The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  I stared at him, taking all this in. How unimaginable to have been a slave in this day and age, to have been forcibly uprooted from your home and family, to have been carried off and sold like merchandise. It was hard to believe that a woman who had suffered this fate should exist in this, the twenty-first, century; that she should be fast asleep in the back of the car in which I now sat. The concept was impossible to assimilate, let alone justify, no matter how easily Taïb spoke of it. ‘And just when did this sort of thing, this slavery, come to an end?’ I tried and failed to keep the outrage out of my voice.

  After a long pause, Taïb said, ‘Well, it varied. The Tuareg are a people without boundaries, so traditionally they have not been subject to any form of central government or law, only to their tribal chiefs and the leaders of a regional drum-group. And you have to remember that much of North and West Africa was until quite recently subject to colonial control, mainly by the French. The colonials largely turned a blind eye towards slavery, simply didn’t address the issue. It wasn’t until the individual countries won their independence from colonialism in the sixties that slavery was formally prohibited and the Tuareg way of life was dismantled, often violently.’

  ‘And how do you feel about this part of your heritage?’ I asked, curious.

  He shot me a look. ‘How do you feel about your heritage? With a French mother and a British father I would imagine you must have your own share of slave-owning forebears.’

  This didn’t seem entirely fair, but I couldn’t think of a useful rebuttal, and so for a while we drove in silence through the dusty vistas, past towers of crumbling rock and dried-up riverbeds bordered by scrubby vegetation and the occasional shocking burst of green oleander or palm. The few scattered settlements we passed were half-hearted affairs: squat, single-storey adobe buildings of the same dull red-brown as the soil out of which they rose. The further south we went, the more rudimentary these hamlets became, the higher the incidence of bare breeze-block, as if no one could raise the optimism or the energy to complete the buildings with render and paint. Man was losing the battle with the natural environment here, his influence losing traction, slipping backwards; for several kilometres we did not even pass another vehicle.

  Clouds of dust swirled in the air outside; even with the air conditioning on I could smell it, spicy and musty, clogging the hairs of my nostrils; feel it coating the inside of my mouth and settling heavily at the top of my lungs. Dusty flatlands gave way to a rugged lunar landscape of barren peaks and jagged outcrops of jutting slate, all stabbing at an angle into the hard ground like foundered ships in a sea of rock, bringing to mind, despite the different colour values and environment, the north Devon coast at Hartland and Sharpnose where I’d climbed one summer and refused, superstitiously, to return to. The area had a grim, forbidding air to it, even on a sunny day. It was a coastline haunted by shipwrecks and drownings, a place that had long been seasoned by death and disaster. I’d had the same sensation there that I had here: that we were intruders in a place where the natural world didn’t want us to be, and that it had made itself ugly and unwelcoming in a determined effort to keep us out. I was still turning over this Gothic notion in my mind when Taïb said suddenly, ‘Look!’

  He brought the car to a halt just in time for me to see an enormously bushy-tailed fox propelling itself in great galvanic bursts of adrenalin-fuelled energy up an almost-sheer rock face, terrified by the noisy thunder of our approach.

  I watched it in amazement and admiration: admiration for its flamboyant brush and thick, glossy coat of rust and black; amazement that a thing so vital and beautiful could exist in this dusty cauldron of a place. It seemed a minor miracle of life in the midst of such deadness and I said so to Taïb.

  He snorted. ‘Of course there are animals here! Did you think that just because you did not see them they did not exist, or that because there are no people to be seen there’s no living thing in this zone? This fox lives here because there are rabbits to hunt; the rabbits are here because there are tender plants and good burrows to be had amongst the boulders. Keep watching and you’ll see hawks and owls too. And when the sun goes down you’ll hear jackals and wild boar. Herds of gazelle pass through these valleys on their way to their grazing grounds in the north. There is life everywhere, as you’ll see, even in the depths of the desert.’

  ‘And what sort of fox was that? I’ve never seen one with such a bushy tail, or with such a dark coat.’

