Monsters of iron and steel appeared one day from nowhere. No one had warned us they were coming. First we heard an enormous roar. Some people thought it was thunder, but the sky remained an unblemished blue. Others turned their eyes towards the mountains; the faraway summits stood steadfast and serene. The earth began to tremble beneath our feet. We listened, worried, and strained our eyes towards the horizon. In the distance, a cloud of ochre dust rose towards the sky. We remained immobile, gaping at this sight for which we had no name. When we realised the rumbling and the storm were coming towards us, panic spread like wildfire: people ran to hide behind dunes or collect livestock, men went to get their guns, women grabbed their children and ran inside tents. The tribal drum sounded to summon those who were away from the camp. We watched, stunned and powerless, as the terrible unknown thing approached.

Then it stopped. The dust swelled and began to dissipate, until we could make out terrible giants emerging from it: a machine the like of which even those who had been to the city had never seen, huge lorries with colossal structures mounted on top of them. There were people too, swarming around the machines. We glanced at each other, understanding nothing. What were these people and their monsters of steel doing just a mile from our camp? Men jumped from the lorries and pulled down huge trunks and long planks. They began to erect small, misshapen tents made from crude cloths. These tents had neither poles nor decoration and went up in the blink of an eye. The men also built tiny houses of wood, unrolled cables, panted as they pushed trollies loaded with large iron boxes, which they lowered to the ground with care.

We assembled on the big dune overlooking our camp to observe them. They had no livestock, no women, no children. Some were black, some white. Some were bare-chested. They moved constantly, like ants. They weren’t a tribe, nor were they soldiers. We had no idea what they were. We looked to each other for answers, but no one had an explanation. The whispers began: they’d come to take our land, our wells would dry up, they would burn the vegetation when the rains came.

Our men conferred all night in the chief’s tent and came to no conclusion. The next day, after a morning of confusion and hesitation, the chief announced he would go down, alone, to meet the new arrivals. He was gone for a long time. We waited on tenterhooks. When he finally returned, the drum sounded, calling the whole tribe to meet outside his tent. Even the girls were authorised to attend.

The chief seemed concerned. He began by trying to reassure us. Loud sounds of metal grating on metal sometimes drowned out his voice, but we understood that he was saying we should not be alarmed, that the people down there were not an enemy tribe, or looters, that they would not stay forever, and that they had the permission of the government. They would stay for a few months, then leave. They didn’t need the water from our wells or the vegetation from our pastures, they could even help us sometimes if we needed them to, for example to treat us if we were sick. Most of them were not from our country. Their bosses were Nçaras, completely white people from Europe, who had our languages translated for them but could listen and understand well enough. They were going to sniff the earth, or something like that, as far as he had understood, to try to find metals, or gold or oil perhaps, but they weren’t doing that work here, they were sending teams to other places, faraway, to open up the earth and dig down into it. They were just using this spot to rest and sleep. The chief said none of us should approach the strangers’ camp. We could still take our livestock wherever we wanted, we could continue our daily lives just as before, but we shouldn’t go near their area. He would go and speak to their chief from time to time, if necessary, but no one else should go there. That way peace would continue to reign between us and no one would have any cause for complaint. The strangers, he said in conclusion, seemed to be powerful, a thousand times richer and more powerful than our humble tribe, or any of the tribes we knew. They had the government behind them, and we didn’t want to get into difficulties with Nçaras or with the government. He stopped speaking and lifted his hand in a weary gesture. His sunken eyes searched the room. I knew my uncle: he was anticipating questions to which he had no answers.

But nobody asked any questions. We didn’t understand much either, but we looked around at each other and nodded our heads. No one spoke because no one could think of the words. All the same, we were disturbed. We felt the vague sensation that strange things had crept into our world, that they would cause disruption of a lasting nature, of a nature we didn’t know how to name because it didn’t exist in our language, rich as it was. The older people fingered their long strings of prayer beads and mouthed resigned inch’Allahs. The young people expressed their restlessness without words.

