Flyaway / Windfall

As he started the engine Byrne said, ‘Billson came through here four days ago. He must have been travelling damned slow.’

‘I don’t wonder,’ I said. ‘He’s more used to driving on a road. Which way did he go?’

‘Towards Assekrem – or further. And that’s not going to be any joke.’

‘What do you mean?’

He gave me a considering look. ‘Assekrem is a Tamachek word – it means, “The End of the World”.’

The truck jolted as he moved off. The Tuareg waved languidly and I waved back at them, glad to offer some contribution to the conversation. Then I sat back and chewed over what Byrne had just said. It wasn’t comforting.

Presently I said, ‘What did you give those men back there?’

‘Aspirin, needles, salt. All useful stuff.’

‘Oh!’

Three hours later we stopped again. We had been moving steadily into the mountains which Byrne called Atakor and had not seen a living soul or, indeed, anything alive at all except for thin grasses burnt by the sun and the inevitable scattered thorn trees. The mountains were tremendous, great shafts of rock thrusting through the skin of the earth, dizzyingly vertical.

And then, at a word from Mokhtar, we stopped in the middle of nowhere. He got out and walked back a few paces, then peered at the ground. Byrne looked back, keeping the engine running. Mokhtar straightened and walked back to the truck, exchanged a few words with Byrne, and then took the rifle and began to walk away into the middle distance. This time he left his sword.

Byrne put the truck into gear and we moved off. I said, ‘Where’s he going?’

‘To shoot supper. There are some gazelle close by. We’ll stop a little further on and wait for him.’

We drove on for about three miles and then came across a ruined building. Byrne drew to a halt. ‘This is it. We wait here.’

I got out and stretched, then looked across at the building. There was something strange about it which I couldn’t pin down at first, and then I got the impression that it wasn’t as much ruined as intended to be that way. It had started life as a ruin.

Byrne nodded towards the tremendous rock which towered three thousand feet above us. ‘Ilamen,’ he said. ‘The finger of God.’ I started to walk to the building, and he said sharply, ‘Don’t go in there.’

‘Why not? What is it?’

‘The Tuareg don’t go much for building,’ he said. ‘And they’re Moslem – in theory, anyway. That’s a mosque, more elaborate than most because this is a holy place. Most desert mosques are usually just an outline of stones on the ground.’

‘Is it all right if I look at it from the outside?’

‘Sure.’ He turned away.

The walls of the mosque were of stones piled crazily and haphazardly one upon the other. I suppose the highest bit of wall wasn’t more than three feet high. At one end was a higher structure, the only roofed bit, not much bigger than a telephone box, though not as high. The roof was supported by stone pillars. I suppose that would be a sort of pulpit for the imam.

When I returned to the truck Byrne had lit a small fire and was heating water in a miniature kettle. He looked up. ‘Like tea?’

‘Mint tea?’

‘No other kind here.’ I nodded, and he said, ‘Those stone pillars back there weren’t hand-worked; they’re natural basalt, but there’s none of that around here for twenty miles. Someone brought them.’

‘A bit like Stonehenge,’ I commented, and sat down.

Byrne grunted. ‘Heard of that – never seen it. Never been in England. Bigger, though, isn’t it?’

‘Much bigger.’

He brought flat cakes of bread from the truck and we ate. The bread was dry and not very flavoursome but a little camel cheese made it eatable. It had sand mixed in the flour which was gritty to the teeth. Byrne poured a small cup of mint tea and gave it to me. ‘What are you?’ he asked. ‘Some sort of private eye?’ It was the first time he had shown any curiosity about me.

I laughed at the outdated expression. ‘No.’ I told him what I did back in England.

He looked towards the mosque and Ilamen beyond. ‘Not much call for that stuff around here,’ he remarked. ‘How did you get into it?’

‘It was the only thing I know how to do,’ I said. ‘It was what I was trained for. I was in the Army in Intelligence, but when I was promoted from half-colonel to colonel I saw the red light and quit.’

He twitched his shaggy eyebrows at me. ‘Promotion in your army is bad?’ he enquired lazily.

‘That kind is. Normally, if you’re going to stay in the line of command – field officer – you’re promoted from lieutenant-colonel to brigadier; battalion CO to brigade CO. If you only go up one step it’s a warning that you’re being shunted sideways into a specialist job.’ I sighed. ‘I suppose it was my own fault. It was my pride to be a damned good intelligence officer, and they wanted to keep me that way. Anyway, I resigned my commission and started the firm I’ve been running for the last seven years.’

