“Eleven,” he replied, proud of his role, that of which I was not too certain. My guide? We walked a few hundred metres to where the camels sat on their curious three-part legs, knees bent beneath them, their ankles oddly not extended.
As I prepared to mount, Tabel came around a corner with the charming Portuguese woman, Monica, walking beside him. He said, “She is going with you.” My solo trips always seemed to include a surprise companion.
Monica was thrilled to be a part of the adventure. We each bought a blue cheches, the Tuareg turban. Tabel wrapped mine around my head and neck. Monica spent ten minutes learning to do it herself and tugged hers into place. She stuck my sunglasses through the cloth of my turban, pressed them snugly, and, after rubbing suntan lotion on her nose, smeared it on mine. We mounted our camels. With a shout, the guide trotted away and our two camels trailed into the world’s largest expanse of sand. Sahara means ocean, and, where it flounders, Sahel means shore.
Tabel had informed us that, “Allah removed all unneeded life — animals, and people too — from the desert, to make a place for him to walk in peace … and so the Sahara is called the Garden of Allah. If you get lost, remain calm. The desert is calm.” I would try to remember this.
We traversed ergs, plains that shift with weather, to the great openness. Monica was as silent as the desert. My camel made not a sound. The sky was empty. The wind, alizé, was gentler than the worrisome harmattan.
The ubiquitous sun, purveyor of heatstroke, skin cancer, and exhaustion, also made for a continuously dry mouth. Turbans sheltered our throats and noses from tiny, swirling particles of dust. My feet cramped one over the other against the camel’s neck. I straddled the dromedary’s hump, the stiff leather seat grinding against my crotch.
There is only the broadest of schedules in the desert and they relate to seasons, generations, possibly centuries. After a morning of searing heat, we stopped near trees but did not use their shelter. We spread a blanket under the open sun. From a saddle pouch, the guide offered us food and we sampled. Our own packs had granola bars, which were a treat for him.
A weathered man approached, as if coming from nowhere. He believed it our good fortune that he found us, as he had wonderful pieces of silver, all of his own tooling. Sitting on what seemed at that moment to be the sanded centre of the universe, I bought Janice a Tuareg wedding band. In appreciation, the man gave me a fist-sized rock as a gift. Using sign language, he indicated it was for milling pepper and softening meat. Nothing was rushed. He smoked his pipe and offered it to me. I puffed, unsure from the taste if I smoked tobacco or sand. My elbow leaned in the earth and with my free hand I reached into my pack and gave him a clump of good tobacco. It was then I realized I was sitting among red ants (Africa! Red Ants!) and bolted upright.
I tossed the old man his pipe to hold while I brushed off the ants.
“Pests. Pests,” I said, not knowing the term in French nor Berber.
When I turned around, the merchant was walking toward the desert’s horizon. In the botched farewell, who forgot to thank whom?
The scorching heat sapped our energy as we remounted and rode through the miles of uncharted desert between us and the oasis. The camels picked their way around small rocks strewn on the broad path, the distribution work of flood waters. In the belligerent heat, with our throats parched, we travelled along the forlorn, would-be-waterway. It led to the traveller’s salvation: Essakane.
The guide did not touch his guerbas all day. “Water,” he stated, his one necessary word of English. He took my water, avoiding his goatskin container. With my bottle in hand, he washed his mouth, swirled, spat it out, and sucked more from the bottle mouth. Then he handed the bottle back to me.
Here, the great desert sculpts new stories each day, changing landscape and lives with its winds and dangers. Being parched was a reminder of perils others encountered in their travels through that unforgiving land. With the sun penetrating my shirt, I thought of the unwilling traveller Robert Adams. The American pressed across these lands on foot, and when he weakened, his captors draped him across a camel.
A New Yorker, born in America and of Afro-American decent, twenty-five-year-old Adams (originally named Benjamin Rose) was the first non-African, non-Arab to see Timbuktu. It was 1811. His misfortune was to be on The Charles, a ship wrecked off the coast of Mauritania.