It was as if several rungs had broken off the ladder of our routines. The days began to be dictated by elements outside our control. In the mornings, we were woken by alien noises. The cries of our muezzin, the calls of our herdsmen, the grunts of our camels, the bleating of our sheep, had all become weak and inaudible. The voices and the motors of the strangers filled up all the space. Our evenings were taken from us too, because that was when they came back to their camp: their car engines continued to roar into the night, and we heard them singing, shouting and laughing. Their powerful lights sometimes illuminated the tops of our tents. From the moment they arrived, the strangers stole something essential from us, without us feeling we had the right to protest.

A malaise invaded our spirits. Anger began to brew inside the tents. A number of people expressed the opinion that we should move our camp elsewhere. The chief opposed the idea. He thought it would be wrong to abandon our land just because others had arrived on it. ‘We’re no longer really nomadic people,’ he said. ‘We’ve learned to stay in one place, and this is the place we’ve chosen. Why should we desert it? Let’s try to rise above these irritations – they will pass!’ Eventually everyone agreed that my uncle was right.

Without discussing it further, we all worked hard to ignore the new arrivals. We stopped climbing the highest dune to look down at them, we no longer talked about them, we pretended we couldn’t hear when their lorries filled the air with noise first thing in the morning and at sunset. We terrified our youngest members out of approaching them by saying they ate children. Even our animals no longer strayed in the direction of their camp. We closed our eyes to them because, deep down, we were ashamed we had allowed their presence to be imposed on us, ashamed of our failure to understand it, to confidently accept or reject it.

In keeping with tradition, however, the chief ordered that we sacrifice a camel, prepare a sumptuous feast and go and offer it to the Nçaras. He explained we were only doing it because it was our tradition, that it didn’t represent a gesture of friendship towards the nameless strangers. They would accept the offering, and that would be the end of the exchange. We’d quickly realised they were avoiding us too. They never approached our well or our camp. Their lorries never drove too close to our tents. Their men never came among us, and if they passed us, they didn’t pause or make even the tiniest hand gesture in our direction. We too looked away, pretended to be distracted by something. We lived in two separate universes. That seemed to suit everyone.

The only person who remained completely indifferent to the appearance of the foreigners was my mother. But very little affected my mother; she was unmoved by bad winds, harsh winters or droughts. She had crossed the Sahara of doubt long ago, never to return. She watched, expressionless, as life passed her by. She didn’t frown, didn’t question, didn’t fret. The only thing that troubled her was seeing her brother troubled. As soon as she saw anxiety written on his face, she’d fly into a panic, as if the earth were about to swallow us up, searching frantically for the source of his anger.

She’d organised her life around her older brother, and him alone, ever since she was a child. She sought his approval before making even the most insignificant decision. She loved only what he loved, rejected whatever he didn’t like.

My father had loathed his wife’s obsession. He forbade her from seeking the chief’s approval in everything, and from mentioning Sheik Ahmed all the time. My mother ignored his complaints. She couldn’t help it; she was chained. My father continued to object. His antipathy towards my uncle grew by the day, until he ended up hating him. One morning, sick of the constant spectre of Sheik Ahmed in his life, my father left the camp and my mother, setting out with nothing but a small bundle on his back. He shouted, loud enough for everyone to hear, that he was leaving forever, turning his back on life in a tent ruled by an authority other than his own, in a camp controlled by an incompetent chief. He would no longer bow to Sheik Ahmed’s will, and he would go somewhere he would never hear that name spoken. From that moment onwards he disowned family, clan and tribe.

I was six years old when my father left. I have only a vague memory of a tall figure with bushy hair, a clearer one of the sensation of his thick beard prickling my cheeks when he kissed me. I always listened carefully when people talked about him, not realising I was there or thinking me too young to understand. They described an angry, brutal man, whose hatred for his cousin, the chief, was out of all proportion, a man whose bad character and rebellious spirit had pushed him towards a life bereft of family, livestock, tent or tribe. I was the daughter of a renegade.

