“Kid stuff,” she mouthed as we headed for the car. “A steel nail file and a rock. I punctured the gas lines and tires—not big holes, just slow leaks. We’ll run them around in the desert a while ’til they wear out, then hit the road.”
“Two birds with one stone—and file,” I said warmly as we climbed into the Corniche. “Good work!” But as we were pulling out onto the street, I noticed there were half a dozen cars parked around us in the lot, maybe those of the restaurant staff or neighboring cafes. “How did you know which one was the secret police?”
“I didn’t.” Lily gave me a smug smile as she took off down the street. “So to be safe, I drilled them all.”
I’d been wrong when I guessed it was eight hundred miles by the southern route. The detailed sign at the edge of Ghardaïa that gave mileages to all points south (there weren’t that many) said 1637 kilometers—over a thousand miles—to Djanet at the south gate of the Tassili. And though Lily might be a fast driver, how much time could she make when we ran out of freeway?
As Lily had predicted, Kamel’s bodyguards had run out of transportation after about an hour of following us through the waning light of the M’zab. And as I’d predicted, Sharrif’s boys had stayed so far behind we weren’t privileged to witness how they let their boss down by falling at the wayside. Once we were free of escorts, we pulled over in the dusk, and I crawled under the big Corniche. It took five minutes with the aid of a flashlight to find their bugging device behind the rear axle. I smashed it off with the crowbar Lily handed me.
Overlooking the sprawling Ghardaïa cemetery, breathing in the cool night air, we jumped up and down, slapping each other on the back a few times at our cleverness as Carioca pranced around us, yapping his head off. Then we jumped back in the car and hauled iron.
By now I’d changed my attitude about Minnie’s choice of route. Though the northern freeway might have been simpler, we’d shaken our pursuers so they couldn’t tell which direction we’d taken. No Arab in his right mind would dream that two women alone might select this route—I found it hard to visualize myself. But we’d pissed away so much time eluding these guys that by the time we left the M’zab it was after nine o’clock and quite dark. Too dark to read the book in my lap, too dark to look at the empty scenery. I caught a few catnaps as Lily barreled down the long, straight road, so I could relieve her the next shift.
By the time we crossed the Hammada and cut south through the dunes of Touat, ten hours had passed; it was already dawn. Luckily it’d been an uneventful trip—maybe too uneventful. I had the uneasy feeling our luck was wearing thin. I’d started thinking about the desert.
The mountains we’d crossed yesterday at midday had been a cool sixty-five degrees. Ghardaïa at sunset was maybe ten degrees warmer, and the dunes at midnight, even as late as June, were still cold with dew. But now it was dawn in the Plain of Tidikelt, the brink of the real desert—the one with sand and wind replacing palm trees, plants, and water—and we still had four hundred and fifty miles to go. We had no clothes but those on our backs, no food but the few bottles of bubbly water. But there was worse news up ahead. Lily interrupted my thoughts.
“There’s a roadblock up there,” she said in a tense voice, peering through the insect-peppered windshield splashed with strong light from the rising sun. “It looks like a border crossing.… I don’t know what it is. Should we take a chance?”
Sure enough, there was a little kiosk with the striped barrier pole one associated with an Immigrations outpost, sitting there in the middle of the desert. It seemed strange and out of place in this vast, empty wilderness.
“We seem to have no choice,” I told her. We’d passed the last cutoff a hundred miles back. This was it—the only road in town.
“Why would they have a roadblock here, of all places?” said Lily, edging the car forward, her voice tight from nerves.
“Maybe it’s a sanity check,” I said with false humor. “Not many people are crazy enough to go beyond this point. You know what’s out there, don’t you?”
“Nothing?” she guessed. Our laughter released some tension. We were both worried about the same thing: what the prisons were like in this quarter of the desert. Because that’s what we’d be facing if they found out who we were—and what we’d done to the vehicular property of the OPEC minister and the head of secret police.
