A Single Swallow (27 page)

‘Right.'

‘You get a pot and heat some water on the fire and you add some special herbs.'

‘OK . . .'

‘Then you add some more herbs and heat the water for a long time, stirring and stirring . . .'

‘Yes . . .?'

‘And then you put in the swallow, not the lungs, but the heart and everything else, and a tiny bit of oil, and heat it for a very long time, stirring and stirring . . .'

‘Uh-huh . . .'

‘Until it makes a kind of paste. Then you eat it and you will be protected from car accidents.'

‘Car accidents?'

‘Yes. And plane accidents.'

‘Plane accidents!'

‘Yes! Imagine you are in a plane and something crashes – bang! The plane goes down. But not you. When the plane crashes you will not be there.'

‘Where will I be?'

‘You will be standing not far away, on the ground. Zap! Like that! If you are in anything, a train, a truck, a plane, a car and it crashes – bang! Zap! You will not be in the crash, but you will be near by, if you have eaten the swallow paste.'

‘Wow!'

‘Yes. Protected. But only for five years.'

‘Five years? Then what?'

‘Then you must be very careful.'

After a while we turned downstream again. One or two swallows had passed over in the early morning, and now one or two more came upriver, but they were few compared to what I had hoped for. Staring at the map I had imagined the Niger would form a great swallow highway, running from the Gulf of Guinea north into the heart of the Sahara. Perhaps they did not need the river: the birds do use watercourses – I had seen them flying up the Rhône in great numbers one spring – but in good weather, with insects abundant, it seemed likely that they were either fanning out, feeding as they went, or had already taken to higher altitudes, where they might find tail winds to help them across the Sahara. I scanned the skies in vain. My timing was still good – I had not fallen behind the main body of the migration, as far I could calculate it – but my positioning was out. A great many swallows must already have been engaged in the desert crossing.

According to the maps the single greatest obstacle to a European-breeding swallow's migration is the Sahara, but the statistics contradict this impression. Storms, collisions with traffic, predators and most of all sudden and severe changes in weather patterns are the principal killers of swallows: the greatest desert on earth, it seems, presents a surmountable challenge.

Before they fly south in autumn the birds build up fat reserves to fuel the crossing of the Mediterranean and the desert: those flying down the Italian peninsula, which make the longest sea crossing, add between 30 and 40 per cent to their lean body weight; those flying down through Spain add slightly less. The heaviest birds will set out weighing around 24 grams, around 4½ grams of which will be fat. It has been calculated that those 4½ grams are sufficient to fuel up to 1,600 kilometres of flight – allowing the biggest birds, incredibly, to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean in one long-distance flight, without stopping.

The birds also put on weight before the migration up from the south, adding the same 2 to 4 grams of fat. To cross the sands they
must fly non-stop for fourteen to sixteen hours a day: there are few recorded sightings of them in the desert itself. The cost of this effort is clear in a study of swallows arriving in southern Europe in 2002: on average they weighed 13.4 grams and were carrying only ½ gram of fat. This would still have afforded them 200 kilometres of flight, and beyond that, like other migrant birds, swallows have an emergency reserve: when fat reserves are close to expended they are able to break down proteins from the breast muscles and gut.

According to another study, the keys to survival for large numbers of north-bound birds lie in the weather, vegetation and insect populations of North Africa, especially Algeria. While the sea and sand crossings come early in the south-bound migration, when the birds are carrying their maximum fat reserves, on the north-bound leg these two obstacles come at the other end of the journey – especially for the furthest-flying, most northerly breeding birds. Only after several thousand miles of Africa do they reach the Sahara. Conditions in the rich coastal crescent beyond the sands are therefore crucial: here many will feed and build up strength for the push into the various weathers of the European spring.