Thrashing ashore after their shipwreck, the terrified Americans, unconfident even with solid earth beneath their feet, found themselves in a strange, hostile land without their weapons, which had been abandoned on the ship. All who sailed the Atlantic off West Africa had heard of the terrible Moors and would have preferred to cast their fate with roiling seas.
Their first morning on the harsh shores dawned with the threat of heat. From the horizon came a greater scare: Forty armed Moors, whose fishing camp was nearby. They surrounded the frightened men and stripped them naked. From Mauritania, the American sailors were sold into slavery, in a reversal of that time’s terrible trend.
The unforgiving sun blistered the sailors’ skin and dehydrated their bodies and souls. The sand gouged the blisters, and the sun baked the sailors’ scabs as they walked without any protection from the elements. Eventually they were force-marched in the direction of slave-trading marketplaces and desert transfer points, where most of them were sold to northbound nomads. Adams and a Portuguese mate, however, were traded separately from the rest and taken eastward.
In 1811 Robert Adams (also known as Benjamin Rose), an Afro-American sailor from New York, was shipwrecked, captured, and taken as a slave to Timbuktu, about which he later mused covered “as much ground as Lisbon,” a perspective that brought his other observations into disrepute.
It is said that such journeys require the ability to judge where you are by the colour of the sand, to know direction by the sand’s different tastes. The alizé wind brought a comparative cool to the desert during the dry season when Adams and his captors moved forever east through the haze. For nourishment they caught the urine of camels in their cupped hands, and drank it.
Four months after The Charles gave way to the sea, a bitter and resigned but living Adams arrived in Timbuktu without any preconceptions of what the French call La Mystérieuse. He stayed there from February until June, that month marking one year since his departure from the United States.
Adams knew nothing of the reputed power of the city or of its rumoured wealth. Not one thing there impressed him. He did not see the mosques for which Timbuktu was famed. In his wanderings, he estimated the size of the city to be similar to that of Lisbon, which then would have been two hundred and fifty thousand people. He qualified this: “As the houses are not built in streets, or with any regularity, its population, compared with that of European towns, is by no means in proportion to its size.” The arrival of small caravans ensured that Adams saw all types of trade goods, from tobacco to ostrich feathers, muskets, swords and skins, grains, and ivory. Slaves were profitably sold in Timbuktu, and that would continue to be Adams’s fate. Traded to a northbound caravan, resold to yet other slave traders, he was eventually rescued by the British consul in Algiers. He recuperated in North Africa and worked a passage first to Greece and then to England.
Living without work on the London streets while trying to return to the United States, Adams was recognized by a dockworker he’d once known and who had heard stories of his being in Timbuktu. Word of mouth connected the destitute Adams with merchants interested in African trade; the rumour of his journey through Timbuktu was both tempting and hard to believe.
In 1814 the Committee of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, also known as the African Committee, interviewed Adams extensively and then published his story as The Narrative of Robert Adams. This itinerant slave’s account of Timbuktu was such a contrast to the expectations of both European authorities and the public that they dismissed his narrative. He was called a fake, his travel accounts were questioned. How could this illiterate and inarticulate man have reached Timbuktu?
In support, the committee provided a qualifying statement in the Narrative: “Notwithstanding, therefore, the alleged splendour of its court, polish of its inhabitants, and other symptoms of refinement which some modern accounts (or speculations), founded on native reports, have taught us to look for, we are disposed to receive the humbler descriptions of Adams as approaching with much greater probability the truth. And here, we may remark, the relative rank of Timbuctoo amongst the cities of central Africa, and its present importance with reference to European objects, appears to us to be considerably overrated.”
Desert day’s end.
Monica walked out of a clump of scrub brush and across a flattened dune toward the camp.
“Rick, the shower. You must.” She grinned. “Wonderful.”
“Shower?” There’d been talk of a public facility strewn with unpleasantries and hooked to a gravity-fed, low-pressure hose from a tank.
“Tell them I sent you. Two men and a trailer.”
