Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

  As we loaded the camels, a car went by. The Italians from Genoa were moving on, but they weren’t crossing Ténéré. We learned later that they had been sent back to Djanet. Perhaps that was why they drove past staring in front of them. They didn’t even wave goodbye.

  Before leaving the oasis, we had been told to report to the chief of gendarmes, who wanted to check our agreement with the guide and to note down our official departure time. In his narrow office, Mu’min and I stood before his desk while he read the contract out loud. Suddenly, Mu’min scowled and said, ‘What about my return fare?’

  ‘I don’t pay return fares,’ I answered him.

  The sour, broken-toothed face screwed up as he glared at me. ‘That’s not right! A guide should always have the return fare!’

  ‘You should have mentioned it sooner,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ the chief agreed. ‘You should have mentioned it when you made the contract.’

  ‘If you’ve changed your mind, I’ll have the money back,’ I told Mu’min.

  He felt in his pocket and brought out the wad of francs I had paid him as an advance. As I put out my hand to take them, a more thoughtful expression came over his face. He looked at the notes, then stuffed them back into his pocket. ‘Let’s go!’ he said.

  We camped an hour outside Bilma, on the edge of the oasis.

  Mu’min told me to watch the camels carefully when they grazed. ‘If they get into any cultivation, there’s a fine of 5,000 francs to pay,’ he said.

  In the dusk, he erected a neat little shelter from his windbreaks and retired into it, cloaked and blanketed like a queen ant. After we had eaten, he told me that this would be the nineteenth time he had been to N’Guigmi by camel. In the past, he had worked as a caravaneer, taking salt and dates as far as Yoruba in Nigeria, a thirty-day trek. ‘That trade finished ten years ago,’ he said. ‘It all goes by lorry now.’ He didn’t much like the Yoruba anyway. He didn’t like the Tuareg either. He spoke Toubou, but he hated the Toubou. And he had worked in Libya and learned Arabic, but he had no sympathy with the Arabs. You could tell that if we hadn’t been there, the list would have included Westerners as well. Mu’min didn’t like anyone but the Beriberi. They were a minority in the desert, tending palm trees and digging salt. They were neither slaves nor Haratin, he told me; they had once, been a famous warrior tribe. Properly called the Kanouri, they were closely related to the Bornu of Lake Chad, who had once, ruled all this region. In N’Guigmi, there were plenty of Beriberi, Mu’min said. Mu’min seemed to like N’Guigmi.

  Later, he went back into his shelter and switched on the radio. It was the first time we had heard a radio in the Sahara. The voice of a far-off stranger, drifting unseen into our camp, seemed an intrusion. After a few moments, Mu’min said, ‘There’s big fighting over in Chad. Habri’s men are driving the Libyans out of Tibesti. Oh, there’s big trouble in Tibesti now!’ For a short time, we mulled over the news, not knowing if it was good or bad for us. The machinations of the greater world outside our tiny camp seemed suddenly awesome and incomprehensible. Then our thoughts turned to the next day’s journey and our next source of water. Only when I came to write up my diary did I realise that it was New Year’s Eve.

  We had been in the Sahara eight months. We had been married two-thirds of a year. It seemed only yesterday that we had left Chinguetti with Mafoudh. It seemed a century ago. The desert distorted time. Time was day into night, sunrise, sunset, the passing of the planets, the silent theatre of the stars. Time was birth, childhood, thirst and hunger, struggle, war, old age, death. Survival. On and on to another horizon while man survived, forever changing, forever the same.

  The next morning, we crossed the first dune chain of the Grand Erg of Bilma. The dunes were lumps of sand 60 feet high, placed at regular intervals and joined by sandy ridges. As we laboured up the windward slope, Marinetta took her camera and ran about taking shots. Mu’min and I engineered the caravan gingerly down the leeward side. Marinetta was nowhere in sight. We halted the camels and waited. Five minutes passed. I was itching to get moving, and the camels were fidgeting under their heavy loads. In another five minutes, Marinetta appeared at the top of the dune. She had removed her thick jacket and her headcloth and tied them round her waist. I watched as she scuttered down the steep face, leaving a ladder of scallops where her feet had been. Her panther-slim muscles contracted and relaxed under her tight T-shirt as she ran, her dark hair swinging behind her in a weighty mass. Her eyes were alight with excitement and animation. She looked extraordinarily attractive, but that worried me. It seemed out of place in this harsh world. ‘Marinetta,’ I said, ‘we can’t keep stopping to wait while you take photos. Next time, we won’t stop.’

