Near Death in the Desert

TWO AGAINST THE SAHARA

On Camelback from Nouakchott to the Nile

MICHAEL ASHER

Mafoudh

We left Chinguetti on 6 August. Mafoudh turned up at first light, bringing with him nothing but a blanket, a camel stick and a much patched knapsack containing a teapot, a glass and a spare gandourah.

I envied him his simple gear. Ours seemed to cover every bit of ground outside the house: saddles, sacks, cushions, saddle bags, tent, poles and waterskins. We had even exchanged one of our butterfly saddles for the more comfortable woman’s litter. Loading it was a marathon. A crowd of women and children gathered around to watch the spectacle. Sid’ Ahmed made an appearance and started shouting instructions. Not to be outdone, Mafoudh shouted back, while every child who could walk tramped joyfully through our belongings, picking them up, putting them down and arguing with any adult who tried to stop them.

Slowly the piles of equipment grew smaller as each item found a place on one of the camels. Miraculously there was a place for everything. We got the animals to their feet, groaning and grumbling. Isn’t it a bit heavy? I asked.

Nonsense! Mafoudh replied. "This is nothing. You should see what a real caravan carries, by God! Then he grabbed the headrope of the leading camel. In the name of God, he said, the way is long. Let’s go!"

As he led the caravan off, there were cries of Go in peace!, which struck me as comically inappropriate amid the clamour, Sid’ Ahmed walked us down to the bank of the wadi, saying, Omar is the boss, Mafoudh. When he says go, you go, and when he says stop, you stop. Then he shook hands with us and said, Send me a letter when you reach the Nile. God go with you! We left him standing there, a solid, proud old warrior on the edge of his domain.

Moments later we had crossed the wadi and plunged over the ridge of dunes, which for three months we had seen on waking. Now we were among them, and Chinguetti was blotted out, gone for ever. I feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Marinetta said. We’ve just entered the whale’s belly.

All morning we trudged through the dunes. They were the visible expression of the unseen force of the wind, delicately moulded, rippled and coloured with watery pastels. There were places where the sand had been scooped out of the desert floor and layered over the rocks so that the sharp edges showed through the smooth carpet like ground-down teeth. We crossed bridges of sand where the surface cracked like ice and fell away; the camels stumbled down at incredible angles, drifting into narrow corridors where the dunes towered above us, dwarfing our tiny azalai with its arrogant mission of conquering the great Sahara.

Once I stopped to pick up a barbed arrow head. It was just like the ones that the people of Chinguetti had tried to sell us so often. I wondered how many thousands of years it had lain there, waiting for me to pick it up. It had belonged to a hunter, some time long ago, when this desert was a forest. The forest had gone, and the hunters had gone with it, but men had survived in this desolate land by changing their ways and adapting to the new order. Change was certain, but man survives by adapting. If we adapted to the ways of the Sahara, we too could survive.

At midday we reached the palm groves at Aghayla, where Mafoudh owned some young trees. The dates were red and squashy, ripe for the cutting. A host of people helped us to unload and set our gear down in the shade. Marinetta took the cooking things and went off to make lunch. Four old men came to talk, sitting cross-legged on our blankets, and I invited them to eat with us. They looked pleased, but I wondered if they would remain so when they saw the standard of the cooking.

Half an hour passed. The men shifted restlessly. Then the unmistakable smell of burnt rice drifted through the palm trees. A few moments later Marinetta appeared and slapped in front of us a tray of the familiar scorched pellets. Lost within the desert of rice were a few oases of dried meat, now reduced to lumps of charcoal. The men looked at the dish, and I saw their faces drop. Mafoudh grinned at me cheerfully. It’s the wind, he said. It makes the fire too hot. Come on, everyone, eat! The old men each took a small amount with their fingertips and began to chew. They chewed and chewed, and the tension mounted as I wondered if anyone would take another handful. None of them did. One by one they whispered thanks and got up to leave. Before we departed, though, they brought us a gift of ripe dates. Was there a touch of pity in their eyes as they handed them over?

