A Handful of Honey

by Annie Hawes

  We turn off the path at a tiny whitewashed dwelling, the home of the marabout, Sheikh Haddou. Inside, the place is floored with sand like Hadj Mouloud’s. But the marabout has an even better way of keeping cool. What we’ve taken for the main house is just the entrance hall. His rooms are down below, a whole storey beneath the desert. And there sits a little old man, cross-legged on a palm mat in the cool sand, who rises to greet us, displaying a piously modest short-and-narrow white robe and a set of very bad teeth. The teeth, I now find, get seriously in the way of my believing that he is truly wise or holy. A terribly unworthy reaction. Where do I think he would find a dentist?

  There are deep, decorated alcoves built into the ancient walls down here – was the whole building once above the sand? – which are filled to overflowing with books and rolled parchments in grandiose disorder. I wander over to inspect them, complimenting him on his library, and Sheikh Haddou tells me in no uncertain terms not to touch anything. His library is doubly precious, he says through Mohammed, the translator, since so many documents were lost over the last century. When the Tuareg attacked Timimoun, in the year 1908 of your Christian calendar, he says, they took almost every book and parchment in the place – all that were not hidden – and burnt them. Only the writings held in the outlying villages, and in the zawiyas, survived. The rule nowadays is that nobody but a marabout must touch them. In the case of Christians like ourselves, he is not permitted even to display them to our eyes, which may suck out their baraka.

  Mohammed gives us his gloss on this. When the French first appeared in these parts, he says, they came up with many ruses to get at the documents held by the zawiyas. The French historians and archaeologists, begging the sheikhs as one learned man to another, were allowed to borrow many items, which very often were never returned. They didn’t stop at books, either. There is an ancient well, now dried up, at the entrance to this village, at whose mouth, once upon a time stood an ancient stone with an inscription carved into it in Hebrew. It was sacred to the memory of a certain Sarah, who had died in childbirth, and whose husband deeply mourned her passing. It had stood there since time immemorial – until 1926, when a party of French archaeologists came visiting. They denied any knowledge of its disappearance, but it was clear that if no local person had disrespected that woman’s memory in a thousand years, they were unlikely to have suddenly started now. Various outrages of this kind occurred, until the educated classes of the Gourara concluded that the only solution was to refuse to show their sacred possessions to any visiting Christians at all. That way, they were safe from envy, greed and covetousness.

  Sheikh Haddou gets down to business with Kebir: business that involves much muttering at close quarters, the perusal of various books from the shelves and the making of sets of strange marks – which may be Arabic letters, though they don’t look much like any I’ve seen so far – on a small piece of squared paper, which is then folded up even smaller, wrapped in a fragment of soft red leather and stowed away in the pockets of Kebir’s gandoura.

  Now, says Sidi Haddou. Time for the Nazarenes! What would the Christians like his help with?

  We can’t think.

  Mohammed can, though. A question about me. What should I do next? Make tracks for the north as soon as possible, before things get any worse? Stay in Timimoun until the trouble dies down? Or head on south with my companions towards Mali, where peace still reigns?

  The marabout has a think. Finally, he says something long to Mohammed, in his own language. And I wait with bated breath to hear my doom.

  He is saying, translates Mohammed eventually, that I must decide whether I want a handful of honey, or a basket of bees. He says that life is a choice between the one and the other. I must ponder on that, and the answer will become plain.

  A positively gnomic utterance, the meaning of which does become somewhat plainer when, as we walk back across the sand, Mohammed explains that a basket of bees means a beehive. Still, that certainly leaves plenty to ponder upon.

  As we wait at the whitewashed tomb for Kebir to scoop up some Sand of Good Fortune, Gérard starts battling with his chèche, which – unlike Guy’s, of course – unravels when he tries to tuck in its trailing side-tail to cover his nose and mouth against sun and sand, the way the locals do so casually. Mohammed pulls his own chèche off and shakes out the cloth, ready to deliver a full-blown chèche-winding lesson, from A to Z. His one is even longer than Gérard’s. How many yards of cloth can there be in it? How vain you Algerian men are, I say. Surely there is some rule in the Koran about not having too much cloth in your chèche?

