Miss Webster and Chérif Read online

  ‘Water is very close,’ sang Abdou.

  But all around her she saw nothing, nothing but long stretches of grey rock. When she opened her eyes again they were grinding up a little incline. A small jeep trundled towards them. She stared at this apparition emerging from nowhere. Both vehicles stopped and negotiated one set of tyres off the edge of the road in the potentially murderous hamada. Abdou turned down the radio and leaned out. A black man with shining polished skin lowered his window. His hairless arm was a deep blue-black and his face a mass of lines and folds. The conversation was conducted in broken French, so she could follow what was said, but the content seemed utterly surreal.

  ‘Peace be with you.’

  ‘Peace be with you also.’

  ‘Are you well?’

  ‘Praise be to God, I am very well. Are you well?’

  ‘I am well.’

  ‘Your family is well?’

  ‘Yes, thanks be to God, they are very well.’

  ‘And your family?’

  ‘They are well.’

  ‘May God protect everyone dear to you.’

  ‘May he bless you and all of yours.’

  ‘Have you seen the pool hidden in the hills of Tinnazit?’

  ‘I have seen it. The water is plentiful and sweet.’

  ‘Were you alone there?’

  ‘No one else came.’

  ‘May God preserve you and your people.’

  ‘May He bless you and all your sons.’

  ‘May God go with you upon all your journeys.’

  ‘May He be present in all your travels.’

  The taxi lurched back on to the road and the jeep continued, draped in sheets of dust. Abdou turned up the radio. Elizabeth began to wonder if she had hallucinated the entire thing.

  The light boiled, hard and angry, glinting on every surface, near and far. She removed her dark glasses briefly only to replace them at once. The rocks shimmered, as if alive, grinning brilliant and purposeful, directly into the taxi’s windows. She closed her eyes again. She was being carried forth into eternity by the unknown charioteer, to an accompaniment of raucous dance music, interspersed by passionate outbursts of Arabic.

  ‘Madame Webster! Awake! Look! We have arrived.’

  She jolted back into the fiery, scorching world in a state of shock. A rushing breath of hot wind stirred her veils, her lips felt cracked and dry. She was still propped up, a little lopsided, in the back of the taxi. The music vanished. A giant silence, tangible and vast, embraced and held her, tense and startled in its grasp. There was Abdou, wonderfully pleased with himself, holding the door.

  ‘I will install you by the pool. Then I will arrange the picnic.’

  Another sound came to her. It was the sound of water falling gently into water. She clambered out of the taxi and staggered forth into the rocks. The landscape itself breathed heat, but remained apparently bereft of every living thing. They had abandoned the road and were parked beside an enclave of leaning boulders, all taller than a man, which appeared to be plotting or praying, bound together in a sinister huddle. And from somewhere down amid the rocks came the sound of water. She peered into the precarious gulf before her, and saw, some twenty feet below, a tiny green place, a secret hidden crevice that smelt of water. She grabbed her sticks and tottered down the path, supported by Abdou who had gathered up a handful of sweaty cushions and a folded rug. All she could smell now was fresh, clear water.

  The tiny ravine represented an oasis in miniature. She beheld a miraculous patterning of small trees, acacias, thorny mimosa, shady tamarisk; bright moss and tiny ferns actually clung to the side of the pool. The small pond of uncertain depth was replenished by a steady, assiduous runnel of clear water pouring out of the rocks. Elizabeth Webster stood over the pool, marvelling at the clear waters beneath her feet. She imagined that she saw something move, flicker and vanish among the curving stones below the surface. Abdou inspected her shoes and then carried out a sedulous, investigative form of housework on the flat stone resting in the shade. He brushed it down and peered round all the sides.

  ‘Scorpions!’ he announced. ‘I like to be careful.’

  She looked at him, horrified.

  ‘They crawl into beds at night,’ he waved his hands, ‘or fall from ceilings. But don’t worry. I will clear them all out. Nothing can come near you.’ He handed her a bottle of Fanta and a straw.