“Let’s not panic,” I said as we eased up to the barrier. The guard came out, a little mustachioed fellow who looked as if he’d been forgotten when the Foreign Legion decamped. After a lot of conversation in my mediocre French, it became clear he wanted us to produce some sort of permit before we could pass.
“A permit?!” Lily screamed, nearly spitting at him. “We need permission to enter this godforsaken armpit of the earth?”
I said politely in French, “And what, monsieur, is the purpose of this permit we need?”
“For El-Tanzerouft—the Desert of Thirst,” he assured me, “your car must be inspected by the government and given a bill of health.”
“He’s afraid the car won’t make it,” I told Lily. “Let’s cross his palm with silver, let him check a few things himself. Then we can go.”
When the guard saw the color of our money and Lily shed a few tears, he decided he was important enough to give us the government kiss of approval: He looked at our cans of gas and water, marveled over the big silver hood ornament of some winged, bosomy bimbo, clucked with admiration at the bumper stickers that said “Suisse” and “F” for France. It looked as if things were tooting right along until he told us we could put up the convertible top and go.
Lily looked at me uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure what the problem was. “In French, does that mean what I think?” she said.
“He told us we could split,” I assured her, starting to get back into the car.
“I mean the part about the roof. Do I have to put it up?”
“Of course. This is the desert. In a few hours it’s going to be one hundred degrees in the shade—only there’s no shade. Not to mention the effect of sand on the coiffure.…”
“I can’t!” she hissed at me. “There isn’t any top!”
“We’ve driven over eight hundred miles from Algiers in a car that can’t make it through the desert?!” I was raising my voice. The guard was in the gatehouse ready to lift the pole, but he paused.
“Of course the car will make it,” she said indignantly, sliding into the driver’s seat. “This is the best automobile ever built. But there’s no roof. It was broken, and Harry said he’d have it repaired, only he never did. However, I think our more immediate problem—”
“Our immediate problem,” I yelled at her, “is that you’re about to drive into the biggest desert in the world with no roof over our heads! You’re going to get us killed!”
Our little guard might not have understood English, but he knew something was going on. Just then a big semi pulled up behind us and tooted its horn. Lily waved her hand, started the ignition, and backed the Corniche to one side so the big truck could pull ahead. The guard came out again to inspect the trucker’s papers.
“I don’t see why you’re getting so excited,” said Lily. “The car does have air-conditioning.”
“Air-conditioning!” I screamed again. “Air-conditioning? That’s going to help a lot with sunstrokes and sandstorms!…” I was just warming to my theme when the guard went back into his hut to raise the gate for the trucker, who, undoubtedly, had had the sense to have his vehicle inspected before descending into the seventh circle of hell.
Before I knew what was happening, Lily hit the gas. Churning sand, she plowed back up onto the road and through the gate right behind him. I ducked as the iron bar came crashing down past my head and smashed into the back of the Corniche with a clang. There was a sickening sound of chewed metal as the bar scraped across the sleek rear fenders. I could hear the guard running from the gatehouse, screaming his head off in Arabic—but my own voice drowned him out.
“You almost got me deca
pitated!” I hollered. The car tottered dangerously toward the edge of the road. I was thrown back against my door; then, to my horror, we spun off the road and plowed into deep red sand.
Terror seized me—I couldn’t see a thing. Sand was in my eyes, my nose, my throat. The red haze swirled around me. The only sounds were Carioca’s hacking cough beneath the seat and the booming horn of the giant truck, which seemed dangerously close to my ear.
When we surfaced into the glittering light of day, sand sifted from the big fins of the Corniche, our wheels were on hard pavement, and the car somehow—miraculously—was thirty yards in front of the semi, still barreling down the road. I was furious with Lily, but also thunderstruck with amazement.
“How did we get here?” I said, pulling my fingers through my hair to loosen the gritty sand.
“I don’t know why Harry ever bothered to get me a chauffeur,” Lily said blithely as if nothing had happened. Her hair, face, and dress were completely coated with a thin powdery layer of sand. “I’ve always loved driving. It’s great to be out here. I bet I already hold the land speed record among chess players—”
“Didn’t it occur to you,” I interrupted, “that even if you didn’t get us killed, that little guy back there might have a phone? What if he reports us? What if he calls ahead?”
