Impossible Journey

by Michael Asher

The day dawned into a horror of sun and sand. We left the last tatters of the plateau and moved out into the dreadful, yawning emptiness of the sands. Strange silver lights were blinking like eyes across the erg. From the moment we started, a demon of terror had me in its grip. It was fear without rhyme or reason. It came from somewhere deep in the hidden ravines of my mind. Some dragon of fear had been lurking down there all my life, and now it was rising to the surface. Some fifth-column subversive was in open revolt against my will to go on. My voice seemed to come from somewhere else, far away. It was not me speaking. My heart was palpitating, and there were sudden surges of adrenalin through my body, urging me to flee maniacally across the desert. The world seemed unreal and sinister. It was as if Udungu’s jinns were squabbling like vultures over my mind, its psychic defences worn down by utter exhaustion.

  I couldn’t communicate my feelings to Marinetta, but I guessed that they were the same as those she had felt the previous night, signifying the presence of something alien inside. I remembered reading about the mysterious psychic ailment that the French call the cafard. It was supposed to affect expatriates who worked for too long in the Sahara, a disorientating, maddening illness. I wondered if I was experiencing the cafard and whether, indeed, it was just another way of saying ‘jinns’.

  Wadi Howar lay a day’s march ahead. The hours unrolled with horrific emptiness. The sand seemed to be turning to flame and smoke. There were outcrops of rock, weird, bloated pillars of carmine and ochre. Scintillating diamonds of moisture appeared temptingly on the horizon. By afternoon, another fear had gripped me: we were marching too far east. I was afraid we might miss the wadi completely. I stopped and took out my map and compass. I had marked the well of Ghobeishi carefully, knowing that of several wells on the south side of the wadi, it would be the easiest to find. ‘If we don’t get this right, we’ll die,’ I told Marinetta. I was not exaggerating. Literally hundreds of men had died of thirst in this wilderness over the years, even recently. Only two years before, forty men had lost their way on a journey to Libya and had died in this desert.

  Marinetta looked at me calmly. There was no trace of the sobbing fear of the previous day. It was as if she had found some new strength in the night. ‘God will look after us,’ she said. It was the first time I had heard her assert her faith. I understood then where her new strength came from.

  Her calmness gave me new courage. With an effort, I scoured the map and identified the rocky outcrops nearby. I took a grid bearing from there to Ghobeishi. It was a gamble, I knew; there were scores of outcrops, and not all of them were marked on the map. If I had identified this one incorrectly, then the bearing would be wrong. I checked it twice. Then I oriented the compass, and we turned to face the empty desert.

  We never strayed from the bearing all afternoon, even when the fresh tracks of two camels intersected our path. They were the first tracks we had seen in five days, and we were both tempted to follow them, yet we knew this might be a fatal error. Hour after hour went by, and I felt the same hot terror smouldering on the edge of my consciousness. The camels paced on determinedly, and we fell silent. There were no jokes or bawdy songs today, just two very small beings praying that they would not die.

  Just before sunset, Marinetta said, ‘Can’t you smell something?’ I sniffed deeply. There was a slight but unmistakable scent of acacias in bloom. Then I noticed that the camels were covered in flies, the small black flies that bred in the wadi. A little later, we climbed a ridge and saw a line of trees below us and the rocky hump of a hill. It was Ghobeishi. It seemed that no less than an act of God had brought us straight to it, using a bearing from a landmark chosen almost haphazardly from the map.

  Adam

  The Nile lay only ten days’ march away, but when we awoke the next morning, it might as well have been a hundred. We lay in our sleeping bags, staring at the sky and not caring if the drifting desert sand should bury us under its skirts and build a sandy tomb over us forever. My body felt hollow and aching. My nerves were as raw as gristle. Finally, we dragged ourselves out into the morning of another day, made our fire, drank our coffee, and loaded our camels.

  Beyond the strip of ravaged greenery called Wadi Howar stretched the most desolate rocky plains in the southern Sahara. There was but one well in that desolation, Abu Tabara. I had visited the well from the east side two years before and had come nearer to dying of thirst then than on any of my other journeys. The well was concealed in a vast area of wind-sculptured rock and was impossible to see from a long way off. To find it from the west side, I knew I would need a guide.

