The Shadow of the Sun

Salim

In the darkness, I suddenly spotted two glaring lights. They were far away and moved about violently, as if they were the eyes of a wild animal thrashing about in its cage. I was sitting on a stone at the edge of the Ouadane oasis, in the Sahara, northeast of Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital. For an entire week now I had been trying to leave this place — to no avail. It is difficult to get to Ouadane, but even more difficult to depart. No marked or paved road leads to it, and there is no scheduled transport. Every few days — sometimes weeks — a truck will pass, and if the driver agrees to take you with him, you go; if not, you simply stay, waiting who knows how long for the next opportunity.

The Mauritanians who were sitting beside me stirred. The night chill had set in, a chill that descends abruptly and, after the burning hell of the sun-filled days, can be almost piercingly painful. It is a cold from which no sheepskin or quilt can adequately protect you. And these people had nothing but old, frayed blankets, in which they sat tightly wrapped, motionless, like statues.

A black pipe poked out from the ground nearby, a rusty and salt-encrusted compressor-pump mechanism at its tip. This was the region’s sole gas station, and passing vehicles always stopped here. There is no other attraction in the oasis. Ordinarily, days pass uneventfully and unchangeably, resembling in this the monotony of the desert climate: the same sun always shines, hot and solitary, in the same empty, cloudless sky.

At the sight of the still-distant headlights, the Mauritanians began talking among themselves. I didn’t understand a word of their language. It’s quite possible they were saying: “At last! It’s finally coming! We have lived to see it!”

It was recompense for the long days spent waiting, gazing patiently at the inert, unvarying horizon, on which no moving object, no living thing that might rouse you from the numbness of hopeless anticipation, had appeared in a long time. The arrival of a truck — cars are too fragile for this terrain — didn’t fundamentally alter the lives of the people. The vehicle usually stopped for a moment and then quickly drove on. Yet even this brief sojourn was vital and important to them: it injected variety into their lives, provided a subject for later conversation, and, above all, was both material proof of the existence of another world and a bracing confirmation that that world, since it had sent them a mechanical envoy, must know that they existed.

Perhaps they were also engaged in a routine debate: will it — or won’t it — get here? For traveling in these corners of the Sahara is a risky adventure, an unending lottery, perpetual uncertainty. Along these roadless expanses full of crevices, depressions, sinkholes, protruding boulders, sand dunes and rocky mounds, loose stones and fields of slippery gravel, a vehicle advances at a snail’s pace — several kilometers an hour. Each wheel has its own drive, and each one, meter by meter, turning here, stopping there, going up, down, or around, searches for something to grip. Most of the time, these persistent efforts and exertions, which are accompanied by the roar of the straining and overheated engine and by the bone-bruising lunges of the swaying platform, finally result in the truck’s moving forward.

But the Mauritanians also knew that sometimes a truck could get hopelessly stuck just a step away from the oasis, on its very threshhold. This can happen when a storm moves mountains of sand onto the track. In such an event, either the truck’s occupants manage to dig out the road, or the driver finds a detour — or he simply turns around and goes back where he came from. Another storm will eventually move the dunes farther and clear the way.

This time, however, the electric lights were drawing nearer and nearer. At a certain moment, their glow started to pick out the crowns of date palms that had been hidden under the cover of darkness, and the shabby walls of mud huts, and the goats and cows asleep by the side of the road, until, finally, trailing clouds of dust behind it, an enormous Berliet truck drew to a halt in front of us, with a clang and thud of metal. Berliets are French-made trucks adapted for roadless desert terrain. They have large wheels with wide tires, and grilles mounted atop their hoods. Because of their great size and the prominent shape of the grille, from a distance they resemble the fronts of old steam engines.

The driver — a dark-skinned, barefoot Mauritanian in an ankle-length indigo djellabah — climbed down from the cab using a ladder. He was, like the majority of his countrymen, tall and powerfully built. People and animals with substantial body weight endure tropical heat better, which is why the inhabitants of the Sahara usually have a magnificently statuesque appearance. The law of natural selection is also at work here: in these extremely harsh desert conditions, only the strongest survive to maturity.

The Mauritanians from the oasis immediately surrounded the driver. A cacaphony of greetings, questions, and well-wishings erupted. This went on and on. Everybody was shouting and gesticulating, as if haggling in a noisy marketplace. After a while they began to point at me. I was a pitiful sight — dirty, unshaven, and, above all, wasted by the nightmarish heat of the Saharan summer. An experienced Frenchman had warned me earlier: it will feel as if someone were sticking a knife into you. Into your back, into your head. At noon, the rays of the sun beat down with the force of a knife.

