Free The Salt Road by Jane Johnson

colonies, mining. Or, as I had once put it to him in the midst of a furious teenage argument, ‘raping African resources’. My youthful political fervour had soon given way to more inward, personal angst, and then to the cowed and cautious conservatism that had taken me through my accountancy training and into my comfortable career. Feeling a brief shudder of shame, I read on.
    ‘Where once our families drove their livestock and pastured their camels, there is now nothing but a vast industrial waste land. No one asked our permission, no one paid us compensation. They stole our lands; they stole our livelihoods and our children’s inheritance. Our people are left destitute. These hostages will not be harmed; we want only to make our point and have the world listen to us. We do not want your nuclear bombs, we do not want your mines. All we want is to live free in our ancestral lands.’
    The article concluded by reminding readers how British prime minister Tony Blair had claimed in what later became known as ‘the dodgy dossier’ in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase from Niger huge quantities of uranium to create the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that formed a major part of the justification for the ‘pre-emptive’ attack on Iraq, and showed a small and rather indistinct map of the region. I frowned and examined the map, feeling a gnawing uneasiness in the back of my head. At last, unable to focus on the tiny print of the place names, I shook out the paper and riffled through to the arts pages. There, as if planted by a mischievous force determined to torment me, I found a photograph of a group of veiled men, their turbans wound as intricately and comprehensively as those of the men who populated my dreams. ‘Desert Blues Strike Gold’, the headline read, followed by an appreciative review for a new CD by a band of Tuareg musicians performing under the name of Tinariwen.
    Tuareg. I remembered where I had come across that word now. In my father’s description of the possible provenance for the amulet.
    My skin prickled all over.
    All day I had the sense of a low murmur in my head, as if someone was having a long conversation with a part of me I could not access, in another room, behind my back, just out of earshot, in a foreign language. Sometimes I found myself poring over a column of figures as if they had been inscribed in hieroglyphics or the Punic alphabet, unable to make head or tail of them.
    Back at the house, I fired up the laptop and searched out flights to Morocco. It was years since I’d been abroad. Fear of flying was just one part of the reason; there had been no one to go with, for Eve was only recently divorced. And Africa, that’d take ages, wouldn’t it?
    It’s closer than you think.
    It was as if the voice were exterior to me now, somewhere in the room. I shook my head and devoted myself to tracking down the best flights. Then, task accomplished, I opened the box and took out my father’s typed papers.
Notes regarding the gravesite near Abalessa
Abalessa (latitude 22°43'60N, longitude 6°1'0E, at an altitude of 3,000 ft) lies almost at the heart of the great desert. Terrain is rugged and rocky. When the site was first discovered by Byron Khun de Prorok in 1925, it would have been easily overlooked at first, appearing to be just one more confused jumble of stones, otherwise known as a redjem , such as are commonly found in the Sahara. The initial excavation revealed a large monument over 80 ft on its longer axis and 75 ft on the shorter, constructed using ancient techniques for drystone walling, the stones carefully selected and placed. The irregularity of the structure and the roughness of the style and masonry suggest Berber origins, not Roman, as has been suggested (see later notes).
Inside the exterior walls is an antechamber and various chambers, in the largest of which the sepulchre was found.
According to witnesses, the skeleton of the desert queen had been wrapped in