The afternoon was steaming-hot. Every half hour my mouth became so clogged with mucus that I had to take a sip of water from one of our canteens. Marinetta had the same problem. This water tastes like honey, she gasped. I never knew water could taste so good. For hours we stumbled on through one band of dunes after another, but before sunset we had emerged on to a plateau of black stone that allowed us to ride for the first time. We couched the camels, and I helped Marinetta into her new litter. I had chosen to ride the red camel, Shigar, even though he now carried an uncomfortable pack saddle with almost all the provisions. Mafoudh climbed aboard the smaller Li’shal, carrying a butterfly saddle, and led the way. We rode on silently until the last sparklers of the sun burned out and left the plain in thick darkness.

It was all confusion in the camp that night. It seemed strange to have a third person with us, and neither of us knew quite what to do. Mafoudh took everything in his stride, however. He collected firewood, lit a fire and made tea while we were still sorting out our equipment. I have to drink tea first, he explained apologetically, or I get a tight feeling in my head. It makes me feel angry. We all felt better after we had drunk tea and eaten a plate of macaroni and sardines. We sat back in the warm sand to watch the last flux of the fire. The dark screen of the night was awash with the familiar pattern of the stars. The camels, unseen in the darkness, made shuffling sounds as they hunted for shoots of grass. There may be some rain tomorrow, Mafoudh predicted, sniffing the air. It’s been hot today. The rain follows the heat at this time of year.

You think it’s a mistake to travel at this time? I asked him.

In some ways the rainy season is better than winter for travellers, he said, because although it’s hot, the rain leaves pools of water in the desert. When you’ve got water you don’t need to be afraid of the heat. Water is God’s blessing.

It was soon time for sleep, and I worried about the sleeping arrangements. It seemed ridiculous to concern myself with this in the middle of the world’s greatest desert. There was no lack of space, but I felt protective about Marinetta. I was wary even of leaving the camp to relieve myself, afraid that Mafoudh might take advantage of her in my absence. Mafoudh solved the problem by taking his blanket and going off to sleep in the sand a good distance away. Marinetta and I spread out our blankets among the saddles and gear. We cuddled up close in the darkness, more contented with each other than we had been for weeks. Well, that was day one, I commented. Do you think we’ll make it to the Nile?

Yes, she answered. A few minutes later she was asleep.

We saw the first signs of the storm the next afternoon as we crossed the Agfeytit valley. Before us was a vast line of grey cliffs stretching as far as the horizon. The base of the valley was a serpent of black powder on which lay a school of small, humpy dunes that reminded me of jellyfish washed up on a beach. The sky suddenly filled with a scud of cloud, and the wind carried a touch of dampness. Sloughs of silvery dust began to squirm across the ground, and we heard the distant boom of thunder. The sky was a ragged quilt of grey and blue, and there were places around us where the clouds seemed to be reaching down into the desert. The wind began to buffet us in waves that rose and fell successively. Suddenly there was a shocking crack of lightning directly in our path. For a split second I saw the distant flash pattern, like a many-branched, electric-blue tree as it forked down into the earth. It was followed by a shell blast of thunder, which made us jump. Jesus Christ! Marinetta said. We’ll all be fulminated! We waited for the rain to come.

We’d better make camp, Mafoudh advised.

No, I said. Let’s risk it and go on till sunset.

That evening we erected our Arab tent in case the rain started. It didn’t begin until the next morning at about 5 A.M., but when it came it hit us like an explosion. The wind railed through the camp, knocking down the tent with a single blow. The violence of the storm was frightening. Every few moments the darkness was slashed by brilliant streaks of lightning, and the thunder growled overhead like a barrage. Then the rain came gushing out of the night, roiling into the sand, soaking everything, dripping cold down our necks and running three inches above the ground so that we sat like ducks in the current. Every time the thunder boomed Marinetta let out a gasp and tried to crawl closer to me. We were already completely entwined in each other’s arms, and it was somehow very comforting to feel her small, damp, warm body close to mine. How many times had we watched storms like this from the cosy safety of my flat in Khartoum? How different it was to be out in it.