The driver looked at me and at first said nothing. Then he motioned toward the truck with his hand and called out to me: Yalla! (Let’s go! We’re off!)” I climbed into the cab and slammed the door shut. We set off immediately.

I had no sense of where we were going. Sand flashed by in the glow of the headlights, shimmering with different shades, laced with strips of gravel and shards of rock. The wheels reared up on granite ledges or sank down into hollows and stony fissures. In the deep, black night one could see only two spots of light — two bright, clearly outlined orbs sliding over the surface of the desert. Nothing else was visible.

Before long, I began to suspect that we were driving blind, on a shortcut to somewhere, because there were no demarcation points, no signs, posts, or any other traces of a roadway. I tried to question the driver. I gestured at the darkness around us and asked: “Nouakchott?”

He looked at me and laughed. “Nouakchott?” He repeated this dreamily, as if it were the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis that I was asking him about — so beautiful but, for us lowly ones, too high to reach. I concluded from this that we were not headed in the direction I desired, but I did not know how to ask him where, in that case, we were going. I desperately wanted to establish some contact with him, to get to know him even a little. “Ryszard,” I said, pointing at myself. Then I pointed at him. He understood. “Salim,” he said, and laughed again. Silence fell. We must have come upon a smooth stretch of desert, for the Berliet began to roll along more gently and quickly (exactly how fast, I don’t know, since all the instruments were broken). We drove on for a time without speaking, until finally I fell asleep.

A sudden silence awoke me. The engine had stopped, the truck stood still. Salim was pressing on the gas pedal and turning the key in the ignition. The battery was working — the starter too — but the engine emitted no sound. It was morning, and already light outside. He began searching around the cab for the lever that opens the hood. This struck me as at once odd and suspicious: a driver who doesn’t know how to open the hood? Eventually, he figured out that the latches that need to be released were on the outside. He then stood on a fender and began to inspect the engine, but he peered at its intricate construction as if he were seeing it for the first time. He would touch something, try to move something, but his gestures were those of an amateur. Every now and then he would climb into the cab and turn the key in the ignition, but the engine remained dead silent. He located the toolbox, but there wasn’t much in it. He pulled out a hammer, several wrenches, and screwdrivers. Then he started to take the engine apart.

I stepped down from the cab. All around us, as far as the eye could see, was desert. Sand, with dark stones scattered about. Nearby, a large black oval rock. (In the hours following noon, after being warmed by the sun, it would radiate heat like a steel-mill oven.) A moonscape, delineated by a level horizon line: the earth ends, and then there’s nothing but sky and more sky. No hills. No sand dunes. Not a single leaf. And, of course, no water. Water! It’s what instantly comes to mind under such circumstances. In the desert, the first thing man sees when he opens his eyes in the morning is the face of his enemy — the flaming visage of the sun. The sight elicits in him a reflexive gesture of self-preservation: he reaches for water. Drink! Drink! Only by doing so can he ever so slightly improve his odds in the desert’s eternal struggle — the desperate duel with the sun.

I resolved to look around for water, for I had none with me. I found nothing in the cab. But I did discover some: attached with ropes to the bed of the truck, near the rear, underneath, were four goatskins, two on the left side and two on the right. The hides had been rather poorly cured, then sewn together in such a way that they retained the animal’s shape. One of the goat’s legs served as a drinking spout.

I sighed with relief, but only momentarily. I began to calculate. Without water, you can survive in the desert for twenty-four hours; with great difficulty, forty-eight or so. The math is simple. Under these conditions, you secrete in one day approximately ten liters of sweat, and to survive you must drink a similar amount of water. Deprived of it, you will immediately start to feel thirsty. Genuine, prolonged thirst in a hot and dry climate is an exhausting, ravaging sensation, harder to control than hunger. After a few hours of it you become lethargic and limp, weak and disoriented. Instead of speaking, you babble, ever less cogently. That same evening, or the next day, you get a high fever and quickly die.

If Salim doesn’t share his water with me, I thought, I will die today. Even if he does, we will have only enough left for one more day — which means we will both die tomorrow, the day after at the latest.

Trying to stop these thoughts, I decided to observe him closely. Covered with grease and sweating, Salim was still taking the engine apart, unscrewing screws and removing cables, but with no rhyme or reason, like a child furiously destroying a toy that won’t work. On the fenders, on the bumper, lay countless springs, valves, compression rings, and wires; some had already fallen to the ground. I left him and went around to the other side of the truck, where there was still some shade. I sat down on the ground and leaned my back against the wheel.

Salim.