  He looked at me oddly. ‘It was just a fox,’ he said.

  A few minutes later a white-tailed black bird jinked low across the ground in front of the car and vanished into the branches of a thorny tree. ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  ‘The tree’s an acacia. The bird? I have no idea.’

  ‘I thought you knew everything about the wild world,’ I teased, and watched him bridle.

  ‘Our people don’t share the European mania for naming and categorizing,’ he chided me. ‘You think that just because you can give something a name you know something about it; but if I told you its name, what more would you know about it? Nothing essential about its nature, nothing important at all: just an artificial word some man has randomly attached to the creature that won’t make it fly any better or produce more young. It is another form of colonialism, this naming of our world.’

  This stung me. ‘Look, it wasn’t me who colonized your wretched country! I didn’t even like my French family.’ I saw his lips twitch and realized I had just swallowed the bait.

  ‘So, Isabelle, tell me about your family, your childhood.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ I said primly.

  ‘What, you will punish me now for being sharp with you?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s just … well, there’s not much to say.’

  ‘That’s the saddest thing in the world to say about your childhood. Can you really dismiss it so easily?’

  ‘I was a different person then.’

  ‘How can that be? When I look back at who I was at the age of four, then nine, or fifteen, I can see that I am still the same person now as I was then – whether I am walking the streets of Paris or in the Tafraout souq. Nothing has greatly changed who I am. I have just learnt more lessons about life, about other people, and myself. But I hope I haven’t lost the essential innocence or joy of the boy I was back then.’

  I sat quietly, thinking about this, envying him such simplicity, such clarity in his life. Could I remember my four-year-old self? I could, if I tried, quite clearly – little Izzy, always out in the garden, making things: castles and hides and daisy chains and wormeries and nests for birds who never used them. I smiled, but the memory was tinged with sadness, for I was not that Izzy any more. ‘Tell me about your childhood,’ I said instead, deflecting the awkward subject. And so we drove through endless wastes of fractured rock and low scarps and black pyramidal hills rising mistily through the dust-filled air, while Lallawa snored softly on the back seat and Taïb told me tales from his youth. How he had been the leader of a band of boys who ran riot through the town, stealing fruit from the orchards, playing war-games amongst the rocks, creeping into the donkey-park on market day and letting loose all the hobbled donkeys, driving them into the hills so that all the poor folk returning with their sacks of shopping from the souq found their transport home to the outlying villages milling around in noisy confusion. How they would run off into the mountains with whatever food they could cadge or steal. It had one day been Taïb’s task to bring a chicken as a dare, and so he had sneaked out to where the neighbours kept their livestock and made off with a struggling bird stuffed down inside his robe. How they had got up into the mountains and prepared to butcher the poor thing only to find their only penknife so blunt that even sawing at the chicken’s neck caused no harm but a great deal of squawking, and how in the end the chicken had wrestled itself free and gone staggering off into the wilds with its neck at a peculiar angle and its wings shedding feathers as it ran, and they had all laughed so much no one had
thought to go after it. ‘I like to think it’s still out there somewhere,’ Taïb said, his black eyes gleaming, ‘having founded a dynasty of wrench-necked, rugged mountain chickens.’

  On the road signposted to Akka, Lallawa awoke suddenly. I watched her hunch closer to the window and peer out myopically, her hand cupped against the glass and her breath frosting the pane. She said something to Taïb and he pulled the car to a halt and handed me a box of paper tissues with the word ‘Beauty’ and a coy-looking Arab princess with a beaded headpiece, kohled eyes and a discernible moustache emblazoned across it. ‘She needs to … you know.’

