A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  On July 26, after only eight days in Ghat, the expedition moved on. Richardson captured this pivotal moment well:

  … we were about to enter upon a region totally unknown, of which no authentic accounts from eyewitnesses—unless we count the vague reports of natives—had ever reached us; valleys unexplored; deserts unaffronted; countries which no European had ever surveyed. Before us, somewhere in the heart of the Sahara, raised into magnificence perhaps by the mirage of report, was the unknown kingdom of Aheer [Aïr], of which Leo Africanus hints something, but the names of whose great cities are scattered as if at haphazard over the maps, possibly hundreds of miles out of their right position. What reception shall we meet with in that untried land? In what light will its untravelled natives—fierce from ignorance and bigotry—regard this mission of infidels, coming from latitudes of which they have never dreamed, with objects unappreciable and perhaps hostile? Will nature itself be hospitable? Are there no enemies in the climate, no perils peculiar to the seasons? These questions occupied my mind as the caravan wound between the last palm-groves of Ghat; and my camel, resuming its swinging march, went away with its neck advanced like a bowsprit over this desert sea, which might be scattered with hidden dangers at every step.

  That evening he fretted to his journal, in barely concealed irritation, “Dr. Barth was again lost this evening, having pushed on in his usual eager way for about half an hour. We were filled with alarm.” Barth, traveling ahead of the caravan as always, had reached a fork and stayed on the main path; the expedition took the other way. Barth was mounted, with plenty of water, and he caught up with the caravan before dark. It was a nonevent, but Richardson was still shaken from the scare at the Palace of the Demons ten days earlier, and irritated that Barth persisted in his impatient ways.

  The next day they passed through a beautiful desert valley that ran between high rocky hills. Quail flitted in the bushes. Vultures, crows, and white eagles crisscrossed the sky. In a pleasant ending to the day, they camped among the rocks at a pool, wide and deep, where the slaves of the Kel Owis merrily swam and splashed.

  In the following days the caravan climbed and descended through fantastical rock formations that resembled castles, forests, and human tableaux. Water and pasturage were plentiful. Five days out of Ghat, this idyll ended.

  Word arrived that a Tuareg chieftain from farther south was en route to annihilate the expedition. Richardson was aflutter. Barth, always the scientist, considered the rumor an untested hypothesis.

  Less at ease, they moved on. The terrain flattened into bumpy gravel. They occasionally passed small pyramids of mounded stones left by travelers to mark the route. Smaller heaps marked the graves of slave children who had died on the march. On August 2 the expedition sighted a steep ridge called Mariaw, harbinger of the Ténéré, a desolate plain of sand and gravel that stretches across 150,000 square miles in the central Sudan. “Entirely destitute of herbage,” wrote Barth, “and without the smallest fragment of wood for fuel.” Wells were rare. The temperature was 111 degrees.

  For several days, traveling for twelve hours at a stretch, they pushed across this bleakness toward a destination equally bleak called Falesselez. This barren place offered not a stick of shade, but for the first time in two days there was a well. After drinking, Barth measured its mouth: one-and-a-half feet across. The water was “very dirty and discolored,” he wrote, “but it gradually became clearer, and had but little after-taste.” On the Ténéré such a spot passed for luxurious. In other places the water tasted salty or sulfurous. At one well the murky water tasted like ink, “and when boiled with tea became entirely black.”

  Falesselez revealed two sides of the Saharan character. The expedition’s camel drivers, traveling several days ahead, had left a stash of dates at the well, marked by a stick in the sand. Though everyone traveling through this part of the Ténéré stopped at Falesselez, and though desert tribes were rapacious by habit, the dates had not been touched. The Saharan code dictated that no one would steal provisions left for someone else’s survival, in the same way that someone in great need was never denied water. The code was practical, not compassionate. No desert traveler knew when he might be the one desperate for help. If not for the stashed dates at Falesselez, some of the expedition’s camels would have been unable to continue.

  On the other hand, the Kel Owis began to extort the expedition here. Capitalizing on Richardson’s fears about being attacked, they demanded twice the fee they had agreed to, for half the work. They now intended to leave the expedition in the middle of Aïr, about 300 miles short of Zinder. Richardson felt trapped by circumstances. He also half-suspected the Kel Owis of being in cahoots with the rumored attackers. He agreed to the new terms. He also agreed with Barth’s comparison of the Kel Owis to snakes.