When my father left, my mother ceased to care about her appearance. The woman who had turned so many heads in her youth stopped grooming herself, no longer put kohl on her eyes or rubbed butter into her body, no longer burned incense in our tent. She wore a thick veil and a gloomy expression.

Still, we weren’t poor. My father had left behind everything he possessed, and he was one of the richest men in the camp. Our tent was more than twenty spans wide, even more spacious and beautiful than that of the chief. It was made of black wool, with sturdy flaps. It had taken all the women of the camp a month to sew it. The best of our artists had decorated it with fantastic arabesques; we had numerous, colourful cushions; our floor was covered with thick, silky animal hides; our utensils made by the best blacksmiths. The tent kept out both rain and wind; the women of the camp liked to say that it breathed the weather.

We had lots of plump, white camels, as well as goats and ewes. We had servants to look after them. But my mother handed the task of managing this fortune over to her brother. She wanted nothing for herself. She said she had no ambitions other than to please God and see her daughter grow up and make a good marriage. If she missed my father, she never said so. The only help she accepted to run our small household was that of Mbarka. People pitied my mother and praised her faith and humility, yet her pride in her ancestry never left her; she claimed to be descended from the noblest Saharan families. She evoked her ancestors morning and night, prayed for the souls of the many amongst them who had spent their lives raiding and stealing, as well as those who had lived in faith. She cherished them all, the bandits and the imams. The former were heroes in her eyes, the latter saints.

Gradually, life at the camp returned to its normal pattern. The men took the camels out to graze all day, the old people gossiped in their tents, the boys studied the sacred texts and fetched water from the wells, the women looked after the homes and the domestic animals, the blacksmiths worked at their fires, the slaves and the freed slaves helped with the odd jobs around the camp. My friends and I, the girls from good families, concentrated on fattening ourselves up so we would be beautiful and get good husbands, and most of all on telling stories in which dashing princes fell in love with pretty young Bedouins.

We girls were in the habit of meeting in the evenings on top of a dune to sing, dance and talk. We played the old tunes we knew, using a jerry can as a drum. The boys of the camp came along too. They listened to our singing and complimented us, trying to impress us by appearing intelligent and spiritual. Sometimes one of them would compose a gav, a little quatrain, in praise of the beauty of one of us. We laughed and applauded. At other times the boys competed in poetic jousts for our favour. We were charmed and encouraged their playful rivalry. Tentative flirtations began, beneath the watchful gaze of the matrons who sat at a little distance, keeping an eye on us while pretending to be asleep.

One evening a young man appeared, a stranger. We hadn’t seen him approach. He wore a black turban, a blue boubou and a white shirt, all spotlessly clean. A watch glinted on his wrist. He held a strange machine in his hand. He greeted us. One of the boys returned the greeting, then we all fell silent. The girls didn’t even dare look at him. We were intimidated by his clothes, the cigarette in his mouth, the thing in his hand, which made crackling noises, and to which he sometimes spoke, a single foreign word that meant nothing to us. We glanced at each other, uncertain, then began to get up. The boys prepared to confront him. He ignored them and spoke to us:

‘Where are you going, sisters? I’m not a djinn. I’m just a brother who’s come to say hello and compliment you on your lovely singing.’

His tone wasn’t rude, just a little mocking.

One of the boys moved towards him, threatening.

‘What have you come here for, man?’

‘I just told you. To compliment these girls on their beautiful voices. Perhaps even to compose some verses better than the ones I’ve just heard.’

‘Where did you come from?’ asked another of the boys.

‘From down there! I didn’t fall from the sky!’ He pointed at the foreigners’ camp.

‘We don’t have anything to do with the people down there. The understanding is that you stay in your place and we stay in ours.’

‘I never agreed to that “understanding”. And down there is not “my place”. I’m a stranger here. Is this the way your tribe greets strangers? I’m a guest, and all I want is to stay for a while and listen to these girls. I think you’re forgetting yourselves.’

