A Single Swallow (34 page)

We counted meteorites that night, as we talked and argued and cried, under a sky that seemed to burn and pulse with stars like flecks of fire. I went out, later, while my friend slept, with my camel, which refused to carry me to the top of the dune. I saw the moonrise over Algeria, just after dawn, huge and perfectly round, like a ghost, like the sun's dead twin.

Out there, beyond the encampment, there was no way to judge distance, height or depth. With nothing to fasten on, the eye assigns uncertain values to the landscape – that is far, this is near, everything in between is a speculation. There are tracks on some of the dunes – fennec foxes, gerbils – their marks the only tiny traces of life between the sand and the high, bare sky. Under our cloudscapes, we of the north live in a narrow strip which allows us to scale the earth according to our own proportions. A man is so high, a tree is higher, then a building, then a hill. But in the desert there is no such relativity; here you are confronted by space the eye cannot measure and the mind cannot calculate. To climb to the top of a mountain in Britain is to be exalted, as the land spreads below you for your contemplation.
But to gain a vantage point in the desert is to be confronted with the daunting exaltation of untamed space, to be further diminished. Your sense of self shimmers at the sight of the dune sea. The tenets with which you armour yourself against existence seem vain illusions against the desert's beauty and indifference: you are a tiny, tiny, temporary thing, fragile and vulnerable as a bird. To stand in the dunes, a speck on the sand, is perhaps something like finding yourself in the water, mid-ocean, beyond the sight of ships and shores. To find my way back, not trusting my tracks in the sand, I left one shoe, then another, as markers on top of high dunes.

The desert, more than anywhere else, raises the question of how swallows find their way. Ornithologists believe that there is no single answer. Experiments have shown that they are sensitive to magnetism, perhaps able to see, or at least sense, magnetic field lines, which allows them to distinguish between two directions: towards the pole, and towards the equator. However, the same experiments have also shown that they do not use this compass when the sky is not overcast: in clear conditions, it seems, they orientate themselves by the position of the sun. It is also thought that they use landmarks, and perhaps olfactory cues: navigating by the smell of the terrains they pass over, and certainly, it is thought, the distinct scent of their breeding grounds.

Ahmed taught us to read the winds. The Chirugui blows from the east, just before dawn, the north wind blows at night in that season, and the south wind, the Sahel, rules the day.

In the morning we rode out of the dunes into a sandstorm, a yellow-white fury which thrashed the palms and cast an unholy pallor over the daylight, it was as though the world had aged and paled into an antique photograph.

We took turns driving Brahim's jeep, a thing so sophisticated it seemed to me almost a weapon. And the mountains were so cold and so high, with icy lakes where I saw swallows, and the ridges were coiled like burning black and copper-red monsters: terrifying, awesome, bared and shaled and sharpened like dragons' backs.

In the morning in Fez I was on the roof watching swifts and falcons
and Pallid Swifts, and then we set out again, after coffee – the only vehicle on the road. And what were all the police waiting for? I was still giving away – I gave my binoculars to Brahim's niece; my eye was now so trained I could spot swallows without them, and when the girl said she was interested in birds it seemed that she would gain so much more from the beautiful device than I ever would. I felt a great tiredness at all my possessions and equipment, something like a longing to be free.

Everything seemed better, as we neared Tangier, through the rain, and we rolled down the windows, and the world smelled salty, green and sweet, and we exulted because it smelled exactly like the warm spring morning on the coast in Wales.

We hugged Brahim and ran pell-mell through the port, to our ferry, and scrambled up onto the deck, and my friend was delighted to see swallows:

‘Woah! Look at them all! That is quite wonderful, actually . . .' he said, because they were all around us. Cutting through the drizzly air like little racing boats, flinging themselves away from Tangier, out of Africa, low and furiously fast across the Straits, they headed for Europe and we went with them. Our boiling wake seemed to tow the low coastline after us and I had a waking daydream that the Straits were closing behind us, and imagined Hercules drawing Gibraltar and Jebel Musa together again, closing the gap that splits one world from another. Not long ago they were finding over a thousand bodies a year washed up on the beaches of Morocco and Spain. No one knows how many drown and disappear, unfound, unclaimed.

 

WHEN I PLANNED
the journey I made glib assumptions about crossing from Africa to Europe. The swallows, I hoped, would teach me what it is to travel like a migrant, and to contrast real boundaries, jungles and deserts and seas, with notional ones: the lines that humans have drawn on the world. I will arrive in Europe with my eyes peeled, my sight renewed, I thought, I will see our continent as if for the first time, the way immigrants from Africa see it. I had no idea what that would mean.

At their narrowest point the Straits of Gibraltar are only 8 miles wide. From the Moroccan side you can see wind turbines turning on the Spanish shore. It is a place of wild weathers: fronts and squalls blow in from the Atlantic; brief and fierce sunshine is veiled in gusty rain. Below the surface, seven currents interweave, the principals being the Mediterranean outflow, which is highly saline, and sinks below the incoming tides of the Atlantic. The ferry heads east, travelling 30 miles between the two coasts, aiming for the semicircular Bay of Gibraltar and the docks of the port of Algeciras. Algeciras is a busy and crowded port, but all its activity is dwarfed and dominated by the massive upthrust of lion-yellow stone that is the Rock of Gibraltar.

My friend and I parted after customs at Algeciras. He planned to take a train to Barcelona; I took a taxi to Gibraltar. It is famous among birdwatchers as being one of the great places to watch migrants, and I
was keen to see it, this little outpost of Britain on the Mediterranean. The driver was a Catalan with no English. Our communication was poor but he insisted on teaching me one word. Not ‘Gibraltar' but ‘Yibralta', he said, and made me repeat it.

