‘And if they kill you? What will become of us?’
‘If they kill me, my camel and I will make a straight run for paradise as promised to me by Allah, because it is written that whoever dies in a fair battle can be sure of reaching Eternity.’
‘But you have not answered my question,’ the old slave insisted. ‘What will become of us? Of your children, your wife, your livestock and your servants?’
He shrugged fatalistically.
‘Was I able to defend you before?’ he asked. ‘If I could not stop one of my guests from being killed then how can I defend my family against rape and murder?’ He lent over and with a firm gesture forced his slave to stand up. ‘Go and get my camel ready and my weapons,’ he ordered. ‘I will leave at dawn. Then, pack up the settlement and take it and my family far away to the Huaila guelta, where my first wife died.’
It was always the wind that heralded the arrival of dawn across the plains, as its nocturnal howling became more of a screeching wail, usually about an hour or so before the first ray of light appeared in the sky, some distance away, near the rocky Huaila mountains.
He listened to it with his eyes wide open, contemplating the familiar striped roof of his jaima and imagined the tumbleweed outside, rolling away across the sand. Those vagrant bushes that were always in a hurry, always looking for somewhere or something to attach themselves to, for a proper home and somewhere that would take them in and free them from their eternal wanderings, from journeys without destiny that took them from one end of Africa to the other.
In the milky light of dawn that was filtered through millions of tiny suspended dust particles, these bushes would appear out of nowhere, like ghosts waiting to pounce on man and beast. Then they would disappear, as discreetly as they had arrived, back into the infinite emptiness of a desert without borders.
‘There must be a border somewhere. I am sure,’ he had said in a voice that was heavy with anxiety and desperation. Now he was dead.
Nobody had informed Gazel of these borders because there had never been any borders in the Sahara until now.
‘How could you stop the sand and wind from crossing a border?’
He turned his face to the night as if searching for an answer, but found none.
Those men had not been criminals, but they had killed one of them and where they had taken the older man was anybody’s guess. It was wrong to kill someone in such cold blood, whatever his crime, even worse when that person was under the protection of an inmouchar.
There was something odd about the whole incident, but Gazel could not quite put his finger on it. One thing, however, remained startlingly clear: that an ancient law of the desert had been broken and that, for an Imohag, was unacceptable.
He remembered the old lady Khaltoum and the fear he had felt emanate from her icy hand as she placed it on the nape of his neck. Then he turned towards Laila’s huge open eyes, shining widely in the half light, reflecting the dying embers of the fire and he felt sorry for her and the fifteen paltry years she had barely reached and for the emptiness she would feel at night without him. He also felt sorry for himself and for the emptiness he would feel at night without her by his side.
He stroked her hair and her eyes widened like a startled gazelle in open appreciation of his gesture.
‘When will you return?’ she asked, almost pleadingly.
He shook his head:
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘When justice has been done.’
‘What do these men mean to you?’
‘They meant nothing,’ he confessed. ‘Until yesterday, that is. But it’s not about them. It’s about me. You would not understand.’
Laila understood, but did not protest further. She just moved closer to him as if trying to absorb as much of his strength and warmth as was physically possible. Then she stretched out her hand in one last effort to keep him back, as he stood up to leave the tent.
Outside, the wind was moaning gently. It was cold and he wrapped himself up in his djelabba as a shiver ran down his back. This often happened to him and he never knew if it was a reaction to the cold or to the black space that stretched out before him. Entering into that black space was like immersing yourself into a sea of black ink. Suilem came out of the shadows and passed him the reins of “R’Orab.”
‘Good luck, master,’ he said and disappeared back into the shadows.
He made the beast kneel down, climbed up onto his back and tapped him lightly on the neck with his heeclass="underline"
‘Shiaaaa…!’ he ordered. ‘Lets go!’
The animal let out a bad-tempered bellow, got up slowly and stood still on his four feet, face to the wind, waiting.
The Targui pulled him round to face the northeast and tapped his heel, a little more forcefully this time in order to get them on their way.
At the entrance to the jaima he could just make out a shadow that was darker than all the others around it. It was Laila, her eyes shining once again in the darkness, watching as the wind carried the rider and his mount away like tumbleweed and as they disappeared into the night.
The wind’s desperate wailings intensified, in the knowledge that the sun would soon be there to calm its anguish.
Even in that early, milky light, Gazel could only just make out the head of his camel, but he did not need any more guidance than that. He knew that he would not meet with any obstacle for hundreds of kilometers either side of him and that being a man of the desert he was capable of navigating his way through the desert with his eyes closed, even on the darkest of nights.
This was a skill that only he and others born like him, amongst the sands, possessed. Like pigeon carriers, like migratory birds or whales in the deepest oceans, the Tuareg always knew where they were and where they were going, as if an ancient gland that had expired in the rest of the human race still remained active, intact and efficient only in them.
North, south, east and west; springs, oases, roads, mountains, “lost lands”, rivers of dunes, rocky plains: the whole, huge Saharan universe was embedded in the depths of Gazel’s brain, without him even knowing it, without him ever really being conscious of it.
The sun rose and started to pound down on the mehari’s back, moving quickly up to its head and getting stronger by the minute. As the wind died down and the tumbleweed came to rest, the sand settled and the earth recoiled. The lizards came out of their hiding places and the birds came to rest on land, not daring to take to the air as the sun approached its zenith.
The Targui stopped his mount and made him kneel down. He then pushed his long sword and his old rifle into the sand as supports next to the saddle cross and stretched a small piece of thick fabric across them to make a crude shelter from the sun.
He crawled under it, lay his head on the white back of his mehari and went to sleep.
He woke up with his nose twitching, as the most yearned for smell in the desert began to fill his nostrils. He opened his eyes but remained there without moving, breathing in the air, without wanting to look up at the sky, scared that it might be just a dream. When he eventually turned to look east, he saw it there, on the horizon, large, dark, promising and full of life. It was different from the other white ones that appeared from time to time, high up in the sky and that blew in from the north, only to disappear as quickly, without even the slightest hint of rain. All the watery treasures of the universe seemed hidden within that splendid, low, grey cloud. Gazel had not seen one quite so beautiful for some fifteen years, not since the great storm that had raged on the eve of Laila’s birth; the storm that had made her grandmother predict a miserable future for her because on that occasion the rain that had been so longed for, fast became a flood that swept up jaimas and animals, destroyed crops and drowned a camel.