My God, the cameras! Marinetta said suddenly. I pulled the cotton sheet of the tent aside and rushed out, barefoot, from its spurious protection. Mafoudh’s body was a wet sausage under his blanket. He was lying on a hillock of sand, above the running water, and he had moved the most vulnerable of our equipment up there with him and had covered it with a plastic sheet. His narrow, drenched features peered at me through the night. We laughed at each other. God is generous! he said. But it didn’t sound as though he meant it.

The dawn came, bleak and freezing. The rain stopped and was replaced by the cutting edge of the wind. We shivered uncontrollably in our wet clothes as Mafoudh tried to make a fire for the morning tea. The rain had washed off the light topsoil and liberated the colours beneath, which showed in a mandala of patterns across the plain. Our tea was soaked; our loaves of sugar had dissolved into a damp mass mixed with sand and grit. Marinetta’s flip-flops had been carried off, and my leather sandals were so wet that they folded up as soon as I put them on. Mafoudh said that we should dry out everything well before we started, as the saddles would fall to pieces if we tried to use them while they were wet.

"I’ve never seen a night like that!" Marinetta said, and laughed.

God is generous! Mafoudh repeated, then he laughed too. But the rain is hell, isn’t it? he said.

For the next three days we crossed a landscape where water had taken over the job of sculptor from the wind. The black plain had become a blotch of blood-red, amber, orange and gold, overlaid in places by slicks of mud as smooth and creamy as milk chocolate. The rain had excavated narrow canals that fed into pools among the rocks. We never lost an opportunity to fill our girbas from them. Mafoudh reckoned that rain water was far better than well water, since it was never salty or sulphurous. That it tasted of camel urine and was full of camel droppings didn’t seem to bother him.

In fifteen days there will be grass everywhere, he informed us. That rain was enough for all Adrar. We heard later that the wadi in Chinguetti had been awash like a river, and in Atar the flood water had boiled through the market, demolishing buildings and drowning four people. You can’t win in the desert, Marinetta commented. Either you get too little water or too much. We were lucky the lightning didn’t strike us.

That all depends on the will of God, Mafoudh replied. I once knew a man who was just sitting inside his tent and the lightning killed him. Burnt a hole through the roof as clean as a bullet, by God! Another time I saw seventy sheep killed by lightning while they were sheltering under a tree. Killed the lot! You never know when your time has come.

As we travelled, we gradually got used to each other’s ways. Mafoudh had a great deal to put up with. He sometimes watched me tying on the luggage in the morning, shaking his head sorrowfully as I tried to tie knots as secure as his. You’ll have to learn to tie knots better than that if you want to travel in the desert, he told me once. When I was a boy working on the caravans, the custom was that anyone whose knot came undone had to buy a goat or a cone of sugar. That’s what we should do. I agreed and threw myself into the knot-tying with new vigour. By the end of that day I owed two goats. Don’t worry, Omar, Mafoudh said, smirking. Everyone has to learn.

The following day a girba that he had tied came undone and showered water across the sand. Later we almost left one of the camels behind when the headrope came unfastened. Mafoudh had tied that one too. I think that’s two goats each, I said smugly.

He looked as though he regretted having mentioned it. Goats were a lot cheaper in those days, he said.

We generally walked for the first three hours, then rode until noon. As midday approached we would start looking for a tree around which we could build our shelter of ropes and blankets. There were few trees that were more than brittle skeletons, yet still we argued about which was the best. That one’s no good, Mafoudh might comment. It’s got no branches to hang the waterbags on.

We can’t camp there, I would respond. There’s not enough shade. When the intense heat finally drove us to accept one or the other, we couched the camels near it. Tired, thirsty and very hot, we had to spend long minutes picking at the knots that had slowly tightened during the morning. Even Mafoudh, his head already throbbing from the lack of tea, would get angry and swear like a trooper as he struggled with the rope. We drank zrig, and then Mafoudh would make tea. He always looked tense and harassed until he had downed his first glass. Then he relaxed, and a smile spread across his face. We drank the tea, nibbling dates or biscuits.