The boys didn’t answer. They looked at each other, taken off guard by the stranger’s rebuke. He was right that all guests should receive a courteous welcome. The arrival of the camp of foreigners had disturbed not just our habits, but our emotions as well. There was another awkward silence. Then we, the girls, sat back down and softly resumed our singing. After a moment, one of the boys ran to the nearest tent and came back with a teapot, cups and some wood charcoal. He dug a hole in the sand, started a fire and began to prepare tea for the guest. The boys were eager to uphold our traditions, but they were disturbed by the stranger’s presence: something wasn’t right. They eyed each other, still undecided. The stranger smoked serenely. When he spoke, his tone was calm, with just the tiniest hint of irritation.

‘I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, or spoil the atmosphere. I was drawn to your group. I’ve heard you laughing and singing every night, and I was bored down there, with all those men who don’t understand anything about anything. The voices of these girls reminded me of a world I knew as a child, a world I thought I’d lost forever. I hesitated for a long time before coming. I’ll go away again if you like.’

Everyone protested. We asked him to stay.

‘I’m actually from a tribe related to yours,’ he added, ‘if you are, as I think you are, the Oulad Mahmoud. I’m from the Oulad Ethmane. My name is Yahya Ould Ahmed Ould Sidi Ould Ethmane.’

The boys immediately surrounded him.

‘Why didn’t you say so? This is your home! Our tribes have been allies for years. There isn’t even a blood debt between us! You should’ve introduced yourself!’

‘Didn’t really get a chance,’ he said, laughing.

They all burst out laughing too, and started to shake hands.

Delighted with this turn of events, we, the girls, forgot our jerry can drum and bombarded the stranger with questions: what was the foreigners’ camp? What was the thing in his hand that crackled? What were they really doing down there? Was it true they didn’t drink water? Why didn’t they have wells? Was it true they were extracting things from the ground? Why didn’t they have any women or children?

He laughed and answered our questions simply, with humour. We learned that the device in his hand allowed him to stay in contact with people faraway, that at the camp they had very big basins that could hold enough water to last a long time, that the company he worked for belonged to Nçaras, westerners who were looking for gold and precious metals.

We were disappointed to hear he worked for others: only slaves or low-caste people worked for others. How could a young man from a good family accept servitude?

‘Don’t mind them,’ said one of the boys, laughing. ‘They’re little Bedouins who know nothing of the world.’ He turned to us and explained that in the city, people worked for companies, the government, even for other people. There was no dishonour in it.

Then Memed spoke. He said, ‘It’s true that in the city they know nothing about honour.’

His tone was angry. We all knew that Memed, the only one of us to have been educated elsewhere, hated the city and everything that came from it. But his jibe surprised us: he was normally a person of few words, and they were always polite. We resumed our singing. The stranger turned out to be an elegant speaker. He even knew how to compose a gav. To my amazement, he addressed his poem to me. It praised the brightness of my gazelle-like eyes, which he couldn’t see in the dark, and the lightness of my steps on the sand, which he had never witnessed. All the same, I was pleased. I stammered some timid words of thanks that made everyone laugh at me.

He returned on other evenings, bringing incredible offerings: sweets, chocolates, butter biscuits, cakes, fruit. Delighted, we stuffed them all into our mouths then and there, knowing we couldn’t take offerings from one of the strangers back to the camp. At first the boys sulkily refused the gifts, then they agreed to keep the secret and joined in our feasting. Only Memed stopped coming to our meetings after that.

Yahya became a regular in our circle, a friend to the boys, to whom he was like a generous and knowledgeable older brother, and courteous with the girls, who thought him very respectable. Every evening he composed a small poem in honour of my eyes, my smile, my voice. I was flattered and started to regard him with interest. He was very brown, nearly black, with even features, a full mouth and a high forehead. He wore no turban, and his hair was wild and flowing. He wasn’t what you’d call handsome, he didn’t fit the image we’d created of the noble prince who would carry us away on a golden litter to a faraway land, but there was something bold in his glance that made him intriguing.