  Precisely the opposite, says Kebir, ducking back out of the shrine. A chèche must be long enough to double as your shroud: enough cloth to bury you in. It is meant as a constant reminder that life is short, and that you should always behave justly, never do anything you would be ashamed of, were you to meet your Maker tonight.

  But then, says Mohammed frivolously, he himself finds that wrapping your own shroud around your head each morning can often have the opposite effect, and remind you that you’d better enjoy life as much as you can, before it’s too late.

  Once we and Hadj Mouloud have made our lengthy and formal adieux, Abdallah says he will accompany us to the square where we are to meet Kebir, Mohammed and the Gak. On the way, he finally reveals to us what a bad time his father has been having since we came to stay. He would never dream of mentioning it himself: he is too good a Muslim. But Abdallah wants to warn us that Hadj Mouloud has actually written a letter to Jean-Pierre asking him not to send him any more guests, claiming that it’s because he’s too old to cope. But what Hadj Mouloud has really found impossible to cope with is having me about the place, confounding all his mental – and social – categories.

  Mohammed, who has joined us en route, is cracking up laughing as Abdallah reels off the list of my offences, showing how badly I have brought Hadj Mouloud’s honourable name, and that of his household, into disrepute. Starting from the beginning, the list goes like this. Firstly, turning out not to be married, or even related, either to Gérard or to Guy: an unmarried woman roaming the town with no officially designated protector is an abomination. Then, hanging around with the moksirin, amongst whom alcohol is known to be drunk. And asking to eat with Hadj Mouloud’s women, when I should have realized that, as an honorary man, I couldn’t suddenly decide to inflict my dubious company on decent, God-fearing ladies. Still, I had to be humoured: Islamic rules of hospitality dictate that you must never refuse a guest anything. Then, publicly attending the dancing soirée, in front of the whole town, when I was known to be staying with Hadj Mouloud, thus associating his name with women of ill repute. And lastly, as if all that wasn’t enough, cavorting with female Haratine – in front of the whole town, again – and actually presenting myself for a meal at his home dressed up as one.

  His father was convinced I was intentionally trying to make him look a fool over that one, says Abdallah, giggling. And apparently, whilst disguised as a Haratine, I not only asked him about second and third wives – by implication asking him about his own – but also disagreed with him about something. You are not meant to disagree openly with your host, especially not if he is a generation older than you, and you are female.

  All in all, Hadj Mouloud’s nerves are wrecked. And he feels that his standing in the community may have been irreparably damaged.

  And I, on the other hand, feel that small-town morality is the same the world over.

  23

  Into the big grey Gak lorry with Kebir and Mohammed. We’re off to the plains, the sheep and Rashid. Gérard and Guy are riding shotgun behind us, in the truckbed of the vehicle, amongst bales of hay and bags of sheep-nuts, hidden beneath a wigwam of palm and eucalyptus branches which, if the sheep turn out to need moving, will be roped on across the lorry’s open back to shade them.

  We stopped at a chaotic roadside animal market some way back, amid swarms of other antique lorries and of milling sheep raising immense clouds of dus
t, to buy the fodder. Ruinously expensive, was the verdict on the hay. I was torn between sympathy for my present companions and hope that this would have brought Youssouf the good luck he hoped for – and a family of his own.

  Now, back in the lorry, Uncle Kebir is enjoying Mohammed’s recitation of my sins against Hadj Mouloud for the third time. It does not seem to be palling yet. He is quaking with laughter all over again. Though he does agree with him about the hair, he says. It doesn’t look right on a white woman.

  Mohammed disputes this hotly. He thinks it looks great. I sit quietly and say nothing. I would certainly feel a complete idiot, back in Europe, with my hair in braids and beads – so maybe Kebir is right. Fortunately, I can’t bring myself to care. It feels good. And the incidence of mirrors larger than three inches across is so rare in this part of the world that I have not been able to form any opinion myself, and am not expecting to. I am pleased to report, though, that suntan is now nicely filling in the spaces between my freckles. Hardly anyone has commented on them all week.

