Tuareg

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, like 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.

The Tuaregs were famous in the desert for their “lovemaking ceremonies,” or the Ahal, when boys and girls would get together to have supper by the light of the fire, tell stories, play their onestringed anzads and dance in groups until the early hours. Then the women would take the men’s palms and trace patterns on them, patterns that only the Tuaregs knew the meaning of and which told of how the girl desired to make love that night.

Then every couple would disappear into the darkness, to the dunes and the soft sand, upon which white gandurahs had been laid, to fulfil the desires that the girls had expressed in their patterns.

For a traditional Arab, who would insist on his future wife’s or daughter’s virginity, such customs were beyond scandalous and Abdul knew of countries like Arabia and Libya, including regions in his own country, where you would be stoned to death or have your head cut off for a similar offense.

But the Imohag had always defended the right of their women to have sex and to dress as they pleased; to have a voice and to vote on family matters, ever since the old days of Muslim expansion when religious fanaticism was at its most rigid and demanding.

For as far back as people could remember they had been known as a race that would accept the best of what they were offered, but tended to reject anything that might curtail their liberty or sense of identity. Even though they were ungovernable, Abdul-el-Kebir still knew that he would be proud to be their ruler.

The Tuaregs would know how to accept and understand what he was trying to offer them and they would never try to betray him or condone the betrayal of him by anyone else, because once they had sworn allegiance to an amenokal then that allegiance lasted well beyond the grave.

But the men from the coast, who had celebrated his ascent to power almost fanatically once the French had been expelled and to whom he had given a homeland and a reason to feel proud of themselves, had not known how to cope with their sworn allegiance. At the first signs of danger had withdrawn back into the depths of their miserable huts.

‘What does it mean to be a socialist?’ Gazel had asked him on the first night, when he had still felt like talking as they lurched around on the backs of the swaying camels.

‘It means that justice is the same for everyone.’

‘Are you a socialist?’

‘More or less.’

‘Do you believe that everybody, like the Imohag and the servant, is equal?’

‘In the eyes of the law? Yes.’

‘I’m not referring to the law. I’m referring to whether servants and sirs are considered equals.’

‘In one way…’ he tried to find a way of explaining further, without compromising himself. ‘The Tuaregs are the only people left on earth who still unashamedly have slaves. It is not just.’

‘I don’t have slaves, I have servants.’

‘Really? And what would you do to them if they escaped or no longer wanted to work for you?’

‘I would search for them, flog them and bring them back. He was born in my home, I gave him water, food and protection when he was unable to do so himself. What right does he have to just get up and go when he feels like it?’

‘The right to his own freedom. Would you accept that you were a servant to somebody else, just because they fed you when you were a child? How long does it take for one to repay that debt?’

‘That is not how it works. I was born an Imohag. And they were born Aklis.’

‘And who says that an Imohag is superior to an Akli?’

‘Allah. If that wasn’t the case he would not have made them cowards, thieves and servants. He wouldn’t have made us brave, honourable and proud.’

‘My word!’ he exclaimed. ‘You are more fanatical than a fascist.’

‘What is a fascist?’

‘Somebody who claims that his race is superior to the rest.’

‘Then I’m a fascist.’

‘You really are,’ he said with conviction. ‘Although I’m sure that if you knew what it really meant, then you would renounce that label.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s not something I can explain to you while we’re lolloping around on a camel that seems half drunk. We’ll leave that one for a more suitable occasion.’

But that occasion had not arisen again and seemed less likely to with each day that passed, as the fatigue, thirst and heat threatened to overwhelm Abdul and the simple task of saying even one word seemed to require a superhuman effort.

When he finally woke up, Gazel had taken down their camp and was loading up three of the animals once again.

He gestured to the fourth camel with his head:

‘We’ll have to kill it tonight.’

‘Surely that will attract the vultures and the vultures will attract the planes. They’ll track our route.’

‘The vultures don’t come into the “lost land.”’ He had taken a small ladle and filled it with water. He handed it to Abdul. ‘The air is too hot.’

He drank urgently and held it out to him for more, but the Targui had already closed the gerba firmly.

‘No more.’

‘That’s it?’ said Abdul in astonishment. ‘That hardly wet my throat.’

Gazel pointed over to the camel once again.

‘Tonight you will drink its blood and eat its meat. Tomorrow is the start of Ramadan.’

‘Ramadan?’ he repeated in disbelief. ‘Do you really think we are in a fit state to observe the fasting rules of Ramadan?’

He could have sworn that the Targui had smiled.

‘Isn’t this the perfect place to be in if we our to observe its rules? It’ll be easy for us to respect its laws out here,’ he said.

The animals had already stood up and he put out his hand to help Abdul up.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘The road is long.’

‘How long will this ordeal last?’

Gazel shook his head: ‘I don’t know. I give you my word that I really don’t know. We must pray that Allah makes it as short as possible, but even he is not capable of making a desert smaller. That is all I know and that is all we have to go by.’