Our mothers weren’t sure how to react when they found out Yahya had been spending time with us. It seemed he was from a good family, part of a tribe allied to ours, so perhaps he was trustworthy. Memed argued that no one really knew anything about him, he was arrogant, he worked with foreigners, he hadn’t presented himself to the chief, or asked for the hand of one of the girls. But after some deliberation, our mothers relaxed their surveillance. They didn’t forbid us from associating with him, but told us to be on our guard.

The other new arrival at the camp, of lesser interest to us girls, was the teacher. Our chief had travelled to the city to ask that a classroom be opened at our camp. The authorities had been putting us off for some time: there was a school in a larger camp not far from ours. Why could we not send our children there? The chief explained that sending our offspring to be educated at a rival camp would be tantamount to conceding the superiority of that camp, which was out of the question for us. If the state wanted our children to be schooled, and wanted to remain neutral in matters of tribal conflict, it should provide a classroom just for us, alongside our tents. He’d helped the education ministry official understand his point of view by taking along two plump camels and two fat ewes.

A large tent had been erected next to the chief’s. Long mats had been laid on the floor and a blackboard had been brought from the city. The chief had even placed a spear outside the tent to hold a sign that said in large, proud letters ‘CAMP PRIMARY SCHOOL.’

The administration had trouble finding a teacher prepared to go to a school in the middle of the desert. The teachers who were offered the position all used every means at their disposal, including corruption, to wriggle out of it. It was both to punish him and to get rid of him that the authorities finally sent us Ahmed Salem.

He was in his thirties, short and slight, but strong. He had a shaved head, inexpressive eyes, hollow cheeks and a small beard which he tinted with henna and liked to stroke. He dressed in a white jellaba9 and was always mumbling prayers. The chief had furnished the school tent well for him, but when he wasn’t teaching, Salem preferred to strut around the camp, hands clasped behind his back, interacting with whoever he met; telling a woman to cover herself more completely, encouraging young people to pray, describing the hell fires of Gehenna to a group of nomads who listened attentively, then got up and immediately forgot everything they’d just heard. He had a radio that he often listened to. He would report to the men about what was going on in the world, quoting important names. People listened in silence and smiled as he moved away. Then they laughed and said ‘what do we care what happens in those places? It’s another universe. The quarrels and wars of distant people have nothing to do with us.’

The teacher enjoyed expounding on the threats represented by the new camp. The strangers, he said, had come with the help of our corrupt leaders to exploit our resources. They were modern-day Satans leading debauched and impious lives, and we should keep our distance from them. The hate he harboured for the new arrivals was accepted by everyone, but his diatribes against the government displeased the chief. My uncle summoned him and explained that we were only a small camp, part of a medium-sized tribe, and we didn’t want to attract the wrath of the state. After that, Ahmed Salem’s criticism of the city leaders became more veiled. In return, the chief began to invite him often to his tent. Sheikh Ahmed appreciated the teacher because, unlike the teachers allocated to other camps, he always turned up for work. We were proud that our school was growing. We even began to welcome children from other tribes.

One of Ahmed Salem’s diatribes was against the custom we girls had of meeting every evening, with too many boys in attendance, and singing songs with lyrics he considered too light-hearted. He spoke to the chief and the other older men of the camp about it. Some sympathised, others laughed and maliciously suggested he join our group, others told him it was an old tradition and not his concern; most just looked away, bored. When the mothers heard of his complaint, they said they had no intention of bullying their daughters and preventing them from enjoying themselves. They taunted him, ‘When you have your own daughter, you can bury her alive if that’s what you want!’ The matter was dropped.

