The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  Nothing could be seen of the desert but the darkness in the windows and all of us reflected there, veils of dust flashing across the small lamp of the car before us, shadows, the glow of an ember. The desert boy, Hamid, sat in the driver’s seat smoking his weed and put the Algerian tape back into the sound system. The wailing voices and the ghostly strings. He was the guide of us all without us really knowing how or why. He was a boy, rude and childish, provoking. He said he knew the desert like his hands. There was nothing that made him afraid. Sometimes the train stopped and we leaned out the windows to the wind, but Hamid climbed out the driver’s seat window and leapt down to earth and walked away, scoffing, laughing at us over his shoulder. He peed long and languidly into the sands with the stars over his head. We only came down when he was there. The need was great, but the fear of being left behind was worse, our feet on the sand on the edge of the endless dark, our feet ready to get us to the flatbed in time. Sometimes the train stood breathing for long moments, ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. Other times it lurched forward violently after seconds of being still and our hearts pounded as it sped on into darkness.

  It kept us from sleep, bruised and battered us. The seats were not long enough to lie down on. Mark and Daniel went to sleep on the floor. Hamid stayed in the driver’s seat with his bare feet out the window. When the train slowed again and came to a stop he looked at me through the rear-view mirror. He told me they stopped to sweep the sands from the tracks, that it was true the trains sometimes left the tracks and flew. He got up from his seat.

  “Viens!”

  There were cots in the car ahead. He would take me and show me. “You can’t sleep here,” he said. “I’ll stay,” I said. He glowered at me and disappeared out the window. The train began again, shaking, shuddering, the screech of the wheels on the rusted rails beneath us, clattering, clattering on and on, our bus tilting side to side, in wider and wider waves, made me think we would go over soon, snap the cables and go free.

  Allain and I are stuck again. This time the back wheels are in too deep, the bottom of the car is lying on the sand. We have tried everything. Bruno gets up from looking under the car, walks to the shade side of the car and sits down, grinning, pulls out a joint from his pocket.

  “Ah, oui, les mecs.”

  My mouth is parched. I find it hard to swallow. The sun is blinding and still, the sands are white-hot, and somewhere is a sound, a far away song.

  “Merde, c’est le train!” Allain cries.

  And as I am running up a hill to see I hear Bruno yell:

  “Les mines!”

  After all that we’ve done, miles off the tracks, making our own way, oblivious, it seems ridiculous to me that he thinks about the mines only now. Because the train is there in the desert, a slow tiny moving line. It tells us where we are, but we cannot move now. I carefully retrace my footprints coming down. It is then that I see the smoke and a dark spot on the empty land behind us where I have looked so many times, hoping. A car, a truck? Who is it? Brown metal, olive green, glint of sun. “C’est les militaires,” Claude mutters, like it is a bad joke. Is it the military? They seem to be approaching. Have they seen us? We can do nothing, but wait.

  They are not following our tracks, but go around a large hill to find us. A Land Rover pulls in to our little bay in the sea of sands, two Mauritanians get out and walk towards us with their black head wraps coming undone, the cloth blowing, and the whirlwind of their language. Another man stays standing near the car. One of them is the guide Allain insulted back at the police post, hours ago. After he had negotiated with him to be our guide he drove past him, leaving him behind, and yelled out the window, “Je m’en fou!” To hell with you!

  This man begins yelling fury at Allain and his friend declaims:

  “Ici, ce n’est pas la piste pour Nouakchott.” This is not the road to Nouakchott.

  Bruno looks him right in the eye.

  “We’re not in a hurry.”

  The man answers him, “So, it will take you a long time. Eight kilometers and already lost!”

  The guide laughs outright at this as he checks underneath the Mercedes.

  “Ca c’est grave.” This is serious.

  They ask what we are doing out here. Why didn’t we take a guide?

  “We don’t need one,” Bruno states simply.

  “Then you will die out here,” the man answers. “Do you want us to help you?”

  Bruno tells them to screw off. My heart is beating. I understand that I have now been given a choice. The guide and his friend are walking away, waving their hands angrily. Bruno is still talking, telling the men that we don’t need a guide.

