All of us Friends impatiently awaited our arrival at the deserts of the Batna region, which are the main ones in the area. Professor Pecha resembled a child with the best of gifts awaiting him; excitedly, he admitted to us that it was there, in Batna, that his passion for the desert had begun thirty years ago. Days earlier, at Hoggar, they had projected slides of photos taken there by other expedition groups; all of us, thus, well knew where to head and what it was that we were going to contemplate. Young Vlk was at my side again. His face was distorted, he didn’t look very happy.
I retain two clear observations from that glorious day, both featuring our beloved young guide.
We got out of the vans a few kilometers from El Goléa, the nearest town; from there we walked to Tindouf, where one of the most spectacular oases on earth, according to the experts, is located. There was nothing to be afraid of: it was just six kilometers by foot, seven maximum. In two hours—much sooner, thus, than the sun would start to set—we would arrive at the camp where we would spend the night.
Just before setting off on the march, Shasu perched on some ruins. I raised my eyes to observe him, but the sun shined in my face, blinding me. Up there, scanning the horizon and wrapped in a sunlight that finessed his shape down to its essence, Shasu struck me as an angel ready to launch into flight. He pointed in the direction we should head, or perhaps greeted a faraway acquaintance. The group finalized preparations for the trek and I, meanwhile, observed the boy in expectant, admiring silence. Shasu leaped down from those ruins, and my beautiful vision dissolved in the act. His adolescent figure, trimmed down by the firmament and wrapped in a halo of light, is one of the most beautiful images that I retain from my stay in that desert.
At one of the meetings before the trip and at the advice of its preparatory committee, the Friends had decided to make this journey by foot and without talking; in this mode—in silence—we would tire less and better perceive what is called “the message of the desert.” This wording alluded to the impression that a particular landscape would provide us, which we would later share with our companions when we regrouped. As for me, I made that journey in Shasu’s company: with that sleek, supernatural Shasu that I have already spoken of, almost transparent, who I saw pointing at the horizon, perched on some ruins. The flesh-and-blood Shasu was behind me, the last member of the caravan, keeping pace with the slowest in the party. Just like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famous French writer and aviator, I too had found my own little prince in the desert; and, like some of the characters that famous little prince encounters in his story, I too needed to be tamed to receive my lesson.
“Give me a word that will help me live,” that is the only thing I would have asked of the boy.
That same day, one of the most defining in the history of my soul, as I will explain next, Otla Plícka didn’t leave my side: perhaps he intuited that something important was about to happen, which would make me into someone different. Or maybe he knew (who can really know the Friends?) that in a few hours I would become one of theirs forever. It’s likely that he thought about the baptism by sand, which for me had entailed getting lost and being rescued during the storm in the Sétif. He didn’t know, naturally, how deeply our Shasu had seen into me: his embrace in the middle of the blur; his sweet “It’s over now, it’s over now,” while the sand drew the most terrible and intoxicating shapes at our feet; his figure trimmed beneath the sun, like a god’s or, at the very least, like that of my own little prince. Neither did Otla know—indeed how could he?— my raging happiness when I walked at Shasu’s side on our way to meet his sisters Rose, Lilac, and Blue. But Otla, in any case, was not mistaken: the desert’s venom, if I can call it that, now flowed freely through my veins. Perhaps that venom was already inoculated into me during my first trip to the Sahara, when we were victims of the discourtesy and lack of interest of our guide, Serbal; or, even earlier, when—without really knowing the significance that it would have—I framed some photographs to then hang them and sit before them. I don’t know—perhaps everything began with the sentence that I read on the back cover of one of Professor Pecha’s many books and with the subsequent initial email that I sent to the organization, or…who can know? Who can know with certainty where a story begins?
Many must have read that book by the professor before I had, and to many of them, no doubt, the sentence from the back cover that so moved me must have seemed banal. It said this: “In addition to his scientific qualifications, he has the experience that comes from his continuous trips to deserts all over the world.” Is that enough to give birth to a love? Is a single sentence enough to begin writing an entire book? Can a sentence, just one, change a person, change the world? Nonetheless, only in the desert of Tindouf, and because of something seemingly banal, did I realize that my fascination with the desert had arrived at a final station which, inevitably, was also my point of departure.
We had been contemplating the Tindouf desert, in the Batna region, with our field glasses. In silence, as was our custom. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, that desert’s sand is the finest of all the Sahara. Its color isn’t uniform: there are places where it is completely red, so that the pilgrim has the impression they are walking over fire; others, the most beautiful ones, where it is orange—the orange stretch we passed through resembled a lunar landscape; and others, finally, where it is a very intense yellow, which was the stretch that we could only make out with the field glasses. Like the sea, like fire, there is something hypnotizing about the desert: hours can go by and, the same way that we don’t tire of watching how the waves break against the cliffs or logs burn in a fireplace, neither do we tire of the inexhaustible activity of the desert. Because this is, precisely, what these three landscapes of water, fire, and earth have in common: they are in perpetual ferment and, consequently, they never offer the same show twice. I could have confirmed this myself on the occasion of the sandstorm; but the intense fear that had seized me then impeded my enjoyment of the panorama. Now, however, with my high-definition field glasses, I was a privileged spectator of the dunes’ marvelous spectacle. The entire group was awed. And we spent a long time in an almost religious silence, each with their own field glasses, scanning the horizon. All the members of the expedition were in the same desert at that moment, but I would swear that none of us saw the same thing. In a moment of relaxation, I noticed how some were crying with emotion.
