did not associate the noise with danger or death and it was only when they saw a man running towards them waving a knife, his robes billowing out on either side of him, that they took flight and scampered back onto the plains, disappearing quickly out of sight.
Gazel went over to the wounded animal that was struggling to stand up and follow his family, but something inside had already snapped and its body was no longer obeying its brain.
Only its enormous and innocent eyes reflected the magnitude of its anguish as the Targui grabbed it by the antlers, pulled its head to face Mecca and slit its throat with a sharp dagger, in one clean movement.
Blood came gushing out, spilling over his sandals and splashing his djelabba, but Gazel was oblivious to it, caught up in the moment and satisfied that his aim had been such an excellent one again, having shot his prey in exactly the right place.
He was still eating as night fell, but asleep before the first stars appeared in the sky, sheltered from the wind under a bush, his back warmed by the fire’s dying embers.
The jackals and the mocking call of the hyenas woke him up as they gathered round to claim the dead antelope, so he stoked up the fire until they withdrew back into the shadows. Then he lay there, looking at the sky, listening to the wind as it picked up and meditating on the fact that he had killed a man that day - the first time he had killed a human being in his life - which he knew meant that his own life would never be the same again.
He did not feel guilty about it because he considered his cause to be a just one, but he was concerned that it might unleash a war between the tribes, of the kind that he had heard so much about from his forefathers. A war that could spiral into a senseless massacre, where nobody knew why anyone was killing anyone or indeed what had started it all in the first place. The Tuareg, the few Imohags that remained wandering through the desert’s confines, still faithful to their traditions and laws, were simply not in a position to defend themselves from this type of warfare, struggling as they were to protect themselves from the advances of civilisation alone.
He remembered the strange sensation that had passed through his body as the sword had softly entered Mubarrak’s stomach and he could still hear the hoarse death rattle that had escaped from the back of his throat at that very same moment. As he had brought his arm back out, it was as if he had been carrying the life of his enemy on the end of his tabuka and he was already scared of having to use his sword against anyone again. He hurriedly reminded himself of the dry crack of the shot that had killed his sleeping guest and consoled himself with the fact that those men had committed an unpardonable crime.
It dawned on him that while injustice was bitter, it was an equally bitter experience having to right that wrong, because he had not taken any pleasure in killing Mubarrak. In fact, it had simply left him with a deeply unpleasant feeling of emptiness afterwards and just as Suilem had warned, his act of revenge had not brought back the dead.
Why, he wondered, was this unwritten law of hospitality that the Tuaregs put before all other laws so important - more important even than the laws of the Koran. He tried to imagine what kind of a place the desert would be if the traveller could not rely on their hospitality, on the help and respect that would be given to them whilst in their care.
According to legend, there were once two men who hated each other so much that one day the weakest of the two turned up at his enemy’s jaima, asking for hospitality. In respect of their deep tradition, the Targui accepted his guest and offered him protection until finally, after some months, he tired of looking after him and giving him food and promised him that if he went on his way he would never try to kill him again. That was many years ago, but the Tuaregs have used this same method ever since to resolve their differences and put an end to their quarrels.
How would he have reacted if Mubarrak had come to his settlement to ask for his hospitality and to beg forgiveness?
He would never know the answer to that, but he would probably have behaved as the Targui did in the legend, otherwise he would only have ended up committing a crime in order to punish someone for having committed that very same crime.
As the jet planes roared through the high desert skies and the lorries hurtled along its well-trodden tracks, pushing his people back into the remotest corners of the plains, it was hard to say for how much longer they would manage to resist their relentless advances. What he could say with confidence, however, was that while one of them remained on those sands, even if the rest of the infinite and stony plains were devoid of life and the hamada devoid of its horizons, the laws of hospitality would remain sacred, otherwise no traveller would ever dare to cross the desert again.
Mubarrak’s crime was unforgivable and he Gazel Sayah would take it upon himself to make those men that were not of the Tuareg people, aware that in the Sahara the rules of his race must continue to be respected. Those laws and customs had been created to suit an environment that had to be respected. They were intrinsic modes of behaviour that had been created to ensure their survival.
The wind picked up as dawn broke. The hyenas and jackals, having lost all hope of getting even the smallest morsel of the dead antelope, skulked off to their dark habitats, growling at their misfortune, joined by all the other creatures of the night: the long-eared fennecs, the desert rats, snakes, hares and foxes. As the sun started to heat up the land, these creatures would be asleep, conserving their energy until the shadows of the night returned to make their lives bearable once again. It was the law of nature that there, in that most desolate place on the planet, in contrast to the rest of the world, all activity was carried out by night, while the day was for sleeping.
Only man, despite the passage of time, had not managed to completely adapt to this nocturnal existence, and for that reason, at the first sign of light, Gazel found his camel, grazing about one kilometre away, took him by the halter and set off unhurriedly towards the east.
The Adoras military outpost was situated in a triangular oasis made up of about one hundred palm trees and three wells. It sat right in the very middle of a long line of dunes, which made its survival something of a miracle since it was constantly threatened by the shifting sand that surrounded it. But while the sea of dunes sheltered it from the wind, it also meant that, at around midday, it became a burning furnace with temperatures often soaring to sixty degrees.
The three dozen soldiers that made up the garrison spent half of their time under the shadow of the palm trees, cursing their bad luck, and the other half of it shovelling sand in a desperate effort to keep it at bay. They struggled on a daily basis to keep clear a small stretch of road that allowed them to communicate with the outside world and receive provisions and correspondence once every two months.
For the last thirty years, ever since a crazy colonel had become obsessed with the idea that the army should have control of those four wells, which were the only ones around for about one hundred kilometres, Adoras had become the “accursed destiny,” both for the colonial troops then and for the natives there now. Of the tombs lined up on the edge of the palm grove, nine of them were due to “death by natural causes,” while another six were due to suicides committed by men who simply could not bear the idea of living in that inferno for another day.
When a tribunal was unsure as to whether they should condemn an offender to the firing squad, life imprisonment or commute his sentence to fifteen years of compulsory service in Adoras, it was quite aware that all three punishments were of equal measure, even if the offender was under some illusion that by having his sentence commuted and being sent to Adoras, he was being let off lightly.
Captain Kaleb-el-Fasi was commander in chief of the garrison and supreme authority over a region that was as large as half of Italy, but where only a little over eight hundred people lived. He had been there for seven years as punishment for having killed a young lieutenant who had threatened to expose
