The Salt Road (30 page)

On the road signposted to Akka, Lallawa awoke suddenly. I watched her hunch closer to the window and peer out myopically, her hand cupped against the glass and her breath frosting the pane. She said something to Taïb and he pulled the car to a halt and handed me a box of paper tissues with the word ‘Beauty’ and a coy-looking Arab princess with a beaded headpiece, kohled eyes and a discernible moustache emblazoned across it. ‘She needs to … you know.’

Lallawa and I managed this pit-stop with a remarkable degree of dignity, despite my injured ankle and her age and infirmity and apparent bulk. In fact, she was very frail beneath the acres of cloth: I could feel the knit and jut of her bones, the slack flesh and wasted muscles in my grasp as I helped her back to the car, and my misgivings began to surface again. I glanced across at Taïb as he made Lallawa comfortable, but he appeared to be sharing some private joke with her and was not looking at me. Seeing him with his eyes downcast and the smile-lines etching his cheeks, with all his attention focused on Lallawa, I realized with a sudden shock how attractive he was – not just physically, with his strong-boned face and tall, spare frame, but in the way he engaged with the old lady: with a genuine warmth and open-heartedness that made my concerns seem petty and selfish.

We drove for another half an hour before Taïb swung the vehicle off the road to a lookout spot, and we gazed out over the edge of a huge escarpment at the most amazing vista. Directly below, a series of oases burst out of the red and dusty ground in vibrant emerald-green; beyond these the landscape flattened out and stretched into infinity: a never-ending blanket of rock and sand spread across the world.

‘South of here is the gold mine at Akka, and beyond that, the Sahara.’ Taïb shaded his eyes, then added casually, ‘The gold mine is one of the biggest in Africa.’

I watched as Lallawa made a face and touched one of her amulets.

‘She heard the word “Akka”,’ Taïb said with a smile, seeing my expression. ‘Not so deaf after all. And she knows the legend.’

‘The legend?’

‘When gold was first found in this part of Morocco, people went crazy. They gave up their wives, their children, just to search for gold; they spent every day and night digging and digging. They were possessed by greed; or by the djenoun. Seeing this, God sent a great flood out across the land, followed by a drought and a plague of locusts, to teach them the value of the things on which life depends. Gold is unlucky, in our culture. Wealth brings nothing but unhappiness, exploitation and death.’

‘I’d have thought poverty brings with it a good deal more death and unhappiness than a bit of gold,’ I said acidly.

‘Men never die for lack of gold,’ he said softly. ‘But many die in the pursuit of it; and many more are trampled underfoot. In my experience, the rich never become rich by honest means.’

‘So what are you doing in Paris, then, rather than staying here and marrying Habiba?’ I asked, stung. ‘Trading your culture’s artefacts, no doubt for hugely inflated prices, to rich clients?’

The look he gave me was so direct that it felt tangible. ‘The money I make from trading Tuareg goods goes back into the Tuareg economy. With the proceeds we have established a travelling school so that nomad children can learn the skills they need to negotiate the modern world and pass their knowledge on to their children. They are learning the history of their culture, and passing on the stories they hear from their grandparents, and recording the oral tradition in written form, for posterity. We also fund a travelling doctor who visits the encampments.’

I flushed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘And what do you do, Isabelle, when you’re not on holiday, falling off mountains?’

As I started to explain the nature of being a corporate tax accountant, I found myself gradually overcome with an emotion I had never once associated with my work before: a profound and all-encompassing sense of shame. I had prided myself on my much envied portfolio of blue-chip clients, on my knowledge of tax loopholes and procedures, on my diligence and cunning. As I explained the job I had done for the best part of twenty years to Taïb, I felt progressively disgusted, with myself and with the system in which I had played a part. ‘And so, you see, that’s what I do,’ I said at last, wearily. ‘I help fat cats avoid paying the taxes to the government that would make life better for the rest of the population, the money that would pay for more benefits for the poor, and heating for the old, and better hospitals and schools …’

‘Fat cats?’ he interrupted. In the heat of my discourse I’d slipped into franglais, dropping an English phrase in where I didn’t know the French equivalent.

