Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  Neither I nor anyone else

  knows the Sahara.

  The last words of General Henri Laperrine, 1920

  Two can do together what is impossible for one.

  Arab proverb

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Foreword

  MARIANTONIETTA

  SID’AHMED

  MAFOUDH

  MOUKHTAR

  SIDI MOHAMMED

  UDUNGU

  MU’MIN

  JIBRIN

  WILDBEAST LAND

  BANDIT COUNTRY

  EDGE OF DARKNESS

  ADAM

  THE BELLY OF STONES

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  THIS IS THE DIGITAL REINCARNATION of Michael Asher’s conquest of the Sahara alongside his wife, Mariantonietta Peru. It is a book of two stories: their travel from Mauritania to Egypt by camel, and the parallel journey of their marriage. It carries readers through the vast lands of Africa long before the Arab Spring of 2011 threw the region into turmoil.

  You will find in it a record of life in the Sahara in the late 1980s and how it felt like to traverse the desert. For example, in Niger, which is photographed on the cover, Asher says, “The landscape was dreary: spiky trees, spiky grass, spiky rocks, grey stones, grey sand, undulating hills. The sun blazed down. It seemed that we were getting nowhere, marking time in the same spot. We were travelling through time but going forward not at all.”

  It is a story of endurance, patience, and love at its best and worst. Through this long journey, Michael and his wife discover themselves and become a part of the desert.

  For the digital edition, we have retained the original language, although certain elements of it may not apply to today’s politically correct landscape. We believe, however, that they are important to keep as part of that particular historical milieu. We did not include the print version’s photo section and index due to technical issues, which we intend to address in a subsequent edition. Other than this exclusion and minimal editing (to conform to our in-house style), we have remained true to the original published by Penguin Books in 1991.

  We hope you will enjoy the book as we have because Asher is a brilliant storyteller, a keen observer of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of his subject.

  Agatha Verdadero

  Publisher, Master Publishing

  December 2012

  Author’s Note

  As dialects vary considerably throughout the Sahara, I make no apology for standardising common names. The flowing shirt worn by most Saharan tribes in one form or other is referred to here as gandourah. The Moors call it dara’a, a word which few Westerners can pronounce correctly (this is probably why the French named it boubou, a word the natives never use and one which I detest). In the eastern Sahara, this garment is called a jallabiyya. I use the spelling girba for a waterskin in preference to the more common guerba, which bears no relation to its pronunciation in any dialect. I have no intention of getting bogged down in Saharan tribal names. It is sufficient to say that most names have plural masculine singular and feminine singular forms.’ for example, Haratin (plur.), Hartani (masc. sing.), Hartaniyya (fem. sing.). The principal nomadic groups of the Sahara are (from west to east).’ the Moors (who call themselves bidan or ‘whites’), the Tuareg, the Toubou (more correctly called Teda or Gor’an), and the Arabs. Nomadic tribes of the eastern Sahara have been labelled ‘Afro-Arabs’ by those who make a business out of labelling races. Their name for themselves is, simply, ‘Arabs’.

  For place names, I have mostly followed the map, except where a degree of anglicisation has made for simplicity. Thus ‘Ouadane’ appears as ‘Wadan’ and ‘Oualata’ as ‘Walata’. Nigérien refers always to the Niger Republic and never to the state of Nigerian, whose adjective is Nigerian. Finally, I have referred to ‘western’, ‘central’, and ‘eastern’ Sahara as integral parts of the great expanse of desert that lies between the Atlantic and the Nile. It was the custom in colonial times, and still is in some quarters, to believe that the ‘Sahara’ ends at the borders of the Sudan and Egypt, beyond which it is mysteriously transformed into the ‘Western Desert’ or the ‘Libyan Desert’. If anyone is in doubt, I can assure him or her, having walked and ridden by carriel every inch of the way, that the Great Desert is all in one piece.