My first sight of Niamey, that night, coming in on the bus, was of a low-built, dimly lit town, which even after eleven at night still seemed to pulse with heat. On the first morning I rose at dawn and scanned the skies for swallows. I crossed the John F. Kennedy Bridge, one of Niamey's few landmarks, where camels were as much part of the rush hour as lorries, and peered through my binoculars at downstream islands of rice paddies, gum trees and reeds. Very few swallows came over. In the heat of the day I began to research the next stage of the pursuit. Everything was an effort; the heat drained strength first, then will, then concern. Walking 50 yards out of the shade seemed an intolerable test. I hid in shack-like bars, in the company of old men, and made calls. Very soon my own Sahara crossing was in trouble: Akly in Agades was adamant that I could not cross to Algeria from northern Niger.

‘Why not?'

‘There is a war.'

‘Seriously? Surely not . . .'

‘It is too dangerous. The frontier is closed.'

‘What is the danger?'

‘The conflict between the army and the Touareg.'

‘I have not heard anything about this.'

‘No one has!' he cried, with a joyless laugh. ‘This is the war that does not exist! But believe me, I am here in Agades, I have lived here for many years, and it is not safe to the north, and the border definitely not. It is not safe for you to go there and it is not safe for me to help you.'

The Touareg formally describe themselves as Imashaghen, ‘the noble and the free'. They are also known as the Kel-Tamasheq, the people who speak Tamasheq. Their culture has been dated to the first century
AD
but it is almost certainly older. Traditionally there were four Touareg kingdoms, based in the four mountain ranges of the central Sahara: the Tassili, the Adrar, the Hoggar massif and the Air Mountains. The Touareg have always lived in a world of great spaces, relatively recently divided by frontiers: the entities of Niger, Mali, Algeria, Burkina Faso and Libya have all been imposed on their timeless homelands of sands and stone. Their first uprising, against the formation of the state of Mali, began in 1960 and was swiftly crushed. The second began in 1990: this time they fought the governments of Mali and Niger, in the name of autonomy, and again they lost, though peace agreements signed with both countries (with Mali in 1992 and Niger in 1995) called for the decentralisation of national power. Then, in February 2007, a group of Touareg, ‘the Niger Movement for Justice', rose again. Niger declared a state of emergency in the north of the country: this conflict was now over a year old, and unresolved.

Stories from this unreported war were easy to find – I barely had to agitate the surface of conversations with barmen, waiters, idlers and drinkers for snatches to emerge. The rebels had mined a road near Niamey not long ago. They were at war with the government over
independence, and also for a share of the mines. The mines – didn't I know about the mines? The uranium mines, of course! The ones the French controlled, until the government had sold a slice of the contracts to the Americans. The same government, the same Americans, the same French who did not care about anything in Niger as long as the uranium kept coming, and the Touareg stayed quiet. The same government who paid the army well, and the police, and cared nothing for anyone else.

‘There is nothing else in Niger,' said a barman, who spoke with an extraordinary vehemence, a fury I had not seen anywhere else. ‘The tourists come for the cave paintings, they don't care; the Americans and the French come for the uranium, they don't care; the government gets rich – they don't care.'

I watched the French Embassy staff at dinner. They were a credit to their country, in a way: glossy men and glamorous young women who would have fitted into the smartest Parisian restaurant, with one or two older, tougher individuals among them. They ate under a hot golden moon which hung in an indigo sky while a band sang and played for them. They did not look around once: neither the entertainment, the waiters, the life of the restaurant or the other diners held any interest for them. In Niamey, it seemed, their business was all the business there was. Later on, in a bar, I drank with soldiers of a commando unit of the armed forces of Niger. They wore T-shirts on which a grinning skull was wreathed with AK-47s. They were big, rough men; a brusque, uncouth counterpoint to the civilised table of diplomats.

I wanted to get out of Niamey as soon as possible. Perhaps I should have taken the time to secure visas for Mauritania and Mali, and made a wide semicircle overland, avoiding the trouble on the Algerian frontier. But I was acutely conscious of days falling off my Algerian visa, and desperate to get there. Algeria, I felt, held the key to my journey, as much as to that of the swallows. So huge, so diverse, so close to Europe – and yet so little visited, since the French left and the country fell into civil war; a place of such dread reputation, and so little known. I had wanted to go for years. The idea that the swallows,
our swallows, passed through it every spring and every autumn intrigued and beguiled me. I resolved to fly to Algiers, and greet the birds as they came in from the desert.

