I pointed out, sotto voce, to Kolya that we might well be overheard. He shrugged and said, in English, ‘We’ll ride with the caravan as far as al-Jawf, but we can’t risk being recognised by any more of Stavisky’s people coming up from Benghazi so we’ll have to head further over and get to Tunis, perhaps. I’m going to need a buyer. We’ll steer clear of Tripoli and Tangier because someone’s bound to spot one of us. That means selling to a local dealer up here, which means going to Zazara, I suppose. Another oasis the authorities deny exists!’ He was satisfied with his plan. ‘From there, if need be, we can make our way south, following the tropic of Capricorn all the way across the Sahra al-aksa!’ Even I had heard that such a route was a myth, frequently searched for and never found. Kolya shook his head at this, laughing. ‘Everyone knows Zazara and the Darb al-Haramiya here, though they wouldn’t admit it to the Rumi. The Darb al-Haramiya is the old Thieves’ Road. It’s the secret slavers’ route out of Chad and French West across the top of the world. The Arabs insist it is the most dangerous trail in the whole Sahara. The Berbers, who are its undisputed masters, call it the Road of Courage.’ His smile continued to broaden. ‘Isn’t it strange, Dimka! It has a thousand names yet appears on no map. That’s why it’s safe for us. The British and French, for instance, have officially declared its non-existence. The Italians claim to have destroyed it. Are these the responses of men who have failed to control something, I wonder? Sour grapes, as Achmet al-Imteyas might point out.’
I ventured that not one of those names made it sound in any way attractive. I had no further curiosity about any other aspects of the slave-trade. So far we had travelled in easy-going, amicable company. But I had seen the blue-veiled warriors. Such as these would doubtless be our company on the Thieves’ Road. How would they receive us?
‘They will recognise men of courage,’ Kolya informed me with cheerful insouciance. ‘After all, there is no route mapped to Zazara. Men must find it for themselves. With a map and a compass.’ He held up an old leather case attached to his belt. I admired my friend in so many ways but I must admit I had no great faith in his scout-craft. I believe now he was more desperate than he admitted. He was, I gathered, in the process of stealing a commodity of huge value. Stavisky had a hold over Kolya and had been blackmailing my friend in Paris, perhaps threatening to give him up to the Chekists, now about half the city’s émigré population. There had been some trouble, too, over an Apache girl. I did not judge. I, too, have had moments when I have been unable to act like an absolute saint. Il fallait être idiot ou hypnotisé pour périr dans ces fameux camps. Chacun a toujours être maître de son destin.
Our journey, which would end, we hoped, in Tangier, had hardly begun. All we knew was that it would not be the leisurely and predictable trek we had so far enjoyed. By now, however, I had learned to respect the desert and never to trust it - the only attitude permitting survival. As yet we had hardly experienced the ‘real’ desert, that ‘abomination of desolation’ as Leonard Woolworth had it, although he was referring, I think, to Ur.
Egypt conquered Phoenicia but made the mistake of letting her people settle in Canaan. They had a theory that the ‘Philistines’ would control the Jews. And of course reckoned without Samson.
Paradoxically relieved to leave the lonely citadel of Christendom behind us, we took up with a party of tall white-robed Sheul making a trading circuit which would bring them back to Chad as wealthy men. They spoke thickly-accented Arabic and bad French. But the blacks were cheerful company for the two weeks it took us to reach al-Jawf, a typical oasis with the usual assemblage of clay hovels, ramshackle places of worship, ragged awnings and rickety stalls, but boasting a collection of Jew merchants who, judging by their relatively rich clothing, possessed the only wealth in the place and with whom Kolya did some discreet business. He disposed of our oldest and weakest camel at a price which surprised and delighted him. When he showed me the purse of gold, my heart sank. Now the Tuareg were bound to attack us. I had been listening to some of the drivers and suggested we follow one of the other routes down as far as Djarba and from there make our way to Tunis, but he said it would be too dangerous. We must be sure never to live in fear once we returned to Europe. Also we could not risk the French and Italian patrols who nowadays habitually covered those roads. The only sensible route for us was the one he had chosen.
I asked him if he was absolutely certain the Darb al-Haramiya existed. He laughed loudly at my question but did not offer a direct reply. He said I should prepare myself. In less than a week we would be making our way into the Sand Sea, en route for ‘the Lost Oasis’. ‘We’ll be the first white men ever to see it!’
With good riding-camels and three of our pack animals exchanged for two fresh sturdy beasts we had traded with the Tebu who had brought them to al-Jawf to sell, we allowed the momentum of the next caravan to carry us from the oasis while our prayers were still echoing amongst the eroded hills. Kolya had insisted we needed cover so we were carrying fabrics and clothing, much of it in colours favoured by the Berbers. We now claimed to be Palestinian haberdashers from Haifa. As I had guessed, the Zazara Oasis was not marked on any map, and most believed it a myth, but Kolya’s information came, he said, from an Arab slaver in al-Jawf who travelled that way regularly. It lay far into the Sand Sea, a place of lush vegetation and sweet water, hidden by a great rocky overhang so that it could be seen neither from the air nor from the ground. ‘He swore it gives the purest water in the world.’
Everyone on the caravan guessed we were planning to go south-west to trade with the Tuareg and to a man declared us both mad. One Sudanese spice-merchant told Kolya he now realised he was ‘as foolish as your brother. You are clearly of one blood!’ He begged Kolya as a friend not to choose certain death. This caused me to sink into a peculiar, expectant calm from which it was almost impossible to arouse myself. Having failed to convince us to avoid the Thieves’ Road, he shrugged and left us to the Will of God, but continued to behave as if he had persuaded us to stay with them and give up all thoughts of the Darb al-Haramiya. This was a form their courtesy took.
Again, I found it remarkable how different were all these people, all of whom were conditioned and moulded by the desert. The Sahara is a pitiless wasteland of sand and rock relieved here and there by peaceful waters and waving fronds of blood-red flowers when the palms and cactus are in bloom, yet places of sanctuary are found even in the most run-down and overpopulated of the oasis townships. It is the basis of the desert nomad’s sense of order. Outside is threatening Chaos, uncertain Fate. Within the tribe, within the camp, within the family, within the tent, must be harmony. It is why the Moslem divides his world into Zones of War and Zones of Peace. Their architecture provides havens of tranquillity in the din of the city. They have developed a philosophy which seeks to accommodate the world’s realities, not abolish them. This is a fundamental difference between the Christian and the Moslem and especially between the Moslem and the Westernised Jew who has done so much to tinker with the great machinery of our existence. With his ‘social experiments’ and his theoretical physics, he has led us nowhere but to self-destruction. This the Arab understands; it is what informs his realistic assessment of his old friend, the Jew. Otherwise he has more in common with his Semitic cousin than he has differences. This is the only ironic amusement one can gain from the Arab’s superstitious notions of race. Those superstitions, to which he clings with proud insanity, are the rocks against which he dashes even his finest brains, all his ambitions, his yearning desires. Like the natives of New Guinea, he has developed a religion of self-destruction, of perpetual defeat. Sometimes, to me, this Arab seems noble in his quixotic combination of hard common sense and crazed hallucinatory vision. Perhaps Don Quixote has his most profound psychic origins in some Moorish desert where to survive you must also go mad.