As a Black man, a so-called American Negro, I know the meaning of perpetual quarantine: I have been under some sort of arrest all of my life. I ought to be used to it but I am and I am not. Just to breathe is to flaunt authority in some states, so I know how to flaunt authority really quite well. I walked out in the village like a tourist, learning to ride a camel a little further each day. I rented the beast from one of the tall Tuareg slave-owning gangsters who drift around veiled, looking for tourists to “guide.” This one spoke little Arabic and almost no French but, by drawing easily erased maps in the sand, I learned a few things from him about the lay of the land. The village doctor came up on us silently during one of our geography lessons. He was a bit of a cynic and thought, I believe, that the captains were treating me badly. I am sure it was he who persuaded the Tuareg to take me north on his camels to Salah so that, from there, I could strike west to the other trail leading back south. As it turned out, I had to go back all the way to Algol before I could strike west again and south.
My Michelin map showed Salah some six hundred and forty kilometers north by the road. A Tuareg racing camel was said to cover sixty kilometers a day but the doctor assured me this was a legend left over from the days when Tuareg prowess was exaggerated by a universal dread of the bloodthirsty desert pirates. Even so, that made more than ten days to Salah by camel. We had covered the same distance in about thirty hours of continuous driving. An ordinary caravan cannot do more than twenty-five kilometers a day, for camels amble and stray, eating whatever they can as they go. On the road to Tam, we had, luckily for them, overtaken just such a caravan of straggling, badly ballasted animals foundering under the blows of thirst-maddened men who slogged along beside them on foot, day after day. In any case, no such caravan would dare take me with them for fear of running into a desert patrol sent out by the captains. Besides, said the doctor, who understood where I wanted to go, the trail west from Salah to Reggan was closed to all traffic. I would have to go four hundred and fifty kilometers further north to Algol from where I might be able to strike west through Timoun to Hadrar on the other trans-Saharan route, south to Reggan and then over the worst of the worst of the desert, the infamous Tanezrouft, through Bidon Five down to Gao on the Niger. It would be just a short side trip, or so it looked on the map, from Gao to Timbuctoo. From there, perhaps, I could drift down the Niger on a paddle-wheeler or even a raft, for the winter season should provide enough water in the Niger to float river traffic. The Niger rises from torrential rainfalls in the mountains near the Atlantic, from where the waters flow back in a great buckling loop, inland through desert country. Many a raft-load of slaves must have perished on its sandbars.
I crept away to Singer’s compound, becoming each night less and less welcome there as my bladder of keef was burned up in smoke and collapsed. No doubt, my presence may have compromised the Assassins but the worst was an evening cut short by the sudden arrival of a man dressed entirely in white, bound up in yards of turban, veils and flowing robes. From out of this big bundle of laundry stared two black eyes; the most hateful I ever have seen this side of the Klan when they told him I was black but a Christian. I understood what he meant later, when I saw twenty-five or thirty sooty-gray and putty-colored children slither past in a long crocodile through the sandy streets of Algol. The Brother from Aoulef had taken me for one of these Harratin children of abandoned slaves whom their Tuareg masters deem utterly worthless and drive away to be “taken in” by the Christians, where there still are any such creatures about.
The following night, when the blue tide of darkness had raced across the Sahara, bowling over the giant purple shadows of the amethyst mountains like ninepins, I was off and away without taking leave of the captains. In the Sahara, you are supposed to check in and out of each fort, showing your identity papers, stating your purpose and time of departure for what destination, as if you were leaving one island for another under semi-independent authority. I skirted the airstrip in a sandstorm on foot, beating my way back to a black basalt cave where my Tuareg guide was to meet me. I would almost as soon trust my life to the Klan as to these ex-convoyers and hijackers of slave caravans but there was no other way. A group of about twenty Tuareg was sheltering in there from the storm; among them, one hugely fat man, their king, the Amenokal, with whom I spoke through an interpreter. In his presence, they stripped me of my gold class ring and my watch and the old-fashioned straight razor I carry, as “presents” even before we discussed their terms, which were cutthroat. When the storm died down a bit, some of them went out in search of their camels and, as I lay on my back on the sandy floor, I noticed a fine prehistoric fresco on the ceiling. Its ochers and blacks were still lively under a glacis which looked so like a recent varnish that I was foolish enough to ask the fat king if they knew who had painted it. Too disgusted to translate the stupid question, the Arab interpreter snapped: “Women’s work!” I laughed to myself for a while but the hours dragged on so that I had begun to wonder if they had already sold me to the fort when my man came up in the night with the camels. I mounted and rode away behind him in the dark.
The next days went by so quickly I can hardly remember them. We were mounted on two giant camels, more like yachts under sail than four-footed beasts. The first part of the trail was all downhill through volcanic moon-surface landscape which fled past like painted stage sets or, as I rarely looked up for fatigue, a nightmare series of absurdly old-fashioned surrealist lantern-slide pictures projected on the curtains of air, almost solid with wind-borne sand. We paused to catch our breath in a circular valley like a tar barrel five hundred feet deep into which we led our balky, protesting camels through a bung-hole in the stone drilled by the wind. We stopped for a moment to admire the white sand floor of the basalt barrel set out with thorn trees which had been so clipped by passing generations of camels that they look like a topiary garden designed around the gigantic chunks of black stone, some as big as a truncated skyscraper, which have fallen from the cliffs to be sculpted by the blasting of sand into statues of monsters a hundred times bigger and more astonishing than those of Bomarzo. The valley looked and felt old and evil.
As we mounted our camels, my guide pointed with his whip down to the odd arrangement of white boulders, about twice as big as a man’s head, on which we had been sitting. The stones looked whitened, as if they might have been bitten by the acid from a car battery, perhaps. From the height of our saddles, they formed a pattern of letters to be read from the air: S O S. “Seven Roumis,” said my guide. “Seven Romans?” I asked in surprise. “Roumi Merikani,” he assured me with a cruel laugh from behind his veil. “Americans?” He pointed again with his whip to a message spelled out in stones on the ground. I could believe it was in English for I was able to make out the letters forming the word: T H E Y. The word, if it was a word, occupied my imagination many hours and many days for if anyone was to leave his last message in the Sahara, surely he would begin by I, or even We. Why “They”?
From the last high black gate of the Hoggar, we looked out over the Great Seas of Sand across which, I understood, we were to run with our sagging waterskins banging away at our knees, tied to the pommels of our excruciatingly uncomfortable wooden saddles. We would have to make a big circle around most wells for fear of running into a desert patrol; darting in quickly to fill our skins with water, leaving as little trace as possible of our passage. I realized how hopeless this was when the Tuareg read tracks which he claimed were twenty years old near a well which is rarely visited because it yields, in the best years, only a trickle of bitter water the color of urine. It must have been already dry when this last caravan before us got there to find no life-saving water for their valuable merchandise, which they had abandoned in chains to perish at the brink of the deep dry well. Nearby, the wind had uncovered a mass grave dug shallow by a desert patrol sent out by the captains, presumably; almost certainly not by the Arab traders who left their slaves here to die while they ran for the next well. The skin of a Black child had been dried, tanned and mummified; abandoned there in the hot dry sand by its young owner, like a broken doll. My tall Tuareg, laughing behind his veil, played a quick game of football with some dried heads still covered by enough parchment-like skin to make them grimace abominably. He dropped several of them neatly into the dry well. It was a long time before they hit rock bottom: luckily, we still had some water.