  We are heading north-east now, through dunes that are growing more and more massive, skirting the eastern edge of the Grand Erg. Eighty-thousand square kilometres of baking nothingness. It’s hard to believe, with barren mountains of sand as far as the eye can see, that we can possibly be heading for grassland. Plenty of desert to get through first, says Kebir. In this landscape of heat and bulging yellow sand, an alien apparition heads towards us through the heat haze, silver and red and gleaming, a giant’s toy in an overheated sandpit. We are about to meet one of the massive Saharan oil-industry lorries that Mohammed himself described to me all those years ago on a Spanish train. As it draws close, its true proportions become apparent. It looms over our lorry, dwarfing us, its wheels so huge that the tops of the tyres are level with our heads. We can’t even see the driver, he is perched so high. With a whoosh of wind it passes us and vanishes into endless yellow as suddenly as it appeared, leaving nothing but a trail of flying sand.

  An inhabited place at last: a palm grove and a set of shacks by the side of the road, built from palm-fronds interlaced, and shaded by a dozen eucalyptus trees. Two other lorries are parked outside it, as ancient in style as our own. A transport café, desert style.

  We pile out and head for one of the shacks. The place looks oddly reminiscent of an African village from south of the Sahara – and with good reason, it turns out. The people who serve us our coffee, at wooden benches set beside a palm-log table, are Malians, migrants who set out long ago on the long trek towards Europe and riches, but ended up staying here instead. A collection of strange objects hangs suspended from the branches of one of the eucalyptus trees: a head of corn, a fragment of shattered mirror, a piece of cloth and what looks like the arm and hand from a plastic doll, hung fingers-upwards in the style of the Hand of Fatima.

  Some kind of gri-gri, says Kebir. An amulet to protect the proprietors. People from across the Sahara often believe not in the One God, but in many. Each element of nature has its own spirit, to be praised and placated. You call it animisme. But you can combine animism, if your tastes run that way, with a single Master God who rules over the others, and rub along just fine with us People of the Book – so long as nobody starts going into the fine print!

  Mohammed and Kebir have ordered café-poivré – peppered coffee – and, glutton for punishment that I am, I have followed suit. Not chilli-pepper, as I half suspected, but ground black pepper and a dash of cinnamon, go into the brew. Surprisingly good. Also on offer is coffee with armoise. Funny, I’ve always imagined it was the North Americans who invented flavoured coffees. Wrong again.

  Mohammed has returned from the bar with one of the other lorry-drivers, an acquaintance from the trans-Saharan transport trade. Ali is a Cha’amba nomad, keeping up the old trading traditions of his tribe, using the internal combustion engine in place of the camels. Though in the old days, he says, the Cha’amba did not usually go as far south as Mali. He has stolen the route from the tribesmen of the Tuareg. Once upon a time all hell would have broken loose over such lèse-majesté, but nowadays, everything’s a free-for-all. Dates and salt go south to Mali, we hear, while sheep and camels – to our surprise – come north. Nothing surprising about it, says the driver. There are endless grasslands to the south of the desert, around Gao.

  But of course there are – I recall now the English cannons, used at Gao to scatter that defensive shield of Malian livestock.

  The Malian café-owners, Kebir tells us, built the first of these palm shelters as a temporary home while they worked on the local palm groves to top up their travel money – they’d found some seasonal work, rebuilding the local afregs. But there were plenty more jobs in the palmeraies. The Malians stayed on and started up this café for the trans-Saharan lorries – and an unofficial employment agency, finding other migrants, in their turn, jobs on the palm groves. The émigrés from Mali, Niger, even Senegal and the Ivory Coast, have ended up doing the jobs that the Haratine, now free men and with some resources of their own, will no longer do – or not at the wages on offer. More shacks soon sprang up around the first one, and there is a whole set of service industries here now, catering to the passing trade of dates, sheep and migrants. One enterprising man – an Algerian from the north, come to get away from the unemployment and all the religious trouble – has even managed to set up a phone booth here in the middle of nowhere, and does a roaring trade charging for phone calls back home to sub-Saharan Africa.

  Remembering Yazid, I enquire about the cassette method of home communication. But no. It’s no use down here. These days, a developing country will have the telephone long before it gets round to a reliable postal service.

  Mohammed’s friend Ali occasionally brings humans back across the desert among his truckloads of livestock, he confesses. It’s against the law, in theory, because they’re supposed to have visas to come here to Algeria, too. But what is he going to do? Leave them there by the roadside to walk?

