OTHERS OF THEIR KIND
A Territorial Imperative
by Christopher Williams
When the Great Pestilence ravaged Europe and North America, I was a girl of just twelve years. My home was in the South of France. My family lived in a small village. A year after the deadly virus began its march, my mother, my father and a carefully chosen gathering of ninety-three, still healthy villagers, which included many of my friends and their families, decided we must flee if we were to have any chance of survival. My parents were never the ones to shy from a decisive action, and now they were active in the implementation of this escape, to where, remained a secret for the time.
In late September of the year 2029, three men from our group commandeered three school buses from the school in the dead of night. Of course I knew nothing of the details, but I did know that my father and mother were off organizing something big when the first people of our village suddenly became ill, and some died straightaway. For many nights, my parents disappeared out the backdoor to orchestrate clandestine meetings in the old, abandoned abbey south of town. I was told to discuss this with no one, not even my closest friends. When the time came, I could only take a rucksack on my back and what I could carry in my hands. My brother and I were terrified yet thrilled at this sober undertaking.
On the designated night, three men dressed in black met at the fountain in the center of town. They then headed by back alleys to the schoolhouse, classes had long since been suspended. They were told that if anyone saw them, to pretend that they were drunk and trying to get home. They were prepared with an extra set of keys to the buses and had already stored many tins of diesel fuel in the abbey. My mother had food for our family for many days. At one o’clock in the morning, ninety-three adults and children silently slipped from their beds and apartments, and without light or sound crept into the street. At the edge of town, the group gathered like a phantom assembly and walked along the roadside the two kilometers to the abbey.
We congregated in silence and apprehension. Even the children were somber. For a twelve-year old, it was ominous and scary, yet exciting. Not one person from our group was detected by the other inhabitants of the town. When all were at the abbey, we loaded the tins of fuel and ourselves into the buses and headed off into a haunted land.
We traveled at night, stopping in the woods and farm fields by the day, with guards posted all around the buses. When we passed through towns, we wore face masks, rubber gloves and were instructed to lock the doors and seal all the bus windows with tape. We did not stop or speak to anyone. A few times, people would come out of the darkness to the bus wanting to be picked up, but we would shake our heads and keep moving. Some towns had bad smells and lumpy heaps on the sidewalks with blankets over them.
Once we were stopped by policemen at a roadblock somewhere outside a city. The bus driver talked to them through the closed window. We, in the back of the bus, could hear him shouting through the glass. The police said that the city was quarantined and nobody was to go in or out. Our driver told the police that we might have some contaminated people on board. They told us to detour the city and waved us on as quickly as possible. I remember looking up apprehensively at my mother there in the dark, she shook her head, and whispered, “not so”.
Afterwards, we placed signs for contamination on the sides of the buses to discourage any intrusion. We drove through the countryside for many nights, and we saw things that I have shaken from my memory. Horrible, chilling, awful things. We passed completely empty towns. We went through cities with people wandering in and out of broken stores and corpses scattered with the debris. We passed armed gangs on the highway, but they only shied from us.
After days of travel, we arrived at the dockyards in Algeciras, Spain, in the early morning hours. We put our face masks and our gloves back on and tied rubber bands around pants legs and sleeves. Before we drove through town we removed the contamination signs from the buses.
The big buses worked around the docks. Eventually we found the ferry terminal to Tangier, Morocco. Everyone on the bus was tense. My father stood in front of the bus talking with the immigration officer. Both were dressed with masks, plastic suits and rubber gloves. The officer kept looking down and shaking his head. My father had prepared for this. Out from his pocket came a plastic envelope filled with sanitized bank notes. He held up three fingers and pointed to the three buses. The officer looked around, pocketed the envelope, and waved us onto the ferry and abruptly turned away. Order of law is one of the first victims to fall in a pandemic.
Our plan, which had been secret, I now found. It was to go to the Hoggar Mountains in the heart of the Sahara Desert near the intersection of Algeria, Libya, and Niger, to find solitude in an empty land. One of our members, some years ago, had come upon a remote and little-known oasis that possibly could sustain our people. He had the coordinates. We pinned our lives to the hope that the oasis would be free of the virus. There we would start a new life protected by the vast stretches of sand from the crumbling world outside. It was a desperate move with the lives of ninety-three people in the balance, but the alternative, to wait for the heinous wave of sickness and death to sweep us into its bosom, would have been a certain end.
