by Annie Hawes
But then, says Moussa, when the French left, the new government stepped in and forced the landowners to write off the ancient debts. They said it was serfdom, and it’s illegal now. Released the Haratine from their bondage. So now they are free men. They can simply refuse the terms of the landlords – and leave to work elsewhere!
One daring moksirin claims to have heard it said that the shurfa of Timimoun are not truly descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, anyway. Of course they have more baraka – but that’s because they’re rich! Anyone with more money has more luck in life – c’est évident!
They are all stomachs of sin, says one of the smokers, a certain Ali, who oddly enough is wearing a T-shirt with a Guinness logo. Another older man repeats this remark, nodding his agreement. Stomachs of sin! That, he explains, is how you describe rich people here!
Bad rich people, really, says Moussa, diplomatically. Not Hadj Mouloud, necessarily, who he has always heard was an honourable sharif . . .
Still, emboldened now, the night-shorteners all plunge in at once, telling us how Haratine have always done all the work here – along with the poorer Berbers and Arabs – while shurfa and m’rabtin sat on their bums on silken carpets writing poetry, or long involved commentaries on the Koran!
But, says Moulay, the Old Rich are getting their come-uppance now, because plenty of them are worse off than their former serfs, these days – all because they were too noble to leave their fiefdoms and become lowlife migrant workers! Plenty are having to sell up their lands – sometimes even to their old employees!
A quiet older man who has hardly spoken so far says that they haven’t stopped their bad old ways, though. His brother, back from France with his life savings, is trying to buy a palmeraie of his own, here in Timimoun, and the Stomachs of Sin are pulling out all the stops to prevent it.
A boy in a stripey jellaba and a baseball cap wants to tell us another of the tricks of the Stomachs of Sin. The shurfa and m’rabtin of these oases, he says, were the only people in the whole of Algeria who actually made a profit out of the French being here! They had always collected the levy off the whole town, in crops or money, that paid the nomads’ share – their taxes, as they liked to call them, for protecting the town. Both shurfa and m’rabtin being respected religious mediators in disputes, and having the baraka of their birth-lines, that was their traditional job. But once the French army’s presence had ended the nomads’ power, and there were no more warring Tuareg or Ait Atta to worry about, the aristos went right on collecting the same taxes as always – which they just kept for themselves! And got richer than ever, as a result!
We now hear that, when the new government tried to redistribute the oasis land more fairly, the Stomachs of Sin simply hid their holdings. Anyone with more than 1,000 palm trees was supposed to relinquish the rest, to be shared out among the landless and destitute. Of course they just gave shares away to their brothers and wives. And, surprise! When it came to counting, hardly anybody at all had more than 1,000 trees. The few that did get redistributed were right on the sickly edges of the palmeraie, or without irrigation. The government were too stupid to realize that land here in the desert is no use without access to water, or that the old nobility owned almost all the rights to it! Lots of people had no choice but to sell their plots right back to the old owners. The Pouvoir would have done better to redistribute the water than the land – that would really have given people a chance. But what do you expect? They would rather consult some expert in Paris than their own people.
The thought of Paris inspires the night-shorteners to start sharing tales of their derring-do in Oran and Algiers, in France and Germany, of the heroic sufferings of immigrant life, and of their steadfast courage or deepest cunning in the face of hostile Christians – whose main pleasure in life is in thinking up clever new reasons to throw you out of their country.
Those few swigs of deffi seem to have had the most extraordinary effect on me. Can it be down to the fact that one of the forty herbal ingredients, as Moulay now reveals, was the seed-head of the opium poppy?
An hour or two later, as the bottle empties and the smoke from the kif rises thicker and faster around us, we hear the tale of a pair of djinns, seen fighting one another with swords of flame down in the heart of this very palmeraie. The hero of the story tells us that, with great presence of mind, he snatched up seven pebbles, quick as a flash, and hurled them into the nearby water-course that must be their home, shouting, ‘Djinns begone, and angels enter!’ And they vanished, that very moment, in a crash of thunder and a puff of orange smoke.
Out on Hadj Mouloud’s roof again, I stand and admire the early-morning sand dunes, now in bold relief with the sharp shadow of the early sun and coloured a very unlikely lemon-yellow. Below the town, the dark plumes of the palm grove keeping the desert at bay; the outcrops of red cliff standing guard beyond, glowing pink in the morning sunlight. Now I turn my attentions inward, to the courtyard below me.