  Foreword

  In April 1986, I travelled to Mauritania with my wife, Mariantonietta, to begin preparations for a journey across the Sahara desert, from west to east, by camel and on foot. Our route lay through Mali, Niger, Chad, the Sudan and Egypt, a distance of 4,500 miles. No Westerner had made such a journey before.

  Mariantonietta and I were no newcomers to Africa; we had both lived there for some years and spoke Arabic fluently. To each other, though, we were little more than strangers. When we arrived in Mauritania, we had been married for exactly five days. She, an Italian born on the island of Sardinia, and I, an Englishman, were from cultures as alien to each other, almost, as Saharan ways were to both of us.

  This book is the story of our journey across the world’s greatest desert by camel and on foot. It is also the story of a man and a woman from very different backgrounds who had come to terms with each other in a harsh environment and of how they managed, just, to survive.

  For six years, I had dreamed of crossing the Sahara from west to east by camel. Meanwhile, I had been living and travelling with desert nomads in the Sudan. In March 1985, I was in Khartoum, on my way back from a desert journey, when I received an unexpected message from the representative of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), asking me for advice on the use of camels in their aid project in the Red Sea hills.

  It was at UNICEF’S headquarters in Khartoum that I first set eyes on the woman who was to become my wife.

  Mariantonietta

  She was sitting behind a desk in the smallest office on the highest floor of the UNICEF building. Her appearance confirmed my worst fears.’ she was beautiful.

  Her face was square, precise, and Mediterranean, her perfect nose almost imperceptibly angled down. The lips, when closed, were the shape of a flattened-out heart. The page-boy-style hair swirled glossily when she moved her head. The best thing about her face was the eyes. They were enormous brown pools, partly hidden under enormous spectacles. The spectacles were strangely irritating. You felt like pulling them off to get a better look at the marvellous face.

  ‘So you’re the writer who’s an expert on camels!’ she said, looking me up and down through the giant spectacles. There was a hint of disapproval on her face as she took in my faded shirt, my jeans, and my battered flip-flops. I hid my feet under the desk instinctively as I sat down on the proffered chair. ‘Did it take you long to drive here?’ she asked. ‘The office is a bit far out, isn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t drive.’ I told her. ‘I haven’t got a car. I walked.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, pursing her lips. ‘Don’t you find it difficult to get around without a car?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been one for cars. Camels are more in my line.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said snootily, ‘but you can’t take a camel to the Hilton, can you? I mean, what do you do when you want to go out to dinner?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I told her. ‘And I’ve never been to the Hilton.’

  She looked down again at my jeans, probably thinking that I would never be allowed in the Hilton anyway. The nose was perfectly constructed for looking down, I decided.

  The telephone rang and I jumped. She spoke into it coolly while I looked around the room. It was crammed with books and pamphlets about UNICEF. An air conditioner blew an arctic gale in my face. On the
wall was a poster showing a cherubic African child wearing a UNICEF hat, and there was a black-and-white photo of a burly Latin American policeman immunising a little boy. From the outside came the insistent jingle of other telephones and the clack of typewriters.

  It was only when she put the phone down and stood up that I realised how small she was. From a distance, you might have mistaken her for a child. She excused herself and ran out of the room.

  She came back eventually, walking gracefully, as if trying to erase the childish impression given by her hasty departure. I watched her squeeze past the desk with admiration, attracted by the sleek, suntanned body. Yet I was repelled by the thought of how the tan had been acquired. I could imagine the yachts, the beach parties, and the cocktails. I could imagine tennis with the well-heeled boyfriend; I could see the Mercedes-Benz. The men in her life wore polished shoes and safari suits. They didn’t ride camels, I thought.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said as she sat down, ‘the representative told me to brief you about my work. Basically, I promote GOBI.’

  ‘The only Gobi I know is the desert,’ I said, grinning weakly.

  She frowned. ‘GOBI means Growth monitoring, Oral rehydration, Breast-feeding, and Immunisation,’ she lectured me. ‘It’s UNICEF’S masterplan for ridding the world’s children of all major problems by the end of the century.’

