Maiden Voyages (48 page)

Naturally we fight it; scowl, curse, complain; immolation is not to be taken lying down especially when attended by bodily discomforts and massive blows to pride. Who is that wretched human relic, female most likely, bent over nearly double, on its last legs and not far from breathing its last as it struggles like a dying beetle to get a foot one more time up the stony rise and into position in front of the other. There now, it’s crying for rescue, for pity. “We stopped the camels for you back there,” says Belka-shi, “and you didn’t get up.” Now she really has
to grovel. “Please forgive me, I was a fool, I thought we were starting downhill but it’s going up some more and I can’t …”

Another time when I’ve asked when we’ll get there, wherever there is, I mimick his “
bientôt, bientôt
. Soon,” and he mocks my version back to me, though in friendly fashion, and says, “Ah, she’s making fun of me.” Once with a long day’s push ahead when I would prefer to start out on foot, I ask El Ramis riding beside me if there’ll be much more climbing; if so, it’s Betsey or nothing. “Est-ce qu’on monte encore beaucoup?” He answers like the voice of doom, not turning his head, “On monte beaucoup, on descend beaucoup.” At moments it appears fairly certain that one of us two elders, amrar or tamrart, is losing his/her mind, hard to know which. I can’t tell if that strange evasive glint in his eyes is reflecting his own condition or a concern for mine. On a later afternoon as we spread our possessions on the spot picked for the night, Kate, doing the same nearby, the Irish wag to the death if so it should be, says she’s been talking to Bernouze, “And he says he’s going to keep us out a week longer because we’re such a good group.” “At no extra cost?” says I from the pit. “At no extra cost.” That’s how bitter you can get in your bliss, in your luxury. She borrows some more antiseptic cream for her underside. I borrow some more cough medicine from Bob. To be admitted, though, is that nobody is getting dysentery or any form of the common traveler’s complaint that is endemic in the best or any other hotels at comparable latitudes. Evidently the desert water is not just pure but curative as well, even after three days in a goatskin.

Another plus: no sweat so no smell, from our own or our companions’ bodies, although the washing we can do between water-points, for two or three days at a time, is minimal, just cat dabs from our little plastic basin. Perhaps we are getting mummified without knowing it. The lack of appetite would tend to bear out that hypothesis. A peculiar development; have never before failed to be hungry at the customary intervals except when ill or after an abnormally sedentary day, conditions far from the present case; barring aforementioned aches and bruises I never felt healthier and the kind of sitting we do on our camels hardly qualifies for any usual meaning of sedentary. And it’s not that the food isn’t appetizing; on the contrary, what Bernouze concocts from his cans and
powders and whatnots, along with tangerines the first week and dates after, is delicious, but except for those two fruits of the country and the breakfast chocolate and porridge, nothing tempts beyond a few bites. Sleep too, no matter what the day’s exertions, is down to very little and that also is on the smiling, not the glum side of the accounts. We’ll be sacked out an exorbitant number of hours but asleep for very few of them, yet suffering none of the frets and stews of civilized insomnia; on the contrary; aside from what the Hoggar moonlight does to every contour and detail of the scene, it seems that willy nilly you have become prey to the aforementioned sky-sized feline of the claws long as mountains, and its name and nature are to be found somewhere in the category of exultation. Or exaltation?

But let’s not claim too much even for a mummy. At least there’s no question that from fast and wakefulness combined—unplanned, unprescribed, and at the time unrecognized so unscrutinized which could be half the secret—comes a keying up of the senses so they take in fuel for more and still more extravagance of perception, I suppose to some leveling off point or else to surfeit and rebellion, which we in our thirteen days won’t have had time to reach. I haven’t yet heard the diagnostic term for the condition but can imagine its being called Sahara Fever or the Hoggar Syndrome or even Atakoritis for an extreme case. The clinical picture will include a very high level of ambivalence and a volatile emotional state swinging between the leadenly uncurious, or half dead half imbecile, and the close to hysterically perceptive and acquisitive. We know that other terrestrial extremes for all their shrinkage in our day can have similar effects, whether teetering more toward beatitude or suicide, on those not born and bred under their influence.

