The owner of the car is a 30-something Malian man who now lives in France and is going back down to see his family for Tabaski, the biggest Muslim holiday, which is starting three days from now. He's driven non-stop for three and a half days already from Paris, maybe with a couple of hours of sleep here and there at best, and is presently rolled up on a mat in the back of his van, sleeping like a puppy. When he stopped for me, the first thing he did was asking me if I had a driver's license. Then, as I shook my head he said "well, it's not difficult", and made me sit down. He briefly showed me how to start the engine -change the gear, turn the key, push the gas- and how to drive -gas right, brake left-, then supervised me starting the engine once on my own, and immediately threw himself onto the floor in the back, zonking out without further delay. Hesitantly at first I rolled off, quickly gaining in confidence. The road is long, the landscape bland, potholes to slalom around exist but aren't abundant, and traffic overtakes me once in a blue moon. After six hours I had to wake him cos there was going to be a police stop in the town announced to me on the horizon, as he had warned me before going to sleep. At once after showing his papers and paying his baksheesh tho, he went back to sleep again. He is sleeping so long, it seems he is catching up on every lost minute of sleep during the preceding days. Now it is my turn for vigil. I drive through the night, chasing the shadows with the headlights.
A couple of hours on and the sun is coming up in the far distance embedded in the pale violet morning haze like a slippery egg yolk. Rising steadily, soon hovering above the horizon like a firm golden rubberball.
So this is my first morning in the dessert, my limbs and eyes hurting, exhausted, but I still drive one. I turn my head to take a glimpse at my driver who hasn't changed position over the last few hours. On one side the dessert is stretching out -pretty unspectacular endless barren land- on the other side the sea -rusty shipwrecks run ashore on the beach popping up in almost the same gawky rhythm as the bus jolting over bumps in the road.
The road is long, longer even than Mamadou thought, since the only map he has is a hand-drawn leaflet a waiter in Marrakech has made him and the town of Tan-Tan on it is posited right next to the frontier which results in us driving the last 400 km with him incessantly mumbling, "We'll be there in the next twenty minutes" and "We should have got there long ago"... Finally I coil up myself, and am diving in and out of unconsciousness, as the vehicle rumbles on.
In Nouadhibou, the first Mauritanian town after the border, I bid my "driver" farewell, wish him godspeed and rest for a day. I want to see the dessert for a bit and soak in the local culture rather than traversing all too quickly to Black Africa.
I find a lift with a Flemish guy called, appropriately, Guy, who also takes on a young French couple who'll occupy the backseat. We'
re going to drive through the dessert. Usually you really should take a Moor as a guide, but since now there doesn't seem to be any space anymore and since Guy has done the trajectory already 11 times, to add to us merry four comes only our hook up with a Dutch couple and their dog who'll make their way with us in their as massive as old Mercedes Benz.
...
After a few hours of driving, when we take a break and stop the car for a minute, I catch sight of my first dunes: pure and young forever, forever baby-skinned limbs folding, forever reforming with the wind -but their substance, the sand as old as the continent. Ground rock.
The wind carries the silence down from the sky, but its delicate weave soon is torn by the insects incessant whirr in my ears. We move on before we get bitten too much.
In my sleepy state I like listening to the car engines grunt, the overtones taking off to a seperate level of perception, a higher sphere, the bass rumble on its own dragging us forward laboriously.
I always find that there is this place, precariously suspended between sleep and wakefulness, when i'm really really tired, but still hovering just outside the bubble of sweet temporary unconsciousness, where my hearing sense is at its most perceptive and clearest. Music attains its most enjoyable qualities, where i feel like i'm hovering on it, dissolving into it -really, only a tiny little bit like when you're on acid.
Unfortunately, obviously this moment is hard to hold, unconsciousness' dark throat always looming just beside.
Grasshoppers keep jumping in on me through the car window and back out into the wind. I shall not decide whether they are pretty or ugly creatures. I heard in Ghana you get them roasted on the street markets, but they remind me that the exoskeleton of a travel recital shall give me plenty of wobbly interior space to erupt into occasional poetry.
I see the landscape as a melody, a piece of music in our radioless landrover.The sand, the substance are the tonal system, the dunes melodies going up and down.
Repetition and variation the essence of our passing through the textures.
Sand being the main theme, but pale grass bushels, sporadic tress and rolling fields of pebbles joining the fugue. The stark clear sand dunes popping up from time to time, constitute the glorious chorus -pure, strong and melodious. The very act of our passing through represents the beat. After all, music, like driving, is a temporal delight. The landscape photographed right here and now wouldn't necessarily be amazing or even striking, it's the fluidity of its textures that is the very appeal.
Especially now, as we're sweeping over the sandy fields at a comparatively speedy 60 km/h, but Guy says he's hardly pushing down the gaspedal even. It feels a little bit like we are hovercrafting and I stick my hand out the window and grope the air thick with velocity.
We are approaching the sea again, in a hundred metre distance I can just about perceive it as a shiny narrow stripe of metal, goldscaled in the afternoon sun. We stop for a minute to stick our toes into the thick dark sand heavy with wetness and inhale the seabreeze heavy with the typical foul mixture of mud, dead fish, salt and seagull piss that always evokes that exotic sense of liberty in me, that i think is due to my having grown up in the middle of the continent far from any natural agglomeration of saltwater.
A couple of hours later we stop again next to a range of dunes for lunch and a few of us disperse in selected directions for liquid relief. With every step up the sandy slope its virgin surface breaks into shells and my feet sink in like into warm snow. Soon enough i've trudged my way far enough to feel on my own. A photo would capture the contrast of the bright, strong blue canvas of the sky and the almost orange dune all too beautifully, but it wouldn't manage to portrait, or induce, the private euphoria I am softly taking over by being here, and being able to grab the elusive matter with dark-tanned hands.
