draw it way back over thataway. And you know what you find on this side of that there line?'
'What do I find?'
'Trouble. Trouble with a capital T.'
I half-noticed when we passed two piles of large flat rocks on the right-hand side of the trail, spaced about thirty feet apart from one another, but paid them no mind. We were too busy entertaining one another and gaping at the landscape. The desert had changed its look yet again. Here the sand had been densely packed by the wind and then baked by the sun into near-sandstone. The result was a huge field tiled by a fractal pattern of cracks, occasionally interrupted by puddles of soft sand, or by swooping, curving forty-foot ridges worn smooth as glass by the wind, all of it coloured the rich gold of a lion's pelt.
Our trail was marked by deep tire ruts that could have been gouged decades ago. Occasionally it disappeared into patch of soft sand fifty or a hundred feet wide before re-emerging. As we crossed one of those patches, I saw a flicker of movement in the distance, and I stopped and squinted.
'Look,' I said. 'Camels.' A half-dozen of them, barely visible.
'One hump or two hump?' she asked.
I shook my head. 'Too far to tell.'
'They could be horses,' she said.
I looked at her.
'You know,' she said, 'with big growths on their backs. Hunchback horses. That happens. A ship carrying a whole circusload of hunchback horses might have crashed on the coast here and released them into the desert. And maybe it was years ago and they've survived ever since by sneaking up on convoys like ours and ambushing them at night.'
'I don't think that's very likely,' I said sternly.
She blinked at me innocently.
'But,' I said, 'they could be people wearing camel suits. You know. Soldiers. Saudi Arabian soldiers who got lost because they didn't make the eye slits big enough. They might have just taken a wrong turn in the Sinai and wound up over here.'
She nodded. 'That's possible too.'
'But from this distance you just can't tell.'
'I guess just to be safe we shouldn't really call them camels,' she said, her lip quivering with repressed laughter. 'We should call them Unidentified Dromedarial Objects.'
I nodded very seriously. We managed another two seconds of sober looks before both of us burst into laughter.
The rest of the convoy, a dozen civilian vehicles escorted by three military Jeeps, waited for us at the checkpoint. Europeans, mostly, in Land Cruisers and Land Rovers brought across from Gibraltar, plus four crazy Germans on fully-decked-out motorcycles, two Belgian girls cycling around the world, and a half-dozen multinational hippies in a Volkswagen man who looked older than me. There were also a few African families driving back home in battered but serviceable Renaults and Peugeots.
The rest of the convoy seemed even more bored and bad-tempered than our group. The checkpoint itself was a brick pillbox just big enough for four soldiers dressed in jungle camouflage suits and carrying AK-47s. Like all the soldiers they were Arabic and not black. There had been more and more black faces as we moved south through Morocco, but rarely among soldiers or officials.
A French couple approached us and demanded that we tell them what was wrong with our camion and how long it would take to fix. They had to repeat it five times before my rusty high-school French decoded what they were saying. ' Trois heures, peut-etre plus,' I said with a casual shrug, annoyed by their hostile tone. The French pair muttered with frustration and retreated back to their Land Rover, casting occasional angry glances our way.
The Moroccan and Mauritanian soldiers who escorted the convoy were within earshot of the conversation but paid no attention. They had the African relationship to time. Things happen when they happen, if they happen at all.
Laura and I decided to abandon the convoy and walk up the hill above the checkpoint, bigger at maybe a hundred feet than any other hill in sight. The view from the top was incredible. An endless stark sea of golden desert extended to the horizon in every direction. Our Big Yellow Truck looked as small and unimportant as a Tonka toy.
'You know what I'd really like?' Laura said, after we had our fill of gaping and sat down. 'I'd really like to take a shower and eat some ice cream. But not at the same time. And if I could only have one I'd pick the shower.'
I nodded. 'Between the sand and the sweat I feel like I grow a new layer of crud every day.'
'And you don't have to deal with a bra,' she said, looking down at herself. 'You blokes get to walk around topless all day. You can only imagine our troubles.'
'Another victory for the grand patriarchal conspiracy.'
We smiled at each other. After a moment she closed her eyes, lay back on the ground, and tipped her Tilley hat over her face. I sat and watched her. I wasn't exactly ogling her but I was very aware of her presence. Even encrusted in sand, her long dark hair pulled into a ponytail, she was pretty. She wore sandals, khaki shorts, and a white shirt, and just beneath the brim of her hat I could see the small smile that was her default expression. She was a naturally happy person. I liked that about her. Just being near her made me happy, right from the start.
'Cookies?' a voice from behind asked.
I turned around and looked. A goateed man grinned down at me and held out a bag of Spanish chocolate-chip cookies. They seemed so out of place in the middle of the Sahara that for a moment I wondered if the man was a mirage. But he was real, and the cookies were delicious. I couldn't remember the last time I had tasted anything so sweet. Laura devoured three, closing her eyes to savour the taste. We used the last of our water to wash them down, and our Spanish angel Fernando offered to fill up our water bottles from his own, claiming he had plenty of water. After a moment we accepted.
'Oh my,' Laura said, after a sip. 'Real water. Clean water.' I nodded blissfully. For ten days now we had been stuck with safe but foul-tasting desalinated water from the town of Dakhla, and Fernando's water tasted like champagne by comparison.
We sat and chatted with Fernando for a little while, talking mostly about football and the girlfriend waiting for him in Senegal. His English was uncertain and it didn't take long for the conversation to peter out. The sun was beginning to sink from its apogee and I was growing tired from our constant exposure.
'Should we go back?' Laura asked, moments before I was about to suggest the same thing.
'Yeah,' I said. 'Time for a siesta.'
We rained thanks on Fernando and began the walk back. At always it seemed three times as distant as the first leg. But with Laura by my side the time shrank away nearly to nothing.
'Hey,' I said, about halfway back.
'What?'
'You're a lot of fun.'
She smiled at me. 'Thank you,' she said. 'So are you.'
We walked in pregnant and slightly awkward silence for a little while, glancing at each other without saying anything. I was trying to work out if anything she had done during our expedition counted as flirting or whether she was just being friendly. Later she told me that she was pondering the same thing in reverse.
Then two hoarse, desperate voices called out, and we looked up in surprise. Just a few hundred feet away, right where those two piles of rocks met the side of the trail, was one of the military convoy's Jeeps. The two men inside were shouting to us in French. I couldn't make out what they were saying. Laura and I looked at each other, worried — they were were clearly alarmed by something — and hurried towards them. We were only twenty feet away when I realized, from the position of the Jeep between the rocks, that the soldiers had not driven on the visible hard-packed road that we walked on. Instead they had taken a longer and much fainter path I only now noticed that ran from those two rock piles — trail markers — to where the convoy waited.
'Oh shit,' I said. I turned around and looked behind us, wide-eyed.
'What is it?' Laura asked.
'Nothing,' I said. 'Come on.' I consciously made myself hurry to the Jeep before allowing myself to fully understand the implications. Laura followed.