Marinetta made lunch, choosing from our menu of rice, pasta, couscous, tinned sardines and dried gazelle meat. It was usually too hot to eat much at midday, and often we ended up tipping the remains of the food into the desert. Mafoudh would shake his head and declare that this was forbidden. It was worse when Marinetta threw away excess water from the cooking pot. Getting water is hard work in the desert, he told her. It’s a crime to throw it away.

We ate from a communal steel plate with our right hands, in the Arab fashion. Although the Moors didn’t generally eat with women other than their wives, Mafoudh never turned a hair at eating with Marinetta. He told me once that it would have been a disgrace to refuse. What did cause him to raise his eyebrows was her appalling manners. The rice was invisibly divided into territories, and it was as impolite to reach into someone else’s territory as it would have been for us to take food off someone else’s plate. Marinetta constantly dived into Mafoudh’s portion for tasty morsels of dried meat or sardine. Keep to your own bit! I had to tell her several times before she understood.

Eating rice was a problem that she found hard to resolve. You were supposed to thrust your fist into the food, squeezing the rice into a ball between fingers and thumb. Then you transferred the ball to your mouth and popped it inside with the thumb. It was unseemly for the fingers to enter the mouth. When Marinetta tried to make a ball, it would inevitably crumble before it got anywhere near her mouth, leaving a scattering of rice across the sand. Furiously, she would crush the gluey stuff into her palm and chew it out of her closed fist, drawing disgusted glances from Mafoudh.

The reason why the Moors used only the right hand for eating was that the left was exclusively for cleaning themselves after defecating. They thought toilet paper disgusting and used water to clean themselves when it was available. In the desert they used sand or stones. Marinetta tried sand and found it painfully abrasive. Often she pined for Scottex Supersoft. Answering nature’s call was always a dilemma for her. In the daytime there was nowhere to hide, and she had to pull her long Arab shirt over her knees and hope no one was watching too closely.

After we had eaten, Mafoudh would whip through his afternoon prayer. He prayed at sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset and evening. The prayer consisted of bowing, kneeling and the repetition of certain verses from the Quran, like a meditation. Before each prayer he would make ritual ablutions, covering his hands and face with sand. He always seemed to be in a hurry with his prayers, though, as if they were something to be got out of the way before he drank his tea.

As the days passed, any doubts that I may have entertained about Mafoudh dissolved. He seemed completely trustworthy. I felt foolish for having been over-protective about Marinetta. Still, we had to behave very formally with each other while he was around, never touching or showing any sign of affection, which might have upset his sense of propriety. In Chinguetti, with a measure of privacy, we had fought like cat and dog, rowed and argued and raged. Perversely, now that there was no privacy at all, our desire for each other increased in leaps and bounds, and I found Marinetta more attractive every day as her clothes became more stained and dishevelled and her appearance wilder. Often when Mafoudh’s back was turned we found ourselves exchanging secret smiles and, occasionally, the forbidden delight of a kiss. Mostly, though, we maintained the distance of strangers, hardly able even to talk.

Marinetta always kept her hair covered in the Moorish fashion. For a woman to show her hair in their culture was as much a green light to men as flashing a naked breast in ours. She had always detested hats of any kind, and keeping her thick headcloth on, even in the cool of evening, was the worst torture she had to bear. Throughout the journey she dressed like a man, and the bulky Arab shirt and sirwel neatly disguised any alluring feminine curves she might have shown. This brought us problems of its own. When we arrived at a well on 11 August two women who were watering goats there refused to greet her. They backed away, giggling, when she held her hand out. They think she’s a man, Mafoudh chortled. Moor women never shake hands with a man. Both the women were dressed in faded indigo shifts and even more faded cotton skirts. One of them was quite an old lady with a face like parchment, but the other was young, slim and willowy with creamy, smooth shoulders and pert breasts. To me she looked decidedly sensuous as she dipped the rubber bucket in the well. But Mafoudh hardly gave her a second glance. Watching Marinetta beside her, I realized with a jolt what a weird, hermaphroditic figure she must have seemed to them, with her feminine smallness and her masculine dress.

