In Arabian Nights (23 page)

It is there that the desert begins.

As soon as the cart pulled into the town, I felt the change. The
road I had followed in fits and starts from Casablanca came to an
abrupt end. Beyond it was sand, a stark Wild West Tuareg town,
where all the men wore blue robes and the women never stepped
out. We had ventured here as children, drawn by my mother's
romantic love of
Beau Geste
, and my father's dream to see where
the road was swallowed up by dunes. I can remember the 'Blue
Men' vividly, their indigo robes so drenched with sweat that
their skin was dyed blue. We drew pictures of them and my
mother bought up half the robes in the bazaar to take home and
turn into quilts.

My father had chosen the desert to recount a story of a jinn
married to a mortal. I have forgotten the twists and turns, but I
recall what he said when the tale was at an end.

'These stories are technical documents. They are like maps, or
kind of blueprints. What I do is show people how to use the
maps, because they have forgotten. You may think it's a strange
way to teach – with stories – but long ago this was the way
people passed on wisdom. Everyone knew how to take the
wisdom from the story. They could see through the layers, in
the same way you see a fish frozen in a block of ice. But the
world where we are living has lost this skill, a skill they certainly
once had. They hear the stories and they like them, because the
stories amuse them, make them feel warm. But they can't see
past the first layer, into the ice.'

My father would sometimes pause a block of information
halfway, as if to let us ruminate, to take in what he had said. He
would pretend there was a reason to halt, but the reason was to
give us time.

'The stories are like a lovely chessboard,' he said. 'We all
know how to play chess and we can be drawn into a game so
complicated that our faculties are drained. But imagine if the
game was lost from a society for centuries and then the fine
chessboard and its pieces were found. Everyone would cluster
round to see them and praise them. They might never imagine
that such a fine object ever had a purpose other than to entertain
the eyes.

'The stories' inner value has been lost in the same way,' he
said. 'At one time everyone knew how to play with them, how to
decipher them. But now the rules have been forgotten. Tahir
Jan,' he stressed, 'it is for us to show people again how the game
is played.'

Dr Mehdi had instructed me to take the letter to Hotel Safari
and to ask for his nephew Ibrahim. A sandstorm had just
blustered through and the people of M'hamid were furled up
expertly in their robes, as if the searing wind was an adversary
they knew well. There were a few gaudy signs for second-rate
tourist lodges, a row of knickknack shops touting Tuareg junk,
and the forlorn-looking Hotel Safari.

I had heard of the place before. For it was there in the main
salon that the French Foreign Legion used to come to repose, to
mingle with the locals and to get blind drunk. Their bar stools
were still in position, almost as though they had just stepped out
for a pee. At the end of the bar was standing a young Tuareg
with a bandana and the prerequisite robes.

'I'm looking for Ibrahim.'

'Hey, brother, you wanna see the desert?'

'You speak very good English.'

'I've been around.'

'Around the world?'

'Around Marrakech.'

'Oh. Seen Ibrahim?'

'You're lookin' at him.'

After such a long journey it felt like a grave moment, a
messenger at last dispensing with his duty. I fished out the letter
and presented it to Ibrahim. He lit a cigarette, held it in his
teeth and opened the envelope.

'Dr Mehdi sent me,' I said. 'I've to bring some salt back to
Casablanca to purify a wedding garden.'

Ibrahim scanned the lines of Arabic, wincing as the smoke
swirled into his eyes.

'Got a car?' he said.

'No.'

'Then how you gonna get to the salt?'

'I will walk.'

Dr Mehdi's nephew threw his cigarette out of the window.

'The salt lake's fifty miles away.'

'Can I borrow a car?'

Ibrahim lit another cigarette.

'Fouad could help you,' he said.

When I was a university student in Kenya, one of my best
friends was a shepherd from the northern Turkana Province. He
was tall, wiry, and was called Nathaniel. His front teeth had
been pulled out in childhood so that he could be force-fed if he
ever got lockjaw. I was in my late teens. Nathaniel was about
fifty-five.

One day I asked him why he had waited so long to get higher
education.

'Bwana,' he said, smiling, 'in my village we are shepherds. So
we never paid much attention to getting educated.'

'So why bother now?'

'Because of the future,' he said. 'We had a meeting of the
village elders and decided that one of us must get educated as a
way of protecting us all. So everyone gave a little money and they
chose me.'

For twenty years I have carried Nathaniel's example in my
mind. Long after we graduated, I happened to be in Kenya and
had a few days to spare. So I crossed the equator and travelled to
the blistering desert of Turkana, where Nathaniel lived. He was
on a hillside with his sheep. It was so dry that the animals were
forced to eat roots. Nathaniel hugged me. He was pleased to see
me – and I him – and he didn't seem at all fazed that I had
turned up. We stood on that hillside looking into each other's
eyes, the scorching wind on our faces.

