Tuareg Read online

  He looked at him in surprise:

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘The Tuareg usually show their faces when they are with family and friends, but you haven’t done so with me.’

  Gazel meditated for a few seconds and then slowly raised his hand and pulled down his veil, allowing him to study his thin, firm and deeply lined face, at leisure. He smiled:

  ‘It’s a face like any other face.’

  ‘I imagined you to look different.’

  ‘Different?’

  ‘Older maybe. How old are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never counted. My mother died when I was a child and that is the only thing that women seem concerned with. I’m not as strong as I was, but I have not started to tire yet either.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you ever getting tired. Do you have a family?’

  ‘A wife and four children. My first wife died.’

  ‘I have two children. My wife also died, although they won’t tell me when.’

  ‘How long have you been in prison?’

  ‘Fourteen years.’

  Gazel remained silent, trying to gauge what fourteen years meant in the life of a person, but try as he may he could not even vaguely imagine what it would be like to be locked up for that length of time.

  ‘Were you always in the Gerifies fortress?’

  ‘For that time, yes. But before then I spent eight years in French prisons.’ He smiled bitterly. ‘When I was younger I fought for freedom.’

  ‘And in spite of everything, you still want to fight even though they might betray you and lock you up again?’

  ‘I belong to a class of men that can only exist at the top of the pile or right at the bottom.’

  ‘How long were you at the top for?’

  ‘In power? Three and a half years.’

  ‘That does not make sense,’ the Targui replied, shaking his head repeatedly. ‘However great it might be to be in power, three and a half years in charge cannot surely justify twenty-two years of imprisonment. No. Not even if it were the other way round. For us Tuaregs, liberty is the most important thing of all. That is why we do not build houses from stone, because we would feel hemmed in by the walls around us. I want to know that I can pull up any one of my walls in the jaima at any time, just to look at the immensity of the desert beyond it. And I like to watch the wind blowing through the canes of our sheribas.’ He paused. ‘Allah could not see us if we were hidden beneath a stone roof.’

  ‘He sees us everywhere. Even from inside the deepest of dungeons. He weighs up our sufferings and compensates for them if they are for a just cause. My cause is a just one,’ he concluded.

  ‘Why?’

  He looked at him disconcertedly.

  ‘What do you mean, why?’

  ‘Why is your cause any more just than theirs? You’re all after power aren’t you?’

  ‘There are many different ways to exercise power. Some will use it to their own advantage. Others use it in order to benefit society, to achieve a better future for their people. That’s what I was trying to do, which was why they could not find anything to accuse me of when they overthrew me and did not, therefore, dare to shoot me.’

  ‘They must have had some reason to overthrow you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t let them steal,’ he smiled. ‘I wanted to build a government made up of honest men, without realising that there were not enough honest men in any one country to make up an entire government. Now they’ve all got yachts, palaces on the Riviera and Swiss bank accounts, despite the fact that when we were young we swore we would beat out corruption with the same spirit that we beat out the French. We could fight the French because, however hard they might have tried, we would never have become French. But it wasn’t so straightforward when fighting against corruption, because people become corrupt all too easily.’

  He looked at him intently: ‘Do you understand what I am talking about?’

  ‘I am a Targui, not an idiot. The difference between us lies in the fact that we the Tuaregs look across to your world, observe it, understand it and then distance ourselves from it. You do not come anywhere near our world and neither do you ever come anywhere near to understanding it. That is why we will always be a superior race.’

  Abdul-el-Kebir smiled for the first time in a long time, truly amused by the Targui’s words:

  ‘Do the Tuaregs still really believe that they are a race that was hand-picked by the gods?’

  Gazel pointed outside:

  ‘Who else could have survived for two thousand years living on these sands? If the water ran out, I would still be living long after the worms had already devoured your body. Is that not proof enough that we were chosen by the gods?’

  ‘Maybe…and if that is true, then now is the time to call on them for help, for what the desert has not managed to do in two thousand years, man will manage in twenty. They want to destroy you; wipe you off the face of the earth, even though they’ll not be able to build anything on top of your tombs.’

  Gazel closed his eyes, seemingly unperturbed by this threat or warning:

  ‘Nobody can ever destroy the Tuaregs,’ he said decidedly. ‘Only the Tuaregs themselves and they no longer fight each other; they have been in peace for many years now.’ He paused and without opening his eyes, added: ‘Now it’s better that you sleep. The night will be long.’

  The night was indeed a long and tiring one. They walked from the minute the sun, red and trembling, started to disappear behind the clouds of dust that hovered over the crests of the dunes, until that very same sun, well rested and brilliant, reemerged from the left to reveal once again, the same curved landscape of gigantic, sun-bathing women.

  They said their prayers facing Mecca and studied the horizon once again.

  ‘How long now?’

  ‘Tomorrow we will reach the plain. And things will start to get more difficult.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  The Targui did not have an answer. It was a feeling; like knowing that a sand storm was on its way or that a heat wave was imminent; like being able to sense that a herd of antelope was just over the other side of a dune or like running down a forgotten path without getting lost.

