I didn't say anything then, but I wondered about de Foucauld. If he chose to meditate here – did he worship God or the Devil?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Byrne was still talking to the dark-skinned men who had come out to join us. There was much gesticulating and pointing until, at last, Byrne got something settled to his satisfaction. These guys say they saw something burning out there two days ago.'

'Christ!' I said. 'What is there to burn?'

'Don't know.' He fumbled in the leather pouch which depended from a cord around his neck and took out a prismatic compass. He looked at me and said with a grin, 'I'm not against all scientific advance. Mokhtar, down there, thinks I'm a genius the way I find my way around.' He put the compass to his eye to take a sight 'How far away?'

'Don't know that, either. They say it was a column of smoke – black smoke.'

'In the daytime?'

There was astonishment in Byrne's eyes as he looked at me. 'Sure; how the hell else could they see smoke?'

'I was thinking about the Bible,' I said. 'The Israelites in the wilderness, guided by a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night'

'I don't think you've got that right,' he said mildly. 'I read it as a pillar of cloud.' He turned back to take another sight 'But I guess we'd better take a look. I make it just about due north of here, on a compass bearing. I don't bothe r none about magnetic variation, not on a short run.'

'What do you call short?'

'Anything up to fifty kilometres. Magnetic deviation is another thing. These goddamn hills are full of iron and you've got to check your compass bearing by the sun all the time.'

He put the compass away, and from another bag he took a couple of small packages which he gave to the two men. There was a ceremonial leave-taking, and he said, 'Salt and tobacco. In these parts you pay for what you get.'

As we set off down the steep path I said, 'There is something that's been puzzling me.'

Byrne grunted. 'Hell of a lot of things puzzle me, too, from time to time. What's your problem?'

'That veil of yours. I know it's Tuareg dress, but sometimes you muffle yourself up to the bloody eyebrows and other times you don't bother. For instance, you didn't bother up there; you let them see your face. I don't understand the rationale.'

Byrne stopped. 'Still on your anthropological kick, huh? Okay, I'll tell you. It's the politeness of the country. If you're in a place and you don't do as everybody does in that place, you could get yourself very dead. Take a Targui and set him in the middle of London. If he didn't know he had to cross the street in a special place, and only when the light is green, he could get killed. Right?'

'I suppose so.'

Byrne touched his head cloth. This thing is a check; it's a substitute for the real thing, which is a tagelmoust, but you don't see many of those around except on high days and holidays. They're very precious. Now, nobody knows why the Tuareg wear the veil. I don't know; the anthropologists don't know; the Tuareg don't know. I wear mine because it's handy for. keeping the dust out of my throat and keeps a high humidity in the sinuses on a dry day. It also cuts down water loss from the body.'

He sat down on a convenient rock and pointed downwards. 'You've seen Mokhtar's face?'

'Yes. He doesn't seem to bother about me seeing it.'

'He wouldn't – he's a noble of the Kel Rela,' said Byrne cryptically. 'Society here is highly class-structured and a ceremonial has grown up around the veil. It's polite to hide your face from your superiors and, to a lesser extent, from your equals. If Mokhtar met the Amenokal you'd see nothing of him except his eyelashes.'

He jerked his thumb upwards. 'Now, those guys up there are Haratin, and the Haratin were here thousands of years ago, long before the Tuareg moved in. But the Tuareg conquered them and made slaves of them, so they're definitely not my superior, so the veil don't matter.'

'But you're not a Tuareg.'

'The male singular is Targui,' said Byrne. 'And I've been a Targui ten years longer than I was an American.' He jabbed his finger at me. 'Now, you'll see lots of Tuareg faces, because you're a no-account European and don't matter. Got it?'

I nodded. 'I feel properly put in my place.'

Then let's get the hell out of here.'

If I had thought Atakor was bad it was hard to make a comparison with Koudia; I suppose the only comparison could be between Purgatory and Hell. I soon came to realize that the high road I had anathematized in Atakor was a super highway when compared to anything in Koudia.

I put it to Byrne and he explained. 'It's simple. People make roads when they want to go places, and who in God's name would want to come here?'

'But why would anyone want to be in Atakor except a mystic like de Foucauld?'

'The Hermitage is a place of pilgrimage. People go there, Moslem and Christian alike. So the going is easy back there.'

After leaving Assekrem and plunging into the wilderness of Koudia I don't suppose we made more than seven miles in the first two hours – walking pace in any reasonable country. Koudia was anything but reasonable; I don't think there was a single horizontal bit of land more than five paces across. If we weren't going up we were going down, and if we weren't doing either we were going around.

The place was a litter of boulders – anything from head size to as big as St Paul's Cathedral, and the springing of the Toyota was suffering. So was I. We bounced around from rock to rock and I rattled around the cab until I was bruised and sore. Byrne, at least, had the wheel to hold on to, but I don't think that made it any better for him because it twisted in his hands as though it was alive. As for Mokhtar, he spent 'more of his time out of the truck than in.

Apart from the boulders there were the mountains themselves, and no one could drive up those vertical cliffs so that was when we went around, Byrne keeping his eyes on his compass so as not to lose direction in all the twisting and turning we had to do. He stopped often to take a reciprocal sighting on Assekrem to make sure we were on the right line.

As I say, Mokhtar spent more time on the ground than in the truck, and it wasn't too hard for him to keep up. He had a sharp eye for signs of passage, and once he stopped us to indicate tyre marks on a patch of sand. He and Byrne squatted down to examine them while I investigated my bruises. When we were about to start again Byrne said, 'Superimposed tracks. One vehicle going in and another, later, coming out.'

I had casually inspected those tracks myself but I couldn't have trusted myself to tell which way the vehicles were going. As a Saharan intelligence officer I was a dead loss.

About seven miles in two hours, then we stopped for a rest and food. There was no vegetation in Koudia at all but Mokhtar had thoughtfully gathered a bundle of acacia twigs while waiting for us at Assekrem and soon had a fire going to boil water for the inevitable mint tea. I said to Byrne, 'Don't you ever drink coffee?'

'Sure, but this is better for you in the desert. You can have coffee when we get back to Tarn. Expensive, though.'

The sun was past its height and sinking towards the west as we sat in the shade of the Toyota. This was the hottest part of the day and, in Koudia, that meant really hot. The bare rocks were hot enough to fry eggs and the landscape danced in a constant heat shimmer.

I remarked on this to Byrne, and he grinned. 'This is winter – would you like to be here in summer?'

'Christ, no!'

This is why they wouldn't give Billson a permis. And come nightfall the temperature will drop like a rock. You leave water exposed out here and you'll have half an inch of ice on it by three in the morning. If Billson is lost he'll either have burned to death or frozen to death.'