  Lallawa and I managed this pit-stop with a remarkable degree of dignity, despite my injured ankle and her age and infirmity and apparent bulk. In fact, she was very frail beneath the acres of cloth: I could feel the knit and jut of her bones, the slack flesh and wasted muscles in my grasp as I helped her back to the car, and my misgivings began to surface again. I glanced across at Taïb as he made Lallawa comfortable, but he appeared to be sharing some private joke with her and was not looking at me. Seeing him with his eyes downcast and the smile-lines etching his cheeks, with all his attention focused on Lallawa, I realized with a sudden shock how attractive he was – not just physically, with his strong-boned face and tall, spare frame, but in the way he engaged with the old lady: with a genuine warmth and open-heartedness that made my concerns seem petty and selfish.

  We drove for another half an hour before Taïb swung the vehicle off the road to a lookout spot, and we gazed out over the edge of a huge escarpment at the most amazing vista. Directly below, a series of oases burst out of the red and dusty ground in vibrant emerald-green; beyond these the landscape flattened out and stretched into infinity: a never-ending blanket of rock and sand spread across the world.

  ‘South of here is the gold mine at Akka, and beyond that, the Sahara.’ Taïb shaded his eyes, then added casually, ‘The gold mine is one of the biggest in Africa.’

  I watched as Lallawa made a face and touched one of her amulets.

  ‘She heard the word “Akka”,’ Taïb said with a smile, seeing my expression. ‘Not so deaf after all. And she knows the legend.’

  ‘The legend?’

  ‘When gold was first found in this part of Morocco, people went crazy. They gave up their wives, their children, just to search for gold; they spent every day and night digging and digging. They were possessed by greed; or by the djenoun. Seeing this, God sent a great flood out across the land, followed by a drought and a plague of locusts, to teach them the value of the things on which life depends. Gold is unlucky, in our culture. Wealth brings nothing but unhappiness, exploitation and death.’

  ‘I’d have thought poverty brings with it a good deal more death and unhappiness than a bit of gold,’ I said acidly.

  ‘Men never die for lack of gold,’ he said softly. ‘But many die in the pursuit of it; and many more are trampled underfoot. In my experience, the rich never become rich by honest means.’

  ‘So what are you doing in Paris, then, rather than staying here and marrying Habiba?’ I asked, stung. ‘Trading your culture’s artefacts, no doubt for hugely inflated prices, to rich clients?’

  The look he gave me was so direct that it felt tangible. ‘The money I make from trading Tuareg goods goes back into the Tuareg economy. With the proceeds we have established a travelling school so that nomad children can learn the skills they need to negotiate the modern world and pass their knowledge on to their children. They are learning the history of their culture, and passing on the stories they hear from their grandparents, and recording the oral tradition in written form, for posterity. We also fund a travelling doctor who visits the encampments.’

  I flushed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And what do you do, Isabelle, when you’re not on holiday, falling off mountains?’

  As I started to explain the nature of being a corporate tax accountant, I found myself gradually overcome with an emotion I had never once associated with my work before: a profound and all-encompassing sense of shame. I had prided myself on my much envied portfolio of blue-chip clients, on my knowledge of tax loopholes and procedures, on my diligence and cunning. As I explained the job I had done for the best part of twenty years to Taïb, I felt progressively disgusted, with myself and with the system in which I had played a part. ‘And so, you see, that’s what I do,’ I said at last, wearily. ‘I help fat cats avoid paying the taxes to the government that would make life better for the rest of the population, the money that would pay for more benefits for the poor, and heating for the old, and better hospitals and schools …’

  ‘Fat cats?’ he interrupted. In the heat of my discourse I’d slipped into franglais, dropping an English phrase in where I didn’t know the French equivalent.

  ‘Les gros chats,’ I translated, which made him even more confused. I tried to explain further until at last he said, ‘Ah, les rats dans un fromage! The greedy ones who leave nothing for the rest.’