Real friends can sometimes dispense with talking. They can
take comfort in silent companionship. Nathaniel said very little
to me that day. He took me to his hut, served me some homemade
millet beer and asked me to pray with him.

We prayed that the future would be as quiet as the past.

I had never thought I would ever meet another Nathaniel. But I
did at the end of the road, at M'hamid. Ibrahim's half-brother
Fouad was a subdued Tuareg with oversized hands and a lazy
eye. He spoke in short bursts, like machine-gun fire, and had
learned his English in far-off Casablanca thirty years before.
Back then M'hamid was a one-horse town. As in Nathaniel's
village, the entire community had pooled resources to educate a
single man.

'There weren't any tourists until recently,' he said.

'So why are they here now?'

'German television showed the sand dunes.'

'Camel treks?'

'No. No one wants to trek with camels now.'

'So what do they want?'

'Sand boarding,' he said.

Fouad waved an arm at a string of scruffy tourist shops lining
the last few feet of road.

'Adventure tours.'

'I can't stand tourism,' I said.

'Neither can I,' replied Fouad. 'But it's like a drug. The more
cash people make, the more they want.'

I asked where I might find a car to cross the dunes.

'You can borrow mine,' said Fouad.

I took a room at Hotel Safari, but it was too hot to go inside. So
I dragged the mattress up on to the roof and found a burly
American already there. He had soaked a pair of trousers in cool
water and wrapped them round his head. His arms were bare
and tattooed with vivid scenes of a martial artist in training.
Across the back of one hand was written LOVE and across the
other,
FATE
.

I flung the mattress down and lay on my back. The stars were
like a million grains of salt cast on a black canvas, the moon a
sliver of lemon rind.

The American said his name was Fox.

'I'm from Iowa.'

'Hello,' I said.

'Ever been there?'

'Where?'

'Iowa.'

'No, I haven't.'

'Know anything 'bout it?'

I thought for a long time.

'Des Moines,' I said.

'That all?'

'Yup.'

Fox pulled a Moleskine notebook from his breast pocket. He
twanged back the band and scribbled something in pencil.

'What are you writing?'

'A note to myself.' He paused, then read: 'Des Moines sucks.'

'I'm sure it's not that bad.'

'Oh, but it is,' said Fox.

'What are you doing here, at the end of the road?'

'I'm a surfer.'

'You're a long way from the waves.'

'Sand. I surf sand.'

'Wow,' I said.

'That's the Sahara desert,' said Fox, 'the greatest sandbox on
earth.'

He asked if I surfed sand.

'No. I'm here doing a favour,' I said.

'Like what?'

'I've come to get some salt for a friend.'

'
Salt?
'

'Salt.'

'Can't you get it where you come from?'

'Yes, you can. But this salt is different.'

'How?'

'Er, it's special?'

'Why?'

'Because it's going to be used to chase away the jinns.'

The American put away his notebook.

'So you believe in the jinns?'

'Not really. Not properly.'

'So you're telling me you've come all the way to the Sahara to
get something you could have got at home for someone else's
superstition?'

'Er, um . . .'

'Well?' said Fox.

'Yes, I guess that's about it.'

Joha's watchman found his master breaking into his own
bedroom in the middle of the night.
'Master, what are you doing?'
'Hush, said Joha. 'My wife says I walk in the night. I'm trying to
see if it's true.'

ARIANE AND TIMUR HAVE A SHELF FULL OF BOOKS IN THEIR
bedroom. Before they sleep, one of them goes over, pulls down a
favourite and begs me to read it. Timur likes
Where the Wild
Things Are
. He stomps around gnashing his teeth, pretending
he's a Wild Thing. Ariane likes the book, too, but she won't
admit it. She once whispered to me that she thought the Wild
Things were sweet but a little bit naughty and not very pretty at
all. She prefers her
Barbie Princess Book
. Whichever book they
choose, they ask me to read it again and again, and again.
They never tire of the words and really only delight in a book
when they know it by heart.

When I was a little older than Ariane, my father said that
the more you read a story – the same story – the more it works
on your mind. Like a beautiful flowerbud, he said, the story
only opens up, and flowers, with time. Seeing my children
enjoy the same tales time after time helped me to see that
this repetition is a kind of natural setting inside us all. But as
adults in our world, and with the strain of reading rather
than oral repetition, we choose a new text rather than a
known one.

Our competence in reading is something of which we are
especially proud. We publish hundreds of miles of books each
year and fill cavernous libraries with them. Mass education has,
of course, led to the upsurge in writing. The more written text
we have in a single room, the more valuable we regard it, and the
more knowledgeable we think we are because so much writing
is available to us. We cling to the belief that the more we read,
the wiser we become.

