Sunday, November 06, 2005
Above the goats, waiting to fall
Then we slept. I woke up a few hours later shaking with cold. It was ridiculous. I was fully dressed with three shirts, a hooded sweatshirt and a thick ski cap, wrapped around with a large sheet. I removed the remaining clothing from my bag and spread it over my body. It made little difference and I slept poorly. Morning commotion woke us. They were loading another forty sheep into the back. This did not really seem possible. But nobody with any power over the situation looked the least bit concerned and I focused my energies on finding a shack that would serve us Nescafé with concentrated sugar milk.
I was able to install myself on the roof of the cab facing backwards, legs dangling into the area for goats. When someone protested about my new location I played dumb and exchanged Arabic pleasantries with my neighbor. I thought that this seat would be a real delight. I was sitting on our bag of foodstuff with the ambition of protecting its contents. There were five men behind me facing forwards who had the best seats on the truck. They were teenage boys (Sean and I suspected that they were the same ones from the room marked for narcotic offenses that we saw as we passed through the police station seeking official permission from the Nigerienne officials for our somewhat unconventional trip); all friends and very defensive of their space. Others were crowded around me.
The turbulence was much worse up here and the pulverized essence of goat filth from down below was carried in a vicious updraft straight into my face. I wrapped a shirt around my head in imitation of a turban, anchoring it with my ski cap and dividing them with my glasses. I had to hold on for my life or at least to avoid impaling myself on goat horns or breaking my legs. We were not driving on a road; it was just a deeply rutted sand track over dunes and through rocky wasteland. I would have been fine if I had thought to attach our bag of foodstuffs to some part of the truck; but I had not done this and the foodstuff bag was advancing, inch by inch, bump by bump, over the lip of the roof toward the ten foot drop onto the people below. It was a heavy bag; it would injure however many people it struck and then they would injure me. I began by removing a sock from my left foot, looping it through my belt and tying it to my backpack which one of the teenagers was sitting on. With the other sock I made a handhold out of a security rope tied so tightly that I could not slip my fingers beneath. Now I, at least, would not fall; I was clear to work on the problem of my vanishing danger seat.
I tried pushing the bag backwards; but things were usurping its place. I sought in vain for something to connect it to the truck's upper deck. All of my attempts involved groping around the asses and gripping hands of other men. None of my attempts worked and none of my attempts were popular. My neighbor was the only person sympathetic to my plight, perhaps because we were locked into a food and water sharing ritual and both suffered from the well situated and gradually reclining teens. Eventually I got Sean's attention from below and we managed over the course of fifteen minutes, as I balanced on a wire strung over the holding area, to work the bag gently loose, to the point where he and Tuuli could catch it when it fell and swing it beneath them.
With this accomplished I felt somewhat more secure. I was able to watch in relative comfort as an unholy vomit fest began beneath my feet that left large portions of the floor, quite a few articles of clothing, Sean's backpack and a great number of sheep covered in the underworked stomachfruit of some deeply ill and very unhappy travelers. Sean and Tuuli were about two feet from this unpredictable fountain. The goats were unperturbed. They suffered in admirable silence. The shepherds could actually lift them by the ears without causing complaint. There hides were not pierced by one another's horns or hooves. They just dealt with it. From this vantage point, I admired them.
The only language I could use for communication was Arabic and I engaged whole heartedly in debates about where it was possible to sit and who had the good chair. The man to my left was from Niger, traveling to Libya for work, the man to my right was a Chadian who anticipated a successful crossing into Italy for work. I was an Irishman going to Bilma because Egyptian Bedouins had taught me to love the desert.
The landscape gradually emptied of everything that was not sand. From my perch I could see the occasional Tuareg caravan, with up to several hundred loaded camels, returning with animal salt from Bilma. They purchase huge salt licks for approximately forty cents. After two and a half weeks of walking through the desert, they can sell the same licks for about fifteen dollars in Agadez. That is why this is the only viable old school caravan still operating with great regularity today. Fuel for the truck costs far more than straw for the camels and makes vehicular salt shipment cost prohibitive.
Long ridges of dunes, for the most part, were more than a kilometer distant, miniaturized and hard to appreciate. From time to time we drew near them and could see with what purity and delicacy they had been composed. The truck drove fast and relentlessly. A few times I saw speeding black dots in the distance, kicking up dust, driving in formation; I was sure we were going to be robbed. There were nearly fifty people in this truck who were carrying everything they owned and everything that established their legal identities. It would be a good target. But this Libyan driver was also not messing around. He would certainly give any aggressor a mean chase and his truck could probably handle deeper sand; also, it is impossible to guess what kind of arsenal he had concealed in the ample cabin space.
We stopped when we reached a giant covered well in the middle of nowhere, established by a coalition of NGOs who put their names on the only billboard in the Sahara. Every year 80-100 people die making this crossing on trucks. Most die of dehydration. Some of them must fall off. There were at least three meager figures straddling the rails of our truck like gunshot cowboys. Nobody would have been shocked if one of them dropped or failed to wake up in the morning. I do not know what we would have done with the body. We were told that our stop at the well would last just thirty minutes so we neglected to cook a meal. Instead we mixed two cans of Palestinian Foul and a can of tuna into a plastic cup and ate it raw. Then we waited. We waited for another hour and half and got hungry. Then our departure was signaled. Tuuli wanted my seat so I gave it to her.