  ‘Don’t drink it, if it isn’t bottled.’ Abdou delivered this maxim as if it was another piece of desert wisdom about the goodness of Allah. When he returned, staggering down the path with a plastic cool box and a giant umbrella, she was perched on the cushions sucking at her straw like a child, peering delightedly into the pool, relishing the emerald moss and the deep shade of the tamarisk.

  ‘Abdou!’ she burst out, for she believed herself the witness to a miracle, ‘there are fish in this pool.’

  He nodded, very pleased.

  ‘Picnic first, then siesta!’ he commanded, his dreadful teeth making him look like a murderer. Miss Webster could think of no way to convince him of the urgent need to replace them with a gleaming set of fakes.

  There was always water in this great desert. We can still see the ancient watercourses cutting through the giant massifs. If you dig down in the dried-up wadis you can find water, sometimes fifteen, maybe twenty feet beneath you. It is harder to find the wells in the desert. They can be marked by a simple pattern of sticks in the sand. You could walk past them without knowing. But far beneath you, buried in the deep rocks, left there from the days, many millions of years ago, when the great lakes covered the desert, huge caverns of water lie hidden, the reservoirs known as the fossil aquifers. The plains here were once savannah grasslands, peppered with lakes. Antelope roamed here, grazing on the long grass, moving from lake to lake, following the rivers. Here zebras browsed by the pools, and drifting herds of buffalo, and even elephants, patrolled the plains. We have found their bones buried deep in the salt depressions that were once the great lakes. And the water still lies beneath us. It has ebbed away and descended, down, down, down through the porous rocks to the great buried spaces in the sleeping earth, but it is still there, still waiting, secret, hidden.

  Elizabeth Webster dreamed this crepuscular buried mass of water. It saturated her brain. She heard the rumbling crackling mass of the flash floods bursting the sandbanks, desecrating the mud houses of the lost desert peoples. She saw the giant black rainstorms sweeping the masses of the Ahaggar and the swelling rivers beginning again in the gravel valleys of the Anti-Atlas, rushing away down the wadis only to vanish without trace in the rolling wilderness of sand. She looked back into the crevasses and ravines that had been barren only days before, and beheld the gleaming green moss of fresh plants, which the floods had seeded, nourished and then abandoned. The rising flood had proved that its promises were fickle. For this is a place where nothing lives for very long.

  ‘It is an old desert saying that the date palm must keep its feet in the water and its head in the fire.’

  Had she dreamed that too? Abdou specialised in garrulous trivia. For indeed her feet were in water and her head was on fire. The siesta had transformed her forehead into a furnace. She swallowed two aspirins with a gulp of Fanta and subsided once more into the copious cushions. Gradually, she sank into a comatose lethargy, like La Grande Odalisque, whose public had deserted her now that she had grown old. When she awoke her temperature had dropped and the desert, whose rocks showed their fangs above the green ravine, was peopled with long bounding shadows. Abdou finished reciting his prayers and wrapped up a little carpet upon which he had carried out a brief transaction with Allah. Elizabeth Webster gazed up at the giant sky, which had gulped back down the white haze of fire. It was still very hot, but the desert no longer held a vicious swab of scorching air against her mouth, daring her to breathe. She stood up, wavering, and jabbed one of her sticks into the pebbles, like Aaron’s rod.

  And then they were bobbing along the gravel once more
. It was a complete mystery to Elizabeth Webster how Abdou knew where he was going. There were no landmarks of any kind that she could discern. The music was re-instated, but it was softer, more melancholy than the thumping dance music, and more appropriate to the later hour, a strange braying song, backed by a zither, that accompanied the shudders and jolts of the Citroën. She stared out of the dusty windows, hypnotised. And then she saw the dunes.

  Directly in front of them, with no warning given, several long banks of caramel sand, shivering with threads of gold, suddenly materialised out of empty space. As the car thudded towards them they grew in scale and loomed high above the roof of the vehicle. The great dunes shivered and rustled in the light; there was an illusion of movement, yet they remained still. Here they were at last, the sandscapes of legend, sculpted into ripples, ruffles and flutes, kissed by the hot wind. She looked up at the sharp crest; running down the flanks of the dunes was a constant trickle of blown sand.

  Harmattan.

