Tuareg

‘He’s dead,’ muttered Lieutenant Razman. ‘He’s got to be dead. He hasn’t moved for four days now, he must have just turned into a pillar of salt.’

‘Do you want me to go and check,’ one of the soldiers offered, thinking that he might be given stripes for such an act.

The heat was starting to ease off.

He shook his head over and over again as he lit his pipe with a sailor’s lighter — the only lighter that really worked out there in the sand and wind.

‘I don’t trust that Targui…’ he said. ‘I don’t want him to kill us at night.’

‘But we can’t spend the rest of our lives here,’ the other one pointed out. ‘We’ve only got enough water for four days.’

‘I know…’ he admitted. ‘Tomorrow I’ll send in a man from each point. I’m not going to take any stupid risks.’

Once he was alone, however, he wondered if the greatest risk of all might be just that: waiting there for him and playing the Targui’s game. He was unable to work out what his plans were and still did not believe that he would have let himself die of heat and thirst without having first put up a fight. From what he knew of Gazel Sayah, he was one of the last, truly free Tuareg, a noble inmouchar, almost a prince among his people, capable of crossing the “lost land” and taking on an army in order to avenge a wrongdoing. It just did not make sense that a man like that would let himself die as soon as he felt trapped. Suicide did not figure in the minds of the Tuareg, nor did it in the minds of Muslims, who knew that if they tried to kill themselves they would be barred from eternal paradise. Maybe the fugitive, like many of his people, was not in reality a fervent believer, but preferred to follow their more ancient traditions. But still, he could not bring himself to believe that he would shoot himself, cut his wrists or allow himself to be consumed by the sun and thirst.

He had a plan, of that he was sure. The plan would be Machiavellian but simple. There was also no doubt that the elements around them would play a key role in that plan — a landscape that the Targui had learned, even before he was born, to use to his advantage. But try as he may, the lieutenant could not work out what that plan might be.

The Targui seemed to be gambling on his men’s fatigue and indeed his own and on the fact that no one would believe that a man could survive for so long without water in that raging furnace. He was trying to get them to believe, almost subconsciously, that they were actually keeping watch over a dead body so that without even realising it, they would drop their guard, at which point he would just slip away into the immense desert.

It was a reasonable assumption, but every time he remembered the insufferable heat that he had endured down there in the saltpan and calculated how much water a human being would need to survive in there, Targui or not, he changed his mind and became convinced that there was no way on earth that the fugitive could still be alive.

‘He’s dead…’ he repeated once again, furious with himself and his impotence. ‘The son of a bitch has to be dead.’

But Gazel Sayah was not dead.

He was there, as still as he had been for the last four days and almost four nights, watching the sun sink below the horizon, heralding the arrival of the darkness that would fall without warning and he knew that on this night he would finally have to act.

It was as if his mind had emerged from a strange kind of stupor that he had consciously forced himself into in order to convert himself into an inanimate object. He had managed to transform himself into a desert shrub, a rock from the erg, or one of the millions of grains of salt in the sebkha, overcoming his need to drink, sweat or even urinate.

It was as if the very pores of his skin had closed up and like his bladder was no longer connected with his exterior. His blood had seemed to thicken into a soupy mass, pushed around his body by his heart that had slowed to a minimum of beats per minute.

He had to rid himself of every thought and every memory and close down his imagination, because he knew that the body and mind were inexorably linked. Even a simple memory of Laila, the idea of a well, full of clear water, or a dream that he had escaped from that inferno, would make his heart beat faster, undermining his efforts to become a “man of stone.”

But he had managed it and now he awoke from his long trance to contemplate the remains of the day. He worked to get his mind out of its stupor and awaken his body, to get the blood flowing and his muscles moving in order to recover the strength and flexibility that would soon be required of them.

Then, in the shadows, once he was totally sure that nobody could see him, he started to move. First an arm, then the other, then finally his legs and his head as he eased himself out of his refuge and stood up, still using the camel’s body, which had started to rot, to support himself with.

He looked for his gerba and summoning up all his will and strength once again, he swallowed the greenish, repugnant, thick liquid, which had started to congeal and was now more like egg white mixed with bile, than water.

He then got out his dagger and moving the saddle off the animal, he cut through the skin of the camel’s hump in order to extract a white fat that was already on the point of turning putrid and began to chew on it immediately, aware that it was the only thing that would give him back his strength.

Even in death, his faithful mount had given him a final offering: the blood from his veins and water from his stomach in order to fight off his thirst, as well as his precious fat reserves that would bring him back to life.

An hour later, now in the thick of night, he looked back at the beast thankfully one last time, gathered up his water gerbas, his weapons and started off, unhurriedly, towards the west.

He had taken off his blue djelabba so that he was even less visible now and was just a white smudge, moving silently across the plain. Even when the moon came out and he cast a faint shadow, he was still invisible to anyone more than twenty meters away from him.

