Betty smiled at the questions and answered each one. She understood the sheltered lives these women lived. Helen had told her that apart from two holy days, when the women were allowed to go and peer out through the portals in the outer courtyard, they never left the suite of rooms they were now in. They did not see the sun. They did not go to the market—or anywhere else in the wonderful city of Kano.
As Helen drove Betty back to her house, Betty was grateful that she had so much freedom. She was free to read, free to have her own opinions, free to have her own faith, and free to soar above the clouds. She never again flew over the emir’s palace without praying for the women confined within its walls.
Chapter 12
It’s Not Harmattan
Betty sat in the cockpit of her trusty Cessna. Today she was going to ferry a missionary, Mrs. Ruten, and her newborn baby back home to Diapaga, Upper Volta (now called Burkina Faso). She had laid out a meticulous flight plan. From Kano she would fly westward to Sokoto, stop there for refueling, and then head in a northwesterly direction to Niamey, Niger, where she would again refuel. From Niamey she would head southwest to Diapaga.
As always, Betty had arrived at the airport an hour before she was due to depart so that she could check out the plane and supervise refueling. As she strolled across the tarmac to the hangar, she noted that it was going to be another bright, sunny day. Not a cloud was in the sky.
Everything went according to plan, and by 6:45 A.M., Mrs. Ruten was buckled snugly in the back seat with her new baby son nestled in a woven basket beside her. Betty cranked the plane’s engine to life and taxied onto the runway. She set the throttle to full, and the Cessna sped off down the runway, pulling itself into the air as the early morning sun glistened on its wings. Betty guided it up to five hundred feet before banking right until the aircraft pointed west.
As they flew back over the airport, Betty could see the emir’s official below standing between two splendidly decorated camels. The official raised a long horn to his lips and blew. Although she could not hear the sound over the noise of the engine, Betty smiled and waved. To her, some things about life in Kano seemed as though they were taken right from the pages of The Arabian Nights. The emir’s official with his horn was one of them. Every day he stood at the entrance to the airport ready to salute with his horn any incoming or outgoing flights. Betty had no idea, though, why he always had two camels with him, other than that it added a dramatic touch to the scene.
Flying over the desert took extra care, since there were few landmarks to guide them. Betty asked Mrs. Ruten to help her look out for a particular town as they flew on in the morning air. Finally, the town of Kauro Namoda came into view. It was located on the bend of a dry riverbed, and Betty heaved a sigh of relief when she saw it. With the town beneath her, she knew she was on course and about two-thirds of the way to Sokoto.
Traveling on they spotted a caravan of camels below them. Betty dipped her left wing and banked around for a closer look at the fascinating sight.
“They’re probably headed for Kano,” Betty said to Mrs. Ruten, who stared down at the sight. “I met a group of them in Kano once when I was shopping with Ray de la Haye. They belong to the Tuareg people, and Ray talked to them in Tamashek. It turns out they travel hundreds of miles in caravans like that to trade dates for corn and cloth.”
“I guess dates are what’s in those bulging bags on the camels,” Mrs. Ruten replied.
Betty nodded. “They were some of the fiercest men I’ve ever seen,” she said. “They had huge curved swords and two or three daggers each with them, but they were very friendly to Ray and me.”
As Betty guided the Cessna toward their refueling stop, she and Mrs. Ruten passed the time talking.
“It was too bad about what happened to the chief of the airport,” Mrs. Ruten said. “I think a person is much safer flying over the Sahara than driving through it.”
Betty nodded again. She had heard about the fate of the Englishman who had managed the airport in Kano until just before she had arrived in Nigeria. The Englishman had retired and, wanting an adventure, decided to travel overland from Kano to the Mediterranean coast rather than take a commercial flight. Apparently the trip had been well-planned. The man took several others with him, and they followed an ancient route used by slave traders for eight or ten centuries. The route had been well marked with fifty-five-gallon oil drums, but somehow something went wrong. A month after leaving Kano in high spirits in their three Landrovers, the remainder of the party straggled back to Kano dazed, exhausted, and dangerously dehydrated. The retired airport manager was not with them. He had died along the way and was buried somewhere out in the desert. No one ever quite knew what went wrong on the trip, other than that they had encountered a harmattan, lost their way, and run out of water. As Betty looked down at the vast expanse of sand, she could appreciate just how easily someone traveling across the desert could get lost, even if he had taken precautions.
Soon the monotonous hum of the engine put Mrs. Ruten and her baby to sleep, and Betty was the only one awake as the city of Sokoto appeared on the horizon. Far to the north of the city she could see haze rising into the morning air, and she wondered what it could be. She made a mental note to mention it to the air traffic officer on the ground.
As the Cessna landed, Betty’s two passengers awoke. Mrs. Ruten was grateful to be able to climb out of the airplane for a while. Betty suggested she find the passenger waiting area and wait there until the refueling was complete. By now the day had turned very hot, and even though it had no air conditioning, the waiting area was shady and cooler.