When they learned that she was a woman their behaviour changed dramatically. They hustled up to her, examining her clothes and touching her skin. They fingered her wedding ring and earrings and peered into her camera bag, continually demanding presents. They seemed like wild things. Once she presented the young girl with a cheap bracelet from Chinguetti; the girl said, This is nothing! and asked for more. When they became aggressive in their demands I went to her rescue and told them gruffly to leave her alone. They did so immediately. I found myself wondering about this culture in which women could touch any other woman, even a complete stranger, but a man couldn’t touch his own wife.

The well was in the Khatt, the great fault in the desert crust that divides the regions of Adrar and Tagant. The water was salty, but the women said it was all they had, since no rain had fallen here or farther south. That means there’ll be no tents for us to rest in, Mafoudh said testily. "We’d better fill a girba, even though the water’s bad. A man who doesn’t fill his waterbags when he gets the chance knows nothing about the desert."

The heat was back with a vengeance, and a hot wind raked us, scorching the sand and drumming up a shroud of dust that raged in the sky like sea-froth, obscuring the sun. This is the worst type of day to travel on, our guide declared. It’s hot, and with this mist you can’t tell the north from the south. The heat got us all down. Mafoudh became prickly and argumentative, lapsing into sullen moods of silence, then waking up and yelling, Come on! Come on! even though we were right behind him and going no more slowly than usual. Instead of laughing, he glared at me nastily when one of my knots came undone and, when he saw me tying a girba, commented crabbily, "I thought you knew how to tie a girba. You should tie it on the left, not the right."

Rubbish! I snapped back. It doesn’t make any difference. You just want everything done your way!

The heat did this: it made you argue. Yet I knew that beneath the arguments was the ancient, ugly question that has plagued all men at all times: Who’s the boss? No one travelling in the desert with desert people can avoid that issue for long. Sooner or later, in ways subtle or obvious, there will be a struggle for power.

Ours came that night, when Mafoudh told me, The way you march is wrong. We should get up two hours before dawn and travel in the coolest time. That way is better for camels and men. We should rest most of the day and travel at night. The day is our enemy in this heat. When you find grazing you should stop for a day or even two.

I told him that I had developed my own system of marching in the Sudan. I knew that Arabs marched haphazardly, resting for two days when they found grazing, then rushing on madly for twenty hours to make up. That style was no good for our journey of 4,500 miles. It was a journey that most Arabs would not have undertaken. I was convinced that it required a more methodical approach, a blend of the Orient and the Western. Mafoudh would be with us only till Walata, then we should have another guide, then another, and another. We couldn’t change our ways continually to accommodate the whims of each new guide. Our guides would have to adopt our way. And our way was to march by watch and compass, going by day and covering the same distance daily, come hell or high wind, from Chinguetti to the Nile. I remembered the story of Harry St. John Philby, the explorer of Arabia’s Empty Quarter. His bedouin guides had threatened to kill him because he insisted on travelling by day. He had won only by refusing to eat with them. I doubted if such drastic measures would be needed with Mafoudh. I reminded him of what Sid’ Ahmed had said before we left, and he stomped off to bed, muttering. By the following day it was forgotten.

The next morning we saw the palm groves of Talmoust sprouting from a depression in the middle of a dusty black plain. The palm trees looked temptingly green, but when we got nearer we saw that they bore no dates. The Moors who were at the well inside the groves told us that there had been no rain there for five years and that dates no longer grew. The palms need water just like the grass, one old man said. If we don’t get rain next year, Talmoust will be finished. There were no Haratin in Talmoust. The people here were bidan of the Kunta, an Arab tribe of noble origin found throughout the Sahara. They herded goats and camels around Tijikja and retired to these palm groves in the season of the date harvest. Their tents were rolled up and stored on wooden frames outside the huts of palm fibre that they used in summer. The village of huts was bleak. The buildings were grey and derelict, inhabited by naked brown children and shy women in the usual faded blue. The men were very Arab-looking, stringy as thorn trees, with wisps of beard and ragged gandourahs. A few scraggy camels were being watered at the well, and around it lay butterfly saddles, stained and broken, and heaps of old ropes and saddle bags.

