Finally, away we go, up the hill from the house, sliding and swerving on the fine sand until we have a grip on the stony rubble at the top.
My last images of Smara camp are the small plots on the edge of town, fenced with anything from rice sacks to beaten-out oil cans, where people keep their livestock - goats, sheep, even camels. Two young girls are dragging a length of chicken wire across the sand to build another enclosure. That life goes on like this in these most straitened of circumstances is extraordinary. Smara is becoming less like a camp and more like a proper town every day. For everyone under twenty-five this is their only home. And that’s not good news for the Polisario.
All morning we rumble across the hammada, stony, gravel-strewn desert, which appears featureless and forbidding, but is constantly changing. At one moment we’ll be on the flat, at another cutting down a ravine or passing a small hill, both of which seem to come from out of nowhere. A scattering of acacia trees suddenly evaporates, leaving no cover at all. At moments like this, when there is no single piece of shade as far as the eye can see, the desert becomes quite frightening, and our vehicles seem small and pathetically vulnerable. It’s like being on a rowing boat in the middle of the ocean.
Fifty-five miles later we stop at a Polisario checkpoint. A rough barrier made from lengths of piping, a few outbuildings, goats sheltering beneath the skeleton of a jacked-up, wheel-less lorry. A couple of Toyota pick-up trucks stand side by side with a couple of anti-aircraft guns in the back. The Saharawi army, Bachir points out.
The only exception to the general air of lethargy is the presence of a single swallow, darting and swooping above us.
I assume this is the border between Algeria and Western Sahara, but no-one seems quite sure. Bachir, squinting into the wind and dust, says we must move on, we’ve many hours driving still ahead. Najim, who’s driving me and Basil, has wandered off and ambles back as the engines are being re-started, bringing wild dates for everybody, straight off the tree.
There is no surfaced road of any kind, but we follow the piste, as they call it, and every now and then pass a black tyre half sunk into the sand. The sight of these markers, sometimes at 5- or 10-mile intervals, becomes immensely reassuring.
At least someone has been here before us.
For a while, the terrain turns viciously stony, as if all the sand cover had been sifted through, leaving only this underlay of sharp grey points, jabbing at our tyres and sabotaging our progress. Ironically, it’s on a much less hostile surface of soft white shells that we have our first puncture. Bachir kneels, scrabbles in the dust and picks out a handful of stones. He straightens up.
‘Look, you see. Shells, little fish. This was all sea bed once.’
The desert as ocean again.
A half-hour later we’re hurtling across a hard-baked gritty plain, flat as an ironing board, with nary a bush or a boulder breaking the surface as far as the eye can see. The drivers can at last put their feet down, and we fly across the desert, each vehicle swathed in its own dust, a string of small clouds chasing each other.
It’s well into the afternoon before we find anywhere suitable to stop for lunch. A scattering of smoothly rounded boulders offers shade and there are a few dry and whitened trees for firewood. As the drivers gather wood, the cook, a middle-aged man with a broad, guileless face, thick moustache and greying hair, walks a little way off and falls to his knees in prayer. He picks up a handful of dust and rubs it up and down his forearms and on his brow, mimicking, I suppose, the act of purification in a waterless world.
The meal is, surprise, surprise, camel stew, cooked in a pot over the fire, and accompanied by good sticky rice and washed down with Coca-Cola, our main treat in this world without alcohol and wistfully referred to as Coke du Rhone. Now we are indisputably in Western Sahara, Bachir is a changed man. He looks around at the rocks and the desiccated trees with proprietorial satisfaction.
‘Ours is the best desert!’
I laugh. But he doesn’t.
‘It is known to be the greenest, Michael.’
Greenest? I look around at the tawny undergrowth. This is chauvinism gone mad.
‘All the great desert poets come from this part of Western Sahara.’
A woman laden down with possessions appears amongst the rocks, going apparently from nowhere to nowhere. When she comes closer the drivers shout a greeting. She nods amiably, comes over for a chat and carries on. It’s certainly a friendly desert.
Hours later, the vehicles have stopped again. The sun has set and the horizon is a sand-stained yellowish rim. Our drivers have got out and are kneeling in a line in this desolate place, bowing to Mecca. Bachir, hands sunk deep in coat pockets, looks out ahead. He doesn’t join them.
‘I am not devout,’ he says matter-of-factly.
An hour later, more mundane thoughts. Where are we going to eat and where are we going to sleep? We’ve been on the road twelve hours and Bachir has stopped the vehicles and is consulting with his driver. No-one appears to have a map, but there’s much pointing into the darkness.
Then we’re all urged to get in again. They’ve missed a turning.
Half an hour further on and out of the pitch blackness appears the outline of a long, low, grimly unwelcoming building on the crest of a hill. Built by the Spanish military, this decommissioned barracks is to be our home for the night. We’re billeted in two rooms with seriously dodgy wiring. Turning the light off involves physically pulling apart two wires to deactivate the current. No-one dares turn it on again.
The cook is the only one who seems unconditionally happy to be here. With a real kitchen to work in, he sets to work on a vegetable stew, with just a little camel in it.
WESTERN SAHARA
Day Nineteen
TFARITI
Revenge of the camel. Plucked from deepest sleep, I just have time to stumble up from my mattress, grab torch and toilet paper, pull open the jarring metal door of our dormitory and race to the nearest lavatory. A strong wind has got up and I’m aware of how Gothic a scene this must be - white-T-shirted figure with disordered shock of hair, sprinting along concrete passageways open to the sky, as the wind howls after him, setting doors and windows banging.
I know things are bad as I have to do this twice more, on each occasion reaching the hole in the ground only just in time and holding my breath against the stench emanating from it.
Five o’clock. Woken by the chimes of a grandfather clock. For a moment I believe myself to be safe and well in some ivy-covered country-house hotel, and then I remember that the sound is coming from John Pritchard’s alarm clock and I’m actually recovering from diarrhoea in a barracks in Western Sahara.
Roger and Bachir try to cajole the reluctant, slumbering drivers into a six o’clock start, but they won’t move until they’ve lit a fire and brewed some tea. It’s nearer seven when we bounce and sway off down the hill, heading north and east for a privileged glimpse of the front line between Moroccans and Saharawis, one of the world’s best-kept secrets.
In 1982, in an attempt to consolidate their military superiority over the Polisario, the Moroccan government began work on a system of fortifications stretching for over 1000 miles along the edge of occupied Western Sahara.
This mighty Moroccan wall, longer than the Great Wall Of China, reportedly costs $2 million a day to maintain. As we brake, turn, twist and sway for mile after mile across a carpet of fractured stone slabs I should be feeling intrepid and privileged, but to someone suffering from camel poisoning the ride is slow torture. By gulping mouthfuls of air and staring fixedly at the horizon, I manage to hold out for three hours before the desire to shed last night’s stew becomes uncontrollable and I have to ask Najim to pull up.