I look in the distance and it seems that the horizon exudes the sky and it stretches over my head and further and further as i turn, as far as the eye can reach, -rather than coming to a zaggy fuzzy halt midway.
I am sandwiched between two infinities, standing right inside the sky. The air alone, immense, is keeping me upright -the sand's only purpose seems to be tickling on my feet.
Back to the car to unpack my lunch. It's funny how canned tuna, warm mushy tomato and sunspoilt cheese (almost liquid) suddenly become the most delicious of meals by force of its being the only available. Even despite everyone's making mock-moans of pleasure about how delicious our canned luch really is I enjoy it.
We drive on a few hours and then stop for campfire and stories of FrankЄs first two Sahara crossings through Algeria and sleep in the sand when the embers fade.
Of course I sleep fitfully, as always. I am awake very early and my thoughts abandon to nightly ravings of thought. The moon here hangs differently in the sky from how I know it from Europe. It's sichle lies in the sky like a bowl waiting to be scoped out, like a scarab fallen on his rounded back, whereas further north it hangs upright.
And when I sleeplessly realize, or maybe more imagine, that what this night really is is none so poetic as a blanket sky hovering above me, but really just shivering little me, stuck to this planet by force of gravity, like a grain of sand to an eyeball, i'm glued down to a gigantic spherical piece of rock rolling in the vacuous socket of our galaxy, riding its same old groove. The stars not pinholes, but remote fierce fireballs.
I can feel it heave and pull its weight through space. And I even imagine the plateau I'm lying on as one gigantic heaving breast plate of one fat round, Humpty-Dumpty like creature exercising its slow routine summersaults.
...whoo my imagination is taking me places here I chuckle to myself and this illusion of feeling it move is probably due to the sway induced by lack of sleep -and I know that just over the brim there will be the first flab end of soft blue sky (still only a transparent veil through which some stars still are shining discernibly) to chase my lunar musings.
And indeed soon the sky's blue sheet unfurls weakly and with it, the quivering heat of the day seeps up.
As we are driving we can see a range of majestic dunes in a far distance, which Guy points out to us jocosely as "les Alpes".
We see soe cars of the English ralley with a Union Jack blowing in the wind - no sense of discreetness or diplomacy. "Let's hope they won't get shot", laughs Guy.
Frank and Hanneke's Mercedes is so old and rotten, they can't change speeds while driving, but have to stop the car, open the engine bonnet, reset the accelerator manually and restart at the new velocity. But the engine is strong enough to do this at all, which is stronger than most cars' engine. The noise it makes is hellish to say the least.
From time to time the exhaust pipe will fall off and Frank has to crawl under the car to fix it back up. He is constantly smeared black all over, his hair in a wild mess, his T-shirt soaked with oil, and when I get to see him showered and in fresh clothes in Nouakchott two days later I sure do not recognize him at first sight.
In France the car still had a roof which was only cut off in the south of Spain a week ago. Now it is an airy cabriolet and Uil ("owl"), the dog, is enjoying it fully with his nose stuck into the wind, muzzle and nose dripping black and wet, his flabby ears blowing like flags, eyes squinting.
We're driving along a seemingly endless beach, the sea glistening in far right, naked skinned dunes hemming it on our left.
I stick my hand out the window groping the air thick with speed and I watch the Dutch couples' shabby mercedes cabriolet flick in and out of the rearview mirror like a tiny toy car, flashing white in the metallic sunshine.
Stopping again, for a short break for our driver, I get out of the car and walk away from the others just a few metres. My feet make their way over the sand sprinkled densely with multicoloured stones, my toes digging them up one by one, rolling over their imperfect spheres, trying to rub off dead skin.
A sea of bushels of grass is stretching out before us now, all uniformely bending westward in the wind, pale green and slender, brilliant with a metallic tinge.
Guy says he has never seen the dessert so green, and the reason for this is -as i shall find out much, much later- also why we encounter so many dead bodies of cows along the road -they are lying there by the tens and twenties every hundred metre. There were enormous rainfalls a couple of months ago which the dried out dessert ground wasn't able to absortb, and the cows had saved themselves onto the tarred road during the floodings and then there had starved to death.
During our drive all this remains a mystery to us however, and I get to hear this only months later and still then it is quite frightening to remember back and imagine the foregoing scenario.
The last day we get up early, too. It is at 8.00 that the sun sends the day's first glimmer from beyond the horizon. Only half an hour later it is adrift in the brand new morning sky, carried by the winds, or so it seems.
Today we are going to make our way into Nouakchott finally, driving on the beach.
We are the first car of the morning to drive on the sand, tautly strung like fresh clean bedsheets it seems, with the sea rolling up to us in mercury waves teeming with the play of light and shadow. It gushes up from the wheels, all pure glittering matter.
Now thats how I imagined it: all sand, sea, and sky, three simple infinities.
From time to time a flock of seagulls' calm morning chatter -parked on the beach as they are- is disturbed by our arrival and they collectively take off. The lake-like assemblage of compact pale grey bodies suddenly dispersed into an amorphous cloud of m-shaped wings is something midly spectacular to watch. They are rising in unison creating the illusion of a pattern, which only just after disintegrates into its yellow-beaked fragments then settling on the sea each one alongside the white sun scattered.
We pass a fishing village, a bunch of kids run up to us, cheering. The Mauritanians being pure nomads and meat eaters they are immigrants, Senegalese, as all the fishermen are.
In Nouakchott I get an e-mail that Mamadou had made it safe and sound to his family for the holiday, thanking me, cos he'd never made it without my help.
