The tale of souls captured

I had a camera that wasn’t too bad for taking photographs and of course, when I meant it was not bad, that was when comparing mine with the smaller cameras that most people used which looked like a toy.

I rarely used my camera when I lived in Madrid in the old days because people stared at me when I carried it on my back.

Evidently I wasn’t such a striking person in the desert. Not to mention that, in this sparsely populated land, if you wanted to see another human being, it was possible just, to stand up on the high sandy ground and blocking the sunlight with your hand, if you could see a tiny black spot appearing on the horizon, that would be very satisfying.

When I first came to the desert, one of my prime ambitions was to use my camera to photograph the living Nomads in the extreme remote areas.

When it came to make an analysis of my love of this foreign culture, it was because there was a huge cultural difference between them and myself; in the end, it generated an exquisite beauty that touched my heart indeed.

By the time when I first initially arrived in this piece of mysterious vast land and before I got married, I was often travelled deep inside the great desert.

I tried everything to get to know every aspect of the desert by using any possible transport; and the most valuable thing was I wanted to see what enabled people to equally have joy, love and hate in their lives in this piece of barren desert when not even a blade of grass grows here. 

Taking photographs was the essential thing for me in the desert, at the time my financial situation didn’t enable to rent a car, only enough to bring along with some food and water for my travelling, I didn’t even have the luxury to spend too much money on photography; although this investment was a very important and worthy one, worthy of every single penny spent for it!

Apart from the camera, my only photography equipment I counted on was a tripod, a long shot lens, a wide-angle lens and few colour filters, I also bought some rolls of high sensitivity films, black and white films and some normal use colour films. I wasn’t good at using flashlight so I didn’t bring one with me.

Before I came to the desert, occasionally I could have one or two good photos among the several hundreds photographs I took. When I lived in Madrid I also spent some time to reading books about photography technique, I learnt some knowledge of it from those.

Nevertheless even though I didn’t have much experience or achievement of photography, I went to North Africa just like that.

The first time on the train to the real desert, my hand was holding my camera with surprised fright; I just wanted to photograph every single scene that I  passed on my trip.

The mirage in the desert was like a dream, the constant smooth sand dunes just as tender as the body of a women, the violently strong sand wind blew on the face like rain, the dry cracking earth, the cactus stretching their arms calling to the sky, the dry dead river bed from million years ago, the black mountains, the frozen deep blue endless sky and a wilderness covered with randomly scattered rocks; all of these sceneries made me feel lost and delirious as if a feast for the eyes.

On my rocket like journey across this land I was often so shocked that I forgot my hardships and toil. 

During that time I despised my poor knowledge and skill, if previously I could have humbly learnt some photography techniques, then I could have recorded and melted together all the heart touching and spectacular scenes to provide a valuable memento of that part of my life!

Although I didn’t have much money to spend on photography and the strong wind and sand may possibly have damaged my camera, under the circumstances I could take and afford the risk. So I took some photos for the record.

As for the inhabitants who lived in the great desert, I had an unspoken care and love for them, no matter the posture of their walking, the way they ate dinner, the colourful pattern on their clothing, their hand gestures, languages, man and woman’s wedding and their religions; on top of that, I loved to get close and observe them; it certainly enriched my own never ending particular curiosity. 

It was an impossibility for myself to reach the level of what I expected I needed to use a camera to deal with the world’s biggest desert. After many times of travelling, I had finally figured it out; I should focus merely on few important points and not on a whole giant project, something beyond my ability.

“Lets us to take photos of people! I like people.” Jose said to me.

When the time came, Jose didn’t go with me but through an introduction I was able to travel on the water truck with a reliable local person called Basin and his assistant.

The journeys usually started from The Atlantic Ocean close by Algeria and then went down below the map and back, some of my journeys were over 2000 miles.

At every gathering place for the nomads that Basin’s water truck was scheduled to call at, dozens of buckets of water would be sold.

It was certainly a big challenge of my physical strength to travel several thousand miles in an old open truck under the blazing sun.

Jose didn’t object as he valued me and had faith in me. So I wanted to repay him by not making any mistakes during my trips and after travelling for a few days have a safe return back to town.

The first time I travelled to the great desert, I went with empty hands apart from a tent and a rucksack and I didn’t bring along any of the things that Nomads needed, so unfortunately I didn’t gain any friendship from them.

