His tent was white cotton with a camel’s-wool roof. We unloaded at some distance from it and greeted Ahmed’s wife and daughter. The wife, with her slim body and jet-black tresses, was still very attractive, though among these Arabs, it is difficult to pinpoint age. The Arabs evidently had the same problem with us. Ahmed’s pretty daughter, a little girl of perhaps ten, was much taken with Marinetta. The girl had an almond-shaped face and short, velvety braids of hair. Her limbs looked strong under her swinging, flowery dress. Later, Ahmed asked me if my wife had reached womanhood yet. He looked shocked at my weathered, sun-baked face when I explained that she was exactly three years younger than me. ‘My little girl wanted her as a playmate!’ he said.
Inside the tent, we all huddled together on the bed, a mat of palm fibre joined by skin and resting on pegs driven into the ground. Balls of carded goat’s wool hung from the ceiling like baubles, and beneath them was a wooden frame supporting three large sacks of grain. The grain was all that the family had to live on until the next rains.
Ahmed said that he owned some goats and a few sheep, two donkeys, and a camel for bringing water. ‘It hasn’t rained here at all this year,’ he said. ‘Any grazing left here is two years old.’ I asked about the American grain. ‘It should never have stopped,’ he said. ‘Many people haven’t got on their feet again yet.’
A woman called Amni came to ask if she could travel with us as far as Khitimai. She was not old, but she was cadaverously thin, her skin drawn tight around her mouth, her black hair rotted to grey. She looked hungrily at Marinetta’s earrings, and said, ‘That woman is loaded with gold!’ A boy of sixteen arrived. He had recently married, and Amni asked him to enumerate the animals he had received as presents on his wedding day. She kept count on her fingers as he described them, one by one.
Another youth appeared and asked Ahmed for a sack of grain. ‘It’s not for sale,’ Ahmed told him. ‘Take one, and give me one back when your family can afford it. One for one, that’s all I want.’
Ahmed’s wife had cooked a goat’s head as a parting feast. Ahmed stripped the succulent flesh off the skull, ears, eyes, nasal membranes, and tongue. The tastiest part was the brains, but you had to smash the skull open to get at them. I asked Ahmed if there were any bandits in this area. He told me that during the Great Drought, people had stolen animals to feed their’ starving families. Now things were better, and the main threat was from the Meidob. They would come out of the mountains at night in raiding parties with nothing but their rifles and waterskins. Many people had been shot and wounded. A few days earlier, some Kababish had gone off into Jebel Meidob following a party of raiders. They hadn’t yet returned. ‘We never light a fire when we’re travelling,’ Ahmed said, ‘not while we’re in sight of the Meidob hills. The Meidob would come to you like vultures.’ I could hear the fear in his voice as he spoke.
We left at sunset, Marinetta and I with our three camels, Ahmed astride his slow watering animal and Amni on a thin camel with a twisted rear foot. Amni looked very poor and begged from Marinetta constantly as we rode. ‘If you don’t give me something, I’ll cause you problems,’ she insisted.
Ahmed looked embarrassed. Later, he told me that she had been driven half crazy by the drought. ‘The women had to sell all their gold, the stuff they had inherited.’ he said. ‘Now, they have nothing, and it drives them to distraction!’
We rode until midnight and made camp under the wall of Hattan. Camping here by the mountain was dangerous, but Ahmed said that it was too dark to climb the pass. He strictly forbade the lighting of a fire; this was nothing new to Marinetta and me.
At daybreak, we climbed the pass and found at the top a mob of camels with a herdsman. He belonged to Ahmed’s clan and greeted us warmly, insisting on giving us a bowl of camel’s milk. On his camel was a Kalashnikov rifle. In return for the milk, he asked for news of the pursuit party that had gone into the Meidob hills.
The skin of the plateau was stony and veined with wadis and the dry beds of pools. A family of Arabs was holed up on one of the pool beds. They had no tents. Their rifles, girbas, and cooking utensils hung from trees. We halted with them, and they made us tea. The Arabs were hungry and had nothing to eat; they filled their bellies only with the milk from their camels. They were watering their herd at Khitimai wells every nine days and, in between, lived here in Hattan.
