Tom Foran Clark

High winds rose up. Pike and Emery pushed blindly through Monastir on the Rue du Maroc, traveling headlong into blistering gusts, seeking the road to Mahdia. They stayed outside the Medina walls, pressing southward.

The winds began easing up even as the two rolled into the northern outskirts of Mahdia. They rode through a maze of inchoate, tumbling cubicles glued haphazardly to the coastline like barnacles, and came to the tip of the peninsula, where they followed along a crumbling ancient wall to a courtyard of pillared arcades carved from ivory-colored sandstone which, mysteriously glowing, seemed lighted from within. The village mosque, also of modern construction, was a simple, tranquil place of quietness and worship. Its courtyard also glowed eerily -- not with ivory shining, however, but rather emitting a vibrant emerald hue.

They rode out of the ville, down to the beach. On a sandy dune of tall crabgrass was a small, domed mausoleum, a memorial erected -- as an attached plaque stated in Arabic, French, and English -- in honor of "a simple man of Mahdia" who’d "lived an exemplary life." The two walked up the beach about a quarter mile from this honored hermit, saint, or sultan, and pitched camp.

Mahdia schoolchildren woke them in the morning, an excited, chirping crowd encircling their tent. It was a dim, windy morning -- gray and bleak. The urchins jumped up and down, waving their arms, laughing and yelling -- the customary ceremony. Unruffled -- in the aura or shadow of that anonymous man of Mahdia who’d lived an exemplary life -- Pike and Emery calmly packed, cast their blessings on the kids, and rode away.

Through the next few days the sun came and went but the winds were relentless -- steady, dry, and harsh -- dying down only in the evening. During the day, clouds would be shining in one part of the sky even as it was gray and bleak in another. Pike and Emery rolled up and down low ridges, dunes, knolls. They passed through El Djem and marveled at the ruins of the Roman Theater, high stone rings of layered golden arcades as elegant and exuberant as the Coliseum in Rome. Despite fleets of ominous gray clouds overhead, they about flew to Sfax, carried by favorable winds.

They took a room in the Medina at the Hotel du Sud -- a large, sparse room with a high white ceiling, two beds, and a card table -- then went to a cavernous, smoke-filled coffeehouse and sat among the card players. They ate cous-cous Tunisienne for dinner and, at the same canteen, they had their breakfast of piping hot smoule heaped with tomatoes and carrots.

Under gray and drizzly skies, they rode out of Sfax along the coast, parallel to train tracks, with the turquoise ocean on their left and flat-out empty barren desert on their right. They put in a long day of churning the pedals and settled that evening in an empty stone house in a small, lush oasis of palms. They rode on to the seaside village of Mahares in the morning, then traveled twenty more kilometers before having lunch alongside a sandy ridge where a platoon of camels and camel-drivers passed by below them. They got their first real taste of the harsh, parching, brutal Tunisian south fifty miles out of Gabes, arriving at a village on the plain called Skhira. The two rode through, camped under a Magnolia tree, and heard only the buzz of cicadas in the night.

Nearing Gabes, they entered a territory of palm clusters -- oases. They encountered people in motion again -- camel-riders, bicyclists, and walkers going both ways on the road. The two had the feeling they’d been plunged suddenly into central or even southern Africa. The faces looked Nubian, Congolese, Ethiopian. Even as the faces were darker, the storefront colors were brighter than they’d yet seen. Pike and Emery stayed three days in colorful seaside Gabes, staying at the Auberge d’ Jeuness and eating at the Restaurant Populaire.

The road from Gabes climbed into austere mountains, then dropped to sahels, craters, and holes in the ground. The two entered the valley of Matmata, where the holes provided human shelter -- portals to the homes of Berbers living underground. The rutted road was pocked similarly, a microcosm of the larger valley full of holes. Then it happened that Pike’s front wheel got caught in the vice-grip of a crack in the road, and they came to a complete standstill. Working together, the two coaxed the wheel loose.

Rising higher from the valley, walking with their bikes, they pressed on. The ruts got deeper, and the gravel turned to tiny spears and shards. Eventually, they got to a height where they could see the whole breadth and span of the encircling Mountains. This gave them new energy and resolve. They reached Tamezret, half village, half mountaintop, where the homes, stacked cubicles, clung defiantly to the slopes as if the laws of gravity were less enforced here than elsewhere.