I knew it was time to go because I heard how Jan was giving instructions to head toward the vans.
“Are you coming?” asked Otla, attentive to me like a guardian angel.
One question. One short phrase. I didn’t look at him. The desert required the entirety of my concentration. Those geological forms, so hallucinatory, reminded me of landscapes I had never seen, which, nonetheless, something or someone inside of me did remember. I asked myself where the intense impression of having been in the desert before might have come from. Why this feeling, so clear, that all of humanity must have had to once live there? In any case, if seventy percent of the earth’s surface is desert, can it really be strange for a man to feel entirely at home there?
Minutes later I boarded the van along with everyone else, but just before that—with the field glasses at my eyes and the desert in my heart—I had wanted to answer that “Are you coming?” with a, “No, I’m not going back. No, I’m staying in the desert.”
I think that Otla read my mind, since he stared at me for a very long time.
“Are you coming?” he finally asked me again.
And I followed him.
Not to go back: that was the first time that that possibility occurred to me. Of course, I did not then know that many Friends of the Desert—many, many of them—had heard a similar call at some point. In my naïveté, I imagined that I was the only one to know that the desert had a voice: “Don’t go back, don’t go back,” the voice repeated in my heart. Or I repeated it—how to know?—as if it were a prayer. As if I needed to repeat the words to consider their viability. As if it were necessary to soak in the possibilities that that music drove me to. To not go back…how sweet that strange sentence sounded to me!
When does a man know that he has arrived at that point from which, they say, there is no going back? Is there truly a point from which it is no longer possible to turn back? I could take a train and then a plane to go home, there was no doubt of that; I could go back, that was a fact. Nonetheless, something told me that sooner or later the day would come when I would regret that decision, a thousand times over: the day when I would be sorry for having ignored that voice, indisputable and, despite everything, respectful.
At first, the Sahara is very uncomfortable for a European, and a certain amount of time must pass—sometimes quite a bit—until they’re able to feel at ease. For me, feeling at ease—now I know—simply means not wanting to go home. I have always wanted to go back from the places that I have traveled to; I have never wanted to stay anywhere. The conclusion isn’t difficult to come to: until then I had never traveled to a place that was mine. I hadn’t found the place that I belong to—and it’s none other than the desert—until I arrived at the yellow desert of Tindouf, at age forty-two. Late? For a person of the desert there is never late or early; everything happens at the age when it should happen, and nothing is purely random or arbitrary.
During the return trip I was indifferent to whether we stopped to refuel or made the journey without stopping; to whether my neighbor spoke to me or preferred silence; whether it would take us eight hours to reach our next destination—as was planned—or sixteen. In fact, it didn’t even matter to me if I was myself or another person. And I swear that anything that they had said to me at that moment, anything, I would have accepted without argument. That completely indifferent mood was as novel for me as it was pleasant. Anything could happen to me—I repeat, anything; by virtue of the possibility of not going back, I was stronger than the circumstances.
With addictive insistence, and rocked by the rattling of the bus, I relived the brief conversation I had had with Otla while my eyes were bathed in the most yellow sand on the face of the earth. “Are you coming?” he had asked me. “No,” I had responded. “Why don’t you want to go back?” Otla’s imaginary voice kept asking me. But that voice—which was none other than my conscience—was accustomed to my not answering it, so then it too had to accept my silence and perplexity.
Once we had arrived at the hotel, the question of whether I should return to Europe or not remained unanswered. Could I really abandon my house, my work, my family, my colleagues…? Could I simply give up being who I had been up until that moment and begin to be someone different, unthinkable up until then even to me? But is it truly possible to be born again? To not go back, to not go back: like the sirens’ song in Ulysses’ ears, tied to the mast of a ship, that enchanting melody continued sounding in my heart for a long time. To not go back, to not go back.
Even today I don’t know if we should return to the point from which we set out and thereby close the circle that we have opened, or if it is better to remain far away and not close it. I can say today that it doesn’t matter to me to know what anyone else in my place would have done, nor what would have been more exemplary or heroic, more honest, more necessary.
Weeks later, back in my country, at one of the meetings at Hoggar, I mentioned to Professor Pecha my desire to undertake a trip to the Sahara entirely on my own.
“I need to spend a few months in the desert,” I said. “I have requested leave from work.”
“In the desert no one can manage on their own strength alone,” he replied.
“I imagine that’s true,” I responded, “but it is necessary that I take this trip alone.”
He did not respond to my last statement. He just looked at me as he had surely looked at so many others over the course of his life: with gentle, tired eyes. He seemed to understand what was happening to me and, to demonstrate it to me, he commented how much my case resembled that of one Andreas, whose definitive admission to the organization had been delayed for years. The professor explained to me that Andreas, who I never met, had always rejected traveling to the Sahara or to any other desert on the planet. He said that his love for the desert didn’t rely on geography and that his was a platonic friendship, or so Pecha asserted this alleged Andreas had said. I, frankly, did not see any parallelism between that story and mine: Andreas hadn’t framed a single photograph, nor had he been bewitched by its contemplation. Andreas had never been in the desert, but everyone insisted that he could speak better of it than any of the Friends and, perhaps, with even greater authority than the professor himself, for whom Andreas felt a limitless admiration.
“He thinks you are only free when you can take everything you have with you when you depart,” I heard from the professor’s lips.
I didn’t respond to that either. I kept asking for his permission to go.
“My permission?” Pecha repeated, seemingly amused that someone like me, who had never treated him like a guide or teacher, would make such a petition.
“Your permission,” I confirmed.