Flyaway / Windfall. Desmond Bagley
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all dead.’
‘No water?’
He shook his head. ‘Goddamn Arabs. They wanted loot and they didn’t care how they got it.’
‘And you came back here after the war?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I let the war go on without me. During the time I was walking through the desert I got to thinking. I’d never seen such space, such openness. And the desert is clean. You know, you can go without washing for quite a time here and you’re still clean – you don’t stink. I liked the place. Couldn’t say as much for the people, though.’ He poured some more mint tea. ‘The Chaamba Arabs around El Golea aren’t too bad, but those bastards in the Maghreb would skin a quarter and stretch the skin into a dollar.’
‘What’s the Maghreb?’
‘The coastal strip in between the Mediterranean and the Atlas.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, early in ’43 I got a letter to say my Pop was dead. He was the only family I had, so I had no urge to go back to the States. And General Eisenhower and General Patton and more of the top brass were proposing to go to Italy. I didn’t fancy that, so when the army went north I came south looking for more favourable folks than Arabs. I found ’em, and I’m still here.’
I smiled. ‘You deserted?’
‘It’s been known as that,’ he admitted. ‘But, hell; ain’t that what a desert’s for?’
I laughed at the unexpected pun. ‘What did you do before you joined the army?’
‘Fisherman,’ he said. ‘Me and my Pop sailed a boat out o’ Bar Harbor. That’s in Maine. Never did like fishing much.’
Fisherman! That was a hell of a change of pace. I suppose it worked on the same principle that the best recruiting ground for the US Navy is Kansas. I said, ‘You’re a long way from the sea now.’
‘Yeah, but I can take you to a place in the Ténéré near Bilma – that’s down in Niger and over a thousand miles from the nearest ocean – where you can pick up sea-shells from the ground in hundreds. Some of them are real pretty. The sea’s been here and gone away. Maybe it’ll come back some day.’
‘Ever been back to the States?’
‘No; I’ve been here thirty-five years and like to die here,’ he said peacefully.
Mokhtar was away a long time, nearly five hours, and when he came back he had the gutted carcass of a gazelle slung across his shoulders. Byrne helped him butcher it, talking the while.
Presently he came over to me and squinted into the sun. ‘Getting late,’ he said. ‘I reckon we’ll stay here the night. Billson is either between here and Assekrem or he ain’t. If he is, we’ll find him tomorrow. If he ain’t, a few hours won’t make no difference.’
‘All right.’
‘And we’ve got fresh meat. Mokhtar tells me he stalked that gazelle for twenty kilometres and downed it in one shot.’
‘You mean he walked twenty kilometres!’
‘More. He had to come back. But he circled a bit, so say under thirty. That’s nothing for a Targui. Anyway, Mokhtar’s one of the old school; he learned to shoot with a muzzle-loader. With one of those you have to kill with one shot because the gazelle spooks and gets clear away before you can reload. But he likes a breech-action repeater better.’
And so we stayed under the shadow of Ilamen that night. I lay in the open, wrapped in a djellaba provided by Byrne, and looked up at those fantastic stars. A sickle moon arose but did little to dim the splendour of those faraway lights.
I thought of Byrne. Hesther Raulier had compared him with Billson, calling him, ‘another crazy man’. But the madness of Byrne was quite different from the neurotic obsession of Billson; his was the madness that had struck many white men – not many Americans, mostly Europeans – Doughty, Burton, Lawrence, Thesiger – the lure of the desert. There was a peacefulness and a sanity about Byrne’s manner which was very comforting.
I thought in wonder of the sea-shells to be picked up from the desert a thousand miles from the sea but had no fore-shadowing that I would be picking them myself. The night was calm and still. I suddenly became aware of the startling incongruity of Max Stafford, hot-shot businessman from the City of London, lying in a place improbably called Atakor beneath the Finger of God which was not far from the End of the World.
Suddenly London ceased to matter. Lord Brinton and Andrew McGovern ceased to matter; Charlie Malleson and Jack Ellis ceased to matter; Gloria and Alix Aarvik ceased to matter. All the pettifogging business of our so-called civilization seemed to slough away like an outworn skin and I felt incredibly happy.
I slept.
I woke in the thin light of dawn conscious of movement and sound. When I lifted my head I saw Byrne filling the petrol tank from a jerrican – it was that metallic noise that had roused me. I leaned up on one elbow and saw Mokhtar in the desert mosque; he was making obeisances to the east in the dawn ritual of Islam. I waited until he had finished because I did not want to disturb his devotions, then I arose.
Thirty minutes later after a breakfast of cold roast venison, bread and hot mint tea we were on our way again, a long plume of dust stretching away behind us. Slowly the majestic peak of Ilamen receded and new vistas of tortured rock came into view. According to Byrne, we were on a well-travelled road but to a man more accustomed to city streets and motorway driving that seemed improbable. The so-called road was vestigial, distinguishable only by boulders a shade smaller than those elsewhere, and the truck was taking a beating. As for it being well-travelled I did not see a single person moving on it all the time I was in Atakor.
Nearly three hours later Byrne pointed ahead. ‘Assekrem!’
There was a large hill or a small mountain, depending on how you looked at it, on the top of which appeared to be a building. ‘Is that a house?’ I asked, wondering who would build on a mountain top in the middle of a wilderness.
‘It’s the Hermitage. Tell you about it later.’
We drove on and, at last, Byrne stopped at the foot of the mountain. There seemed to be traces of long-gone cultivation about; the outlines of fields and now dry irrigation ditches. Byrne said, ‘Now we climb to the top.’
‘For God’s sake, why?’
‘To see what’s on the other side,’ he said sardonically. ‘Come on.’
And so we climbed Assekrem. It was by no means a mountaineering feat; a track zig-zagged up the mountain, steep but not unbearably so, and yet I felt out of breath and panted for air. Half way up Byrne obligingly stopped for a breather, although he did not seem in discomfort.
I leaned against the rock wall. ‘I thought I was fitter than this.’
‘Altitude. When you get to the top you’ll be nine thousand feet high.’
I looked down to the plain below where I saw the truck with Mokhtar sitting in its shade. ‘This hill isn’t nine thousand feet high.’
‘Above sea level,’ said Byrne. ‘At Tam we were four and a half thousand high, and we’ve been climbing ever since.’ He rearranged his veil as he was always doing.
‘What’s this about a Hermitage?’
‘Ever hear of Charles de Foucauld?’
‘No.’
‘Frenchman, a Trappist monk. In his youth, so I hear, he was a hellion, but he caught religion bad in Morocco. He took his vows and came out here to help the Tuareg. I suppose he did help them in his way. Anyway, most of what the outside world knows about the Tuareg came from de Foucauld.’
‘When was this?’
‘About 1905. He lived in Tam then, but it wasn’t much of a place in those days. In 1911 he moved here and built the Hermitage with his own hands. He