On the trip across the Straights of Gibraltar to the Continent of Africa, we learned from other travelers, all dressed in protective clothing and speaking with muted voices through layers of plastic. Of the dire state of the world, few, they said, would escape the ravages of this virulent disease, it seemed to be everywhere.
The Port of Tangier was chaotic. There were no workers to help dock the vessel. It was rumored that the captain intended to head the ship out to sea after this last trip. The only factor in our favor was the fact that during a pandemic, the masses on the street attempted to remain separated from each other. As a consequence, we were saved from possible mob violence. Here, everyone was a potential carrier.
The people from our village in charge of our escape caravan had prepared us well. There was food and fuel, and plenty of maps. We were self-sufficient for many days and probably thousands of kilometers. We headed out of Morocco to the east along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. On the highway, all the border crossings were deserted and the barriers were raised. At Algiers, Algeria, we refueled and renewed our supplies without incident. We now turned away from the sea to the south on the notorious African Highway, the Trans-Sahara Highway, TAH-2.
In the best of times, the Trans-Sahara Highway is a most dangerous road. It is known for its thousands of blistering kilometers of broken pavement and ambiguous sand tracks that sometimes meander unmarked through the desert. Only the experienced and skilled, or the foolish and the desperate travel this highway - we were the desperate. Our buses had no air-conditioning and could turn into solar ovens with us inside to bake like potatoes. A mechanical breakdown or blown tire on the Trans-Sahara could easily end in death. And now during these godforsaken times, there could be violent people on the road with little fear and nothing to lose. We had no firearms. In their carefully considered caution, the planners intentionally omitted carrying any weapons.
Again, we were forced to travel during the night, this time because the heat was too brutal to endure during the day. We stopped our travel just after dawn to climb under the buses for the only shade available in this landscape. We ate, talked and tried to sleep, lying on the hot sand beneath the bus. None would hazard a trip out of the shade for any purpose. We started traveling again an hour after sunset. Driving in the dark was demanding, we often moved at a crawl when the road was poor or to determine our way following our dim headlights in the monstrous dark of the sand sea. We passed many forsaken vehicles left at random with their doors ajar. We slowed but never stopped. At an improved stretch of pavement, we abruptly came upon a roadblock of several broken vehicles spread across the roadway with torches burning atop. We saw the band of light at some distance. The lead bus, ours, hesitated only momentarily, the driver called for us to go to the floor. The bus began gaining speed, then plunged into the barricade, the other two buses close behind. With a huge slam the carcasses of two cars were tossed through the air. Rifle shots sounded and bullets snarled through the bus sides and ruptured the roof. The bus leaned and rocked but kept its wheels on the ground. The other two still close behind. No one attempted to follow us. Several miles ahead we stopped in the middle of the road. Everyone ran out onto the roadway, cried and embraced. There were no injuries.
In my seat, I sat in a state of half-sleep, with my slumped head rattling against the window glass and with the constant deep rumbling vibration of the engine under my feet. The Sahara passed by, night after night. There was only an occasional pinpoint of light somewhere out there in the desert gloom. We came upon melancholy little villages, no more than an empty gathering of adobe walls with darkened windows. Sometimes we stopped for water or fuel where there were people present. We roused the proprietors out of their beds. Some knew nothing of the coming pestilence. We never stopped in the larger towns. Shrouded heads turned to see our fleet move swiftly through the marketplace with our drawn white faces at the windows. We overtook Ghardaia, El Golea, and In Salah. Some distance north of Tamanrasset, we left the Trans-Sahara Highway for a narrow desert road heading to the east.
The landscape had changed from a bleached white plane to the rich pink Sahara bronze. The buses started to climb the mountains of the Hoggar. We were now on a stony plateau, ahead were mountain buttes, looking like giant tan molars coming out of curved soft gums of sand. Behind them in the distance were grey and purple spires sharply jutting from rounded camel colored sand. There was nothing at all growing out of this landscape.
Two days later we were deep into the mountains. The extreme heat of the flat desert plane had moderated. We stopped earlier than normal in the pre-dawn. It was the only time of day that the air was pleasant. The ninety-three people, now haggard and desert-worn assembled for our critical instructions. As the sun rose, the man with the global positioning device and the precious coordinates was ready to tell us his story, for we now were near to our destination, and soon must leave our buses behind. Our lifesaving, dear, battered buses.
