in peace and order prevailed over his small empire, made up of four camel-hair tents, half a dozen woven cane sheribas, a well, nine palm trees and a handful of goats and camels.
Then, as he did every night, he slowly climbed to the top of the tall, solid dune that protected the settlement from the east winds, and by the light of the moon, looked out over the rest of his empire. This was his dominion, the desert that stretched out to infinity. Gazel Sayah ruled over this vast area of sand, rock, mountain and stony ground with absolute authority, being the only inmouchar to have settled there and owner of the only known water source in the region.
He liked to sit there on top, to give thanks to Allah as he counted the thousand blessings that filled his thoughts: the beautiful family he had been given; the good health of his slaves; the wellbeing of his livestock; the fruit from the palm trees and the highest of all his fortunes, that of being born a nobleman amongst nobility in the powerful town of Kel-Talgimus, one of the veil people, the indomitable Imohag, or, as they were known to the rest of mankind, the Tuareg.
There was nothing to the south, the east or the west that set a limit to the land under Gazel’s rule. Gazel “the Hunter” who had, over time, left the settlements behind him in order to set up camp in one of the desert’s furthest confines, where he could feel utterly alone with his wild animals. There he lived side by side with the roaming addax, that grazed on the plains for days at a time; the mouflons from high up in the remotest mountains that rose up between the seas of sand; wild donkeys, wild boar, gazelles, and never ending numbers of migratory birds. Gazel had fled the advances of civilization, the influences of invaders and their indiscriminate killing of the sand beasts and he was well known throughout the Sahara and all around, from Timbuktu to the banks of the Nile, for his generous hospitality. But while Gazel Sayah’s hospitality went unequalled, so did his wrath and he was equally well known for having stopped slave caravans and mad huntsmen who had dared to enter his territory, dead in their tracks.
‘My father taught me,’ he used to say, ‘never to kill more than one gazelle at a time, even if the herd was on the move and it would take another three days to find it again. I can easily go on a trip for three days again, he would say, but nobody can bring a gazelle that was killed in vain, back to life.’
Gazel had seen how the “French” had killed off the antelopes from the north to extinction, and the mouflons in much of the Atlas, and the beautiful hamada addax that came from the other side of the great Sekia, which thousands of years ago used to be a mighty river. That was why he had chosen this stony corner of the plains, with its endless sand and inhospitable mountains, a fourteen-day walk from El-Akab, because only someone like him would dare to take on such an inhospitable land, in the most inhospitable of all deserts.
The days when the Tuaregs were true warriors - ambushing caravans and attacking the French military with their war-like cries, sweeping the plains like fierce winds, pillaging and killing and in combat with anything that stood in their way - were long gone. They had been proud of their reputation as the “desert bandits” or “masters” of the Saharan sands, from south of the Atlas to the shores of the river Chad. But the fighting and wars of fratricide were long forgotten now, apart from in the distant memories of some of the older generations. The Imohag race was in decline, as the most valiant of its warriors chose to leave the desert and drive lorries for a “French” patron instead, or joined the regular army or sold candles and sandals to tourists in tie-dye t-shirts.
On the day that his cousin Suleiman left the desert and went to live in the city to sell bricks, driving them around from one place to the next, day after day, covered in cement and whitewash, he knew that he to had to leave and establish himself as one of the last of the solitary Tuaregs.
And it was there, high up on that same dune, his family below him, that he would sit every night and give thanks to Allah one thousand and one times and not once in all those years – so many now that he had lost track - had he regretted his decision.
From the bits and pieces he picked up from passing travellers, it seemed to him that strange things were happening in the world. They brought with them tales of death and war, of rapid change that did not seem to be of any great benefit to anyone and he was happy not to have witnessed the events that they spoke of.
One night, as he sat there, contemplating the stars that had so often guided him through the desert, he saw one he did not recognise, shining brilliantly and moving at a fast but steady, almost purposeful rate, unlike the reckless paths of errant shooting stars that would eventually fade away to nothing. For the first time in his life he had frozen with fear, unable to find in his memory or in the memories of his ancestors a tradition or legend that told of such a star, of one that followed the same path, night after night. They grew in number over the years, until together, they resembled a pack of racing hounds running riot through space and disturbing the ancient peace of the skies.
He would never know the significance of these strange apparitions. Nor would the ancient Suilem, the father of nearly all his slaves and so old, that his grandfather had bought him, already a man, in Senegal.
‘The stars have never taken such strange paths through the sky, master,’ Gazel noted. ‘Never. This could mean that the end is nigh.’
He had asked one traveller about them, but he had been unable to give him a straight answer. The second traveller he asked had said that it might have something to do with the “French.” But Gazel was not convinced, because even though he had heard rumours that the French were making significant advances in technology, he still could not believe they would be mad enough to start putting more stars into a sky that was already full of them.
‘It must be a divine sign,’ he said. ‘Allah is trying to tell us something. But what?’
He tried to find the answer in the Koran, but the Koran did not mention shooting stars that followed paths of mathematical precision, so over time he just got used to their presence, but that is not to say that he forgot about them.
In the clear air of the desert, in the darkness of a land where not a single light burned for hundreds of kilometres all around, the stars looked so close to the land that Gazel would sometimes stretch out his hands as if he was trying to touch the trembling lights that hovered just above him, with his own fingertips.
He remained up there for a long while, alone with his thoughts, and then scrambled quickly down to take a last look at the livestock and the camp and to check for hungry hyenas or cunning jackals that might threaten his small world, before retiring to bed.
At the door of his tent, the biggest and most comfortable in the encampment, he stopped and listened. If the wind had not started up, the silence would have been so intense that it hurt.
Gazel loved this silence.
Every day at dawn Suilem, the old man, or one of his grandsons would saddle up Gazel the inmouchar’s favourite camel and leave it at the entrance of their master’s tent.
Every day at dawn the Targui would fetch his rifle, mount his white, long-legged mehari and head off to one of the four compass points in search of prey.
Gazel loved his camel, as much as a man of the desert is capable of loving an animal and often depended on him with his life. When they were alone together he would chat to him out loud. He called him “R’Orab, the raven,” and made jokes about his snow-white colour, so close to the colour of the sandy landscape through which they travelled, that it often just melted into the background.
There was not a faster or stronger mehari to be found on this side of Tamanrasset. A rich merchant, who was the owner of a caravan of over three hundred animals had once offered to exchange it for five of his choice, but Gazel had turned down his offer. Gazel knew that if anything