From the roofs and walls the two looked out across the sea of hills, a blue haze of far dunes -- the northern line of the Sahara. The sun sank down, an orange fireball. The horizon turned purple. They rolled back down the pass, eastward, away from Tamezret. The streets were impossibly steep. Somewhere in that marvelous expanse of desert between Tamezret and Matmata, the two pitched their tent on the precarious edge of a plunging hillside. As if some natural law of relative plunging had evolved here, the temperature plunged, too. Pike, shivering, went out in the middle of the night to make water and nearly plunged, feet first, into the wintry air.

The sky was covered in clouds the next morning. A forceful wind was about, whistling over the hills. Pike and Emery followed the road back to Matmata where, in the scorching heat of mid-day, they took shelter in the coolness of an abandoned, partially caved-in underground hole. Soon the urchins came along, the chattering village boys, gathering on the lip of the orifice, pointing and shouting "Touristes! Touristes!" They whistled and cheered when the two climbed out of their hole and moved on.

The route south to Medenine brought further up and down hauls. The road itself became a shapeshifter, every now and again becoming a seemingly impassable riverbed of moist earth and tumbled boulders. At sundown, the two came into a strange territory of cave dwellings drilled into vertical hillsides where Berber women in tatters dominated the populace, all hauling sticks on their backs. The sun went down, casting long, funhouse shadows of the women, and of Pike and Emery, across the road. The two clattered down a rough, eroded camel route, their teeth rattling in their heads. The bikes did not dissemble. Some part or other on Pike’s front fender came loose, creating a soft tinkling sound as he proceeded -- like a wind chime.

The panorama was breathtaking. Pike got many pictures. The two pitched their tent. They assumed they were out in the middle of nowhere, but in the morning they discovered they were just outside a village. The two zig-zagged down the mountain and, around a bend, came onto further bluffs, mesas, plateaus, canyons, and the tumbling ochre dwellings of Toujane -- a beige, barren, sunscorched desert outpost. Oddly, Toujane was famous for its honey -- bu there was none to be had however, then, in the month of February.

As Pike and Emery dropped down into a stony maze of paths, the sun burned through the morning cloud cover, putting down a steady griddle heat. Roosters crowed. Desert flies and bees buzzed around the heads of loafing camels and stomping burros. Along the trail were sparkling slivers of mica amid crystalline shards of Rose Quartz. The two rode and rode, winding down out of those mountains back to sagebrush plains and the dunes along the coast. They were in the palm-filled green oasis of Metameur by sundown.

Accompanied by a throng of shouting boys, the two went in to the town, a central square sided by houses, stores, stalls, cafés. They got fresh fruit and vegetables, but Emery discovered he had no appetite for these -- and that he wasn’t really feeling all that well in general. It was just a vague feeling of not operating at full strength, perhaps a low grade fever -- he didn’t know what was wrong. Pike and Emery rode to an outlying field on a knoll with a view to the ancient village, and pitched their tent. Feeling lightly feverish, Emery was soon asleep.

The next morning, in bright sunshine, the two saw before them a road they took at first to be a mirage -- shimmering, newly paved with asphalt. They sailed from Metameur south to Medenine. The ancient center of the modern, booming town held souks like pauper’s dens. They entered into a spare, dark shop where Emery persuaded a merchant to climb a ladder to get down, from a high shelf, two cans of apricot jam. The merchant insisted there were only cans of coings up there, but Emery could distinctly see two cans of apricot jam. The merchant rubbed his eyes when he got up there, fetching down the cans. Back at the counter, he vividly conveyed his embarrassment, nonetheless going forward slyly, selling Emery two cans of apricot jam for the price of four cans of coings.

It looked like it was going to be a fine day for riding. But so soon as Pike and Emery got to the outer limits of Medenine, high winds raced up to meet them. They braced themselves for another grueling haul, leaning forward into the gusts. The road looked like it was going to be flat, straight out ahead, but it tilted up in fact. The two rode to the foothills of the plateau village of Djebel. There, though the winds died down, the road climbed just about straight up. Pike and Emery walked with their bikes on the vertical canyon walls like clinging flies.

The sweet musk smell of dry sage filled their senses. The winds purred gently around them, held at bay by the plateau ridges. Forceful gusts swirled atop the peaks, ambushing Pike and Emery when they got to the top of the pass. Emerging from the shadowy deeps, they were hit by fierce, flapping winds. Here -- in this harsh, far place with a view down the canyon to the Plain of Djebel and the sprawl of Medenine, at the very rim of this high plateau, out of view until we reached the peak -- was a crumbling, peeling, long-since whitewashed café. At least the two guessed this, that it must once have been a café -- or a refreshment stand, snack bar, or luncheonette. Some such thing. As it had iron bars on its windows, Pike and Emery supposed momentarily it might have been a jail. But no, of course it could not have been a jail. It could not have been anything -- it made no sense at all. It was Emery's turn to rub his eyes in disbelief.

