Desert Divers Read Online Free PDF

water against tiles and the murmur of voices under the vaulted ceiling.
    There is no wind in there. The light doesn’t hurt your eyes. Your nails don’t split. You don’t get sand in your mouth. The air is not prickly dry in your nose. On the contrary, it is thick with steaming moisture and feels soft and smooth in the hollows of your body. Good water flows. In the desert, that is paradise.
29
    The human body has six hundred muscles. You use most of them automatically without experiencing them. The best part of training is finding new muscles which have never been conscious before.
    How many muscles has a human life? You’re sure to use most of them automatically, without experiencing them. Particularly in long-term relationships, developing a routine is labour saving, and thus enervating. The best part of suddenly encountering solitude is that it provides training: you discover your life when you have to start using its long-since forgotten and atrophied muscles.
30
    I am living on a hillside, the road meandering past. I wake early and go out for a newspaper.
    The news on the front page is criss-crossed with thick black lines which make them invalid and partly illegible. There is only one legible and valid item of news. That is printed in microscopic typescript and says that the country has been invaded by a foreign power. The foreign troops can be expected at any moment to pass along this particular road.
    Then I suddenly remember that I had a goat as well as a dog when I left. But the dog is too faithful and the goat too rebellious and unmanageable. So I have tied them up in the forest. I was thinking of fetching them later, but forgot them. Are they still alive? Has anyone found them? Have they died of starvation? I must find out before the foreigners get here. But how shall I get there? My wife is already messing about in the garden. The children will soon wake up. So far, I am the only one who knows about the invasion, about the goat, about the dog – and what shall I do?
    I go and ask my father. He has put a piece of white paper in front of him on his desk. He takes out his pocket-knife with its mother-of-pearl inlays, slots a nail into the groove and opens the knife. It is the small sharp blade he opens out. Without a word he starts slowly and carefully cutting away the white on his nails.
    He isn’t cutting his nails. He is trimming them. He prunes them, just as you prune a tree or a bush in the garden. He cuts off just that part of the nail which helped him open the knife.
    I say nothing. Father is also silent. With a scraping sound, the slice of nail falls onto the white paper.
31
    The first inhabitants of Smara were black and came from the south. Their rock engravings show a Saharan savanna where elephants and giraffes grazed.
    In the millennium before our era, they were driven back south by the drought. Those who stayed behind were subjugated by Berber peoples from the north, who rode horses and had weapons made of iron.
    The desert deepened all around them. The horse was followed by the camel, which arrived from the east around the year 100 and made possible the regular caravan trade across the desert.
    In the year 1000, there was a gang of Saharans who called themselves the ‘Almoravids’. They took over the caravan trade, penetrated northwards and conquered Morocco and Spain. There we got to know them by the name of
Moors
.
    In the thirteenth century, all the Saharans who stayed behind in the desert were conquered by a Bedouin tribe, Beni Hassan, emigrating from Yemen. Hassanic Arabic pushed out the Berber language, Znaga. The ruling Arabs accepted tributes from their Znaga vassals who in turn ruled over the black indigenous population: slaves and freed slaves. A council,
djema
, drew up laws and chose a chieftain.
    The most famous of these chieftains was Ma Ainin, ‘The Water of the Eyes’. He founded Smara in 1895 as the centre for the Saharan tribes and his headquarters in the struggle against the