Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  When the loading was complete, we would string the camels together and start walking. We walked for two or three hours into the swelter of the morning. The rift gusted behind us, tearing across the dunes and sharpening their knife-blade edges with a spindrift rasp of sand. The dust sandpapered our faces raw as we plodded on, tramping up the sides of great crescent dunes and skidding down with our camels in tow. The bulbous, orange sun of first light shrank into a glowering ball of white-hot fire. When we could walk no more, we stopped and mounted.

  At first, Marinetta was nervous of getting into the saddle. Her height was a disadvantage, for her legs couldn’t reach the camel’s shoulder to ensure a steady foothold. She would scramble up the equipment using it as a stepladder, while I held the bridle tensely, afraid that her camel, Gurfaf, would leap up despite my solid grip. The first day was a comedy. The great Gurfaf snorted as she settled herself into the saddle. Then he rose like a leviathan, holding his head high and bubbling with irritation. I handed her the bridle. ‘It seems a K,’ she said.

  Just then, Gurfaf started to wander off, as if he realised she was a novice. ‘Tug the headroper,’ I yelled at her.

  She tugged as sharply as she dared, making little ‘Hey! Hey!’ sounds, which were scarcely audible. ‘You’ve got to shout at the sod!’ I told her. ‘Let him know you’re the boss! Dig your heels in!’

  She tried to bounce her tiny feet on the camel’s shoulder. Her legs were an inch too short, and she managed only to kick against the saddle. This produced as much reaction from Gurfaf as did the flies buzzing around his muzzle. He veered haughtily in a circle and started mooching back towards Chinguetti. ‘Maik!’ she shouted. ‘Stop him!’

  ‘Pull his head round!’ I called. She strained vainly on the rope, and a moment later, she committed the worst of all camel-riding sins: she dropped the headrope. The camel was out of her control. She sat there, terrified, both hands frozen to the saddle while Gurfaf continued his meandering voyage home. I ran desperately to catch him, working around in a semi-circle and praying he would not bolt.

  ‘Thank God!’ she said, when I grasped the headrope.

  ‘Never, never, drop the headrope,’ I said.

  After that, I towed Gurfaf behind me. We would continue until noon, when we couched the camels and dumped the equipment. Then we would hobble them by the forelegs. This was always a dangerous job, since once, you had knelt down to twist the rope around his legs, the camel could give you a smashing kick with his back feet. Marinetta showed great aptitude for this job. She had no fear. She would crouch like a doll in the shadow of the huge animal, fitting a thong of rope about his ankles without a thought for the twitching legs and stamping hooves. When this was done, we built a shelter of blankets and sticks, which gave us a tiny pool of shade. It was generally too windy to cook, and instead, we made the Moorish drink zrig. It was a mixture of milk—made up from the powder we carried—sugar, and water. It was ideal food for these conditions, and we swallowed it in massive draughts from an enamel bowl, trying to finish it before it filled with grit.

  Each of these midday halts was a three-hour mini-hell. We could do nothing but curl up foetally in our few feet of shade, waiting for the time to pass. The rift beat over our prone bodies, sucking out the moisture we had just poured into them. It dehydrated the waterbags too, and often, we found no trees to hang them from, so that more water escaped by osmosis. To cap it all, one of them developed a leak. We watched our water dripping into the sand with dismay.

  When the sun began to wane, we fetched the camels. They were usually reluctant to be loaded. They would squirm as we hied to fit the headropes into their nose rings, roaring and spluttering and snapping their canine teeth threateningly. Roping difficult camels like these was a job for two. One person had to grab their nostrils—about the only thing that made them docile—while the other threaded the headrope carefully through the ring. Marinetta’s job was to thread the rope through. She would stand there, steeling herself, while I wrestled with the beast’s nostrils, shouting, ‘Come on! Come on!’ I would watch with admiration as she determinedly threaded the rope and knotted it.

  Afternoon was another passage through the barbecue grill of sun and wind. After sunset, we would halt and unload the camels again. By that time, both of us were exhausted, stiff from the riding and sore from the rubbing of the saddles. But there was no time for rest. The camels had to be fed their meal of grain. We measured it out and set it before them on a canvas sheet. They had poor manners. Always, they fought and lunged at each other, each trying to drive the other away from the food. Quite often, they would give each other nasty bites, and there would be a roar like thunder and an eruption of sand as the serpent-like necks twisted around themselves. Up would come the canvas sheet and the grain would be spilled in the sand.

