The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  She had left a dozen fine robes, boots for the winter, jewelled sandals and belts, many coloured headscarves and shawls, her sheepskins and the fine goat-leather her mother had been keeping for her so that she could make her own tent when she married. All she had brought with her was contained in the wooden box beside her bed: her jewellery, cosmetics, a little knife and a spare robe. The clothes on her back and this bedcovering represented all she had left in the world – or at least in this place. She ran her hands over the embroidery, feeling homesick and lonely.

  ‘Very pretty.’

  She turned but before she could cry out there was a hand over her mouth. She could smell the stink of mutton-fat on it, and the char of the fire.

  ‘Who are you going to call for? Your father and brothers are halfway across the Sahara, loading up their camels with cones of salt like the common traders they are. Your aunt? She can’t stand the sight of you. Your cousins, Ana and Nofa? They’ve both been chasing after me for years: not that I’ve any interest in them – the hulking great oxen. All the men live in fear of my uncle, and I am his chosen successor. You’re an outsider in this tribe, Mariata, while I am the heir of its high chief. No one is going to lift a hand to stop me. And afterwards, whose word are people going to believe?’

  Rhossi pushed her face down on the bed and held her there, straddling her body, his weight suffocating her. She couldn’t call out, could hardly breathe. The next thing she knew there was cold air on the back of her bare thighs and a hand trying to prise her legs apart, fingernails digging into her delicate flesh. ‘Don’t struggle,’ he told her. ‘You’ll enjoy it: girls always do when they get used to the idea. Just stay still, damn you.’

  Her cries of outrage were swallowed by the bedding.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about the baby: you won’t need to kill it – you’ll be my wife. There’ll be no shame.’

  There came a moment when his hold on her lessened and in that moment Mariata felt herself filled by a spirit, a vengeful, ravening thing possessed of supernatural strength. An animal noise came out of her, rough and guttural as she bucked and twisted. Her right arm came free and she shot out a wild elbow that caught Rhossi full in the mouth. Everything stopped.

  Mariata fought herself upright, dragging her robe back around her ankles. From her treasure chest beside the bed she took the little dagger and held it out in front of her breathing hard, ready to use it.

  Rhossi’s eyes were huge. He touched his face. The hand came away from his mouth covered in blood and he stared at it as if both hand and blood belonged to someone else. When he spat, a tooth fell out on to the beautiful bedcover, spotting it with a different shade of red. He looked at it in disbelief, then transferred his gaze to Mariata. A little whimper escaped him, and then he started to cry. He hurled himself to his feet and ran from the tent.

  Mariata stared after him. Then she moved methodically around the tent, collecting the things she would need.

  She arrived at the harratin village an hour later.

  ‘Tell no one that you have seen either Rahma or myself,’ she instructed the headman carefully. ‘And make sure everyone in the village – even the children – say the same thing. They will punish you if they know you have helped us.’

  She gave him the rice and flour and tea she had stolen from Dassine’s tent. Then she took Rahma by the arm and led her out to where two of the fine white, fully laden mehari camels that had once belonged to Rhossi ag Bahedi stood waiting complaisantly for them under the light of the three-quarters moon.

  6

  Had I forgotten to take off the amulet when I went to bed that night? You’d think it’d be a hard thing to forget, as massive as it was. But I was wearing it when I woke up the next morning.

  As I swung my legs out of bed, I had the sense that I was in two places at once, but never fully present in either. And when I threw back the curtains it seemed to me that the London sun that shone in on me was dull, as if someone had changed a hundred-watt lightbulb for a low-energy equivalent.

  On the tube as I travelled in to work I was aware for the first time in years that millions of tons of stone and earth and sewers and buildings were pressing down upon the tunnel through which we passed at unnatural speed. Trying to divert my attention from this uncomfortable thought, I cast my gaze around the carriage. An advert for holidays in Egypt, a line of camels silhouetted against dunes and pyramids; cheap flights to Marrakech … A knot of foreign women got on at Knightsbridge and stood swaying with the movement of the train, only their heavily kohled eyes visible in the slit black fabric of their niqabs. One of them looked right at me, said something to her companions and they all stared at me.

