Tuareg

It was a long journey. He was unsure of which route to take home, not being exactly sure of where his home was and in search of his family, but not sure whether he still had any family.

It was a long journey.

First he went west, putting a day’s distance in between himself and the start of the “lost land” and then, once he knew it had ended, he veered north, aware that he was crossing the border once again and that the soldiers that seemed to plague his waking hours, might appear at any time.

It was a long journey.

And a sad one.

He had never, not even during the very worst moments of his journey through Tikdabra, with death as his only companion, imagined that this would happen. Being a warrior from a race of noble warriors, death was always considered to be the ultimate defeat. But he had suddenly realised, like a punch in the face, that dying was nothing compared with the hideous reality that your family had become the victims of your own personal war. This was truly the defeat of all defeats.

Images of his children and the voice of Laila came into his head and scenes of their peaceful and solitary lives at the encampment, at the foot of the large dunes, tortured his thoughts.

The cold dawns when Laila would curl up against his stomach in search of warmth; the long, beautiful, bright mornings they would spend hunting, full of expectation and fear: the soporific midday heat and the sweet siestas; the flaming red skies in the afternoons, when the shadows would stretch out to the horizon and the intense and fragrant nights spent by the fire-side, listening to well-known legends being told over and over again; their fear of the harmatan wind and of drought; their love of the windless plain and the black cloud that turned the desert into a green carpet of acheb flowers; the goat that died; the young camel that finally became pregnant; the cry of the little one; the smile of his eldest son; Laila’s cries of pleasure in the half light. This was his life, what he yearned for, all he had worked for and everything he had lost because he had not been able to live with the fact that his honour, a Targui’s honour, had been offended.

Would anyone have blamed him for not seeking revenge on the army? Who would blame him now for having done exactly that and for losing his family along the way? He had not considered the size of his country. He had ignored the number of people that lived in it and stood up against it, against its soldiers and its governors, without thinking of the consequences or of what his actions might lead to.

Where was he going to find his wife and children in this huge country? Who, out of all its inhabitants, would be able to give him news of them? With every day that took him further north he became increasingly aware of how small he was, even though that very same desert, in all its immensity, had never made him feel powerless in all the forty years or so that he had spent in it.

Now he felt powerless, not in the face of nature’s grandeur but in the face of the vile people that lived in it, people who were capable of involving women and children in a war between men. He did not know what type of weapons one used against those people. He had no idea how to play their game and he remembered a story that the old black man Suilem had told them once. It was a tale of two families at war who hated each other so much that one of the families buried the other’s small child in the sand, causing the mother to go mad with sorrow. But that was the only story of its kind in the whole history of the Sahara that he could remember. It had shocked his people so much that its memory had lived on and been carried through the centuries by word of mouth, only to be recounted night after night as a warning to adults and as a lesson to the children.

‘See how hate and fighting lead to nothing more than fear, madness and death.’

He could repeat from memory every word the old man had said and maybe only now, after years of listening to it, did he really understand its true significance.

So many men had died since that dawn when he had first headed off into the desert with his mehari, in search of his lost honour, that it should really have come as no surprise to him that of all that blood shed, some of it would eventually trickle back to tarnish his life and the lives of his family.

First there was Mubarrak, whose only crime had been to head up a patrol, having taken over from another man who nobody had heard of. Then there was the sweaty captain, who had defended his position by saying that he was just following orders. There were those who had not been able to defend themselves at all — the fourteen sleeping guardians at Gerifies — whose only crime was to have been asleep and in his way. There were the soldiers who he had killed on the edges of the “lost land” and the men who had been blown into the air before they had even known what had hit them.

They were too many and then there was him, Gazel Sayah, with only one life to offer up in exchange — one death to compensate for so many.

Maybe that was why they were using his family, as part payment for this huge debt.

‘Insh. Allah,’ Abdul-el-Kebir would have said.

The image of the old man came to mind again and he wondered what had become of him and if, as he had promised, he was struggling for power once again.