By this time my friends all considered Yahya to be my rightful match. I protested, but secretly I was flattered. He was my first suitor, unless you counted Memed. According to the other girls, Memed liked me. He’d never indicated this directly, but I had noticed him sneaking glances at me, surreptitiously, as if he was doing wrong. He was a taciturn person who rarely contributed to the conversation. He was turned inwards, his eyes full of sadness, as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’d grown up and been educated in a rich family in the city. His paternal uncle was a merchant who still lived in the city and was involved in politics. This man was our camp’s main benefactor. Memed could speak French, apparently, and even owned books. He sometimes told us stories about the world. He was polite and obliging. He did have good qualities, but we girls found him boring. We’d formed that opinion the day he returned to the camp, and never changed it.

Yahya was ‘the other’, the visitor from afar who knew so many things. All the girls in the camp had tried to charm him, but it was me he’d chosen. I knew my friends envied me the attention from someone so exotic. It didn’t take long for me to fall for his spontaneous declarations: he told me he loved me more than anything in the world, that he would prefer any word from me, even an insult, to owning all the kingdoms of the north and entry to paradise in the hereafter. I was innocent and foolish, intoxicated by the promise of forbidden passion. I allowed him to get close to me.

The gestures of affection between us were tentative at first; tiny pebbles of love cast across the space between us: a brief wink, a swift, audacious brush of the hand. We were never alone together; it would have been unimaginable for a young couple to separate themselves from the group, that would be shameful, and our friends would never have allowed it. We contented ourselves with talking to each other whenever the others were busy with their own conversations or songs. I didn’t know what to say to him, but he told me fantastic stories of the distant lands that he said he would take me to: roads as wide as all of our wadis, with real cars travelling on them, not the crude trucks we saw coming from the strangers’ camp, but small, beautiful cars; lights that never ended and buildings that reached the sky. He told me we would travel on planes, like the ones I saw passing in the distance, way above our heads, leaving white trails behind them like clouds. Every evening, as I watched their lights blinking across the sky, I tried to picture myself sitting in one. It was impossible: it made me feel dizzy.

When my friends urged Yahya to ask for my hand, he laughed and said, ‘What’s the hurry?’

Everything acquired a new intensity. Whenever Yahya’s fingertips brushed mine, whenever he stole the lightest caress, right in the middle of speaking to the others, I felt it like a current passing between us, a sweet yet terrifying sting.

One night when I was sleeping deeply, a hand pinched my nose. I woke, dumbfounded and trembling. The hand moved to my mouth. A voice whispered in my ear, ‘It’s me, Yahya, it’s me!’ My mother was snoring on the other side of the tent, just a few metres away. I was shaking. Yahya told me in a low voice that he loved me. His hands travelled all over my body. He kissed me. I was afraid. I told myself I must be dreaming. I opened my eyes as wide as I could, but he was still there. I was half-undressed and he was there with me, in the dark. I couldn’t imagine the scandal if my mother woke, if someone saw us, if my uncle found out. I would die, surely, and Yahya would too. He continued to press himself against me. I couldn’t speak for fear of waking my mother. I fought against the desire that rose up in me and I was so afraid.

The next evening, when we met with the others, I couldn’t say a word. I was still stunned by the intrusion of Yahya into our tent. He behaved just as he had on every other evening, laughing as if nothing had happened, reciting old poems, whispering sweet nothings in my ear. I stared at him and began to doubt. Perhaps it had all been a dream, the work of my imagination.

He came again on other nights. I was scared, but there was nothing I could do. I knew I would be the first to be blamed, and I didn’t know what would happen to me. Yahya was oblivious to the danger; he would just slip between the sleeping tents and then appear at my bedside. I was staggered by his recklessness. If my mother had woken, she would have screamed to the heavens, and he and I would’ve been be flayed on the spot. I didn’t know what to do. I sometimes murmured quietly to him that he was crazy, to which he replied, ‘Yes, about you.’ Sometimes I let tears fall, but it was no good. Despite myself, I began to lie awake waiting for his arrival, anticipating the instant I would see his shadowy figure creeping towards me.

Note

9  Translator’s note: loose wool or cotton garment with sleeves and a hood.