Later, bearing bags of millet, sugar and mint, but with no money left over for new outfits, Doulla and Perri return to their lodgings to prepare for the big night, the first public performance of their Gerewol.
We return to our camp site, passing the various shops and stalls on the edge of the showground. One is run by the Niger Post Office, which proves to be boldly internationalist, with colour-soaked special issues devoted to such typically African heroes as Raphael, Rembrandt and Princess Di. Another booth boasts a pair of skis and a snowboard. A dashingly elegant Touareg appreciates my curiosity and tries to sell me a course of sand-skiing lessons. On some of the higher dunes, he says, when the sand is cold and crisp, it can be just like the Alps. He may be right, but the name on his card doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.
‘Danger,’ it reads. ‘Abdul Khadir Danger.’
It’s late in the afternoon when we return to the Wodaabe compound. Hairdressing and make-up is already underway as they prepare themselves for their first night at Cure Salee. Doulla is having his hair dressed by one of the women. Almost unrecognisable without his headcloth, he has, like most of the Wodaabe, and unlike the Hausa, a surprisingly luxuriant growth, which is being carefully plaited until tresses hang down by his ears like those of a Hasidic Jew.
Other young men sit in a line, holding up plastic-framed vanity mirrors, which no self-respecting Wodaabe youth would be seen without. Each one has a sandal on the ground in front of him, which he uses as a palette for the colours. The predominantly yellow base is powder from a stone called macara, which they find out in the bush. The black lipstick is from another mineral, called stibnite.
Those already made up are scrambling into leather leggings and exchanging their everyday sandals for elaborate, decorated versions, which they slip on lovingly. Then they tie each other’s white turbans, onto which are fixed headdresses of cowrie shells, precious stones and, to cap it all, ostrich feathers.
Once this long and painstaking process is complete, they leave their temporary home and walk the mile or so to the showground. Despite the confidence of their display, they still seem pitifully self-conscious. Country cousins in the big city.
The thudding music grows louder and the red and white Coca-Cola umbrellas draw closer. Our friends sing, not very convincingly, more to keep their spirits up, as their eyes search the crowd for fellow Wodaabe, like new arrivals at an old school reunion. Suddenly I feel that our presence is superfluous. The best way we can repay their hospitality is probably to stay out of the way. It’s their show now.
Day Fifty-Eight
AGADEZ
I’m standing on the small roof terrace of the Pensione Tellit in Agadez. A hot and hazy sunset is over and night is wrapping itself around the mud-brown walls of this old trading town. Orange lights mark out the network of narrow streets that connect a spread of rounded walls and flat, rectangular roofs. There’s only one tall building in town and that’s the minaret of the Grande Mosquee, a pyramid of mud, stones and projecting wood beams which rises high above the surrounding town. Anywhere else in the world it might barely be noticed, but this one is the tallest building for a thousand miles and, along with the mosques at Djenne and Timbuktu, it has almost mythic status in Islamic Sahara. I’m staring at it now, as my wife, on the other end of a satellite phone, is describing the almost unbelievable destruction of two other iconic towers, 6000 miles away, in New York.
The news that greeted us all on our arrival at this modest comfortable little whitewashed hotel seems incomprehensibly unreal, but friends and family, contacted by satellite phone, confirm that the attacks not only happened but were seen to happen and are being replayed constantly to those who might have missed them.
They appear to have taken place right across the northeastern United States. The President is in hiding and the country has virtually shut down. Though nobody has claimed responsibility, the finger of blame is being pointed at Arab terrorists and reprisals are said to be imminent.
We eat later, under the stars, beneath a sky which, even out here, seems less friendly than it did last night. All of us are shell-shocked, turning over what we have heard, flailing around for explanations, repeating the facts and trying to fit them into theories, wondering what on earth might happen next.
Day Fifty-Nine
AGADEZ TO TABELOT
A night of raucous air-con and bad dreams. When I come to write the day’s date in my notebook I pause. Yesterday I wrote ‘Tuesday, September 11th’ without noticing.
Today I write ‘Wednesday, September 12th’ without conviction. According to radio reports, casualties in New York alone are said to be in their thousands. Thousands. Thousands of people, in a city which, apart from Sheffield and London, I probably know better than any other. I flick back the page of my notebook and look at what I scribbled before climbing into bed last night: ‘I can think of no parallel act of destructive violence in my lifetime aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’
Out on the tiny courtyard breakfast is laid out. The sky is clear blue, the morning sunlight will soon be tipping over the wall and spilling onto us. I eat bread, two eggs, honey and tea, with which I swallow my malaria pill. The others begin to emerge from their rooms. John has heard the latest news on BBC World Service. Details it’s hard to deal with - mobile phone calls from those who knew they were going to die, people jumping eighty floors from the blazing Trade Center. Things you don’t want to hear.
But our waiter is the same and the manager is the same and outside in the small square the same cast of characters rise to their feet as we appear, not to talk about terror attacks or the likelihood of a world war, but to sell, cajole and wheedle, exactly as they did when we arrived from Ingal yesterday. The short thick-set man with the rings and silver Touareg crosses: ‘I am good friend of the English. I have jewellery. You have come to Niger, you must buy something.’ The tall, imposing man with a craggy face and thin grey beard, who stalks me, repeating over and over again, ‘You must talk with me. I know Ginger Baker.’ A blind woman, hand outstretched, led around by a little girl. Two men on crutches, fleet and persistent. The children, as ever, wanting a gift or some money.
Here in Agadez the world hasn’t changed. And why should it? Niger is not a player. It is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Its gross national product works out at $850 per person per year. There are no banks of television screens here pumping out the apocalyptic scenes they’re seeing back home. In Niger the literacy rate is barely 15 per cent, and I have not seen a single newspaper or magazine on the streets of Agadez. Life goes on.
We have heard that there is a possibility of joining a camel caravan at Tabelot, a town 50 miles to the northeast as the crow flies, though more like six hours in a vehicle, as it lies deep in the Air (pronounced ‘eye-eer’) Mountains.
I’m excited at the prospect, not just of joining a camel train, but of entering, for the first time, one of the three legendary mountain ranges of the Sahara, the others being the Tibesti in Chad and the Hoggar in southern Algeria.
I’m not disappointed. This is a tortured, twisted, dramatic landscape, created by immense volcanic forces, which have swung the bedrock of the Sahara from the horizontal to the vertical, rolled it over and left it to shatter and splinter in the heat. Rock-fields stretch away into the distance, charred like the rakings from a furnace. Across this untamed surface runs a roughly cleared track. As we shake and sway along, the goatskin in which the water supply is kept, lashed to the side of the car to keep cool, occasionally swings round and taps ghoulishly at the window, as if the goat had come back to life and was asking to be let in.