Day Three

TANGIER

�When I meet fellow Americans travelling about here in North Africa, I ask them, �What did you expect to find here?� Almost without exception, regardless of the way they express it, the answer reduced to its simplest terms is a sense of mystery.�

Thus wrote Paul Bowles, the American writer who adopted Tangier, in the book that lies where it fell from my bed last night.

Earlier in the evening, a group of elderly Moroccan musicians had played a thin, tinkling version of �Happy Birthday� for me in the hotel restaurant. It was such an uncompromisingly Arab sound that it was only halfway through that I realised it was �Happy Birthday� at all, and for that reason alone I shall treasure the memory of it.

It�s six o�clock now and I�m trying to shake off the first hangover of my fifty-ninth year. The new day glows cruelly bright behind the curtains and I can�t ignore it. I swing myself out of bed, surprised by the cool touch of a marble floor, and throw open the curtains. But the smarter the hotel the less easy it is these days to throw open the curtains, and by the time I�ve found the right cord to pull and disentangled the net from the main drape I�m seriously irritated and irreversibly awake.

The view is less spectacular and much friendlier than I�d expected. It�s a painter�s view. Below me is a small verdant garden, dominated by the luxurious crown of a palm tree and a solitary Norfolk pine standing with its branches out like a cake stand. Running roughly in line from west to east are a harbour wall, with a ferry boat alongside, a distant beach already covered with tiny figures and, rising gently behind the curving bay, the headland, beyond which a pipeline dives beneath the Strait, carrying 10,000 million cubic metres of Algerian natural gas into Europe every year.

The town is compact. Narrow streets rise and fall around low hills and their damp cobbles catch the morning sun. The buildings look more French than Spanish, with red roofs and white-plastered walls, sooty and streaked by the rain, from which sprouts a canopy of television aerials and satellite dishes. The sharp clarity of the light is softened by the drowsy mix of early-morning sounds - dogs barking, doves cooing, a fishing-boat engine springing to life.

I�m excited. I know there�s a way to go before we reach the Sahara but I�m on the starting grid. Tangier, where Europe clings onto Africa and Africa clings onto Europe, has a fine record for great departures. Among my birthday presents from the crew, piled up beside a bottle of duty-free champagne (empty), are two books about Ibn Battuta, one of the greatest travellers of all time and a Tangerine, born in this town in 1304. At the age of twenty-one, he set out on the first stage of a 75,000-mile adventure through most of the known world, across the Sahara to Timbuktu, up to Spain and through Europe to Persia, Arabia, Sumatra, India and China, returning home thirty years later to write a book about it.

Not a bad role model.

The El Minzah Hotel opens onto a busy street leading up from the port and the market. There are cars, but they�re well outnumbered by human traffic. Berber women, tough, pugnacious and wide, plod up the hill as if wearing all the clothes they own at the same time. Their low centres of gravity allow them to carry virtually anything. I wouldn�t be surprised to see one of them with a small car on her back. The men, by contrast, don�t carry, they push. Covered from head to foot in thick woollen burnouses (the wind that�s keeping the clouds away is brisk and chilly), they steer rubber-wheeled handcarts full of bits of this and that up the centre of the road. Amongst the crowd are men in sharp suits doing nothing but standing and looking around. The admirable Alan, our fixer, tells me they�re probably policemen. At dinner last night a local man went out of his way to deny that Morocco was a police state.

�Not at all,� he insisted, �it is a well-policed state.�

There�s an Anglican church near by which was painted by Matisse, one of a number of artists, from Delacroix to Francis Bacon, drawn to Tangier by the quality of light and the tolerant hedonistic atmosphere, which also attracted writers like Bowles and Joe Orton and William Burroughs. Putting thoughts of hedonism aside for an hour or two, I fish out my only tie and walk over there for Sunday Service. My parents would have been proud of me.

Walking to church in Sheffield was never like this. The entrance to St Andrew�s, Tangier is virtually obscured this morning by a Berber street market. Doughty ladies from the mountains have taken over the pavement, spreading in front of them a fragrant assortment of fresh cheeses, onions, carrots, thick sheaves of mint, coriander, sage and rosemary.

Somewhere behind the piles of food I locate two white gateposts, which mark the way into the churchyard. Once inside, I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Nothing is quite what you expect it to be.

