The tree burned, a black stump surrounded by air of fire, but there had been no man on it. His trunk existed only, in the warmth, as if all the moisture of his body had run but into the grit and sand of his refuge and he couldn’t understand why a wispy column of vapour wasn’t lifting from the hole he had made. The air sucked it up, and he was dry, tinderous, dismembered, separated by yards it seemed from his dead limbs. He was glad there had been no man on the tree, that it must have been a piece of trunk falling into intense, almost solid smoke, a vision of his bodyless eyes.
The noise of an aeroplane scraped out of the sky. It came low, low-winged and propelled, slow and straight. There was nothing it could see except smoke and emptiness, a stilled sea of lava and rock, and grey sand-patches frozen suddenly as earth. The pilot wasn’t air-conditioned either, as he must have yawned and looked, then swung back towards Tiaret, climbing as if to get nearer the sun where it would be cooler.
Out of the half-sleep of stupefying sun and exhaustion, his instinct was to rub his legs into life, but his hands wouldn’t move. They lacked food, water, but above all he craved salt, and in his walking visions the sea was a flat metallic shimmer stretching from north to south, a line never more than a few miles ahead, and he increased its reality by wading in it, pushing into the shallow watery salt and lifting it up and over his head like sheets of silk, and in this way he felt better and the false sea became less distinct. Yet any way he turned, the horizon remained, with slothful fishing-boats that had no one aboard lifting and falling a short way out.
By his side was a bag of ammunition and food, and a plastic container whose water tasted as if it had been run through iron filings in the factory, for the smell was almost the same as that which met him on going in each morning less than two years ago. The wells were deep and the water rotten, but his stomach had sealed itself against bacteria after the first crucifying bout in the Monts des Ksours. He rubbed his hands together, and the ache of life came back into his legs. Lifting his head, he saw Mokhtar and Idris standing in front, Ahmed and Shelley further down the slope, Mohamed behind. He’d been alone, flattening every second into an infinity of isolation, and he was almost surprised to see other people as he got up and swung his arms and lifted his legs to bring the dismembered pieces back to his torso.
‘It gets worse every time,’ Shelley said, lighting a pipeful of his precious tobacco to show how bad it was. He pushed his lower lip out with his tongue and tried to spit because it didn’t taste good in the thirst and heat. ‘Two hundred miles as the Mig flies and we’ll be in friendly territory. High mountains and running streams. Winter sports when it snows. We’ll freeze to death then, and see how we like it.’
‘It’s friendly enough here,’ Frank said, picking up his rifle. The lorry with the best guns and ammunition, bales of literature and maps, Chinese grenades known as ‘the rice harvest’, had been left in the Monts des Ksours, where the FLN was trying to tie down as many French brigades as possible to ease pressure on the Kabylie, keep a route open to Morocco, and threaten all roads from Colomb-Bechar. Nobody could say that they hadn’t done their bit with that load. The four FLN soldiers had orders to escort them to the Kabylie, and cause as much damage on the way without getting killed.
‘Nothing like spending summer in the mountains,’ Shelley went on. ‘Used to go to the Catskills with mother, where my old daddy had a big house for us, while he was walking out some dame in Boston. We kept the house after the divorce. Mother skinned him, pretty well.’
‘Nice tales for the camp-fire,’ Frank said. ‘All I want is a shave and a drink of water.’ Shelley seemed untouched by the trek, had a personality so strong that it would not adjust to the dominating sky and landscape, danger and lack of provisions. Every face had thinned to the bone, stubbled grey on Dawley, all eyes of whatever colour unable to shake themselves out of a fixed stare on long stages of the march. Frank felt the sky entering his bones. All extra flesh had vanished, leaving only aching muscle to carry him, as if he had turned into the big ants he sometimes saw; a desert insect when naked, thin and brown, strong and indefinitely living. They once stripped by a muddy pool, brown ants with shaggy heads, thin limbs and bellies firm, rushing into the magnesium filth. Ahmed missed a horned viper and, hoping anything else had fled, they went on bathing, men worn into ants, which was how Frank felt for much of the walking day. He was only a man on coming out of sleep in the morning, when he didn’t have to wonder for any time at all where exactly in the world he was.
They moved another ten miles before darkness, a line of ants, each fifty yards apart, Mokhtar, the tall intellectual Nubian-Moroccan, in front; Shelley, the ever-suspicious next in line. Frank Dawley was the last man, with a full view of them filing down to the scorching dull silver of a salt lake. There was no beauty in their route, only monotony and desolation, and though now and again such adjectives made him smile, they soon lost meaning, for it was land to cross, not question or define, and the endlessness of it emptied him of all response. You took the easy way by giving your total physical being to it, he thought, so that only the unusual was beautiful, something that shocked and pierced your heart, the purple and lugubrious cold dawn striking your eyes as soon as they dared to open at the mounting pressure of it, the great rose-hipped escarpment on emerging from a twisting and narrow cleft, the sight of a hyena suddenly setting into flight from its frozen position, so that you who were also unexpected may have been a form of beauty for it. He once thought beauty ended with the eyes, struck them and that was all before you turned away, but now it only began with the eyes, and your whole body and life responded to it so completely that often you could pass through a hundred similar beauties in a day and remain unmoved, on the surface, until you tried to close your eyes in the darkness, when the delayed-action shock of the day eventually drugged you into sleep. It was beauty, and not beauty, and only the shifting mind treated you to it at the moment of its choosing.
Purple and lugubrious dawn flattened into monotone day. The great rose-hipped escarpment turned grey, was climbed and left behind. Mokhar shot the hyena and roasted its flesh for supper. A land so big could hide you like jungle if you followed certain rules. There was no condition of life in which rules were not necessary. If there was, he had yet to find it. When the unexpected vanished, its beauty was gone, because you were totally drawn back into the flattened, staring eyes of the walk, of the oblivion of racked sleep.
Under this land there was water, oil, manganese, copper, bauxite — materials that one day would put roads and railways where they walked at fifteen or twenty miles between sunstroke and moonbeam. They wanted ice-factories and water-pumps, power stations and fish-pools, cotton-farms and air-conditioned mills, soil labs and canning-plants: then one might live here and think it beautiful if someone had written poems to tell you it was so, and you had the leisure and comfort to realise that they were right as you drove through it at forty miles an hour to meet its charms half-way.
They ambled like dead men, seeking refuge from the stony midday sun, no longer knowing that they walked. Land was like alcohol; he walked, and walking was like drinking. He drank it in on waking, and went all day from sundown to blackout wallowing in it until he dropped from exhaustion and total inebriation, happy and not caring if he ever woke again. Trudging all day over the flat stale beer of the stony plain, brandy of hills, mouth shut tight because it seeped in continually through eyes, ears, nose and anus, the drink of land and the never-ending gutterbout of topography, a blinding weekend of landbooze that went on for months. Such drink killed one with thirst, that was the only trouble, but it gave you the required lift, the lighting-up time of the brain in the flaring magnetic dayflash of the desert.