Beyond customs was a red telephone box; beyond that a cash machine poked out Gibraltar pounds like paper tongues, decorated with fighting ships. My book advance had come through: I was solvent again. In the streets people acted differently, walked differently. I could not define it at first but then it came: it was in the eyes, in the gaze. A passer-by in Europe carries a distinct expression, a certain look, as though the stare is not a reaching out of the gaze, but a by-product of a turning in. As though existence is self-consciousness, as though the world itself is not a curiosity, far less a wonder, but a distraction from the essential business of the self; as though the life of the street is humdrum, something to be blotted out.

The high street was like something out of the home counties, with signs trumpeting VAT-free shopping; I walked under surveillance cameras and everywhere passed plaques commemorating victories, deaths and defences. In Gibraltar guns and ships and flags are fetishes; high up, a Moorish castle flying the Union Jack now serves as a prison. Men walked with bulled shoulders, their hair cut to fit under berets. The Rock itself bristled with aerials and dishes: the Rock was listening; everything was watching and listening, yet nothing made noise. In Africa music played all the time, everywhere: here it was silenced, piped through headphones; one of humanity's great communal experiences was here used to isolate, to create private experience. Europe's shared music is the sound of traffic.

In the foyer of the hotel a
Daily Telegraph
and a
Daily Mail
lie like flags of allegiance on the counter at reception and the staff call me ‘sir' coldly, because I am thin and brown and a bit dirty.

The hotel is decked and panelled like a ship. I withdraw into the cabin of my room and revert as if for comfort to my African habits, washing my clothes with soap in the sink. Night falls and all the lights
of the bay come up; ships move in slowly, buoys flash, docks are bright under arc lights. I hang my clothes in the window to dry; in a time of war I would be accused of signalling to the enemy. Gibraltar feels as though it is on a war-footing, so ubiquitous is the presence of the military. One of Britain's most infamous peacetime executions took place here, on a street in broad daylight. Three unarmed members of the IRA were shot down by the SAS. Eye-witnesses who said the soldiers gave no warning were smeared by the newspapers, and the government tried to prevent the broadcast of a film about the incident,
Death on the Rock
. There is nothing innocent about Gibraltar; there is no peaceful or civilised explanation for why it exists, except the claim of all powerful civilisations, that they prepare for war to preserve peace. Gibraltar is a strategic asset, a weapon.

I did not eat but I drank. I lay down and dreamed but did not seem to sleep. Late, I got up and went out, my bag packed, resolved to leave. I climbed a stairway from a courtyard behind the hotel onto a roof. With binoculars you can watch the migration at night by focusing on the moon. If a bird flies across it you will have a second in which to attempt identification. But I had no binoculars, so I lay down under criss-crossed washing lines and gazed up at the Rock. I saw the spark of a cigarette lighter; soldiers, an exercise, a watchman? I slept a little, then got up and went south on silent roads. A patrol boat seemed to keep pace with me. I felt watched again. I followed signs to Europa Point. Something was growing in me, like an anger or a madness. What was this place? What was it watching for? What were you to make of this strange little British fist, clenched around stone at the mouth of the Mediterranean? Home? This was not home, this was a garrison. I abhorred myself for having scuttled here, for taking refuge here, with my little sack of treasures, and my notebooks, two of them, bursting with records of all that I had seen and felt. I thought back to the Kovango, to the pages I wrote – how does the white man come to Africa? Like a treasure hunter, above all, seeking reward – financial, spiritual, experiential. And like a treasure hunter I was suddenly ‘safe' in a fortress, under the Union Jack again, watched over, or just watched (the patrol boat still seemed to keep pace with me), ‘safe',
‘home', a ‘citizen', a ‘traveller' ‘returned'; mission accomplished. It made me feel sick, this parody of completion in this parody of a country, this fortified Little England.

I walked faster and faster through rain-salted darkness until I came to the end, to a crashing black void of indistinct waves below the cliffs and a single lighthouse waving its white arms at the sea. Without thinking or hesitating I slipped my arms out of the straps of my rucksack, grasped them and began to spin round and round on the cliff top, round and round like a hammer-thrower, until the bag seemed to have a lift and velocity all of its own and I snapped round one last time, jerked my arms up and let go, sending it all flying, everything I had collected, carried, preserved and noted: I flung it all off Europa Point into the darkness, and it rose and then fell, tumbled down spinning, into the body-hungry sea.

Perhaps a doctor would have said I was suffering from stress, exhaustion – I had not slept much at all, through those nights in Morocco – malnourishment (I was 2 stone under my usual weight) or even concussion. But I felt better, as I walked back to the town, and the light came up, and Gibraltar began its new day. Soldiers drove to work as young men do, all roaring engines, and in the barracks on either side of the road others came in from a night exercise and made themselves breakfast. I realised I had left my passport and wallet on the roof where I had slept so went back to the hotel to fetch it. At the hotel they said that roof was nothing to do with them. Then the police showed up: a tall Englishman, a young Welshman and an Irishwoman police officer, and they were very civilised.

My passport and wallet had already been handed in, and the police wanted to know what I had been doing on the roof in the middle of the night. I was intending to watch birds, I said.

‘Very well,' said the English policeman. ‘There you go. And if I catch you climbing on any more roofs in Gibraltar I'll arrest you – all right?'

‘Fair enough.'

I walked out of Gibraltar, back into Spain, and followed swallows through the streets of La Linea.

I still had the skeleton of my phone but the battery and charger had gone into the sea with my rucksack. Travelling for the first time without communications, compass, maps, soap, toothbrush, razor or a change of clothes was nothing compared to travelling without language. La Linea, a small town strung along the coastal strip in the hinterland of Gibraltar does not welcome English or mime. What Spanish I had became confused with Italian, which I speak a little. For the first time in the whole journey I had no tongue.