  “We love the desert, we could live here a month or two, no problem.”

  The men are walking away with the harsh sounds of their language, and I find myself in this strange dream, watching them walk away, step by step across the sand, the worn leather of their sandals, the way the cloth blows at their ankles, getting to their car, opening the door.

  “Wait.” My voice is shaking and they turn to look at me.

  “Are you going to Nouadhibou?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to go to Nouadhibou.”

  “Then you are welcome,” they say.

  I don’t know how I take all my baggage, shoes, coat, water, food into my arms in one sweep and carry it across to their car, under the sober gaze of the Mauritanians, in the stunned silence of Allain and the others. I crawl into the back. They ask if I am comfortable. We sit there a long time. They are arguing, still angry. Finally they open their doors and I watch them walk back to the Mercedes. They get that car out of the sand in half an hour. Does anyone say anything? Allain calls out to me, darkly muttering, “Bon voyage.”

  I drive away with the three men of the good route, I know. I want to make them understand how I feel, that the French men are crazy, that I made a mistake.

  “Oui, oui, c’est vrai,” they say.

  Maybe I’m as crazy as the rest of them, but I love these men because they have saved me. They are good and I am safe. I want to touch their hands, sitting in the back on a metal bench, watching them from behind, the way they have wrapped their long cloth round and round their heads, the way of their language, their brotherhood. There is not enough to thank them with, but maybe it is enough that I chose them.

  Over the hours I look back to find a sign of the white Mercedes. Nothing. The desert, a valley of white cliffs, pinnacles. There is a black shell of a car sitting on the sand. We stop to look at it from a distance. The men speak quietly together in Hassaniya and I realize it is the story of the French man blown apart by a mine a year ago. Allain had explained it to me. Two 4x4s made a detour from the convoy. One man got stuck in the sand and the other man came to pull him out. As the one car pulled the other hit a mine. The man watched his friend explode into the sky. All that comes to rest in the desert, the old tires used as landmarks, the rail ties, the car parts broken off in passage, the garbage, the bones will remain preserved, in perfect obedience to the Lord’s eye, Allah.

  It is the time for tea. They welcome me into the shade of their car. They make a small coal fire, set a little silver teapot on it, take out their bag of tea and glasses from a plastic container. They give me the rest of their sweet milk, zrig in a bottle, cool, quenching. The guide, Ahmed, lies stretched out on his stomach. Moustapha, the driver sits beside me, and Ali, the owner of a tourist inn in Nouadhibou, leans against the back wheel of the car and begins the tea. The sound of the hot liquid being poured, the hiss of the coals. I take off my sandals and set my feet on the sands. The coolness, the sweet silence.

  “Le désert c’est bon?” they ask me.

  “Oui.”

  The desert is good.

  I see how it is different now. I remember.

  I remember the sunrise in that bus on the iron ore train. Peach sky, ember mountains in green light, small scalloped dunes, olive green in the shadows, yellow tufts of grass, wind-blown thorn t
rees, a white camel and her calf moving among a dark herd. Mark woke me up to ask for a cigarette, but I thought he wanted someone to watch this with: the land revealing itself, the sand warming from cinder and ashes to ochre to salmon-orange and then becoming a plain of light.

  Now the train rides ever on through the desert to Choum with the characters, the red bus, the memories. But I am not going there. I am stuck in Nouadhibou at Ali’s Campement de Désert, and the tourists come and go but no one has room for me, or they do not wish to take me. There is a copy of an article up on the bulletin board about Frank Cole, a Canadian explorer and filmmaker who crossed the Sahara alone by camel from Nouakchott to Suakin, Sudan in 1989, seven thousand kilometers, and then returned to do it again and was murdered somewhere near Timbuktu. He was from my hometown. And I remember another story of a British man and his Italian wife who crossed by camel from here to Egypt. Ali and the guides say they have never heard of them. Why do we of the other world keep coming in droves to the desert? To discover our own personal odyssey? Frank Cole wrote: “I suffered continuously from fatigue and loneliness.”