  ‘I see,’ I lied grimly, looking around for a way of escape. I was dying to get out of the office. I felt that I didn’t belong there, and I had been out of the company of women for so long that her proximity made me nervous. I asked a few desultory questions and she replied dreamily. Soon, she yawned and looked at her watch.

  Taking the hint, I said, ‘I’d better be going,’ and poised myself for the getaway. I stood up and offered my hand. Hers was very small, soft, and delicate. ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably see you in Port Sudan.’ I turned and marched towards the door. I didn’t make it. On the second step one of my flip-flops broke. The little plastic knob that held the strap in place must finally have worn through. In a moment it was hanging from my foot, making me stagger clumsily.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a voice said, ‘but isn’t your shoe broken?’

  I felt myself flushing. ‘It’s rather awkward,’ I stammered. ‘I’ve got nothing to fix it with.’

  Marinetta giggled. It was a fresh, childish giggle that seemed suddenly to change the atmosphere from icy-cool to warm. ‘I bet I can find something,’ she said, rummaging in an elegant handbag. She produced a small, blue pin-badge with a smiley face and the words ‘UNICEF is for children’ printed on one side. It did the trick. When I showed her the worn-out sole with ‘UNICEF is for children’ etched across it, she laughed delightedly. The laugh did it for me; it was a lovely laugh. ‘Don’t forget to give it back when you get a new pair!’ she giggled. It must have been precisely then that I fell in love with Mariantonietta Peru.

  The next time we met was in Port Sudan on the shores of the Red Sea. I was there assisting UNICEF with their camel project, and she had been sent to compile a photographic report of our progress. Photography, I discovered, was only one of her many talents. She looked ravishing.

  ‘So you bought a new pair of flip-flops!’ She smiled. ‘Now, where’s my badge?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s gone the way of the old flip-flops,’ I said. ‘But I want to make it up by inviting you out to dinner.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t go out to dinner,’ she said mischievously.

  ‘There are always exceptions,’ I told her. ‘How about it?’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  We ate at a small, open-air restaurant on the dockside, where they fried fish and grilled shish kebab. It was full of displaced Eritreans trying to find ships to America and foreign sailors with raucous voices. There were lights blinking out on the seaways and the honking of unseen ships coming in. The stars were out in their thousands, and the rich smell of the sea was everywhere.

  Marinetta told me that she was Italian, born on the island of Sardinia but based in Rome. Her father was a retired army general who had been captured at Tobruk and had spent five years in a British prison camp in India. Her mother was a teacher of English. She was an experienced photographer but preferred to call herself a linguist.

  She had studied Arabic, French, and English at the University of Rome and had perfected her Arabic in Tunis and in Cairo, where she had spent a year with an Egyptian family. She had been UNICEF’S information officer in Somalia for two years and had travelled for the organisation in Ethiopia and Kenya. Travel was a passion that she had inherited from her parents. She had been all over Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States. Despite my earlier misgivings, I was impressed.

  In turn, I talked about my life as an English teacher in the Sudan and how I had given it up to live full-time with the nomads. Now she seemed interested. ‘What about the future?’ she asked me later. ‘You can’t live in the desert forever.’

  ‘I’m planning something really big.’ I said. ‘I’m going to cross the entire Sahara desert from the Atlantic to the Nile, by camel.’ I wondered if she would think I was mad. Instead, she looked at me attentively. I explained that I had been fascinated by the Sahara since I had first seen it spreading out west from the banks of the Nile six years before. I said that I had dreamed of traversing the whole of that desert, all 3,000 miles of it, in one go and by camel. I explained that the trek would actually cover more than 4,000 miles, since a straight-line march would be impossible, and that it would mean crossing six of the world’s most arid countries, some of them unstable, one of them at war.