  The caravan continued south. Some Tuareg hunters entered camp and bartered two carcasses of Barbary sheep (aoudad) for a length of gray calico. Ravenous for meat, Richardson ate so much that “it threatened to produce injurious effects.”

  As they exited the Ténéré, the gravel plain gave way to rugged mountains, ravines, and sharp cliffs, with patches of grass and trees. All of this contradicted European assumptions about the Sahara as a vast stretch of sand. Just ahead, in the district of Aïr, lay even greater surprises. About 300 miles long and 200 miles wide, Aïr was filled with steep disconnected massifs and volcanic cones, some of them rising more than 6,000 feet from the desert floor. The region was notorious as an isolated redoubt haunted by gangs of Tuareg brigands who had never been subdued by an outside power.

  ON AUGUST 10 a man appeared in camp with the news that a nearby caravan of Merabetin Tuaregs had heard about the Christian expedition and were threatening to stop the infidels from entering Aïr. The Kel Owis immediately started a fresh round of extortion. At the same time, Richardson was besieged for gifts by a Ghat Tuareg whom Hatita had sent with the expedition, with instructions to milk it. Richardson eventually offered this persistent man, who was providing no services, a small burnoose and a fez. He rejected them angrily. “Money, money, money!” he shouted. His threats grew so violent that Richardson loaded his pistols. This had the intended calming effect. The man also tried squeezing Barth to pay him “taxes” for visiting the Palace of the Demons and for drinking at various wells. These demands, wrote Richardson, merely amused the German.

  The landscape changed again, becoming more desolate. Fog hid the mountaintops, a precursor of tropical latitude. The Kel Owis had gotten word that a large group of Tuaregs from the desert mountains of Hoggar, to the west, were in pursuit of the Christian caravan. That brought the number of rumored hostile gangs to three. These threats triggered grumbles within the expedition’s Muslim employees, most of whom were unwilling to die protecting infidels. Richardson didn’t seem to notice. “To any one who paid due attention to the character and disposition of the people,” wrote Barth, “serious indications of a storm, which was gathering over us, became visible.”

  In response to the threat from pursuers, the Kel Owis pushed the caravan to travel for twelve to fourteen hours each day, covering more than 30 miles at a stretch. On August 16 they ran into a violent sandstorm followed by a drenching rain, with winds that threatened to knock them from their saddles—another tropical greeting. They marched for fourteen hours that day, rested for four, then remounted at eleven o’clock to trudge through the night, rocking in a half-doze on their camels. After nine more hours they reached another bleak place with several wells called Asiu. When Ibn Battuta stopped here in 1353–54, it was already an important way station on the caravan route. Asiu also marked the northern boundary of Aïr, home of the Kel Owis.

  Richardson, relieved, thought they were now safe. Barth wasn’t so sure. He reminded Richardson that nomads ignored territorial frontiers. Absurd, insisted Richardson, adding that desert tribes respected boundaries even more scrupulously than Austrians. “But he was soon to be undeceived on all the points of his desert diplomacy,” wrote Barth, “at his
own expense and that of us all.”

  8

  Plundered

  AFTER A DAY OF REST THEY CONTINUED SOUTH. TWO HOURS LATER, a cry advanced up the caravan: the Hoggar Tuaregs are coming! The expedition, already tense, was thrown into turmoil. Richardson, hard of hearing, at first didn’t know what was happening, but jumped off his camel and cocked his pistols. The Germans loaded their guns. Any man with a firearm was given powder and shot. The slaves grabbed their bows and arrows.

  The warning came from a member of the caravan who had lingered at the well that morning after the expedition left. Three Tuaregs had ridden up on mehara camels, the fast slender breed favored by desert raiders. The man asked the Tuaregs if they were traveling with others. The terse reply—yes—sent him scurrying in panic toward the expedition.