  We moved only half a mile from the camp site. On the crest of a dune, among green araks, we saw the figures of people, with camels and goats and a tiny shelter. An Arab came slithering down the dune to greet us. Glad to see another soul, I ran up to meet him, and we clasped hands like two lost strangers in the solitude. ‘Who is that other man?’ he asked, pointing at Marinetta.

  ‘That’s no man,’ I told him, with a touch of pride. ‘That’s my wife.’

  We settled in some arak trees, and the Arab’s wife brought us a bowl of fresh camel’s milk. The Arab, whose name was Ja’adallah, suggested that we should take his father-in-law, Adam, as a guide. ‘Does he know Abu Tabara?’ I asked.

  ‘He certainly does!’ replied Ja’adallah.

  Adam was a reedy man with opaque eyes and many missing teeth. His face might once have been stern and aristocratic, but the desert forces had now riveted it with a network of lines. He had lived almost all of his life in this desolate wadi. He had never even been as far as Umm Sunta, nor met the family of the nazir. The only towns he had seen were those along the Nile, many years before. The only other Westerners he had seen were some archaeologists who had undertaken excavations nearby. ‘God knows what they were looking for,’ he said. They were digging up the sand and putting it into sacks as if it was valuable. “If that sand is valuable,” I said, “then we’ll all be rich, by God!”’ His body was almost skeletal, but his years in this harsh world had given him tensile strength. The seasoned grey eyes looked as if they had been misted over by decades of wind-blown sand. He wore a shirt that was crisp with dust and human sweat and torn in many places. He owned a woollen hat and two plastic sandals that did not match—one was red and the other blue.

  He was pleased that I was English. ‘When the English ruled this country, everything was cheap and plentiful,’ he said. ‘You could buy a pound of tea for 50 piastres. After the English went, it rose to £1.50. Then it became £3.00. I said to the trader, “How can it go up in one day from £1.50 to £3?” He said, “You Arabs with your thick skulls! One day it will go up to £9 and your camel will cost £1,000!”’

  Adam had come to Wadi Howar as a child, in the days of Sir Ali Wad At Tom. His family moved here from the southeast. ‘There were no Arabs living in Wadi Howar then,’ he told us. ‘There was too much trouble from Gor’an raiders. Then the English sent some cars and soldiers to deal with them, and they fled. Those cars were the first I’d ever heard of. Now, there are cars everywhere.’ I asked him, as I had asked all our guides, whether he preferred cars or camels. ‘Eh,’ he said, ‘camels are for men. Cars are for children.’ Camels were the raison d’être for Arabs like Adam. Without camels, they would have been unable to live in this remote place. ‘When we first came here, there was only one well in the entire wadi,’ Adam went on, ‘but the Arabs got to work and dug two or three more, and the camels learned to eat arak leaves. God is generous. The arak stays alive when the other trees die. In the year of the Great Drought, everyone left the desert but us. Our camels stayed alive by eating the arak. They’re still in good condition, by God!’

  The camels we saw grazing among the arak groves were fat and healthy. A large white bull steamed up to challenge our troop of three as soon as we hobbled them. Wad An Nejma bubbled a little in challenge, but the bigger animal spat and slavered with all his might, ballooning out his air bladder until our animals retreated into another arak grove
. The bull swaggered back to his females. One of them had just produced a fluffy white foal, which stood a yard high on spindly, unbalanced legs. When Marinetta tried to photograph it, the mother rushed up and stood over the baby protectively.

  We watered at a nearby well that afternoon. Camels waited for their drink in nervous squadrons. A ring of tousle-haired youths took turns, two by two, to hoist up the sandy water. I took my turn with them. Water splashed into the rusty halves of oil drums. The camels pressed shoulder to shoulder, slurping up the water, lifting their heads and shaking their floppy wet lips. There was the warm, sweet smell of dust and dung, the savoury scent of uncured leather. The Arabs chattered and laughed; one of them dropped a leather bucket into the well by accident. The others jeered mockingly. The boy looked embarrassed and went off to find another bucket. The camels roared and howled, and the mature bulls fought and had to be separated with whips. A haze of dust rose over this small well, a small island of activity in the vastness. Wells, above all things, were the symbol of life in the Sahara. I knew that we would not be seeing many more.