The men crowded round to greet us, and Mafoudh and I shook hands with each of them. The greeting always followed the same ritual. First you wished the whole crowd, Peace be on you! and they would reply in chorus, And on you be peace! Then you grasped each man firmly by the hand and, putting on your most earnest expression, repeated, How is your condition? Nothing evil, I trust! How is the news? Only good, I trust! You jabbered this as if in competition with an opponent, and your adversary would repeat, No evil, thank God! The news is good, praise God! The news was always good, even if your father had died or your entire camel herd had contracted the mange.

When all this had finally died down, someone would diffidently inquire which tribe you belonged to. It was really an inquiry after your social position because in Mauritania your status depended on how high up the social scale your tribe stood. Mafoudh belonged to a marabout tribe, which, while still nobility, didn’t figure very highly in relation to these Kunta. They considered themselves descendants of the family of the Prophet Mohammed, a distinction that earned them the title of Shurfa. The Shurfa were top-drawer in Moorish society. Curiously enough, nsara were considered nobility because it was said that they were descended from a branch of the Prophet’s tribe that had left Arabia before the time of Islam.

When status had been established, they would get down to the real news. The first question was always about grazing. Had there been rain? Where had it fallen, and how much? Had the grass bloomed yet? Where was it, and of which type? When that topic had been exhausted, they would move on to questions about people and places. Had you seen so-and-so in Chinguetti? He was a cousin. Had you seen a she-camel of such-and-such a description? Someone had lost one a few days before. They were always avid for the news, and their grapevine was very efficient, yet they much appreciated the luxury of a radio. Mafoudh constantly chided us for not having one. It tells you everything, he said, even where the rain has fallen. It can be very useful.

Next morning, in a stream of thick, silent heat, we saw Tijikja below us. It lay in a rocky groove in the middle of a valley from which the purple stain of date palms spread for several miles in both directions.

Well, you’ve made it to Tijikja, Mafoudh said.

You said I’d never make it? Marinetta laughed at me.

Anyone can be wrong, I said, and there’s still another 4,350 miles to go.

We made camp by a thorn tree above the town. It was like coming into a great harbour and dropping anchor without reaching the quayside. As soon as we had unloaded, Mafoudh said he wanted to look up an old friend and set off on foot. Marinetta and I put the tent up. It was our first moment of privacy since we had set out. She looked very attractive, and it was all I could do to stop myself dragging her into the tent that moment. How do you feel? I asked her, massaging her shoulder.

I certainly don’t feel flat any more, she admitted, smiling.

I was just about to move a little closer when there was a buzz of voices. We looked up to see a crowd of Haratin children who immediately surrounded us, shouting, "Nsara! Nsara with camels!"

There’s the end of our privacy, Marinetta said. We’ll never get rid of them now. And she was right. We never did.

From the moment we entered the town the next day, the children never left us alone. They followed us, chanting, clapping and even throwing stones. I heard one boy, a miniature adult in gandourah and headcloth, tell his friend, They are unbelievers who will surely fall into the fire. Few tourists visited Tijikja, but there was an American Peace Corps volunteer there who had adopted a Muslim name and prayed in the mosque five times a day. This was fine by me, except that the man was a Christian who, instead of declaring, There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet, as Muslims were required to do before each prayer, proclaimed, There is no God but God, and Jesus is his Prophet. This was not designed to elicit much sympathy from the Moors, and perhaps it had poisoned their minds against all nsara.

We got out of the town as quickly as we could. Every minute in this crowded environment seemed a torture. We bought more dates, powdered milk for our crucial zrig and a few pounds of flour to make bread. We also bought another sack of grain for the camels, piled it all on to a donkey cart and beat a hasty retreat, still pursued by cat-calling, stone-throwing children. Their leader seemed to be the miniature adult, a boy of about twelve, who resisted all my attempts to get rid of him. When we passed the last house, he was still following determinedly. I rounded on him furiously. Where are you going? I demanded.

