by Annie Hawes
There is sheep chaos at the water-hole. Everyone who is anyone has brought their flock here. No wonder Rashid and Nazir have decided to take the water to the sheep, and not vice versa. Thousands of maa-ing woolly backs stretch for miles, their cloven toes churning the rain-soaked earth into mud so deep that you sink in up to the ankles as you step down from your camel. I back off as far away from the mud-sea as I can while the big water skins and plastic cans are filled and loaded onto the camels, finally to find myself pressed up against a very stylish black leather tent, dome-shaped, held up on bentwood supports. I am, I gather, among a family of blacksmiths. Tuareg nomads, I guess, since the men’s faces are veiled right up to their eyes. Dad and Granddad Tuareg are both working away at their anvils, round the far side of the tent. While one sits grinding antimony into kohl with the flat of his hammer, the other has a powerful fire going, and a little girl of seven or eight pumping the bellows while he heats a strip of red-hot metal held in a pair of tongs.
He is hammering a knife blade out of the leaf-suspension steels from a defunct lorry, says Kebir, who has come over to see what I’m at. Fine steel: the knife will be a good one. Blacksmiths here, unlike most people in this part of the world, don’t travel with a tribe or clan, but in family units. And people are afraid to associate with them. They are something like scary magicians, their work too inexplicable, maybe – and too necessary. Didn’t the Jewish metal-smiths of Chefchaouen have the same problem? The Tuareg wives and daughters are busy making those little hide bottles to keep the kohl in, like the first one I bought, up in Kabylia. And, as I suspected, beneath the sleek fur covering of the kohl-pot lurks some unappealing body part, a bit of stiffened dried gut. Still, waste not, want not. This is the exact opposite of the thriftless European abattoir. Even thriftier is the mended earthenware pot they show me to illustrate their husbands’ prowess. Where its base has worn right through from years of resting on stones over their camp fire, it has been beautifully patched with two fine metal plates, welded within and without.
The women tell Kebir to tell me that they have just come all the way from Gao.
Really? From right across the desert? I gaze upon them with a wild surmise.
Yes, they say, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. They always come up here in the spring; there are plenty of repairs to be done once the herding of the flocks starts, harnesses, horseshoes, pots and pans . . .
The women’s dresses are spectacular. Voluminous indigo robes, the same colour as their husbands’ chèches, with huge, wide, flowing sleeves and a kind of built-in veil that winds round from the back, two decorative button-like items on either side of a kind of sweetheart neckline. Their faces are uncovered, unlike their husbands’. Among the Tuareg only the men bother veiling themselves.
It takes me a rather rude amount of staring to work out that, complicated though the Tuareg dress may look, it is amazingly simple – just one long piece of fabric that must be exactly three times the length of their outspread arms.
Luckily, the lady in question is not offended but entertained by my interest in her outfit, and shows me that the two button-things that hold the whole outfit together are nothing but small, round pebbles. This, I am sure, must be the original ancestor of the button-and-hole. Evidently, I am at the fountainhead of human civilization here. First the duffel bag, and now the button! You simply put the pebble beneath the two bits of cloth you wish to unite, hold onto it through the cloth, and tie a bit of coloured thread around it, anchoring both pebble and fabric into place. Genius. The huge wide sleeves, meanwhile, are not really sleeves, but a cowl-like drape, where the fabric is pulled over the shoulders from behind and ur-buttoned at the front. The last third of the cloth, wound back round behind them, forms a hair-covering veil in a Virgin Mary style, and is held between the teeth for modesty as they come to the well to draw buckets of water. As they lean forwards to the well, they throw the sleeve-part of the robe back over their shoulders, out of the way, and bare their naked breasts to the view of all and sundry. Nothing private about breasts round here, not compared to chins, it seems. And why should there be, indeed?
What an eccentric race we are, we humans, the way we randomly select some body part to make a big fuss about. Bare your head, cover your head. Bare your legs – no, cover them up! In my own culture, the nipple is certainly one of the few taboos left. No problem at all here, though. Another member of the family is sitting happily on a nearby rock, one sleeve thrown back, suckling her small baby, no worries.
Stupidly, I go over and admire the child. Whoops. The mother does a weird gesture at me to ward off my Evil Eye. She makes a fist, leaving only her thumb and little finger outstretched, which she now pokes several times towards her own eyes, obviously trying to interrupt the dangerous rays of potential envy glancing from mine.
