A House in the Sky (10 page)

I pulled back. I didn’t kiss other women’s boyfriends. It had been a long time since I’d kissed anyone at all.

Suddenly, we were both stammering. “I hadn’t realized,” I was saying. “I didn’t know.”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. My fault.” He added, “It’s a confusing thing.”

We sat back on the bed and passed a long moment staring at the floor.

Nigel then started to talk. His girlfriend’s name was Jane. She was also Australian, he said. They’d been together a long time, about ten years, having met when they were quite young. They were in the midst of an agonizing, slow breakup, he said. It was her job that had taken them to London. That they were far from home and living together
made it harder for them to extract from the relationship. It was sad, he said, but it was over. The trip to Africa was punctuation on the end of the sentence.

I let it go at that. I wanted to be the start of a new sentence. I was charmed. He was different than the boy backpackers I met on the road, a little cocky but also earnest. I thought it kind of noble, even, that he’d spilled the truth about the soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend. I knew plenty of guys who wouldn’t. I was a believer in fate, and something told me that despite our individual plans and our homes on different continents, Nigel and I were fated to be together.

That night, we did a lot of kissing. The next morning, he caught the early bus for Harar. We promised to meet up again as soon as possible.

For the next six weeks, it went like this: Nigel traveled and shot pictures for the aid group while I explored on my own, as I’d planned it. We used e-mail to arrange rendezvous, coming together for a few giddy days in one crossroads town or another before staunchly resuming our travels. I took a punishingly hot two-day bus trip over the border into Sudan, where I spent a week at a backpacker encampment at the Blue Nile Sailing Club in central Khartoum. I befriended a Sudanese businessman named Ayad, who showed up at the club in the late afternoons and took loads of camping foreigners for sunset rides in his powerboat, showing us where the Blue Nile fed into the larger Nile River, its waters flowing north toward Egypt. Despite the fact that alcohol was banned in northern Sudan, he served chilled beer from a cooler in the stern. When I asked how he got it, Ayad, wearing designer shades and driving at full speed, shouted, “Anything is available on the Nile!”

I also at one point got myself all the way to the border between Ethiopia and Somaliland, a breakaway state in the northern part of Somalia that had managed to keep itself out of the nasty civil war going on in the south. I was hoping to spend a few days in the city of Hargeisa, which I’d heard was pretty and welcoming. I had another motive, too: Like a lot of backpackers, I was a country counter. We were always looking to improve our numbers. Listing the number of countries we’d visited gave us a way to measure ourselves. Most country counters kept quiet about their numbers until they got over thirty.
After four years of on-again, off-again travel, I’d been to forty-six countries. A trip over the next border would bring me to forty-seven.

The uniformed border guards—each with a Kalashnikov slung idly over a shoulder—took one look at me and started shaking their heads. “Not now. Too dangerous,” I was told.

I’m pretty sure “not now” meant not while Muslims around the world were feeling jittery and provoked. A few months earlier, a newspaper in Denmark had commissioned and published a group of satirical cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad, setting off a furor among conservative Muslims. There had been riots and protests everywhere from Nigeria to Lebanon, and the controversy seemed to be continuing.

I don’t know if some faraway official had issued a dictum regarding foreigners in Muslim Somaliland or if it was a gut decision on the part of the border guards in their squat concrete shack amid the swirling dust of eastern Ethiopia that I was bad news, but in short order I was turned around and heading back where I’d come from, my country count stuck on forty-six. There was, I supposed, no upside to letting someone like me in.

*

Nigel, meanwhile, was coming alive in Ethiopia. When we talked on the phone during our stretches apart or I read his e-mails from an Internet café, I could sense him firing on the cylinders of each new day. I recognized the feeling. He sounded exuberant, untethered, even while complaining that he was ground down by the long bus rides and the flies that crawled up his nose and the unending barrage of begging children. When we met up, we feasted on meals of chopped collard greens and dollops of mashed chickpeas spread over pancakey
injera
bread. We tossed our backpacks into the corners of grotty guesthouse rooms and threw ourselves into bed. He was strong and capable, and I loved the golden hair on his arms.

