I had taken to Cody when I was still in Hollywood and he had promised, when we next got together, to introduce me to Pecos Bill’s hairdresser. Sadly, Fate intervened. I was driven, willy-nilly, into Egypt. The hairdresser, I discovered when Cody and I met again years later, had shortly afterwards been killed by a disappointed customer up in the Texas Panhandle.
One has only to see Mr Dirty Spaghetti Eastwood to see where standards are today! I think it was one of the ways we maintained self-respect in the desert. No matter how gruelling the day’s journey and how little sleep we had had during the night, we always maintained a smart appearance.
Neither plain nor dunes revealing the slightest sign of a trail, we proceeded only with the aid of Kolya’s inexpert compass while he forever bemoaned his inattention during his army orienteering instruction as a cadet and cursed the British for having no talent for map-making. We were now heading more or less due south, towards the Tropic line. By this means, Kolya believed, we were certain to find Zazara or, if not, one of the slave roads which would lead us to the oasis. Under my friend’s baffled guidance I had rarely felt as exposed and vulnerable. With new fatalism, however, I sat comfortably on my camel as she followed Kolya’s up and down the great frozen wastes of the red Sand Sea. For some reason my female had been christened ‘Uncle Tom’ - actually Um-k’l-Thoum by Arabs, who cannot pronounce the letter ‘T’ any better than we can make that discreet throat-clearing sound they use in preference to the ‘k’ (and not so alien to a Russian as it is to a Briton). Still psychologically escaped into the Land of the Dead, I saw no sign of potential enemies in all the vast world around me. I had the tranquil satisfaction of my own company. I no longer had to caper and squawk to ensure my life. At first I was also glad to lose the burden of the five daily prayers; yet, paradoxically, after we had been moving across the dunes for a while and our pace had become steady, I began to miss the routine and discipline of the call to prayer and would gladly have resumed it. I now realised I had found a peculiar happiness and security with the caravans and felt homesick for them. I prayed our journey through the trackless Sahara would not be long, that we should soon meet another great caravan and travel with that all the way into the Maghrib. I asked Kolya if the Zazara were used only by slavers. ‘And drug-smugglers and gun-runners,’ he reassured me. ‘It will be good to give up a few of our prejudices for a while, eh?’
I protested I had not yet come to think of the people he described as my natural comrades. He grinned at this, remarking on the wonderful sense of piety in the ‘convent’ of Bi’r Tefawi. I knew instinctively that his sharp tongue betrayed, as they say, a soft conscience. I did not torment him further. My friend was of the Romanoff blood. It pleased him no better than I to consort with the riff-raff. We already had sufficient money, I said, to get a passage back to Genoa or Le Havre. From there we could return to America where I had a small fortune awaiting me. All Kolya could do was remind me that I was now a Spanish citizen, Miguel Juan Gallibasta, resident of Casablanca, born in Pamplona, and a Catholic. He pointed to the passport I had picked. I told him that I had preferred my American passport and would have been willing to take my chances. Free at last of the caravan’s security, we came close at that point to bitter quarrelling. Perhaps we allowed ourselves this release of tension knowing that to part now would increase considerably our chances of perishing. Frequently travellers died within a mile or less of the water whose location they had lost. I must admit, it did not seem to me to be an advantage to go from American to Spanish citizenship, especially since I had never set foot in my ‘home’ country.
How, I asked, would ‘Gallibasta’ prove himself ‘Peters’ back in Hollywood? Matters of identity were growing at once more complicated and less secure. The world looked up to an American film star. How could it make a myth of a Moroccan café proprietor? Kolya said that I was worrying over trifles. As soon as I presented myself back in the USA, with a tale of my capture, torture and escape, I would be a bigger hero than ever. My career was assured. I would be able to tour the country on the strength of my adventures. I said that I hoped my adventures would not be illustrated with film.
We were veiled, now, against a fine dust borne on an uncomfortably steady breeze. As yet we had to experience a full-fledged sandstorm. The Sudanese had warned that it was nearing the season of storms. Another reason, I suggested, for picking a different time to find the Lost Oasis. The Arabs adored such tales. Frequently books circulated among them -Where to find the Buried Gold of Egypt, The Sweet Wells of Nubia, and so on. They believed these much as Americans believed their National Enquirer or Australians their Sun. They told stories of men who had foolishly set off to look for these places. Even the Nazrini, the Sudanese had said, with their noisy machines, had failed many times to reach Zazara. I was conscious of the ghosts that must flock all around us, wondering how much the sand buried. How many souls had been driven like dew from the sun-withered corpses of men who had risked everything merely to prove the truth of a legend? I remembered the melting snows of Ukraine during the Civil War, that white purity hiding the evidence of a million tragedies, a million violent crimes. Perhaps now we rode over the final remains of all the travellers who had perished here in Africa, from the time of Atlantis to the present?
The ash of those dead Japanese drifts through Annaheim and settles on Pluto’s gigantic ears; the ash of Greeks and Egyptians and Arabs and Jews blows back and forth on Mediterranean winds; ash from the Congo and from India and China sweeps across the surface of oceans and continents. There is so much death, so many dead. Every breath we take carries human cells to our lungs, to our blood, to our brains. We can never be free of our ancestors. Perhaps the desert contains nothing else. I fell into the peculiar trance, that state between the sleep of ages and the alertness of the instant, when we come to contemplate the nature of existence and our fulfilment of God’s intentions. I blew the sand from my nostrils and spat, occasionally, on the ground. I hated to spit. I hated to lose even my urine or my sweat. I had an instinct to preserve any liquid, no matter how noxious, in the knowledge that it surely had good use in a waterless world. The dunes - great russet drifts in this part of the Sahara - glared in the heat of the day and little rivers of silver ran through them, always the mirage of water, to a point where by the time you actually saw water you had learned to ignore it. This, too, was how desert venturers met their end within very sight of the oasis. Once we passed a litter of camel and other bones, marks of a camp still in the sand, undisturbed for a century, perhaps, and a presentiment of our own slow death. Again I thought of the mummified corpses, the thoroughly preserved bodies of all those others who had sought Zazara and never found it. Why should we be favoured, when God had determined that the Zwaya’im and the Tebu’um, who were native to this region, had perished in the same quest?
My other fear, perhaps a more practical one, considering Kolya’s orienteering abilities, was not that we should become irretrievably lost in the desert but that we might turn in a curve and encounter to our embarrassment just the caravan we had quit with such discreet grace. Our discretion, accepting full responsibility for our decision, would have been admired by our companions. They would be suspicious, however, if we returned for no clear reason. I had begun to concoct a suitable tale involving overwhelming Tuareg attack when Kolya interrupted my train of thought with the somewhat unoriginal observation that we might, for all intents and purposes, be traversing the sands of Mars. From my reading of Mr Wells, I said, even the Martians had no great desire to live on their home planet! Why had we to remain any longer than necessary in an environment in which no sane man - or monster - would choose to spend more than a day of his life?