  After they had eaten, it was time to look for firewood. Although this region was called Rag as Sder or ‘Plain of Trees’, most of the forest that had given it that name had long since disappeared, leaving only the occasional stump like a scarecrow in the dunes. It often took us half an hour to find wood. Then we had to struggle with the fire and the cooking. Mostly, we ate rice, though its standard was rarely higher than that of the rice we had eaten in Chinguetti.

  Only then would we lie down on our blankets and try to sleep. ‘I could have led such an easy life,’ Marinetta told me. ‘When I’m exhausted during the day, I think all this is a stupid waste of time. But when I arrive at the camp in the evening, it seems a small victory. Then I’m glad I did it.’

  We rarely got a good night’s sleep. We would be woken by a fresh outbreak of hostilities between the camels or by mice scuttling about after the tidbits of grain that had been spilled. It was the black beetles that Marinetta feared the most. Their scratching woke her from sleep, quivering. ‘They’re like monsters,’ she told me. ‘The noise makes me think they’re coming to get me!’

  It took us three days to reach Wadan, a fortress of stone buildings set on a cliff overlooking a wadi rich in palms. This oasis was one of the first places in the Sahara to have been reached by Europeans. The Portuguese had set up a trade mission here in the fifteenth century to tap the rich caravan trade between Morocco and Tombouctou. Now the oasis had a derelict look. More than half the stone houses were in ruins, and a hotel built to attract tourists had been shelled by the Polisario. Many local inhabitants had left for other parts. There was no caravan trade through Wadan now. Ours was probably the first azalai to visit the place in years.

  We spent a night in the wadi beneath the town, plagued by ragged children with their packets of arrow heads for sale. The next day, we pressed on towards Guelb Richat. We climbed out of the wadi and rode across a flat plain for hours, until we saw a sheer wall of silver-grey stone rising out of the desert. This was the Guelb. It looked like the shell of an extinct volcano, though there was no evidence of volcanic activity in the area. Monod believed that it was the crater of an enormous meteorite that had crashed here in prehistoric times.

  We remained at the crater for only a few hours and were back in the wadi by sunset the following day. As we climbed out of the depression the next morning, the rift hit us head-on. We wrapped our headcloths around us and plunged into the tide of dust. At midmorning, we mounted as usual and rode on in silence for two hours. The motion of the camels was almost hypnotic. We had no inclination to talk, which meant shouting over the wind. Occasionally, I heard Marinetta humming snatches of a tune. Suddenly, there was an ear-piercing roar followed by a shriek of ‘Maik! Maik!’ I whipped around just in time to see Gurfaf bucking like a mustang and Marinetta sailing out of the saddle as if in slow motion. A second later, she hit the sand, face down, with a resounding crump. A look of utter amazement was frozen on her face for a long instant. Then a waterbag hit the ground and split open, showering her with water. After it came a saddle bag, which burst and scattered utensils across the desert. I grabbed the headrope tightly, but by then the camel had lost all signs of fight. He regarded me cooll
y through big, black eyes.

  I dismounted and picked her up. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  She looked as if she was unable to decide whether to cry or laugh. ‘I think so.’ she said. What happened?’ ‘The saddle bag collapsed on one side. It must have given him a prick or something.’ There was a pause while we both remembered who had fixed the saddle bag that morning. Me.

  ‘Thank God it was sand, not rock!’ I said.

  As the days passed, we began to master the small problems of loading. Marinetta gained confidence with the camels despite her fall. Soon, she was hobbling and bridling as well as me and had even begun to grasp the intricacies of fire-making. The severe summer conditions, the blazing, merciless desert, began to weld us firmly into a tiny team.

  One evening, we were couching the camels in the half-light when I noticed that my map case was missing. The rifi was still howling across the landscape and quickly obliterating our tracks. ‘You unload the camels and feed them,’ I told Marinetta. ‘I’m going to look for those maps.’