‘
Les gros chats,’
I translated, which made him even more confused. I tried to explain further until at last he said, ‘
Ah, les rats dans un fromage!
The greedy ones who leave nothing for the rest.’

Like rats in cheese. I nodded glumly. Yes, that described them well, those greedy, exploitative, immoral corporations with whom I dealt. I realized that for some time I must have been harbouring a deep-seated resentment of all those sly, complacent businessmen in their Savile Row suits and private-dentist smiles who were disgorged at our offices from sleek, chauffeured limousines; whose carbon footprints were the size of the Arctic; whose faceless global companies were cheerfully mining, drilling up and shipping out Third World countries’ mineral resources, and whose social consciences had been clinically excised in a private hospital at birth. All those captains of industry who employed me, for a handsome salary and bonuses that were several hundred times the average national wage, to find all those slippery loopholes in the tax law, of burying their profits in ‘research’ and other tax-saving devices. I’d only been away from it all for a few weeks, and suddenly I found myself wondering whether I could ever go back to it … The realization of this made me feel deeply uncomfortable.

We drove past dusty tarpaulin-covered trucks on and on through kilometres and kilometres of dry, unrelenting scenery, through the ugly modern town of Tata and the checkpoint at Tissint where Taïb spent several fraught minutes in a police hut proving his ownership of the vehicle, showing my passport and his and Lallawa’s national identity cards, explaining our route and answering many apparently irrelevant questions. Just before Foum-Zguid, Taïb swung the Touareg off the road on to an unsignposted and unmetalled track. Soon the car was made to prove its mettle as he switched into four-wheel drive to negotiate the boulders and craters. Dust flew everywhere. On we went, juddering over the rutted ground until every tooth in my head was rattling and I was blessing the fact that I was small-breasted and supported by a good underwired bra. I reached back and took Lallawa’s hand. ‘
La bes?
’ I asked her, being one of the few phrases I had managed to pick up, and ‘
La bes
,’ she answered, grinning like a loon. ‘
La bes, la bes
.’

After one particularly violent passage of track I looked at Taïb with some concern. ‘Does this go on for long, or is it a shortcut to a better road?’

He shot me a glance. ‘Did you think there would be a motorway into the desert?’

‘Well, no, but …’ I felt rather stupid, and shut up.

‘Don’t worry, I know the piste well, but it’s certainly not one for tourists.’

‘Do people ever take it and get lost, or break down?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said cheerfully. ‘All the time. They think the Sahara’s some sort of adventure playground. It’s good for them to learn it’s not.’

‘What happens to them, then?’

He kept his eyes trained on the track ahead, but I saw his grin widen wolfishly. ‘Have you not seen the bones scattered around?’ He pointed out to the left, where a scrubby-looking tree had broken through the crust of rock and compacted sand. At its base lay a scatter of …

‘Oh …’ I stared in horror, then realized belatedly I was looking at a fall of sun-bleached sticks.

Taïb laughed silently to himself for several minutes. Chastened, I watched him expertly change through the gear modes, noting despite myself the flex of his muscled forearm, the sleek brown skin beneath the fine curling black hairs, and felt a thoroughly unexpected shiver of pleasure run through me. Normally I hated to be driven, hated to be in someone else’s control. What was happening to me? Was it Taïb who was effecting this change in me, with his effortless confidence and capability, a man unfazed, it seemed, by anything, least of all carting a dying woman and a lame foreign tourist into the Sahara; or was there something innate within me that was changing its nature?

I felt abruptly like the landscape through which we passed: in a state of transition, caught between control and powerlessness, civilization and the wilderness; the known and the unknown.

But a moment later my meditation was jolted as I noticed the fuel gauge arrow had slipped into the red. ‘Taïb! We’re nearly out of fuel!’

He flicked a glance towards me, unmoved by my panic. ‘I know.’

‘Well, hadn’t we better turn around and head back to get some?’

‘No need.’