‘He was a mad man,’ he muttered quietly. ‘A crazy dreamer, born to be on the receiving end of life’s blows and with the gri-gri of bad luck stuck to his side and hidden in his clothes. His gri-gri was so strong that I got swept up in it too.’

To the Bedouins, a gri-gri was an evil spirit that brought with it illness, bad luck or death. The Tuaregs tended to dismiss it as a superstition that only the servants or slaves believed in. Even so, many of the most noble inmouchars had been known to avoid certain regions that were famous for their bad spirits, or certain people that they knew attracted them.

It was a sad and tragic fact that when a gri-gri fell in love with you there was no hiding from it and nothing in the entire universe could protect you from its malign spirit. Even if you buried yourself in the deepest of dunes or sought refuge in the depths of Tikdabra, the gri-gri would still search you out and stick to your skin like a tick, or a smell, or the dye from your clothes. The Targui felt sure that the gri-gri of death, the most loyal and insistent spirit of them all, had taken hold of him. A warrior could only be freed from that kind of spirit when he came face to face with another warrior whose own death spirit was still more powerful.

‘Why have you chosen me?’ he would ask it at night, when by the light of the fire he imagined he could almost see it sitting there on the other side. ‘I did not summon you. It was the soldiers who brought it with them when they came to my home and the captain shot the sleeping boy.’

From that day on, from the very moment that his guest had been shot under his roof, it only seemed logical to accept that the gri-gri of death had consumed the master of that jaima, in the same way that the gri-gri of adultery would settle inside the wives-to-be, who cheated on their husbands in the month prior to their wedding.

‘But it wasn’t my fault,’ he protested, as if trying to banish it him from his side. ‘I wanted to protect him and I would have given my life in exchange for his.’

But as Suilem used to say, the gri-gri was deaf to human pleas and threats. Those evil spirits had their own criteria and when they loved someone they loved them to the end of time.

‘There was once a man who fell victim to the locust gri-gri. He lived in Arabia and year after year, without fail, a plague of them would demolish his crops and the crops of his fellow citizens.

‘In desperation, his neighbours took him before the caliph and begged that he be executed, otherwise, they said, everybody would die of hunger. But the caliph, realising that it was not the man’s fault, defended him by saying: “If I kill you, then the locust gri-gri, who will continue to love you beyond death, will still visit your grave once a year. So I order you now, while you are alive and tomorrow when you shall be a spirit, to travel, every seven years to the coast of West Africa, where you shall stay for seven years. In that way, we won’t offend Allah, the locust being one of His creatures as well and we will effectively distribute the load in order to alternately enjoy seven years of misery and seven of abundance.”

‘So that is what the man did during his lifetime and his spirit continued that way too, long after he had died, which is why the plague visits us for a time and then returns, with the man’s spirit, to his own country.’

Whether the legend was true or not, it was certainly true of the locusts and it was also true that the Tuaregs, being the more cunning of all the Arabian peasants, had solved their hunger issues in a much more practical way and one which did not demand the execution of an innocent man. They chose to eat the locusts in the same way that they ate their crops. Toasted over a flame, or made into flour, they turned them into their finest foods and when they arrived in their millions, blacking out the sun at midday, it was never a miserable occasion, but one of prosperity and abundance for months on end. Laila would turn the insects into flour, mix them with honey and dates and turn them into cakes as treats for the children.

He had loved those cakes too and now he yearned for the long afternoons when he would sit at the door of his tent, eating them with a steaming hot glass of tea and watching as the sun slipped below the hor¡zon. Then, as the women milked the camels and the children brought in the goats, he would walk slowly over to the well and check its level from the parapet. He could not bear to believe that all that was now over and that he would never again return to his well, the palm trees there, his family or livestock, just because this invisible and malign spirit had become attached to him.

‘Go away!’ he begged once again. ‘I am tired of carrying you around and of killing without knowing why I am doing it.’

But he knew that even if the gri-gri had wanted to go, the sad souls of Mubarrak, the captain and the soldiers, would never have allowed it to.