  The next morning, Adam led us across the dunes and towards the fantasy-like mountains of Rahib, at the easternmost end of the wadi. The black frames of the hills and the amber glaze that covered them gave them the look of drawings on a backcloth. The camels paced well after their day in the arak groves. The heady perfume of sallam trees drifted about us in clouds. The camels pulled out of our line of march to investigate the sweet smell. Adam said that it was eighteen years since there had been a good rain in Wadi Howar. ‘When it rains once, properly, there is grazing to be found as far east as the Nile,’ he said. ‘The whole desert blooms!’

  At Rahib, there was a beautiful girl called Fatna, with butter-smeared hair and wreaths of cowries around her neck. She smiled at us with ivory-white teeth and helped us to fill our girbas. They were in bad condition now, but Adam said they would be sufficient as long as we refilled them at Abu Tabara. When they were filled, we rode out into open desert.

  We camped near a rocky hill called Dabbat An Nahas, or ‘Kettledrum Hill’. Adam told us that sometimes, you could hear a great drum booming from inside. ‘It happens before somebody dies,’ he said. ‘You can hear it from miles away. Even the ground trembles.’ I asked him what he thought it was.

  ‘It’s the Drummer of Death!’ He shivered.

  That night, the Drummer of Death remained silent.

  Another hill blazed on the horizon the next day. We climbed into its heart, where we found a hidden spinney of very dead thorn trees. There would be little firewood to be found farther on, and Adam advised us to collect as much as we could. After we had eaten, Adam presented Marinetta with a leather bag made of gazelle skin. She accepted it eagerly, saying, ‘This is really special! You can’t buy things like that in my country.’ That afternoon, Adam asked Marinetta for her blanket. He didn’t own a blanket, he said. Anyway, you couldn’t buy blankets like that in his country.

  We scaled a huge dune that was laid against a gorge of rock and cut through a split in the hills down to a basin of glittering mineral salts. Patterns made by camel grooves interseded it in all directions. An occasional knoll of granite peeked above the plain, stretching on east until it dissolved into the aquamarine sky. We trawled across the plain like skiffs drifting on a tranquil ocean of dreams. We rode on until the sun roared and the shadows telescoped and shrank beneath the bellies of our camels.

  Adam sat uncomfortably on the firewood and chewed tobacco like a ruminant. He chewed all day and made clicking noises to encourage his camel. He said that he had taken tobacco first to get rid of a headache. ‘That’s how I got into the habit,’ he said, ‘but now, any time I stop taking it, I get a headache.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make you thirsty?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he answered. ‘It helps your thirst. Once, I rode from Wadi Howar to Dongola with some of my family. We had no water, only camel’s miik and tobacco. After a few days, the camel’s milk went sour. Then it doesn’t quench your thirst. It was only the tobacco that kept us going.’ He said that it had been ten days before they reached an oasis. ‘There were some Arabs there,’ he told me, ‘and they offered us camel’s milk. “Keep your camel’s milk!” we told them. “Just give us water!”’

  ‘Thank God you were alive!’

  ‘Yes. But the Arabs can endure thirst more than any other people,’ he went on. ‘I’ve seen so many townspeople going to Libya by camel who don’t even know what thirst is. They take too little and drink too much.’ He told me the story of some camel riders who had come to Ghobeishi the previous year on exhausted camels. They had been sent back from the border post on the Libyan frontier. The men had left their camels in Wadi Howar and had hitched a ride on a truck going to the Nile; it had broken down near Abu Tabara. ‘Eighteen people died of thirst,’ Adam said, ‘and one of the few who didn’t was an Arab, one of our family. He couldn’t speak when they found him, and his mouth wouldn’t take water. They put liquid into his veins with a tube, I heard. He stayed alive, by God! He was a true son of the Arabs.’

  Once, we came to a pair of oryx horns that had been stuck firmly in the earth. They were more than the record of an unknown hunter’s skill. They were a requiem for a bygone age. ‘The oryx are all gone now,’ Adam said, ‘but there used to be plenty when I was a lad, in the time of the English. The English brought us luck, you see.’ On another occasion, he pointed out a ridge called Zalat Az Zabit, ‘The Officer’s Ridge’. ‘It was named after an English officer,’ Adam said. ‘He’s buried there.’ The story ran that a young British subaltern had moved a detachment of camel corps from a local oasis to the Nile. A fearful sandstorm had blown up, and the guide had panicked and refused to go on, even though the column was short of water. In the end, the officer had shot the guide dead. Then the sergeant had shot the officer dead, declaring that he was mad. They had buried the officer near the ridge.

