Tuareg Read online

  The sentry was asleep, in exactly the same position as before and there was still no sign of life or any breeze that might disturb the stillness of the deserted palm grove. He slipped away, moving deftly from tree to tree, then climbed up on to one of the dunes with practised agility and disappeared, as if he had been swallowed up by the sand.

  It was late afternoon when the captain’s batman found the body.

  His shouts, verging on the hysterical, rang through the oasis, prompting the men to drop their shovels and go running over to the small shack, but the sergeant major shoved them all firmly back as they all tried to crowd into the hut.

  When he was finally alone with the body, lying now in a flyinfested pool of blood, he sat down on the stool and cursed his bad luck. The son of a bitch could have waited four more days.

  He was not at all sorry; nor did he feel the slightest bit of compassion for that son of a bitch, the biggest bastard of them all, lying in front of him, despite the fact that they had shared many years in that hellish place together. He also had been the only one with whom he could ever have a vaguely intelligible conversation with from time to time. Still, he did not doubt that Captain Kaleb-el-Fasi deserved to die, be it there or anywhere else, but he wished to hell that the timing had been better.

  Now they would send in a new commandant, who would be neither better nor worse, just different. It would be years before he would know him well enough to take advantage of his weak points and learn to manage him in the same way that he had managed the one that now lay dead in front of him.

  He was also worried about the complex process they would have to go through with the investigating commission, because even he did not have the remotest idea who, out of the bunch of murderers that stood some five meters from the door outside, talking excitedly to each other, was guilty this time.

  They would all be suspects, including him, he quickly realised, since he would have much the same motives as any of the others: to get rid of the man that had made the lives of anyone under his command unbearable.

  He had to find out who the murderer was before anyone turned up and hand it over as a closed case in order to avoid any further trouble.

  He closed his eyes and mentally went through the faces of all his men, in search of a suspect, but finished the exercise totally disheartened.

  He could dismiss about a dozen of them as possibly innocent. The rest of them, he realised, would all have taken great pleasure in slitting his commandant’s throat.

  ‘Mulay!’ he screeched.

  A broad, very tall, sour-faced man came in immediately and stood there, pale and shaken, almost trembling, in the doorway.

  ‘At your orders sergeant,’ he stuttered.

  ‘You were on duty weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sergeant.’

  ‘And you didn’t see anyone?’

  ‘I think I must have fallen asleep at some point, sergeant,’ the giant of a man said, almost sobbing. ‘Who would think such a thing could happen in broad daylight…?’

  ‘Obviously not you. You’ll probably be up before the firing squad for this. Even if you’re not guilty of it, you’re responsible for it.’

  The other man gulped and his breathing became laboured as he put his hands out in front of him beseechingly:

  ‘But it wasn’t me sergeant. Why would I do it? In four days time we were off in search of that caravan.’

  ‘If you mention that caravan again I’ll personally arrange for you to be shot. I’ll deny ever having spoken to you about it. It’ll be your word against mine.’

  ‘I understand sergeant,’ Mulay said apologetically. ‘I’ll never mention it again.’

  ‘I just wanted you to know that I was one of the few people that wanted him alive.’

  Sergeant Major Malik-el-Haideri got up, took the dead man’s packet of cigarettes from the table and lit one with his heavy silver lighter that he then slid nonchalantly into his own pocket.

  ‘I understand,’ he admitted. ‘I understand very well, but you were also on guard and that means that it was your job to shoot at anyone who came near this hut. Bastard! Whoever did this I’ll skin him alive!’

  He glanced back at the body, went outside and stopped in the shade of the porch where he scanned all the faces of those present. Everyone was there.

  ‘Listen to me and listen well!’ he growled. ‘We have to sort this out between us, unless we want a load of officials coming in to make our lives even more unbearable. Mulay was on guard, but I don’t think it was him.’

  ‘The rest of you, I suppose, were all asleep. Who wasn’t in the hut and why?’

  The soldiers looked at each other suspiciously, aware that the situation was pretty serious and that it might lead to an investigating commission being called in. Finally a petty officer spoke up timidly:

  ‘I don’t remember anyone being missing, sergeant. The heat was unbearable. It would have been very odd if anyone had stayed outside.’

  There was a murmur of mutual agreement.

  The sergeant meditated for a few moments.

  ‘Who went to the bathroom?’

  Three men put their hands up.

  ‘I wasn’t even two minutes,’ one of them protested. ‘He saw me and I saw him.’

  He turned to look at the third man.

  ‘And you, who saw you?’

  The skinny black man came up from the back.

  ‘Me. He went over to the dunes and then came straight back. I also saw the other two… I couldn’t sleep and I can tell you for sure, sergeant, that nobody left the hut for longer than three minutes. The only one that wasn’t here was Mulay,’ he paused for a minute and then added casually: ‘And you of course.’

  The sergeant major shifted about uncomfortably and for a split second seemed to lose his composure as a cold trickle of sweat ran down his back. He turned to Mulay, who was standing quietly next to the door and gave him a withering look.

