The Salt Road

by Jane Johnson

  After a time, Taïb took his mobile out of the door’s side pocket, pressed in a number and started talking into it. The modern world reached its fingers everywhere, making a mockery of the word ‘wilderness’. As a product of such a world I should have found comfort in knowing that help was no more than a phone call away. I thought of stories about climbers in Everest’s death zone calling the rescue services; and now it seemed even the Sahara was not impregnable. Something inside me felt hollow with disappointment, as if my one and only experience of the desert was being stolen from me.

  At no apparent landmark, Taïb veered the Touareg off the track along which we had been crunching on to a barely discernible piste at right angles to it. Patches of sand started to appear between the endless scattered rocks and stones, and the vegetation became ever more sparse and spiky, trees giving way to tortured-looking shrubs and cacti. The land dipped down into a dry riverbed and then rose and the car spidered up the other side one tyre at a time. As we topped out on the rise I saw in the distance a tiny splash of green shimmering amidst the dun. The more I stared at it the more distant and indistinct it seemed to become, but Taïb aimed the car at it, and after what seemed an interminable time the spreading fronds of date palms showed themselves clearly against the merciless blue of the sky, the water below them a sheet of silver mirror reflecting back a perfect reversed image. In their miraculous shade, Taïb parked the Touareg and we helped Lallawa out. I watched as she steadied herself with one hand against the hot metal of the side panel and sniffed the air, her eyelids pressed tightly closed as if even the blurriest of images might spoil the acuity of her other senses. At last she turned to Taïb. ‘Zair Foukani,’ she said and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  ‘She knows where we are,’ he said to me. He looked shaken.

  I smiled, nodding. No great mystery to realizing we were at an oasis: we were in the shade and even I could probably smell the water if I tried.

  ‘No, she knows our exact position: she knows the name of the oasis and the direction we take from here to the old trade route, the salt road.’

  I felt myself shiver, despite the heat of the day.

  21

  We ate a basic but delicious meal of goat’s cheese and bread and almonds and dates, the sort of meal that thousands of travellers must have eaten here beneath the palms for centuries. Shading my eyes against the bright land beyond, I could easily imagine a caravan of camels silhouetted against the pale sky, wending their weary way out of the cauldron of the Sahara, relieved by the proximity of the end of the desert and the promise of shade and water. But it was not camels that appeared on the skyline as we were finishing our picnic, but what looked like an army jeep, the sort you see in black-and-white war movies, its khaki sides pitted and dented and covered in dust. It looked almost as if a part of the desert had grown wheels and was rolling towards us. Should we be concerned? I had read in the guidebook alarming stories about tourists attacked and robbed in the desert, their vehicles stolen, the passengers left for dead. I shot a look at Taïb, but he was on his feet, a little half-smile on his lips. Then he started to loop his turban cloth around his head.

  The jeep pulled in beside our vehicle and three men got out. They wore the same odd combination of East and West as Taïb: jeans and shirts topped by turbans; but where Taïb wore his loose around his face, all I could see of these men were their eyes, dark and glittering, out of a narrow slit in the fabric. Were they hiding their identities? I felt myself tense and turned to say something to Taïb, only to find that he now wore his own head-covering in a similar fashion. Two of the men came forward and greetings were exchanged: head nods and a sort of tentative handshake that seemed a mere touching of fingers and palms, very different from the effusive greetings I’d seen in the Berber villages. The third man hung back, keeping his distance. His eyes slid to me, then to Lallawa. He waited for a pause in the conversation, then addressed Taïb loudly and abruptly. Taïb gestured towards me in a dismissive manner – just a tourist – and, as if mollified, the man nodded and turned to take something out of the back of the jeep. By craning my neck I could see that it contained stacks of large olive jerrycans. Three of these were hefted out, money exchanged hands, and the third man counted it carefully while the other two helped Taïb refuel our vehicle. Then polite farewells were made, and the men got back into the jeep and drove away.

  ‘Well, that’s the most unusual petrol station I’ve ever visited,’ I said laughingly as we made our own way south from the oasis.

  ‘That’s how we do things here,’ Taïb said quietly. He had pulled the turban loose so that his nose and chin were visible again. He was smiling.

  I looked at him suspiciously. ‘Who were those men?’

  ‘It’s probably better not to ask.’

  I bridled. ‘I’d like to know.’ A thought occurred to me. ‘Smugglers?’

  His gaze slid from the road, rested briefly on me, then returned to the route ahead of us. ‘If you like.’

  ‘Where the hell do they get the fuel from?’

  He shrugged minutely, as if it was a stupid question, hardly worthy of an answer. ‘Algeria is one of the world’s major producers of oil. There are pipelines everywhere, and huge refineries. A few barrels go missing here and there …’

  Contraband fuel. Stealing it was probably a crime you’d get shot for in these parts. If they caught you. ‘Are we close to Algeria here, then?’ I asked after a while.

  ‘We’re in Algeria.’

  ‘What?’ I stared at him in amazement, remembering with a sudden frisson the mention of Abalessa in my father’s paper. ‘I didn’t see any border, no checkpoint or anything.’

