Tuareg

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, diamonds 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.

There was then only one hope, to head east and then to veer south and hope that by taking that route they would reach the end of the “lost land” more quickly.

Gazel knew the Tuareg guides well and that if they took a wrong turning they would carry on and pay the consequences. That one mistake usually meant they had completely lost their notion of space and distance and that they no longer knew where they were. There would be nothing else for it but to push forward and pray for salvation in the hope that their instinct would lead them to water. The Tuareg guides hated changing their routes unless they were completely convinced that they knew where they were headed, because centuries of tradition had taught them that there was nothing more exhausting or demoralising to man than wandering aimlessly from one side of the desert to another, without a concrete destination. It was without doubt then that, for reasons that would never be known, once the guide of the “great caravan” had realised they were in the unknown universe of the “lost land,” he had continued blindly on, putting all his trust in Allah to make their journey short, which, in one sense, it would have been.

And there he was now, mummified by the sun, teaching Gazel a lesson, a lesson that Gazel would accept.

Evening fell and once the sun had stopped its angry assault on the land, he abandoned the shade of his refuge and filled his pockets with gold, money and large diamonds.

Not for a moment did he feel as if he were robbing the dead of their belongings. According to the unwritten law of the desert, everything there belonged to the person that found it. It was understood that the souls who entered paradise would be well provided for and have no need of them, while the evil souls condemned to eternal wanderings had no right to do so with their pockets full of riches.

Then he divided up the rest of the water between Abdul, who did not even open his eyes to thank him and the youngest of the camels; the only female that still had a few days left in her. He drank the blood from the last animal and tying the old man onto the saddle, he started off again without even taking the fabric that they used for shade with them as this time it would just be an unnecessary weight. They would not be stopping again, either by day or night, since their only chance of salvation now was to get out of that inferno.

He said his prayers, for him, for Abdul and for the dead, then took one last look at the army of mummies, checked his direction and set off, leading the camel by the halter. She followed him without protest, in the knowledge that only a blind confidence in the man who was leading her could save her now.

Gazel was not sure if that night was the longest or the shortest one of his life. His legs moved automatically and his superhuman strength of will turned him once again into a stone, but on this occasion, he was a “travelling stone,” like the ones that you saw in the desert. They were heavy rocks that moved mysteriously from one side of the flat land to another, leaving a wide track behind them. How they moved was anybody’s guess. Maybe they were pulled along by some strong magnetic field, or by the spirits condemned to eternity or maybe the phenomena was just another of Allah’s whims.