I did my best not to worry about the girlfriend named Jane. When Nigel talked about her, he grew flustered. Sometimes when telling me a story about his past, I could tell he was editing her out of it. But mostly he didn’t talk about Jane. He talked about me.

He was soon to return to London. Before he did, we made one long excursion together, into the brown desert of northwestern Ethiopia, across a legendary swatch of land called the Danakil Depression. I’d read about it during my pretravel reading binge at home, in a
National Geographic
story titled “The Cruelest Place on Earth.” The Danakil was far from anywhere and scorchingly hot. My Lonely Planet carried a brief mention of the area but didn’t provide instructions or encouragement to go. Which somehow made it perfect.

We took buses until we reached a market village on the outskirts of the desert. The town was populated by a tribe called the Afar—Muslim nomads who made their living pickaxing salt from the flats on a distant edge of the Danakil, then loading it onto camels and trekking it many miles through the some of the hottest weather in the world to sell to traders. The Afar women wore loose head scarves, and many had henna tattoos on their faces, three thin lines or a series of droplets on their cheeks. The Afar men were famous, apparently, for castrating their enemies.

We wanted to see the salt mines. Nigel thought maybe he could sell some photographs of the miners to a magazine. I thought I’d try my hand at writing about the experience, possibly for a travel website or my hometown newspaper. After asking around, Nigel and I found a guide—a short, rotund Afar man with a face that was wrinkled like a walnut shell and a long gray beard into which he’d rubbed a rust-colored henna dye. Hereafter known to us as Red Beard, he spoke no English but, in an agreement brokered by a local guy who did, Red Beard said he’d take us out to the salt flats and back, a trek of about ten days. We were joined by a solemn younger man—the Camel Whisperer, we called him—who said nothing in any language but had beautiful bladelike cheekbones and a shy smile and walked devotedly next to the four camels in our little caravan: one for each foreigner, one for Red Beard, and one for the luggage. Each animal also hauled two yellow plastic jerry cans, sloshing with water.

We rode behind Red Beard on a path that took us first across low hills of hard-packed sand and shrub and eventually out onto the flaking gray expanse of the sodium flats. From atop our camels, Nigel and
I sang songs, played Twenty Questions, and shouting over our shoulders at each other, told silly stories from childhood. He had spent his school years at a boarding school for rural kids, where he hated all the rules. He’d been angry at his parents for years afterward, he said, for sending him there. He tutored me on all things Aussie—why they loved Vegemite; how to shout “Why the fuck not, mate?” as a kind of battle cry for life.

We slugged water out of our bottles, let the sun broil our shoulders, behaved like high-schoolers on a rambunctious first date, only our date was taking place in an Ethiopian desert, with Red Beard and the baby-faced Camel Whisperer quietly and inscrutably observing our every move. The unspoken assumption was that Nigel and I were married. Which was why it was okay for me to rest a hand on his cheek or for him to give my butt a playful knock as I pulled myself back into the saddled notch of my camel’s back after taking a food break.

I was coming to understand a few things about Nigel. He was less a photographer from London—at least not in the way I first interpreted it—and more a hopeful guy at the start of his career, even at the age of thirty-five. He talked about wanting to do more with his photography, how the idea of being a war correspondent appealed to him. We talked about Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, all the places in the world where wars raged, all the places where a photojournalist would want to be. I told him about the week or so I’d spent in Kabul, staying with Amanuddin’s family. Despite having been robbed there, I thought of it as intriguing and beautiful, a place I wanted to return to. Nigel let me borrow his camera—a black Canon, as heavy as a brick—and play around with it, clicking through its settings and experimenting with what happened when you switched one soup-can lens for another. He showed me how to frame a landscape shot, how to filter the bleach of the high sun.

On our second night, we stayed in a tiny Afar village, a way station for the camel drivers transporting salt. Red Beard had dragged a wide, thin mattress from someone’s twig home and put it out in the open air for us. There were zillions of stars blinking infinitely over the blue desert, slinging the occasional meteor, each one hooking through the sky
on a quick shimmering tear before flaming out. It was impossible to look away; we watched for what felt like hours. I was just beginning to nod off when Nigel reached over and gave my hand a squeeze. “Know what?” he said. “Right now I can’t think of anywhere in the world I’d rather be.” He paused a second and added, “Or anyone else I’d rather be here with.”