  Like rats in cheese. I nodded glumly. Yes, that described them well, those greedy, exploitative, immoral corporations with whom I dealt. I realized that for some time I must have been harbouring a deep-seated resentment of all those sly, complacent businessmen in their Savile Row suits and private-dentist smiles who were disgorged at our offices from sleek, chauffeured limousines; whose carbon footprints were the size of the Arctic; whose faceless global companies were cheerfully mining, drilling up and shipping out Third World countries’ mineral resources, and whose social consciences had been clinically excised in a private hospital at birth. All those captains of industry who employed me, for a handsome salary and bonuses that were several hundred times the average national wage, to find all those slippery loopholes in the tax law, of burying their profits in ‘research’ and other tax-saving devices. I’d only been away from it all for a few weeks, and suddenly I found myself wondering whether I could ever go back to it … The realization of this made me feel deeply uncomfortable.

  We drove past dusty tarpaulin-covered trucks on and on through kilometres and kilometres of dry, unrelenting scenery, through the ugly modern town of Tata and the checkpoint at Tissint where Taïb spent several fraught minutes in a police hut proving his ownership of the vehicle, showing my passport and his and Lallawa’s national identity cards, explaining our route and answering many apparently irrelevant questions. Just before Foum-Zguid, Taïb swung the Touareg off the road on to an unsignposted and unmetalled track. Soon the car was made to prove its mettle as he switched into four-wheel drive to negotiate the boulders and craters. Dust flew everywhere. On we went, juddering over the rutted ground until every tooth in my head was rattling and I was blessing the fact that I was small-breasted and supported by a good underwired bra. I reached back and took Lallawa’s hand. ‘La bes?’ I asked her, being one of the few phrases I had managed to pick up, and ‘La bes,’ she answered, grinning like a loon. ‘La bes, la bes.’

  After one particularly violent passage of track I looked at Taïb with some concern. ‘Does this go on for long, or is it a shortcut to a better road?’

  He shot me a glance. ‘Did you think there would be a motorway into the desert?’

  ‘Well, no, but …’ I felt rather stupid, and shut up.

  ‘Don’t worry, I know the piste well, but it’s certainly not one for tourists.’

  ‘Do people ever take it and get lost, or break down?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said cheerfully. ‘All the time. They think the Sahara’s some sort of adventure playground. It’s good for them to learn it’s not.’

  ‘What happens to them, then?’

  He kept his eyes trained on the track ahead, but I saw his grin widen wolfishly. ‘Have you not seen the bones scattered around?’ He pointed out to the left, where a scrubby-looking tree had broken through the crust of rock and compacted sand. At its base lay a scatter of …

  ‘Oh …’ I stared in horror, then realized belatedly I was looking at a fall of sun-bleached sticks.

&nb
sp; Taïb laughed silently to himself for several minutes. Chastened, I watched him expertly change through the gear modes, noting despite myself the flex of his muscled forearm, the sleek brown skin beneath the fine curling black hairs, and felt a thoroughly unexpected shiver of pleasure run through me. Normally I hated to be driven, hated to be in someone else’s control. What was happening to me? Was it Taïb who was effecting this change in me, with his effortless confidence and capability, a man unfazed, it seemed, by anything, least of all carting a dying woman and a lame foreign tourist into the Sahara; or was there something innate within me that was changing its nature?

  I felt abruptly like the landscape through which we passed: in a state of transition, caught between control and powerlessness, civilization and the wilderness; the known and the unknown.

  But a moment later my meditation was jolted as I noticed the fuel gauge arrow had slipped into the red. ‘Taïb! We’re nearly out of fuel!’

  He flicked a glance towards me, unmoved by my panic. ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, hadn’t we better turn around and head back to get some?’

  ‘No need.’

  No need? Were we going to run on air; or walk? I stared out into the horrible stony wilderness that now stretched all around us. It was all but featureless in every direction. Behind us the plateau from which we had come rose as a distant blue haze; to either side stone-strewn terrain broken by the odd outcrop of bare rock; ahead, flat, raw ground merging with the pale sky in a shimmer of heat-haze. I stared out across the dead and stony plain, searching for a point of interest, a speck of life, but nothing met my gaze except endless rock and dust. It looked as if a vast sea had millennia ago been rolled back, leaving its bed naked beneath the sun’s burning eye. And all the time the needle on the fuel gauge fell lower and lower.