We sat in a half circle on a small sandhill confronting this man with whom we had placed such trust. He was of English descent. He stood quietly facing us with his hands deep in his pockets.
“Camels,” he said, “are remarkable creatures, supremely suited to their environment, our diametric opposite. They are the desert specialists, we are the generalists, not suited to any particular environment…But now, here, we are in a country of extremes, where the generalist does not do so well. This place calls for special ways to cope. The camel has an arsenal of devices suited to coping with this land. I won’t take time now to tell you of his amazing abilities to close his ears and nose, to shield his eyes from the wind and sand with two pairs of long lashes, or his great long legged body’s ability to regulate its temperature, to be cooler than the ambient air, and to stride out across the blazing desert with little water or food for days and weeks.”
“It was such a camel that saved my life.” As he spoke, he bent forward with his pale eyes scanning his audience, his fists still jammed into his pockets. “Several years ago, as a photographer I was on assignment to join and record a camel caravan out of Tamanrasset in the south of Algeria. Our route took us through these mountains of the Hoggar. There were twelve cargo-bearing camels and six people. On the seventh day out, we were overtaken by an enormous sandstorm at the foot of these mountains, not far from where we are now. For days the wind continued, entombing us beneath masses of sand. Again and again we dug out, only to be buried anew. I was with men of the desert, men who had spent their lives out here, but even now they became anxious, as the wind intensified its force on the fifth day of the storm.”
“It is customary to stay in place in conditions like these, to wait until the wind moderates to break camp, however, now the camel herders debated the question of whether to leave, as dangerous as it may be, to seek a more sheltered place. If, indeed, it could be discovered, for this storm showed no signs of abating.”
“Then, we found, to our astonishment, this decision had already been made for us. The camels had been staked a short distance from out tents. Now they were launching a loud commotion. We left the tent with our eyes almost closed to grope our way out to them, no small task in the driving sand. The camels were on their feet and wanting to leave. A strong sign for us to load up and go. As best as we could in the impossible conditions, we packed as much as possible and let the camels guide. When a camel has decided what it is that they want, there is no changing them. Now, in the thick of this colossal and prolonged wind, moving masses of airborne sand, we were ready to follow them. They knew what was best, we did not. Holding fast to their tails we followed with our heads wrapped in cloth, not seeing, only feeling our feet on the soft shifting ground and hearing nothing but the cry of the wind, and the hiss of sand against our headgear. We thus stumbled along for many hours behind our determined animals. To momentarily lose contact with the camels, even to hesitate in order to spill the sand from our boots, would tempt fate to be lost in the void, for the camels were not stopping. It must have been into the third day from our breaking camp when the storm eventually slowed. There were only three of us left now, behind the twelve camels. Our eyes were dim and our bodies were spent. Still the camels did not stop, and so we had no choice but to follow on, clutching their tails.”
“We soon emerged into a pale milky day. The wind was gone. With cool determination, our camels climbed a rise up a rock ledge. This is where they stopped. When we came to the crest, we saw an illusion, a fantasy below us. Tucked into a rocky valley was an oasis of liquid green beauty, deep pools of very blue water surrounded by fields and date palms. The camels knew this place, somehow, and they knew just how to get there, they needed no coordinates. There was a very small village next to the waters, and a few Bedouins were there living a quiet life. Much later, I found out it was the Oasis of Ihrere. There has never been a road to Ihrere, the people who are there are completely self-sufficient and want no connection with the outside.”
“This, the Oasis of Ihrere, is where we are going very soon,” our leader told us. “We will have to leave the buses at a place near the end of a desert trail when they can no longer be driven. We will then gather our things in our arms and walk the last few kilometers. It will be a few days on foot.”
“Living here in this desert will be a tough go.” The Englishman had eased off from his intensity some. “We are out of our habitat. There are scorpions with poisonous stings at the ends of their tails. There are snakes the size of a piece of string that can hide inside a dent in the sand and can kill you in a few seconds with a bite to the bottom of your foot. There are flies on every surface and in your ears and eyes. It is dry and hot. The sun can roast your flesh and sear your lips. We will have to work very hard. We must grow everything we will need right here at the Oasis of Ihrere, but we will survive, and we will eventually thrive.”
