Desert Divers Read Free Page A

the Saharans. His name was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
13
    I loved the airmen in Saint-Exupéry’s books. The pilots of those days were kind of canoeists of the air, with no more than their lower bodies inside the ‘flying machine’, as it was called. Flying was shooting the rapids with the propellor as a paddle.
    The primitive, single-engined machines flew below the clouds to see their way. In fog or a sandstorm, they were lost. One in six flights between Cap Juby and Dakar ended in a crash or emergency landing in the desert.
    And when the pilot in his thick leather overalls, ‘heavy and cumbersome as a diver’, clambered out of his cockpit – then, if the rescuers did not get to him in time, what awaited him was captivity or death at the hands of hostile nomads. Altogether, 121 pilots were lost.
    There was no shortage of exciting adventures in the boys’ books of my childhood. But they had one failing – they had no idea what they were talking about.
    If you asked Edward S. Ellis how Deerfoot behaved when he ‘crept invisibly through the thicket’, there would have been a silence. Ellis was not an Indian. He had no idea how it happened. I could see that already from the way he wrote.
    Saint-Ex, on the other hand, was a real airman. He knew that the pilot can feel from the vibrations in his own body when fifteen tons of matter has achieved the ‘maturity’ required to take off. He knew what it felt like to separate the plane from the ground – ‘with a movement like picking a flower’ – and let it be borne by the air.
    His knowledge was no thin veneer concealing massiveignorance. He was authentic. When he called the desert sun ‘a pale soap bubble in the mist’, I knew he had seen it. He had been there. It was in his language.
    Saint-Ex was the first writer who gave me some sense of what ‘style’ is.
14
    Today, Cap Juby is called Tarfaya. I book in at the Green March hotel. There is no other.
    The town is white with blue front doors and flat roofs, a forest of reinforcement rods protruding from the walls – the houses are all prepared for a second floor which has not yet arrived.
    The small shops are just holes in the walls, all with an identical assortment of candies, cigarettes, batteries, sewing thread and soft drinks.
    I start asking after old people who might have memories of the 1920s. Yes, there should be a few. But while I am waiting for them, a courteous Moroccan policeman comes and asks me to accompany him to the police station.
    They already know everything there. The squealing radio with its crackling voices has told them where I have come from, where I have spent the night, which police posts I have passed, all my father’s first names, all my mother’s first names and her maiden name, and also that claim not to know the names of my father’s father or my maternal grandmother.
    So I want to talk to old Saharans in Tarfaya, do I? Thechief gendarme is full of goodwill. Tomorrow I am to meet the mayor. He will help me.
    I am allowed to see the charming and obliging side of the system of control. Other people get the disappearances and the torture.
15
    The front door of the Green March hotel is kept shut with a thick piece of paper folded twice and jammed in between the door and the doorpost. Whenever anyone fails to do this, the door swings open and slams violently in the wind.
    There is a café on the ground floor. For dinner, I am served two eggs apparently fried in waste engine oil. I eat the bread with gratitude.
    The café has the town’s only television set. The news begins with the usual good wishes and other courtesies which Hassan, the King, has exchanged with other heads of state. Then comes what Hassan has done during the day, often with flashbacks to what Hassan had done previously on the same day or in the same genre. It ends with a prediction of what Hassan will do tomorrow, illustrated with film of what it looked like when Hassan last did the same thing.
    The few seconds left