The second time I visited and I knew the importance of being a witch doctor, I got myself a little medicine kit.

I also understood, even in the back ends of the world, there were still women who cared about beauty and children who loved to eat; therefore I bought quite a few strings of crystal beads and inexpensive rings; I even bought a large pile of shinny keys, tough fishing wire, white sugar, milk powder and some candy with me.

I brought along those things with me to the desert and I felt ashamed of myself indeed because I was using material things to exchange for friendship; but I asked myself what I expected from them was merely to be able to get close to them and let myself understand them better. 

What I exchanged was just to show my kind intentions and friendship, they liked my little gifts and that enabled them to see my love for them and helped their further progress to accept an alien foreign woman just like me.

Although the Nomads was sociable people who lived in groups they spread their tents very wide. Only a few of their camels and goats mixed together and they were in groups chewing the few little leaves they could find on dying trees to keep themselves alive.

Whenever the water truck stopped in front of a tent, I immediately jumped off from the vehicle and went inside the tent.

These lovely inland inhabitants were easily scared and dispersed in a rush whenever they saw a stranger like me go straight inside their tents.

Basin would shouted out loud to these people when they saw me and made an inevitable great escape, they came back after he shouted and stood up in front of me just liked lambs; men might come over but women and children were more difficult for me to get close to. 

I never allowed Basin to force them came close to me because in my heart I felt that would be a bit harsh for them.

“Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you, please come and don’t be scared of me.” I obviously knew they wouldn’t understand Spanish but I also knew my tone of voice could comfort them, even though they couldn’t understand, if I had spoken gently, at least they wouldn’t panic again.

“Come, take these beads, it’s for you!”

I put a string of beautiful beads on a little girl’s neck, pulled her to come over and stroke his hand.

When all the gifts had almost been given away, I started to check their health.

If there was any skin disease, I applied some anti-inflammatory cream on it, aspirin was given for the ones that had headache, eye-drops for someone who had problem with eyes and vitamin pills for the ones who were too skinny, most important was to give them plenty of vitamin C.

I had never dared arrive in a place and photograph these inland inhabitants without first to get close them, it would be an un-respectful action for them.

One time I gave two of aspirin pills to an old woman who said she had headache, I also gave her a key ring as a decoration on her head scarf; after she swallowed the aspirin for not even five seconds, she nodded her head to show me she had no more headache and pulled me by hand to go inside her tent.

She showed gratitude and appreciation and hoarsely called some women who had full faces veils to come, I thought they must be her daughters and daughters in law.

These women had extremely heavy body odour and their bodies were all wrapped up in black clothes. I made sign language to them, asking them to remove the veils from their faces, one or two of the girls were very shy but showed their light brown cheeks in front of me.

Those two beautiful faces had big eyes with blank expressions but had opened their sexy lips with an innocent look; their appearance caught me completely and I couldn’t help but raise my camera up from my hand.

These women had not even seen a camera before, more than that, they had never saw a Chinese person either, these two strange things combined together were fascinating for them too; they looked at me without moving and let me take as many photographs as I could, until the man from this family came, he saw what I was doing and rushed in with a long loud cry.

He was jumping and shouting loudly, he almost kicked over the old woman and scolded the women who were huddled together; the group of young women shrank away scared, to cry together after what they heard from this angry man.

“You, you have captured their souls, they are going to die!” He spoke in broken Spanish.

“What Me?” I heard that and was shocked, he was wrongly accusing me.”

“You! You, woman, can cure sick also can catch souls; you have caught all their souls in here.” He pointed a finger to my camera with a harsh voice and was about to come over to hit me.

I saw the situation was not going well, I held my camera tight and ran out to escape. I ran back to the truck and called out loudly to my protector Basin.

Basin was delivering water but when he saw what was going on, he immediately held back the people who were chasing me, but the group of people kept intensely coming. 

I knew under the circumstances we could threaten them with not delivering fresh water anymore or use the name of The Desert Corps to stop them; or even scare them with some superstition stuff to let me and my camera peacefully back on the road; but when I thought it over, they were groups of people who thought their women had already became ’human without souls’.

