Through the rock-rock-rocky mountains and the pure-and-driven snow, balancing on bootlace roads with the smell of pine cones and nostril-burning frost to clear the head, Frank became as adept at such turnings as Shelley, as if they’d been on the trek for weeks. Stapled by front bend and backmirror hairpin, the new land blinded him to past or future. Trees hammered the sky over them like a circus tent in which only thoughts and sensations of the present could perform. In spite of plenty to eat and smoke and a shower last night at Midelt, he already felt as if he were living rough, a tramp with a purpose, sharpened by driving and fatigued by lack of past or future.
The country was cold (even at midday), stony, laced with iron trees, vast. The world is small until you come to the wilderness, he thought, then you see how big it is. Beyond the desert there was jungle, land still unexplored, unsurveyed, unconquered.
They followed a narrow river hemmed in by sheer rock, going under a tunnel at one place. The first palm trees appeared, stuck like Worn-out mops along the water-edge, thickening to a belt of green on either side. Luxuriant green snaked between barriers of red-coloured rocky pinnacles, the narrow wedge of a valley opening towards blue sky. Under high sedate palms grew orange, lemon, pomegranate trees, flourishing by the knife-glint of irrigation ditches cutting out from the main bountiful stream.
Seen from above it was a pattern of glass fragments, crystal strips scattered in green chaos, yet made orderly and precise by the water rations delivered to each plot or field. Nothing had come about by accident, only by labour and brain, time and patience, a battle for increase against the nearby desert — so marvelled at by Frank that he once misjudged the acute switch of a curve and almost shot the whole of them down towards it.
They stopped for a meal of cold beans and mutton, bread and mint tea. Filling watercans and loading them on the lorry, he tried to imagine what Myra might be doing at this moment, saw her dimly in the flat wearing her maternity dress, reading and relaxing on the Frenchman’s grand divan, abstracted and distant from him, as he was from her, certainly. He loved her like that, hoped to be back with her soon, to be there when the baby was born. He heard its cries already, brought to the nearby stream as an antidote to the desert.
West and south from the last village of their trip, dusk-clouds higher than the highest reddening escarpment were banked up tall and rugged with pink fire, as if part of a wall enclosing the whole world in whose middle he seemed to be standing. Transfixed, he stood alone, a clank of buckets and gabble of women at the well behind.
The light at dusk was of a half-clear quality that made him doubt the power of his eyes, rub them and wonder whether he needed glasses. But wind and dust was the breath of evening desert in midwinter. He expected to feel particles of snow against his skin but got grit and sand, differing temperatures striated one within the other. The sharp line of spectacularly jagged cloud seemed like real wall from this village of gardens and date groves, goat-bells and camel-grunts. They would head towards it at night, as if darkness were the only way to get through safely, no meaning left of its terror. They would come back that way, return under its mounds and hillocks — if it were still there.
Smoking, shuffling his boots on a boulder, he turned to see whether this same red wall surrounded everything. Since it rarely rained, why were such big clouds gathering? All he could see was a deeper fallen night, a corrugated ceiling to the spreading darkness, with land the same non-colour. He returned to his more livid views of the Hamada du Guir, but they had gone, red wall vanished — though perhaps only the deepening night concealed it. The nearness of the desert made him feel like a machine rather than a man, its capacity well-marked and he his own toolsetter for it. He walked back into the village, finding his way in darkness over-stones, and rubbish.
All number plates had been taken from the lorry, and they had given up their passports to the village agent. Frank felt glad as he handed his over, as if the last of all labels had been unpinned from his back, though remembering how impressed he had been on receiving it.
The road soon worsened, headlights bucking at rocks and sliding gravel. They drew back as if shaking a fist at the sky, then dipped. The lorry rocked, like a lifeboat in a storm disregarding what other boats flee from. Bringing his head forward from the seat Frank looked out at lights and dust, the occasional bush, desert rose, or rockhump Sliding out of vision like an escaping footpad who had had second thoughts. They moved slowly south in the bitter night cold of an empty three-thousand foot plateau, yet it seemed that the way was a strip of land only a few feet wide, and that they would pitch into nearby oblivion should the lorry, on one of its two-wheeled tilts, slip right over and roll, roll, roll.
‘This is the safer route,’ Shelley explained. ‘We’re bypassing a Moroccan post where the officer isn’t so sympathetic to the Algerians, believe it or not. He’d hold us up a few hours, which would throw us into daylight and get us seen by one of the flying napalm wagons. So we’ll go this way — because any rational man would think it’s suicide. The French don’t look much where we’re going.’
‘What about these lights?’ Frank said. ‘They’ve had me worried all the way from the village. We can be seen for miles. Or don’t we bother about that sort of risk?’
‘We’re a long way from the border yet,’ Shelley laughed. ‘I’ll clip them off when the time comes.’
Frank hung on when the sway took him unawares, thinking that a man could get seasick this way. But no one did. Ten of them were packed in behind, all smoking shit-fags, except Shelley who smoked his in a pipe, sucked away as if it were whisky in the bowl. Frank couldn’t imagine what lay ahead in the way of landscape or human events. He was spinning out the rope of his life behind. It dragged along the ground, and only when it touched hard rock did it disturb him. In front was space; untouched, spiritual and corporeal territory, darkness for a sharpening mind to enter and fill up on. Unable to consider the past, he tried feeding on the future, but shied back from it because nothing was there. Only idleness has a future. Work, fatigue, dust and grit imposed the prison-minutes of passing time on him. He had to think on the present, dwell on it with the great concentration that can only be employed by a man who has no future. ‘These are the times when I’d like to read,’ he said. ‘At least you can see something in daytime.’
‘Recite a piece of poetry, then,’ Shelley laughed, ‘or a passage from the Bible. Isn’t that what the English do when they’re in a tight spot? If we can’t rub the boredom out of our lives we’re no use as people.’
Frank smiled, in response to a grin he didn’t see but knew had happened. Those clearcut platitudinous teeth of Shelley’s will be the ruin of him, he thought, like the third match in the trenches. Three grins, and a mortar bomb’s got them all.
By night and in secret they crept nearer to the border. ‘It’s no use looking for it on that map,’ Shelley said, maintaining the air of uncertainty. ‘According to mine we’re in Algeria already, so take over while I hand out the medal ribbons, will you?’
Lights off, towards dawn they stuck in an unexpected pool of sand. ‘You bloody night-owl,’ Frank said. ‘I thought you knew the way a bit better than this.’
‘You can’t stop mistakes. What sort of a holiday do you think gun-running is?’
‘I always thought it was a man in a turban,’ Frank said, ‘picking off Beau Geste with a silver-handled blunderbuss and then getting signed up for Hollywood.’