  ‘Don’t go!’ she said, suddenly afraid. ‘You’ll never find your way back in this.’

  ‘We need those maps,’ I said and left her standing there in the near-darkness. I followed the faint traces of our path with torch and compass. The camp was soon out of sight behind me in the night. The trail went on and on. I cast around constantly with the torch beam, only half expecting to find the maps. The wind began to subside, as it usually did around sunset, and the going became easier. After almost half an hour, I saw the transparent case lying like a fallen leaf in the sand. I vowed that I would never let this happen again.

  I began to follow my own footprints back towards our camp. It was difficult going. Often, I lost the direction and had to backtrack. A few minutes later, I saw a flicker of flame as fragile as a candle in the night. ‘God!’ I thought. ‘She’s made a fire!’ It was the first time Marinetta had made a wood fire in conditions like these. It was like a beacon in the dead landscape, and I ran straight towards it. I found her standing by it, staring into the night. The camels had been unloaded, hobbled, and even fed.

  The first thing she did was hug me. ‘You were so long!’ she gasped.

  ‘I thought you were lost!’

  ‘What made you light a fire? I didn’t tell you to.’

  ‘I suddenly thought I might lose you,’ she said.

  As we neared Chinguetti, we were consumed by a creeping exhaustion, which increased daily with the constant battle against deep sand, the heat, and the relentless wind. On the afternoon of the ninth day, we saw the shadows of palm trees on the horizon. We dismounted, both sore from the saddles, and continued on foot. We struggled through the sand for what seemed like hours, but the palm trees were no nearer.

  Marinetta had to stop to relieve herself and told me there was blood in her urine. I hoped to God she hadn’t been injured internally by her fall. I saw that she was in pain and wondered how long she had been hiding it. Now we were desperate to reach those palms. The terrible heat and the wind had worn us down. My legs felt like jelly and we carried on at a snail’s pace. Every few minutes, Marinetta had to squat down. I could see agony written on her face. I started to believe that the palm groves were an illusion. The sun dropped lower. We had been in sight of the palms for four hours.

  Suddenly, the palm fronds were above us like feather plumes, and there were houses and people. There were children clapping their hands and shouting, ‘Nsara! Nsara with camels!’ It sounded like a welcome. Moments later, we were unloading outside our house. Neighbours poured out to meet us as if we were royalty. Sid’Ahmed was there, smiling and saying, ‘They said you’d never do it without a guide! But I told them Omar is a man! This is the work of men!’ And by the way he looked at Marinetta you could tell he was paying her the ultimate compliment. He was including her in that most elite of groups.

  It was a week before Marinetta recovered completely. The bleeding was replaced by full-blown dysentery, which sent her dashing miserably into the desert many times a day. Yet somehow, her resolution to complete the journey was stronger than ever. ‘It’s all changed somehow,’ she said. ‘Before, it all seemed unreal, the idea of crossing the Sahara from west to east. The Sahara was just something out there. But now I’ve lived through those conditions, anything seems possible.’

  We felt more alert, our senses sharpened, our milk-fat, city bodies honed down and ready for the challenge to come. There was a change in the way people treated us, too. They would stop us in the street and say, ‘Did you really go to Richat without a guide?’ The women looked at Marinetta with a new respect, if not with admiration. It was hard for us to settle down and wait the summer out, but we employed ourselves by learning Hassaniyya and prying into the workings of the township.

  One of Sid’Ahmed’s jobs, we discovered, was doling out sacks of wheat, marked ‘Gift of the People of the United States of America’, which piled up periodically in the town’s warehouses. The grain explained the numerous tents of nomads that circled around the perimeter of the oasis. The nomads had become dependent on the free supplies, since half of the livestock on which they had once, depended had been wiped out in the drought. It seemed a cruel irony that such people, notorious for their independence, were now unable to survive without help from a Christian country that most of them had never heard of.