Betty stood by the plane as six barefooted African men dressed in military khaki rolled out a fifty-five-gallon drum of fuel. A handpump was attached to the top of the drum. Once the cap was removed from the Cessna’s fuel tank in the wing with a flourish, one of the men produced a piece of chamois. The cloth was used to strain the fuel as it was pumped by hand into the plane’s fuel tank. When they had finished, Betty thanked the men and screwed the fuel cap back in place.
As Betty walked around the airplane checking to be sure everything was in order, another African man walked up to her. In his hand were some papers. Betty guessed that it was the latest weather information.
“Good morning,” he said. “I see you have a clear day for your travels. Where are you flying to from here?”
“I’m on my way to Niamey, and then Diapaga.”
“Very good. Here is the weather chart. It’s a good day to be flying.”
Betty laid the chart down on the hot tarmac and crouched to study it. She could see nothing on the chart to explain the haze she’d spotted on the horizon as she flew in. She decided to ask about it. “When I was flying in I thought I saw a haze to the north. Could it possibly be harmattan?” she asked.
The African knitted his eyebrows together and shook his head vigorously. “No! No way at all. It’s too late for harmattan.” He drew himself up to his full height and then added, “I can assure you most definitely, you will not be headed into harmattan.”
“I wonder what the haze was then?” Betty questioned, hoping not to insult the African by questioning his report.
The African shrugged his shoulders. “It cannot be more than a swirl of sand. It is nothing to worry about,” he assured.
Betty thanked him and, after studying the weather chart a little longer, went to find her passengers and get ready for takeoff on the second leg of the journey.
Once they were airborne, Betty double-checked the map for the points on the ground she would be looking for during the flight to make sure she was on course—a road that ran south to north, a small village, and a rocky outcrop. They weren’t much to go on, but if the weather was as good as she’d been assured it would be, Betty felt the points would be enough to guide her to Niamey.
They had been flying for about twenty minutes when Betty started to get concerned. The haze she had seen in the distance was getting closer, and instead of being a thin cloud of dust, it looked more like a solid wall of sand. Ten minutes ticked by. Betty checked her compass. She was still on course, but sand was whipping around the Cessna, and visibility was dropping fast. Betty wondered about turning back, but she decided to keep pushing on as long as she could see five miles ahead. She didn’t think it could be harmattan. After all, she had been assured by someone familiar with the local weather conditions that it was not harmattan season. It could only be a localized sand squall, and she reassured herself she would be through it in a few minutes.
After forty minutes in the air, Betty knew it was no localized sand squall. She was flying in a harmattan. She scanned the ground for the Niger River. Spotting it would relieve some of her anxiety. She could follow the river northwest to Niamey. An hour into the flight, visibility dropped to three miles. It was the halfway point in the flight, and Betty agonized over whether to turn back or keep heading for Niamey. While a small airplane like a Cessna, without a radio beacon, could take days to locate if it was downed in the Sahara, Betty felt she should keep going, as long as the visibility got no worse.
Much to her relief, conditions began to improve, and Betty was congratulating herself for making the right decision when sand began pelting her windshield again and visibility plummeted. She stayed calm. The worst thing a pilot could do in such a situation was panic. Despite her calm demeanor, she was genuinely concerned about their situation. Her mind was spinning as she tried to decide the best thing to do. Finally she decided to make a rapid descent in hopes of finding a suitable landing place on the ground. She pushed the yoke forward, and the nose of the Cessna dropped. The plane dropped from sixty-five hundred feet to twenty-five hundred before Betty could see the ground. Alas, it was all dunes. Betty had nowhere to land, so she decided to turn south in hopes of finding the road to Niamey (indicated on her map). By now it was too late to turn back, and the road was their best hope.
Betty’s eyes scanned the ground beneath her as she looked for anything that could possibly be a road. She flew over a dry swamp, but it was not marked on the map, and she couldn’t use it to help fix her position. Then, from amid the golden swirl of sand, she saw what she was looking for: a single-lane, red clay road. She brought the plane down farther to keep the road in view as she began to follow it toward Niamey. She had never before flown skimming along so close to the ground, except when she was landing. The only time she dared take her eyes off the ground below was to check her altimeter.
The ribbon of road below was their lifeline, and the minutes ticked by slowly as Betty flew above it, guiding the Cessna northward. Eventually the road widened, and Betty saw signs of civilization. She breathed a prayer of thanks as she pulled the plane up to ten thousand feet and spotted Niamey airport.
Betty radioed for permission to land and then guided the Cessna down the runway for a landing. As she taxied across the tarmac, relief surged through her. It was the closest she had come to a catastrophe since the engine of the Grumman Duck had failed in flight in Peru and she’d been forced to make an emergency landing on the river.
The propeller came to a halt. As Betty helped Mrs. Ruten and her baby out from the backseat of the plane, she said, “We’d better see if we can find somewhere to stay for the night. I’m not flying a foot farther in this weather.”
The two women battled the wind and sand as they made their way to the main airport building. With the wooden doors finally shut behind them, Betty stopped a moment to enjoy the silence. She hadn’t realized how noisy the harmattan was.
