Tuareg Read online

  How could he tell him that their real difficulties had not yet even begun? They still had water and three camels to drink the blood of. It was still a while before those strange bright lights, like a thousand suns, would start to burn behind their eyes, the surest symptom that dehydration was setting in. The road was still a long one, a very long one and would demand enormous will power and an invincible spirit, without ever offering an ounce of hope or reward in return.

  “Stay away from Tikdabra.”

  He could not remember when he had first heard that warning, probably while he was in the womb of his mother, but now he was there, somewhere in Tikdabra, carrying with him a man who was fast becoming a shadow. He was quite sure, moreover, that he, Gazel Sayah, “the Hunter,” Imohag of the Kel-Talgimus, could have conquered Tikdabra alone, with the help of his four camels.

  He would be the first man ever to have achieved it and his fame would have spread throughout the desert far and wide and his name passed on by word of mouth, as he became a legend. But he was carrying an unbearable weight with him, like the chains put on the ankles of rebel slaves by their masters and the weight, this man who had been destroyed and beaten down in less than a week, meant that neither him nor any other Targui in the desert would ever make it through that empty land.

  He realised that the moment would come when he would either have to shoot the man in order to relieve him of his sufferings and save himself, or they would both of them end up suffering the most hideous of deaths.

  ‘He will ask me to kill him,’ he said to himself. ‘When he cannot go on any more and I will have to do it.’

  He could only hope that it was not already too late.

  If his guest asked to die voluntarily, it was within his rights to do so and he would be free of all responsibility from that moment and free to try and save himself.

  ‘Five days,’ he calculated. ‘In five days time he will still be in a condition to ask for it himself. If he lasts any longer then it will be too late for both of us.’

  He was presented with a difficult dilemma, on the one hand he should try and keep his companion whole, feed his hope and try to save him in every humane way possible. On the other hand, he realised that for every hour and day that he managed to prolong his companion’s life, the possibility of him surviving for another day or hour decreased.

  Abdul-el-Kebir, because of his constitution and out of habit, drank three times as much as Gazel did. This meant that when the time came, the Targui would have four times more chance of surviving, if he were alone.

  He watched him as he slept, restlessly, murmuring occasionally and with his mouth wide open, as if searching for air. He would be doing him a favour if he extended that sleep now to eternity, freeing him from the terrors of the punishing days that lay ahead of them. It would almost be kinder to ease him into an eternal sleep right then, at least while there was still a measure of hope in his heart; the hope that they might yet manage to cross the border.

  What border? It had to be there, somewhere ahead of them or maybe it was already behind them. Nobody in the whole world would know to point them in the right direction since the Tikdabra “lost land” had never accepted a human presence in it before, let alone allowed the imposition of a border upon it.

  Maybe “it” was the border; the final frontier between countries, between religion and life and death. “It” sat there like a barrier to man and Gazel realised that in one way he loved the “lost land.” He loved the fact that he was there of his own free will and that he might be the first ever human being, since the beginning of time to know what it was like to take on the “desert of all deserts.”

  ‘I feel strong enough to beat you,’ was the last thing he said, before falling into a deep sleep. ‘I feel capable of defeating you and putting an end to the legend once and for all.’

  But once he was asleep a voice came into his head that echoed repeatedly and monotonously: “Stay away from Tikdabra.” Then the image of Laila emerged from out of the shadows and she stroked his forehead and gave him fresh water from the deepest of wells. She sang to him in the same way that she had sang to him on the night of the Ahal, at the festival of love-making, when she had drawn strange patterns on his hands, patterns that only his people knew how to interpret. Laila! Laila!

  She stopped in her task of grinding maize and lifted up her dark eyes to look at Suilem’s wrinkled face. He was staring up at a peak that overlooked the guelta.

  ‘Soldiers,’ was all he said.

  And soldiers they were and they came from every angle, their weapons at the ready, as if attacking a dangerous enemy enclave instead of a miserable nomadic camp occupied by only women, old men and children.

  She took one look at them and knew immediately what was happening, so she turned around and said to the Akli in no uncertain terms:

  ‘Hide,’ she ordered. ‘Your master will need to know what’s happened.’

  The old man hesitated for a minute before obeying, then slipped off in between the jaimas and sheribas and disappeared into a bed of reeds by a small lake, as if he had been swallowed up by it.

  Laila then called her husband’s children and the women servants over, took the littlest into her arms and stood there, tall and strong in front of the man who appeared to be in charge of the group.

  ‘What do you want from my camp?’ she asked, even though she already knew.

  ‘Gazel Sayah. Do you know him?’

  ‘He is my husband. But he is not here.’

  Sergeant Malik took in the tall and defiant Targui, without any veils covering her face or heavy drapes over her arms, breasts or strong legs, at leisure. He had not been close to a woman like that for years, not since he had been posted to the desert and had been forced to rid himself of all such thoughts and desires. He replied softly, a smile playing at his lips:

  ‘I know he’s not here. He’s very far away, in Tikdabra.’