  ‘Do you think the officer was mad?’ I asked him.

  ‘The desert can do strange things.’ Adam said. ‘Only the Arabs can live in the desert.’

  On 12th April, we spotted a double-headed rock in the distance. ‘That’s it!’ Adam cried. ‘That’s Abu Tabara!’ An hour passed and the guide’s elation waned. He fell silent. I kept on checking my compass. The double-headed rock looked way off the bearing. Suddenly Adam broke the silence. ‘I don’t think that’s it after all,’ he said.

  Marinetta and I stared at him in alarm. ‘You don’t think!’ I exclaimed. ‘You mean you’re not sure where it is?’

  ‘Not again!’ Marinetta gasped. ‘Oh, God, not again!’

  As the sun dropped lower, we found ourselves in a landscape of moulded rock, which broke the sunlight into a pattern of long shadows. The rocks grew larger until they blocked the view on every side. They were like dream creatures of the night, closing in on us, moving beyond the corners of our eyes as we turned our heads away.

  At last light, we camped in a nest of sand and boulders beneath a granite stump. Adam sat down heavily in the sand. ‘I’ve forgotten it, Omar,’ he said. ‘It’s twenty years since I’ve been here, you understand.’

  I grinned and choked back the anger I felt. ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ I said, ‘even the sons of the Arab!’ But I was savagely aware that I had listened to stories of the Arabs’ remarkable powers with incredulous naivete for the last time. ‘If we don’t find it tomorrow, we’ll have to head back to Rahib,’ I told him.

  ‘No,’ he protested. ‘We can still reach the Nile.’

  I knew that he would lose face if we returned to his home and that he was worried about his money. But I also knew that reaching the Nile was out of the question: our water would never last us that long. ‘Adam,’ I said, ‘the Nile is six days away, maybe seven. We have water for two. You may be an Arab, but you aren’t a gazelle. You still have to drink. Everyone does.’

  Later, I climbed the stump of rock and surveyed the desert with my binoculars, hoping to catch sight of a camp fire.
I even set off a flare, praying that it might flush somebody out. The night was dark, starlit and endless. In the whole whispering canopy of the desert, nothing moved.

  Back in the camp, I found Adam reading the sands. He was making patterns with his palm and thumb and looking at the results intently. It was the favourite form of fortune telling among the Arabs.

  ‘What do you find?’ I asked him. ‘We’ll see people tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The sands say we’ll see people.’

  ‘Will we find the well?’

  ‘I don’t know if we’ll find the well, but we’ll see people.’

  As soon as it was light, Adam went off on foot to search for camel spoor or tracks that might give us a clue to the whereabouts of the well. I watched his long, bony feet making a swirl of footprints through the gentle ripples of the sand. ‘Oh, God!’ sighed Marinetta. ‘So near to the Nile and this had to happen.’

  I put my arms around her. ‘You don’t regret doing this journey, do you?’ I asked.

  ‘Not for anything, Maik,’ she said. ‘And there’s no one else I’d rather have done it with.’

  ‘Do you realise you have never told me that you love me?’ I said.

  She looked at me with her great, soft, brown eyes as if she were about to burst into tears. Then I saw Adam coming back across the dunes and released her.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve found camel tracks in the sand.’ But the camel tracks he had found led us nowhere. They were old and wove in and out of the boulders, not even showing us a direction. After an hour of moving south, we climbed another great tower of rock and sand. Adam’s gaze swept across the desert. ‘Nothing!’ he said. I scanned the east, west, and south with the binos. Suddenly, I stopped and backtracked. I had picked out the tiny shape of a grazing camel. Then I picked out another, and another. There were five camels grazing together in tufts of grass, several miles away. Adam screwed up his old eyes but couldn’t pick them out. There was no trace of any human beings with them. ‘Camels are watering every nine days at this time of year,’ Adam said. That means that these camels could be up to five days’ journey from the well.’