  Marinetta fell silent and I thought that my enthusiasm must have put her off. I sat back and lit my pipe. The restaurant was quiet now. Most of the sailors had gone. The Eritreans had gathered on the waterfront and were talking in soft, wistful voices and smoking cigarettes. Marinetta was looking at me with a dreamy, meditative air. Two flecks of light burned in the corners of her spectacles. Her face was smoothed by the lamplight and framed in the dark halo of her silky hair. ‘God, you’re so lucky, Maik!’ she said. ‘I wish I could do something big like that, something really exciting. Then they’d know that I’m tougher than I look.’

  We had dinner in the same place the following night. And the night after. And the night after that. The restaurant became a special place for us. No one else existed. The two of us seemed enough. We talked and talked. We talked about nomads, about the Sahara, about Africa, about the aid agencies, about photography.

  By day, we met and walked along the waterfront, under the parasols of the nim trees. We strolled through the streets, beneath the façades of the tall, Indian-style buildings with their verandahs and arched balconies. We laughed at the fat camels that wandered unperturbed among the hooting traffic. We watched the Beja tribesmen with their plumes of knotted hair. We scoured the market for big, red apples. We bought hooks and fishing lines and tried our luck in the harbour. Marinetta always caught fish, but I caught nothing.

  Before long, it seemed that she was waiting for me to do or say something, to make some move. Like a fool. I was terrified, still unable to believe my eyes. Why should a marvellous woman like Marinetta be interested in an eccentric like me? It was only the romantic setting, I thought; the sea and the stars. It was three weeks before I kissed her goodnight, clumsily, on the balcony of her borrowed flat. She seemed to like it. ‘Maik.’ she asked me, ‘are we having a relationship?’

  ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I do believe we are.’

  It was like all the romantic films I had ever seen, played simultaneously and all happening to me. I had spent six years in remote backwaters of the Sudan, where women were few and far between. Now, a quiet kind of madness had beset me. Our restaurant had become a sacred place. Those evenings, entranced by the flow of her syllables, the reflection of the lamplight in her eyes, the soothing glow of the stars on the inky water, are held in my memory like a magic spell. It was a long time since I had felt so tranquil.


  One afternoon, as we were walking, the air cooled suddenly and the sky misted over with slate-grey clouds. Marinetta grew excited. ‘It’s going to rain!’ she shouted. A moment later the rain fell, the drops splashing across the sand. We laughed like children. ‘It’s the beginning of a new lifer she cried. ‘I can feel it! The beginning of a new world!’

  Caught up in her excitement, I took her hands. I was about to blurt out that I wanted to marry her and be with her always. But the words, blocked by years of caution, refused to emerge. Right on cue, the rain stopped. The wind pushed the clouds away. The magic spell was broken.

  In Khartoum, Marinetta returned to her gloomy office and her GOBI. I settled down in my rented apartment to work on a book about the Great Drought and its effect on the Sudanese nomads. I still saw a great deal of her.

  She was restless, disillusioned with her job. ‘I can’t stand much more of this GOBI.’ she told me once. ‘I dread the meetings we have. So many people using long words. They use big words, but when you listen to what they are really saying, it’s crap. I don’t want to spend my life telling nomads about breast-feeding. I want to know what they have to teach me. I want to know what their lives are really like.’

  One evening, she said, ‘I was always so little. At school, they treated me like a baby—the teachers and the pupils. It was because I was so small. You know, they called me “Perina”. It means “little pear”. I’ve always wanted to do something really big so that they would know what the little pear can do.’

  She must have been a lonely, shy little girl, I thought, always wanting to sit at the back of the class and always being made to sit at the front. Her small size and strict Sardinian upbringing had made her different from the rest. As she grew older, her estrangement had grown into aloofness. She had despised the smoking and the drinking, the casual sex and the experiments with drugs. She had been a serious girl, top of the class in languages, sensitive and artistic, with a streak of relentless steel. It must have been a chagrin for all those other girls when she turned into a ravishing beauty.