  The tourists arrive: Frenchmen, Italians, with their laden Land Rovers and jeeps, and a Swiss man on a bicycle on the last leg of a seven-year journey around the world. Everything he has ever needed is hung in bags across the bike frame with ropes and clips and fancy knots, and all of his stories he carries in his head. He is going up through the desert and across the Gibraltar Strait to Europe, going home. Everyone wonders how he will get through the desert like that, but he wonders how he will ever get over his fear of going home.

  And now the blue motorbike rolls in through the gates. “Teneré 2000.” Bruno, the lunatic, of all people. He doesn’t recognize me or Ali at first. He gets off his bike as if nothing has happened, expects a kiss from me and when I do not give it, sits down across from Ali, grinning, babbling, nonchalant. “Claude has broken his car,” he says. Allain and Claude are waiting in the desert, not thirty kilometers away across the bay for him to bring back car parts and supplies. Allain is hoping to catch another convoy. Bruno smiles at this. “They don’t know the desert,” he says. He’ll go back to them but in his own time. He demands a room from Ali, “Eh, monsieur …” and goes to take a shower singing, “Ma petite douche, de douche, de douche …” Ali and I exchange looks. He pulls me away to the pâtisserie next door where we sit deep on the couches in the back room with our coffees, depressed. Ali keeps muttering.

  “Dégalasse.” Disgusting.

  “They think they know Africa,” he says, “but what do they know?”

  “NO FEAR!” a poster exclaims on the kitchen bulletin board, a picture of one man skiing boldly down the snows of a treacherous mountain. Adrift, anonymous, free.

  We left the train at Choum and rode on to Atar in the red bus, with the great burnt-purple walls of the plateau always on our left. Lou and Dirk drove on ahead in the Land Rover and the Australians came and went, and we heard the insect whine and drone of their engines, saw the smoke of sand from their skidding wheels. Hamid hung out the open bus door and watched the track and told Jean how to go. Jean cursed him and the track and chain-smoked. The track was deep sand and we were stuck time and again in places where it seemed the sea had once washed in and out and left ripples in the sands, islands, shells, great white boulders and polished stones. The cleft prints of camels told of the desert people but we never saw them. We saw the sunset on a pass between hills. It lay below us on the plains, in a swath between the high translucent sky of bottle green and the black spires of desert bush. It was a band of orange on the dark horizon and in the orange light was a play of waving light rays.

  At dusk we got stuck a last time. Jean said that if we could not get out we would stay there until morning. We went looking for rocks and pebbles, took them from the earth without a thought for where the stinging creatures sleep. There was only one flashlight that worked and Jean needed it to find his sand ladders. The earth was humming with a side wind that came from far off over the lip of the plateau. The little sound the husk grass made, then everything hovered still with night. We dug the sands out from around the wheels, brushed the areas flat and laid our rock foundations under the wheels, hour after hour.

  Udo sat in the bus and refused to come out. It annoyed us that he would not help, but I understood then that it was Hamid’s temper that frightened him. The desert boy was crazy, nothing made him afraid, and he had a fire that never died. He could not stay still and would not let anyone have his peace. He ordered us, Sarah, Mitsu and me, and even Jean.

  “Allez! Allez! Non, ce n’est pas comme ca ! Putain !”

  Jean threw his wrench in the sands, swearing, raging, swung his fist and Hamid ducked. They glared at each other, eyes wild, then Hamid backed down. Jean ignored him and went to work on the bus engine. But the desert boy provoked the rest of us to burning silence, rock by rock.

  A light appeared on the horizon, then disappeared again, and reappeared, the headlights of a car that took forever to arrive. We stood there waiting for it. Lou and Dirk had come back for us. Dirk brought out his ropes and hitched up the bus to the Land Rover. It roared out of the sands with Jean happily yelling obscenities. We got to Atar by midnight, to the little Hotel Adrar owned by a wealthy Sahrawi. There we found some others of the convoy we thought we had lost for good, the two German businessmen and the Swiss uncle and boy, their surfboards still tied to the roof rack in this desert land and no sea in sight. Dirk and Lou, and the Australian boys were not there, and I soon understood why. The place was full of shadowy people, guides and men of cunning. They set us up at a long table in an open shelter under a thatched roof, served us a meal of rice and meat stew, and began at once to needle us about camel tours and prices.

