Sur la Route a Tafaya

Pre-dawn. Jolting along the rutted road thru the dunes in the back of the smugglers' truck, thrown about amongst sacks of God knows what, in the desperate race to escape from the distant police.

Suddenly their lights faded as they bogged and stopped.
Wind-muffled rifle cracks, parting shots, the ping of lead on metal as bullets hit & deflected off the truck sides.

I clung to the huge comforting back of Seattle Bill while Brother Tomas spooned me from behind. We were so,so cold, the searing wind unrelenting, the truck a lurching screaming nightmare ride.

Suddenly it all stopped, the motor shuddered to silence.
All I could hear was shrieking wind and...yes surf...
I stood up and saw we were beside the Atlantic, the last of the moon low on the horizon, stars fading as the night sky lightened in the east above the dunes. Total tranquility.

The blue men motioned us to jump down. Time for tea. It seemed so absurd. But it was close to sunrise and the time for prayers.

There was no sign of the police now, so we relaxed a little, keeping anxious ears & eyes tuned for any sign that they had found us. We seemed to be in a hide, tucked in amongst the sand dunes right beside the ocean, the wind had erased our tracks.

I ran to the water and washed the sand from my eyes then scrambled to the top of the nearest dune - a rolling ocean of sand stretched as far as I could see to the west - feeling the immensity of the Sahara, of Africa I had a timeless moment of transcendental clarity.

Then....from below...La! La! Come down... the men called me to tea & chided me for exposing our hideaway,
should the eyes be there to see. Stupid woman. I could feel their disdain.

Brother Tomas being strange, evasive ....and I saw his less than holy side had emerged again.

My basket was disgorging it's contents...he'd raided my basket! Looking for what I wondered, was this another of his jealous fits? He really should grow up, Bill is just a travel buddy, I wasn't coming on to him, I was only cuddling up to him because I was freezing cold. Surely he understood the way sharing body heat in such circumstances worked? Bill seemed oblivious. No big deal for him. He understood.
But then he came from the cold north, while Tom had grown up in Hawaii.

I shrugged the thoughts away and quickly stuffed everything back in, as my drawings & diary notes were threatening to blow away.

Then I saw them. My Klea's baby photos. Oh, No!
He'd thrown them into the wind and there they flew, spiraling unreachably up and over the dunes and out of sight.

The wind seared away my tears as I watched them disappear. Just like that. My baby. Gone!

Chronicles d'Anu. Sahara.

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Apophysis 2.08 beta 2