He now gave us his only smile. “Because we are intelligent, capable humans, and humans can adapt to changing circumstances, no matter where on earth we are. That’s why we are everywhere.”
“I am now ready for your questions.” The questions appeared to go on for hours. Afterwards, we began preparations for our trek. We talked and napped into the night.
This time the buses started in the morning. Following the coordinates, our driver soon left the roadway. For several hours, we continued overland, dodging boulders and ravines. For some distance, the ground had a hard surface, enough to support the weight of the bus. But soon, in a shallow valley, with a formidable mountain before us, the ground gave way beneath the bus, and the tires sank deep into the sands. Our long walk was upon us. To leave the bus, the last vestige of our one-time life was a most difficult moment for me. I cried the whole morning. As a school child, I rode those very buses every day in our far off, now dead village. Our last view of that life, from high on the mountain side as we pulled ourselves up, was of those three little derelict buses gathered down there on that vast plane, with their sad darkened windows.
TWO___________________
It was six in the morning of a Tuesday, in the year 2030, at the Camel Market in the town of Darau, Aswan, Egypt. It was the day of Camel Exchange. Dawn was already ferociously hot with a fine ambiance of dust. Like a dry ochre fog, the dust lay on the air and gave the sun a celestial light. Hundreds of camels were standing about the dirt of the grounds waiting for the events that will necessarily occur as the day progressed. They will be circled by men with money in their pockets who will look in their mouths and lift their feet and have their hands on them. Their lives will be changed. Some will be pack animals, a few will be dray or dairy animals, and some will be reduced to hide and meat.
For those who knew the Camel Market, it was clear that something today was wrong. There was an incompleteness in the air, another reality was at work. The pandemic had just arrived in Egypt, months after it had struck Europe. The full extent of its impact was not yet known, much of the rural population was unaware. Yet there was a palpable wariness among the merchants today. Deals were negotiated at greater distances. The crowd was thin. At 10:30, a buyer dropped the traces of his freshly acquired camel, doubled with pain, fell to the ground and in twitches of agony, was soon dead. Twenty minutes later, a camel driver and his daughter were seized with convulsions. By noon, the buyers had fled and the camel owners were panicking and abandoning their charges. By 3:30 in the afternoon, only the camels were left at the market. The dust was sinking to the ground again.
The camel takes everything in his long stride, this prodigious shift in the human population was observed by them with their usual detachment. Hidden within the shadow of this moment, the camel’s day had arrived. Their years of domestication had come to an end as discreetly as it had started some 4000 years before, but only the camels were there today to witness what was taking pace. By the time of the setting sun, the dirt streets were empty of people, but filled with camels on the move. They were leaving this little town and many others like it across the country, finding their way back to the open desert, their home and their territory.
One very tall, battered, old, grimy, white camel walked quickly with cause and conviction. Without falter, he put his head to the west. On his long sinewy legs of tendon, muscle, and bone, he strode out across pastures of rubble, yards of human discard, through fences, out into the unpeopled land. Those legs, which were there today at the camel market for their fibrous gristly meat and thick hide were very much alive. They knew where they were going. Guided by an internal mechanism, a biological device we humans have long since lost and never understood, the old camel would scarcely rest for another 28 degrees of longitude across blue-purple-black volcanic rock and soft, hot caramel brown sands. To the west, thirty-five hundred kilometers of White Desert and Black Desert, following no trails or roads, he would cross the Western Desert of Egypt, the Libyan Desert, Al Haruj al Aswad, Ramlat Rabyanah, and the great Massif du Tibisti lying between Libya and Chad. As he passed, other camels, some with traces still about their necks and trailing on the ground, fell into his stride. He overtook many small herds of random feral camels who joined the march.
After a month of travel, they had passed 15 degrees of longitude. They stopped at an oasis beneath tall cliffs. They walked into the water to cool their feet and put their heads deep inside to take in vast quantities. There were now more than two hundred camels. On the move, they fell into file, as was their habit. The old camel led them through mountain passes and around fields of broken rock in a line, head to tail, 700 meters long. With their large liquid eyes fixed on the distance behind double rows of dark lashes they crossed shallow planes spotted with weathered black volcanic rock so sun-hot that it broke the lines of vision. When they stopped for rest, they grouped close together and lowered to their padded knees holding them away from the fiery sands to share the cool of their bodies. Some died on route. Quietly and steadfastly acknowledging the doctrine of that natural process, they simply folded their legs to go down to the desert sands and wait for it to come, nothing could move them again, let the others continue on. Calves were born on route, with curly black hair, short snouts, and long legs to keep up.
