After five hours we run into Tabelot. It’s not much more than a large village, but significantly different from the villages on the plain. The mud walls of the compound are stout affairs, with stone foundations. The tents inside them are more substantial too, with heavy flanks hanging from a strong rattan spine. It all makes sense as soon as I step down from the four-wheel drive and feel the pleasant sensation of a fresh, almost cooling edge to the air. We’re in the mountains, 2000 feet higher than Agadez, looking across to a mountain peak that’s 3000 feet higher still.
Our accompanying team, led by the imperious Mohammed Ixa, a tall, straight-backed Touareg swathed in a yellow robe, slings a plastic cover between acacia trees and vehicles to provide us with some shade. A groundsheet is laid, and as soon as the sponge rubber mattresses are arranged on top of it Mohammed selects one, lies down, closes his eyes beatifically and proceeds to listen to his radio through an earpiece for the next couple of hours. Meanwhile, his minions prepare a late lunch of all the things the guidebooks advise you not to eat - hand-prepared salad (but whose hands?), watermelon (who knows where the water’s come from?) - that sort of thing. Apart from French bread and hard-boiled eggs, it’s all there is, so we eat it anyway. A fierce gusting wind snatches at the plastic awning above us, which snaps and crackles but holds fast. This is the harmattan, someone says, the wind from the heart of the desert, hot and dry enough to split tree trunks.
Around four the wind begins to drop, and I’m taken to meet Omar, who will be leading the camel train to Bilma. He is a Touareg, around forty years old. Square and almost stocky, he has a wide, friendly face, deep black skin and a thin black beard. He smiles readily, with a shy lowering of the head as he does so.
He’s proud of his village and takes us a mile or so away to see the oasis on which Tabelot’s survival depends. The water table is close to the surface here and two or three wells feed prolific fields of onions, carrots, maize, millet, and orchards of orange, lemon, fig and pomegranate. In a shady clearing a young boy leads a docile white camel up and down a 30-foot pathway. The camel is harnessed to a rope, which is wound round a wooden pulley and drops down into a 50-foot well, from which it draws water in a glistening black goatskin bag. A funnel attached to the bag flops out like a great tongue, regurgitating the water down a wooden pipe into an elaborate system of mud-walled channels and conduits that carries it eventually into the fields. Every few trips the boy rewards the camel with a mouthful of maize leaves, which it despatches noisily, like a paper-shredder.
As we walk back past freshly tilled onion fields, it’s easy to forget we’re anywhere near the Sahara. Doves are cooing, streams are gurgling and a balmy and benevolent humidity seems to seep up through the ground.
Omar insists I try dates straight from the tree, which is not as easy as it sounds, for he has to find someone more athletically built than himself to shin up and get them. They appear to grow in white plastic bags. I’m reassured that this is not another GM food trial but a precaution to stop the birds getting at them. And there are birds everywhere: large black birds with white caps, small, noisy, bouncy wagtails, red-dusted firefinches darting in and out of the trees. We move on, munching the dates, which are disappointingly leathery, passing red peppers spread out to dry in groves of grapefruit, grenadine and mango.
We end up at Omar’s house back in the village. He lives in a modest collection of straw huts and stone and mud buildings with his four wives and fifteen children, ranging in age from one month to eighteen years. I ask him if he’s rich.
‘No,’ he replies gracefully, ‘but in terms of children, yes.’
When I enquire if there are problems with such a large family, he nods. Shortage of food, medicine, clothing. Wouldn’t it be better to have fewer of them, I ask, impertinently.
He shrugs, head on one side. No, he says, with a coy half-smile, he likes a lot of children.
And the wives, do they get on well?
Before he can reply there is a loud guffaw from the youngest and prettiest of them. Judging by the blank looks of the others, she is the only one who understands French.
Omar, who doesn’t look like a ladies’ man, smiles bashfully and mutters something about ‘jalousie‘.
Tonight we are entertained, as is the custom when strangers arrive, by an evening of dancing. In the moonlight, the young women sit together beneath a tree, singing and chanting, while the men form a line opposite them and either singly or in pairs approach the women to dazzle them with their dancing. The beat gradually increases, the movements become wild and flamboyant and inventive, the foot-stomping harder and faster, as each man tries to outdo the other, dancing themselves to the point of hysteria, arms and legs flying, robes stuck to their backs with sweat. The women remain sitting, chanting repetitively and gradually becoming obscured by the cloud of dust raised by their suitors. My eyes sting and a dry, rasping cough catches in my throat, but it’s impossible not to be drawn in.
To grunts of approval I’m led forward hand in hand with the man who is going to introduce me to the dance. He watches apprehensively as I improvise a routine that owes less to classical dancing and more to the Ministry Of Silly Walks. Not only am I asked to reprise it, but later I’m paid a high compliment by my sponsor.
‘All the forty-year-old women say they have never seen a non-Touareg dance so well.’
Day Sixty
TABELOT
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Despite accolades from forty-year-old Touareg women, my dreams are more Sunday morning indigestion than Saturday Night Fever, and, waking before dawn, I reach for my head-torch, toilet paper, garden trowel and matches and extricate myself as swiftly as I can from the tent. This is never as easy as it should be, and as I corkscrew my way out into the surrounding darkness I imagine this is what it must be like being born. The sky is clear and dense with stars and the temperature has plunged 20 degrees. It’s a good walk to the nearest patch of cover, and as I crouch over my excavations it occurs to me that these are the only times when I’m truly alone in the desert and should be savoured. By the time I’m home and dry, as it were, I have to pull on a sweater to keep warm.
An hour later, the deep lilting cry of Tabelot’s muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. Check my clock. It’s five. Soon there are sounds of life, soft footsteps passing my tent, grunts of goats and bleats of sheep. There’s no such thing as a lie-in in the desert.
Some thirty camels are assembled on a stony stretch of ground surrounded by low houses. Mohammed Ixa, glass of tea in hand, points with languid admiration at the white camels, peculiar to this part of the Sahara.
‘Le chameau d’elegance,’ he purrs, in a Maurice Chevalier sort of way.
For some reason, I’ve been allotted the most non-white of them. Indeed, his name, Ekawik, evidently means Blackie. There is much laughter from the camel team as I try to pronounce the name, so I’m probably saying something rude by mistake.
Meanwhile, Omar moves quietly amongst them, inspecting a harness here and there and helping one of his eight-strong team to heave baggage, bedding, food and water aboard. The camels endure all this with permanent expressions of weary disdain, as if the whole of the rest of the world is a bad smell they have to endure.