Leaning on the parapet, I watch, unseen, the two women from last night, and two more female household members as yet unknown, going about the business of Saharan housework. One of them is doing something on a brazier over in the corner, a fine wisp of smoke rising from it. Another is sweeping the sand – really! – with a sort of palm-leaf rake. Two of the older ones are busy making what I soon realize is couscous, sitting cross-legged on goatskin mats spread out on the sand, intent on their work and oblivious to my presence.
One is using a prehistoric quern to grind the corn into flour, just like the one we saw used as a musical instrument last night – two chunky stones, the bottom one round and flat, the top one a big doughnut with a wooden noggin set in its side to turn it. She is unveiled now, and her hair is showing, red-gold with henna, beneath a scarf looped at the nape of her neck. She trickles a fistful of grain into the central hole of the hand-mill, then turns the top stone. The flour begins to pile up on the bottom plate-stone, to overflow. The other woman collects it up with a ladle made from half a gourd, pours it into a wooden bowl, dampens a handful with water, dextrously rolls it over a big, shield-like reed mat held between lap and shoulder, the tiny couscous bobbles falling away onto the basketwork bowl at her side, ready for drying: just the way Uncle Kebir described it, back in Paris. It looks amazingly easy. Something tells me it probably isn’t.
Fascinating to watch: and I see that my sandy couscous of last night was not entirely my own fault for fidgeting. Created under these sandy conditions, the stuff is actually incorporated into the raw material of the dish.
Gérard steps out of our apartment now, yawning and stretching, and wanders over to join me leaning on the parapet. He finishes rubbing his eyes, and now he too deciphers the activity. Couscous! he announces triumphantly. The women look up at the sound of his voice; we both wave and say good morning. They make no response, just turn their backs resolutely upon us. What can we have done to annoy them so?
Minutes later, Abdallah appears on the roof. In our excitement, we had forgotten that men are not supposed to look at women, at all, ever, unless they are related to them.
His father has forgiven us, says Abdallah, since we are newcomers and obviously didn’t do it on purpose – but please remember not to do it again. It has upset the women badly.
This is the first of our offences against the honour of Hadj Mouloud’s family. Or at any rate, the first we know of, because hanging out with Haratine and the moksirin is not considered good form either. Just about acceptable from men, who must be allowed their little adventures, but impossible to handle when done by a woman. Especially one who is the guest of a sharif. Honorary manhood being, as I’ve already noticed, a pretty unstable category, my sins will multiply over the week we are here, until eventually they produce dramatic results. For now, though, we know nothing. We are off for a stroll around town.
Moussa makes us buy a chèche each before he takes us walking. He doesn’t want to be responsible for our getting sunstroke. They are enormous – yards of cloth, more ev
en than in that Tlemcen haik. Much entertainment now as Gérard and Guy try to put them on. Moussa does his in a couple of nimble twists – but he can’t do someone else’s, he says, it’s impossible. It must be like trying to tie someone else’s tie. I’ve never been able to do that, either.
I am not supposed to wind mine around my head like the men, but drape it like a stole, according to Moussa. This doesn’t seem fair. Rolled up, it gives you a lot more layers of protection from the sun. And aren’t I supposed to be an honorary man, anyhow? Moussa says I can do it like a man if I really want to, but not here in the market. He will be embarrassed.
Guy has certainly got the hang of it. Doesn’t his look great? Has he been practising in secret? He’s even got the nonchalantly trailing side-bit hanging right, I say.
Moussa says that, on the contrary, they’ve both made pigs’ ears of them. Still, as long as they’re good enough to please another European! Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of his mother!
I do a double-take. What, I ask, did he just say?
He repeats it. It’s nothing – just a saying.
But is it a saying from here? From Algeria?
Of course it is! Where else would it be from?
Italy! I say. That’s why I’m looking so flabbergasted. It’s a saying I’ve heard loads of times from my southern Italian friends back in Diano Marina. Ogni scarafaggio e gazello a mamma sua!
Well, probably everyone says it, everywhere, says Moussa.
Not in France, say the boys. They’ve never heard such a peculiar expression!
And not in England, either, I say. I think we’ve just found another trace of your erstwhile presence across the Mediterranean.
Moussa is vastly entertained to hear that we’re staying in Hadj Mouloud’s roof apartment. Those rooms are for storing the precious stuff of the house, and more especially, he says, for new brides, for the first year of their marriage! Didn’t we know that? So Moussa is out and about with Hadj Mouloud’s three new brides! Moussa finds this hysterically funny, and will repeat it to everyone we meet for days.