  ‘You never give me a chance to take shots,’ she panted. ‘You never think about photography. Just to move on, that’s all you want!’

  ‘And cover yourself up.’

  ‘Jesus, don’t you realise what hard work it is, running about in this deep sand!’

  ‘Perhaps you should have come in your bikini. You’re no better than those Italians from Genoa in their swimming trunks.’

  ‘You’re just a British prude. No sex, please, we’re British, ha, ha!’

  ‘At least we don’t wave our hands about as you Italians do. Look at you, giving off signals all over the place when you get excited!’

  ‘I knew a Turkish woman once, who was married to an Englishman. She told me, “Never marry an Englishman.”’

  ‘Pity you didn’t take her advice,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why the hell we got married.’ It was a lie, of course. I knew why we had got married. I had been in love with her. Her strict Sardinian upbringing had made her anything but promiscuous. She wasn’t the kind of woman you could just live with. And my years among the nomads had made me as chauvinistic as they. It was only proper that a man should marry when he found the right woman. I had believed that she was the right woman. I had been determined to marry her.

  My determination had taken me on a plane to Rome the previous January. I landed at Ciampino at night; the city was pulsing, electric in the winter heat. I booked into a pension in the Via Nazionale. It had doors a foot thick as if they had built them to withhold a siege. I met Marinetta there in the foyer next morning, looking tense and harassed. ‘You’re crazy!’ she said, pushing me away as I tried to kiss her. She was afraid the manager would notice.

  Warm rain was falling in the Via Nazionale. It was Epiphany, and most of the shops were closed. The city seemed deserted, and we spent most of the day wandering from street to cobbled square with our collars turned up. Marinetta told me about the bad dreams she had been having about the Sahara trek and how worried her parents were. We sat in the Cafe Greco among elegant paintings and antique mirrors, while the rain fuzzed the windows. I asked Marinetta to marry me. I was prepared for ‘No’, but it was the ‘I don’t know’ that threw me. For two days, we dawdled around the drizzly streets, rode in buses, stood in bars. She told me that she wasn’t sure if she loved me. She didn’t think she could ever be a wife. Marriage seemed to her like a betrayal of her parents. In all her twenty-nine years, she had never taken a boyfriend home. In the end, though, my persistence won through. She looked at me gloomily and said, ‘You’d better come home and tell my father. God knows what he’ll say!’

  The argument played itself out as we struggled up the next dune face. We inched the camels down again, while their legs trembled in the sliding sand. Suddenly, there was a Waaaaah! Waaaaaah! WAAAAAH!, and we turned to see Abu Nakkas, the white camel, floundering in the sand and trying to wriggle out from under the heavy jerrycans that had fallen forward on to his neck. The other camels halted, watching the spectacle on unsteady legs. Mu’min and I rushed up to the thrashing animal, expecting the lead ropes to break at any moment. The white camel spat venomously at us like a cobra. We had to remove the saddle and carry the load down the slope to firmer ground. Then we replaced the saddle with a tail cord to prevent it from slipping forward again.
Abu Nakkas hated the tail cord. He turned his head and snapped at me viciously as I slipped the rope around his tail, trying to lurch up and kick backwards with his rear leg. He was the most aggressive gelding I had ever seen. ‘This camel,’ Mu’min pronounced solemnly, ‘is mad.’

  On the next ascent, the saddle slipped backwards. The big jerrycans thumped into the sand, and the tops came off. Water splashed across the dune. Yaaaah! Yaaaaaah! YAAAAAH! squealed the camel. Marinetta and I exploded with laughter. Mu’min scowled and hit the white camel with his open hand. WAAAH! WAAAAAH! the camel answered him. He ranted in incomprehensible Beriberi as we picked the saddle up.

  On the next dune chain, the hay bales fell forwards and pinned Abu Sanam’s head to the ground. He wailed pitifully, and Marinetta and I laughed again. Mu’min raved at the camel as though the beast had done it on purpose to spite him. We fixed it, but the scratchy hay bothered the camel all morning, drawing dribbles of blood from his shoulders. It rocked backwards on the ascent and forwards again on the way down. Finally Mu’min hit on a way of hoisting it up above the camel’s shoulders. I complimented him on the technique, and a flicker of satisfaction crossed his lips as he said, ‘We know camels!’ Ten minutes later, the saddle rope broke, and the entire load of hay was deposited on the ground. With it went bits of firewood, dried waterskins, tent poles, and the machete. Mu’min looked as if he would burst into tears.