  Disconcerted, I picked up a discarded Guardian and opened it at random. Under world news a paragraph leapt out at me: ‘Four hostages, employees of the French nuclear company Areva, have been kidnapped by a splinter group from the Niger Movement for Justice, a group of so-called Tuareg freedom-fighters.’ Tuareg: the word snagged my eye. It was foreign, unknown, yet somehow familiar. I had the sense I had come across it recently, and that it held some weighty significance, but I was unable to dredge up the relevant connection from my fuzzy memory. ‘A spokesman for the group said the four captured hostages were “in good health” and being held in the Aïr, the conflict zone in Niger.’ With sudden vivid force I remembered my mother talking about the huge reserves of uranium that had been discovered in what was then the French colony of Niger, a discovery that had enabled France to become a nuclear power. Ah yes, Niger. In my mind I heard her languorous accent playing over the two long, foreign syllables: Neee-jhair. My maternal grandfather had made much of his sizeable fortune there and elsewhere in the French colonies, mining. Or, as I had once put it to him in the midst of a furious teenage argument, ‘raping African resources’. My youthful political fervour had soon given way to more inward, personal angst, and then to the cowed and cautious conservatism that had taken me through my accountancy training and into my comfortable career. Feeling a brief shudder of shame, I read on.

  ‘Where once our families drove their livestock and pastured their camels, there is now nothing but a vast industrial waste land. No one asked our permission, no one paid us compensation. They stole our lands; they stole our livelihoods and our children’s inheritance. Our people are left destitute. These hostages will not be harmed; we want only to make our point and have the world listen to us. We do not want your nuclear bombs, we do not want your mines. All we want is to live free in our ancestral lands.’

  The article concluded by reminding readers how British prime minister Tony Blair had claimed in what later became known as ‘the dodgy dossier’ in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase from Niger huge quantities of uranium to create the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that formed a major part of the justification for the ‘pre-emptive’ attack on Iraq, and showed a small and rather indistinct map of the region. I frowned and examined the map, feeling a gnawing uneasiness in the back of my head. At last, unable to focus on the tiny print of the place names, I shook out the paper and riffled through to the arts pages. There, as if planted by a mischievous force determined to torment me, I found a photograph of a group of veiled men, their turbans wound as intricately and comprehensively as those of the men who populated my dreams. ‘Desert Blues Strike Gold’, the headline read, followed by an appreciative review for a new CD by a band of Tuareg musicians performing under the name of Tinariwen.

  Tuareg. I remembered where I had come across that word now. In my father’s description of the possible provenance for the amulet.

  My skin prickled all over.

  All day I had the sense of a low murmur in my head, as if someone was having a long conversation with a part of me I could not access, in another room, behind my back, just out of earshot, in a foreign language. Sometimes I found myself poring over a column of figures as if they had been inscribed in hieroglyphics or the Punic alphabet, unable to make head or tail of them.

  Back a
t the house, I fired up the laptop and searched out flights to Morocco. It was years since I’d been abroad. Fear of flying was just one part of the reason; there had been no one to go with, for Eve was only recently divorced. And Africa, that’d take ages, wouldn’t it?

  It’s closer than you think.

  It was as if the voice were exterior to me now, somewhere in the room. I shook my head and devoted myself to tracking down the best flights. Then, task accomplished, I opened the box and took out my father’s typed papers.

  Notes regarding the gravesite near Abalessa

  Abalessa (latitude 22°43'60N, longitude 6°1'0E, at an altitude of 3,000 ft) lies almost at the heart of the great desert. Terrain is rugged and rocky. When the site was first discovered by Byron Khun de Prorok in 1925, it would have been easily overlooked at first, appearing to be just one more confused jumble of stones, otherwise known as a redjem, such as are commonly found in the Sahara. The initial excavation revealed a large monument over 80 ft on its longer axis and 75 ft on the shorter, constructed using ancient techniques for drystone walling, the stones carefully selected and placed. The irregularity of the structure and the roughness of the style and masonry suggest Berber origins, not Roman, as has been suggested (see later notes).