Deep within the Mountains of Tibisti at the bottom of a dry wadis, they were spotted by the Toubou people high on the ridge above them. The Toubou are isolated, tough, independent, and dangerous. They are endemic to the Tibisti. The sovereign camel caravan appeared to them as a gift from the heavens. With great excitement, they prepared to seize the trespassers. The Toubou gathered their forces to meet the moving caravan at a point where the wadis emptied into the desert plain. The Toubou quickly established a line of skirmish across the sands ahead.
As the old camel emerged from the ravine, he knew immediately that there was trouble. Now that their freedom had been sent to them, they were holding fast to it. When a camel has decided what it is that they want, there is no changing them.
A camel can run as swiftly as a horse, and that is just what the herd of two hundred did. In a blizzard of dust and hooves, they thundered across the desert directly into the line of men. The startled Toubou broke position and fled for their lives.
The camels crossed the Tropic of Cancer, circled Idhan Murzuk, and passed to the south of Ghat. Four months and twenty days after leaving the Camel Market in Darau, Aswan, Egypt, the old camel walked into the familiar waters of Oasis Ihrere, in the Ahaggar Mountains, also known as The Hoggar.
THREE _________________
Now, as I write this, twelve years have passed since we fled France and arrived at this implausible place in the desert mountains. Our odyssey in the old school buses taking us through an infested dying world and to this distant place was a success. We had slipped beneath the specter of death and lived. We settled here, we worked hard and we thrived. The Oasis of Ihrere was beautiful then, the waters were transparent and the lands were a pleasure to the senses.
All that changed when the camels arrived. It is so difficult to construct in my memory exactly how it came to be with the camels. My mind falters, it seems too impossible.
I will try to explain.
I am now twenty-four and a complete creature of the desert. My skin is tough and wrinkled way beyond my years. My fingernails are permanently brown and thickened, and my hands look like the hands of a marmoset. My eyes are always squeezed half-closed for the sun and sand. The soles of my feet are dense with elephant skin, and my legs are skinny, the legs of a frog down by the water. But my muscles are like iron, I move with an intensity unknown to most human life, I have no fat. I am steady and swift, I run like a svelte desert fox. All our people are tight and lithe, we all are of solid health and strength, few are ever sick.
Healthy though we are, we are no longer our own masters. I am mortified to tell you what I am about to say. It comes hard, and it will be even harder for you to understand. But of course it must be said. We, our little party of humans here at this oasis in the desert, have, over these years, become the camel’s chattel. This human population, to all intent, belongs to the camels of Ihrere. The camels have taken charge of the oasis, they are the ones who are dominant here, not we humans. We are, how shall I say, their retainers and providers. What’s more, as I write this I fear that our human population of Ihrere will soon be gone. The irony of our lives is that we successfully escaped The Great Pestilence abroad, only to be driven into extinction here at this far-off oasis by a powerful force, a force more dominant than our desert population of humankind.
I had just turned fourteen when the camels arrived. We had been adjusting to our new lives at the Oasis for two years. To this point things had gone well for us. The pestilence had not reached our refuge. Here, we are so isolated that we know very little from the outside world. When the occasional nomad passes through, we always wanted to hear their stories so we would take them in, set them in isolation, give them food and rest, and listen to what they have to tell us before sending them on their way. Civilization, as we knew it, was gone. There were probably many small bands of people like ours surviving. But abroad, as we call it, it is a very dangerous place, the plague is still dominating the land. There is violence everywhere. We couldn’t leave the oasis even if our situation here became untenable.
After initial adjustment, the original occupants of the oasis welcomed us. They had been losing their young people, and their community was near collapse. We brought new hope and a new workforce. The palm groves were in disrepair with dead trees and old palm fronds scattering the forest floor. The small canals that feed the gardens were clogging with sand and debris. We put all that right, and in a year and a half, the date palms had been shorn, and the grove cleared. The canals were running briskly with clear water. We grew peppers, pimentos, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, cantaloupes, and of course, dates. Our people were well fed and healthy. In the evenings after the hard work of the day no longer filled our minds, there were tears of loss and the great hollow in our hearts was given space for our long-gone life back in France. But that had to be accepted as it was, as that way had disappeared completely and forever. All was as well at the Oasis of Ihrere as one could hope.