  Before we loaded again, Marinetta suggested that we should eat. We sat down in the sand as she brought out the pot of cold macaroni and sardines. There were pieces of straw in the macaroni. Mu’min inspected each spoonful very carefully, removing the straw and flicking it into the sand with utter distaste. ‘You should have removed the straw before you cooked it,’ he declared. It was all we could do to prevent ourselves from laughing again. After the macaroni, we ate a few dates. They were the dates we had brought from Agadez.

  We reloaded the hay and marched on. There were more dune chains and everywhere, the purple battlements of cliffs. Deep, rippling sand had been swept off the valley floor, revealing a network of patterns like mosaics. The sand made us pant with effort, and the afternoon sun brought slivers of sweat to our foreheads. Often, we found the leeward slopes too sheer to descend and had to traverse far along narrow ridges to find a way down. There was no chance to ride. Dunes followed dunes, and bars of sand interlocked with each other. Sometimes, we were lost in labyrinths of sand more frightening than anything I had seen. There were no comforting markers in the Grand Erg, and I prayed that Mu’min knew the way.

  At sunset, we stopped, tired out, and threw our baggage into the sand. The dunes were as sterile as ice, and a cold wind reared across them like a dragon. We laagered the camels in a circle, heads facing inwards, and fed them some chaff. Mu’min erected his shelter against the cold and I put up our open-sided tent. As we sat down to eat, he noticed more straw in the macaroni. He brought his flashlight and fixed it in the sand so that he could examine each mouthful before he ate it. To divert his attention, I said, ‘There are always problems on the first day.’

  The Beriberi looked at me morosely. He sucked his teeth and set his massive boxer’s jaw. His eyes, each holding a speck of yellow light, were suspicious. He did not answer me. He kept on staring quietly out of the primitive soul of the Sahara, asking wordlessly, ‘Who are you? Why have you come here?’ I realised that he hadn’t even asked our names.

  In the morning, the cold cut us like a knife blade. We looked out across a landscape of sand like polar ice. The camels were reluctant to get up. We picked at their hobbles with blue fingers and stood back as they heaved themselves to their feet, shivering. They showered us with warm urine and pellets of dung. Before we loaded, Mu’min drew out a pair of gloves with the air of a surgeon about to perform an operation. The gloves were of light-brown wool and had pictures of pink elephants embroidered on them. They matched the woollen bobble hat that he wore beneath his headcloth.

  The dunes got higher day by day. They towered above the ivory sands of the plain. Often, I thought that the camels would never make it down the steep inclines, but they always did, with trembling legs and shaking loads. Always, there were stoppages, though. The chaff had to be shifted higher; the jerrycans had to be rebalanced by pouring icy water from one to another; the firewood came unfastened, scattering twigs across the sand. Loads tilted forwards or back; headropes snapped; nose rings were wrenched out as camel heaved against camel in the slithering sand. We tottered across scrolls of shimmering silicon, through bows of orange chiffon and draperies of pale cream. The Grand Erg was too big for the mind to take in, too featureless for the memory to gain hold. If it were not for the detailed notes in my diary, those days would have blurred with each other and become as featureless as the erg itself. In my dreams, the action took place in a vast hall with austere stone floors and windows draped with sweeping curtains. It was as if my mind was desperately trying to define and limit the fearful dimensions of the sand sea.

  Mu’min never cheered up. He remained silent and aloof, asking us little and telling us nothing. His Arabic was poor. At first, he stalked on ahead very fast, as if wanting to escape. Soon, though, his pace slowed. He became tired, and his left knee swelled up with the constant battle against the sand. After an hour of walking in the morning, he would start limping, a spindly, surreal figure in his flapping vampire cloak and his bobble-hat. When limping, too, got difficult, he would try to hop. Then he would couch his camel with a vicious expression and snarl at Marinetta threateningly, ‘Madame! Why don’t you ride?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she would answer. Mu’min would swing his lanky legs viciously into the saddle and urge on his camel at a terrible speed. It was a humiliation for him to ride before we did, and especially before a woman no higher than his chest. He drove the camels on fast, hoping that we wouldn’t be able to keep up on foot and would be forced to ride when he did. We were determined not to give in to this pressure, and anyway, we were very fit now. We had walked hundreds of miles. We refused to ride until three hours had passed, and only then would we couch our camels. Mu’min never paused to wait for us to mount. He just charged on madly across the erg, making us trot the camels in order to catch him up and tiring them out needlessly. If there were jinns in the Grand Erg, they had certainly got to Mu’min.

