the rest of the audience. How could it be? We don’t know any numbers beyond ten. I start inspecting the wares, complimenting one of the owners on his lovely white camel. Beautiful! I say. Is it waiting to go on sale? Are all the camels his, or just this one? He seems oddly reluctant to answer, and François suddenly drags me away, sharpish.
Never compliment anyone down here in the desert, he says, on any of their possessions, nor ask them a question whose answer might involve their making a display of their wealth or good fortune – such as how many camels they own! Or, indeed, how many date palms, or how many children they have. People here are great believers in the Evil Eye, and anything that could provoke envy, anything that might seem like publicly showing off their skill or good fortune, may attract it. François doesn’t know, he says, if it’s the envy of other humans, the jeal
ous rays emitted by their eyes, that puts the Evil Eye on you, or the malevolent envy of the djinns, the djnun, provoked into making you laugh out of the other side of your face. But that is irrelevant. Just don’t do it!
All right. I won’t. Fascinating information, though, especially to one who has spent much time in Italy. Italians, too, are very preoccupied by the Evil Eye, the malocchio, and my neighbours there, especially those of southern Italian origin, will often visit mysterious persons in the hills who possess the ability to remove it, with the help of a beaker of olive oil and other such objects of power. But, whilst Italians hotly deny my own argument that, logically, it must be these same mysterious practitioners who put the Evil Eye on them in the first place, none of them has any alternative explanation of where the Evil Eye really does come from, and how. This North African answer certainly fits the bill: especially when I recall that a certain aged southern Italian gentleman of my acquaintance keeps a large mirror on the side of his farmhouse, reflecting out across the valley, which he claims is to keep the Evil Eye off his crops. Of course – because it reflects back any envious thoughts an onlooker may be having about the volume of Salvatore’s grape harvest, or the fecundity of his olive trees! The Italians, though they still remember – and follow – the correct procedures, have somehow have lost this important information in the mists of history.
Abdelwahab has spotted a new delight over among the camels: a mother camel with a frolicking baby camel, teetering around its mamma on absurdly unstable and gangly legs that make it look as if it’s on tiptoe and fluttering its eyelashes coquettishly. I am charmed, and so is Abdelwahab, who pulls a camera out of his bag and takes a photo of the cameleer and his beasts.