We mounted and rode down into Khitimai valley. The plain stretched as far as the eye could see, parched and dead. At noon, we rested under a thorn tree and let the camels graze. Neither Amni nor Ahmed had seen powdered milk before; they sipped our customary zrig suspiciously. ‘It’s just like cow’s milk,’ was Amni’s verdict. We ate rice and dried meat, since neither of the Arabs had heard of sardines.
As we were fetching the camels later, a rider approached. He was a watchful Arab with a rifle and a waterskin. After he had greeted us, he took a look around our camp and rode away. ‘My stomach feels bad about that man,’ Ahmed declared. ‘That’s how a bandit travels: with a rifle and a girba. The Meidob aren’t the only robbers here.’
In the afternoon, we ran into a herd of camels being driven from the wells by a young Arab boy. Ahmed rode up to him for the news. ‘He says not to enter the well at night,’ he told me afterwards. ‘There are bad people about. Better to rest with the Arabs tonight and go to the well tomorrow.’ I was not to be put off so easily after 3,500 miles, and I insisted on reaching the wells. It was late when we spotted camp fires and heard the thud of the donkey engine across the sand. Amni rode off to stay with her relations, taking two of our spare sacks with her. A sack was nothing, I knew, but Ahmed noticed and looked embarrassed again. We made camp by the well and were joined by some Arabs. Marinetta was exhausted and went to sleep at once.
Later, I made the mistake of waking her up to eat and drink tea. She jumped up as if bitten, with a terrified look on her face. She stared at me with wide eyes as though I was a stranger, stupefied by Ahmed and the faces of the other Arabs illuminated by the firelight. Her hands were trembling, I noticed. She tried to help make the tea, but her coordination was unsteady. She kept looking at me as if I was a monster. After we had sat down in our small den, she said, ‘I feel as if I’ve lost touch with reality. I forgot who Ahmed was. I even forgot who you were for a minute. It was as if everyone was a stranger.’ The conversation made me afraid, too. Deep within us was something more fearful than bandits or hyenas. It was the fear of the disintegration of the self.
Our depression increased in the morning, when we filled one of our jerrycans and discovered a leak. We unrolled the three remaining new waterskins and were shocked to find them unusable. Two of them had been punctured in brushes with thorn trees, and the third cracked like paper when we tried to open it out. We patched up the jerrycan with melted plastic and bought a new waterskin from the Arabs at the wells. We filled all our water vessels. Then we bade farewell to Ahmed, and an Arab from the well led us out into the sand and showed us the direction of Wadi Howar where, five days away, we would find the next well. The man told us, ‘From here to Wadi Howar, you won’t see anyone. No one at all. No one will know if you live or die out there.’
Those words stayed with me all day as we moved across the featureless sand hills, following the compass. No one would know if we lived or died. No one. There was no one here but Marinetta and me, and we hardly counted as separate people any more. The vast emptiness weighed down on us like a stone. Deep exhaustion had changed our feeling for the void. The freedom that we had sensed in Ténéré had become terrible. There were no restrictions on us. We could have done anything, performed any perversion, stripped naked and copulated on the sand without any observers, slit each other’s throats, mutilated and murdered each other. It was not the desert itself that frightened us but the raw, unreasoning power inside us that might become unharnessed and run wild, a crazy cave-animal force, across these sands of nothing. Only my responsibility to Marinetta kept me going. She kept me alive with her strength and her weakness,
her unquestioning faith in my ability to lead her to safety.
The following morning, we crossed the Wadi Mafarit, a wide wedge of trees in a deep chasm. The wadi was inhabited by two black crows, which hovered around us, croaking. I had slept off the terror of the previous day, and my spirits lifted. Soon, we saw the cliff of Galb Al Ba’ir, the southern tip of the Tegaru massif, which we would follow for three days. By late afternoon, we were already in the shadow of the plateau. After the empty sands, the rocks felt like live, friendly spirits. We scrambled over screes of gravel and larger boulders and found a sandy place among them where we made camp.
