As soon as Betts stepped out of the Land Rover the red-faced Frenchman reached across from the driver's seat and attempted to slam shut the passenger door. Seated at the wheel and having to lean over, all he managed to achieve was a light clunk. "Let's see how you manage now!" he roared.
The Frenchman had consumed a steak and a carafe of vin rouge for breakfast at the hotel in Tessalit. John Betts stood watching him now through the open window - his glaring face, his grey moustache, his khaki shirt. He was all dressed up like a soldier of fortune. He was just a poseur.
The Frenchman let out the clutch with a jolt. The vehicle, an ex-Desert Corps ambulance, jumped forward, spraying sand. As it wobbled away, its wheels spinning for purchase, it looked absurdly top-heavy.
"I'll be fine," John Betts screamed after it.
He had his backpack, which contained a tent and a compass, and he had his water-bag. This was the Sahara to be sure, but the main highway was only ten miles away, fifteen at most. A remarkably busy highway, given its location. Every day a score of trucks went down it. Betts had been happy to run into the Frenchman and get a lift with him off the beaten track. The book would be all the better for it when he got home and down to work with the ghostwriter.
To confirm both to himself and to the Frenchman, in case the latter happened to be looking in the rearview mirror, just how fine he would be, Betts sank to his knees and put his lips to the tap of his water-bag. This device made of blue rubber swelled like a bladder to hold much more than a conventional canteen. He attempted to lift its plastic valve, expecting to release a warm trickle, but the tap had jammed. He tugged on it and as he did so heard a click it did not normally make. A pleasant warmth spread over his chin and neck, then down his shirt. Betts snatched the bag and tipped it up, but too late. Its belly was already flexing, limp. Somehow he had unfastened the entire valve. His shirt was drenched, warm. All but a cupful was gone.
Quickly he turned after the Land Rover. It was climbing an incline four or five hundred yards away. He ran after it waving and shouting. The small object trembled in the heat as it disappeared over the brow. Betts ran a little further then stopped, not quite able to believe what had just happened.
It was a beautiful day. All around, the desert shimmered like silver foil. There was not a sound. When Betts returned to his backpack his footsteps crunched like someone eating toast.
He needed to sit down and think. But there was nowhere a man could sit and think under that sun. Best to get moving. The sooner he started the sooner he'd be out. But how did he know the Frenchman wouldn't think better of it and turn round? Should he wait? He would have to walk across an erg, a sea of sand, to get back to the main road. A man made slow progress on the dunes. He might have two days' walking ahead of him. Two days was too long with one cup of water. It was the limit. You died in forty hours, so they said. Perhaps he should retrace the Land Rover's tracks to the north-east, to where they had branched off the road. But that would mean a longer route than cutting directly east.
He held out his compass. The first quarter mile along a sort of gravel lane was easy going. To either side banks of sand rose up. The gravel, he guessed, was not a lane at all. There were no lanes out here. It was some random spill off the back of creation's truck. He soon came to the end of it and the sand began.
Just wait until Melanie hears about this, he thought. He may not be riding horses for gold medals any more but Mr John Betts hiked alone across twenty miles - call it thirty, forty, fifty miles - of the emptiest Saharan dunes. "I knew you'd do it," she'd say. "I knew you hadn't lost your balls." Just wait till the book came out. Sensational. They'd have him on the telly for sure, if anyone still remembered who John Betts was. Though that was the TV presenter's job, to remind people.
On the sand the going was harder. You didn't so much walk as wade, losing half of every step. Never did your two feet land on the same level, always you were either climbing or descending, or else traversing. He longed for one level pace.
From the top of the third dune Betts saw a sea of sand hills ahead, the view ending in a ridge of orange mountains many miles off. Dunes was not the word for those eminences. The road, Betts reasoned, must cut through the middle somewhere, but he could not imagine how in that emptiness there could possibly be a thoroughfare.
Good thing I'm not a doubter, a prevaricator, Betts told himself, following his compass needle. Straight as an arrow. He'd be out by nightfall, and if he wasn't it didn't matter. There weren't any hidden crevasses or ravines here; he could walk on in the cool of night, the best time for walking.
He wished he hadn't left his hat in the Land Rover, though. His face was soaked but the rest of him was dry. Except beneath the backpack, where his back was swimming, cool.
The sand piled itself according to its own laws. Spurs ran off on sublime curves, bulky shoulders buttressed triangular peaks. It was like a geometry class in three dimensions, a playschool for giants. A faint breeze lifted veils of sand off the tops of ridges, fluted ripples ran down long slopes, and always in the distance hovered that mountain range.