  ‘I just know.’ was all he could utter in the end. ‘By dawn we will reach the plain.’

  ‘I’m happy then. I’m fed up with going up and down the dunes and sinking into the sand.’

  ‘No, you won’t be happy,’ he said with conviction. ‘There’s a breeze here. However light, it still refreshes you and helps you along. These rivers of sand are formed by wind streams. But the “lost lands,” they are like dead valleys where everything is still and where the air is so hot and dense you can almost touch it. Your blood will almost boil and your lungs and head will feel as if they might burst, which is why no animals or plants could ever survive there. And nobody,’ he stressed, pointing ahead with his finger, ‘has ever managed to cross that plain.’

  Abdul-el-Kebir did not reply, impressed not by what the Targui had said, but by the tone of his voice. He had got to know him and knew, from the moment they had set off together, that he was a competent force, with nothing or no one appearing to unsettle him, so sure was he of the ground beneath his feet and the world that surrounded him. He was a serene, hermetic and distant man who could anticipate danger and deal with it, but now, as he spoke about the “lost land” with such awe, a feeling of great dread descended upon him. For any other human being the erg that they were crossing would have meant the end of the road, a sure descent into madness and a hopeless death. For the Targui it was the more “comfortable” part of a journey that would soon start to become really difficult. The very idea of what constituted something “difficult” for a man like Gazel, filled Abdul with horror.

  Gazel, for his part was struggling to work out whether or not he was overestimating his capabilities by ignoring the advice, or was it a law, that his people had passed on by word of mouth for generations, that warned: “Stay away from Tikd
abra.”

  Rub-al-Jali, to the south of the Arabian Peninsula and Tikdabra in the heart of the Sahara were the two most inhospitable regions on the planet. They were places that the heavens were supposed to have put aside to house the spirits of the most hideous murderers, child killers and rapists and where the tormented souls who had fled the holy wars, were also said to wander.

  Gazel Sayah had learned as a child not to be scared by stories of spirits, ghosts and apparitions, but he had been scared by the stories of other “lost lands” that were less famous and much less terrible than Tikdabra, so he was able to imagine with some accuracy what lay in store for them in the coming days.

  He looked at his companion. He had in fact been studying him from the moment that he had noticed that flash of fear cross his face when he had told him that he had killed his guardians. But, he reasoned, if he had endured that long in captivity and still had hope and was ready to fight again, then he was clearly a courageous man with no ordinary spirit.

  But the spirit to fight, Gazel knew well enough, was nothing like the spirit needed to take on the desert. You never fought with the desert, because you would never defeat it. You had to resist the desert, by lying and cheating and then finally by running away from it with your life, just as it thought it had you firmly in its grip. In the “lost lands” you could not be a hero in the flesh, only a bloodless stone, because the only things that survived in those landscapes were the stones. Gazel was worried that Abdul-el-Kebir, like any other human being who had not been born an Imohag and raised amongst the sand and stones, would not even begin to understand the concept of becoming a stone.

  He looked at him again. He was definitely not afraid of other men, but he was also crushed by the solitude and silence of that quietly aggressive landscape, where everything was made up of curves and soft colours; but where no animals walked or snakes or scorpions dared to tread; where not even the mosquitoes would go, even at sunset. It was a place that stank of death, even though it smelt of nothing, since even smell, in that aseptic sea of dunes, had been erased many thousands of years previously.

  Abdul had already started to show the first signs of anxiety, overwhelmed by the huge sea of sand that they were in, even though their problems had barely begun. His pulse was already racing as they scaled the highest dunes, the old ghourds that were reddened and as hard as basalt, from where all you could see was the endless, repetitive landscape both ahead of them and behind them. And he was already starting to curse the camels every time they threw their load to the ground, or fell down and threatened never to get up again.

  And this was only the beginning.

  They put up the tent and two planes returned half way through the morning.

  Gazel was thankful of their presence and that they were flying directly over their heads, insistently but still without discovering them, because he realised that these planes were evidence of the danger they were in and would spur Abdul on. They acted as tangible reminders of the prison that awaited him; of the dirtier and more degrading death that he would suffer at the hands of his pursuers.

  Both of them knew that if they disappeared in the “lost land” of Tikdabra that they would soon become legends; on the same scale as the “great caravan” or like all the other heroes of our time who never surrendered. One hundred years would have to pass before the people who had loved him, gave up hope that the mythical Abdul-el-Kebir would return from the desert, while his enemies would have no choice but to live with his ghost, because there would never be any physical or palpable proof that he had died.

  The planes broke up the silence once again, leaving a smell of benzene in the air that stirred up old memories. Once they had gone away again he went out to look at them, watching as they circled the skies in search of their prey.

  ‘They seem to know where we’re headed. Wouldn’t it be better to turn back and try and escape from the other side?’

  The Targui shook his head slowly.

