Tom Foran Clark

Within ten minutes of their entering Algeria, Emery's rear tire went flat. The riders pulled off the road and walked with their bikes to a heap of burned-out shells of cars -- an auto-cemetery. In that bleak setting, Emery repaired the tire and re-aligned the wheel.

Near and far around this eerie junkyard were smooth dunes. The road was good. That day, Pike and Emery put in eighty kilometers, passing through the oasis village of Massi Khalifa to camp on an open plain. It was like a night on the beach except there was only beach -- and the moon and stars. There was no sound of lapping waters. There was no sound at all.

There was not a cloud in the sky in the morning. The two broke camp at their leisure and, under the harsh, sizzling sun, walked with their bikes much of the way through the smooth sweeps of the Dokhara dunes, where the road disappeared for long stretches under sand. Intermittently reassessing their situation, they kept their bikes pointed in the direction of reemerging lengths or patches of black asphalt out ahead, trusting these were not mirages but in fact authentic resurrected stretches of the road. Pike and Emery figured they’d as soon be swallowed into the sands of time beyond returning as pass through the villages of Debila and Hassani Abdelkirin on their way to the oasis city of El Oued, which they reached that afternoon.

El Oued lay in a bowl or valley spooned or gouged from the everywhere-surrounding sands. Their first order of business there was to trade dollars for dinars. It took them half an hour to find a bank. Alone in the unmarked building, which looked like an eroded stucco jail, the clerk was shaking when he exchanged the currencies. There was no identifying signage anywhere. Pike and Emery had to wonder whether they’d even actually got real Algerian money, so they went straight to the marketplace to try it out. But their dinars were fine -- these got them plenty of oranges, and plenty loose change.

The neighborhoods of El Oued looked like sand-etched abandoned boxcars strewn amid flourishing palms. Dehydrated, Pike and Emery dawdled in the shade of the umbrella leafed palms and sipped water -- all ambition to proceed quashed under the heavy, pulsing sun. If this was February, the two had to wonder, what must this place be like in July?

With evening approaching, Pike and Emery finally peeled themselves from the flatness of their lethargy, and went on. They were passed on the road by a truckload of young men in grimy red and yellow turbans and djellabas in tatters, shouting, shooting rifles in the air. "Bon courage!" they called out jubilantly as they rumbled by.

Pike and Emery pitched their tent in a circular basin of ochre sand. On the rim of this basin, they sat in silence, regarding the silhouettes of tent and bikes under the silver moon amid feathery mists and wisps of clouds. In the morning, they rolled on to Oued El-Allenda where they filled their water bottles from the village well. Pike pointed out a rare sight: a sign with a French word on it. The word was "Sable"-- sand. It was the first good laugh the two enjoyed in Algeria. There was hardly anything else around them except sand. They amused themselves a little while, pretending to seek out companion signs for the blue sky and the relentless scorching sun. The sun was so hot, they wondered which would come first, their being seared or fried red as lobsters, or bleached or sandblasted white.

Lizards scurried across the sands; black beetles dashed across the pavement. Cinnamon and lilac colored crystal rocks, sandroses, lay everywhere along the dunes -- all the way to Touggourt. Here were luxurious stands of grasses, marshes, and palms. Pike and Emery rolled to the market square, inhabited more by flies than by humans. No boys ran up; no merchants hawked wares. The two bought bread, then rode to the oasis on Touggourt’s eastern side, where they camped.

The dominant thing out there: Flies -- little ticklers, tiny pests, relentless. They didn’t bite or sting, but were just maniacally annoying. Late in the afternoon, just prior to dusk, their more psychopathic brethren, the mosquitoes, emerged -- tiny insane flying devils driven by maddest blood lust. Pitching their tent amid those hordes of oasis tormentors feeding on them, Pike and Emery waved their arms and jumped up and down, cursing. It was then a kind of heaven, to get inside that tent -- to take refuge from the mosquitoes. The insects finally departed, surreptitiously, in the dark of night.

The morning was cool and clear. Pike and Emery got on the road leading southwest out of Touggourt toward Ourgla. There was nothing else out there, not even dunes, but there were flies. Riding on that flat, empty stretch, they also saw several burro corpses in varying stages of decomposing – all covered with flies. They saw occasional burned-out shells of cars -- not rusting but, like the skeletons of the burros, being etched clean by the flies and sun. They came to a sign pointing toward the village of Khechem-Errih. Near the sign, about twelve feet from the road, was an abandoned hut built from rocks, which they momentarily considered as a possible shelter for the night -- but the hut had been on fire and the floor and inner walls were charred, soot black.