Then we slept. I woke up a few hours later shaking with cold. It was ridiculous. I was fully dressed with three shirts, a hooded sweatshirt and a thick ski cap, wrapped around with a large sheet. I removed the remaining clothing from my bag and spread it over my body. It made little difference and I slept poorly. Morning commotion woke us. They were loading another forty sheep into the back. This did not really seem possible. But nobody with any power over the situation looked the least bit concerned and I focused my energies on finding a shack that would serve us Nescafé with concentrated sugar milk.
I was able to install myself on the roof of the cab facing backwards, legs dangling into the area for goats. When someone protested about my new location I played dumb and exchanged Arabic pleasantries with my neighbor. I thought that this seat would be a real delight. I was sitting on our bag of foodstuff with the ambition of protecting its contents. There were five men behind me facing forwards who had the best seats on the truck. They were teenage boys (Sean and I suspected that they were the same ones from the room marked for narcotic offenses that we saw as we passed through the police station seeking official permission from the Nigerienne officials for our somewhat unconventional trip); all friends and very defensive of their space. Others were crowded around me.
The turbulence was much worse up here and the pulverized essence of goat filth from down below was carried in a vicious updraft straight into my face. I wrapped a shirt around my head in imitation of a turban, anchoring it with my ski cap and dividing them with my glasses. I had to hold on for my life or at least to avoid impaling myself on goat horns or breaking my legs. We were not driving on a road; it was just a deeply rutted sand track over dunes and through rocky wasteland. I would have been fine if I had thought to attach our bag of foodstuffs to some part of the truck; but I had not done this and the foodstuff bag was advancing, inch by inch, bump by bump, over the lip of the roof toward the ten foot drop onto the people below. It was a heavy bag; it would injure however many people it struck and then they would injure me. I began by removing a sock from my left foot, looping it through my belt and tying it to my backpack which one of the teenagers was sitting on. With the other sock I made a handhold out of a security rope tied so tightly that I could not slip my fingers beneath. Now I, at least, would not fall; I was clear to work on the problem of my vanishing danger seat.
I tried pushing the bag backwards; but things were usurping its place. I sought in vain for something to connect it to the truck's upper deck. All of my attempts involved groping around the asses and gripping hands of other men. None of my attempts worked and none of my attempts were popular. My neighbor was the only person sympathetic to my plight, perhaps because we were locked into a food and water sharing ritual and both suffered from the well situated and gradually reclining teens. Eventually I got Sean's attention from below and we managed over the course of fifteen minutes, as I balanced on a wire strung over the holding area, to work the bag gently loose, to the point where he and Tuuli could catch it when it fell and swing it beneath them.
With this accomplished I felt somewhat more secure. I was able to watch in relative comfort as an unholy vomit fest began beneath my feet that left large portions of the floor, quite a few articles of clothing, Sean's backpack and a great number of sheep covered in the underworked stomachfruit of some deeply ill and very unhappy travelers. Sean and Tuuli were about two feet from this unpredictable fountain. The goats were unperturbed. They suffered in admirable silence. The shepherds could actually lift them by the ears without causing complaint. There hides were not pierced by one another's horns or hooves. They just dealt with it. From this vantage point, I admired them.
The only language I could use for communication was Arabic and I engaged whole heartedly in debates about where it was possible to sit and who had the good chair. The man to my left was from Niger, traveling to Libya for work, the man to my right was a Chadian who anticipated a successful crossing into Italy for work. I was an Irishman going to Bilma because Egyptian Bedouins had taught me to love the desert.
The landscape gradually emptied of everything that was not sand. From my perch I could see the occasional Tuareg caravan, with up to several hundred loaded camels, returning with animal salt from Bilma. They purchase huge salt licks for approximately forty cents. After two and a half weeks of walking through the desert, they can sell the same licks for about fifteen dollars in Agadez. That is why this is the only viable old school caravan still operating with great regularity today. Fuel for the truck costs far more than straw for the camels and makes vehicular salt shipment cost prohibitive.
Long ridges of dunes, for the most part, were more than a kilometer distant, miniaturized and hard to appreciate. From time to time we drew near them and could see with what purity and delicacy they had been composed. The truck drove fast and relentlessly. A few times I saw speeding black dots in the distance, kicking up dust, driving in formation; I was sure we were going to be robbed. There were nearly fifty people in this truck who were carrying everything they owned and everything that established their legal identities. It would be a good target. But this Libyan driver was also not messing around. He would certainly give any aggressor a mean chase and his truck could probably handle deeper sand; also, it is impossible to guess what kind of arsenal he had concealed in the ample cabin space.
We stopped when we reached a giant covered well in the middle of nowhere, established by a coalition of NGOs who put their names on the only billboard in the Sahara. Every year 80-100 people die making this crossing on trucks. Most die of dehydration. Some of them must fall off. There were at least three meager figures straddling the rails of our truck like gunshot cowboys. Nobody would have been shocked if one of them dropped or failed to wake up in the morning. I do not know what we would have done with the body. We were told that our stop at the well would last just thirty minutes so we neglected to cook a meal. Instead we mixed two cans of Palestinian Foul and a can of tuna into a plastic cup and ate it raw. Then we waited. We waited for another hour and half and got hungry. Then our departure was signaled. Tuuli wanted my seat so I gave it to her.
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