  This was true of the nomads we visited outside the oasis. They lived in four pyramid-shaped tents of thick goat’s wool, pitched in the sand among some thorn scrub. There were some young men with their wives and children. The men were small and trim, with the confident step of desert people. Their faces were smudged with beard, and their hair grew in wild masses. There were also two friendly old women with features of wizened leather, clad only in wraps of blue cotton. They invited us into the shade, and a young woman with a baby made zrig in a wooden bowl. Then one of the men made tea. This was a solemn business. The Moors drank green China tea in tiny glasses. It was brewed in a miniature pot into which they dropped a chunk of sugar hacked from a two-kilo conical loaf. The tea was very strong and very sweet. You received only a mouthful at a time and you had to swig it down in a gulp so that someone else could use the glass. There were rarely enough glasses to go round. When you had finished, you were supposed to throw the glass back to the server with a twisting flick of the hand so that it landed by his knees. I was too unsure of my aim ever to attempt it. Your host served you three glasses of the stuff. Any less was an insult and any more excess.

  While we drank, I looked around at the tent. Streamers of brilliant light pierced the gloom from the seams in the roof, which was kept in place by massive V-shaped poles. The floor was covered by straw mats. On one side of the floor stood a frame with carved legs, which supported two nylon sacks of American grain. Around the opening were scattered some pack saddles and wooden funnels for milking, encrusted with milk stains. An old rifle leaned against a comer, rusty-looking and held together in places by surgical tape. Outside in the thornbush was a scrimmage of goats.

  ‘We don’t move far now,’ one of the men told us. ‘We used to go as far north as Bir Moghrein at one time. That was when we had camels. But most of them died in the drought, and we sold the rest off. You have to keep moving when you have camels. Now we have these goats and some date palms. It will be date harvest in a few weeks, then we’ll leave the tents here and move into our shelters in the palmeries.’

  ‘There’s nothing like the life of the desert, by God!’ one of the old crones cut in. ‘There was once, milk and meat, enough for you and your guests. The camels ate good grasses. We rode all over the desert, all the women of the family in litters. But that’s gone now. The old life is finished. Now we get this nsara grain in Chinguetti, two sacks a family.’

  The young men had been extras in Fort Saganne. They had earned more in a day than they normally earned in six months. They had formed part of the background of a million-dollar fantasy, while at the same time, the roots that tied them to their environ
ment were being severed. One day, I thought, they might become ‘museum nomads’, putting on shows for tourists, sad souvenirs of a way of life that was no more.

  A few days later, a Land Rover pulled up outside our house. Out climbed a lanky, fair-haired Westerner in shorts. He produced a camera, took two quick shots of the house, then jumped back in the Land Rover. As it pulled away, I saw the words ‘Oasis Tours’ painted on the outside. ‘It’s the tourists,’ Sid’Ahmed told me later, ‘They come here every winter. They stay in the town for a few days, then they go for a ride round the hills on camels. This year, I’m going to rent the house to them. They pay plenty of money.’ I thought of the rusty rifle leaning against the corner of the tent. You had to be a man in the time of raids.

  Sid’Ahmed was even more crestfallen next time I saw him. He told me that one of his female milch-camels was sick. ‘It’s that camel cake,’ he said. ‘It’s swollen her belly. Now she won’t eat.’ He asked me to help Mohammed hold her while he fed her some evil-smelling medicine in a kettle. It was a traditional mixture of oil and baobab seeds, used as an emetic. The idea was to purge the camel’s stomach of cake so that she could eat. She coughed and spat while he poured the disgusting stuff down her throat, but afterwards, there was no improvement. The following day, he called me to help again. This time, the baobab sauce had been replaced by ten bottles of Pepsi, which he proceeded to administer to the sick beast. A few minutes later, she groaned, and there was an eruption of dark-brown mess from her rear end. ‘You see!’ Sid’Ahmed said. The new ways are sometimes the best!’

  The summer dragged on. Our Hassaniyya improved with constant practice. In mid-July, we returned to Atar and bought another camel. Sid’Ahmed had advised us that three camels would be enough to take the two of us and a guide as far as Tombouctou. The new camel was of the small breed native to the Adrar region. It was named Li’shal because of its blond-coloured skin. We made a few more training trips up the wadis and across the plateau, but these short treks were no longer enough. We looked forward to getting out of the oasis and into the wilder world of the Sahara. Towards the end of July, Sid’Ahmed brought us a guide. He was called Mafoydh, and he belonged to a marabout tribe, the Laghlal.