Didn’t they have every single right to take back the souls captured? If I just sneakily drove off after I had taken the photos, how much damage would I have left for these weeping women who thought they were going to die soon?

“Basin, don’t argue any more, please tell them, souls were captured in this box, I am going to release them in front of these people right now, please ask them not to be scared.”

“Mrs, they are talking nonsense and so ignorant! Pay no attention to them.” Basin’s attitude was very arrogant that left me feeling of antipathy.

“Go! Get away!” Basin waved his hand and to drive them away; the crowd was unwilling but spread out a little.

When the women who thought their souls had been captured saw us about to start the engine to go, they immediately squatted down with pale faces.

I patted Basin’s shoulder and asked him to not drive away; I said to them: “Now, I am going to release the souls, you won’t be worry anymore.”

I opened the camera and pulled the film out like playing magic in front of the crowd, then I jumped off the truck and showed them the negative of the film was blank with no any shadow on it by holding it up to the sunlight, they felt released after what they had seen and their faces smiled with satisfaction.

Once back on our journey, Basin and I put another roll of film in and smiled; I sighed and looked at the two hitchhiking old Sahara men who were sat next to me. 

“Long time ago, there is a thing, when it shows in front of your face, your human soul will clearly be captured inside, it was more powerful than your box!” One of the old man said.

“Basin, what are they talking about?” I was sitting behind Basin and asked him with the wind blowing as we drove along the bumpy road.

After Basin explained, I said nothing, just took a small mirror out from my rucksack, lifted it up slowly in front of the old man; when they saw the mirror, they shouted out loud with shock that almost caused them fall off the truck; they desperately hit on Basin’s shoulder and asked him to stop the truck.

Basin braked hard and they jumped out as quickly as they could so that they almost fell off the back. I was shocked by their move, after I got my head up and looked at Basin’s water truck, it actually didn’t have any rear mirror or anything similar at all.

Material advancement is not an essential to human society but I was shocked that living on the same earth, there were actually people who had never seen a mirror before; that totally caught me by surprise and also lead me to feel compassion for them; did this ignorance happen because the limitations of the geographic environment? Or was it a factor caused by human beings? I couldn’t find an answer for it at all.

When the next time I visited the desert again, I brought along with me a medium sized mirror and once I got off from the truck, I placed this shiny thing on top of a rock, every one was especially scared of the mirror and they paid no attention to my camera; the most powerful soul catcher was the mirror!

It wasn’t respectable behaviour using this trick to fool them because of photography; I deliberately often knelt down and combed my hair in front of the mirror, acted nothing special and went away after I looked at the mirror; the children slowly came forward and quickly swayed around in front of the mirror, when they discovered nothing happened, they would sway again; at the end, the mirror was surrounded by strange shrill noise of the Sahara people. And just liked that, the tale of souls captured had disappeared.

After I got married, it wasn’t merely myself that became Jose’s property also my camera too, they were all in the hand of this person.

On our honeymoon when we travelled straight across the desert, my master didn’t let me touch my treasure once, Jose became the one who caught souls in the desert instead of me and quite often the souls he collected were the beautiful women in the neighbourhood. 

One day, we sat in the rented Jeep and drove over to the edge of the desert by the Atlantic Ocean. We were already over a thousand miles away from our little town.

Desert, had a colour of black, white, earthy yellow and also red. I especially loved the black desert because of it’s magnificence; Jose liked the white desert, he said it was like a delicate scenery of snow under the strong sun.

That afternoon we drove the car, slowly passing through a vast piece of purely white desert and at the other side was deep blue ocean; that was the moment when a blush of smooth light red clouds appeared from nowhere, the light slowly fell across the beach and the sea was immediately covered up in a striking evening sunset like glow.

I felt extremely strange and staring hard on this phenomenon in the heavens; how on earth had that happened so suddenly, the sky coming down into the evening sunset in the afternoon?!

When I carefully looked again; dear! Oh dear! It was actually a sea of red flamingos, there was thousands and thousands of red flamingos huddling together and they were headed down to eat something unknown on the beach.

I put my hand on Jose’s camera very lightly and whispered to him: “Let me! Let me take photos, don’t make a sound, don’t move.”

Jose was one step ahead of me; he had already raised the camera over his eyes.

“Quickly take a photograph!”

“I can’t take the whole picture, it’s too far away, let me go over there.”