  ‘The wind has another name in every place where it blows,’ said Abdou, ‘and the grains are dirty like smoke in the big storms. It gets into everything. Everything! But you miss the worst. The big blow comes later.’ He hunched himself up in a despairing shrug, keeping one claw on the wheel. And then they were driving on sand. The road was washed by sand. The road vanished beneath the sand. The dunes pushed towards them, horribly close, now nearly twenty feet high, looming up beside the black taxi which crawled like an escaping beetle along the windward edge.

  ‘You wanted sand. Voilà les sables!’

  She lowered the window and stared at the great humpbacked dunes, unable to gauge their extent and size.

  ‘It’s the wind that embraces the dunes and gives them their identities,’ said Abdou. ‘They have all different shapes. And sometimes they build up, huge, like a holy dome, but then I come back a week later and they are gone.’

  The shivering dunes were streaked with red and gold, luminous with subtle, leaping shadows. She stared at their slopes and crests. The desert now spoke to her disoriented soul. I am neither merciful nor malignant. I am neither cruel nor compassionate. I am neither intelligible nor opaque. I neither spare nor kill. I do not make peace or create evil. I am simply here, before you. I am I am I am.

  Abdou heard the old woman whispering to herself and immediately feared the worst. Sunstroke.

  ‘Have another Fanta. You are not used to heat. You must drink.’

  He passed her another bottle. It hadn’t been that hot as far as he was concerned. Thirty-five degrees at midday was quite normal for this time of year. And it was already much cooler. They were having a good day.

  ‘I am,’ murmured Elizabeth in English, her cracked lips quivering at the austere, rustling dunes.

  ‘Mais bien sûr,’ agreed Abdou cheerfully, looking out for the first crowns of the date palms amidst the mountains of sand.

  The oasis town solidified like a wondrous apparition sprouting from the desert: suddenly, there it was, like a theatrical magic turn, fabulous as the overwhelming dunes. At first she saw a huge couronne, a bizarre crown of green palms encircled with thorny scrub, then, as they descended into a little depression, they were surrounded by gardens and squat, unpainted buildings. Some houses had no glass in their windows, just blankets pulled across blank square gaps, as if the eyes of the buildings had been put out. The red and umber walls crumbled gently at the corners, clearly made from packed mud. Some roofs boasted real ridge tiles, others, covered with the same thick, dried dirt, slapped on with trowels, looked less reliable. Several two-storeyed buildings guarded the main street; one of these had a striped orange awning set up on the roof. Many others had rough stick and tarpaulin shelters projecting out over the doors. A tin-shack garage disgorged the innards of a dozen dismembered cars into the sand. Two men grappling among the remains waved to Abdou as the taxi crawled into the street, the only street. The road beneath their tyres was solid and flat, but thickly coated with drifting sand. Further away she could see a huge battered sign advertising the HÔTEL DES VOYAGEURS. Between the houses she caught glimpses of irrigated vegetable patches, fenced off and defended against the nibbling goats. Chickens darted across their path, and then suddenly the taxi was surrounded by a mass of running children. Abdou coasted to a halt in front of a general store. An insane collection of goods, laid out side by side, dusted with sand, confronted them on a makeshift porch: teapots, carpets, pumps for tyres, pumps for bicycles, pumps for siphoning liquids, pumps for unblocking drains, packets of screwdrivers and pliers in different sizes, storm lanterns, fertiliser, seed packets, plastic buckets, two green Hammerlin wheelbarrows, rolls of wire, rope, all colours, all sizes, tins of putty, nails and wrenches, tarpaulin querbas made of goatskin for carrying water, two leather saddles for giant camels, highly decorated, a box of pumice stones, a dozen jerricans and a mass of tacky-looking carrier sacks with zips on the top. Just inside the doorway she could see a stand with every known form of battery, a pile of blankets, grey, dark blue and maroon, and a row of plastic models representing Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator.

  Abdou stepped out in front of the store, pretended to rush the children, who began screaming delightedly, and then commenced yelling in a language that might have been Arabic. The children mobbed the taxi. A big man in a tatty brown djellaba surged out of the shop and bundled them out of the way. He loomed in at the back window.

  ‘Madame Webster! Welcome. I am Saïda’s brother-in-law. She told me that you were coming.’