  ‘You can’t cross legally between Morocco and Algeria. It’s been a closed border since ’94. In fact, relations have been strained between us ever since the War of the Sands in 1963.’

  ‘Sounds like something out of Tolkien!’

  He smiled faintly. ‘It probably had a lot more to do with oil than sand. But isn’t that always the way? There’s no war now, but it’s still a tense situation. Both sides try to police the border as best they can, but it’s eighteen hundred kilometres long: impossible to patrol without phenomenal manpower and at terrific expense. Both countries try to keep some sort of eye out from their respective army posts with high-powered telescopes and the like, but people slip past them every day: Polisario, trabandistes, refugees, nomads.’

  ‘What will they do to us if they find us?’ I asked weakly, images of filthy, rat-infested Algerian prison cells forming themselves insidiously in my mind. We hit a bump harder than expected and I yelped.

  ‘Sorry. But look around: this is the desert. It’s ridiculous to think anyone can police something as notional as a political line between one country and another in such terrain. How can anyone “own” territory like this? It’s a wild place: it belongs to all of us. Might as well put barbed-wire fences across the Atlantic and forbid the fish from crossing them.’

  I watched the sand begin to pile up higher and higher around us and wondered just what it was I’d got myself into here. But things were soon to get worse, as the piste all but disappeared. Taïb nipped smartly out of the Touareg and let some air out of each of the tyres, but still we glissaded this way and that as if driving through snow. We passed through a region in which a brittle crust of clay lay upon the surface, poked through here and there by spiky grasses, and then suddenly we crested a rise and found ourselves in a great static sea of dunes, wave upon tawny wave of them stretching away into infinity.

  I gasped, it was so beautiful. That was the word that came into my mind. Not empty, or deadly, or terrifying, but beautiful. When you come from a city, emptiness is beautiful. And there was something elegant about the endless replication of all those sweeps and curves and folds. My eyes followed the graceful lines and for some reason I found the panic in my brain receding, soothed by the reiteration of similar forms, by the alternating bands of light and shadow, by the clean delineation between one sharply d
rawn dune and the next. The repeating patterns distracted me for a moment from the knowledge that amidst all that glorious space desolation and death lay in wait for the unwary and unprepared, and very possibly for us. It seemed quite extraordinary that in the space of barely six hours we should have passed from the relative civilization of the Berber villages, with their houses and shops, schools and tarmacked roads, to this, and I said as much to Taïb.

  ‘Eight hours in a quat’ quat’, but over a week by camel or on foot.’

  ‘No, really?’ I whistled. And what a walk it would be, what a feat of endurance, knowledge and determination. And yet we were still only on the northern fringes of the world’s greatest desert. It was impossible to imagine how the caravan traders who had crossed the whole desert, bringing gold and ivory, salt and ostrich feathers, had managed to survive in such a place. It was a mighty achievement, by heroically hardy men. Then I remembered that gold and ivory and salt and bird feathers were not their only trade goods, and that they had also brought with them from the sub-Saharan states thousands of slaves.

  I turned to look at Lallawa and found her looking right back at me.

  ‘Bîdd!’ she said suddenly, and Taïb put his foot on the brake and pumped it gently till we slid to a halt. Concerned, he turned and asked Lallawa something and she answered him swiftly. He asked another question and this time the response came back fast and furious. It sounded as if she might be in need of an urgent toilet stop and inwardly I groaned, then chided myself for my selfishness, released my seat belt and opened my door. After the air conditioning the change in temperature was shocking, and within seconds it felt as if the hairs in my nostrils were crisping. The sun was a hammer on my head. I helped Lallawa out into the furnace and winced as I put my weight on my damaged ankle. She stood there, swaying slightly, her face turned up to the sky, her eyes closed and the sunlight glittering on her jewellery and bringing out the oily gleam of the indigo cloth. Then she started to move forward. Immediately, I put an arm around her waist for support, but she batted me away. ‘Oho, oho!’

  One foot shuffling in front of the other, the sand riding up in ridges over her leather slippers, she started to walk: not like a blind woman, with her arms out for balance or to ward off obstacles, but like someone trudging through an Antarctic storm, with great difficulty and against all the odds.

  I made to go after her, but Taïb caught me by the arm. ‘Let her be. She is determined to do this. She will not fall, and even if she does the ground is not hard. Let her do this for herself: she wishes it.’

  And so we watched her slow progress from a safe distance until suddenly she sank to her knees. I ran towards her, thinking she had collapsed, but at that moment she started to sing, an ethereal warble that rose into the air like birdsong, and out of nowhere the image of the sun-drenched sparrows came back to me, their dull feathers filled with golden light; the hairs rose on the back of my neck.

  The inadan say that all things have their time

  The beetles that creep, the bird that flies

  The flowers that bloom when the rains come

  The female camel whose calving days are done.

  My days now are as dark as my nights

  The tinad says we begin and end in darkness

  In darkness I come to you now, spirits of the wild

  You who have waited patiently for me

  I have heard you calling me in the night and on the wind.