  They rode all day with their weapons in hand, scanning the hills above them for silhouettes. They camped in late afternoon and propped up the boat sections as barricades. Near sunset three Tuaregs on mehara ambled into camp. They dismounted and strolled with haughty nonchalance through the caravan, enjoying the jittery silent stares. Under their dark blue flowing robes and headdresses, only their predatory eyes were visible. They cast appraising looks at the caravan’s mass of baggage and its 107 camels. The Kel Owis were swiveling their heads, looking for the rest of the raiding party. Their alarm was contagious.

  After their stroll, the strangers sat down and asked for supper, claiming they hadn’t eaten for fifteen days. The Kel Owis confirmed that the men were carrying no supplies except a single waterskin. The strangers were given hamsa (hot rice pudding) and zummita, a dish made of parched ground corn. They pretended to be surprised that the caravan contained infidels, and maintained that they were en route to visit relatives in Aïr. No one believed them. Nevertheless‚ Richardson hoped that hospitality would soften their intentions toward the caravan.

  Barth scoffed at this naïveté. He recognized the classic tactics of desert freebooters: “They will cling artfully to a caravan, and first introduce themselves in a tranquil and peaceable way, till they have succeeded in disturbing the little unity which exists in such a troop, composed as it is of the most different elements; they then gradually throw off the mask, and in general attain their object.” The strangers’ disingenuous conduct, added Barth, “was mere farce and mockery, and the only way of insuring our safety would have been to prevent these scouts from approaching us at all.”

  Barth had learned that the three strangers were not from the Hoggar, but were Kel Fadey Tuaregs. Their home was in northern Aïr near Mount Ighalgawan—“eyrie of vultures.” Still, there were sixty armed men in the caravan. But most were Muslims, and their loyalty to infidels might quickly evaporate when threatened by a Tuareg raiding party. Even Richardson noticed that the servants were becoming troublesome. The three strangers bedded down on the camp’s perimeter. The caravan posted watchmen throughout the night. It was August 18.

  Early the next morning the three strangers disappeared over a ridge. Some members of the caravan, cutting herbage there later, found the tracks of nine camels. The caravan was being shadowed. Despite the danger, they didn’t break camp that day because the Kel Owis wanted to rest and feed the camels. They also suggested that, for safekeeping, the Europeans give them everything of value, a self-contradictory proposition that amused Barth.

  That evening three Tuaregs rode into camp, different men from the night before. Barth learned that they were Hadanara, a division of the Hoggar Tuaregs and infamous as “migratory freebooters.” Richardson evidently didn’t notice the new men’s dissimilarity, perhaps because both groups of nomads were covered head to toe in blue robes. But the differences were immediately apparent to a discerning eye. Like their companions on the other side of the ridge, these new strangers requested and received supper. They promised to go their own way tomorrow and not to ask for hospitality again.

  The next day, wrote Barth, “we started with an uneasy feeling.” For once he didn’t range ahead. No one straggled. The three strangers, despite their promise, followed on the caravan’s flank. They occasionally cantered with their spears held in battle position, their long shields of bullock hide clasped at their sides.

  Four men materialized on a hill ahead. The Kel Owis instantly sent a small troop of archers to investigate. The rest of the caravan moved forward tensely. Barth, anticipating trouble, dismounted to give himself more secure footing. As the caravan neared the ridge, two of the four strangers and several of the Kel Owis suddenly started “a wild sort of armed dance” while the others sat quietly. When Barth reached this perplexing scene, the two strange dancers, whom he could now see were black, rushed at him and grabbed the rope of his camel while vigorously demanding a gift. Barth, already nervous, pulled his pistol and was about to fire when someone hurriedly began explaining this weird encounter.

  Long ago the Kel Owis, a Berber people, had taken possession of Aïr from the Goberawa, part of the black Hausa nation. In a peacemaking pact, the two groups agreed that from then on, the head chief of the Kel Owis could only marry a Gober woman. To commemorate the event, which had occurred on the little hill where Barth now stood, the black “slaves” were licensed to make merry while levying a small tribute from any passing caravan. One of the dancers who had rushed Barth was the chief of the slave-acolytes who lived there. They collected their levy. As the caravan marched on, “these poor merry creatures” were still dancing at their good fortune.

  The incident would have been even more fascinating, noted Barth, if the caravan’s members had not been “vexed with sad forebodings of mishap.” The shadow riders with their spears still haunted the flank. One of the camel drivers insisted that Barth stay in the middle of the group as a precaution against a sudden lancing.

