Tuareg

The landscape was like a sea of naked women lying in the sun, their skin golden, sometimes bronzed, at times burned, and the tips of the oldest ladies tinged with red. They were enormous, their breasts often rising to over two hundred metres high, with buttocks that were sometimes over a kilometre wide. They had long, never-ending legs, inaccessible legs, through which the camels climbed, clumsily, and heavily, shrieking and biting with each step as they struggled not to fall back down to the bottom of the dune and be devoured by the sand once and for all.

The gassis, the paths that ran between the dunes, would often lead them into windy labyrinths that led them nowhere or right back to the beginning and it was only thanks to Gazel’s incredible sense of direction and personal conviction that they managed to advance south, day by day, without once retracing their steps.

Abdul-el-Kebir, who prided himself on how well he knew the country that he had governed for a number of years and who had lived in the heart of the desert, would never have imagined, not even in his worst nightmares, that such a vast sea of dunes could actually have existed. It was like an erg that you could not see the end of, even from the highest of ghourds.

Sand and wind were the only things to exist out there, on the outskirts of the great “lost land” and he could not believe, as the Targui had told him, that there was something even worse out there than the petrified landscape he now found himself in.

They spent the days sheltering from the wind and sun in the shade of a roomy, wide, yellow-coloured tent that they shared with their camels, only resuming their journey in the early evening and continuing through the night to the light of the moon and the stars. Dawn would arrive suddenly and never failed to take their breath away, as the shadows scurried away across the sabre-shaped sifs, running from crest to crest, the grains of sand on those fine, blade-like tips, somehow defying the rules of gravity.

‘How much longer?’ he asked at dawn on the fifth day, as he realised with the first light that he still could not make out the start of the great plain.

‘I don’t know. Nobody has ever crossed this. Nobody has ever counted the days of travel across these sands or the time it takes to cross the “lost land.”’

‘So we are headed for a certain death then.’

‘By saying nobody has done it, does not mean that it cannot be done.’

He shook his head incredulously.

‘I am flabbergasted by the unerring faith you seem to have in yourself,’ he said. ‘I myself am starting to feel scared.’

‘Fear is your main enemy in the desert,’ came his reply. ‘Fear leads to desperation and madness and madness leads to stupidity and death.’

‘Are you ever afraid?’

‘Of the desert? No. I was born here and spent my life in it. We have four camels and the females have enough milk for today and tomorrow and there are no signs of a harmatan coming. If the wind respects us, there is hope.’

‘How many days of hope?’ Abdul asked himself.

He went to sleep trying to calculate how many days of hope they had left, how much longer they would have to endure the suffering but was awoken at midday by a buzzing sound overhead. He opened his eyes and saw the silhouette of Gazel, kneeling at the corner of the tent and looking up at the sky.

‘Aeroplanes,’ he said without turning round.

Abdul crawled over to him and looked up to see a small reconnaissance plane circling overhead that was about five kilometers away and approaching them slowly.

‘Can they see us?’

Gazel shook his head, but even so he went over to the camels and tied up their feet to stop them from getting up.

‘The noise will startle them.’ he said. ‘And if they bolt they’ll give us away.’

When he had finished, he waited patiently until the plane had disappeared behind the tip of the nearest dune on one of its circuits, then left the tent and covered up the most visible parts of it with sand.

The animals bayed nervously and one of the females tried to bite them several times, but after about fifteen minutes, having only flown directly over them once, the buzzing noise started to fade away and the plane became a small dot on the horizon.

Gazel, who was sitting half in the shade, leaning against one of his mounts, took out a handful of dates from a leather bag and started to eat them as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened and looking as relaxed as he might have been, were he sitting comfortably in his own jaima.

‘Do you really think you can remove them from power if we manage to cross the border?’ he asked, although it was clear that he was not actually that interested in the answer.

‘That’s what they think. Although, I’m not so sure. Most of my people have died or been imprisoned. Others betrayed me.’ He took some dates that the Targui was offering him. ‘It won’t be easy,’ he added. ‘But if I manage it, you can have anything you ask for. I will owe it all to you.’

Gazel shook his head slowly:

‘You will not owe me anything and I will still be in your debt for the death of your friend. Whatever I do and however many years pass, I will never be able to give him back the life that he entrusted me with.’

He looked at him for some time, trying to understand the man from the depths of his deep, dark eyes, which were still the only part of his face that he had seen up to that point.

‘I keep wondering why some lives mean so much to you, while others mean so little. There was nothing you could have done that day, but your guilt has pursued and tormented you. But you seem completely indifferent to the deaths of the soldiers whose throats you slit.’

He did not receive an answer. The Targui just shrugged his shoulders and continued to put dates into his mouth, under his veil.

‘Are you my friend?’ Abdul suddenly asked out of the blue.

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 Tikdabra.”

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.