We had begun on the cooking when I suddenly spotted two lights. They were as yellow as hyena’s eyes, hanging in the darkness and seeming to move towards us over the rocks. But there were no hyenas in Tegaru, unless they might be human ones. ‘It’s two men with torches.’ Marinetta said. ‘They’re searching for us!’ I considered the possibility of bandits grimly. Here, in the open desert, there were no people and no villages from whom to seek help. We were totally alone. No one would know if we lived or died. Even the authorities wouldn’t bother to inquire. We weren’t supposed to be here.
I quickly doused the fire and picked up my spear. Just having a weapon in my hands gave me a primitive confidence. I examined the lights with my binoculars, which told me nothing. They came no nearer. The camels shifted slightly in their narrow pits of sand. The desert was as silent as the sea. ‘They can’t be men with torches,’ I told Marinetta. ‘They would have been here by now.’ As we watched, the lights seemed to undergo a strange fission. Each one split into two separate cells. Now at last they moved faster, and in an instant, the entire perspective changed. Instead of seeing something small, very near, I was seeing something large, far away. ‘Good God!’ I said, ‘They’re lorries!’ We had been watching the headlights of two vehicles, miles and miles away—so far away, in fact, that their engines couldn’t be heard, and their two headlights appeared as one. Yet our minds had already produced an intricately detailed scenario of bandits with menacing intentions. ‘I was even wondering what I would do if they murdered you and tried to rape me,’ Marinetta said.
I watched the lights disappearing into the darkness, knowing that our enemy was no longer the desert. Our enemy was ourselves.
Tegaru was our only friend in the wilderness. Its blue-and-orange buttresses stayed with us comfortingly from dawn till sunset. We rode over rocky ground littered with the remains of prehistoric settlements. We saw billions of sherds of bone and shattered red pottery and picked up many diorite stone axes. I wondered who these stone-tool makers had been. Were they hunters, or nomads, or farmers? Marinetta held up a different type of relic that she had found: it was the brass cartridge case of a modern bullet. ‘It’s like reading a book about history,’ she said. ‘Stone tools transformed into bullets. Humans always find new ways of doing things, but underneath, they don’t change, do they?’
In the doldrums of the day, we fantasised about the future. Marinetta told me that she dreamed of being clean and perfumed, dressed in her most expensive outfit. ‘We will both dress smartly,’ she said, ‘and we will drink a bottle of Champagne. Then you will take me out to a nightclub. We will dance very close together in a dark corner, and you will kiss me on the neck.’
‘And then?’
‘Then you will take me home, and we’ll drink more Champagne. We will sit down by a log fire.’
‘And then?’
‘Then you will slowly begin to undo the buttons of my dress. You can imagine the rest.’
I looked at her, at her face grained with sand, her long shirt and sirwel tattered and yellowed by unnameable stains, and laughed. The world she had talked about didn’t seem to belong to either of us.
We followed grooves in the rock etched by camel caravans over centuries. Here and there were shreds of motor tyres and discarded chunks of engine, oil filters, and broken suspension units. We crossed a sheet of rippled sand, with the occasional umbrella of trees. A cold wind blew from the north. The sky filled with uneasy clouds, and suddenly, a miracle happened. Silver rain fell across the sand, touching the dryness with a billion tiny blades. To the east, a perfect rainbow formed over the plateau. Marinetta stared at it, entranced, with tears in her eyes.
At sunset, we made camp in the sand sheet. The shower had lasted only minutes, and the soft sand was still dry. After we had eaten, we sat back in the moonlight. The hugeness of this place really scares me,’ Marinetta said. ‘But it’s beautiful, too. It’s like an enchanted world—the colours, the rainbow, the stillness. It’s like a place that is sleeping under a spell. You can’t believe there’s really no one. I keep looking at the horizon for a person or a camel, but I never see one.’
‘We’re alone,’ I said, smiling, ‘just as two people should be on their honeymoon.’