  The time of butter and dates is now long gone

  And my days have become as dark as my nights

  The sun has gone down like a fire in the west

  The time has come for me to take the azalay,

  To follow the long, hard salt road to my rest.

  Were these the words of the song, or were they just words I heard in my own head as she sang? To this day I don’t know; all I do know is that as the last notes died away, I found that I was gripping my amulet so hard that its edges left red indentations in my palm.

  When I looked towards Taïb, I saw there were tears rolling down his cheeks. He made no attempt to stop or hide them: they fell, making dark patches on the folds of the turban beneath his chin, and when I turned back I saw that Lallawa had lain down in the sand.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ I whispered, but he didn’t answer.

  Instead he walked over, knelt beside her and took her hand. I heard quiet words exchanged, and then he rose and went past me to the car. When he came back it was with a bundle of white cloth under his arm. He gestured for me to sit down on the sand and then sat down beside me with the white fabric draped over his knee and stared out into space as if waiting for something.

  Overhead the sun beat down, the sky becoming almost white with its heat, the sea of sands beneath it a shifting palette of grey. The blood beating in my ears seemed to be the only sound in the world. I picked up a handful of sand, so hot that it burned the tender places where the amulet had left its mark, and let it run through my fingers. A million tiny grains, each one worn down from a boulder, deposited here by desert winds in a mysterious process that had taken millennia. As if time had slowed almost to a stop, I watched each grain fall and merge with the billions beneath it, picked up another handful, let it drain. The action became addictive, obsessive, the repetition somehow necessary to keep the panic I could feel rising inside me safely at bay.

  After an unknowable time something snagged my peripheral vision. It was a long-legged black beetle, skittering across the ground like a waterboatman flicking its way across the surface tension of a pond. I watched as it set about climbing a ridge of soft sand, sand that fell away beneath even its balletic feet. Up it went; back down it came. Up, down. I found myself willing it on, as if the power of the thought I trained upon it might make a difference. Eventually, it tried another angle up the ridge, and persistence carried it over the edge and out of sight, leaving behind it only a series of hieroglyphic tracks in the sand.

  How long we waited, or how Taïb knew when the waiting was over, I have no idea, but one moment he was sitting as still as a stone and the next he had uncoiled his long limbs, got to his feet and gone to the old woman. He stared down at her for a long moment, saying nothing, and I knew from his stillness that Lallawa was dead.

  My heart began to beat hard, but what had I been expecting? Ever since we had left Tiouada this had been the sure and final outcome of our journey, had it not? The twenty-first-century part of me – the Isabelle who worked in the City of London and obeyed the rules imposed upon me there, who wore a professional uniform and turned away from the raw nature of the world – was appalled that I could have allowed such a thing to happen, that I had not demanded that Taïb simply bundle Lallawa back into the car, albeit against her will, and drive her to the nearest hospital. But the old, wild part of me rose up exultant at the old woman’s courage and dignity and envied her the serenity of her passing. I walked over to Taïb and looked down at Lallawa’s dead body. Her expression was beatific, her eyes closed, her mouth curved up in a smile. Her amulets, necklaces, bracelets and earrings all glinted in the sun.

  ‘Here,’ Taïb said. ‘Help me undress her.’

  I stared at him. ‘What?’

  ‘We must wash the body.’

  I stared around us. Yes, just as I thought: we were in the Sahara. ‘There’s no water,’ I said stupidly.

  He sighed. ‘Just help me undress her.’

  I had never seen, let alone touched, a dead person before. Some squeamish, superstitious part of me was repelled by the very idea, but Taïb fixed me with a stern glare. ‘I can’t do it on my own, and in our tradition it should be a woman who does this for Lallawa. You’re not in London now, you know: you have to stop thinking like a Londoner.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘OK.’

  Together we carefully unwrapped Lallawa from her complex clothing and laid her pieces of jewellery aside. When she was nearly naked, Taïb stood up. ‘It would be considered improper for me to continue now, so I will tell you what you must do. I kn
ow it is hard for you, but, Isabelle, remember you are doing this for Lallawa, you are honouring her memory and our traditions. First you must rinse the interior of her mouth. I will bring you some water from the car.’

  He brought me the two-litre plastic bottle of mineral water he had given me in Tafraout, back there in relative civilization, where it was possible to buy things and no one talked about burying dead slaves in the desert. There was not a lot left; enough, I supposed, to rinse out a dead person’s mouth. I took the bottle from him, steeled myself and put my hand gently on the old woman’s face. Rigor had not yet set in, and she was still warm, though that might have been from the sun. Touching her did not immediately give me the shock of disgust I had been expecting, but it was not long in coming. I opened her mouth and found myself looking into a toothless cave, the tongue grey and fallen backwards. Trying to close off my imagination, I poured water into her mouth, then shut my eyes and ran my fingers around the inside. It felt alternatively slick and slightly sticky, and there were hard protuberances at intervals like rocks in a sea. At last I tilted her head, and the water ran out and dribbled away into the sand.

  ‘Now wet your hand and wash her face three times.’

  I did as I was told. By the third time it was easier. I washed the top of her head, feeling her braids coarse and dry and springy beneath my fingers.