No need? Were we going to run on air; or walk? I stared out into the horrible stony wilderness that now stretched all around us. It was all but featureless in every direction. Behind us the plateau from which we had come rose as a distant blue haze; to either side stone-strewn terrain broken by the odd outcrop of bare rock; ahead, flat, raw ground merging with the pale sky in a shimmer of heat-haze. I stared out across the dead and stony plain, searching for a point of interest, a speck of life, but nothing met my gaze except endless rock and dust. It looked as if a vast sea had millennia ago been rolled back, leaving its bed naked beneath the sun’s burning eye. And all the time the needle on the fuel gauge fell lower and lower.

After a time, Taïb took his mobile out of the door’s side pocket, pressed in a number and started talking into it. The modern world reached its fingers everywhere, making a mockery of the word ‘wilderness’. As a product of such a world I should have found comfort in knowing that help was no more than a phone call away. I thought of stories about climbers in Everest’s death zone calling the rescue services; and now it seemed even the Sahara was not impregnable. Something inside me felt hollow with disappointment, as if my one and only experience of the desert was being stolen from me.

At no apparent landmark, Taïb veered the Touareg off the track along which we had been crunching on to a barely discernible piste at right angles to it. Patches of sand started to appear between the endless scattered rocks and stones, and the vegetation became ever more sparse and spiky, trees giving way to tortured-looking shrubs and cacti. The land dipped down into a dry riverbed and then rose and the car spidered up the other side one tyre at a time. As we topped out on the rise I saw in the distance a tiny splash of green shimmering amidst the dun. The more I stared at it the more distant and indistinct it seemed to become, but Taïb aimed the car at it, and after what seemed an interminable time the spreading fronds of date palms showed themselves clearly against the merciless blue of the sky, the water below them a sheet of silver mirror reflecting back a perfect reversed image. In their miraculous shade, Taïb parked the Touareg and we helped Lallawa out. I watched as she steadied herself with one hand against the hot metal of the side panel and sniffed the air, her eyelids pressed tightly closed as if even the blurriest of images might spoil the acuity of her other senses. At last she turned to Taïb. ‘Zair Foukani,’ she said and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

‘She knows where we are,’ he said to me. He looked shaken.

I smiled, nodding. No great mystery to realizing we were at an oasis: we were in the shade and even I could probably smell the water if I tried.

‘No, she knows our exact position: she knows the name of the oasis and the direction we take from here to the old trade route, the salt road.’

I felt myself shiver, despite the heat of the day.

21

We ate a basic but delicious meal of goat’s cheese and bread and almonds and dates, the sort of meal that thousands of travellers must have eaten here beneath the palms for centuries. Shading my eyes against the bright land beyond, I could easily imagine a caravan of camels silhouetted against the pale sky, wending their weary way out of the cauldron of the Sahara, relieved by the proximity of the end of the desert and the promise of shade and water. But it was not camels that appeared on the skyline as we were finishing our picnic, but what looked like an army jeep, the sort you see in black-and-white war movies, its khaki sides pitted and dented and covered in dust. It looked almost as if a part of the desert had grown wheels and was rolling towards us. Should we be concerned? I had read in the guidebook alarming stories about tourists attacked and robbed in the desert, their vehicles stolen, the passengers left for dead. I shot a look at Taïb, but he was on his feet, a little half-smile on his lips. Then he started to loop his turban cloth around his head.

The jeep pulled in beside our vehicle and three men got out. They wore the same odd combination of East and West as Taïb: jeans and shirts topped by turbans; but where Taïb wore his loose around his face, all I could see of these men were their eyes, dark and glittering, out of a narrow slit in the fabric. Were they hiding their identities? I felt myself tense and turned to say something to Taïb, only to find that he now wore his own head-covering in a similar fashion. Two of the men came forward and greetings were exchanged: head nods and a sort of tentative handshake that seemed a mere touching of fingers and palms, very different from the effusive greetings I’d seen in the Berber villages. The third man hung back, keeping his distance. His eyes slid to me, then to Lallawa. He waited for a pause in the conversation, then addressed Taïb loudly and abruptly. Taïb gestured towards me in a dismissive manner – just a tourist – and, as if mollified, the man nodded and turned to take something out of the back of the jeep. By craning my neck I could see that it contained stacks of large olive jerrycans. Three of these were hefted out, money exchanged hands, and the third man counted it carefully while the other two helped Taïb refuel our vehicle. Then polite farewells were made, and the men got back into the jeep and drove away.