Down by the gatepost, squeezed into a corner of the wall, is a makeshift wooden construction that I take to be a kennel, but which, on closer examination, proves to contain a bearded old man, who glares back at me. A moment later an attractive Arab woman pops in through the gate, squats down and begins to dictate a letter to him.

Leaving the boxed scribe behind, I walk up the shaded path. On either side of me is a thick, entangled, but artfully managed secret garden of cypress, gum and false pepper trees, jacaranda and creepers and assorted thick bushes, in the recesses of which I can dimly make out graves and headstones. On closer inspection most of these bear the names of people from the Scottish Highlands. Curiouser and curiouser.

Then there is the church itself. It emerges from all this greenery looking like something out of the Cotswolds, except that the tower from which the blue cross of St Andrew flies is decorated with Moorish tiles. The church porch has an Islamic horseshoe arch and inside is a chancel arch, around which the Lord�s Prayer is picked out in Arabic.

I�m warmly welcomed by a manic garrulous Moroccan, in white djellaba and black astrakhan hat, given to fits of giggling, lunging kisses and a curious staccato English punctuated regularly by the phrase �thank you very much�. He introduces himself as Mustapha Chergui, the church caretaker. Thank you very much. For thirty- eight years, thank you very much. In between pointing out such features as the coffered chancel ceiling, carved from cedar wood by master craftsmen from Fez, and the display of arum lilies, which he fetches every Sunday from the market, he has to rush away to help Mary Evans, one of the churchwardens, prepare the hymn books.

Mustapha Chergui and Mary Evans are not really off the same menu. She is quintessentially English, pronounces lost �lorst� and, very much in the tradition of Tangier travellers, is just back from Syria and Jordan.

The congregation begins to assemble. Only a smattering of the 150-strong British community comes to church, one of them being an engaging Australian-born journalist called Jonathan Dawson.

Thanks to him, I soon know all the dramatis personae, that Mrs Evans, the churchwarden, married �one of the few straight chaplains the church ever had� and that by far the greater proportion of the congregation are Nigerians involved in getting themselves and others across the Strait of Gibraltar.

So here we all are: the British upper-class ladies, the Nigerian migrants, Mustapha the sexton and myself, all leafing through our books to find Hymn Number One Hundred and Forty-Four and in our own ways, and often our own keys, giving voice to �Glorious Things Of Thee Are Spoken�.

The Nigerians treat the service as a moveable feast, coming and going according to the demands of their mobile phones, which go off frequently, often in the middle of prayers. (Jonathan tells me that the Christmas service was constantly interrupted by mobiles playing �Jingle Bells�.) No-one seems to mind them nipping out to do business during Matins. Their attendance rate today is impressive, if variable, rising from eight before the collection to twenty-five afterwards.

At the end, when we�ve filed out and the chaplain has shaken hands with everyone, I ask him about the Nigerians. He says life is precarious for them here. The Moroccans arrest them and then dump them back at the Algerian border. The chaplain introduces me to a young man called Regis, a Catholic with a plastic rosary around his neck. He has just walked back from the border by foot. It took him four days, but he didn�t dare take public transport in case he was arrested again. Once again, I find myself wondering what it is about their own country that makes these young men risk arrest, beatings, drownings and the Sahara Desert.

Then something reminds me I�m still in Wonderland.

Hobbling out behind Regis is a tiny Englishwoman with a fierce stare. Her name is Lady Baird. She must be well into her eighties and yet has come to live here relatively recently. When I ask her what brought her to Tangier, she replies crisply, �A garden! The most beautiful garden in Morocco.�

I�m about to ask her whether this wasn�t a lot to take on at such a late age, when, on seeing Jonathan Dawson pass by, Lady Baird indignantly indicates her right leg.

�You see that?� she cries. �Birdie did that!�

�Birdie?�

�His bird. Bit me on the leg.�

Birdie, it transpires, is a cockerel who lives in Jonathan�s apartment.

He doesn�t attempt to deny it.

�Bit a great hole in her leg,� he confirms.

I said he was lucky not to be sued. Jonathan looks uncharacteristically sheepish.