The flight went via Ougadougou and Casablanca, and left in the middle of the night. Waiting for it, in the half-lit airport bar, I saw the barman sit up suddenly, his posture stiffening with interest. An aeroplane was coming in.

‘What is it?' I asked.

‘I don't know,' he said, ‘I have never seen that plane before.'

It was a jumbo, a Boeing 747, and it was all white. There were no markings on its tail and nothing obvious on its fuselage. As it taxied to a halt I pulled out the binoculars and studied it. Now I could see it quite clearly – it was a cargo carrier with an almost empty hold. Two pallets came out of it, and two pallets went on. On the side of the plane, in tiny lettering, I could just make out a registration number and an American flag.

‘What do you think they're doing?' I asked a friend of the barman's, a woman in uniform who had also taken an interest.

‘I don't know,' she said, then she laughed: ‘Better not ask.'

It so often seemed to be the way in the Africas I passed through. If you did not know what
they
were doing, your gun-toting government, the foreign corporations, the British oil people, the French loggers, the American uranium hunters, the Chinese copper contractors, the mysterious Russian aircrews, why, then you had better not ask.

 

I DID NOT
know I was carrying contraband until they pulled me out of the line. The only European on the plane, nervous with anticipation at what I would find, I was wondering why they X-ray the bags after you have landed when there was a commotion around the monitor, I was pointed out, uniforms closed in and they marched me into an office.

There was my bag, and my binoculars.

‘Are these yours?'

‘Yes.'

‘What are you doing in Algeria?'

‘Er, tourism. And bird-watching.'

Although the young woman operating the X-ray and the man who pulled me aside had been in uniform, everyone in the office was in plain clothes. They were all tall men, from young to middle-aged, and they all seemed to be smoking, except my interrogator, who had been halfway through a baguette sandwich. I pulled out my cigarettes and lit up too, the nicotine flooding me with artificial relaxation. The questioner studied my passport.

‘Right!' he said. ‘We will give you a receipt for your binoculars.'

‘A receipt?'

‘Yes. No binoculars in Algeria!'

‘Why not?'

‘Security,' he said, with a smile, and wrote. More questions
followed and I volunteered more information than necessary, babbling about swallows and smoking too hard, nervously, but they did not seem to mind.

‘Come and get your binoculars before you go,' said the man. ‘Enjoy your visit to Algeria.
Bon courage!
'

‘
Bon courage!
' was everyone's favourite valediction. The man at the Air Algeria desk, who revealed that a flight to Tamanrasset was cripplingly expensive and took three hours; the man who changed euros to dinars for me, and recommended a taxi, and the taxi driver himself.

‘
Bon courage!
' they all said. It was a rather sweet expression and also unsettling. What was going to require so much courage?

The flight had been spectacular. Sometimes there were tiny bundles of light below us in the desert. The sky lightened as we approached the Atlas, their snows and cliffs of ice and stone protruding from rock-pools of cloud. To the migrating birds the lie of the land must swell and recede like a series of waves driving northwards. The Cape Flats rise up to the Drakenstein Mountains and the escarpment to the Great Karoo, which folds into the great veldt plains of the Free State, the Kalahari and the water-table of the Okavango, only to climb again to the high plateaux of Zambia, and sink into the green vastness of the Congo. The forest lifts to the mountains of Cameroon, drops into the undulations of Nigeria and the sandy seas of Sahel and Sahara, then peaks here, in the Atlas before subsiding once more into the fertile plain of the North African coast. There is nothing to compare with these mountains until the Pyrenees and the Alps, the ramparts of central Europe. As we flew along the coast of Algeria I could see, to the north, across the sea, a distant shore, and just above its far horizon, a little more solid than cloud, the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada – a first glimpse of Europe. On the other side, to the south, were mountains: some brown, some ochre and some very green.