  ‘So if it wasn’t any of you lot and there’s nobody around for at least a one hundred kilometre radius, it looks like you’re going to have to…’ He stopped suddenly, then starting praising the skies jubilantly as a thought suddenly flashed across his mind:

  ‘The Targui! Well I’ll be damned…! The Targui! Officer!’

  ‘Yes, sergeant,’

  ‘What was that you were telling me about something to do with a Targui not wanting you to enter his settlement? Can you remember what he was like?’

  The officer shrugged his shoulders doubtfully:

  ‘All the Tuareg people look the same when they wear that veil, sergeant.’

  ‘But could it have been the one that stayed here yesterday?’

  It was the skeletal black man that answered.

  ‘It could have been him sergeant. I was also there. He was tall, thin with a blue, sleeveless djelabba over a white one and a small bag or charm made of red leather round his neck.’

  The sergeant gestured for him to stop right there as he breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  ‘It’s him, without a doubt,’ he said. That son of a bitch had the balls to come in here and slit the captain’s throat right under our very noses. Officer! Lock Mulay up! If he escapes I’ll have you

  shot. Then radio through to the capital. Ali!’

  ‘At your orders, sergeant!’ the black man replied.

  ‘Get all the vehicles ready to go… We’ll need maximum supplies of water, petrol and provisions. We’ll catch that bastard even if he’s hiding in that hellhole out there.’

  Half an hour later, the Adoras military posting was buzzing with activity, the likes of which had not been seen since its first opened or at least not since the large caravans from the south had stopped going there.

  He did not stop walking for the entire night, guiding his mount by the reins to the light of a half moon and thousands of stars that meant he could just make out the profile of the dunes and the sinuous contours of the paths that wound between them. He followed the gassis, tracks formed by capricious
winds, which often, without warning, would suddenly disappear, forcing them to struggle back up on to the soft sand of a dune. As they climbed back up they would stumble and fall in the loose sand, the mehari snorting and pulling at the reins, in protest of their uncomfortable journey at a time when, by rights, it should have been resting or grazing peacefully on the plains.

  They would only rest for a few minutes at a time, until they finally reached the erg, which suddenly opened up before them, infinite and flat, without horizon. The empty terrain was made up of black stones, cracked by the sun and a coarse sand, almost like gravel that the winds did not disturb apart from when they blew furiously during one of the big storms.

  Gazel knew that from that point on he would no longer see any bushes, or grara, not even a dried up river bed, all the things you would see so frequently in the hamada. The monotonous terrain would be broken up only by the odd depression in the ground, caused by a salt pan with deep sides, in a landscape where a rider and his mount would stand out like a sore thumb.

  But Gazel also knew that no other camel could compete with his mehari on that terrain, with its thousands of pointy, sharp rocks, some of which were as high as half a meter, making it impossible for any type of motorized vehicle to drive through it.

  And unless he was very much mistaken, the soldiers, when they came in search of him, would come in jeeps and vans and not being desert people they were neither used to long journeys, nor to swaying from side to side on a camel for days on end.

  By dawn he was already far away from the dunes, which were now just a vague and winding line on the horizon and he guessed that the soldiers would just be setting off. It would take them at least two hours on the road that they had opened through the sand before they would reach the plains, some way to the west from his current position and even if one of the vehicles went straight for the erg, it would still not reach the edges of it until late morning, when the sun would already be high in the sky.

  This, he calculated, gave him some breathing space, so he got down from the camel, lit a small fire and cooked the scant remains of the antelope that had already started to rot and said his morning prayers, his face to Mecca, towards the east, the direction from which his enemies would arrive. After having eaten heartily, he covered up the remains of the fire and grabbing the reins of his mount, started off on his journey once again, the sun already beating down on his back.

  He headed due west, moving further away from Adoras and the land he was familiar with. His destination was El-Akab, which was north, but Gazel was a Targui, a man of the desert, so time, the hours, the days, even the months, were of little importance to him. He knew where El-Akab was and that it had been there for hundreds of years and would still be there long after he and even his grandchildren had been forgotten. He would have time to retrace his steps once the impatient soldiers got tired of looking for him.

  ‘Right now they are furious,’ he said out loud.

  ‘But in a month they will have forgotten that I ever even existed.’

  As midday approached he stopped and made the mehari kneel down into a small dip. He surrounded it with stones, stuck his rifle and sword into it and stretched a blanket over them to create some shade that was so essential at that time of day. Then he curled up underneath it and a minute later was fast asleep and invisible to anyone that was more than two hundred meters away.

  He woke up with the sun hitting his face at an angle as it disappeared beneath the horizon. He peered out between the rocks and saw a small column of dust rising into the sky. It was coming from a vehicle that was making its way slowly to the edges of the plain, crawling along tentatively, as if afraid to lose the protection of the dunes and enter into the inhospitable immensity of the erg.

  Sergeant Major Malik stopped the vehicle, switched off his radio and took in the never-ending plain before him slowly. It was as if some giant hand had planted thousands of sharp, black, pointed rocks all over it. Rocks that were capable of ripping a tyre to shreds or even blowing up a crankshaft if one was careless enough.