He saw the bank just as the mosquitoes were starting to emerge, so he wrapped himself up in his turban, covering his eyes with his litham and letting the hems of his robes drag on the ground to stop the insects from biting his ankles.

They emerged, threateningly, in their millions, not as many as there were at dawn or sunset, but an impressive amount all the same. They were ferocious and forced him to slap them off his arms and neck while some of them even managed to bite him through his clothes.

He could feel the salt crust thinning under foot as it became more dangerous with each step, but he knew that in the dark all he could do was place his trust in Allah and hope that He would guide his way. Finally and with some relief, he felt the first slab of rock underfoot, a piece that had come away from the top of the bank and he looked for bit of firm ground to step on to, ignoring the danger of scorpion nests this time in his hurry to get out of the sebkha.

He eventually found a good spot to climb up from, about three hundred meters to his left and when he finally peered over into the immensity of the erg and a light gust of wind hit his face, he pulled himself out and let himself fall onto the sand, exhausted. He gave thanks to his creator that he had been allowed to escape from the salt trap, even though he had reached breaking point out there, his nerves so frayed that at one point he was not even sure he was going to make it through.

He slept for some time, trying to ignore the noise of the mosquitoes buzzing around him and then he dragged himself, meter by meter, with the patience of a chameleon stalking an insect, for about half a kilometre, away from the edge of the saltpan.

Not once did he lift his head higher than a hand’s breadth above the level of the rocks, not even moving a muscle when a snake slithered in front of his eyes.

He turned his face to the sky and looked at the stars to work out how long it would be before dawn arrived. Then he looked around him and found his spot: three square meters of thick gravel, almost completely surrounded by small black rocks. He took out his dagger and started to dig silently, moving the sand away carefully, until he had made a grave the length of his body and two hands deep. It was just getting light as climbed into it and the first of the sun’s rays slid over him. He finished covering himself with gravel, leaving only his eyes, nose and mouth free, which, during the hottest hours of the day would be protected by the shadow from the rocks.

Somebody could have urinated just three meters away without realising that a man was hiding right there, under his very feet.

Every morning, as his jeep approached the edge of the sebkha he was overcome with the same two conflicting fears: the fear that the motionless figure would be in the same place still and the fear that it might be gone.

Every morning Lieutenant Razman would experience first a feeling of fury and then one of impotency. He would start off by cursing the dirty son of the wind who was running rings around him, only to be overcome with a profound sense of satisfaction as he realised that he had not been wrong about the Targui.

‘It would take great courage to let yourself die of thirst rather than be put into prison. A lot of courage. He must be dead.’

The frantic voice of Sergeant Malik came over the radio:

‘He’s gone, lieutenant,’ he said furiously. ‘Everything looks the same from here, but I am certain that he’s escaped.’

‘Where to?’ he snapped. ‘Where on earth can a man who hasn’t got a camel or water go to? Or is that not a camel?’

‘Yes, it is,’ the other man replied. ‘And it looks like there’s a man at its side, but it could also be a dummy.’

He paused. ‘With all due respect, lieutenant sir, I’d like to go in and look for him.’

‘Alright…’ he said reluctantly. ‘Tonight.’

‘Now!’

‘Listen sergeant!’ he replied, trying his hardest to sound authoritative. ‘I’m in charge. You will go out as night falls and come back at dawn. Is that clear?’

‘Very clear, sir.’

‘That goes for you too Ajamuk.’

‘Saud…?’

‘I’ll send a man in as the sun sets.’

‘That’s settled then,’ he concluded.

‘I want to return to Tidikem tomorrow. I’ve had enough of this Targui and this absurd situation. If he’s not dead I can’t even be bothered to hand him over, you can shoot him dead.’

He immediately regretted issuing those orders as he knew that Sergeant Malik would take them literally and do everything in his power to finish off the Targui once and for all, but he could not go back on his word.

Deep down he thought it was probably for the best anyway, since the Targui had given the impression that he would rather die than be shut up in a dirty cell.

He tried to picture the tall man with his noble gestures and measured speech, who, in his own mind, was simply doing his duty according to the dictates of his ancient traditions and realised there was no way that this man would ever survive amongst the rabbles he would meet in jail.

Most of his compatriots were wild, primitive people and Razman knew that. For one hundred years they had lived under the rule of the French colonisers who had made sure that these people remained ignorant. Even now that they were free and independent, those years of independence had not actually created a more cultured and educated population. On the contrary, there were many people who had interpreted this newfound freedom as a means to do as they wished, which saw men rising to power through force, adopting only those legacies left behind by the French that suited their situation.

The result was anarchy, crisis and continued political unrest. Power, it transpired, was a way of getting rich fast, as opposed to a way of guiding a nation forward.

The prisons were full to overflowing with criminals and politicians from the opposition and there was certainly not enough room in them for a Targui, born to live in the desert, the land without limits.