“Don’t go over there, quiet!” I lowered my voice to shout at Jose.

Jose didn’t wait me to say anymore again, he took off his shoes and carefully ran over to the bay, he looked like someone who’s about to steal the guests in paradise; suddenly the large piece of red cloud lifted off and had gone without trace before Jose’s approached.

It was a real shame, as we didn’t take any photographs of the red flamingos but the split second of the beauty I would never forget at the bottom of my heart all my life.

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One of the times when we went with a Sahara friend to be guests in a tent, the host specially slaughtered a goat for us to eat.

The way to eat the goat was very simple; a goat was cut into several pieces, then put the fully bloodied pieces of meat on to the fire to cook, when it had been done about medium rare, they put the meats in a ceramic tub about the size of a bath and sprinkled salt over it; everybody would come up together to share the meats to eat.

All the guests took turns and had a bite on a piece of big meat, after few bits they would left the meats alone and went outside to drink tea or use small stones to play chess; when another hour had gone, they would gather again to eat the already bitten meat; everyone could pick up any of the bitten meat and continue to have a bite again, just like that a whole goat would eventually become bone after many times of biting and going out. 

I asked Jose to take some photos of me chewing a bone but the photos weren’t in action sequence, so I didn’t know how to describe it in words what there photos were about “The same meat I was chewing by now may have had two or three other people who had already bitten it.”

Another time I followed Jose to see a camel giving birth, it was fun and I brought a camera with me because the way a camel is born was that it just dropped the newborn on the floor.

I had never really thought that the little baby camel wasn’t willing to born yet, but I was bored with waiting, so I was wandering around outside on the sandy ground.

I saw from far away an old Sahara man who was in charge of the camels suddenly got down on his knees (he wasn’t praying just knelt down), not long after that he stood up again.

His sudden behaviour aroused in me an interesting curiosity; there wasn’t any toilet paper in the desert and so what could they do after they defecated?

Although this question didn’t involve any construction suggestions it still made me ponder it carefully.

“Jose, how do they do it?” I rushed over to ask Jose with a little voice.

“You saw him couch down and got up straight away, that explains it, he just had a piss not defecated.”

“What? There are people who couch down to pee in this world?”

“There were two ways either couch down or squat; didn’t you know about it before?” Jose said.

“I want you to take a picture of it!” I insisted, to make a record of this big discovery.

“When couching down, there will be a robe to cover it, the photo will come out just as if a person was couching down; that won’t be interesting!”

“I think that it is interesting, how could there be another kind of people who actually strangely piss like that in this world.” I really looked at it as an interesting thing.

“Echo, is there any value of it in Art?.”

I couldn’t answer it. 

The most fun and interesting photography also happened in the great desert.

We were camping not far away from our town El Aaiun, someone saw us putting up a tent and came to talk to us. He was a very friendly young Sahara man, he spoke Spanish and told us in the past he helped to run a mobile clinic for the nuns; he emphasised himself as a civilised person.

This person was very keen to let us capture his soul, very modesty asking Jose to swap clothes with him to be photographed and he was very carefully put the watch on his wrist that Jose lent him; he tidied up his hair and made a pose that was completely unsuitable for him which made him look like an old European fashion fake.

“May I ask is your camera colour?” He was very politely asked.

“What?” I was in bit surprised.

“Is your camera a colour camera?” He repeated the question one more time.

“Do you mean the roll of film? How does the camera have colour?”

“Yes it has, the nun I knew in the past had a black and white one, I prefer a colour camera.”

“Are you saying the negatives of film? Or the machine?” He made me doubt myself after what he said.

“It’s the machine, you don’t understand, go to ask your husband, I think the one in his hand is a colour one.” He gave me a look and seemed like he was looking down on me, as I was a woman full of questions. 

“That’s right! Don’t move, the one in my hand is the best natural full colour camera in the world.” Jose raised his hand and photographed this self-opinionated young man who wanted to appear as a civilised person with his clothing and pose.

I stood by myself at the side and let Jose make this mistake uncorrected, meanwhile I was laughing away like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand.

I noticed Jose was about to take a photo of me as I raised my head was up; I quickly covered my face and shouted back: “The colour camera is going to capture my perfect innocent soul! Please have mercy on me at once!”