  Inside the exterior walls is an antechamber and various chambers, in the largest of which the sepulchre was found.

  According to witnesses, the skeleton of the desert queen had been wrapped in red leather embellished with gold leaf. She lay with her knees bent towards her chest upon the decayed fragments of a wooden bier secured with braided cords of coloured leather and cloth. Her head had been covered by a white veil and three ostrich feathers; two emeralds hung from her earlobes, nine gold bracelets were upon one arm and eight silver bracelets on the other. Around her ankles, neck and waist were scattered beads of carnelian, agate and amazonite.

  From such details it was ascertained that the body was that of a woman of high birth. Professors Maurice Reygasse and Gautiers of the Ethnographical Museum believe this site to have contained the remains of the legendary queen Tin Hinan.

  Tin Hinan (lit. ‘She of the Tents’) is the founding mother and spiritual leader of the desert nomad people known to themselves as the Kel Tagelmust (‘People of the Veil’) or the Kel Tamacheq (‘Those Who Speak Tamacheq’). To the Arabs they are known as the Tuareg. Tuareg is an Arab term and according to some means ‘cast out by God’, since these nomad people fiercely resisted the Islamic invasion in the 8th century. According to their mythology, Tin Hinan came from the Berber region of the Tafilalt in the south of Morocco and walked alone, or with a single maidservant according to another version of the legend, a thousand miles across the desert to the Hoggar and there established her tribe. She was given the title Tamenokalt (m. Amenokal, f. takes the Berber ‘t’ beginning and end) and is known even to modern tribespeople as the Mother of Us All. Aristocratic Tuaregs claim to be able to trace their ancestry directly back to her.

  Found by de Prorok amongst the funerary items in the monument was a wooden bowl commonly used for camel’s milk. On its base was the impression of a gold coin bearing the head of the Emperor Constantine II (AD 337–340). The nature of the burial is incompatible with Muslim burial rites (Islam was introduced to the region by Arabs from the East c. the 8th century). There was also found a perfectly preserved clay lamp of common Roman design, well used and smoke-blackened. Experts have dated this style of lamp to between the 3rd and 4th centuries. Thus from these details we can with some confidence state that the gravesite is likely to date from the 4th century AD and is certainly contemporary with the later Roman Empire.

  The amulet we found at the site is similar to those tcherots worn as talismans by the men and women of the Tuareg to ward off various evils, but why it was overlooked by the 1925 excavators and then by those who followed in the 1930s or 1950s, I cannot imagine. We discovered it just inside the antechamber, lying on the surface and showing no trace of having been interred. Moreover, it bears inscriptions from the Adagh region, and the red carnelian discs are more recent than the carnelian beads found in the gravesite. On the rock wall above it we found an inscription, which I have copied below; but no one has been able to decipher it and the provenance of the object remains a mystery.

  Beneath this was a series of odd-looking symbols inscribed in blue ink.

  I took off the amulet and regarded it solemnly. Did I hold in my hand one of the grave-goods of a legendary queen; or was the mystery deeper still?

  7

  In her haste to escape the encampment and the wrath of Rhossi ag Bahedi, Mariata had been able to carry only one saddle with her to the camel enclosure: the one she had brought from her home in the Alhaggar. It was a beautiful thing passed down from her great-grandmother, made from leather and carved wood decorated with brass appliqué and copper nails. Sitting in it made her feel like the princess she considered herself to be. She didn’t want to offer it to the older woman, but forced herself, out of politeness.

  Rahma took one look at it and laughed. ‘You think I need that unwieldy old thing?’ She clicked her tongue till the mehari folded its legs, attached her sandals to its hobble rope, caught hold of the creature by its lower lip, threw a leg over its neck and settled herself in front of its hump, over the withers. She kept one leg folded under her as if in place of a saddle. She looked down to catch Mariata’s fleeting gaze of admiration. ‘My father only had girls; when times were hard, I went with the caravan.’