My father would say that the Western world spends far too
much time reading and far too little time understanding. It
would infuriate him if someone asked when his next book was
due out. He would say: 'I will write another book when you have
understood the last thirty books I have published.' On this
subject he observed a key difference between Oriental and
Occidental minds: Eastern society values that which is tried
and tested. Stories that have been in circulation for millennia are
regarded as having real value, as being containers of inner
wisdom. Whereas Western society constantly demands new
material. Much of the time it's the same old stuff packaged in a
fresh way. The result is wordage for the sake of wordage. For
my father it was almost too much to take.

'This world we are living in, Tahir Jan,' he used to say in
bewilderment, 'it's upside-down.'

Fouad said tourism was destroying the desert, but it was
bringing in so much money that no one dared speak up. The
sand boarding, the rally drivers and the litter left by campers
were having a grim effect. The next morning we left Hotel
Safari and walked through the empty streets to where the car
was parked. I was laden down with blankets and supplies. Once,
long ago when I broke down in the Namib desert, I learned the
value of preparation.

All the tourist shops were shut up tight. The air was still cool,
sounds muffled by a sprinkling of the ubiquitous sand.

As we strolled through the heart of M'hamid, Fouad talked in
short staccato bursts.

'There is no respect,' he said.

'From whom?'

'From the Tuareg and from the tourists.'

'Why?'

He tilted his head in thought.

'If aliens came from outer space,' he said, 'and gave money to the
Tuareg, they would be happy, but they would not respect them.'

'Who?'

'The aliens.'

'Ah.'

'And the aliens would probably have no respect for us,' he
said.

'Do you blame the tourists, though?'

Again, Fouad tilted his head in contemplation.

'No, Monsieur,' he replied. 'I don't blame them.'

'Then who do you blame?'

Fouad smiled.

'I blame the aliens,' he said.

The car was buried in a sand drift. It looked as if it had been
stuck there for weeks.

'When did you last use it?'

'Two days ago.'

'So much sand in two days?'

'It's the wind,' said Fouad. He opened the back, grabbed a
shovel and worked on the drift. 'I will tell you something,' he
said after five minutes of shovelling.

'What?'

'Just because two people speak the same language, it doesn't
mean they understand each other.'

'The tourists and the Tuareg?'

He nodded. 'If I learned the language of cat, I would not
think like a cat.'

It was still rather early for philosophy.

Fouad let out a kind of grunting sound. 'A hundred years ago
our worlds were separated,' he said.

'By distance?'

'Yes. By distance. Now they are closer.'

'Much closer – a short flight.'

Fouad touched my arm, his lazy eye leering towards me.

'But they are still very far apart,' he said. 'In their minds.'

Fouad's car was one of the reasons I moved to Morocco.

In Europe or the United States, it would have been
condemned a generation before. There would be a hundred laws
against it. Merely looking at it would get you arrested. But for
the proud people of M'hamid, it was in fine roadworthy
condition. Just about everything that could be torn out or
smashed by human strength had been ravaged.

There were no wing mirrors or windows, dials or carpeting,
and the only seat was the one the driver used. Fouad told me he
had bought the vehicle cheap on account of the noise. He asked
if I knew the way to the salt lake. I shook my head.

'I will drive you,' he said.

We set off.

I huddled in the cavity where the passenger seat had once
been. Fouad, cloaked in his long blue robes, sat beside me, the
wheel gripped tight in his hands. The engine noise was jarring
beyond words, matched only by the smog we left in our trail.

There was something a little disconcerting about heading off
into an ocean of sand, especially into the Sahara – the widest
desert on earth, which stretches from the Nile Valley all the way
to the Atlantic. Most of us are road people. We don't realize it,
but we are wedded to the notion of having tarmac beneath the
wheels. Driving on sand is rather like driving over snow. You
aim the vehicle in the vague direction you want to go and hope
that you don't get stuck.

Fouad pointed out the tracks left by a thousand sand surfers.

'They go to the high dunes,' he said angrily. 'These tracks will
be here for ever.'

I asked him about camels. I had seen very few.

'The Tuareg aren't interested in them now,' he said.

'Why?'

'Because they don't have a clutch pedal.'

An hour after leaving M'hamid we were adrift, sand all
around. I quickly understood why the Bedouin call the desert
sahel
, 'sea'. To my eyes, each track was the same. But Fouad
knew better. He said he could smell the dry salt lake.

'But it's miles away.'

'It rained a week ago.'

'So?'

'So I can smell the salt.'

'What does it smell like?'

'Like the ocean.'