�Well, he did bite a very distinguished American woman and she thought it was rather funny, but after three courses of antibiotics and massive doctor�s bills, I�m afraid it was a bit of a strain on the friendship.�

We walk down the path away from the church. Through the trees, across the road, I can see a facade with the faded lettering, �Grand Hotel Villa De France�. Green louvered shutters swing in the wind. It was from one of those rooms, Room 35, that Matisse looked out and painted this unique Anglo-Arab church and the trees and the sea beyond, as it all looked ninety years ago.

�He is a misogynist, I�m afraid,� says Jonathan, by way of explanation. �Only ever bites women.�

I don�t think he meant Matisse. But who knows.

The day ends on twin notes of anticlimax, both football related. Roger wants to film activity on the town beach, the public playing fields of Tangier. To integrate me in this happy recreational scene he has persuaded a local team to let me have a kick around with them. Considering their average age is about sixteen and there are distinct language problems, they do everything to make it easy for the elderly Englishman thrust into their midst, and I�m eager to show that, despite being two years short of sixty, I still know a few tricks.

One of these is the sliding tackle, which, together with the hefty up-field boot, was the basic essential of football as I was taught it. I win the ball, but, this being sand and not the Wembley turf I�m used to, I�m unable to move it, and as one of my legs sprints off the other one stays firmly beneath the ball. As my groin is prised apart I have no option but to fall flat on my back. I see the camera crew chuckling away on the touchline. Good old Michael, really entering into the spirit. This gives me fatal encouragement to get up and race off after the action. One more kick and something goes twang internally, and I hobble around, cursing. More laughter from the camera crew, and it�s several minutes before they realise that this is not an Equity performance, but for real.

To have so recklessly disabled myself so early in the journey could pose all sorts of problems, but at least I satisfied the first rule of filming - if you�re going to get hurt, get hurt on camera.

Inspecting Polisario troops near the wall. Their problem is partly lack of equipment, partly motivation after an eleven-year ceasefire. The flag of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic flies at the right.

WESTERN SAHARA

Day Seventy-One

TAMANRASSET TO ASSEKREM

Around 10.30 the four rusty flagpoles on the forecourt of the Hotel Tahat recede into the distance as we take to Tamanrasset�s gloriously smooth and comfortable roads. Within a mile we throw an abrupt right onto a track so ferociously jagged that for a moment I fear we might have been hijacked.

It does not get much better. Every now and then we come to a stretch that is merely rutted earth, but these are few and far between. Generally, it is a bed of broken and solidified lava, over which the vehicle judders and shudders as if possessed. A puncture offers some brief respite, then the whole painful process begins again. But it is a price almost worth paying for magnificently dramatic scenery. We are in the Hoggar Mountains, which, with peaks rising to 10,000 feet, are amongst the highest in the Sahara. They�re formed by the hard cores of ancient volcanoes, eroded into a series of weird and wonderfully shaped towers, plugs and pinnacles.

Some have incised vertical surfaces, as if they�ve been clawed, others are so deeply scored that their sides look like organ pipes or massive petrified tree roots. On one the scarring runs in all directions like a starburst captured in stone. There are knobs, spires, needles, arcs and bluffs, rocks standing four square on plinths of rubble, resembling mediaeval castles. Tenacious tufts of grass cling to the defiles and gullies; otherwise, this is a land of rock and stone. The Touareg know it by the suitably Tolkien-ish name of Atakor.

Just as I�m constructing romantic notions of mythological lands, a squat white Mercedes jeep bounces down the track towards us. Not unbelievable in itself, but quite a shock when I see it has British number plates. It pulls up and out gets a bony, angular man of late middle age, with a flick of fair hair and a quick, elfin-like energy. With mutual exclamations of surprise we introduce ourselves. His name is Tom Sheppard, a well-known traveller with books to his name.

Like many twentieth-century Englishmen, from T. E. Lawrence to Wilfred Thesiger, he has a passion for desert, and particularly this part of the Algerian desert. He�s been coming here for forty years, following tracks marked on the old French maps.

�The Hoggar�s very special.�

He likes the compactness of the area, and that there is, within 1000 square miles, such an extraordinary combination of mountain and dune.

�Pristine dunes, quite untrodden by anyone at all.�

He hasn�t seen another human being for eight days, one of which was his sixty-eighth birthday. He describes it with almost military relish.