I’m going after you!

Oh no, you’re not! I said, feeling inclined to kick his backside very firmly. The other children lined up behind him. I glared at him and he glared back. To give him his due, he didn’t seem afraid.

I was just wondering if I really would have to use force, when a little old Haratin woman came hobbling up, shouting, Hey, you children! Let the strangers go in peace! Incredibly, all of them ran away.

When we had unloaded our new acquisitions Mafoudh told me that some of his relations had visited the camp. They won’t believe you’re going to Egypt, he said. They say it’s impossible. I sat down in the shade and lit my pipe. Then I took out our Michelin map and followed our planned route with my eyes. Before us lay the rest of Mauritania, Mali, Niger, the whole of Chad and most of the Sudan. The way is long! Mafoudh said.

At that moment I was filled with an inexplicable sense of dread. I had the feeling that I had stepped out of the normal barriers of time and space, that I had lost touch with reality, not knowing where I had come from or where I was going. Suddenly I felt absolutely certain that I had been here before, that I had seen everything before, even that I had already reached Egypt and that time was playing backwards. I tried desperately to remember if I had dreamed this, but it danced like a shimmer of light just beyond my memory, and I walked in abject terror beyond the bounds of time, filled with images of the past, the years of struggle, the planning, the dreaming and the work it had taken to get here. And then the images passed. The terror subsided. I looked at Mafoudh and realized that only a moment had ticked by. Yes, I told him, the way is long indeed.

Postscript: Michael Asher was the first to complete the west-to-east crossing of the Sahara on foot without technical or other reinforcements. The 4,500-mile journey took nine months.

An important part of the Nigerian culture is the bush taxi. Peter Chilson discovered the travails of such travel, replete with bad tires, failing motors, and overloaded human cargo, all of which led to a stream of horrendous, catastrophic accidents. He also encountered a further hazard—numerous checkpoints manned by armed soldiers who were corrupt to the core.

RIDING THE DEMON

On the Road in West Africa

PETER CHILSON

Zinder Notes

I needed, after a few weeks sharing a car with Issoufou Garba, to drink in order to sleep. Evenings, wherever we ended up, I downed three 1.5-liter bottles of Biére Niger, a product of the national brewery. I drank mostly in village bars, where they cooled the beer in a damp pit covered by wet cloth. In Zinder, I went to the Hotel Central bar, with its prostitutes from southern Nigeria and one regular customer, a despondent soldier. Every night he leaned on the bar, automatic rifle propped against the stone countertop, quietly sipping his beer and talking to no one. I drank without Issoufou, whose Muslim faith forbade him to use alcohol. I never got drunk, only tired enough to sleep. I was too wired, I suppose, to become giddy.

I had a room at a hostel, which was the large home of a Zinder family who rented space to travelers. Mornings I walked to the motor park coffee table popular with drivers, including Issoufou. We waited for passengers, drank coffee—instant Nescafé canned in Ivory Coast—told stories, exchanged news. We found out who had crashed or broken down, who had been in trouble at checkpoints and how much it had cost them, which driver had been arrested or beaten. You heard about Moussa? someone asked. Salif says he hit a bull yesterday near Tessaoua. He still hasn’t come back.

The coffee table scene was like a mission debriefing: checking off goals, tallying casualties. Cars, like shot-up aircraft, limped back from someplace—Agadez, Nguigmi, Diffa, Maradi, Kano, Niamey, bush villages—every hour, chewed up and spit out by the road. The image of the West African motor park and its legions of beat-up cars and drivers suggests a conflict with the unknowable. I think again of Saint-Exupéry, who wrote of a pilot’s struggle against the elements: It isn’t the individual that’s responsible, but a sort of hidden force.