All nine of us not of the work force, with all our great spread of ages, temperaments, backgrounds, are showing symptoms; even the two who have done it before, somewhere in the Hoggar if not by exactly that route, Jackie and Emma, are giving indications. What indications? This is no encounter group, nobody has come to confide, or touch, or share, or scream, primally or any way. Probably not one of us could say very well what we did come for. Yet between sighs and groans and sour jokes and moments of almost savage withdrawal you’ll notice a little growing freedom from tension in this voice, around that mouth.

Pierre, the apprentice tour manager and on his first such expedition, is showing rather contrary effects and had better go back to work in France. Goodlooking, well-built, he makes himself agreeable to us, the customers, rather as a shopkeeper in his country might, but from his voluble narrations always addressed to François but as loud as if nobody else understood French or else nobody else’s opinion was worth worrying about, he makes no bones about his contempt for the Tuareg. It irks him to be so dependent on them; their various little ritual customs and prohibitions—who defers to whom, who sits where by the fire, how and by what is food defiled—it annoys him to have to follow Bernouze in respecting. His dislike and ridicule pour forth too fast for two of our Tuareg companions to follow; aside from Bernouze, the two who had better be out of earshot of the tirades are Entayent and his brother El Ramis. But they probably get the gist well enough without hearing it and if this were a centruy earlier might be tempted to add Pierre’s bones to those of Col. Flatters and his company.

I call it Karnak Boulevard; or it could be Ozymandias Park; or a private carriage entrance to the palace of a race of gods back when the Sahara was green and a sacred river circled hereabouts; that was perhaps somewhat before the time of the carved bison we were enjoying the company of the other day. We come over a little rise, on our camels, following the pack train, and find ourselves—in our unworthiness, our mere human dimensions—at the start of an esplanade about a quarter of a mile wide, its far end apparently continuing still farther beyond another rise. Our pedestrian comrades, who have hiked or scrambled up a couple of granite precipices that brought them in by a side access are waiting for us a short way up the avenue, and a brave but pathetic huddle they make: hitch-hikers to eternity. Because this time and I’m sure there is not one of us who wouldn’t be willing to swear it, we have zoomed free of geology, into something using it, that’s true, but in all effect and intention of another order altogether. The order is sculpture. Two among us, Kate and Jeepers, are sculptors by trade; the rest of us either went to progressive schools or were otherwise drenched in creativity or verbiage of same. We’re a pretty sophisticated bunch—good curator material every one—and we know that the works in stone bordering both sides of what is about to be our processional route, in size
roughly between two or three and twenty to thirty stories high, with girths to suit and no two alike, are something we had better keep under our chèches and not breathe a word about ever to a living soul, because they would put the Centre Pompidou known as Beaubourg, and MOMA and its equivalents anywhere you could name out of business before you could shake a lamb’s tail even if you kept one handy for hasty shakes.

We are shook up. We are spiritually transformed. We are agog. And of course it’s poor Henry Moore, with Noguchi and more faintly Calder trailing in behind because they’re not so strictly in the vein in question, that gets the back of our hand. Yes of course, this show makes all their work look like untalented kindergarten stuff. But do we, one or two of us speculate, perhaps see it better because of Henry Moore?

Well, that was really more upheaval than we had bargained for; if that dead volcano we get an occasional glimpse of far to the north had started spitting living devils on our heads it would not have been much more surprising; and we leave that mythical imperial way for one less awesome, because playful in comparison, more in the Max Ernst vein, but on the same vast scale and just as attention-holding; in a way more so because we are going to have it with us, in changing lights and angles, for several hours. This we will call the Strait of Caps (English for form of headgear, not Fr. for tip, top or headland). The Russian fur on the right should perhaps be called a hat. At our left, also with a circumference of several miles, is the kind of vizor cap that golfers and blue collar workers used to wear and some may still; I couldn’t say as I avert my eyes from golf courses and gather there is disagreement among sociologists as to whether there is still a class in society wearing either blue collars or that type of cap. Male passengers on what used to be known as ocean liners wore them too, for striding around decks, back beyond recall.

