Continuing from last week’s article, where I shared the harrowing trials and triumphant moments of my Sahara desert journey, the story continues.
I sang the song over and over again. Suddenly, my car was lifted into the air, as if it were a piece of trash. I was twirling around in a weightless circular motion, and for a moment I felt that I was on a space ride to the moon. I could not see a thing, and before I began to comprehend what in the world was happening to me, I was smashed back to earth in one sickening thud. Silence and dusty vision was all that I could see and hear. I was lying on my side against the driver’s door, still strapped in my seat belt.
I unfastened my seat belt, moved my left foot off the floor to adjust myself, and then attempted to move my right foot, but realized that I could not move it. I tried again, but it dawned on me that there was no way that I could move it. I looked down and found that my foot was wedged between the clutch and the brake pedals. I shifted my position and tried harder to move my foot and free it. When I did so, I screamed in pain and fell back on the seat. “Damn! I have broken my leg.” Somehow, I managed to free my foot in the midst of this pain and scampered out of the car just in time to watch the receding sandstorm that had ended my beautiful drive so ignominiously. I felt my left foot and moved my hand up my ankle, which was now tender and throbbing. I felt for broken bones, but my untutored hands could not locate any.
I picked myself up gingerly, took a few steps and found that I could limp along. “Thank God, only a fractured ankle. Phew, was I lucky!” I hobbled over to the car, only to find that it was half-buried in a sandbank. Oh, no! This was the last thing I needed. I knew it: the birds had been there to lead me astray, maybe to my death. Now I had no car and only one and half legs. What would I do? According to my bearing and compass, I had nearly 41km to go before reaching the next civilization. I tried to dig, but the car buried so deep in the sand that it became clear that this was something far worse than one man could manage on his own. So I collected some water, a bit of food, some warm clothing, my blanket, my money, my passport, and I decided to find life by walking, even with my injured ankle, towards Tamagasset.
The pace was slow, and each minute increased the pain in my right foot. Six hours later, just before midnight, I reached Tamagasset. Civilization at last! If only I could have driven into this town earlier. I reported at the police post and slept with the gendarmes after narrating my story to them. During my stay in Tamagasset, I recalled Claudia Wiens in his recent writing titled “Tea in the Sahara”. Until the civil war in Algeria, Tamagasset was a significant stopover for travelers who were taking a journey across the Sahara, and it is also well known as a stopover town in the Paris- Dakar rally. Despite its location in the middle of the world’s largest desert, Tamagasset has a population of about 45,000 people.
Among the main attractions of this town, the biggest one is its proximity to the Hoggar, the enormous mountain range that provides shelter for both animals and human beings, and the occasional sparse drops of rain. The Hoggar range is as impressive close up as it is from far away.
The brown and yellow tones of these mountains highlight rounded hills, as well as jagged peaks. The mountain range is composed of the remaining cores of volcanoes that belched up the last remnants of lava from their fiery depths long ago. The landscape provides plenty of drama, as the entire area starts at 1400 meters above sea level, with the highest peaks of the Hoggar mountain range covering 240,000 square kilometers and towering about 300 meters.
Tamagasset is not the date-palm-and-oasis type of town. Ground water is so limited that new households are not allowed to hook up to the municipal system and supply. Even the old households are severely rationed. People live on deliveries from private water trucks that scavenge supplies from distant wells. Despite plans to pipe in water from hundreds of miles away in the south, no one expects the situation to improve much, because the town is growing too fast to do anything about it. I took a room in an old tiny hostel at the main road, which provided me with a trickle of water in the morning and evening, a foretaste for the coming weeks in the desert. The oldest building in the town is a small adobe fort with crenellated walls, which looks like a set piece out of a foreign legion movie. Charles de Foucauld, a French religious hermit, who came there in 1905 to live among the fearsome Tuareg tribe, built this building. At that time, Tamagasset was an encampment of twenty straw huts. Because of its poverty and isolation, Foucauld thought that this would be the perfect location for the monastery he intended to found.
Recognizing that his initial efforts to convert the Tuareg to Christianity had failed, he began to study their language, Tamashek, and their handwriting, Tifinar. From his endeavors came the first French-Tamashek dictionary, which covered over 2000 pages. This dictionary is still considered the best. In 1910, he constructed a hermitage on the peak of Assekrem, one of the highest in the Hoggar Mountains. In one of his diaries, he wrote: “My hermitage here is on a summit that overlooks practically the whole of the Hoggar and stands amid wild-looking mountains beyond which the seemingly limitless horizon makes one think of the infinitude of God.”
The following morning, I was directed to meet a local hero, who specialized in a form of rescue efforts in the desert. His name was Monsieur Azzi Addi Ahmed. As luck would have it, he became interested in my story and developed a special affection for me. He admired my courage and was really amazed that I could withstand this kind of pain and undergo all sorts of discomfort just to save others’ lives. Addi then mobilized some people, hired a van and took me to where my jeep was resting. There were four men in this emergency rescue team, and the four of us tried to pull the car out of the sand using a combination of the engine power and manual pushing and pulling.
In the process of pushing and pulling, we lost the clutch, but we pulled the car out of the sandbank. We weighed the option of towing, but this was not possible because of the terrain. If we had tried, the windscreen and probably the rear and side mirrors would have been smashed because the pebbles would have been flying when the car was being towed. Having no other option, we decided to load the car into the truck instead. This we achieved by winching the SUV into the truck. We then set off on our journey back to Tamagasset and we arrived into the town at about 6pm. On this day, I finally called my family and the Director-General of the Nigerian Television Authority, Mr. Ben Murray-Bruce, to inform them that I had crossed the most dangerous part of the desert. This call, I must emphasize, was not in any way to boost my ego or announce my success, but to relieve
the pains and worries of everybody back home. And, having reached civilization themselves, they too, were able to call to congratulate me and we spoke at length.
I was relieved in no small measure to talk to my people back home. They in turn were in a festive mood and began to celebrate in my absence, as the subsequent calls made from them revealed. Those calls actually gave fresh life to me and enriched whatever strength was left in me, and I saw my trip as if, though it was physically carried out alone, morally, it was the work of a team. Somewhere along the line, my wife’s joy was almost cut short when she called my best friend in Washington DC, Prof. Jibril Aminu. She had called to inform him about my successful crossing. Prof. Aminu, who had requested to be kept informed on all the developments, and who is conversant with the desert, told her that the hurdle was not yet crossed. Tamagasset, he said, is still in the middle of the desert.
This news threw my wife into indescribable confusion, and she almost lost consciousness. Quickly, she rang me, and naturally I dismissed her fears and assured her that Prof. Aminu was only joking and that I was quite safe from the point onwards, at least safer than the places behind me. This part of the desert from Tamagasset is quite all right with settlements at distances not more than 400km from each other. There was also the presence of the military along the way. There would be police and gendarme checkpoints at every 100km. From here on, there were marked roads, even though the tracks disappear now and then due to sand storms.
From her reaction, I knew that she was not convinced, but having no other choice, she made some kind of quiet sound as if to remind me of my promise of making a U-turn or flying back if the journey became too difficult. Having arrived at civilization, I must be honest: I was almost making a choice of putting up a permanent tent, having found a little comfort, as was the case with the Apostles and Jesus in His Transfiguration. Unfortunately, I had nobody to encourage me and my mission was ever in my mind. However, I was determined not to betray my people. Besides, any time the thought of backing out came into my head, the desert call was ever present and very strong in my mind all through the voyage.
Join me next week as the story continues!
