The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [107]
15
The Road’s End
ON MY FINAL DAY IN EYL, WE LEFT THE FAROLE COMPOUND IN Badey and passed through Dawad for the last time, stopping for a cup of morning shah in a cramped bodega. As we were sipping our teas, a maroon-and-chrome Land Cruiser pulled up to the shop. A few kids turned to me excitedly and pointed: “Burcad, burcad!”—pirates, pirates! The Land Cruiser revved its engine and sped away.
Dhanane, which lay on a promontory visible to the south of Eyl, should have been a half-hour drive down the coast. But as no such road existed, we were forced to strike inland for an hour and a half before turning onto a path running roughly parallel to the shoreline. As we headed back towards the ocean, our 4×4s began the arduous climb back up the ridge, their insides rocking and jarring like flight simulators. The “path” we were on barely deserved the name; it was fighting a losing battle with the mountain, asserting itself only in brief stretches between jutting slabs of rock. Stunted myrrh trees dug into the sandy soil, their roots tenaciously gripping the sloping rock face.
Upon reaching the top of the plateau I was again shocked by the stark change in landscape; it was completely desolate, reminiscent of the surface of Mars. The continual harsh winds had swept the plain clear down to the rock, leaving it denuded of vegetation save for scraggly patches of shrubs barely more substantial than lichens. Against this empty landscape, reddish termite mounds assumed monolithic proportions, rising out of the ground like a string of sand fortresses guarding the passage. The bluish haze of the Indian Ocean was visible in the distance, barely distinguishable at the horizon from the brown of a seaside bluff. Slightly further to the south, nestled in front of a chalk-streaked cliff jutting into the sea, lay the town of Dhanane. We bounced along for another fifteen minutes, but the headland hardly seemed to get any closer; with no reference points, it remained an unchanging mass in the distance.
As we approached the town, a pair of 4×4s rumbled up the path towards us, likely a pirate supply convoy returning to Garowe after making a delivery in Dhanane. On the trail of Somali pirates, there was no sign more encouraging than near-new Toyota Surfs, the closest thing the pirates had to a company car. As the Surfs pulled alongside us, a driver-side window rolled halfway down and a few hands extended cautious greetings, which were reciprocated by our driver, Mahamoud.
“If you weren’t here, we would capture or shoot them,” Colonel Omar declared. I could not tell if he was joking.
If Eyl was the Wild West, then Dhanane was the wilderness—a hamlet of huts beginning about fifty metres back from the cliffside, many with green-tinged thatched roofs the colour of a corroded penny. Rising ten metres above the ground, the spire of a lone radio tower dominated the town; a nearby mosque was the only stone building in sight. It was as if humanity had attempted to scratch proof of its existence into the bare rock, a testament that would be washed off the cliff by the first torrential rain. Of course, such a rain would never come in Somalia, but it seemed a miracle that the flimsy huts could withstand the vicious winds of the hagaa.
A few faded NGO signs marked the entrance to the village, probably planted during a brief detour by the tsunami relief expedition sent to Eyl in 2004. We drove slowly through the centre of town, past dwellings spilling rough-and-tumble towards the sea. The village was completely deserted, its inhabitants not yet awakened to our presence.