‘Chicken colonel,’ mused Byrne. ‘I never made more than sergeant myself. Long time ago, though.’

‘During the war,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Remember I told you I walked away from a crash?’

‘Yes.’

‘I liked what I saw during that walk – never felt so much alive. The other guys wouldn’t come. Two of them couldn’t; too badly injured – and the others stayed to look after them. So I walked out myself.’

‘What happened to them?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I gave the position of the plane and they sent a captured Fiesler Storch to have a look. Those things could land in fifty yards. It was no good; they were all dead.’

‘No water?’

He shook his head. ‘Goddamn Arabs. They wanted loot and they didn’t care how they got it.’

‘And you came back here after the war?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I let the war go on without me. During the time I was walking through the desert I got to thinking. I’d never seen such space, such openness. And the desert is clean. You know, you can go without washing for quite a time here and you’re still clean – you don’t stink. I liked the place. Couldn’t say as much for the people, though.’ He poured some more mint tea. ‘The Chaamba Arabs around El Golea aren’t too bad, but those bastards in the Maghreb would skin a quarter and stretch the skin into a dollar.’

‘What’s the Maghreb?’

‘The coastal strip in between the Mediterranean and the Atlas.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, early in ’43 I got a letter to say my Pop was dead. He was the only family I had, so I had no urge to go back to the States. And General Eisenhower and General Patton and more of the top brass were proposing to go to Italy. I didn’t fancy that, so when the army went north I came south looking for more favourable folks than Arabs. I found ’em, and I’m still here.’

I smiled. ‘You deserted?’

‘It’s been known as that,’ he admitted. ‘But, hell; ain’t that what a desert’s for?’

I laughed at the unexpected pun. ‘What did you do before you joined the army?’

‘Fisherman,’ he said. ‘Me and my Pop sailed a boat out o’ Bar Harbor. That’s in Maine. Never did like fishing much.’

Fisherman! That was a hell of a change of pace. I suppose it worked on the same principle that the best recruiting ground for the US Navy is Kansas. I said, ‘You’re a long way from the sea now.’

‘Yeah, but I can take you to a place in the Ténéré near Bilma – that’s down in Niger and over a thousand miles from the nearest ocean – where you can pick up sea-shells from the ground in hundreds. Some of them are real pretty. The sea’s been here and gone away. Maybe it’ll come back some day.’

‘Ever been back to the States?’

‘No; I’ve been here thirty-five years and like to die here,’ he said peacefully.

Mokhtar was away a long time, nearly five hours, and when he came back he had the gutted carcass of a gazelle slung across his shoulders. Byrne helped him butcher it, talking the while.

Presently he came over to me and squinted into the sun. ‘Getting late,’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll stay here the night. Billson is either between here and Assekrem or he ain’t. If he is, we’ll find him tomorrow. If he ain’t, a few hours won’t make no difference.’

‘All right.’

‘And we’ve got fresh meat. Mokhtar tells me he stalked that gazelle for twenty kilometres and downed it in one shot.’

‘You mean he walked twenty kilometres!’

‘More. He had to come back. But he circled a bit, so say under thirty. That’s nothing for a Targui. Anyway, Mokhtar’s one of the old school; he learned to shoot with a muzzle-loader. With one of those you have to kill with one shot because the gazelle spooks and gets clear away before you can reload. But he likes a breech-action repeater better.’

And so we stayed under the shadow of Ilamen that night. I lay in the open, wrapped in a djellaba provided by Byrne, and looked up at those fantastic stars. A sickle moon arose but did little to dim the splendour of those faraway lights.

I thought of Byrne. Hesther Raulier had compared him with Billson, calling him, ‘another crazy man’. But the madness of Byrne was quite different from the neurotic obsession of Billson; his was the madness that had struck many white men – not many Americans, mostly Europeans – Doughty, Burton, Lawrence, Thesiger – the lure of the desert. There was a peacefulness and a sanity about Byrne’s manner which was very comforting.

I thought in wonder of the sea-shells to be picked up from the desert a thousand miles from the sea but had no fore-shadowing that I would be picking them myself. The night was calm and still. I suddenly became aware of the startling incongruity of Max Stafford, hot-shot businessman from the City of London, lying in a place improbably called Atakor beneath the Finger of God which was not far from the End of the World.

