hotel that served beer. My subconscious must have recognized her when she walked in, because I looked up for no reason and saw her enter the cafe. She saw me, smiled, and sat down at my table.
'Hi,' she said. 'What are you writing?'
I looked down at the postcard and pretended to read. 'Dear Mom. I have been kidnapped by a strange cult of African nomads who are starving me of meat and forcing me to wash dishes and dig toilets. Please send military assistance. PS I need more money.'
She laughed. 'Is that a dig at my strictly vegetarian cook group?'
'It might be.'
'I didn't notice any steaks the last time your group cooked.'
'That's different. We're vegetarian out of sheer laziness. You guys do it out of principle. That's just wrong.'
'It's not my fault,' she protested. 'Melanie's the only real veggie in our group. The problem is she's also the only one who knows how to cook.'
'And whose fault is that?'
'My lazy parents.'
'Well, as long as laziness is involved in some way all is forgiven,' I said. 'Where's Lawrence?'
She grimaced and waved her hands in a curt who-knows-who-cares-I-wash-my-hands manner.
'Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise?'
She sighed. 'It's not… well. He's a good man. And, it seemed like a good idea at the time… and… and I vote we change the subject.'
'Sure thing,' I said, though I was very interested in the subject. I looked out at the Djamme for inspiration and saw one of the snake charmers. 'You know what I think?' I asked. 'I think the truck needs a pet. You know, a truck mascot. One of those big snakes ought to do nicely.'
'That's a really good idea,' she said seriously. 'It can ride under the floorboards. Or in the locker space. We can feed it rats. I don't know if we have any rats yet but we could start a rat farm, too, where they keep the spare engine parts.'
'Also we could feed it Michelle if she starts giving us any trouble.'
'Good point. And I bet she will. That girl has trouble written all over her. Or at least she will when the henna-tattoo salesmen are finished with her.'
'Let's do it,' I said. 'Sure, we could talk to everyone about it and have a vote, but like they say, easier to ask forgiveness than permission. We can go buy the snake right now and bring it back to the truck. I think Steve's on guard tonight. He'll never notice.'
'Even if he does he'll probably just think it's Michael,' Laura said, and I barely managed to keep my expression rigid. 'But what if it's shy? Then it will have to meet all these other people tomorrow. Poor thing will be psychologically scarred for life. I bet it's better off with small groups, so we should probably just go around tonight introducing it to people in ones and twos. You know, set it loose inside people's tents and hotel rooms.'
'That's an even better idea,' I agreed.
We nodded at each other in a serious, self-satisfied way before allowing two wide grins to creep onto our faces.
'Thanks,' she said. 'I needed that.'
'No, no,' I said, 'thank you.'
She stood up. 'I guess I've wasted enough time. Not that this was a waste of time. But… I need to go find Lawrence and have The Talk.' The capitals were clearly audible.
'Good luck with that.'
'Thanks,' she said. 'And if I find a snake in my room tonight? You're a dead man.'
At eight o'clock Nicole called London from a pay phone. She talked to Rebecca briefly, nodded, hung up, and emerged to give us the news that was supposed to be what we wanted. 'Morgan was on the plane,' she reported.
Nobody said a word.
The two buses to Todra Gorge were big and air-conditioned and populated almost entirely by backpackers saving a buck by spending their night on a bus instead of in a hotel. I felt ill from all the cigarettes. The seats were faded and torn and only reclined back about ten degrees. I didn't feel as if I slept, but I must have, because once I thought I saw a big bald man at the front of our bus turn his head to stare at me, and it was Morgan. I shook myself and when I looked again there was no bald man there, just a Japanese couple.
We had a cigarette break by a gas station that was surrounded by a cedar forest. My watch told me it was two in the morning. The forest looked beautiful; no bushes or weeds, just a smooth carpet of grass beneath hundred-foot cedar trees, painted white and black by the bright moonlight, extending as far as the eye could see.
As we puffed away in front of our bus Lawrence climbed down and walked over to join us. We waited for him to make the inevitable comment about filthy disgusting habits.
Instead he said: 'Give me one of those bloody things.'
We stared at each other in shock.
'Lawrence,' Nicole said, 'have you ever smoked before?'
'Once,' he said, taking a cigarette and a lighter from Steve. 'I was eleven years old. I chundered,' Anzac for 'threw up,' 'like a champion.' He gagged on the first puff. 'Fucking things haven't gotten any better since,' he coughed, but he kept at it. When he was three-quarters finished he stubbed it out and climbed back on the bus.
The four of us gaped at each other, speechless, before following him
I must have slept again after that, because the next thing I remembered was looking out the window and wondering where the stars were. Must be cloudy out there, I thought. Then I realized, probably not. We had left the green, fertile, Mediterranean climate of northwestern Morocco behind and now we were on the very edge of the Sahara Desert, a land of camels and scorpions, raw jagged desert scrubland where only the hardiest and thorniest bushes and weeds survived the baking sun and flash floods, where entire mountains were a smooth uniform colour unpunctuated by a single tree. Heavy cloud cover seemed unlikely.
I looked up further and saw a crescent moon hanging off the shoulder of a colossal mass of rock that swallowed up most of the sky. The cliff edge gleamed pale as death in the moonlight. We were there. Todra Gorge, a narrow crevice perhaps a hundred feet across at this point and a good five hundred feet high. I nudged Lawrence beside me and his eyes opened as if he really had been only resting his eyelids.
'We're there,' I said.
'Oh happy day,' he said, and closed his eyes again.
A few minutes later the bus rumbled and wheezed to a stop and after long minutes of confused disembarkation in the dark we pulled ourselves and our things together and signed into the Hotel des Roches, a grand old dilapidated place, all faded tile and crumbling paint. We signed in under false names, which was easy enough. The hotel staff dealt with us and the three others staying here as if we were the first group of travelers they had ever seen, even though they must have been accustomed to receiving a new crowd every morning.
We napped in our rooms until dawn and then we met in the common room for a quick breakfast of bread, omelettes, and mint tea. Lawrence turned down an offer of a cigarette. There were no jokes exchanged today. Morgan was due to arrive in Todra Gorge in twenty-four hours, on the same bus that had just taken us here. It was time we started talking about the gory details of the ugly mission that had brought us here. It was time for a council of war.
Chapter 25 Conaissance
Todra Gorge runs for a good twenty miles, roughly east to west, a scar five hundred feet deep carved by the thin river which trickles down to the east. We were at the east and narrowest end, where a half-dozen hotels huddle in the shadow of a group of overhanging crags very popular with rock-climbers. About a half-mile beyond the