I knew nothing about the man who held my life in his hands. Or, at least, who held it for this one day. I thought, if Salim chases me away from the truck and the water — after all, he had a hammer in his hand and probably a knife in his pocket, and, on top of that, enjoyed a significant physical advantage — if he orders me to leave and march off into the desert, I won’t last even until nightfall. And it seemed to me that was precisely what he might choose to do. He would thereby extend his life, after all — or, if help arrives in time, he might even save it.

Clearly Salim was not a professional driver, or at any rate, not a driver of a Berliet truck. He also didn’t know the area well. (On the other hand, can one really know the desert, where successive storms and tempests constantly alter the landscape, moving mountains of sand to ever different sites and transposing features of the landscape with impunity?) It is common practice in these parts for someone with even a small financial windfall to immediately hire another with less money to carry out his tasks for him. Maybe the rightful driver of this truck had hired Salim to take it in his stead to one of the oases. And hereabouts no one will ever admit to not knowing or not being capable of something. If you approach a taxi driver in a city, show him an address, and ask him if he knows where it is, he will say yes without a second’s hesitation. And it is only later, when you are driving all over the city, round and round, that you fully realize he has no idea where to go.

The sun was climbing higher and higher. The desert, that motionless, petrified ocean, absorbed its rays, grew hotter, and began to burn. The hour was approaching when everything would become a hell — the earth, the sky, us. The Yoruba are said to believe that if a man’s shadow abandons him, he will die. All the shadows were beginning to shrink, dwindle, fade. The dread afternoon hours were almost upon us, the time of day when people and objects have no shade, exist and yet do not exist, reduced to a glowing, incandescent whiteness.

I thought that this moment had arrived, but suddenly I noticed before me an utterly different sight. The lifeless, still horizon — so crushed by the heat that it seemed nothing could ever issue forth from it — all at once sprang to life and became green. As far as the eye could see stood tall, magnificent palm trees, entire groves of them along the horizon, growing thickly, without interruption. I also saw lakes — yes, enormous blue lakes, with animated, undulating surfaces. Gorgeous shrubs also grew there, with wide-spreading branches of a fresh, intense, succulent, deep green. All this shimmered continuously, sparkled, pulsated, as if it were wreathed in a light mist, soft-edged and elusive. And everywhere — here, around us, and there, on the horizon — a profound, absolute silence reigned: the wind did not blow, and the palm groves had no birds.

“Salim!” I called. “Salim!”

A head emerged from under the hood. He looked at me.

“Salim!” I repeated once more, and pointed.

Salim glanced where I had shown him, unimpressed. In my dirty, sweaty face he must have read wonder, bewilderment, and rapture — but also something else besides, which clearly alarmed him, for he walked up to the side of the truck, untied one of the goatskins, took a few sips, and wordlessly handed me the rest. I grabbed the rough leather sack and began to drink. Suddenly dizzy, I leaned my shoulder against the truck bed so as not to fall. I drank and drank, sucking fiercely on the goat’s leg and still staring at the horizon. But as I felt my thirst subsiding, and the madness within me dying down, the green vista began to vanish. Its colors faded and paled, its contours shrank and blurred. By the time I had emptied the goatskin, the horizon was once again flat, empty, and lifeless. The water, disgusting Saharan water — warm, dirty, thick with sand and sludge — extended my life but took away my vision of paradise. The crucial thing, though, was the fact that Salim himself had given me the water to drink. I stopped being afraid of him. I felt I was safe — at least, until the moment when we would be down to our last sip.

We spent the second half of the day lying underneath the truck, in its faint, bleached shade. In this world circled all about with flaming horizons, Salim and I were the only life. I inspected the ground within my arm’s reach, the nearest stones, searching for some living thing, anything that might twitch, move, slither. I remembered that somewhere on the Sahara there lives a small beetle which the Tuareg call Ngubi. When it is very hot, according to legend, Ngubi is tormented by thirst, desperate to drink. Unfortunately, there is no water anywhere, and only burning sand all around. So the small beetle chooses an incline — this can be a sloping fold of sand — and with determination begins to climb to its summit. It is an enormous effort, a Sisyphean task, because the hot and loose sand constantly gives way, carrying the beetle down with it, right back to where he began his toils. Which is why, before too long, the beetle starts to sweat. A drop of moisture collects at the end of his abdomen and swells. Then Ngubi stops climbing, curls up, and plunges his mouth into that very bead.

He drinks.

Salim has several biscuits in a paper bag. We drink the second goatskin of water. Two remain. I consider writing something. (It occurs to me that this is often done at such moments.) But I don’t have the strength. I’m not really in pain. It’s just that everything is becoming empty. And within this emptiness another one is growing.

Then, in the darkness, two glaring lights. They are far away and move about violently. Then the sound of a motor draws near, and I see the truck, hear voices in a language I do not understand. “Salim!” I say. Several dark faces, resembling his, lean over me.