“Calls ahead where?” snorted Lily with disdain. “This place isn’t exactly crawling with Highway Patrol.”
Of course she was right. Nobody was going to get excited enough to chase after us way out here in the middle of nowhere, just because we jumped a car inspection checkpoint.
I returned to the diary of the French nun Mireille, beginning where I’d left off the day before:
And so I went East from Khardaia across the dry Chebkha and stony plains of the Hammada, headed for the Tassili n’Ajjer that lay at the edge of the Libyan Desert. And as I departed, the sun rose over the red dunes to lead me to what I sought.…”
East—the direction the sun rose each morning over the Libyan border, across the canyons of the Tassili where we too were headed. But if the sun rose in the east, why hadn’t I noticed that it was now rising, red and full, in what seemed to be the north, as we barreled down the road from the barricade at Ain Salah—into infinity?
Lily had been clipping along for hours on the endless ribbon of two-lane road that swayed like a long, long serpent among the dunes. I was growing drowsy from the heat, and Lily—who’d been behind the wheel for close to twenty hours and awake for twenty-four—was looking green around the gills and red at the tip of her nose from the blistering heat.
The temperature had been rising steadily for the last four hours since we’d crossed the barricade. Now it was ten o’clock, and the dashboard dials registered an incredible atmospheric temperature of 120 degrees Fahrenheit and an altimeter reading of five hundred feet above sea level. These couldn’t be correct. I rubbed my scratchy eyes and looked again.
“Something’s wrong,” I told Lily. “Those plains we left may have been close to sea level, but it’s been four hours since Ain Salah. We should be up a few thousand feet by now, moving into high desert. It’s much hotter than it should be this early in the day as well.”
“That’s not all,” agreed Lily in a voice thick from the swelling heat. “There should’ve been a turnoff at least half an hour ago, according to Minnie’s directions. But there wasn’t.…” And then I noticed the direction of the sun.
“Why did that guy say we needed a permit for our car?” I said, my voice rising a little hysterically. “Didn’t he say it was for El-Tanzerouft—the Desert of Thirst? My God.…” Though the road signs had all been in Arabic and I wasn’t too familiar with maps of the Sahara, something horrible was beginning to dawn on me.
“What’s the matter?” cried Lily, looking at me nervously.
“That barricade you ran wasn’t Ain Salah,” I suddenly realized. “I think we took a wrong turn somewhere during the night. We’re headed south into the salt desert! We’re headed for Mali!”
Lily stopped the car in the middle of the freeway. Her face, already peeling badly from the sun, had crumpled in despair. She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, and I put my hand on her shoulder. We both knew I was right. Jesus, what were we going to do now?
When we’d joked that there was nothing beyond that barricade, we’d laughed too soon. I’d heard stories about the Desert of Thirst. There was no more terrifying spot on earth. Even the famous Empty Quarter in Arabia could be crossed by camel, but this was the end of the world—a desert where no life could survive at all. It made the plateaus we’d accidentally missed seem like a lost paradise. Here, when we dropped below sea level, they said the temperatures rose so high you could fry an egg on the sand, and water turned instantly to steam.
“I think we should turn back,” I told Lily, who still sat with her head inclined. “Move over and let me drive. We’ll turn on the air-conditioning—you look ill.”
“That’ll only heat the engine more,” she said thickly, raising her head. “I don’t know how the hell I missed the way. You can drive, but if we turn back, you know the jig is up.”
She was right, but what else could we do? I looked at her and saw her lips were cracking from the heat. I got out of the car and opened the trunk. There were two lap rugs in the back. I wrapped one around my head and shoulders, taking the other to wrap up Lily. I dragged Carioca from beneath the seat; his little tongue was hanging out, and it was nearly dry. I held his mouth up and poured some water down his throat. Then I went up to look under the hood.