  Arrangements for receiving the not-quite-legal migrants are well organized here, he tells us. You drop them at the edge of the palm groves outside the town, where children will be waiting among the trees to take them onwards to work and shelter. Here they will get over the first part of their journey. Some of them, in really bad shape or completely penniless, are fed and nursed by the Sufi brotherhoods in the local zawiyas until they are able to work. Then they can begin to prepare themselves for the onslaught on the Melilla barriers – and Fortress Europe.

  And when, Gérard asks, will he be going back over to Gao? Would he take a couple of passengers the opposite way, for once? It’s fine by Ali. Just be here, in this café, seven days from today, he says. He will look out for them. And any help with the petrol money is welcome!

  Seven days from today in the morning? asks Guy. Or the afternoon?

  Ali shrugs his shoulders. Travelling here is not like driving around Paris! He has been to Guy’s country, where everything is so precise. But here, anything can happen. Ali has travelled a lot, he tells us. And he doesn’t just mean France – or Mali, for that matter. He was in Vietnam, with the French army, when it was defeated at Dien Bien Phu. Airlifted out of there. Then the Americans took over the job. A lovely country, green and fertile, he says. The Vietnamese could grow anything they wanted, given the chance. The only thing their country really lacked was palm trees.

  Gérard pulls out the Petit futé, seeking information on this strange spot, and on the highlands we’re heading for. Alas, The Little Cunning One has nothing at all to say to us on the topic. We are, it seems, nowhere. And heading into nothingness.

  Disconsolately, he shuts it again. Guy has the good grace not to crow this time. He takes the book gently from Gérard’s hands and stows it away from him. We’ll be flying blind from now on, then, he says.

  Kebir is sorry for the Malians, he says as we climb back into the lorry. They are rootless like truffles, with no kin to help them over the hard times.

  We are surprised by the si
mile. Do truffles grow here in Algeria, then?

  They certainly do. We’ll see, if it rains while we’re up there – inshallah! – that the high plains will be stuffed full of them a few days later. The nomads use them for couscous sauces, slice them and dry them for winter, sell them to the cities of the north.

  The eyes of the Frenchmen light up. Yet another reason to hope for rain.

  At last we are up on the high plains – an open, craggy landscape, a huge, wide, pale sky, a green veil over the stones – but when you get up close there is hardly anything there in the way of edible plants, not much beyond stunted and heavily chewed thyme and armoise bushes. But that doesn’t bother Kebir and his nephews, or the nomad relations. They have always bred and grazed their animals up here; now they are breeding without the grazing. It is lambing time, and till that is over, at least, they are staying put. And standing up to the big business sheep-men who are trying to put the small ones out of business.

  The plains are still ’arsh land, which means they are collectively owned – land that was left to the Algerians, since the French settlers weren’t interested in it. So it still belongs to everyone, and anyone can use it. This was fine under the old tribes, who once upon a time had huge areas to wander, and in any case were bound to use the pasture with care – for the survival of their own people. But now with their shrunken acreage and everyone out for themselves, collectively owned land makes no sense. Everyone wants to exploit it to the maximum, nobody wants to take care of it. That, we hear, is why the djema’a, the council of elders, was reintroduced – or re-legalized, rather, because it had never really died out 100 per cent. The government hoped that by putting the old clans back in charge, acknowledging the power of their leaders, the degradation of the land would be stopped. But it hasn’t worked. What authority do the old nomad tribal leaders have? It was destroyed generations ago. Who would listen to them now? The market talks louder. And now the big fish have realized they can put the small ones out of business altogether by cutting their water supply. They have blocked up several wells on purpose – to drive small nomad farmers off the grazing. You only need to throw a load of cement down a couple of waterholes, and the remaining ones are farther apart than a herd can walk in a day. Big money has big water-tankers and can take water to the livestock between-times. But the small people can’t move any more, and, stuck in the one place, the sheep soon have nothing left to graze on. The owners have no choice but to sell up. But Rashid and his partners are fighting on, staying put, in this arid, almost grassless desert. There may be hardly any pasture left – unless, by the Will of God, it rains – but at least they are within a day’s travel of the water-hole. That is why we are bringing in extra feed by lorry.