‘My horse could have come this far without any difficulty,’ Hector confided to Ibrahim one evening. It had been natural to strike up a friendship with the cheerful and enthusiastic young man. ‘Each night we have arrived at a waterhole where the animals could drink. My arms are aching from trying to steer my camel in the right direction.’
‘There’s a saying that “the camel driver has his plans – and the camel has his”,’ was the light-hearted reply, ‘and this is only the early stage of our crossing. Later we will find water only every three days, or less often. And there are places where the surface of the desert is dangerous. The ground seems firm and hard, but it is only a thin crust. It gives way suddenly. A horse would break its leg in the hole, but a camel is more flexible. It can be pulled out with ropes, and continue on the journey.’ The young man tossed another dry branch from a thorn bush on to the fire and watched the sparks fly up into the night air. ‘Besides, my grandfather tells me that tomorrow we will have the irifi, the desert wind. He predicts that it will only last a few hours but it will make life difficult for our beasts. You should warn your companions that they will need their sheshs, their turbans.’
The sky dawned an ominous reddish grey. The caravan had barely begun its march when the first puffs of a gentle breeze began to lift the dust and sand into little spirals that skittered and twisted across the ground before collapsing and disappearing. By mid-morning the wind had increased until sand particles were blowing painfully into the men’s faces, making them sneeze and their eyes water. They were obliged to dismount from their camels, wrap cloths about their heads, and plod onward, heads bent low. Beside them the camels walked on, their nostrils narrowed and their eyes half-closed behind their long eyelashes. Until evening the irifi swirled around them, rising in strength to a full gale. Visibility fell to less than twenty paces, and the coffle huddled in a dense mass, fearful of losing touch with one another. A horse in such hostile conditions, Hector reflected, would have refused to advance and turned to stand miserably with its tail against the scouring wind.
‘Now I know why Abdullah doesn’t need good eyesight to lead the caravan,’ Hector commented to Ibrahim as they rested by the campfire. ‘I could scarcely raise my head against the sand blast. When I did, it was impossible to see anything.’
‘It could have been much worse. The irifi sometimes blows for five or six days, and much more strongly. Entire caravans have been known to perish, unable to move forward or backward until buried by the sand. That was what happened to my father. He was leading a coffle which the wind destroyed. We never found his body. I expect he is lying somewhere beneath the surface of the desert, a dried corpse along with his camels and the merchants he was guiding. Sometimes, years later, the wind blows away the sand again. So maybe he will be found, and we can give him a proper burial.’
Picking up two metal bowls, Ibrahim rose to his feet and said, ‘You and Dan can give me a hand. In less than a week we begin the most difficult stage of our journey. There will be no water for ten days and not a blade of grass nor a single leaf for our camels to eat. There’s an old jmel among our beasts which will not survive the ordeal. It is better we put it to good use now.’
He led the way to where the camels were hobbled. Singling out the animal he wanted, he led it a little distance away. There he made the beast kneel, and showed Dan how to pull the halter so that the camel turned its head to one side, stretching its neck in a curve. While Hector held the bowl beneath the artery, Ibrahim expertly cut the animal’s neck so that the blood splashed into the receptacle. ‘Put the bowl on the embers of the campfire,’ he told Hector. ‘In a few minutes the blood will thicken to a good soup. Dan and I will start to deal with the carcass. Tonight we feast on the entrails. Tomorrow we’ll begin to dry the meat in the sun, and we’ll save the hide for when it’s needed.’ He slid his knife blade into the dead camel’s gut, exposing a globular paunch which he carefully cut open. Inside was a thick green gruel, foul smelling with lumps. Taking the second bowl he scooped out the contents. ‘This too can be cooked for our supper,’ he said. ‘It has already been eaten by the jmel. But we can enjoy it too. In the desert nothing goes to waste.’
A week later the camel hide was put to use when Bourdon reluctantly agreed to abandon his battered footwear despite his fear of snakes and biting insects. By then his boots had been cut to shreds on flinty gravel. Ibrahim expertly cut double-soled sandals for him using the skin of the dead jmel whose meat already hung in strips from their pack saddles, drying in the sun. They were now in the most difficult sector of the desert crossing, a desiccated brown expanse of sand and rocky outcrops which, in the simmering heat haze, could be mistaken for the roofs of distant towns. At its worst the heat was so intense that the coffle had to travel by night. The men spent the days sheltering from the sun under strips of cloth or in the shadow of piles of camel packs. The sand became so hot that it was painful to stand barefoot, and their precious water skins daily grew more flabby as their contents dwindled through evaporation. Finally, when it seemed that the ordeal would never end, Abdullah declared that they had passed the halfway mark. Hector, who had long since given up using the qibla to trace the direction of travel, was amazed by the blind man’s certainty.
‘How can your grandfather be so sure?’ he asked Ibrahim. ‘I have not the least idea how far we have travelled.’
‘My grandfather has crossed the desert at least thirty times,’ Ibrahim answered proudly. ‘In his head he keeps a count of the days and hours on this journey, even the number of paces. He listens to the sounds of the desert, and he says that every part has its own feeling which tells him where he is. When in doubt, he smells the sand.’
Hector had indeed noticed how, from time to time, the old guide took up a fistful of sand and held it to his face. Now he was too tactful to question Ibrahim’s assertion. Bourdon, however, was more dubious. He quietly scooped up some sand and wrapped it in a cloth. The following day he placed the sample in the old guide’s hand and asked Ibrahim to enquire from his grandfather how many days were left until the coffle reached the next watering place. The old man sniffed the sample and, with an angry outburst, flung it down in disgust. ‘What did he say?’ Bourdon asked. Ibrahim looked hurt as he translated, ‘My grandfather says that he is being taken for a fool. Either that, or the caravan has gone in a circle and we are back where we were yesterday.’
Bourdon was crestfallen. ‘Please apologise to him from me. I meant no harm. All my life I have lived among rogues and charlatans so I always suspect some sort of cheat.’
Yet even Hector had reason to doubt the old man when the caravan crossed a low range of rocky hills and Ibrahim rode up to him to say that his grandfather had announced that they should be in sight of the longed-for watering hole. Hector strained his eyes, but could see nothing. The desert stretched out as usual, bare, monotonous, and utterly devoid of life. There was not even the false glimmer of a distant mirage which so often duped him into thinking that a lake lay ahead. Suddenly his camel lurched off at a trot, and within a dozen strides was plunging along at a mad gallop. All around, the other camels were similarly stampeding. They surged forward in a roaring, incoherent mass. Ahead, Ibrahim was goading his camel even faster, kicking up a cloud of dust. After some three miles of this mad careering gallop, Ibrahim drew to a halt, jumped down and began to scrabble at the ground, peeling back a cover made of camel and goatskins. Beneath the cover the ground was a water soak which had been protected from the sun. Ibrahim and the camel drivers dug troughs which filled with a few inches of water, and the thirsty camels shoved and jostled, biting and kicking one another as they fought to suck up the water that they craved. Ibrahim’s face beneath his great bush of hair broke into a broad grin. ‘My grandfather has succeeded again,’ he exulted. ‘The worst is over.’