  She shuddered with horror as he uttered that fearful word, but managed to hide the terror she felt. The Tuareg women were never supposed to reveal their fear.

  ‘If you know where he is, then why have you come here?’

  ‘To protect you. You will have to come with us because your husband has turned into a dangerous criminal and the authorities are afraid that an angry mob might attack you.’

  Laila had to stop herself from laughing at the audacity of this man, as she gestured with a sweep of her hand around her and said:

  ‘Mob?’ she repeated. ‘What mob? There isn’t a soul around here for at least two days in either direction.’

  Malik-el-Haideri smiled like the cat that had got the cream. He felt happy and vaguely amused for the first time in a long time.

  ‘News travels fast in the desert,’ he said. ‘You know that. Word will soon spread and we have to try and prevent the start of any tribal warfare. You will come with us.’

  ‘And if we refuse to?’

  ‘You will come anyway. By force.’ He looked at them all. ‘Is everyone here?’ They nodded silently as he pointed in the direction from which they had arrived. ‘Right, off we go then!’

  Laila pointed to the camp.

  ‘We have to take the camp down.’

  ‘The camp will stay where it is. My men will remain here and wait for your husband.’

  For the first time Laila nearly lost her composure and her reply was almost beseeching.

  ‘But it’s all we have.’

  Malik laughed contemptuously.

  ‘It’s not much then. But where we’re going you won’t need anything.’ He paused. ‘You must understand that I can’t go wandering around the desert carrying blankets and carpets and pots and pans like some kind of tinker.’ He gestured to one of his men. ‘Get them to start moving. Ali, stay here with four men and you know what to do if the Targui turns up!’

  Fifteen minutes later Laila turned round to look down at the small valley where, by the water of the guelta she just could just make out her jaimas and sheribas, the goat pen
and the corner of ground by the reed beds where the camels were grazing. That and a man were all she had ever had in her life, apart from the son she was carrying in her arms and she was overcome with fear that she would never see her home or her husband again. She turned to Malik who had stopped at her side.

  ‘What do you really want from us?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never seen women and children get involved in a confrontation that is between men. Is your army so weak that you need us in your battle against Gazel?’

  ‘He’s got somebody that we want,’ came his reply. ‘Now we have something that he wants. We’ll play him at his own game and you should be thankful that we didn’t slit any of your throats while you slept. We will offer him an exchange. One man for all of his family.’

  ‘If that man was his guest, then I cannot accept that. Our laws forbid it.’

  ‘Your laws do not exist!’

  Malik-el-Haideri had sat down on a stone and lit a cigarette as the line of soldiers and prisoners began their descent down the rocky mountainside towards the flat land, where their vehicles were parked. ‘Your law, made by the Tuaregs for the convenience and exclusive use of the Tuaregs, is not recognised as valid by our national laws.’

  He blew smoke into the woman’s face. ‘Your husband has failed to understand this, despite our best intentions, so now we’re going to have to make him understand this in a less pleasant way. You cannot do whatever you want under the umbrella of your own tradition, somehow relying on the immensity of this desert to support it. He will come back one day and on that day he will be forced to take responsibility for his actions. If he wants to see his wife and children free again then he will have to hand him over and be tried.’

  ‘He will never hand him over,’ Laila said with conviction.

  ‘Then get used to the fact that you’ll never be free again.’

  She did not answer, but looked back to the reed beds where she knew that Suilem the Akli was hiding and then, as if turning her back on her past forever, she turned around and started off down the hill after her family.

  Malik-el-Haideri finished his cigarette, clearly flustered by the presence of this woman and he watched the gentle swaying of her hips as she walked away. Then stubbing his cigarette out angrily, he got up and followed her down slowly.

  He saw it with the first light of day, although at first he thought that he was seeing things. On closer inspection, however, he realised that there really was “something,” lying there on that flat, formless ground, but could not work out for the life of him what that “something” was.

  The sun was starting to beat down and he realised that the time had come to stop and set up camp before the camel, who had been moaning since midnight, fell down definitively. But out of curiosity he forced them on a little further, stopping finally about one kilometre away from the object.

  He put the canvas up over the animals and the man, who was now nothing more than a dead weight, checked that everything was in order and carried on, on foot, slowly. He forced himself to remain calm and not use up what little strength he had left, even though all he wanted to do was run over to the unidentified object.

  Once he was about two hundred meters away he was just able to make out that the white object, crushed against the white plain, was actually the mummified skeleton, of a huge harnessed camel, totally intact still, due to the dry air.

  He looked at it from a short distance away. Its sad smile of death revealed a set of enormous white teeth and there were deep sockets where its eyes had once been. Through the cracks in its skin you also could see that it was completely hollow on the inside.

  It was on its knees, its neck pushed out along the ground, looking over in the direction from which Gazel had come, that is to say to the northeast, which meant it had come from the southwest, because camels, when they died of thirst, always took one last hopeful look towards their destination.

