Previously assured transportation suddenly became precarious. We all sat or lay around in the shade of the truck which stood becalmed in the shallows of some new Time-Barrier. Departure was indefinitely delayed while the truck throbbed gently, as if poised like a porpoise ready to take off. Travelers must show their identity papers to the captains of Saharan Security in the Bordj or fort, before leaving; likewise, trucks. Officially timed departures are said to be relayed anead to the next Bordj or fort where the captains are supposed to follow your progress across the floor of the desert, like a cockroach crawling across a carpet in broad daylight. A conspiracy of silence on the part of the Arab truck drivers seemed to oppose this occult power of the captains. Restless and bored and just about ready to take a last turn around the marketplace, I was lucky enough to be still there when the truck suddenly began to take off, unannounced. I scrambled up into the vibrating cabin, screaming like an American tourist, waving the proof of my right to First-Class Transportation under the nose of the new driver, who had simply strolled over to the truck, jumped into the cabin, thrown in the clutch and started to leave. Even now, I sit here looking at the back of his head, wondering if he is not stealing the truck, the cargo and me.
Later that afternoon — no, the next afternoon, we picked up the Hadj back from the pilgrimage; the little old man I had taken, at first for a bush. I recollect, El Hallaj was skinned alive in Baghdad for proclaiming: “If a bush can say: I am the Truth, so can a man.” I have not been comfortable since. We grind along, hour after hour, like a metallic dung-beetle pushing its nose through the sand, probing the Great Howling Waste. Only sand dunes move more slowly than we do. Schools of golden dunes, which vary in size from ones you could ride astride to some twice as big as this truck, cavort like dolphins across the trail. They were not here when the trail was laid and they may be gone on the next big blow or they may grow into a dune as big as a city, they tell me. We break a new trail over the hard black reg in which the dunes seem to lie half-submerged, for we are skirting a giant paw of the Great Sandy Erg which lies athwart the Sahara like a vast rosy-golden sphinx as big as a country, Guardian of the Sandy Wastes.
At times, we roll down steep corridors of rotting stone which take us from one geological layer to another of this spot where Earth looks like a peeling onion. Torrents of water can sweep down these canyons without warning when rains have fallen miles away, gathering on vast impervious plains to rush through here faster than a locomotive. Many a slow caravan has been overtaken and drowned under a wall of water beneath a cloudless sky. An hour or so back, we stopped on a ridge of this giant washboard to exchange news with a group of wild-looking road-workers who turn trails around moving dunes or can lay down such marvels as a hundred miles of flattened-out jerricans pointing like an arrow at the horizon, across quicksands. I suspect them to be forced labor of sorts, for not even a starving nomad would work in such conditions, but they seemed jolly enough for such a pack of jackals bound up in their rags. Their official name is the Genie of the Sahara, but everyone calls them, more simply, the Broken Boys.
We entered and passed through a string of oases called Algol without stopping for anything but water and fuel because Driver wanted to climb onto the high plateau of the Tademait, the Table of Stone, before nightfall. I barely looked out from under my burnous at the monotonous horror of the landscape up there. Long after sunset, we halted in our tracks and, while the others fell out to sleep beside the truck, I stretched out in the cabin where I was glad of the cooling diesel beside me, for the night turned very cold. Late the next afternoon, we rolled down the great military ramp called the Akba, which was built long ago by somebody’s army. The trail ahead looped like a slack fire-hose over an immense charred plain on whose far side crouched distant dunes at whose rosy paws lay the ancient city of Salah. Salan was once a market town known to the caravans of Solomon with whom the inhabitants dealt in gold, ivory, ostrich plumes and, of course, Black slaves: some say they still do.
I went directly to the military fort and, there, I read a notice posted in French on the red mud walclass="underline"
EVERY TRAVELER
WITHOUT ANY EXCEPTION
MUST ALREADY HAVE POSTED A BOND
IN ORDER TO ENTER
THE COUNTRY OF THE GARAMANTIANS.
I entered the fort to ask for the officer in command. These men have no particular names of their own but, when the sun rises high in the sky, the natives call them Captain, loading them with reproaches because they burn and lay waste the surrounding country and themselves. Herodotus is my authority for this. I radioed back to the American consul in Algut asking for a letter of guarantee to be sent in my name to the next post south, the red village of Tam. Now, there is a mountain called Atlas, so high the top of it never is seen, clouds not quitting it summer or winter and the natives take their name from it; being the veiled Atlantes of legend. I radioed ahead to the Atlantes to say I was coming, bond or no bond. These people are reported to eat the rock dragon, a species of giant lizard whose meat they scoop out with a big wooden spoon as he roasts on his back over a fire. They call this lizard their “maternal uncle” and they are said not to have any dreams. I am still quoting the first historian, Herodotus, but only by memory of course.
When we debarked in Tam long after midnight, Greaser, who had never spoken directly to me before in all the miles we had spun out together, drew me aside in the dark. “An Assassin,” he murmured, presenting me with a slim Broken Boy in rags, who dropped silently from the back of the truck onto the sand between us. After all, the same word Assassin or Hashishin can be used to denote those who smoke keef, so I took it in this sense, glad enough to have a guide in the dark. My young guide picked up my sack, drawing me off into the night after him as he moved silently ahead of me over the cool, silky sand. We walked down an avenue of feathery tamarisk trees beneath which we sat for a while smoking my pipe without saying a word. Then, he led me to a ruined hut whose cracked mud walls threatened to cave in on us. The goats of the wild wandering people came to glare with yellow eyes at us from the fringe of outer darkness, beyond the square white patch of light thrown by my gasoline Primus stove on which we made tea. We fell asleep in there, wrapped up in my big black burnous, but, in the middle of the night, knee-hobbled camels stumbled into our ruined hut, nearly bringing the walls down on us. I insisted on moving out to a place in the open where, just before dawn, we were almost run over by a pack of tiny wild asses, who pulled up short a few unshod hooves from our heads, like inquisitive schoolboys, scampering away when I clapped my hands at them.
In the morning, my Broken Boy wanted to draw me along his way through the quiet sandy alleys of Tam but I insisted on going straight to the fort where I found a letter addressed to me by Mr. Knoblock, U.S. Vice-Consul in Algut, stating:
The Consulate General has been informed by the Government General that, as far as the Atlantes, the names of the nations inhabiting the Sandy Wastes are known but, beyond them, all knowledge fails.
A bond ought not be required of an American traveler intending to visit the Sandy Ridge as far west as the Pillars of Hercules.
I surmised the vice-consul had been dipping into his Herodotus, too, so I asked for the officer in command. I was taken in to an adjutant, who informed me that the Captain of the Southern Wastes could not see me but, until he would, I was not to leave Tam. I wanted to visit Murmur, said to be a city of silence about two days’ journey from Tam. The adjutant said no. Murmur is said to be built entirely out of slabs of purple and greenish-white gem salt and, therefore, so dazzling it cannot be approached or even easily seen in the daytime: its inhabitants come out only by night. The salt is quarried from an ancient crystalline flow which spills over a broken rim of the Hoggar, on the far side from Tam. The Hoggar is an immense volcanic cup of basalt, brimming with sand. Its jagged rim rises nearly ten thousand feet into the milky sky against which it can look peacock-blue or viridian green. It stands on an eternity of absolute desert, infinitely attractive to those who know those glittering wastes.