Suddenly London ceased to matter. Lord Brinton and Andrew McGovern ceased to matter; Charlie Malleson and Jack Ellis ceased to matter; Gloria and Alix Aarvik ceased to matter. All the pettifogging business of our so-called civilization seemed to slough away like an outworn skin and I felt incredibly happy.

I slept.

I woke in the thin light of dawn conscious of movement and sound. When I lifted my head I saw Byrne filling the petrol tank from a jerrican – it was that metallic noise that had roused me. I leaned up on one elbow and saw Mokhtar in the desert mosque; he was making obeisances to the east in the dawn ritual of Islam. I waited until he had finished because I did not want to disturb his devotions, then I arose.

Thirty minutes later after a breakfast of cold roast venison, bread and hot mint tea we were on our way again, a long plume of dust stretching away behind us. Slowly the majestic peak of Ilamen receded and new vistas of tortured rock came into view. According to Byrne, we were on a well-travelled road but to a man more accustomed to city streets and motorway driving that seemed improbable. The so-called road was vestigial, distinguishable only by boulders a shade smaller than those elsewhere, and the truck was taking a beating. As for it being well-travelled I did not see a single person moving on it all the time I was in Atakor.

Nearly three hours later Byrne pointed ahead. ‘Assekrem!’

There was a large hill or a small mountain, depending on how you looked at it, on the top of which appeared to be a building. ‘Is that a house?’ I asked, wondering who would build on a mountain top in the middle of a wilderness.

‘It’s the Hermitage. Tell you about it later.’

We drove on and, at last, Byrne stopped at the foot of the mountain. There seemed to be traces of long-gone cultivation about; the outlines of fields and now dry irrigation ditches. Byrne said, ‘Now we climb to the top.’

‘For God’s sake, why?’

‘To see what’s on the other side,’ he said sardonically. ‘Come on.’

And so we climbed Assekrem. It was by no means a mountaineering feat; a track zig-zagged up the mountain, steep but not unbearably so, and yet I felt out of breath and panted for air. Half way up Byrne obligingly stopped for a breather, although he did not seem in discomfort.

I leaned against the rock wall. ‘I thought I was fitter than this.’

‘Altitude. When you get to the top you’ll be nine thousand feet high.’

I looked down to the plain below where I saw the truck with Mokhtar sitting in its shade. ‘This hill isn’t nine thousand feet high.’

‘Above sea level,’ said Byrne. ‘At Tam we were four and a half thousand high, and we’ve been climbing ever since.’ He rearranged his veil as he was always doing.

‘What’s this about a Hermitage?’

‘Ever hear of Charles de Foucauld?’

‘No.’

‘Frenchman, a Trappist monk. In his youth, so I hear, he was a hellion, but he caught religion bad in Morocco. He took his vows and came out here to help the Tuareg. I suppose he did help them in his way. Anyway, most of what the outside world knows about the Tuareg came from de Foucauld.’

‘When was this?’

‘About 1905. He lived in Tam then, but it wasn’t much of a place in those days. In 1911 he moved here and built the Hermitage with his own hands. He was a mystic, you see, and wanted a place for contemplation.’

I looked at the barren landscape. ‘Some place!’

‘You’ll see why when we get to the top. He didn’t stay long – it damn near killed him; so he went back to Tam and that did kill him.’

‘How so?’

‘In 1916 the Germans bribed the Libyan Sennousi to stir up trouble with the desert tribes against the French. The Tuareg of the Tassili n’ Ajjer joined with the Sennousi and sent a raiding party against Tam. De Foucauld was caught and shot with his hands bound – and it was an accident. An excitable kid of fifteen let a gun go off. I don’t think they meant to kill him. Everyone knew he was a marabout – a holy man.’ He shrugged. ‘Either way he was just as dead.’

I looked at Byrne closely. ‘How do you know all this?’

He leaned forward and said gently, ‘I can read, Stafford.’ I felt myself redden under the implied rebuke, but he laughed suddenly. ‘And I talked to some old guys over in the Tassili who had been on the raid against Tam in 1916. Some of the books I read sure are wrong.’ He half-turned as if about to set off again, but stopped. ‘And there was someone else in Tam not long ago like de Foucauld – but a woman. English, she was; name of Daisy Wakefield. Said she was related to some English lord – something to do with oil. Is there a Lord Wakefield?’

