FOLLOWING AZIZ

How a drive into the Sahara went wrong
by and photographs Jeffrey Tayler

He's a thief!" shouted Abdullah. "He has a knife and will slit your throat from ear to ear!" seconded his friend, making a slashing motion across his neck. Both teenagers stood by my car door and pressed their heads excitedly through my window as they described the fate I was delivering to myself by hiring Aziz as guide for a night excursion into the desert. Aziz had gone to fetch water, tea, and blankets from his house nearby.

I had driven a Peugeot south across Morocco for 15 straight hours, finally reaching the Draa Valley and the Sahara as the sun dropped behind the palms. Around nine that evening I was nearing M'hamid, and the end of the tarmac, when I stopped in Tagoumite at a roadside restaurant.

Aziz had approached my table as I sopped up the last juice from a lamb tagine with a swatch of unleavened bread. He seemed stunted and looked younger than his professed age of 18. But a way he had of lowering his eyes when he talked made him look woebegone, vulnerable even, not criminal, and I felt I could recognize a crook after working for more than two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in thief-infested Marrakech to the north. After a bit of bargaining, we settled on his $10 fee. The sally into the sands seemed a manageable outing, involving only a 10-mile drive along a piste-a rutted desert track-for one night on the dunes, and an early return the next day.

Still, the teenagers' words rattled me. Before Aziz returned, I asked about him in the restaurant and at a store nearby. He checked out. But on the way out of town my suspicion got the better of me. I pulled over.

"Those boys say you're a thief, a murderer even."

His eyes bucked as though I had slapped him.

"Give me your national ID card," I said. He pulled it from his back pocket. I got out and examined it in the headlights-it had expired last year, but he was who he said he was. I then hid the card without his seeing where.

"I'm sure there'll be no problem," I said, locking gazes with him back in the car. The darkened desert outside was utterly silent-the Sahara is a domain of silence-only our faces shone in the dashboard light. "You'll get your card back when we return."

We drove on. At a spot marked on the road by a white arrow, we parted with the tarmac and bounced onto hamada, the cracked, stony flatland of the Sahara. My headlights illuminated the corrugations, faint ruts, of the piste. For an hour or so we followed them, until our lights hit dunes. We halted. Aziz scrambled out, lit the lantern, and ignited coals in the sand on which he perched a teapot.

A flashlight appeared from around the dune. Footsteps edged through the silence.

"Aaa, Aziz!"

"Aaa, Ali!"

It was Ali, Aziz's cousin, a tender of camels from the 'Ariib tribe of M'hamid. In his immaculate white robes and pointy-toed white slippers, Ali looked as though he might be dressed for a mint tea ceremony in any tiled Moroccan courtyard. His nose was aquiline, his brow broad, his legs and arms sinewy. He sat down cross-legged at the edge of the blanket. After a few minutes, I saw he was no simple Bedouin; his speech resounded with the classical Arabic of the Qur'an; he had studied Arabic literature at the university in Marrakech, but he preferred a solitary life on the sands to the bustle of the towns.

"Allah, Allah," he intoned, rising a short while later. "There may be a wind tonight. If need be, come sleep in my tent." He took leave of us and plodded away around the dune, his light a bobbing white orblet on the sand.

Aziz extinguished his kerosene lantern, and I was left momentarily blinded, the image of its yellow flame still flooding my retinas. I lay back on my blanket, settling my elbows and ankles into the sand beneath. A soft crushing sound, a poosh-poosh-poosh, came floating through the dark. A camel, said Aziz. Flat on my back, I gazed upward, and the sky resolved itself into a luminous blue dome, not dark at all, really, not even far away; stars swam as if in holding patterns; infinity extended beyond Polaris, beyond Jupiter and Sirius. I closed my eyes to the starlight.

At midnight, from the hamada to the east, a groan arose, a wail, a wind as heavy and cloying as hot breath. I turned my face away. Aziz slumbered on. An hour later, sand was caking on my face no matter what position I assumed. A flashlight-blur of yellow approached from the dune.

"You must come to the tent now. Sharqi," said Ali (sharqi, or "sirocco," derives from the Arabic sharq, or "east," and denotes "a wind from the east").

The tent flaps whipped and lashed, sand poured in as through a sieve and whirled in eddies around us. Though Ali and Aziz, and another boy, wrapped in black shawls, snored dead to the world, I couldn't sleep with my face covered by my shirt: it suffocated me. I waited and waited for dawn.