There were distance markers set along the road every ten kilometers: these offered the only shade. Their objective, that day, was to come within twenty kilometers of Ourgla. At dusk, having battling the hordes of flies all the long day, Pike and Emery sat inside their tent waiting for the flies to leave and the mosquitoes to descend. To their surprise, military planes buzzed overhead instead, departing from the nearby Ouargla airfield.

Stars filled the sky. The moon, gray and dull, pared to three quarters, waning, hung over the peak of a single distant low sand heap. On the horizon, at Ouargla, specks of orange light flared and sputtered around the tops oil-refinery smokestacks. It was a desolate and eerie scene.

Strangely, in the morning, things looked neither eerie nor inviting. It was all plain bland. Pike and Emery rolled over what, in approaching it, had looked like a lake circled by palms. But the lake turned out to be a mirage. In Ourgla, Arabs were laid out like tumbled bowling pins on flour sacks. The sun blazed fiercely. Pike and Emery took cover under the arcade of a café, drank lemonade for about two hours, then got back on their bikes again.

On the fly-infested road out of Ouargla, they were halted by two military officers in green caps and uniforms, wearing sunglasses, also outfitted with pistols. A slow and dreary inquisition followed. They spoke only Arabic with Pike and Emery -- no French. They checked their papers. The men shook their heads, as if in disbelief. They gave them back their papers, saying further things Pike and Emery did not understand, then continued on toward Ourgla. Pike and Emery got back on their bikes, going the other way.

They rolled toward a plateau. At the top, there may have been a lovely view. Unfortunately, there was such a dense, mad, swarming horde of flies up there, the two couldn’t see anything but these. They grabbed their bikes and ran from that flurry as from a burning house, frantically brushing the flies away. That only seemed to thrill the bugs! Pike and Emery were glad -- they rejoiced! -- when a harsh, parching wind rose up in their faces, because this wind dispersed those flies.

Pike and Emery pitched their tent in a sandstorm. It was tough going but, compared to stuffing one’s head inside a hornet’s nest, pitching a tent in hard-as-granite rock in even the fiercest desert storm was to them now like a walk in the park.

Pike bent a few spikes, trying to hammer them in. Emery managed to straighten these out and find fissures enough to wedge the stakes into, so the tent would stand. The two climbed in. Eventually, the wind died down. Still some stubborn, crazed, persistent flies threw themselves at the tent, trying to get at them through the cloth. Then these departed and there was quietness. The stars came out. The two opened up the tent to air it out. They ate in silence, then turned in.

The picture before them the next day was as simple as a child’s drawing: a straight line of horizon, two narrowing lines indicating the road diminishing in perspective, and a circle of sun. After a short while of riding, the two came to a strange scene: four differently colored small Peugots had stopped on the road. The passengers of these plain, unmarked vehicles were all young men in military uniforms, pointing rifles at a fifth car, a gray Renault, which had rolled over on its side. All its windows had shattered, or been shot out. Neither Pike nor Emery saw anybody get out of the Renault, and they didn’t see anybody still trapped in it. As they rolled toward the scene, only one soldier paid them any mind. He turned his rifle on them, pointing first at Pike, then Emery -- then back and forth, nervously. Then he turned his attention -- and his rifle -- back to the Renault. A second soldier strode to the middle of the road. He gestured to Pike and Emery, signalling they should ride on.

Emery asked Pike if he had any idea what that had been about. Pike said, "Just keep moving."

Further down the road, after perhaps twenty kilometers, the two heard the sound of a car approaching behind them. "Just look straight ahead," Pike said. The car horn honked -- and honked again. It was a green Renault, not the gray Renault the two had just seen tumbled sideways on the road. In this car were four young guys dressed in regular garb -- shirts, vests, slacks -- all talking at once. They handed Pike and Emery bread sticks and bottles of soda. They put their heads out the windows, plying the two bike riders with questions. Pike answered cautiously, particularly when they began showing off knives, pistols, and other arms and ammunition. Then they drove off, laughing and carousing, the car pitching right and left on the road as they sped away.

Emery wanted to hear from Pike about the weapons. Everyone they were meeting now seemed to have them -- military and civilians alike. "They said they were official Democratic Freedom Fighters," Pike illuminated. "They asked me if I had seen any Islamic Liberation Dogs. I told them no. I thanked them for the bread and soda."

