It was all exactly the way Rachel had described it in his diary. The military convoys, the roadblocks, the police, the deserted roads, the stupefying silence, the bus driver, foot to the floor, not looking left or right, the passengers so scared they were throwing up. The only difference was that it was bucketing down and an icy wind whipped at us on the near side. At every bend, the wheels of the bus hung over the cliff. If the terrorists didn’t kill us, the bus would. Or the cold. We stopped in a tiny village that looked like it had died out with the last dinosaur. Not a man or a ghost, nothing but shapeless figures muffled up so you could hardly see their faces. The guy in the café served us scalding hot coffee, took our money and disappeared. I had to change buses in Sétif, but things there were more efficient than they’d been in Algiers. In Sétif, the self-appointed guide only charged me five dinars to tell me, ‘All the blue minibuses go to Bordj Kédir, you can’t miss it.’ In Bordj Kédir I managed to find a taxi driver who was prepared to take me closer to Aïn Deb for a reasonable price. His Peugeot 403 looked like nothing I’d ever seen. ‘There’s something strange going on out in Aïn Deb,’ he told me, ‘people coming and going all the time . . . it’s weird.’ ‘What people?’ I asked, ‘What are they looking for?’ He stared at me but said nothing. Maybe he didn’t trust me, maybe he didn’t understand me, I was talking to him in my best pidgin French with a thick sink-estate Arabic accent. I have to say I didn’t really understand him. I assumed that he was talking about terrorists because he was looking around him all the time like he was expecting an ambush. He dropped me off at a crossroads of two flooded dirt tracks you could barely see in the darkness. To the left, the path climbed steeply, to the right, it ran downhill. ‘It’s that way . . . about three kilometres,’ he said. At least that’s what I understood from him pointing to the left and waving three fingers in my face. Kilometre is international, it didn’t need translating. He disappeared back into the darkness, his headlights off. I took a deep breath and slogged uphill through the driving rain, but at least the wind was now whipping at my arse.