Another hour and we came to a kind of encampment. A low
stockade had been crafted expertly from thorns and was guarded
by a thirsty-looking dog. It went wild at the noise of the car and
came running out, its legs a blur of movement. Its master called
it to heel.

We got down.

Fouad said the place was a sacred spring.

'Drink the water and you will remember.'

'Remember what?'

'Anything that ever happened to you.'

'How much does it cost?'

Fouad shot a line of words at the dog's owner. A mouth filled
with big white teeth said a number.

'Thirty dirhams.'

'Give me a cup.'

A home-made bucket was lowered down into the well. It was
a long time before we caught the sound of wood touching water.

'It's deep,' I said.

'But the water is low. I have not seen it this low.'

'Have you drunk it?'

Fouad said he had.

'Did you remember everything?'

'Yes. Every detail.'

The bucket was swung up and passed to me. Its water smelled
of sewage.

'How much do I have to drink?'

'As much as you want.'

I took a gulp and swilled it round my mouth. It tasted of
sewage, too. I would have spat it out, but the Tuareg seemed
proud of their sacred spring and I didn't want to upset them.

Fouad leaned towards me.

'What can you remember?'

I thought back. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor playing
with a little garage and a toy car, making the sound of the engine
with my lips. How old was I . . . three, four? Then I was running
through the woods, my hands filled with chestnuts, pricked by
their shells. After that I was in a rose garden, riding my red
bicycle between the flower beds.

'I remember my childhood,' I said.

'Drink some more of the water,' said Fouad.

It tasted foul, but I forced down another gulp, closed my eyes
and thought back. I was in Morocco, in the Sahara. My mother
was knitting and my sisters were near by playing leapfrog in the
sand. I looked around. My father was sitting by himself. He
seemed sad. I went over. He picked up a fist of sand and let it
drain through his fingers.

'We are basket weavers,' he said. 'That's what we do, we
weave baskets. My father weaved baskets before me and his
father before him. Tahir Jan, take pride in the baskets you
weave.'

Fouad claimed the water had helped my memory.

'I don't think it was the water,' I said.

'It always works.'

'No, these memories were already inside me.'

We left the encampment, the sacred spring and the ferocious
dog and drove on across the flat surface of sand. The recent rain
had brought shoots and the odd patch of green. The only
flourishing plants had succulent round green pods, the size of
oranges. I asked Fouad if they were good to eat.

'Touch them and you will go blind,' he said.

Two more hours and we came to a vast salt pan. A white crust
stretched as far as the eye could see. There was no water,
although in the middle the salt was darker, no doubt moistened
by the rain.

'This is the lake,' said Fouad.

'The salt! It's the salt I have to get!'

I was overcome with a frail rally of emotion. I got down, fell
to my knees and scooped up a handful of the salt crystals. There
was a plastic bag in my pocket. I took it out and filled it half full.

'Shall we go?' said Fouad.

We looked at each other and then I scanned the desert. I could
see from one horizon to the next. There wasn't another human
in sight. I felt foolish. The journey from Casablanca had taken
me to a distant destination, only to spend a moment there. I was
as bad as the tourists I so disdain, who travel to India's Taj
Mahal, to the Eiffel Tower or to Big Ben, snap a photo and leap
back on to the tour bus.

'You have the salt,' said Fouad. 'You can go back to
Casablanca.'

'I would rather spend a night in the desert,' I said.

We drove a little further to a crested sand dune, with a clutch of
thorn trees on its leeward side. It was early afternoon. The sun
was extremely bright. I couldn't understand how the Tuareg
went without sunglasses.

Fouad laughed at the thought.

'You people need much more than we do,' he said.

'But sunglasses just make life more comfortable.'

'Comfort . . . comfort is from your world,' said Fouad.

He gathered some sticks and tossed them in a heap, ready for
dusk. Then he joined me in the shade. I asked him how the
Tuareg spent their time doing nothing. He didn't reply for a
long time.

'We listen to the sounds,' he said at length.

'To the silence?'

'There is never silence.'

'But how can you stand having no books, no television, or
Internet?'

Fouad grinned. 'When life is too quiet, we talk.'

'Do you tell stories?'

'Sometimes.'

'Can you tell me one?'

'You like stories?'

'I'm sort of collecting them,' I said.

Fouad leaned back and the shadow of a gnarled branch fell
over his face.

'I can tell you the "Tale of Hatim Tai",' he said.

I closed my eyes and the stage of my imagination was set.

'Long ago in Arabia,' said Fouad, 'there lived a wise and
powerful king. His name was Hatim Tai and he was loved by
every man, woman and child in the land. In his stables were the
finest stallions, and in his tents the very softest carpets were laid.
Hatim Tai's name was called from the rooftops and tales of his
generosity filled the teahouses. Everyone in the kingdom was
content, well fed and proud.