At day’s end, Pike and Emery were just about equally perplexed, exhausted, and short-tempered. They argued over what they’d seen, and what it meant. Both agreed what they'd seen didn’t bode well for them. "We’ve made it this far," Pike said. Emery waited for the other shoe to drop -- but that was all he had to say.

No sooner were they back on the road in the morning than another Renault, a little powder blue truck, rolled up. The driver called over to them -- did they need a ride? "Non," Pike called back. "C’est bon. Merci." Pike worried this guy would have rocket launchers and grenades or something in the cab. Pike and Emery preferred just keeping on with the bikes. The man looked perplexed. He shrugged his shoulders and went on ahead. Sand sworled over the road behind the truck, running swift, in sprays, over the plain.

But for the winds, it was a vast, undifferentiated terrain. The wind grew colder as the two approached Ghardaia. Swirling sands stung their eyes. Crusty ridges dipped and peaked. As in Tunisia, they swooped by ancient outlying villages of cubicles clutching incongruously to steep hillsides. Rising from each village was the familiar, surmounting obelisk, the minaret. Beyond these, there wasn’t much to see. The haze and swirl of dust and grit obscured whatever beauty Ghardaia may have had on clearer days.

Pike and Emery rode through, facing yet more forceful winds on the other side of the city. They walked with their bikes up a path of rubble and came to a bend, an elbow with a low wall that offered some protection. They tried to pitch their tent, but the cloth puffed up and flapped and kicked and pulled. At one point, they thought they’d almost lost it, but they grabbed hold of it as if their lives depended on it, and wrestlled the tent to the ground. They ended up pulling tent and bikes and gear and selves and all together as close as they could to the protective wall. The grit swirled around them the entire night -- and all through the valley, across the ridges, across the plain.

The sun in the morning was a white circle in a calm, hazy sky. Pike and Emery pulled their things together and rode back into Ghardia again. There was activity there now. It was a parade of beings, in fact, all scuffling along in sandaled feet. Some of the men wore white skullcaps and gray or green puffy pants. The robes most wore, over multicolored shirts, were white, with wideV-shaped open fronts like decollettes. Some of the men wore white wraps of turbans. There were very few women to be seen. All were covered in white cloth, head to toe, with only one eye showing. In other times perhaps there may have glistened mysterious beauty and intrigue in the eyes of these women, but now one saw anger and pain.

There was much commotion out front of a baker’s souk. With every fresh batch of bread baked, clamorous mobs assembled, awaiting the distribution of loaves. These crowds gathered and dwindled as if in the pull or sway of the moon and tides. They pressed, pushed, crushed forward, surging toward the ovens, then fell back again. Some were knocked to the ground. Ribs must have got broken; a few may have suffocated underfoot. Pike somehow emerged with two loaves of bread. On seeing Emery, Pike waved the bread in the air.

It was a split second of suspended motion -- the calm before pandemonium. The two ran. They beat it to the central square, pursued by infuriated, madly hungry Ghardaians. Emery turned over one of the loaves to an imploring old man. This assuaged the crowd and enabled Pike and Emery to hold onto one of the two loaves -- as compared to losing both loaves and being trampled. Spice merchants and sellers of trinkets sat on their mats, unruffled, watching without passing judgment.

At half past one, the awls of the souks began closing. It was again time for afternoon prayers. The hubbub died down and the chants floated over. Pike and Emery rode out of town. From there they covered much ground, venturing into canyons and sleeping in the open on soft sand amid rugged crags and bluffs. They rode to the oasis village of Berriane and on to the vast region of the Daia. At that point, under the blistering sun, they must have looked like south-summering Eskimos. In that heat, they had on their winter caps, heavy coats, scarves, gloves, and sunglasses. The more they put on, the cooler they were. Ahead of them on the horizon lay crusty blue-purple ranges of forbidding crags -- mountains they’d soon be climbing into.

A truck came along, a big gray Berliot with a cab offering plenty of room for three, though the driver was a large, burly, silver-whiskered man in a checkered shirt and a bandanna. He looked like a cowboy going to a square dance. He drove Pike and Emery to the far side of Laghouat, the big city in those mountains. Despite the fact that in Laghouat you could get Camembert cheese -- and though the girls and women showed their faces -- still it was a scorched, severe, bruised, beaten, forlorn place.