Down another of the myriad pathways through the palmeraie we set off into the sebkha, the bed of the dead salt lake. A lake that was once enormous – and navigable, too, according to Monsieur Brahim, or so the experts think, because some of the names of the villages round here have meanings such as ‘port’ or ‘harbour’. But they have no idea when there was last any surface water here. It was well before recorded history.
If I were to say that the sebkha is flooded with sunlight, I would not be giving a sense of the true grandeur of the thing. From here it looks like a white-hot griddle; and stepping out onto it gives you little reason to change your mind about this notion. The sun is not just beating down, but upwards, too. I get my chèche wrapped sharpish, regardless of Moussa’s feelings.
We skirt along the edge of the salt plain, heading towards the red cliffs to eastward, and cross an abandoned graveyard – the cemetery of the now-defunct ksar perched on high, away along the valley. An extraordinary sight. Graves here are marked with ceramic ewers, big dark-glazed jugs that match the iridescent stones around them, their open mouths gaping skywards to catch any drop of water the heavens may dispense: the most precious gift you could give anyone, living or dead, in these parts. A plain shard of stone stands at the head of each grave among this desolation – no names or engravings, just a jagged tip a couple of feet high, pointing into infinity. They could have been made any time in the last two millennia. Or more.
Everything empty and lifeless for miles, it seems. But it is not so. Nearing the recently whitewashed tomb of the marabout Sidi Abderrahman (are these the original whited sepulchres, as advertised in the Bible?), we see a man crouching way out on the sebkha; he is holding one of those clay ewers used to mark the graves, pouring water from it into a hole in the ground. Why on earth . . . ? Can he be trying to grow something in this unlikely spot?
That is how you make saltpetre, for gunpowder, Moussa tells us. The salts from the ground will melt into the water, then later dry into harvestable crystals. Once upon a time there was a whole saltpetre industry here. The nomads’ caravans would make their way out onto the sebkha to collect it. Nowadays people just do it for the barud – for weddings and festivals, when you make the gunpowder speak. We’ll see that on the last day of the wedding celebrations, five days from now.
Past the graveyard and we’re heading for the red cliffs, clambering up the gentle side of the rise; soon we’re up high and walking on the level. Moussa is taking us to look over the cliff’s edge. I creep forward and lie down gingerly next to the others. Down below is a string of villages, clinging to the ground, each one surrounded by its carefully nurtured palm groves, the walled gardens drawn out like an architect’s plan. Moussa points out the line of the fouggaras that feed these lower villages: a row of tiny black dots in the ground, leading away into the dunes. There are 3,000 kilometres of fouggara tunnels in this area, though nowadays many are in disrepair. They don’t just carry water from points where the water table is higher, we now know. By day, the cool tunnels suck in the warm, humid air of the palmeraie, which condenses on their cool underground walls, depositing precious water back in the channels; then, by night, with the naked desert losing heat at a much faster rate than the mini-climate inside the walled groves, its air, now cool and humid, is sucked back the other way, down into the fouggaras to condense yet again. Even though you’d hardly believe there was any water in the atmosphere down here in the Sahara, they pick up something like four litres of water a night from every square metre of desert above them.
Sad to say, only half of them are still in good repair and working to capacity. People are taking to petrol-driven pumps in their stead, which will drain the subterranean veins of water much faster, having none of the sophisticated recycling system of the fouggaras. But there’s a hope they may be saved. Hadj Mouloud’s researching hydrologists were from Puglia, an Italian region which itself owns ancient water systems based on similar principles, also of unknown origin. Puglia is paying for the study and may help finance the repairs the Gourara can no longer afford these days, since the Haratine, traditional caretakers of the system, escaped their serfdom, and have to be paid properly.
Fingers crossed.
We press on, downhill now, three-quarters of an hour of blazing sun, and we’re back to sand level. These villages are at the farthest extent of the fouggaras. Many of their water-courses have died, either from disrepair of because the vein of water has run out. This is the reason there are so many abandoned ksars dotted about the desert here: water runs out, sand moves, there is nothing to be done but move on. Archaeologists have never found any domestic articles of significance left behind in any of the hundreds of ksars. People were not driven out suddenly, by war or disaster: the desert gave them plenty of time to decide there was nothing for it but to leave, to carefully pack up all their belongings, load up their beasts of burden, and set off for a new life elsewhere.