  ‘Just because they suspect that’s where we are going doesn’t mean to say they will be able to find us. And even if they do find us they would still have to come and get us. And nobody will do that. The desert right now is our only enemy, but it is also our ally. Think about that and forget about everything else.’

  But try as he might, Abdul-el-Kebir could not forget, because for the first time in his life he realised that he was well and truly terrified.

  The light was different and there was nothing that might cast a shadow anywhere on that white, flat and limitless terrain.

  The last few dunes died out gently, like thirsty tongues or waves from a weary sea that had crashed hopelessly onto a beach without end. It was as if nature had placed a natural frontier there on a whim, with no obvious explanation for why the sand should end right there and the plain suddenly begin.

  The silence intensified to such an extent that Abdul could hear his own racing heartbeat and the blood throbbing in his temples.

  As soon as he started to hear his own heart beat he closed his eyes, trying to get the image of that nightmarish landscape out of his mind, but the picture had stuck onto his retina and he was convinced that it was this image that would haunt him in his final, agonising moments.

  There were no mountains, no rocks, no nothing, just a slight depression. It was a blank piece of paper, upon which all the books in the world could have been written. Insh. Allah!

  What had God, with his limitless powers of imagination, been thinking of when he created this space that was so totally devoid of anything, so utterly empty?

  Insh. Allah! It was a decision He had made and so it must be accepted. He had created a poem within a poem; a desert within a desert.

  Gazel had been right and the wind had suddenly dropped at the edge of the dunes, giving way to a rarefied atmosphere and in less than one hundred meters the temperature had risen by fifteen degrees. It was like a buffet of hot air that made you want to recoil back towards the sweet protection of the dunes, which, only a short while back, had seemed unbearable.

  They set off once the sun had sunk below the horizon, even though the air had not cooled down at all. It was as if the laws of nature did not apply to that accursed place, as if the mass of rarefied air that swirled through the “lost land” was trapped under a large glass bell that cut it off from the rest of the planet.

  The camels brayed in terror as their instinct told them that the hard, hot ground beneath them would only take them to the end of all roads.

  As darkness fell, the stars came out and Gazel fixed his route on one of them, which he would follow constantly. Later a pale moon appeared that projected, perhaps for the first time since time immemorial, shadows onto that ghostly plain.

  The Targui walked on foot with a constant, mechanical step, while Abdul rode on the strongest of the camels — a young female who did not seem too affected by fatigue or the lack of water. As soon as the milky white of dawn began to erase the stars from the sky he stopped, made the animals kneel down and lifted a white, camel-hair awning over them.

  An hour later Abdul-el-Kebir started to feel as if he was suffocating and that the air was not reaching his lungs.

  ‘Water,’ he called out.

  Gazel only opened his eyes and shook his head very slightly.

  ‘I’m going to die…!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am going to die…!’

  ‘Stop moving. You have to remain still. Like the camels. Like me. Let your heart calm down and work slowly and your lungs breathe in the minimum of air necessary. Do not think of anything.’

  ‘Just a sip…’ he begged again. ‘A sip…!’

  ‘It will make it worse. You can drink when evening falls.’

  ‘In the evening!’ he said in a horrified tone. ‘That’s not for another eight hours!’

  He soon realised it was pointless to insist, so he closed his eyes, emptied his head and tried to relax all his muscles, to forget about water, about the desert thirst, or the terror that had settled, l
ike a living being, in the pit of his stomach.

  He tried to get his mind to abandon his body and leave it there, alone, resting on the camel, just as the Targui was doing and who, it seemed, had converted himself into a stone. And he contemplated himself, divided up like that, in two parts; one part witness, completely separated from the reality of thirst, the heat and the desert; the other just an empty shell, a human casing that could no longer feel or suffer at all.

  Without falling asleep completely he drifted into far away spaces and past, happier times, when he had been with his boys, who he had last seen as children and who would now be grown men with children of their own.

  Fantasy and reality came to blows as scenes of his real life crashed intensely into fictitious events that at the time seemed almost more vivid, but that were in fact just figments of an unhinged imagination.

  He woke up twice in anguish, thinking that he was still in prison, an anguish that only increased with the realisation that he was free, but locked inside the biggest prison of them all.

  The Targui remained where he was, in front of him, like a statue, unmoving and hardly breathing. He watched him as he tried to understand what he was made of and what kind of emotions he was going through.

  He was scared of him, but respected him at the same time. He felt thankful to him for having freed him and was probably one of the most self-assured, upstanding and admirable human beings that he had ever met. But there was something, maybe fourteen bodies, that came between them both.

  Or maybe it was just a question of race and culture. As Gazel had said, a man from the coast would never get to know a Targui, or accept his customs.

  The Tuaregs were the only group, of all the Islamic people, that still remained faithful to the teachings of Mohammad. They believed in sexual equality and not only did the women never cover their faces — unlike the men — they also enjoyed total sexual liberty until they were married. Their women did not have to account for their actions, either to their parents or to their future husbands and their choice of husband was usually based on their own personal preference.