‘There is.’

‘Then that must be the guy.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘Sure, Daisy and I got on fine. That’s how I caught up with the news; she subscribed to the London Times. A mite out-of-date by the time it got here but that didn’t matter.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘She got old,’ he said simply. ‘She went north to El Golea and died there, God rest her soul.’ He turned. ‘Come on.’

‘Byrne,’ I said. ‘Why are we climbing this mountain?’

‘To see a guy at the top,’ he said without turning.

I trudged after him and thought: My God! Wakefield oil! This damned desert seemed littered with improbable people. In fact, I was following one of them. Maybe two, counting Paul Billson.

The building at the top of Assekrem was simple enough. Three small rooms built of stone. There were two men there who ushered us inside. They were dark-skinned men with Negroid features. Byrne said casually, ‘Don’t handle any of the stuff here; it’s de Foucauld’s stuff – holy relics.’

I looked about with interest as he talked with the men. There was a simple wooden table on which were some books, a couple of old-fashioned steel pens and a dried-out ink-well. In one corner was a wooden cot with an inch-thick mattress which looked about as comfortable as concrete. On a wall was a picture of the Virgin.

Byrne came over to me. ‘Billson went through three days ago, I think. Or it could have been two days because another truck went through the day after, and I’m not sure which was Billson. But that truck came out again yesterday.’

‘We didn’t see it.’

‘Might have gone out the other way – through Akar-Akar.’ He rubbed his jaw reflectively and looked at me. I noticed he hadn’t bothered to keep up his veil in the presence of these men. He said abruptly, ‘I want to show you something frightening – and why de Foucauld built here.’

He turned and went outside and I followed. He walked across the natural rock floor of a sort of patio to a low stone parapet, and then pointed north. ‘That’s where your boy is.’

I caught my breath. Assekrem was a pimple on the edge of a plateau. Below the parapet were vertiginous cliffs, and spread wide was the most awe-inspiring landscape I had ever seen. Range after range after range of mountains receded into the blue distance, but these were none of your tame mountains of the Scottish Highlands or even the half-tamed Swiss Alps. Some time in the past there had been a fearsome convulsion of the earth here; raw rock had ripped open the earth’s belly with fangs of stone – and the fangs were still there. There was no regularity, just a jumble of lava fields and the protruding cores of volcanoes for as far as the eye could see, festering under a brassy sun. It was killer country.

‘That’s Koudia,’ said Byrne. ‘The land beyond the end of the world.’

I didn’t say anything then, but I wondered about de Foucauld. If he chose to meditate here – did he worship God or the Devil?

FOURTEEN

Byrne was still talking to the dark-skinned men who had come out to join us. There was much gesticulating and pointing until, at last, Byrne got something settled to his satisfaction. ‘These guys say they saw something burning out there two days ago.’

‘Christ!’ I said. ‘What is there to burn?’

‘Don’t know.’ He fumbled in the leather pouch which depended from a cord around his neck and took out a prismatic compass. He looked at me and said with a grin, ‘I’m not against all scientific advance. Mokhtar, down there, thinks I’m a genius the way I find my way around.’ He put the compass to his eye to take a sight.

‘How far away?’

‘Don’t know that, either. They say it was a column of smoke – black smoke.’

‘In the daytime?’

There was astonishment in Byrne’s eyes as he looked at me. ‘Sure; how the hell else could they see smoke?’

‘I was thinking about the Bible,’ I said. ‘The Israelites in the wilderness, guided by a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night.’

‘I don’t think you’ve got that right,’ he said mildly. ‘I read it as a pillar of cloud.’ He turned back to take another sight. ‘But I guess we’d better take a look. I make it just about due north of here, on a compass bearing. I don’t bother none about magnetic variation, not on a short run.’

‘What do you call short?’

‘Anything up to fifty kilometres. Magnetic deviation is another thing. These goddamn hills are full of iron and you’ve got to check your compass bearing by the sun all the time.’

He put the compass away, and from another bag he took a couple of small packages which he gave to the two men. There was a ceremonial leave-taking, and he said, ‘Salt and tobacco. In these parts you pay for what you get.’