I awoke at dawn to a dirge of winds, rising and falling and quavering, a cyclonic rhapsody on the sands. I roused Aziz.

"We have to go now," I said.

He sprang forth bleary-eyed from his shawl and grabbed his bundle. I clambered to the top of a dune. The sun, the vicious taskmaster of the sharqi, drove sand at us in ferocious blasts across hamada that stretched table-like to the horizon. Gusts broke my balance; blasts of dust would turn the sky and earth into a single, whirling, gaseous mass. The power of the storm was alarming; I had seen nothing like it before. We pulled away from the tent at five-thirty in the morning, as if into a choppy sea with whitecaps, the sand driving over rippled hamada. We bounced, we jolted, the Peugeot rattled and clanked on the cracked earth. Again and again we slowed as Aziz lost the piste to the blowing sand.

At a meter-high ledge we ground to a halt.

"Don't you know the way?" I asked. We were not on the piste of the night before.

We backed up and snaked along the edge to a trough. I stopped. If this was a piste, it led into a sand patch. Sweat dripped off my brow; the car was turning into an oven with the windows rolled up against the dust.

"Go on!" he said.

We shot over the sand onto more hamada, but the wind blasted up a curtain of dust. I slowed: the wheels cut into sand and spun and spun.

Aziz jumped out. "No problem. I'll get Ali and he will drag us free."

He took off at a trot, but the wind manhandled him and he stumbled. I sat, vexed at my own shortsightedness: Despite all I had read on desert travel, I had entered the Sahara with neither water nor spare fuel, and worst of all, in a car fit for little more than a Saturday jaunt to the mall. I got out and tried to dig myself free: as a result of my exertions, the Peugeot ended up sunk to its axles. I crouched in the doorway of the Peugeot and took out Aziz's ID card; how ill-conceived, how urban had been my precautions. A thief? What was a thief alongside the fury of the greatest desert on earth?

An hour later Aziz came running with a shawl-wrapped waif of a boy, Lahcen, in his mid-teens, but wiry; with black, brown and gray teeth. He and Aziz piled sand around my front wheels and told me to accelerate. I did, and we shot free. We pulled off heading west, away from the sun, with Lahcen in the passenger seat. I followed his left-handed chopping gestures, "Left ... left ... straight on, slow, left."

More than an hour passed with us trundling this way and that. The hamada burned with sand blowing from the east, the direction of the main road. The corrugations of the piste faded in and out; we stalled heading west, then continued, looking first for camels, then a dry river bed.

The sun crept higher, wind tore off the hamada in a bellowing rage; we lost visibility to the sands, we regained it, lost and regained it. We rambled ahead, ever bearing left with Lahcen's chopping gestures. I considered the possibilities: if we overshot M'hamid, Timbuktu was a thousand miles ahead of us. But we would never reach Timbuktu; our fuel would run out, and without water, death from thirst would arrive within three days. I fought back these thoughts-they led only to a debilitating fear-and focused on the piste.

"Are we north of M'hamid, or west?" I asked Lahcen, to determine what our chances were of overshooting it.

"By God, our tent should be over there," he said.

Black and silvery tents resolved themselves into scrub brush as we approached, dashing hopes over and over again. Mirages. They were either standing triangles or glittery silver flats, but with proximity they faded into sand and ridged earth. The piste itself was either imagined or not; corrugations appeared and disappeared; we were tacking crosswise against the blowing wastes. Left, left, said Lahcen's hand. Maybe all this earth was corrugated, maybe there was no piste at all. By ten o'clock, we had described a huge arc.

"Stop!" said Lahcen.

Lahcen opened the door. He staggered out. I got out too, and found I had to hunch low or be blown over.

"The camels are over there!" Lahcen shouted.

We proceeded, bouncing over stony hamada. But there were no camels over there, and Lahcen's hand returned to chopping the air. I felt panic rising within me, coming out of my gut and passing over my heart. My eyes stung with sweat.

"Maybe we should just wait this out," I wondered aloud. "How long can it last?"

"It could clear this afternoon. Or not."

"But how long does the sharqi usually last?"

"Maybe three days, maybe seven. God alone knows."

We next decided to look for the piste to M'hamid, which should be, Lahcen now said, seven miles south. We had been driving for over four hours; I glanced at the gas tank arrow, which hovered at less than a quarter. We had used up more than a quarter tank.