I surprise her by bursting out laughing. Hardly believable, but this is another Calabrian gesture. Except that I think I’ve now understood its true meaning better than my friend Ciccio, back in Italy, who uses it all the time, whenever he’s praising something ironically, and means the exact opposite. Lovely curtains, you might say to him. Yes, aren’t they just, he will reply, stabbing away towards his eyes. And I am so used to this southern Italian gesture that, just, for a second, I think the mother is trying to tell me that her baby is not lovely at all. Which, of course, in a certain sense, she is. Evidently the precise meaning of the gesture has wandered somewhat over the centuries, but the connection is undeniable. I can’t wait to tell Ciccio what he’s really doing!
Night time, another camp-fire. It is two days later, and the moon is full. The Marabout’s charm for the horse’s love life is now soaking in its liquid of Power. Clever that the marabout suggests adding henna and cloves: at least it is bound to have an antiseptic effect, whether the charm itself has any curative property or not. Somebody has brought out a drum, a big ceramic bowl with a goatskin stretched over it: he is tapping out rhythms on it, playing with the children inside one of the tents, who are weaving their own rhythms on sticks and tea-glasses to answer him. Amid much ribaldry, Nazir’s cousin, the man in charge of magic – or do I mean religion? – around here, sets off to anoint the horse with his potion of melted words.
Conversation turns to the miraculous powers of Sidi Haddou, and thence to his remarks, made for my own edification, about handfuls of honey and basketfuls of bees. What did the marabout mean? Many interpretations are proffered. Honey is more pleasant than bees, and less risky, but it is only a momentary pleasure. Bees, if you’re daring enough to choose them, will give you honey for years. Is the handful of honey the world of the rich West? And the bees everyone else? Is the honey my life in Europe, or this trip to the Maghreb? Are the bees what I will make of it? But no, that would be honey again . . . You can’t hold on to honey, it slips out of your hand . . . I should be brave and go the whole hog; that is the general verdict. Unless (from one of the older men) it is better to be content with the honey, and not go after the dangerous bees?
Whatever. Like so many of the words of Holy Men, the interpretations are infinite. Use them to feed your own decisions. I’m beginning to prefer the one where I carry on across the desert. I could follow the road of those Elizabethan cannons to a land of many gods, spirits of nature beyond the reach of the Book. The collective efforts of its People may, as Pedro told me so long ago, have led Europe to America. But then, were the locals pleased to see us come – a race of gold-grubbing plague-bearers?
Since I am free, give or take a few intégristes, to wander this earth as the fancy takes me – unlike so many of its inhabitants – it seems churlish not to seize the chance. From this close, the desert has lost its terror; it hardly seems an obstacle at all. Wind the chèche back on; remember that life is short, and that most people in the world are hard put to it to get so much as a drop of honey, though they may battle whole swarms of bees. Look at that blacksmith family, all the way up from Mali. They came right across the Sahara, tents, babies and all, withou
t so much as a vehicle, trusting to the kindness of passing lorry-drivers. The desert is a lot less scary than the forces that stand in my way if I take the road north: the drogués de la religion and their Macchiavellian opponents. And why should I be in such a rush to get home to Europe? Those olive trees have survived thirty years of neglect. What difference could another month or two make?
The stars are bright in a black-velvet sky, the fire is warm . . . and I am half asleep beside it now, on my own pile of snug sheepskins, wrapped in Rashid’s old brown camel-hair burnous. Its hem got a bit chewed by a hungry sheep, but it will do me fine, he says, if I just trim the bottom off. I can keep it for the journey, if I want. And I think I will.
Another two days have gone by: it is early morning, dew still on the ground, and all around us the land is greening. The mountain thyme, coming back to life, perfumes everything. Tomorrow, Kebir says, there will be truffles. The women are taking down the tents: the men are packing them onto the camels, the bentwood supports hanging snugly across their humps, as if designed with just such transport in mind. The lorry won’t be needed to move the flocks now. They can walk on, grazing as they go, getting nice and plump on the way. If I want, Mohammed and Rashid will drive me north to the border. I can be on my way back across the Mediterranean, to home and safety, in forty-eight hours.
No. I can’t do it. Not yet.
I have learned, now, what a small, snug place Europe is. A life in London town, or an olive grove in Italy? What sort of a dilemma is that? There’s hardly anything to choose between them.
Onwards across the desert it is. I’m going for the basket of bees.