I knew what he was trying to say and I was happy for it.

*

The Danakil Depression is a surreal, sunken basin dozens of miles wide and long, over three hundred feet below sea level in places. It’s like a half-picked scab on the earth’s surface, with the guts of the planet oozing in its cracks. As we moved deeper into the depression, we saw spitting fissures and bubbling pools of yellow and blue sulfur, which thickened the air with its stink. Nigel and I stared at it all. We took photos we were sure were gorgeous and unforgettable, anything to document that the whole thing was real.

Sometime on the fourth day, I stopped sweating. My thighs ached from all the hours clamped on the camel. My tongue felt heavy. My lips were cracked and sore. Even the desert-bred Afar men were getting fried. During a midday break in our lumbering, I refilled my water, a little woozily. Nigel and the Camel Whisperer walked a short distance away to pee. Red Beard swatted two of the camels until they dropped to a kneel. He slid the heavy saddles from the animals’ backs and propped them up on the ground, stringing up a canvas cloth between them. His efforts yielded a low, makeshift tent that created a slim puddle of shade, into which all four of us crawled and quickly, within inches of one another, as if we had absolutely no choice in the matter, fell sound asleep.

By evening, I was shivering and disoriented, feeling ice run up my spine, dehydrated to the point of delirium. After another few hours on the camels, we had bedded down for the night on the salt flat, the crystals like little razors pushing through our straw mat. Nigel dribbled water from a bottle down my throat. I said something to him and watched his brow furrow; I was babbling nonsense, my bearings
slipping away. The sky whirled overhead. Later, Nigel would tell me he was sure I would die that night, that they’d have to rope my body onto a camel to get me out, and the whole mess would be his fault.

It didn’t go that way, though. Early the next morning, I opened my eyes and sat up. I felt better, with just the slightest hint of a headache. I shook Nigel awake. His eyes went wide.

“Aw, thank
God,
” he said, stroking my hair. “You gave us a fucking scare, you know.”

His relief seemed huge. I found it touching.

I convinced Nigel there was no reason to turn back, that we should continue. I promised to drink extra water and keep myself fully covered from the sun. He went along with it, reluctantly. “You’re pushy,” he said, handing my backpack over to the Camel Whisperer to strap on the cargo camel. “Pushy, pushy, pushy.”

That day we followed Red Beard over the last miles to the salt mine—a dirty, grim outpost, the extreme reaches of an already extreme place, where maybe two hundred painfully skinny Afar men dressed in shorts and T-shirts were using long sticks to pry up giant cementlike slabs of heavy gray salt, then chipping them into square tiles that could be bundled and loaded onto waiting camels. Upon arrival, Nigel and I disembarked from our animals, grinning with relief, stretching our backs and shaking out our sore legs as if finishing up a pilgrimage, as if we’d come to some end-of-the-road auberge and were about to have ourselves a soapy shower and a three-course meal. Because that’s the thing about the exact moment when you get somewhere that has required effort: There’s a freeze-frame instant of total fulfillment, when every expectation has been met and the world is perfect.

We weren’t thinking about the long trek back, or the fact that Nigel was still entangled with Jane, or even that the salt miners were staring at us with unbridled hostility. No, this was the moment
before
the moment when reality reasserted itself, which it promptly did, as one of the Afar miners spotted the camera in my hands and, pegging me for the invading alien that I was, scooped up a heavy chunk of salt and hurled it right at me.

F
rom Ethiopia, I went on to Cairo, following my original plan. Nigel flew to London, where he said he was going to break up with Jane once and for all. He would then move back to Australia. I’d get a work visa and join him there. I bought a cell phone so he could call me as I continued traveling, which he did almost every day. Our phone calls were quick—we were on tight budgets—but loving. The longer we were apart, the more perfect he became. I’d never in my life imagined I’d follow some guy to Australia, but it seemed like precisely what was supposed to happen.