Salon Wanderlust | Lost in the Sahara

Illustration by Joel Elrod

T H I S+W E E K
> Lost in the Sahara
By Jeffrey Tayler
A simple overnight trip becomes a battle for survival
Dunescapes
By Pamela Roberson
A desert portfolio
Letter from Amsterdam
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
Toke of the Town
D E P A R T M E N T S
The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
Running on full
Mondo Weirdo
Lions and rhinos and loos -- oh my!
Readers' Tips and Tales
Hitchhiking adventures

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LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, Sept. 9, 1997

Bali low
By Cintra Wilson
Loveless in paradise
A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

_________________ lost in the
_____sahara
_____A FREAK SANDSTORM TURNS A SIMPLE DESERT
_____EXCURSION INTO A DESPERATE DRIVE.
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"I have seen the Fates stamp like a camel in the dark:
Those they touch, they kill, and those they miss live to grow old."
-- The Ode of Zuhayr
BY JEFFREY TAYLER | "he's a thief!" shouted Abdullah. "He has a knife and will slit your throat from ear to ear!" seconded his friend, making a slashing motion across his neck. Both teenagers stood by my car door and pressed their heads excitedly through my window as they described the fate I was delivering myself to by hiring Aziz as guide for a night excursion into the desert. Aziz had gone to fetch water, tea and blankets from his house nearby.
I had driven south across Morocco for 15 straight hours, finally reaching the Draa Valley and the Sahara as the sun dropped behind the palms. Around 9 that evening I was nearing M'hamid and the end of the tarmac when I stopped in Tagoumite at a roadside restaurant.
Aziz approached my table as I sopped up the last juice from a lamb tagine with a swatch of unleavened bread, sweat dribbling down my temples, my back aching from the Peugeot's bucket seat. He seemed stunted and looked younger than his professed age of 18. But a way he had of lowering his eyes when he talked made him look woebegone, vulnerable even, not criminal, and I felt I could recognize a crook after working for more than two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in thief-infested Marrakech to the north. After a bit of bargaining, we settled on $10 as his fee. The sally into the sands he was offering seemed a manageable outing, involving only a 10-mile drive along a piste -- a rutted desert track -- that branched off the paved road north of M'hamid, a night on the dunes, and an early return the next day.
Still, the teenagers' words rattled me. Before Aziz returned, I asked about him in the restaurant and at a store nearby. He checked out. But on the way out of town my suspicion got the better of me. I pulled over.
"Those boys say you're a thief, a murderer even."
His eyes bucked as though I had slapped him.
"Give me your national ID card," I said. He pulled it from his back pocket. I got out and examined it in the headlights -- it had expired last year, but he was who he said he was. I then hid the card without his seeing where.
"I'm sure there'll be no problem," I said, locking gazes with him back in the car. The darkened desert outside was utterly silent -- the Sahara is a domain of silence -- there were only our faces in the dashboard light. "You'll get your card back when we return."
We drove on. At a spot marked on the road by a white arrow, we parted with the tarmac and bounced onto hamada, the cracked, stony flatland of the Sahara. My headlights illuminated the corrugations, faint ruts of the piste. For an hour or so we followed them, until our lights hit dunes. We halted. Aziz scrambled out, lit the lantern and ignited coals in the sand on which he perched a teapot.
A flashlight appeared from around the dune. Footsteps edged through the silence.
"Aaa, Aziz!"
"Aaa, Ali!"
It was Ali, Aziz's cousin, a tender of camels from the 'Ariib tribe of M'hamid. In his immaculate white robes and pointy-toed white slippers, Ali looked as though he might be dressed for a mint tea ceremony in any tiled Moroccan courtyard. His nose was aquiline, his brow broad, his legs and arms sinewy. He sat down cross-legged at the edge of the blanket. After a few minutes, I saw he was no simple Bedouin; his speech resounded with the classical Arabic of the Koran. As we talked, he revealed that he had studied Arabic literature at the university in Marrakech, but preferred a solitary life on the sands to the bustle of the towns.
"Allah, Allah," he intoned, rising a short while later. "There may be a wind tonight. If need be, come sleep in my tent." He took leave of us and plodded away around the dune, his light a bobbing white orblet on the sand.
Aziz extinguished his kerosene lantern, and I was left momentarily blinded, the image of its yellow flame still flooding my retinas. I lay back on my blanket, settling my elbows and ankles into the sand beneath. A soft crushing sound, a poosh-poosh-poosh, came floating through the dark. A camel, said Aziz. Flat on my back, I gazed upward, and the sky resolved itself into a luminous blue dome, not dark at all, really, not even far away; stars swam as if in holding patterns; infinity extended beyond Polaris, beyond Jupiter and Sirius. I perceived depth in the firmament, or thought I did; it seemed perceptible that the Earth was a globe suspended in space. The poosh-poosh-poosh of the camel's padded hooves lulled me into reverie. I slipped into sleep, then out again; I felt myself levitating toward the stars, aware of warm breaths of wind, of wafts of warm wind, of blue infinity and wafting warm wind.
I closed my eyes to the starlight.

NEXT PAGE | A cyclonic rhapsody on the sands

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ILLUSTRATION BY JOEL ELROD