You didn't know what "clean" meant until you came here. Nothing but the minuscule bone-dry particles. No life here to create dirt. There was no freedom like it: nothing, not the merest fly, to get in your way. He imagined such a scene could be scary, but just then in the orange glow of late morning it was exhilarating. And silent. Just him and his shushing footfalls. He ran down a long slope out of pure exuberance. At the top of the following climb he turned round to admire the long line of footprints he would have left. The slope was blank.
I'm a ghost, he thought, feeling lightheaded. His last three paces up the hill were still visible but already shawls of fresh sand were blowing over them. In front of his eyes they became a mere blemish. A moment, and he had never passed. He had not come this way or that. He had arrived from nowhere. He had no past, left no trace at all.
Now this was your Saharan adventure. Betts's limbs tingled. He felt he could walk for days. In a flash he knew what he'd call the book once they got it written: Lion of the Desert. That was the Tuareg name for the sun, Betts had read. The Tuaregs were the only people who knew how to survive in the Sahara, they alone had tamed the lion. The Frenchman had unwittingly given him just what he needed: a real desert adventure. This would be the high point of the documentary film: the solo trek through the dunes. Assuming the BBC came through with the film.
"Not enough drama," the producer had muttered when Betts went to see him with his agent. "People nowadays, they want the human touch."
Here was your human touch all right: man alone in desert. Not enough drama there?
"Still, come and see us when you get back." Betts was counting on that. "People ought to take more of an interest in sporting personalities," the producer went on, "once they're out of the limelight. We might put a few of you together. 'Where are they now?' type thing." Betts hadn't liked the sound of that. He'd only been out of the game a couple of years.
He had his watch with him and by one o'clock was bone tired. Time for a rest. He drained the last of the water from the rubbery blue bag, holding it upside down. At the worst estimate he must have done four miles, he thought. By six o'clock he would have done ten. By midnight he would surely be most of the way to the highway, and by dawn he would have reached it. He could see it now, a dark grey road on a bank of pale rubble, and himself breakfasting in a roadside caf?, some concrete hut with a tiled floor (such as he had not encountered in the Sahara), drinking an orange soda while a frying pan sizzled in the background.
As he struggled up the dunes he imagined sucking half an orange. Over his shoulder hung a sack of oranges. His chin and shirt were sticky with juice. He would wash it off with water from the sky-blue bottle hanging by a string from his other shoulder.
In the afternoon he discovered he was walking without his backpack, though he could not remember taking it off. At first he thought he was dreaming, but no, he really had removed it. Good thing too: no sense carting all that weight about when everything hinged on getting out of here within the given time. He checked his pocket: his passport and wallet were there. But he couldn't remember taking them out of the backpack.
The dunes became gulfs of shadow into which he waded. Their peaks turned to red marble. He was walking across the many-faceted surface of a giant ruby. The sun had swung behind his right shoulder. How long had it been there, he wondered, and who had moved it? He was going to reach that big summit, the highest mountain of sand, just as the sun set. He was sure of it. Thereafter it would be downhill all the way. The sun hung an inch clear of the horizon. It was an Inca coin. Solid gold. Big as a plate.
Time to check the old compass again. But he couldn't get it to work. It kept saying south when he was going east. Bloody thing must have got sand stuck in it.
Night was easier, and funny too. You never knew what the next step would bring. Several times Betts tumbled down a slope roaring with laughter, legs like jelly. It was the Funny House at a funfair, and he and his friends were trying to scramble up the slope but kept falling down, positively drunk with laughter.
Melanie touched his shoulder and spoke seriously to him. He couldn't hear what she said but he could see in her grey eyes how serious she was.
He awoke to find black shapes were huddled round him: nuns, he thought. He had a headache and a small pebble had got itself stuck in his throat. He tried to cough it out but it wouldn't dislodge. On his feet he remembered to check the compass and once more clambered eastwards up a slope to be greeted at the top full in the face by the rising sun. That was something. The lion sending his first roar straight at you alone. It was wonderful. It was to be on an endless stage always watched, and the person who watched you was God. That was why you could tumble down the slopes and have all the fun you wanted - because God held you in His loving gaze.
What the devil - Betts found his underpants attached to his head. He ripped them off and walked at the sun. Free again. Another day of freedom.
