Early on the eleventh day, we came to the northern edge of the Table of Stone. We crawled up cautiously to peer over, being whipped by the wind; suddenly awed and fearful lest we plunge down hundreds of feet onto the celebrated oases of Algol, lying directly below us like a pool of mirage. On the bottom of a bright sea of air, tapestried patches of feathery palm-garden lay stitched out in green on the rosy-golden sands; pinned down by the silver threads of water which run through them in elaborate patterns of irrigation. The various oases are strung out like a broken necklace of emerald along the former course of a fossil underground river. I could make out the military fort by its flag hoisted over the richest cluster of palms and I plotted my course to avoid it. Some miles up the valley lay a last thinly-planted satellite oasis; a mere handful of palms standing around a group of domed adobe buildings dominated by a squat tower. I took that to be Buffalo Bordj and, starting to speak to my guide, found he had silently turned back with the camels and gone.
I swung my field glasses around again to catch a glint from the sun on another glass which someone on the tower of Buffalo Bordj had trained on me. Trust any Old Man to catch me in his sights! I worked my way down a stone chimney in the side of the table of rock; tobogganed down a long col of scree and struck out across country. I could make out a tiny speck moving out of the oasis across the bare plain; someone running to meet me. Within the hour, Sudanese Mr. Barigou came up babbling officiously, ambassador-wise. He wore a brightly flowered Hawaiian shirt over baggy black sarouel pants and he smelled of sour red wine even at that hour of the morning. He was still pretty glossy but already the plump side of thirty; a bit shifty-eyed, he had obviously taken to drink. His Old Man—“Mon Colonel,” he called him — was already delighted to see me, he said. Even as we walked over the desert, the colonel lay on his iron army cot on the top of his tower following us closely through his telescope, every foot of the way. We could feel him out there with us, while we were still some miles from the house. “He can walk in the souk of my head,” Mr. Barigou gravely assured me; regretting that, therefore, he could not hold my hand as we walked.
We came to some rain-ruined outbuildings and then the imposing main portal of Buffalo Bordj; a handsome gateway of red desert-cement in Sudanese Flamboyant style. “No woman pass here,” said Barigou proudly. “Museum,” he waved grandly at some small buildings like bunkers on either side of the big outer court. At the far end was an arch big enough to drive a truck into a smaller whitewashed court at the foot of the tower. In the doorway, stood the colonel to greet me. I would not have recognized him from the photo which is the frontispiece to his unique literary work: Across the Sahara and Back. He had put on flesh through the years as a disguise; tricking himself out in snowy white hair down to his shoulders, a big curling mustache and a pointed goatee. Under his White Hunter’s hat, he tried to look as much like a plump Buffalo Bill as he could, while wearing a fine white burnous and excessively shiny silver-rimmed glasses which made me distrust him on sight. I could see he like the looks of me only too well.
Barigou disappeared into domestic shadow along with a slim, wild-looking boy of about fifteen, who had, I could see, nothing on under a short, torn tunic, belted by the thong of a slings hot such as nomad Chaamba shepherds tie around their waists. The colonel shouted after them: “Don’t let Ahmed make the coffee, Barigou, or we’ll all be poisoned again!” and, turning to me: “Come, I’ll show you around my museum myself.” I stumbled over my own feet with fatigue but I nodded and mumbled politely as the colonel guided me through his “collections,” which looked like so much desert rubbish to me. As we went from one bare, dusty room to another, the boy Ahmed kept popping in and out opening doors, scowling at me from under his black curls. The last room of all was devoted to high moments of the colonel’s career.
While still only a spruce captain, detailed to the desert after World War I, he became by a singular stroke of luck Half the First Man across the Sahara, all because a very white American, name of Hopkins from Boston, had suddenly started up from a 1925 cocktail party or a café table in Paris with a wild blue stare around, looking for the last white spaces left on the map of Earth. It might just as well have been the Arctic but someone suggested the Sahara, which was very much in vogue with the French at the time. Kissing Scotty and Zelda good-by, he had flown due south in his own Gypsy Moth, armed with a handful of letters to military types in the desert, provided by a French buddy-pilot left over from World War I. Landing at Algol, Hopkins blurted out to the super-dapper captain: “Will you take me across the Sahara?” The captain screwed in his monocle: “When I saw how that Amerlou threw out his stale socks instead of having them washed, I knew he was rich. I proposed: ‘Half a million gold francs to cross the Sahara: you bring the trucks and equipment: I’ll bring you back.’” They made it, discovered a prehistoric skull and brought out a book, badly printed, with maps. Captain became colonel with enough money put aside to buy the oasis and build Buffalo Bordj. Houses are sepulchers for the living, the nomads say. It takes more than an Adept or two to set yourself up as an Old Man of the Sands.
I glanced with some amusement at fading photographs of Sudanese boys naked by a river with their cocks hanging down to their knees. That’s what we’re good for, I guess. Next to these hung a pre-World War I cabinet portrait photo, as I believe they were called, of the young officer in his first dress uniform, I judged. He wore pince-nez glasses and a sharp waxed mustache in those days. Beside this hung another from the same Parisian photographer showing him still with glasses and mustache but, astonishingly enough, dressed as a rich bourgeoise French lady of about 1910 in an evening gown with feathers and beads beneath a huge plumed hat. An armor-plated necklace covered his plunging décolleté. “My mother’s jewels,” the colonel breathed in my ear. I was taken aback to find he was pressing my hand. I snatched back my hand before he could kiss it as Ahmed Chaamba came in with the coffee. The colonel looked moved.
Barigou was clucking around the courtyard like a seminsane African comedy version of an imported French wife; his body presumably occupied by the ghost of the colonel’s mother, now playing Friday in the Sahara. We were served semi-French food in a curious underground room which had old Perrier bottles from France set into the low vaulted ceiling, pouring down on us a liquid green light. The Old Man expounded the rule of his house: “No eggs, no milk. I buy cheese from the nomads. I won’t let a female animal enter my house!” I nodded in sympathy: “The rule of Mount Athos.” I hate chickens, myself; cannot bear their cackle and feathers and get little enough pleasure out of smiling: “Bismillah!” while slitting their throats. “My house is my fortress!” boasted the coloneclass="underline" “Will you give me a kiss?” I begged him to excuse me and, as Ahmed Chaamba came back at that moment to clear the table away, I asked: “Could I just lie down for a few hours in his room, perhaps? I am terribly tired.” I pulled out my pipe to turn on but the colonel snapped: “Please! Not in front of my Adepts!” Who the hell did he think he was, anyway?