Issoufou Garba wanted to see a Mad Max movie, Beyond Thunderdome, at the Hotel Central theater, an outdoor courtyard where a man projects movies on a whitewashed wall. He invited me to join him. The idea of seeing Tina Turner on a big screen, larger than life, pleased him. It’s Tina, Issoufou said, sitting that morning at the coffee table. We’re going to see Teeena tonight.

At 8:00 P.M., men packed the theater, which normally shows Kung Fu movies, French police dramas, Hindu love stories. I shared a long wooden bench with Issoufou and a half dozen other drivers wearing simple cotton robes or leisure-style African business suits in shades of gray, navy blue, brown. They laughed a little conspiratorially, a little nervously, looking about the place with arms folded. There was, after all, some guilt involved. These men, supporters of wives and children (at least thirty-five children between them), had paid the three-hundred-franc entry fee, money that could buy a family enough rice for a couple of days. But this was a road movie, a way for drivers to fantasize—about Tina Turner, yes, but about themselves as well. They wanted to see the last scene, the surreal, apocalyptic road battle fought in the Australian desert at high speed with homemade automobile hybrids—reinvented cars that functioned in a brutal, cynical, decayed, post—nuclear war desert world very similar to the scenario around them, subtracting nuclear war.

I watched, expecting something to happen—wild shouting, perhaps, some sort of road culture audience participation; cheers, maybe. Yet my companions sat and looked on politely, silently enthralled for an hour and a quarter, until the road chase, when Mel Gibson’s character climbs from one vehicle to another. Then I heard gasps, laughs, sounds of excited approval: "Oooh la, la, c’est pas vrai ça," or a slightly drawn out "Alllahh!" or "Monnn Dieu!" or the sharp Hausa exclamation, "Kai!"

On the way out, a driver named Mamane asked me, half joking, half seriously: Is it that way in America?

I liked the Hotel Central because, in an old Muslim market city and sultanate, the hotel represents vice like a quiet bordello in the Vatican. Long verandahs with low cement arches frame two sides of a gravel courtyard; behind each arch is a door to an empty room, twelve in all. At the courtyard’s far end is a half-circle stone bar under a millet-thatch awning. Next door, high white cement walls enclose the outdoor theater. In Zinder—where I saw men publicly beat and stone women who did not cover their heads with cloth as the imams required, where in the summer of 1992 a mob of men burned the offices of a women’s center—the Hotel Central offered me sanctuary from events in a city that sometimes appeared to be going mad.

The motor park is next door to the hotel, which seemed to me a natural extension of that world. Carnival manifestations of the road wash up in front of those white walls: the occasional road movie, a traveling automobile spectacle. One day, two German used-car dealers arrived from Cotonou (Benin) in two eighteen-wheelers loaded with used Peugeot 504 sedans and station wagons recently offloaded from freighters that had sailed from Brussels.

Karl and Walter, as the prostitutes called the Germans, wore jeans with cowboy boots and brown leather vests over T-shirts. For three weeks they hung out between the bar and their rooms, where they negotiated with buyers and spent nights with the barmaids, the only other people they seemed to know. Karl was thin, balding, with a wispy red beard, sunken cheeks and eyes, quivering hands. At the bar he held his beer with two hands. He had on a stiff, new brown fedora with a brown leather band. I tried talking to him one night.

I’m told you’re selling cars.

He looked at me, folding his arms. Got a cigarette? he asked.

Sorry.

He looked at me again, up and down. I was at least as scrawny as he was, at least as hollow faced, and, apparently, unable to hide the fact I had no intention of buying a car. In crisp English, he said, Run along little doggy. Karl sipped his beer, and I shrugged and walked away.

Souley, the old hotel barman, later told me, They sell more than cars. He raised both fists and put them together to make the staccato sound and movement of automatic weapons: "Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Guns, guns."

At the coffee table, I told Issoufou the story. It became his favorite. Two or three times a day he slowly repeated my imitation of Karl’s English, Run a-long leetle doggy, and laughed.

Some mornings Issoufou sent me on spare parts errands, normally the job of a karamota. The apprentice mechanic, usually a boy between ten and eighteen, races like a dog after the machine he works on (usually a minibus) has started moving, and