The Russian fur cap, in a view that makes it look somewhat sat on, will remain alone as our guardian height all the next day too, when we’ll have our second and last day of what shall I say, respite, reprieve, recess from the camels. Of course really to be strictly guidebookish about it, the caps are only one pair of images out of dozens, all of them partaking of the godlike, the supernatural, of various unearthly dimensions
that we have had inklings of before from Homer and the brothers Grimm. Most of us were generally too busy, doing nothing you might say, to learn their real names from the maps. One we had reason to ask about sounded like Tamanrut, a name we hunted later in vain. Either it isn’t considered worth identifying, or our maps were poor, or we dreamed the whole occurrence that made us ask.

The evening of the last cigarette, a long way back before the Caps, had three distinctions: the cold, the location, and Jeepers being violently ill from sunstroke. That was the one time dufflebags were white and stiff with frost the next morning and their occupants more or less ditto. We were camping in a narrow oued, not one of our more attractive bivouacs and without a
point d’eau
. The road, or really track, alongside one edge of our dry streambed, is passable by four-wheel drive, the go-every-wheres, but was not being traveled by any just then. Reaching a good long way across the desert from Tam, this track is said to tie in with some kind of inter-town artery but from what we see of it appears to have a single destination. In any case it provides a curious note on what constitutes a tourist attraction, also what can come to constitute some semblance of history in a place without history. The end of and sole reason for at least one long arduous loop of the road is the tiny and never much used hermitage of Father Charles de Foucauld, just below the summit, of spectacular outlook to be sure, of the Assekrem.

The unwitting perpetrator of this one and only showplace of the entire Hoggar, outside of scenery, born a wealthy viscount in Strasbourg in 1858 and orphaned in childhood, lived altogether a smash hit of a scenario and one that is not finished yet, almost seventy years after his death. The one movie that has been made from it, in the 1930’s, must have done the material less than justice, to earn such scanty notice, but aside from a few stills reproduced in biographies that has to be filed here under don’t know, can’t say. One piece of bad luck for it was that it could not have been worse timed politically. The drama is not one to fare well among the pro-Marxist, anti-imperialist fervors, amounting
often enough to intellectual strangleholds, of the second quarter of our century. Far as it must still and always be from any recollection in tranquility, as viewed now in a somewhat different remove from those ideological as well as literal battlefronts, the Foucauld story can be seen as having everything needed for a cinematic prizewinner, including several varieties of religious experience.

Some statistical economist could easily figure what all that romance, pedigree, adventure, exploration, intellect, renunciation, exorbitant piety and finally martyrdom now mean in terms of francs per minute of Algerian national revenue. And as with all modern-day showplaces of which the origin was some form of religious travail or conviction, I doubt if Father de Foucauld would have cared much for the procession of go-everywhere cars to his mountain top. I say
his
because in nomad country you get out of the habit of thinking in terms of private ownership of land. If the spot suited him and nobody else was there first I suppose it was his for the time being.

Our camp the night before was in a far narrower and rockier draw, swept by strong wind, between forbidding if not quite sheer mountain walls, much as I imagine the scene of the Flatters massacre. Luckily I hadn’t yet learned about that so couldn’t harbor morbid thoughts about it. Jeepers, who for two days against all advice and arguments had worn neither chèche nor shirt nor even long trousers, pulled stones together for a wall two feet high to shield his parents from the wind in the night, and another the same for himself and Flora, such as we had seen abandoned by the nomad families or larger groups in many spots, when failure of water or goat and camel fodder made them move on; other walls of the kind in a circle were said to have been their open-air mosques, while similar tiny enclosures were pens for the littlest kids, that last in its sweet, obsolete meaning of young goats.