‘This must be the strangest honeymoon in history,’ she answered. ‘Plenty of moon but no honey.’ She laughed. It was the same lovely, fresh laugh that I had heard in that office in Khartoum. It made me fall in love with her all over again.
‘Perhaps we can do something about that,’ I said, cradling her. Her body felt hard in places and soft in others, like the desert’s crust. I began to kiss her very slowly on the neck, and to move my hand under her shirt.
‘What comes next in the fantasy?’ I asked her.
‘You have to imagine the rest,’ she said.
A few minutes later our clothes were scattered around us in the desert. The camels gurgled quietly in the great silence, seeing all, hearing all.
We were savages now. There was no shame, nothing hidden from one another. Our bodies and minds, bent on one unflinching purpose, fitted like hand and glove. There was no barrier between us, no possibility of pretence. We were no longer Michael and Mariantonietta but two fantasy characters of our own making, who sang bawdy songs across the barren sands and made up stories about their adventures. Our faithful followers were our camels, which padded on silently, carrying our tiny, half-crazy world across the emptiness to our next source of water.
The sun splattered colours across the rippling sands. The plateau cracked and crumbled into piles of black boulders, perching atop each other like hats. The erg gave way to a gravel plain. There were hummocks of grass in places and basins filled to brimming with soft, pink sand. There were more arteries of sand along the skirts of the mountain, glittering, undersea colours of turquoise and starfish-orange. Behind them, the black jacket of the plateau seasoned into mauve as the sun moved higher. There were trees with red flesh that crumbled at the touch. This forest had become extinct long ago. Near sunset, we climbed over a ridge on foot. The camels’ feet left neat ladders of tracks in the velvet sand. Over the hill, we found ourselves shut inside an amphitheatre of rock, where the only movement was that of our grotesque, elastic shadows, thrown before us on the earth.
There seemed to be no way out of the box. We moved one way, then another. Rocks that seemed only a few feet away retreated into the distance as we moved towards them. We turned back towards the way we had come, but the hill behind us was unrecognisable. Our tracks did not show on the hard ground. I felt panic welling up inside me, and I fought to keep it under control. The compass was in my hand, and my mind clicked with detached precision. To drift away from the red needle was to lose oneself in this labyrinth. We moved back towards a ridge that my eyes told me bore no relation to the one we had already crossed how many hours before? On we stumped, dog-tired after the day’s march. Nothing looked familiar, and the sun would soon be gone, leaving us stranded in the night. We climbed over the ridge and looked down on a plain quite different from the one we had traversed so jauntily that morning. Nothing matched. The sun balanced on the edge of the desert and hovered there. Without the compass, I would have sworn I hadn’t seen this part of the desert before. The shapes and forms that I held in my memory had changed. A different light, a different angle, a different mood, had brought us into a new dimension, another world. We were t
ravelling not through rock and sand but through an illusion, an ever-changing mirage.
Then, in the last glow of golden light, I came upon a skein of camel prints punched neatly into the sand. My first impulse was to look about, wondering to whom they belonged. Then a disjointed voice inside told me, ‘They’re yours, you stupid fool!’ We had come back to where we had started.
We were too disorientated and tired to try to make up the hours we had lost. Marinetta sat over the cooking pot miserably. The extra effort of getting lost in the maze of rock had taken us beyond fatigue. We were treading dangerously near to the edge of darkness from which there would be no return. Marinetta started crying. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me,’ she sobbed. ‘I keep having strange feelings. I hear sounds behind me like walking people, but when I tum around there’s no one. Then I see monsters hiding in the rocks. The worst thing is that I feel there’s a monster inside me waiting to come out. I’m afraid I might turn into a werewolf and cut your throat and not be able to control myself.’
I shivered involuntarily and looked down into the flickering flames. The day had been a sobering lesson in the relationship between the real and the unreal. Now I had begun to doubt that there was any dividing line between the two. As I watched the flames holding back the night, even they seemed alive with a malevolent, sentient force.
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