  He did not know whether to be happy or sad. It was the skeleton of a mehari and an object that broke the monotony of the landscape that had accompanied them so far, for days on end, but if it had died there, it also revealed there was not a trace of water behind it.

  His lame camel would die there soon, less than one kilometre away from it. His camel, having made the same journey but from the opposite direction would also end up mummified and staring over to the other dead camel, without seeing it, the two corpses marking the middle of the road.

  In death they would unite the “lost land” of Tikdabra north with Tikdabra south, those poor desert beasts that had reached the limits of their capabilities.

  What hope would there be for him? He, who had to continue ahead with two exhausted, fading mounts and a man that he was only just managing to keep alive. He preferred not to think about it since he knew the answer already and wondered instead where the white mehari’s master was.

  He studied the skin and pieces of exposed skull.

  In most places in the desert he could make an accurate guess as to how long an animal had been dead for, but there, with that heat and dryness, in that terrain where not a drop of water had ever fallen or any being ever survived in, for all he knew, it could have been dead three years or one hundred.

  It was a mummy and Gazel did not know much about mummies.

  He realised that the heat was starting to intensify, so he made his way back.

  He was pleased of the shade and stopped to look carefully at Abdul-el-Kebir’s face. He was panting, almost unable to breathe normally. He slit the throat of the camel and gave him some blood to drink and the rest of the almost putrefied liquid from its stomach, barely six fingers deep in the saucepan. He was glad that he was unconscious, because he would never have drunk the rotten liquid otherwise and he did also wonder if it might actually kill him, given that he was not used to drinking putrid water like the Tuaregs were.

  ‘Still it was better to die of that than to die of thirst,’ he reflected. ‘If he can take it, it will keep him going for a little longer,’ he thought outloud.

  He lay down to sleep, but instead of falling straight into a deep slumber, as he usually did, exhausted by the long journey of the previous night, he lay there awake.

  He could not stop thinking about the skeleton of the dead camel, so completely alone there in the heart of the plain and he wondered what crazy notion had driven a Targui, who must have come from Gao or Timbuctu in search of a northern oasis, to travel through Tikdabra.

  The mehari still had its harness on, but had lost its saddle and load along the way, which meant that its master must have died before it and the animal carried on in search of a salvation that it had never found. The Bedouins, like the Tuaregs, would always remove the harness of a beast that was about to die, out of respect and as a way of thanking it for its loyal services.

  If its master had not removed it, it was because he had been unable to.

  He expected to find the body that night or the following day on the plain, his hollowed eyes also staring out northeast, towards the end of that interminable plain.

  But there was not just one body, but hundreds of them. He tripped over them in the darkness and could just make out their forms in the ghostly half-light of a new moon. The following day, he woke to see that they were surrounded by men and beasts for as far as the eye could see. It was at that moment that Gazel Sayah, inmouchar of the Kel-Talgimus, known amongst his own people as “the Hunter,” realised that he was the first human being ever to have found the remains of the “great caravan.”

  Shreds of fabric hung off some of the guides’ and drivers’ bodies and many of them were still clutching their weapons and empty gerbas. The faded saddles that the Turaegs used were still attached to the camels’ bony humps, with their silver and copper tacks, from which huge, broken bags of merchandise hung, that had, over time, emptied their precious contents onto the hard, sandy floor.

  There were elephant tusks, ebony statues, silk that disintegrated at a touch, gold and silver coins and in the bags of the richest merchants, d
iamonds the size of chickpeas. There it was, the legendary “great caravan;” the ancient dream of all desert dreams; one thousand and one riches, that not even Sheherazade herself, could have dreamed up.

  This discovery, however, did not fill him with joy, just a profound sense of uneasiness and he was overcome with an indescribable anguish. He just stared at the mummies, at those poor beings with their expressions of terror and suffering and it felt as if he was looking at himself in ten or twenty years time, maybe one hundred, one thousand or one million years. He imagined how his skin would also turn to parchment and his eyes to empty hollows, staring into nothing, his mouth open, in search of that last drop of water.

  And he wept for them. For the first time since he could remember, Gazel Sayah cried and even though he realised it was stupid to cry for these people who had been dead for so long, to see them there, before him and to understand the desperation of those last few moments, broke his heart.

  He set up camp amongst the dead and sat down to look at them, wondering which one was Gazel, his uncle, the mythical warrior-adventurer who had been contracted to protect the caravan from bandit attacks and ambushes, but who had been unable to protect them from their real enemy: the desert.

  He spent the day awake, keeping the dead company. It was the first bit of company they would have had since death had carried them away and he called on the spirits, who he believed would be wandering through that land for eternity, to show him the route out of there, the route they had not known to take while they were still alive.

  And the dead spoke to him from their hollow mouths, their bony hands grasping at the sand. They could not tell him which way to go, but the long, never ending line of mummies that snaked southwest as far as the eye could see, was evidence enough that the route they had followed was incorrect and would lead him to nothing more than days and days of solitude and thirst, from which there would be no return.