�I had a really special meal on that one. Meat and two veg. Chilled grapefruit for goodness� sake. Damp kitchen towel, wrapped around the tin, the dryness of the air makes evaporation and you get cooled grapefruit segments. What more could you ask for a birthday?�

Life has been made much safer for him since the advent of satellites.

�God bless the Americans for putting them up there.�

He enthuses about something called EPRB, Electronic Precision Recording Beacon - basically a distress signal, which bounces off a satellite to centres all over the world. He�s had to use it in Libya recently.

�And they were onto it, just like that, eleven minutes after starting transmission.�

I�d like to talk a lot more, but Tom politely turns down our offer of lunch. Though he exudes conviviality, his pleasure is in going solo, and as his dust-covered Mercedes, as compact and self-contained as its owner, crunches off down the track, I find myself distinctly envious of the man.

Having covered the next 50 miles in a painful four and a half hours, we catch sight of a tiny hut silhouetted on a ridge high above us, a refuge built by the ascetic French missionary Charles de Foucauld ninety years ago. After a few more agonisingly slow hairpins we pull up at the gates of a compound below the hut, where there is a hostel maintained by the town of Tamanrasset.

The accommodation is basic mountain stuff: an uncompromising stone-walled building, with two outside lavatories (quite far outside), three dormitories and a communal meeting room, with rugs and cushions, chairs, tables and an open fire. After our meal we sit in here with Arouj, the administrator, a heavily turbaned, moustachioed Touareg, probably a devastatingly handsome man in his youth, now a little fleshed out. Business doesn�t look good. There�s room here for 150, but apart from ourselves there are only four other visitors tonight. One is a young German biker, who set out to cross the Sahara with two friends, both of whom have had to return home after arguments with sand dunes. Arouj orders some mint tea for us all. He�s pleased to see us. Very few British ever come here, he says. Germans, yes, Italians (for the rock climbing) and Spanish.

French?

He wobbles his hand. Some French.

I feel for him. The locals have put a lot into this place. There is an airstrip at Tamanrasset, and the Hoggar mountain area is a national park, protected by UNESCO. But as long as Algeria remains better known for its civil war, places like Assekrem will remain a well-kept secret.

I make my apologies and get off to bed. We�re to be up at five tomorrow to walk up to the refuge. Arouj hands me his card. It has his website marked.

Day Ninety-Four

ALGIERS

Eamonn O�Brien is walking me through the lush gardens of the Hotel El Djazair, Algiers, formerly the St George, known to the Victorians as �The Leading Hotel of North Africa�. An elaborate network of paths winds past beds in which hibiscus, rose and flowering cacti seem to grow in profusion, undaunted by prolific fronds of banana and palm trees. The paths, together with occasional colonnades, pergolas and ornate ironwork screens, show that this bosky little Eden has not grown wild. It was laid out by the British, who built the hotel in the 1880s, when the warm Mediterranean air, sheltered by the mountains from the harsh dry winds of the interior, made Algiers a favoured destination.

The hotel, with its rambling mix of European and Moorish styles, looks much the same as it does in the century-old black and white photos on its walls. But one thing has changed. There is no equivalent now of the crowd of smiling, heavily dressed foreigners photographed taking cocktails under wide umbrellas. Neither the British, nor anyone else for that matter, come to Algiers these days to enjoy the balmy warmth of a Mediterranean winter. It is, as Eamonn is telling me, just too dangerous.

Sitting together on a bench between two ornamental columns, like characters out of a John Le Carre novel, Eamonn tells me the grim reality of present-day Algeria. An estimated 100,000 people have lost their lives in the civil war, which began ten years ago when the government cancelled an election that a radical Islamic party was poised to win. Since 1993, all foreigners have been under a fatwah, a sentence of death, and over 100 have been killed. As the aim of the rebels is to cause maximum embarrassment to the government, those with a high public profile are particularly at risk. I�m not exactly Tom Cruise, but I appreciate Eamonn paying me the compliment of scaring me stiff.

Four members of the SPS, the Service de Protection Speciale, will be with me every time I leave the hotel. With Eamonn, that�s five, so we�ve almost doubled our crew already. And that�s not all. In certain high-risk areas like the casbah, another six members of the SPS will be drafted and men from the Commissionaire de Police of the casbah, the Casbah Cops as Eamonn calls them, will throw a cordon sanitaire around us.