  Mariata looked at her own mehari dubiously. She had travelled all the way from the Alhaggar to the Aïr, but most of the time she had been sitting in a palanquin, as befitted a woman of her status.

  ‘Pull its head down,’ Rahma instructed her. Mariata did so and the well-trained beast sank to its knees. ‘Take your shoes off and keep them in your lap. Tap the right side of his neck to turn left and the left to turn right. Rest the soles of your feet against the curve of his neck so you can feel his movement. You can guide him like that as much as by using the reins. To make him trot, hit him on the rump – not too hard or he’ll bolt; or dig your heels into his neck; or both. If you want to stop, pull on his head rope. And if you want to make him sit down, just tap him smartly on the back of his head and hiss loudly. Ready?’

  Mariata twitched her camel’s head rope, but all it did was give a low bellow. ‘How do you make it start?’

  They rode all that night, down through steep river-cut gullies and rocky defiles, heading north and west. The moon shone out of a cloudless sky, outlining everything in silver. A jackal called and its mate responded, their cries shivering over the hills and down Mariata’s spine.

  At every night sound she turned her head, seeking for pursuers, but there were none. The Bazgan range rose up at their back, rugged and imposing; down below they could see where watercourses – some iridescent, others apparently dry – snaked across the grasslands to the south.

  ‘Down there,’ said Rahma, waving her left hand vaguely, ‘half a day’s ride away, lies Agadez, the gateway to the Ténéré.’

  The Ténéré: ‘the Emptiness’ in their tongue, or simply ‘the Desert’ – over a thousand miles of barren rock and sand. Even now Mariata’s father and brothers were tracking across it, moving along part of the ancient trade route between Fezzan and Egypt and the ancient Songhai Empire. For centuries caravans had ferried gold, ivory, cotton, leather and slaves through the Ténéré to the great civilizations at either end of the route, but the halcyon days were long gone: now the caravanners were reduced to trading dried vegetables and bags of millet for cones of salt and whatever meagre profit they could make once they had bargained hard with the Kanuri who ran the mines, and paid their fees to the men whose territory they crossed and from whose wells they drew water. Sometimes raiders attacked the traders; sometimes dust storms or treacherous quicksands – fesh-fesh – swallowed entire caravans, leaving only their bones to be found years later. Sometimes no trace was ever found of them at all.

  ‘Are we goi
ng into the Ténéré?’ Mariata asked. The idea filled her with a mixture of anticipation and disquiet. She realized for the first time now, out in the quiet night air, her body swaying to the rhythm of the camel’s strange gait, that she didn’t have the least idea where they were going. All she knew was what Rahma had told her: that she had walked for eight days to find her.

  Rahma laughed softly. ‘Good heavens, no!’

  She offered no more and they rode on in silence. Down out of the Aïr Plateau they came, into the wide oueds that gave out on to the floor of the valley below – shale-filled dried riverbeds in which the camels walked easily, their great pads crunching the loose stones underfoot. As the sun came up over the hills behind them, it cast long red rays across the landscape, filling the acacia trees with fire. But still there was no sign of Rhossi.

  As the land flattened out into a broad plain, Rahma smacked her camel and immediately it picked up its pace. She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Come on!’ she urged Mariata. ‘They are sure to be following us, given the value of the camels you stole; we must put as much distance between us and them as we can.’

  Mariata nervously tapped her camel on the rump, but all it did was to swing its great white head around and gaze at her with its huge, languid eyes, managing to look both bored and infinitely superior. ‘Please,’ she begged, digging her heels into it, ‘go faster.’

  For a day and more the world was green and grey, an endless succession of vegetation and stones; but gradually the green gave way to brown, and soon the vegetation was no more than scrub-brush and yellowed grasses. They crossed open ground consisting of nothing more than bare rock and expanses of pitch-black gravel, punctuated by thorn and tiger-bush, with a scatter of tamarisk where the water-table was high. The next day came the sands, wave upon wave of them, tawny and wind-sculpted.