The Night Is Young

By Yulia Denisyuk

This story appears in The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True stories from the world's best writers (Lonely Planet Travel Literature) Paperback – 11 Nov 2016

My guide Mohammed dismounts his camel, takes off his worn leather sandals and steps on the hot desert sand.

The onset of dusk is adding a hint of sorcery to the dunes that loom all around us and I can no longer see the homes of Merzouga village behind the rare Saharan palms. I cling to my camel, Bob Marley, and follow Mohammed into the desert for an overnight stay.

Bob Marley’s flesh is hot against my skin. The sun is still strong and I appreciate the elaborate red cloth turban Mohammed tied on my head a minute ago. Through the narrow slit in the turban, I track Mohammed’s indigo blue tunic, aglow in the ochre dunes, as he guides us deeper into this land. I lose sight of him when we cross a large dune, a sleeping giant, and realize that a camel thread in Mohammed’s hand is the only tie connecting me to another human. I have to believe that the thread is strong enough.

Bob Marley takes careful steps, sinking to his knees but coming back out each time. After a while, the camel and I get into an ancient rhythm, advancing as one through the desert. The quiet dunes surround our small caravan, and at times seem to cover us whole. Still we keep going. Mohammed gazes far beyond the shifting horizon and charges ahead as if following an invisible path etched into the dunes.

I catch the last glimpse of the sun before the next slanted dune hides it from view. The air cools down and my camel perks up. The night is quickly falling on Sahara and Mohammed’s slim silhouette is dissolving into the darkness. I pull on the camel thread to ensure we are still connected. As if he is sensing my fear, Mohammed turns and sends me a bright wide grin. He must be only a kid, eighteen or twenty at most. I realize I don’t know much about him, except that his family lives in a nearby village. By the time I go back to New York, he’ll take ten other people on this nightly trek.

I too will have business to attend to upon my return. I have left an unfinished conversation in New York that began years ago when I started working as a marketer and soon recognized this path was not right for me. Not satisfied with my status quo but afraid to change it, I continued working and tormenting myself and my loved ones for years. At last, one mild spring night in New York a close friend of mine had asked me, “Why are you wasting your best years on something you do not care for?” The question hung unanswered that night but kept simmering in my mind all the way to the African continent.

Mohammed suddenly breaks the silence with his first words to me, “Algerian border.” He points somewhere far, smiles, and says it again, “Algerian border, there. We are close.”

Ten minutes later our caravan stops at a low valley formed by a circle of barely visible dunes. I say good night to Bob Marley as Mohammed helps me dismantle. The camel, unfazed by my good manners, lies down for the night and we step into the dark.

The sand is now cool to the touch, a welcomed change from the earlier furnace. I drop my bags and provisions and run up the nearest dune. There, on top of the mound, the first star of the night emerges into the view. In vain, I try to decipher its elusive flickering message and finally go back down.

Below, Mohammed unhurriedly tends to a fire.

His long lean limbs look fragile and graceful at once. I half expect him to turn around and tell me, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” Instead, he pours me a hot cup of tea, ‘berber whiskey’, a mixture of fresh mint leaves and odd mountain herbs that grow in the nearby mid-Atlas mountains.

The tea soothes my limbs, sore from the two hour trek across the impermanent dunes. Mohammed takes out a large cylinder drum from Allah knows where and starts humming a simple tune, gently at first, but louder and louder with each rhythm.

Zamaza, zamaza

A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba

Asalam-aleykum a mama

Asalam-aleykum a baba

Zamaza, zamaza

A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba

I pick up another drum, smaller in size, and join in.

Zamaza, zamaza

A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba

Asalam-aleykum a mama

Asalam-aleykum a baba

Zamaza, zamaza

A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba

Mohammed pours me more tea and I look up at the skies. The earlier single star of the night has bloomed into a plentiful garden of light, with myriads of tiny and large constellations weaved into one bright carpet. This richness of space, lost on the city dwellers, is re-igniting a fire I thought to be almost dead. I run back up to the dune and throw up my hands.

“Fearless,” I whisper. “Be fearless.”

Oceans away,

I finally say out loud what I could not bear to speak of before. I am afraid to be average. I am afraid to fail. I fear vulnerability, forgetting that in it lies greatness otherwise hindered by safety. Driven by fear, I continue to make life choices that steer me away from all that is risky and grand – creativity, freedom, and passion. I have become a passenger in my life, watching the years unfold to someone else’s scenario.

The stars keep shining as I cry and fall into the sand. My fear, acknowledged, quietly walks off the dune.

Some minutes later, I find Mohammed sitting atop the same dune, his face barely visible under his heavy turban. Only his eyes are alight, twinkling with kindness reflected from lights of the vital fire below. We sit together in silence for a while, surrounded by stars, and then start our descent. As we slide down, Mohammed offers his second and last words of the night to me. “The night is young,” he says.

The night is young.

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Yulia is the founder of NOMⴷD + JULES and a freelance travel photographer and writer. She was born in Kazakhstan, grew up in Estonia, and now lives in the United States. Yulia has traveled the world extensively and turned to a travel journalism career after spending more than ten years in large organizations - first as a Navy Sailor, then as a brand manager at Fortune 500 companies. Yulia's work appears in Lonely Planet, Afar magazine, National Geographic Traveller, and others. See more on her Website and Instagram.