  He proudly produced a cellphone from his pocket and made it play the theme tune from The Lord of the Rings. Elizabeth Webster, now completely drenched in the great I AM, had decided that nothing would surprise her. He kissed her hand and she descended from the taxi like a queen. All the children backed off, tantalised and impressed.

  ‘Enchanté, Madame. My name is Massoud.’

  ‘Ravie de vous connaître.’

  The children gawped at the veiled old lady, open-mouthed. A small crowd of boys gathered to watch her sweep past the outlandish bazaar, through the dark shrouded shop and into a cloistered, irrigated courtyard. Flecked blue paint peeled from the concrete arches, but beneath them lurked a cool swept space, equipped with low seats ripped from defunct vehicles and decorated with carpets and cushions. The garden blossomed scents and colours. After the vast monochrome austerity of the desert she gazed into a living kaleidoscope. She realised that everything rising from the tended earth was edible: aubergines, peppers, carrots, chillies, pumpkins and two magnificent lemon trees. Irrigation channels built of packed earth glistened between the rows. There was a stone well at the centre and a fine modern diesel pump set up beside it.

  ‘We acquired this from the World Food Programme,’ said Massoud proudly, indicating the pump and making the process of acquisition sound like an excessively clever theft. He settled Miss Webster on one of the car seats and presented her with a range of soft drinks, from Coke to Orangina, in real glass bottles. Don’t drink it if it isn’t bottled. Miss Webster knew that these particular Orangina bottles had been discontinued in France years before. Massoud also proposed a draught of water from the well in an authentic pot-bellied pottery carafe. Abdou assured her that it was safe to drink, as it had been drawn directly from the rocky entrails of the earth.

  ‘It is very sweet and clean. The water here is famous.’

  ‘Thank you, Abdou. Thank you, Monsieur. I will have a mug of this water.’

  The two men bent double under the burden of their own copious hospitality. She wondered where they hid the women. So far, woman appeared to be a species either rare or extinct. Yet, these children must have surged out of a human womb. They cannot have reared up from the sand like earthworms. She looked at the suggestive swelling purple of a well-watered aubergine and saw, just beyond the plants, an olive face surrounded by jewellery, a woman’s face which resembled Saïda’s – rounder, fuller, older, but just as beautiful. The other woman squatted before her and clasped both her hands in
her own.

  ‘Welcome, Madame Webster. My sister has told me so much about you.’

  Yes, this was the other sister who had remained in the desert. The French was not as confident, the eyes less fiery and more speculative, and the voice had the soft insistent trickle of the sands. Elizabeth read the face shrewdly and she was not wrong. That servile cunning, never far from the surface of Saïda’s glance, could not be detected in the face of this desert woman. Saïda had been contaminated by the habits of service, her polite smile purchased so many times that it stared back fixed, like a mask stitched to her face. This woman retained the freedom to meet anyone’s gaze. Yet she was watching, waiting for her husband’s gesture of permission to remain beside her guest. She presented a tray with an ornate silver teapot, several glasses painted in different colours and a plate of dates. When she set it down Elizabeth noticed a tiny pool of fine white sand collected beneath the stubby little feet of the pot.

  ‘I am called Fatima.’

  The men melted away. The tea tasted very sweet. The conversation came straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

  ‘You are alone, Madame.’

  ‘What do you mean, alone?’

  ‘You travel alone.’

  ‘Yes. Is that odd?’

  ‘Here it is odd for a woman to travel without her husband and her children.’

  ‘I have no husband and no children.’

  Fatima bowed, but expressed no indication of pity or surprise. She had expected that answer. The entire exchange evolved as an elaborate charade. Elizabeth Webster drank some more very sweet thé à la menthe and waited to see what would happen next. She became fascinated by the devious shiftiness of the people amongst whom she had been sent. She sensed the existence of a hidden agenda, and waited for Fatima to declare her hand.

  ‘My sister wishes for you to meet her son. She wants him to study abroad. He is a very brilliant young man, but he loves the desert. He will miss the heat and the light if he travels to Europe. I have seen pictures of England and it is a green place of perpetual rain.’