Then the camels arrived and everything changed. One clear winter morning at planting time, a camel, a very tall powerful white camel, came over the ridge to the east of the oasis, paused, then, with complete abandon, threw his whole body into the main pool of the oasis with a great splash. He had chosen a very special pool for his bath. This pool was treated with great reverence, there was never to be swimming or playing in it, it was always to remain unsullied. Close behind him there came more camels, and more. They all came over the crest and cast themselves in. There soon were hundreds of big dirty animals in our sacred water. I was on my way to the field as all this happened right in front of me. I could only stand horrified. The whole village had now come, but there was nothing we could do but yell at the camels and throw stones. The camels ignored us entirely. When they had enough, they left the muddied water to sleep under the palms.
That evening we had a meeting. The Bedouins believed that the camels were homing. This, to their thinking, was the place of their ancestors, they were seeking to return. The next morning, the camels poured into our village streets. They walked across my garden. My father and brother got sticks to scare them off. They graze on my carrots.
The camels displayed nothing but indifferent to us. They weren’t mean or hostile, and there was no show of a vindictive attitude. They evidently had found the place they wanted to occupy, their new and their old place of residency. They assumed, without question, that they had every right to do as they might. They turned to us with a yawn of unbiased disinterest. There was never a question of rights. It was their given mandate to inhabit this territory.
We humans, after some time of battle with the camels, gave in to the inevitable and fit ourselves into the space left for us. We took the leftovers. It is my thought that this position has seldom, or never, come upon any of humankind, from any other animal before in human history. We have, many times over, challenged one another, human to human, but I believe that our situation here at this oasis may be unique in the annals of mankind.
FOUR______________
My tribe has been here at the Oasis of Ihrere in the Mountains of Ahaggar for a long time, we have grown up and we have grown older. I would guess it is maybe twenty to thirty seasons. Those things have ceased to be of importance. My parents are old, but still alive and rather healthy. Many of the original people, we call them the French, I being among the youngest of that lot, have died, and many babies have come. I have taken a mate for life. We have made two children. We won’t have more, it is a mandate. I am now in the second half of my life. Still pull my share. Most of us French have permanent melancholia. The two generations of the desert babies, those human animals born to the desert, take to our situation without question. The oasis waters are still giving the Camels and us sustenance. The waters of the big pool are always murky from the constant bathing by the Camels. Our tribe drinks at this pool. The camels drink somewhere else.
Long ago, I was chosen by the Big White Camel as a special caregiver to him. He was the dominant Camel. Now he is long gone, and his prodigy are my family’s responsibility. It is considered an honor to my family, so we have special privileges among our tribe. I should not complain. I know that.
A few years ago, a person from the outside came by to give us information from there. Not many of that lot still exist. It does not matter anymore what is out beyond our territory. We have made that complete separation now. The visitor did not stay too long. The Camels are not happy about human animals who come here from the outside. They want them out very soon. We oblige. We work very hard, it is difficult to tend the needs of the Camels. They demand. Our numbers are dwindling, the Camels are forcing us into extinction, they don’t seem to care too much if we are here or not. We compete for their food, and their numbers always increase.
FIVE________________
A great deal of time has passed now. I am old now, and my parents are long gone, as is my mate. My children have grown to half their lifespans. Two died. Many of our tribe are gone. We dwindle in numbers. The camels prosper. We think the whole of humans are almost extinct now abroad, and with it, the pestilence is gone without its supper. I, and some of my family, have survived because we were chosen by the white camel those many years ago. We get extra foods and care. We rank high in the order. We love our camels because they are good to us. They are big and very strong. We pay tribute to them every day, and we are with great luck that they have chosen our tribe to domesticate. We love our masters and thank them for being so good to us little animals.
SIX_______________
I have been asked by our little tribe to say the last word before I go off to the desert because the Camels don’t want me here now and would like it if I go. There is little for me here now to this place. There is little to say because the words are hard to find. So, goodbye.