As the jet planes roared through the high desert skies and the lorries hurtled along its well-trodden tracks, pushing his people back into the remotest corners of the plains, it was hard to say for how much longer they would manage to resist their relentless advances. What he could say with confidence, however, was that while one of them remained on those sands, even if the rest of the infinite and stony plains were devoid of life and the hamada devoid of its horizons, the laws of hospitality would remain sacred, otherwise no traveller would ever dare to cross the desert again.
Mubarrak’s crime was unforgivable and he Gazel Sayah would take it upon himself to make those men that were not of the Tuareg people, aware that in the Sahara the rules of his race must continue to be respected. Those laws and customs had been created to suit an environment that had to be respected. They were intrinsic modes of behaviour that had been created to ensure their survival.
The wind picked up as dawn broke. The hyenas and jackals, having lost all hope of getting even the smallest morsel of the dead antelope, skulked off to their dark habitats, growling at their misfortune, joined by all the other creatures of the night: the long-eared fennecs, the desert rats, snakes, hares and foxes. As the sun started to heat up the land, these creatures would be asleep, conserving their energy until the shadows of the night returned to make their lives bearable once again. It was the law of nature that there, in that most desolate place on the planet, in contrast to the rest of the world, all activity was carried out by night, while the day was for sleeping.
Only man, despite the passage of time, had not managed to completely adapt to this nocturnal existence, and for that reason, at the first sign of light, Gazel found his camel, grazing about one kilometre away, took him by the halter and set off unhurriedly towards the east.
The Adoras military outpost was situated in a triangular oasis made up of about one hundred palm trees and three wells. It sat right in the very middle of a long line of dunes, which made its survival something of a miracle since it was constantly threatened by the shifting sand that surrounded it. But while the sea of dunes sheltered it from the wind, it also meant that, at around midday, it became a burning furnace with temperatures often soaring to sixty degrees.
The three dozen soldiers that made up the garrison spent half of their time under the shadow of the palm trees, cursing their bad luck, and the other half of it shovelling sand in a desperate effort to keep it at bay. They struggled on a daily basis to keep clear a small stretch of road that allowed them to communicate with the outside world and receive provisions and correspondence once every two months.
For the last thirty years, ever since a crazy colonel had become obsessed with the idea that the army should have control of those four wells, which were the only ones around for about one hundred kilometers, Adoras had become the “accursed destiny,” both for the colonial troops then and for the natives there now. Of the tombs lined up on the edge of the palm grove, nine of them were due to “death by natural causes,” while another six were due to suicides committed by men who simply could not bear the idea of living in that inferno for another day.
When a tribunal was unsure as to whether they should condemn an offender to the firing squad, life imprisonment or commute his sentence to fifteen years of compulsory service in Adoras, it was quite aware that all three punishments were of equal measure, even if the offender was under some illusion that by having his sentence commuted and being sent to Adoras, he was being let off lightly.
Captain Kaleb-el-Fasi was commander in chief of the garrison and supreme authority over a region that was as large as half of Italy, but where only a little over eight hundred people lived. He had been there for seven years as punishment for having killed a young lieutenant who had threatened to expose irregularities in the regiment’s accounts at his previous posting. Condemned to death, his uncle, the famous General Obeid-el-Fasi, the independence hero who Kaleb had worked for as an assistant and confident during the War of Liberation, managed to get him a rehabilitation posting to a place that no other person in the military would ever have been sent, unless of course, their predicament had been similarly precarious.
Three years previously Capitain Kaleb, using only the files that had been made available to him, had worked out that in his regiment, twenty of the men were guilty of murder, fifteen of rape, sixty of armed robbery and countless others of theft, fraud, desertion and petty crime. These statistics, he had quickly realised, meant that he would have to draw on every drop of his experience and employ every ounce of shrewdness and brute force that he possessed in order to stay on top.
The respect he inspired was second only to the fear that the men there felt for his right-hand man, Sergeant Malik-el-Haideri. He was a thin, small man who looked weak and ill, but who was so cruel, shrewd and brave that he had managed to control that gang of beasts and survived five attempts on his life and two knife fights. Malik was, more often than not, behind the deaths labelled “natural causes,” while two of the men who had committed suicide, had blown their brains out just to get away from him.
Now, seated on the peak of the highest dune that looked over the eastern side of the oasis, which was more than one hundred meters high and gilded with age, its core hard, the sand inside it having almost turned to stone, Sergeant Malik watched his men disinterestedly as they shovelled sand off the smaller dunes, which were threatening to engulf the furthest of the wells. Through his binoculars his eyes suddenly came to rest on a solitary rider who had just appeared on a white mehari and who seemed to be approaching the post, in no apparent hurry. He wondered what a Targui was doing in that godforsaken place since they had stopped using the Adoras wells about six years ago and had not made any contact with them since. The Bedouin caravans arrived less and less frequently and when they did, they would make a watering hole, rest for a few days on the furthest side of the oasis, keeping their women hidden and ensuring that they had absolutely no contact with the soldiers there. Then they would get on their way quickly, relieved that there had not been any trouble during their stay. But the Tuaregs were different. When the Tuaregs stopped to use the wells they would walk around with their heads held high, almost defiantly, allowing their woman to walk around freely, their faces uncovered and their legs and arms exposed to the air, despite the fact that the men living there had not enjoyed a woman for many years. They were also quick to reach for their rifles or sharp, curved daggers if anyone dared to cross them.
But after two warriors and three soldiers died once during a brawl, the sons of the wind had preferred to put a distance between themselves and the military post. But this solitary rider was coming resolutely towards them, approaching the last crest, silhouetted against the afternoon sun and his clothes billowing in the wind. Finally, he entered the palm grove and stopped next to the northern well, some one hundred meters from the first of the camp’s huts.
He slid down the dune unhurriedly, crossed the camp and went over to the Targui who was giving water to his camel, this animal that was capable of drinking one hundred litres of water in one sitting alone.
‘Aselam, aleikum!’
‘Metulem, metulem,’ Gazel replied.
‘That is a fine beast you have there. And very thirsty.’
‘We’ve come a long way.’
‘Where from?’
‘From the north.’
Sergeant Malik-el-Haideri hated the Targui veil because he took pride in being able to judge from a man’s expression whether or not he was lying. This was never possible with a Targui as you could only see their eyes and they were only ever partially exposed and usually became smaller whenever they began to talk. Their voices were also distorted by it, which meant that he no choice but to believe him, since he had seen him arrive from the north and had no reason to suspect that Gazel would have made a huge diversion in order to make it appear that he was coming from any other direction.