Hamada. Sand. We swerved. Sand again, then hamada. Lahcen's hand cut the air. We were circling. I thought to object when, during a blind spell, we slammed into something: I heard a sharp report, steel against stone. But we rolled on. Lahcen asked me to stop.

He and Aziz conspired over a baked plate of sand behind the car. I felt panic alternate with despair at the thought of the hours we had spent circling. I didn't show it; there was no one to turn to, no point in a confession. I got out and knelt with them.

"The piste ahead leads to M'hamid," shouted Lahcen above the gale, pointing south. As I passed around the front of the car, I noticed a wet spot on the sand. I bent down: drops of water, dispersed by the wind, were dripping out from behind the bumper. Our last jolt had punctured the radiator.

I sat back in my seat, speechless with the discovery.

We waited, the horizon having abandoned us to another all-enveloping maelstrom. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror: there was my face, tawny with grit and streaked where sweat had poured off my brow and temples. It occurred to me then that death as a phenomenon of nothingness seemed quite divorced from the bowel-churning ordeal of dying of thirst, roasted by the sun. With the wind and sun and grit between the teeth there was no way to collect my thoughts and saunter into metaphysics. And I had two people with me; a sense of responsibility as the driver, not to mention elder, prevailed; I turned in thought back to our predicament.

Staying with the car is the key to survival in desert mishaps. How many times had I read that years ago in preparation for a trans-Saharan run across Algeria that never took place? Attempting to walk out means certain death. I rummaged through memories of Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands, his account of travels among Arab tribes in Arabia: Bedouins drank the blood of their camels through a straw straight from the jugular; they ate camel vomit; they shampooed in camel urine. My creaking Peugeot could offer none of these less-than-epicurean survival treats.

We started up again. With the radiator punctured and our fuel dwindling, I would soon have to make a decision: either we would have to stop and wait out the sharqi, and risk dying of thirst if this should happen after three days' time-or continue looking for the main road, and risk the same.

By eleven the sun was infusing the maelstrom with a gaseous steely glare; the piste was then interrupted by a wash of sand.

"Don't dunes surround M'hamid?" I thought aloud. I had been to M'hamid the year before and seen them! I felt suddenly breathless with the realization that this piste-our last hope-would become impassable by the sheer geography of the region. Lahcen stared ahead. I stopped. "Will we make it?"

His head dropped. "In this car, by God I don't know."

"We have only two choices: either we find the tents now or we wait it out."

His head remained bowed.

Lahcen got out and kneeled, studying the baked earth under his toes. The effect of the ferocious gales of heat was akin to that of a blast furnace; I fingered the cracked skin on my lips. Lahcen climbed back in and motioned left with his hand. Left again, I thought. We started up. More circling. Baked hamada spread under a roiled, oncoming wall of dust. A flash of white-brown from a gust of sand blinded us. When it dropped we saw a dune.

Left, chopped Lahcen's hand.

A rage bubbled within me: we were entering the dunes! Left again, he said. Another left, and it appeared we had run into a dead-end of dunes. I laughed out of despair.

"Go on!" said Lahcen. "Go on!" His voice broke.

We reached the end of the dune and turned left. A knee-high piece of scrap metal, a buoy-like marker, suddenly stood out black in the white blustering blaze.

The curtain of sand flickered to reveal the tent, battered by the sharqi. Ali stepped out as we drove up, his shawl a flailing horizontal mane behind him. He opened my door.

"God be praised. You should not have set out in this sharqi. God saved you. Come, have tea."

Lahcen and Aziz kept their heads low. They thought they failed me, I supposed, though they might have been more worried about the thrashing Ali would give them if I complained or blamed them. I said nothing, seated with my tea amid the eddies of whirling dust in the tent. I bore the two youths no grudges. I was happy to be safe. I had witnessed and traveled through a fierce natural phenomenon with no more ill effect than what a tube of lip balm wouldn't cure. I foretasted the ecstasy of guzzling an entire liter bottle of Evian and then I realized how much a luxury water could be and how ingenious one had to be to survive where it was a rarity, as in the Sahara. Ali's sinew and calm hospitality suddenly commanded new respect.

Later, I learned this was one of the worst sharqis in years: winds hit ninety miles an hour and bore temperatures of over a hundred and twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. That afternoon, it briefly abated. After I poured water in my depleted radiator, we made for the main road. At the whitewashed arrow we bumped and rattled our way onto the tarmac, a black runway to salvation.

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