His watch was all wrong, said it was evening when it was morning. The sun was directly overhead now. A wire hung down from it to the top of Betts's head and Betts dangled like a puppet. It was an electric wire and filled him with the current that kept him moving. Up, down, up, down, left, right.
The sun's wire pulled him this way and that. It became a rod and suddenly pushed him down a slope. Then it pointed him up again. Each time he approached the summit it would give a flick and send him back to the bottom. The sun was playing a game with him. Then it found the centre of his forehead and pushed the tip of the rod straight into his brain. Heat flooded his mind. Every worry, every fear he had ever known poured away, up the rod (which was in fact a syringe) all the way to the heart of the sun, leaving him blinded on his back in a transport of light.
The lone Tuareg rider was as patient as the sea. He rode the rocking waves of his camel's stride, dreaming of the stars in a song. Each time the beast's bony shoulder rose it brushed his cane. He had a long way to go, he neither knew nor cared how far.
The indigo shesh that hid his face was damp in front of his mouth and nose. The water in two clay jars either side of his saddle slapped as the camel paced. The slap-slap lulled him. It was like the splashing of a goat-hide as it rose from the depth of a well. Like the watery sounds of love. For a long stretch he felt himself harden at the thought of that. He let it be: it would pass.
To anyone watching he would have appeared as a little pillar on the yellow sea. He would disappear then slowly, steadily as the hand of a clock, reappear as he rose and descended the waves of sand.
He had been riding for many hours, many days when he paused before a certain ridge. His beast paused as he would have had it do, without a signal from him. They both knew, man and beast, what they would see on the other side. They had watched the staggering man from afar. Riding high above the figure in the trough of the dune, they traversed the bowl in which he lay. The foreigner's bare back was red as henna. At the far rim the Tuareg pulled on the rope tucked between his toes. The camel sank to its knees, emitting a low groan.
He slid off his mount and shuffled hurriedly down the sand, as if he had not been in the least sleepy. He was most of the way down when he stopped and walked back up, as easily as if he had been mounting a staircase, and took hold of the camel's neck rope. The animal leaned onto its front knees and rose to its full height, following its master down the slope to the fallen man.
The sun struck a blow to Betts's head. A stream of cool fluid flowed up his throat as if he were vomiting. But the fluid didn't taste bad. His stomach pumped easily. He smelled an animal close by. Some beast was pushing against him. Betts could neither close nor open his eyes and suffered the animal to be there. His belly began to ache horribly. Someone must have stabbed him, but he couldn't move his hands to check for blood.
He began to shake. He must be in a vehicle, an ambulance perhaps. Except the animal was still there. Betts had the notion he was standing in a horse-box. He could see it all clearly now. He wasn't wounded at all. He was in the back of a horse-box that was open to the sky. They were travelling up the road from Chalfont St Giles towards Newbury, up through the woods on a Saturday morning. It was May, England at her loveliest, and they were on their way to a show.
Each jog hurt his belly. Perhaps the knife was still in him and they were taking him to hospital.
Something deliciously cool on his face. He must be hot if coolness felt so good. It travelled over his lips and up his nose. The coolness stung as it passed the inner gate of the nostril but even the sting felt good.
They weren't going to Newbury, they were going to Basingstoke to fetch his first pony. But the horse was with him already. Perhaps they were driving to Ipswich for his first three-day event and he was going to win, then do his Olympic trial and make the grade and be off to Belgrade for his country. Belgrade, where he took junior gold. What a wonderful start. Nothing had compared to that first thrill of victory.
But why was he in the back listening to the ker-thump of the horse's slow heartbeat?
The coolness was on his lips again. Where the devil did it come from? He licked, wanting more, and it was then that God first spoke to him, saying in a way that one could not disobey: sleep.
When betts awoke he was sitting upright. A cup was at his lips. But he couldn't get his mouth to suck. There was something he had to do but he didn't know what. It was God who told him: next time the coolness comes, swallow.
The coolness did come and he did swallow. God had found him at last. He did not realise until then how hard God had been looking for him, nor for how long. Betts felt a delirious relief.
Someone was calling God in a voice that sounded like the shuffling of feet through sand. De profundis clamavi, Betts thought, then wondered: when was I in profundis? After the hospital, of course. Strange that the two weeks in intensive care should have been a breeze compared to the months that followed. Months of sitting around the house wondering what to do. It was one thing not to be able to ride any more, but not to be able to satisfy his long-suffering wife properly - at last he was home for a while, wasn't on tour, and he couldn't do a thing for her. A dreamy feeling. He'd always imagined there'd be a colossal frustration if something like that happened to a man, a raging in the loins such as to make life insufferable. But it was more like being on Valium. Potter in the garden, mope down to the shops, slump in front of the telly.