Having never had a cordon sanitaire thrown anywhere near me before, I suppose I should feel faintly flattered, but I feel bound to ask Eamonn if it�s all absolutely necessary.

His reply is terse and to the point.

�You�re a public figure. You�re a guest of the Algerian government. And frankly, if I lose you, I lose my job.�

Pure James Bond.

My immediate security team, four lean young men in suits with two-way radios, are affable and approachable. I learn from them that the French for walkie-talkie is talkie-walkie. That cheers me up a bit.

I�m also reunited with Said Chitour, who takes me first to the Villa Suzini, a handsome Moorish house from whose roof there is a fine panorama of the city, laid out across wide, sometimes steep slopes curving round a generous bay. The French called it Alger La Blanche, and it is still a brilliantly white city, laid out like Lyon or Marseille, with tiers of imposing terraces, breaking down into the less regular outlines of the old town, the casbah, on the western arm of the bay.

To the east, the skyline is dominated by a towering monument of 300-foot palm leaves, built of reinforced concrete, and dedicated to the martyrs of the revolution. Martyrs are very important to the Algerians, though there have been so many claimed by different sides that the word has become almost meaningless.

Unlike other countries of the French empire, such as Tunisia, Senegal, Mauritania and Mali, Algeria�s independence was won at considerable cost. Hundreds of thousands of French settlers had made their lives here, and, rather than accommodate the demands for self-determination that swept through Saharan Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, they decided to make a fight of it. Their battle to turn back the tide of history ended in ignominious failure in 1962, when General de Gaulle, heavily influenced by world opinion, finally handed over the country to the nationalist FLN (National Liberation Front).

The elegant old Villa Suzini played a particularly sinister part in all this. Down in the cellars, below the Carrara marble floor and the mosaic tiles and coloured glass of the central courtyard, are rooms into which the sun never shines. Plaster peels off the walls and there is a sour smell of damp. It was down here that the French paras interrogated their suspects. Torture was routinely used. Electric shocks were administered to various parts of the body through serrated pincers known as �crocodiles�. Some of those who died of their beatings were buried in the garden or thrown down a well at the back of the house. The Villa Suzini was, until two or three years ago, used as an office, but now, apart from a sallow-complexioned caretaker and two or three dogs, it is deserted. No-one will work here.

�Too many ghosts,� explains Said.

Near the villa there is a funicular railway, and we take a car down the hill into the working-class district of Belcourt, where Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was brought up, and about which he wrote in an unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man).

He made much in his book of the different levels in Algiers, both literal and metaphorical, with the poor crowded down by the port and the big houses with gardens higher up the hill. It�s like that still. In one short ride in a bruised and dented cable car, the atmosphere of the city changes, from villas to tenements, from well-swept streets to open ground strewn with drifting rubbish. Though the streets are meaner, they�re full of life and bustling activity. One of them borders a cemetery, whose outer wall is an open-air clothing store, hung with dresses, nighties, headscarves, coats, trousers and huge brassieres, with one section entirely devoted to football strips. One of the young boys wears a Manchester United shirt, but the strips on sale are mainly those of the big Algiers club, CRB Belcourt. Various international team names have been painted on the wall, including one which just reads �Holygans�.

The Camus family apartment at 93, Rue Mohammed Belouizdad (formerly the Rue de Lyon) is still there, above a photographer�s shop. There is nothing to commemorate the fact that a Nobel prizewinner lived here, but then Camus was a French Algerian, one of the European settlers they called the pieds noirs, and he was as critical of the Marxist revolutionaries of the FLN as he was of the French colonialists. But it does mean that the room in which he worked is very little changed, apart from a sticker in Arabic on the door, which reads �In the name of God and Mohammed his messenger�. It�s small, maybe 15 by 18 feet, with grey-blue French windows opening onto the street with its neatly clipped shady trees. It faces west and even now, in November, I can feel the force of a midday sun that must have made life unbearable in the long hot summers.

The modest two-storey house may be unheralded, but it�s certainly not unused. It�s owned by an old but sprightly Algerian, who lives there with his wife, three sons and their wives and children. Eighteen people altogether.

One of the sons says that we are the first people to visit since 1998. I�m quite moved to be here and linger by the window for a while, looking out at the children�s wear shop opposite, the milling crowd, the line at a bus stop, the ordinary everyday life of the city which Camus observed so carefully.