  ‘I bet that son of a bitch is out there somewhere,’ he said, lighting a cigarette nonchalantly. He then held out his hand without looking round and Ali, the black man gave him the microphone.

  ‘Officer!’ he called. ‘Can you hear me?’

  A very distant voice answered: ‘I can hear you sergeant. Have you found anything?’

  ‘Nothing. And you?’

  ‘Not a trace.’

  ‘Have you made contact with Almarik?’

  ‘A while ago sergeant. He hasn’t seen anything either. I’ve sent him in search of Mubarrak. He should hopefully arrive at his settlement tonight. He’s going to call me at seven.’

  ‘Alright,’ he replied. ‘Call me once you’ve made contact with him. Over and out.’

  He put the microphone back, stood up on his seat, picked up his binoculars and searched the stony plains once again. He then jumped out of his car bad-temperedly and urinated with his back to the men, who took the opportunity to do the same.

  ‘I’d have gone into that hell hole if I were him,’ he muttered out loud. ‘It’s much quicker in there and he can travel through the night as well, while our vehicles would just fall apart.’ He zipped up his fly, picked up his cigarette that he had left on the bonnet of the jeep and dragged hard. ‘If we just had some idea where he was headed…’

  ‘Maybe he’s headed home,’ Ali suggested. ‘But that’s the opposite direction, towards the southeast.’

  ‘Home!’ he growled sarcastically. ‘Since when have these bastard sons of the wind ever had a home? The first thing they do at the remotest sign of danger is move their settlement and relocate their families to an even more remote spot, thousands of miles away.’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head resolutely. ‘This Targui’s home is wherever his camel is, which could be anywhere from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea. That is the advantage he has over us: he doesn’t need anything, or anybody.’

  ‘What are we going to do then?’

  He looked at the sinking sun and the sky that was stained with red and shook his head despondently.

  ‘We won’t do anything right now,’ he said.

  ‘Set up camp and make the evening meal. A man on guard at all times and if he falls asleep I’ll shoot him there and then. Is that clear?’

  He did not wait for a reply. He took a map out of the glove compartment, spread it out on the car and studied it carefully. He knew he could not trust it. The dunes shifted constantly, paths disappeared underneath the sand, the wells closed up and he also knew, from his own experience, that whoever had drawn up the map had never actually been into the erg itself, but drawn the lines using a bit of guess work and could easily have been a few hundred kilometers out. At the time of reckoning those one hundred kilometers could mean the difference between life and death, especially if your jeep had broken down and you were forced to continue on foot.

  For a fleeting moment he was tempted to pack it all in and order a return to the outpost, because at the end of the day the captain had deserved his end. Had he not met the Targui he might have done just that and sent in a report, case closed. But he had been personally offended by the Targui, ridiculed even. He had been used by a shabby son of the wind who had purposefully deceived him and who must have been laughing under his filthy djelabba all the while they had spoken together about that crazy lost caravan and its treasures.

  He had even helped him tie up the camel’s load, ensuring he had sufficient water and that he was well set up for a long journey, when in reality all he was planning to do was hide behind a dune for a while and return that very same day. He peered over at the endless plains once again, which had become a grey smudge, stretching out before him. ‘If I catch you,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I’ll skin you alive, I swear.’

  He said his afternoon prayers, threw a small leather bag that contained a handful of dates over his shoulder and munching on them slowly, took off once again. He continued to
head west, accompanied only by the shadows that emerged as night fell, well aware that if he were to walk all night, at an average speed, he could put a crucial distance in between his pursuers and him.

  The camel, having drunk enough water and rested sufficiently, was full and strong, his hump rounded and shiny, which meant that he had enough reserves to keep going for a week at that pace. A beast like that could lose up to one hundred kilos in weight before it would start to feel uncomfortable.

  Gazel was used to going out on long hunting treks, so this journey was not unlike any other outing for him, when he would go in search of a wounded animal or a beautiful herd of animals on the move. He liked it out there, alone in the desert, it was the life he truly loved and although he would think of his family from time to time and at night, or when heat of the afternoon pressed down on him and he would miss Laila. He also knew that he could overcome that emotion for as long as it was necessary or for as long as it took to fulfil the task he had set himself, which in this case was to avenge the insult that had been laid upon him.

  He was happy when the moon came out later to light the way and at midnight he could make out in the distance the silver reflection of a sebhka, a huge saltpan that, as he got closer, opened up before him like a petrified sea, without end.

  He started to head north, edging round it and making sure to keep a certain distance because on the marshy, muddy shores of those lakes, billions of mosquitoes would gather in large clouds during the afternoons or at dawn, blocking out the sun and making it impossible for man or beast to get anywhere near the saltpan. Gazel had seen camels go crazy with pain from the mosquitoes as they attacked their eyes and mouths and he had watched as they ran off, shaking off their load and their riders, never to be seen again.

  You could only approach the sebhkas during the day, when the sun was high enough to fry the wings of any mosquito that dared take to the air. At this time of day they just disappeared, as if they had never existed, as if this terrible punishment that Allah had sent down to the desert people, who had already been punished a thousand times over, had simply been a figment of their imagination.