The doctor tried to put him on pills. "Something to lift your mood," he said.
"Not bloody likely," Betts retorted.
"Well, then," Melanie said when he told her, "John Betts had better decide what he is going to do with the rest of his life."
Next time he woke someone was holding him by his throat. He didn't open his eyes but found he could move his head. He sat up with a jolt. His eyes weren't working right. Bright things swam among dark things.
It must have been God at my throat, he decided. Then wondered: what did God have to do with anything? A woman - he knew it was a woman by her thin wrist and soft voice - brought him a brown cup. He drank and drank even after she had taken it away. He grabbed it back from her and tried to drink more but something knocked the side of his head and the cup fell to the ground.
He remembered what God had said: to drink little and to wait.
When had God said that?
Melanie was at his side again. He had had his accident and she was stroking his brow, telling him everything would be fine. They were waiting for the ambulance. Already he didn't believe her. Fine? Then what was he doing flat on his back not able to lift a hand to wipe away his wife's tears?
Funny how when he woke up in hospital he had known precisely what had happened. He didn't realise he had shat himself, it was true, but he remembered the stumble at the water jump, the sudden view of sky and the great neck flying up. He knew what the pertinent questions were.
"Is Blueblood OK? Didn't break her back, did she?"
"Everything's all right," Melanie said.
And he knew. Except he didn't know all of it. "Doctor says I'll ride again?"
"You'll be fine."
He tried to make a joke of it: One-Ball Betts, Cannonball Johnny has shot his last, and so on. Melanie would duly offer a titter she neither meant nor felt. He'd only lost one testicle, but the remaining one wasn't working. It was in atrophy, the surgeon said. Blueblood's passing gift to him. Perhaps a stray hoof had done it, or the sheer weight of the horse. Give it time, the doctor said.
Melanie couldn't have been nicer. She wanted to share his misfortune, it was a joint challenge, a privation they'd pass through together.
Betts grew tired of the word "through." Everyone seemed to be using it. The shrink did, when Melanie insisted they go to one: "There are issues here we need to work through."
No there weren't, Betts thought, he just needed to get it up again.
The vicar used it, when Melanie asked him round. "You must put your trust in God and he will guide you through," he said.
Through what? Betts wondered.
Billy Ramponi the jockey had the same suggestion: "You'll have to go and find God, mate." Billy was a practising Catholic, his brother was a priest back in Malta. "It's supposed to be good for the religious life, innit?" he said in his cockney accent.
But it was Betts himself who finally came up with the answer. "You know me, Mel, I run on adrenaline. I need excitement."
"I always thought you ran on champagne," she said.
"After a thing like this a man needs a change. I see a new venture, not a sport but just as challenging. If I am to be barred from riding then I must walk."
She laughed. "You mean become one of those walkers shimmying round the track?"
"Betts does John O'Groats. Betts goes Cape to Cairo. I'll write about it, get on the telly. A proper long-distance walker. People haven't forgotten me yet, you'll see."
Sure enough, local radio had covered his Land's End to John O'Groats. But that was just the warm-up. "I'm not getting younger, Mel, I'm going to bite off the hardest chunk now while the going's good. The Sahara. That should get some headlines."
She had frowned.
"I'll have all the right back-up, of course."
But he hadn't. That was the problem. The agent had not come through as he should have, the publisher's advance was miserly and there was nothing up front from the BBC. But Betts studied the route and decided all he'd have to do was stay on the road. People rode bikes down it all the time, after all. Why not walk it and be the first to grab the attention? He could see himself already, shuffling into an oasis with a scarf wrapped round his head.
Another cup. He could taste the earth in the earthenware. He opened his eyes on a dark surface glistening in front of his face. A glacier in moonlight. A dewy field before dawn. Then the cup was gone. He wanted another but whoever held the water would not grant it.
God had moved away. God who had been so easy to find he could not find at all now. God never leaves man, Betts thought, it is only man who leaves God. So now he must have started ignoring God again. How did you turn and find Him once more?
He could see where he was, though. His eyes were working at last: a black tent. Black wool, an arena of rugs spread on the floor with the black canopy above. In one corner a woman in black rocked something - a cradle, he imagined. His eyes rested on the motion. Rock rock. An iron tripod, the item suspended beneath, the woman rocking it, a long wrist exposed. In the opening of the tent black bundles of women sat round a fire from which rose a trail of smoke.