I made a few trips to replenish gas and water. I didn’t want to depress Lily any further, but her error last night had been a major fuck-up. Based on the way the tank guzzled down the first can of water, it didn’t look like we were going to make it in this car, even if we did turn back. If that were so, we might as well go forward.
“There’s a semi following us, isn’t there?” I said, getting into the driver’s seat and starting the car again. “If we go on, even if we break down, he’ll have to show up eventually. There haven’t been any exits but dirt roads in the last two hundred miles.”
“I’m game if you are,” she told me weakly, then looked at me with a grin that cracked her lips a little more. “If only Harry could see us now.”
“Gee, we’re friends at last—just as he’d always hoped.” I smiled back with false bravado.
“Yeah,” agreed Lily. “But what a meshugge way to die.”
“We’re not dead yet,” I told her. But as I watched the glaring sun rising still higher in the parched white sky, I wondered how long it would be.…
So this was what a million miles of sand looked like, I thought as I kept the big Corniche carefully clicking along below forty, trying to keep the water from boiling off. It was like a big red ocean. Why wasn’t it yellow or white or dirty gray like other deserts? The pulverized rock sparkled like crystal beneath the sun’s hot glare, more glittery than sandstone, darker than cinnamon. As I listened to the engine slowly hissing our water away and watched the thermostat rise, the desert waited silently as far as the eye could see—waiting like a dark red eternity.
I had to keep stopping the car to cool it down, but the external thermostat was now climbing over 130 degrees, a temperature I found hard to imagine outside an oven. When I stopped to lift the hood I saw the cracking, flaking paint on the front of the Corniche. My shoes were all sloshy and filled with sweat, but when I bent to slip them off it wasn’t perspiration I found. The skin of my swollen feet had burst from the heat—the shoes were filled with blood. I felt nausea climbing in my throat. I put the shoes back on, got back into the car without a word, and kept on driving.
I’d taken off my shirt miles back to wrap around the steering wheel where the leather had cracked and was peeling off. The blood in my brain was boiling; I felt the suffocating heat burning my lungs. If only we could make it until sunset, we could survive another day. Maybe someone would come and rescue us—maybe that sem
i behind us would come. But even the gigantic truck we’d passed that morning started to seem like a figment of my imagination, the memory’s mirage.
It was two in the afternoon—the needle on the thermostat said it was close to 140 degrees—when I first noticed something. At first I thought my brain had sizzled and I was having hallucinations, that I was really seeing a mirage. I thought I saw the sand begin to move.
There wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the air, so how could the sand be moving? But it was. I slowed the car a bit, then stopped completely. Lily was sleeping heavily in the back seat, she and Carioca covered with the lap rug.
I sniffed the air and listened. There was that flat, oppressive air one senses before a storm—that smothering silence, the terrifying vacuum of sound that comes only before the most horrid kinds of storms: the tornado … the hurricane. There was something coming all right, but what?
I jumped out, pulled off my blanket, and tossed it across the car’s scalding hood so I could climb on top for a better view. Clambering up to a standing position, I scanned the horizon. There was nothing at all in the sky, but as far as I could see across the desert the sands were moving—crawling slowly like some living thing. I shivered despite the throbbing, aching heat.
I jumped back down and went to wake Lily, pulling off the lap rug protecting her. She sat up sluggishly, her face already badly blistered from the sun she’d taken earlier.
“We’re out of gas!” she said, frightened. Her voice was cracked, her lips and tongue swollen.
“The car’s still okay,” I told her. “But something’s coming. I don’t know what.”
Carioca had crept from beneath the blanket and started whining as he peered suspiciously at the moving sand around us. Lily glanced down at him, then back at me with frightened eyes.
“A storm?” she said.
I nodded. “I think so. I don’t suppose we could hope for rain out here—it’s got to be a sandstorm. It could be very bad.”
I didn’t want to rub it in that, thanks to her, we hadn’t any shelter. It might not have helped if we had. In a place like this, where roads could be buried in drifts up to thirty feet, so could we. We wouldn’t stand a chance even if the damned car had a roof—even crawling underneath it might not help.