大象传媒

M. Barbot called on us for the last time. With him George, Charlie, Met and I headed east to reach a land of sand dunes - pure sand without a trace of scrub. We crossed these dunes like a ship at sea but at last they grew too steep and powdery. We had to weave between them. I thought, 'We shan't go far in this sort of country. There's nothing to show the way' Then Barbot pulled up. We had halted in a kind of sand-plain. Before us rose dunes higher than any we had yet seen and on the summit of one there was a sharp spire of stone. Barbot lit a cigar and waved it towards the spire.

'I can take the car no further, but if you care to climb to that cairn you will find the view worth seeing. These dunes are, as it were, the outposts of the Grand Erg Oriental. If we could go to El Oued you would see the great dunes - eight, nine hundred feet high. But that is an expedition.'

We started to climb, clumsily, boots slithering in the sand. It took us twenty minutes to reach that huge conical pile of cemented stone.

What we saw was not so much a landscape as an impression upon the mind. We were looking eastwards, over some twenty miles of undulating sand dunes to the horizon. That is all there was and that is all any photograph would show. Silence, apart from an occasional creeping wind which sent the loose sand swirling along the crests. This was the desert as I had always imagined it - something entirely empty and vast, dwarfing human life to the level of bacteria.

And yet... on the very limit of the horizon, on the highest point was a tiny black cone of rock. There was the next cairn. These were the lighthouses of the desert, set up to guide men across a waste inimical to our race. Travel to that second cone and a third would come into view, far off, like a reassuring finger pointing at the sky. You would not be alone and a prey to strange imaginings; others had come this way before you and others would follow.

As I looked out upon this terrible wasteland I felt the urge strong upon me to return one day and look upon the secrets it concealed... the ancient towns, far more ancient than those I had seen, strange peoples with a strange way of life, the ever-present lure of the unknown. Once long ago I got out of a train at St. Anton-am-Arlberg and looked upon mountains for the first time. There was something of the same quality in this experience, but whereas at St. Anton I had gone forward, explored my passes, climbed my peaks, here I must turn back at the very threshold. Dared I hope that one day I might return?

We returned to the car, but just before we reached it, I stopped and pointed. From Touggourt a camel-caravan, slow and patient, was toiling between the dunes. We watched in silence. Barbot said: 'They return to El Oued from the market. All night they will travel and all tomorrow too. In the evening they will be home again.' I would have loved to join them.

Mustapha awaited us at the hotel to bid us goodbye. He received our generous gratuity with delight. I told him of my delight at our afternoon journey and he smiled: 'Before this war I would often take a few people on caravan. First we would travel to Ouargla and then across the desert to the city of Rhadames - how you would love Rhadames with its old walls, its mosques, its bazaars. By night we slept in tents under the stars and in the early morning, if you were so inclined, there would be hunting. From Rhadames the caravan would make its way to Tripoli and there I would leave it.'

I sighed. 'Mustapha,' I said, 'When this war is over I will return to Touggourt with my wife and you shall take us on caravan to Tripoli.' The old man smiled and whispered, 'Inshallah... inshallah..' He saw my puzzled face. 'If Allah wills it... and if I am still living.'

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