Then Betts realised, miracle of miracles, that he needed a pee. At that moment he understood where he was, what had happened, and that he was better. He got up and immediately fell to the ground with a grunt, legs buckling under him like rubber.
When he sat again a small steel bowl stood nearby. At first he wondered if he was supposed to pee into it - but in front of the women? - then he saw the couscous. When he dug in his spoon he found lumps of something like butter melting in it. He couldn't remember anything ever tasting so good. He sat back from the bowl after only a few mouthfuls, wrapped his arms round his knees and experienced deep patience. He had mastered desire. This was happiness: not to have satisfied craving but to have learned that craving itself could nourish you.
One of the women dug her fingers into his arm. He let out a cry as she pulled him to his feet and made him take a couple of shaky steps. When she let him go he slumped to the ground. She shouted at him. He heard the other women laughing. A tall robed man stooped into the tent and stared at him.
The woman set him to rocking the tripod contraption. At first she tried to lead him to the corner where it stood but his legs were no good. The ankles were the problem, they just flopped about, no strength in them at all. Finally she folded up the tripod's legs and brought it to him, together with the goatskin that hung from it.
Betts learned to let the water inside slop back and forth, giving a little tweak as he felt the weight of it hit the far end. Perhaps they thought it would be interesting to him to learn a little about their way of life. He stopped after a while and lay down. Immediately the woman was shouting at him. Confused, he sat up and blinked at her. What was up with her? She skipped over and clipped him round the ear, her hand hard as a bag of nails.
"TV!" he cried. "I'm on bloody TV!" He mimed a box in the air. "Television." No one paid any attention. He rolled his eyes and tried to stand again, balancing on his heels. "I'm a celebrity." That might be overstating it but they'd never know.
"Sport," he tried. Then he gripped a pair of imaginary reins. "Horses. Show-jumping. Cheval. Moi sur cheval sur telly," he said.
A woman got up from the fire and came at him with a stick. She whacked his knee. Pain burst into his leg and he fell down.
Then a man wearing a black scarf pulled him to his feet. He had gentle hands, soft and cool. He took one of Betts's hands in his and made him take hold of the goatskin again.
"Money," Betts called. "Argent. Francs. Dollars." They'd understand that. He rubbed his finger and thumb together. "There'll be a reward."
This time it was the man in robes who gave him a clout round the head.
When he got back here with the film crew they'd all have a laugh. He could see it now, big grins in all those dark faces, and he graciously shaking hands with his one-time tormentors, then doing a piece to camera: can you believe it, these friendly folk once treated me like a slave? Must have thought I was a bloody Frog. No seriously, the French down here... And he'd be off on some historical titbit.
He resumed the rocking. After a while the sloshing lulled him. He thought of a beach, then of a river, a meadow, a thin line of smoke rising from a cottage into a clear English sky. He thought of Melanie with longing, even desperation. He could see her face, its serious expression, and it scared him. She was right, he was never serious enough, as she used to say, he jumped into things too lightly. Here he was doing it again and look where he had ended up. He was mad to have thought he could walk to Tamanrasset. How had he ever embarked on such a venture? He had been sleepwalking ever since his accident, operating in a dream. Why hadn't anyone stopped him? Why hadn't Melanie given him a slap, brought him to his senses? She had probably tried.
Betts wondered if the answer was to find God again.
What was all this nonsense about God? He didn't need God, he needed to get back home. Out of this tent, this enormous desert, back to his wife, his house, and do something sensible. Open a bar, a restaurant, or more sensible still, become a trainer, just like he was bound to have done one day. That day had come. Let somebody else enjoy the limelight now.
The tuareg and his camel had waited a week. The foreigner was on his feet again, well enough to walk. After saying his dawn prayers the Tuareg went in to where the man lay on his back. He stood him up, tied a scarf round his head, a leather string round his wrist and led him outside. The foreigner waited while the Tuareg fastened the string to the camel's saddle, then together they set out on to the rolling sea of gravel.
Next camp was many days away, where perhaps he would have more luck. They would pass three wells along the way, and might run into others who would be interested. It didn't matter. Sooner or later he would make the sale.
One morning they crossed a river of broken tarmac where the foreigner wanted to stop. The Tuareg had to strike him a hard blow with his cane, and tied up both his wrists to the camel before they moved on. Soon the foreigner fell in step, murmuring to himself as the two men and the camel made their way across the sand.