Towel in hand, I went, oblivious to the obvious: I’d just had a woman tell me to go take a shower after we’d spent a day together. I found the truck tucked beneath a tree. There, three men just sat in wait. Nothing else happened. There was no one I recognized. I babbled on about a shower in my poor French and much depleted English and showed my coins.
“A place. Water hose,” a sulky one said in French. “Over.” They all pointed to the rumoured messy place.
It was not a ruse; Monica had emerged too clean for this to be a trick. I sulked and turned to leave.
“Wrick!” It was Mamadou, calling from around a corner. He appeared and spoke to them, and the quietest man eventually said, with his hands, that I should go behind the camel skin. There, I found a shower head, a tap, a glint of privacy.
Drenched, albeit not in a cascade, I scrubbed and felt revitalized. And indebted. “Many thanks,” I said, and offered them money. They would not take it. This was strange to me, given the value I’d just received. Mamadou smiled at their kindness, knowing his intervention had been a favour to me.
Walking back to our camp, I noticed Solomon and Nema hunched over the fire. They peered into a pot of thick, reddish stew. In it floated a skull, bare of flesh.
“Let me guess,” I ventured.
“The goat head,” Solomon boasted and he held high his saucy, bloodied fingers. “Quite the delight. Sorry you missed it.”
“Me, too.”
“Not much left, but you’re welcome.” He tipped the pot my way. I saw he’d been gazing at the entrails.
I shook my head. “How was it?”
“The eyes tasted different than the brains,” he said.
“Did they pop like a grape?” I asked.
“Eyes soft. Brains stringy,” said Nema, smiling, with red goop around her lips.
It’s been said that the Japanese dine with their eyes, such is their reverence for food presentation and culinary display. Here they would blink.
Abruptly there appeared the red gold of a desert sunset. A final flare, and then it was dark. In the sudden change of colour, it seemed as much that the sand had set as the sun. A dozen of us sat on the slope of the dune that tilted toward the cook’s area. Various languages from around the world spoke both of the difficulties of travelling here and of the uncertainties of getting home. We dined on couscous and grilled goat meat.
“If they wish Europeans to travel with them, they must stop throwing garbage where we eat,” Monica asserted as the dinner was ending. The cooks had vanished, leaving garbage — wrappers and empty cans, used boxes and plastic bags, dribbles of food scraps strewn among discarded bones — a scene that was becoming an increasingly prevalent feature of camp life.
“It’s not acceptable,” Helena echoed. “I told Mohammed. It’s terrible how they spoil the setting.”
Monica said, “Maybe we can persuade Mohammed to commit his company to producing less garbage and training his staff. That’d give him a positive image.”
Mohammed and commitment: it was a combination I’d not thought of.
Monica stood up and found a cardboard box. “First, we clean this place and put the box of garbage in Mohammed’s Land Cruiser.” She stuffed clumps of plastic into the box. One of the Americans picked up tin cans. Helena pulled broken glass from under a tree and started piling up empty water bottles. “I will not have them leave a mess in my name.”
“Non. Non!” Mamadou saw us cleaning and didn’t like it.
“Mamadou, it’s okay,” I told him. But it was not. To him it was as though guests had arrived at an American home and, seeing dirty dishes in the kitchen, had begun to wash up. It was offensive.
My broad-brimmed hat covered my face as I dozed that evening. I was lying on the open dune near the fire, and the festival’s music played in the distance.
“Are you leaving Sunday or Monday?” asked a French girl, lifting my hat.
“Monday,” I said with more confidence than I felt.
“Our trouble,” she claimed, “is that these Americans leave tomorrow, and Mohammed arranged our ride in the same fourby-four. Now we’ll end up with three days in Bamako, which we don’t want.”
“Everything gets rearranged,” the plump American complained.
Then, angrily, the French girl murmured: “It’s never what you expect.”
“Speaking of change, see the box over there?” I wanted to change the subject. “Others have a plan to make Mohammed more environmentally responsible.”
The short American scowled. “They’ve got other things to work on first.”
“Such as?” the French girl inquired.
“Trust. Being honest about what you pay for.”