Now that we’re nearing the next village, a bunch of children has raced out to accompany us. Children here have their hair shaved right down short – nits must terrible in a place like this – with just a single odd little tuft left, plaited into a tiny pigtail. It is never right in the centre – is that because only God is perfect? Moussa informs us that all children must have a topknot like this, because, if perchance they should die, they would need it to be pulled into paradise. I can’t get any more out of him on this interesting topic; looking a little shamefaced, he claims that’s all he knows. Not proper Islam, then, we deduce.
The children mill around us. Overheating badly, I head off alone towards the next ksar, along the side of a sandy hill, seeking easier walking and a bit of shade. Walking so far on soft sand does something very strange to all sorts of foot-muscles you never knew you had. The sun is terrible. I am a black spot on a yellow surface, vibrating with light.
The shade of the fortress, granary, whatever it may have been, is a welcome rel
ief. Down below me now is a deep well – once a corn-store, a home, a prayer room? Higher up, the doorways are just two feet wide, crumbling away: on some of them the iron hinges still hang. One more human achievement being slowly digested by the desert. How old can it be? Could it be from the times of the Talmud?
Across the valley a sand dune has thrown itself at the base of a red cliff like some wild animal exhausted from the hunt. Down below, at the bottom of the hill, a racket has broken out: Gérard, Guy and Moussa are playing with the kids, who have brought sheets of corrugated cardboard, bits of plastic grain-sack. Gérard and a tiny child are climbing to the top of a dune together. Gérard seems to be taking orders from the boy, or maybe girl: he sits on the sheet of cardboard. The child sits on him. A quick scull with their hands, and off they both shoot, wild laughter, tobogganing down the slope.
I head for the exit and, blinded by the light, bang my head hard on what was once somebody’s doorway. Race down the hill regardless. Up onto the dunes to grab myself a small child and a slab of cardboard. Wheeeee!
A lovely game. These desert children know a thing or two. That precipitate rush downhill creates a fantastic cooling headwind. On my third go, beginning to feel that the running back up rather cancels out the cooling effects of the skid down, I pause at the top before prostrating myself beneath my favourite child, a very squeaky little girl with the best chance of any of them of getting into paradise: she has not one but three little topknots on her head. From here you can see a broad dune behind us, higher than the others, wearing a strange frill of dead palm-leaves along its crest. Beautiful from up here, this luminous snaking curve outlined in shadow, the fringe of palm-leaves marking the sharp divide between sun and shade. Down below, nestled in its curve at valley level, the children’s village, which must be the replacement to the ksar I was just in. Its palm trees are planted, one by one, down in deep, deep troughs in the sand, only their heads showing. That way, they can reach the water themselves, no need for hard bucket-work. The same decorative fringes of dried palm-leaves sprout from the crested tops of their craters as along the top of the snaking dune. And for good reason, as Moussa now explains. The palm-leaves have not been stuck in along the crests. It is the other way round: the leaves have created the crest. They are sand-stops, afreg. The villagers choose where they want the sand to halt, and place their row of palm fronds along the line. The sand dune will grow: every few months you must go up and add another layer of fronds. But – inshallah – the afreg will usually hold the dune where it is for many decades. You have to treat the desert sand delicately, with respect. To try building an impassable barrier is to tempt the dunes – and the djinns – to show you what they can do. Sand will build up behind the barrier, then begin to overflow it. Soon you have created exactly the menace you wished to avoid. Your village, your gardens, will vanish beneath the giant dune of your own making. As the Pouvoir found to their cost when they tried to build what they called a socialist village, says Moussa, up at the head of the Gourara. They would create palm groves for the propertyless, they said, and new homes for the landless poor. It was part of the plan to rescue the Haratine from their bondage. The water was easily accessible – just a few feet below ground level. Wells were built, sand cleared to find the clay level, palm trees planted. They had some frenchified architect who had designed a village in the form of a spiral. He said the sand would be carried through it and away. People came from miles around to look. But nobody moved in. The landless came to help with the building, all right, and plant the groves: the palmeraies would be good for a few years, they could see that, and they got paid to do it, anyway. Moussa’s father was one of them. But as soon as they’d set eyes on the place, they knew it could never be a permanent home. Why bother moving themselves and their families here? They would just use the gardens – at least they’d been provided free – until they vanished under the sand. Because somehow – nobody knows if it was part of the architect’s original plan – the builders had begun by putting up a twenty-foot protective wall to the sandward side of the village. Before they’d even finished building the first half-dozen homes, the sand was already half way up it. The intended occupiers laughed bitterly into their chèche-tails and went off home. No point in it at all, they said. That was twenty years ago. Today the place has all but disappeared.