  They camped that afternoon on a gravelly plain but didn’t pitch their tents, in case of attack. Though the caravan had been on the march for fourteen hours, that night the slaves of the Kel Owis ran through the encampment, dancing and singing as they exercised their privilege of collecting tribute from every free person in the caravan—a few dates, a piece of cloth, a shirt. Richardson was baffled by their joyful antics and didn’t know what was going on. It’s telling that Barth didn’t bother explaining the old custom to him, and that Richardson didn’t bother to find out what was happening. One man saw only incomprehensible native conduct; the other explored its origins and meaning.

  The three shadow riders entered camp again. As they ate another meal of the expedition’s food, they told the camel drivers that when reinforcements arrived they intended to kill the infidels. Richardson seemed oblivious. “God knows they may be honest men,” he wrote, “in reality poor devils obliged to beg their way to [Aïr].” Barth entertained no such delusions. Despite marching for fourteen hours, he and Overweg took turns watching all night.

  The next day, August 21, a Tuareg rode into camp and demanded that the Kel Owis give up the Christians. This was refused. That afternoon, while Barth was exploring another group of rock sculptures near camp, a member of the Kel Owi escort attempted to throw him down and steal his pistols. The big explorer easily repelled the attack, but such bald treachery by an alleged protector was a bad sign about the caravan’s changing stance toward the Christians. That night Barth took the first watch and used “the splendid moonlight to address a few lines in pencil to my friends at home.”

  As the caravan continued south, the landscape grew more wet and green. Valleys with sandy wadis ran between jagged mountains. Waterfalls, verdure, and wildflowers abounded.

  On the evening of August 22, two mounted men entered camp and demanded the surrender of the Christians. Again, they were refused.

  On August 23 the caravan reached the first inhabited place in the long-imagined region of Aïr. It was an unimpressive introduction. The village looked shabby and defeated. It didn’t have a single sheep or goat to sell the expedition, nor any of the famous Aïr cheese that Barth had been craving. The people were Kel Fadey Tuaregs, part of the Kel Ow
is. Without explaining what he meant, Barth described the village’s women as disappointingly wanton, which surprised him in such a small remote place, until he remembered that “we have ample testimony in ancient Arabian writers that licentious manners have always prevailed among the Berber tribes on the frontier of the desert.”

  Tuareg men preferred corpulent women, and Barth noticed that several of these beauties possessed the desirable callipygian immensity called tebulloden, a Tuareg word whose definition Barth quotes from Leo Africanus in the original Italian, to soften its impact: “the parts behind exceedingly rich and succulent.” (Richardson expressed his delicacy in French, noting that some Tuareg women “attain to an enormous degree of embon-point.”)

  The men looked scruffy and degraded, especially when compared to the “noble and manly appearance” of “our martial pursuers”—the three freebooters, who were once again in the camp. “Though I knew the latter could and would do us much more harm than the former,” wrote Barth, “I liked them much better.”

  Barth’s reaction was typical of Westerners who dealt with Tuaregs. The men personified mystery in their flowing robes and turban-veils, dyed a deep indigo that rubbed off on the skin. The slender “blue men” of the desert carried themselves with haughty grace, like vain kings. They esteemed courage, endurance, and elegance of movement. They were proud, warlike, and ascetic, indifferent to hardship, merciless to enemies.

  The Tuaregs’ origins were shadowy but emerged from the Berber tribes of North Africa. They were already a distinct people by the second century A.D., when Ptolemy mentions them. The Arabic armies of Islam that swept across northern Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries gave these desert nomads the name Tuareg, “the Abandoned of God,” perhaps because they resisted so ferociously, both militarily and religiously. Barth and others suggested that the religion they had abandoned was Christianity, pointing to clues such as their word for God, Mesí (Messiah), their fondness for the decorative motif of a cross, which Islam forbids, and their custom of monogamy in contrast to Muslim polygamy. In any case, the Tuaregs adopted Islam much later than the rest of northern Africa. Their names for themselves were Imoshag or Imajughen, meaning either “the free people” or “the noble people,” or Kel Tagelmoust, “the people of the veil,” or Kel Tamasheq, “speakers of Tamasheq,” their Berber-related language.