As we set off down the steep path I said, ‘There is something that’s been puzzling me.’

Byrne grunted. ‘Hell of a lot of things puzzle me, too, from time to time. What’s your problem?’

‘That veil of yours. I know it’s Tuareg dress, but sometimes you muffle yourself up to the bloody eyebrows and other times you don’t bother. For instance, you didn’t bother up there; you let them see your face. I don’t understand the rationale.’

Byrne stopped. ‘Still on your anthropological kick, huh? Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s the politeness of the country. If you’re in a place and you don’t do as everybody does in that place, you could get yourself very dead. Take a Targui and set him in the middle of London. If he didn’t know he had to cross the street in a special place, and only when the light is green, he could get killed. Right?’

‘I suppose so.’

Byrne touched his head cloth. ‘This thing is a chech; it’s a substitute for the real thing, which is a tagelmoust, but you don’t see many of those around except on high days and holidays. They’re very precious. Now, nobody knows why the Tuareg wear the veil. I don’t know; the anthropologists don’t know; the Tuareg don’t know. I wear mine because it’s handy for keeping the dust out of my throat and keeps a high humidity in the sinuses on a dry day. It also cuts down water loss from the body.’

He sat down on a convenient rock and pointed downwards. ‘You’ve seen Mokhtar’s face?’

‘Yes. He doesn’t seem to bother about me seeing it.’

‘He wouldn’t – he’s a noble of the Kel Rela,’ said Byrne cryptically. ‘Society here is highly class-structured and a ceremonial has grown up around the veil. It’s polite to hide your face from your superiors and, to a lesser extent, from your equals. If Mokhtar met the Amenokal you’d see nothing of him except his eyelashes.’

He jerked his thumb upwards. ‘Now, those guys up there are Haratin, and the Haratin were here thousands of years ago, long before the Tuareg moved in. But the Tuareg conquered them and made slaves of them, so they’re definitely not my superior, so the veil don’t matter.’

‘But you’re not a Tuareg.’

‘The male singular is Targui,’ said Byrne. ‘And I’ve been a Targui ten years longer than I was an American.’ He jabbed his finger at me. ‘Now, you’ll see lots of Tuareg faces, because you’re a no-account European and don’t matter. Got it?’

I nodded. ‘I feel properly put in my place.’

‘Then let’s get the hell out of here.’

If I had thought Atakor was bad it was hard to make a comparison with Koudia; I suppose the only comparison could be between Purgatory and Hell. I soon came to realize that the high road I had anathematized in Atakor was a super highway when compared to anything in Koudia.

I put it to Byrne and he explained. ‘It’s simple. People make roads when they want to go places, and who in God’s name would want to come here?’

‘But why would anyone want to be in Atakor except a mystic like de Foucauld?’

‘The Hermitage is a place of pilgrimage. People go there, Moslem and Christian alike. So the going is easy back there.’

After leaving Assekrem and plunging into the wilderness of Koudia I don’t suppose we made more than seven miles in the first two hours – walking pace in any reasonable country. Koudia was anything but reasonable; I don’t think there was a single horizontal bit of land more than five paces across. If we weren’t going up we were going down, and if we weren’t doing either we were going around.

The place was a litter of boulders – anything from head size to as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, and the springing of the Toyota was suffering. So was I. We bounced around from rock to rock and I rattled around the cab until I was bruised and sore. Byrne, at least, had the wheel to hold on to, but I don’t think that made it any better for him because it twisted in his hands as though it was alive. As for Mokhtar, he spent more of his time out of the truck than in.

Apart from the boulders there were the mountains themselves, and no one could drive up those vertical cliffs so that was when we went around, Byrne keeping his eyes on his compass so as not to lose direction in all the twisting and turning we had to do. He stopped often to take a reciprocal sighting on Assekrem to make sure we were on the right line.

As I say, Mokhtar spent more time on the ground than in the truck, and it wasn’t too hard for him to keep up. He had a sharp eye for signs of passage, and once he stopped us to indicate tyre marks on a patch of sand. He and Byrne squatted down to examine them while I investigated my bruises. When we were about to start again Byrne said, ‘Superimposed tracks. One vehicle going in and another, later, coming out.’

I had casually inspected those tracks myself but I couldn’t have trusted myself to tell which way the vehicles were going. As a Saharan intelligence officer I was a dead loss.