  He never sang or hummed, as our other guides had done. He never told stories. Instead, he smoked his Gauloises, one after the other, coughing and spluttering over them as he whipped on his camel.

  There was a hole in his pocket, and often, the blue cigarette packet would slip through. Then I would be obliged to dismount and pick up the packet for him. He never thanked me and always replaced it in the same pocket. Once, I pretended that I hadn’t noticed the fallen packet, and he was very angry when he discovered it missing. He never dropped one again after that.

  After a few days, Marinetta developed a swollen ankle. She still refused to ride before the appointed time. One morning, Mu’min drove the camels on so fast that she almost had to run to keep up.

  As she fell farther and farther behind, I saw the exasperation written on her face and the pain behind her eyes. I knew her well enough by now to realise that she wouldn’t give in until she had to be carried.

  I lost my temper. ‘For God’s sake, slow those camels down!’ I yelled at Mu’min. ‘Let them go at their own pace. You’re killing them!’ He gave me a murderous look, but he slowed down.

  When Marinetta caught up, she was fuming. ‘Face of shit!’ she said to the guide in Italian. Mu’min didn’t understand Italian any more than we understood Beriberi. But it looked as though he’d got the message.

  On 4th January, we saw the oasis of Dibella beneath us. It was deserted and austere, lying in a deep depression in the sand. Ivory dunes and the dark machicolations of rocky crags loomed over it to the north. The trees were dim shadows, double-stemmed trunks of dom palms intertwined with the feathery headdresses of date trees. There were bushes of thorny talha standing in dusty squads amo
ng outcrops of rock. We made our way painfully down into the basin. It was a place that belonged to the wilderness, a haunting, spartan, dying place. The water, lying in a dear pool under the date palms, was brackish. It gave Marinetta stomach cramps within minutes. I noticed a tiny dead camel rotting by the pool and hoped it hadn’t died from the water.

  While we were hacking off bits of firewood from the acacias, Mu’min pointed out the ruins of Toubou palm shelters. There used to be plenty of Toubou here,’ he said. ‘They had to move on when the grazing failed. There are still some dates, but they aren’t much good now.’

  We hoisted on our full jerrycans and climbed out of the oasis. The ascent was exhausting. In the high sun, we couldn’t make out the sheer drops and angles of the dunes, and we ran the risk of plunging down them with our camels. At the top of the valley, we emerged on to a groundswell of carmine-pink. There were occasional skerries of rock thrusting out of it, jet-black against the dazzling sand. We mounted our camels. The vastness of the landscape eased us into a familiar, compulsive, dreamy mood. It was sensual, languorous, a luxurious state between waking and sleep when the camels flowed on endlessly, rocking us back and forth like babies. My thoughts drifted back, as they often did, to those few frantic days in Rome almost exactly a year before.

  Marinetta had taken me to her parents’ home. It was a well-appointed apartment in the Viale dei Campioni, with automatic doors and polished marble stairs. Meeting her father was more frightening for me than crossing the Sahara. The fact that he had been captured by the Allies near Tobruk and had spent five years in a British prison camp only added to my apprehension. General Peru was a small man with a compensating powerful personality. His eyes were very bright. He wore tweeds and a waistcoat like an English country squire. Signora Peru was very slim and quite beautiful. She was dressed impeccably, and her English was as faultless as her dress.

  The apartment was predictably plush. Prints from India and African carvings decorated the walls and shelves. Marinetta’s brother, a small, dark-haired doctor, began showering me with questions almost before I had sat down. When his artillery barrage petered out, the General and his wife launched the infantry attack. They asked about education, religion, and politics. I tried to drink the chocolate they offered me, but my hands were shaking. My mouth was too dry to eat the special Sardinian cake. After a while, during a lull in the battle, I said, ‘One of the reasons I’ve come is that Mariantonietta and I were, well, we were thinking of getting married, and I wondered if you might have any objections.’ There was a moment’s silence. Had I phrased it in the wrong way? I wondered. But the General’s eyes were twinkling, as if he was remembering himself in the same situation. After this, I thought, the Sahara would be easy.