  Daniel and Mark came while I was having coffee, sat beside me and stared at the guides. Jean with his white baseball cap seemed oblivious to the con artists, or he was in his element. The imposing Swiss man seemed to have come home. He was seen smiling, like old friends with the Sahrawi owner. The Swiss boy told us that he had found work with them. There was a war on between this inn and another one in town, and they needed to round up the tourists before the others did. Mark muttered that it was all beginning to feel like a bloody bus tour. He and Daniel whispered about the other place they had found, clean and quiet, owned by a young woman. Lou and Dirk were there.

  “Nah, you don’t want this bloody rat race,” Mark said. “Come join us.” But I stayed.

  I thought everything was fine, when everyone had washed and eaten and lay content across the pillows and mattresses on the clay floor of a cool back room. Jean and the German businessmen and the Mauritanian guides were drinking under the shelter on the roadside. Hamid said he would take care of the rest of us and began preparing the tea. He made us sit around him on the pillows and listened to all we said, but said nothing for the longest time. We were like his children. The Swiss boy, Armond, had taken off his fuchsia scarf and his hair was short, black and gleaming. He had a way of smiling that made it seem too delicate. He was too polite, but as I was talking to Udo and Sarah about Europe, he broke in, saying that he was never going home. Everything bad was there. It was a God-awful land full of hypocrites. Hamid stopped pouring the tea and said:

  “You are a traitor to your country.”

  Armond just smiled.

  “You know what? I don’t give a shit about my country.”

  “You are a fool,” Hamid said. “Do you not know where you come from? I know my country and I’d fight for my people any day. You are a coward.”

  They were fuelling each other. It was a fight between worlds, cultures. But the Swiss boy was as fragile as a puppet. He lost his nerve and began to roll a joint. Hamid bristled.

  “You have everything in your world. Why do come? What do you want?”

  Udo and Sarah had left our circle. The silence was burning.

  I saw that Hamid wouldn’t go away. He was going to sleep in our room and I knew I was afraid. There was somet
hing in him that showed no boundaries, the desert mind, his hatred for us, or the idea of us, and there was his knowledge of my fear and his wanting to conquer me. I lay out my sleeping bag on a mattress near Udo and Sarah and he came immediately, stood over me and told me to move. It was his place. No, I said. Yes, he said. He came closer, towering over me. I leapt to my feet. He threw my sleeping bag off onto the floor. I grabbed it, he yanked it back. Something broke loose in me, turbulence, rage, driving winds. “Who the fuck do you think you are!” Dead silence. Mitsu looked away. No one said a word. I found a mattress at the farthest corner and lay down shaking. Where is shelter out in the open? Where is home? I couldn’t sleep, with my arms wrapped around my body, armour, battlements, stone, walls so thick they would never let in any light.

  I snuck out in the morning and found the other inn around the corner. The young woman was there, sitting at a small table on the patio. She looked like a girl, a loose orange veil floated around her small face, high cheekbones, child eyes, and she was smoking a cigarette. She was silent, mysterious, watching everything like a sage. She awoke something in me. Dirk and Lou were packing up their Land Rover in the yard. They were all going to Nouakchott. Mark and Daniel came out ruffled, still sleepy, with their knapsacks. We embraced. Mark looked long into my eyes, “Keep safe.” They wheeled their bikes out of a shed. I was holding down melancholy and loneliness. I felt the end of the convoy. I held the image of the two boys riding off with their helmets and luggage strapped on the back, riding down the sand tracks, into the sun-lit open, free.

  I went back to get my bags. I was going to the young woman’s inn, Rebaia’s place, and then I was going to find the next bush-taxi to the dunes, the oasis village of Chinguetti, there where the British man and his wife once left long ago on their odyssey across the Sahara. I wanted to know how they felt staring out at the dunes, preparing to set out across them. In their book they spoke of a world that was the beginning of time, sparse, swept, honed to a bare surface, and moving so slowly across it they were soon worn down themselves. All the layers fell away. This is what I wanted and why I wanted my own odyssey, to travel by horse in a land of no fences, slowly step by step, let it work my own inner landscape.