The winds went through that place like a pack of hounds on the trail of a scent. The sun went down behind a magnificent, pointed, distant crag. The valley light dimmed. The winds grew chilly. They could not keep a candle lit. But Pike showed perverse resolve, insisting he and Emery spend the night in that fine, high place. The two put down ground cloths and laid out their sleeping bags. Then they piled boulders around the edges of the bags, to keep them from flying out. With their flashlights, Pike and Emery studied the graffiti on the walls -- lovely Arabic filigree amid rudely scrawled French phrases and random tidbits of English, also primal sketches of penises and vulvas -- one great Earth Mother had no feet, no arms or hands, a head the size of a grapefruit, breasts the size of tiny tangerines, and a vagina that took up the remaining sixty percent of her total body surface.

It was a harsh night. Emery developed a low-grade fever. He knew he had some sort of an infection -- something was wrong. His body ached. He was sweating. The winds raged and howled. In the morning, despite the frosty air, Emery awoke in a sweat. Pike, shivering in the cold, went out for a walk around the mountaintop. He reappeared, a broken man, white as a sheet. His resolve was shattered.

"I think we’ll never make it to Spain," Pike said. "I’m going back. I’m going to Tunis, and I’ll fly from there or Sicily or Rome to Spain."

"Don’t take the tent," Emery said.

"Don’t take the tent?"

"Yeah, don’t take the tent. I’m going forward and I’m going to need the tent."

"It’s not your dog-gone tent," Pike said, incensed. "I’m going to leave you here dripping sweat, feverish, talking to yourself all through the night, and fly to Spain without you, and all you have to say is ‘Don’t take the tent’?" Pike sat down on the ground, leaning against a sunny wall of the café jail. He scratched his head. "Emery, let’s go," he whispered. "We’ve seen enough Arabia. If you’ve seen one Berber outpost, you’ve seen them all." Shivering, he said he’d never even heard of mountains in North Africa until he’d got there. Now he was weeping, holding his head in his hands. “We’ll never make it across dog-gone Algeria and Morocco,” he cried. Emery, red with fever, sat down next to him, put his arm around Pike's shoulder, and waited.

"Okay, okay," Pike said finally. “Obviously, that came from weakness. I’m going to pull myself together now.” Once he’d got all that out, he was good to go again. The two packed their gear and got down off that mountain. They got on the winding road to the village of Bheni-Kheddache, just five kilometers away. Emery seemed to be feeling a little better, getting back some strength. The two bought milk and loaves of bread and entered the babbling, calming commotion of the souks.

They left Bheni-Kheddache in the afternoon, rising on a mule-trail scraped from the ridge rims, winding treacherously toward Ksar Hadada and Ghoumrassen. It was hard going. Whole sections of the cracked, eroded road had fallen away. "Everything -- takes -- forever," Pike gasped, pressing on. "Ttchk- ttchk-gck- gck- gck- ttchk," clicked an old Berber woman wearing golden coins on her twenty-colored garb, approaching regally with a simple load of sticks, astride a burro. Pike and Emery pressed themselves and their bikes and gear close to the rocks, making room for the women and the burros to pass. Enormous crows circled overhead like vultures.

Pike and Emery came to three apparently abandoned Berber caves carved into a ridge wall, the likes of which they’d never seen before. They picked one and went in. Their bikes just barely fit through the portal, but the empty den within was large -- eight feet long, seven feet wide, five feet high. While the two set out their things, the light outside the den dwindled even as the temperature again fell to freezing.

Settling into his sleeping bag that night, Emery realized he was feeling not better than before, but far worse. He could feel vague toxins coursing through his body. The muscles in his neck felt taut and strained. He tried to ignore the growing pain pressing on his jaw, cheeks, and eyeballs. The night fever’s grip carried Emery into nightmares. He felt heavier than lead. He fell into troglodyte’s caverns, coal mines, and mass graves. He fell to the earth's core -- he fell through the earth's core.

When Emery awoke in the morning, Pike was staring at him strangely. "Do you know you have a swollen lip?" Pike asked, which is when the two discovered a plump, squid-like, pus-filled, festering abscess on Emery's top gums, up front, right under his nose.