The Americans stood together. The French girl shifted her pack, took out a flat hat and leaned against the bulky case. Putting the hat on, she frowned. “I told Mohammed how much I make, my rent, but it’s not helping. I pay and don’t get what I was promised. How can they do that?” She kicked the sand.
The desert calm made my sleep that night feel long. I awoke refreshed before everyone but the Tuareg. I walked out of the camp and toward the capes of sand.
A cooking fire was being readied by a Tuareg who had risen before me. It was cool and I bent over the flames, motioning with my hands. “May I?” The man replied in Tamacheq, and it sounded welcoming. I warmed my hands and added some small twigs to his fire. Another Tuareg walked over and chose a few glowing coals, which he took away to start his own fire. Then the first man placed camel dung over his fire, and both the smell and the warmth made me want to stay. A Land Cruiser rut that curved near the fire pit formed a comfortable perch, away from the sellers of jewellery and camel-leather-sheathed knives, so I took it as mine for the morning.
I craved the solitude.
Within an hour, a German fellow wearing a pink hat and a gold earring walked by. He had a beard that aged him and he looked down at me through wire-rimmed glasses with a broken frame. “I’m tired. Only six hours’ sleep in last two days.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Festival. Music. We dance. We make joke. Then it is five. Sleep only till nine.”
“Fatigue,” I said in festival parlance.
“I did it when I was young. Then, family. Now, I do it again.”
“It is good,” I replied.
“I will do it until I die. You can’t get enough.” The philosopher walked on. He was immediately challenged by a galloping camel, which almost collided with him and passed only a metre from me.
When the dust had settled, Nema came by with a small cup and knelt at the skirt of the wheel rut. “Tea,” she stated in her own way, one that never asked. The drink was sweet, almost thick. She squatted before me and shifted her dress discreetly to cover her knees, sitting picture perfect as she poured.
Soon Tabel appeared.
“I leave for the desert tonight,” he said.
Slowly he took bracelets out of his sash, then two attractively crafted necklaces, one made of beads with a silver pendant. The other was a
totem he described as symbolizing “north, south, my village, and animals passing.”
He let me dig in his satchel to choose a chain with desert agates cut oblong. Pieces of ebony were painted with curly designs. There were silver balls on the chain as well. He told me, “The Tuareg have three prices. The Tuareg price. The price you want to pay. And the price we agree.”
He wrapped his wares and, still squatting, asked: “Do you have any clothing for my family?”
With three weeks of travel remaining, I was unable to oblige. “No. I am sorry.”
Solomon crept into view, sneaking away from the camp. “Goathead,” I called, saying the nickname for my amusement, not his. “How’s that head in your tummy?”
“Not well, not well,” he said and kept creeping toward a bush in a sphincter-tightening walk.
I rose from the ridge of the rut and a hundred flies left me.
Mamadou held a pot from the fire toward me as I walked into camp. “Café, Wrick?” The morning’s empty cans were stacked behind him. Not a wrapper in sight. I spooned powdered milk from a smudged container, scooped coffee and sand from an opened jar, and found the least dirty sugar cube in the box.
The festival would be over that night. Goathead soon appeared before us, seemingly cleansed and with colour returning to his face. “All the vehicles leave when the last act is over,” he said, clearing his throat as part of the sentence. He paused for air, swallowed hard and continued. “Probably two-thirty.”
“Leave?” exclaimed Helena. “I travelled eight thousand miles for three nights at this festival. I’m not leaving.”
There was a hush. “You must see the market at Djenné,” said Mohammed, who had a tendency to appear on every possible miscue. “You must leave.”
“Scoundrel,” one of them said.
“I’ve never heard of Djenné till now. I’m staying here,”Helena protested. Mohammed backed off, but it was a feint.
The murmuring subsided. Of course we must leave. He who owns the trucks sets the time.
Walking near the festival’s production setup for the finale, I heard a call. “Canada.” The BBC cameraman was arranging his tripod on a precarious perch. He looked tired, happy it was the last evening, and ready for home. Our meeting in Douentza four nights before seemed to have occurred long ago, perhaps even during another trip.
To Timbuktu for a Haircut Page 14