by Brian Fagan
Caravans (qualafil in Arabic) large and small traversed the Sahara for many centuries. Larger ones comprised thousands of beasts traveling in lines that extended several kilometers.11 One has an image of unchanging desert tracks, of camels moving steadily across utterly arid landscapes looking neither left nor right. Nothing could be further from the truth. Reality was harsh in the extreme. The caravaner was at the mercy of a constantly changing desert, where environmental and weather conditions differed from month to month, year to year. The agricultural calendar and heat determined the start of the caravan season, which typically lasted from October to March. Most caravans traveled from dawn until just after noon, the time of the afternoon prayer. Many journeyed at night. An average day covered about 34 kilometers (21.7 miles), but there was no such thing as an average day, thanks to strong winds, rough terrain, and the varying number of beasts.
Figure 13.2 A Saharan camel caravan led by a puller. Anna Gibiskys/Shutterstock.
The caravaners walked alongside their beasts through featureless landscapes where mirages were commonplace, the horizon masked by haze. The caravaners’ minds were beset by boredom, their bodies by dehydration and exhaustion. In 1858 the traveler Mardochée Aby Serour complained that the “ground is as uniform as paper and reverberates in your eyes like crystal.”12 He remarked that camel droppings appeared to be human riders at a distance. There were, of course, relatively predictable areas where water and grazing could be found, but the sparse rainfall and pasture varied from year to year, so routes changed constantly. Every caravan depended on intelligence about watering holes and graze. A high level of trust existed between different leaders, merchants, and agents, some of whom formed collectives to organize larger, safer caravans. Caravaners shared route planning, information on potential markets, and insights about volatile political conditions along the way.
Caravan guides provided expert advice from their encyclopedic knowledge of landscape, water supplies, and the latest environmental conditions. Many were expert trackers of animals and of potentially hostile nomads, and knew the most insignificant of landmarks. The fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta marveled at the skill of his guide, who was “blind in one eye and diseased in the other and yet knew the way better than anyone.”13 Every guide had to be able to navigate with the aid of the heavens. The polestar, bilhady in Arabic, did not move, and guided the traveler toward north. Saharan navigators knew the constellations that traveled across the heavens and used them to establish their position, to calculate the distance traveled. Skies were generally clear, but when a sandstorm blew, the caravan was as lost as a mariner in the midst of the Pacific Ocean.
Extreme heat, mirages, thirst, raiders, and sandstorms—the caravaner learned the realities of a tough trade at an early age and was literally born to the job. There was, of course, far more to the plodding caravan than the camel and its rider. Families, entire communities, wealthy merchants, and breeders all played important parts in a trade that has now all but vanished in the face of the truck and the diesel engine. Only a few caravans and a will-o’-the-wisp of vivid recollections survive.
The journey was never easy, with the attendant hazards of heat and dehydration, quite apart from desert nomads, clad in blue burnooses, who would attack without warning. Safety lay in numbers and in carefully thought-out logistics, for the larger the loads the greater the profits. As early as the eighth century, West African gold was well known in the Islamic world, financing wars of conquest and bringing immense wealth to Islam. By the twelfth century, some caravans numbered as many as twelve hundred to two thousand beasts. In July 1324, the sultan of Egypt welcomed a truly exotic visitor, Mansa Musa, ruler of the West African kingdom of Mali. He traveled in style, with hundreds of camels and numerous slaves. The Malians injected so much gold into the Egyptian economy that the value of this most precious metal dropped as much as 25 percent for some years. Before Columbus sailed west, Mansa Musa and his successors supplied two-thirds of Europe’s gold. Such was the demand for gold and salt that caravans traversed the Sahara long after Portuguese ships landed in West Africa and gold flowed from American mines.
Even in the twenty-first century, the last remnants of the trade survive. Camel caravans connect the salt mines at Taoudenni, deep in the Sahara, and Timbuktu, near the Niger River on the southern fringes of the desert (see sidebar “The Salt Carriers”).14
The Salt Carriers
The four-wheel-drive diesel truck is today’s Saharan camel, but a few remnants of the ancient caravan trade linger on. Camels still transport cake salt slabs in Mali, four slabs per beast, the driver keeping one at journey’s end. How much longer the caravans will continue is an open question, for the truck drivers pay cash up front for their loads, and prices have fallen. At least camels do not require diesel fuel or expensive maintenance.
Salt has been Saharan gold for many centuries, since at least the twelfth century when Islamic merchants discovered the rich deposits deep in the remotest parts of the desert. This most commonplace of substances may not seem like gold to you and me, but even small bags of it were critically important to tropical farmers, who lived off predominantly carbohydrate diets. Each winter, large slabs of Saharan salt reached Timbuktu, at the southern edge of the desert, on the backs of thousands of camels. Once in Timbuktu, the salt traveled by boat downstream to the riverside town of Mopti, where it was broken into smaller packages for sale in other markets in the Sahel.
The Tuareg call these seasonal caravans the Azalai. Traditionally, they were journeys from Timbuktu to the salt mines at Taoudenni, eight hundred kilometers (five hundred miles) to the north in northern Mali. At one time, the Azalai extended from Timbuktu to Taoudenni, then northward onto Taghaza, another salt mining location, then to the Mediterranean. North-traveling caravans of as many as ten thousand camels carried gold and slaves. The beasts returned laden with salt. Enormous caravans traveled back and forth through remote, featureless desert. The winter caravan of 1939–40 involved more than four thousand camels and thirty-five thousand slabs of salt. Current production has declined, but remarkably, the camel caravans persist to this day. The numbers are much smaller, each weekly caravan involving perhaps fifty beasts, but the routine never varies, with much of the travel at night. The eight-hundred-kilometer (five-hundred-mile) trek takes about fourteen days through some of the hottest and most featureless dune terrain on earth.
Taoudenni is an unpleasant place by any standards. For some decades a penal settlement, the tiny village occupies an ancient lake bed in one of the hottest regions on earth. Here, summer temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit), with average winter highs around 27 degrees Celsius (81 degrees Fahrenheit). Over one hundred sixty kilometers (a hundred miles) of unrelenting Saharan landscape isolate the inhabitants from any popular center of any size. Arid, windy, and blessed with a mere four days of rainfall a year, Taoudenni has only one asset: cake salt. Thousands of cavelike pits from centuries of mining litter the salt lake bed, each about four meters (thirteen feet) deep, dug by teams of three miners, who are usually indentured servants. Three layers of high-quality salt lie under poorer-quality material and red-clay overburden. Using crude axes, the men cut rectangular slabs of salt weighing about thirty kilograms (sixty-six pounds), each about five centimeters (two inches) thick. These the camels carry to Timbuktu four slabs per beast, stacked from the saddle, one going to the owner. Everyone takes care not to break the slabs, for their value would then plummet. The mining takes place during the cooler winter months, with the miners living in crude huts made of poor-quality salt blocks.
The caravan journey is almost mystical in its isolation, traversing featureless dunes across a landscape that warps one’s sense of distance. Nothing grows for thousands of square kilometers. Water is measured in drops rather than liters. The camels walk from watering hole to watering hole, led by a human guide, who has only the wind, the stars above, and the subtle changes in the color of the sand to help him. He knows the ro
ute like the back of his hand, his knowledge of desert pilotage a legacy going back centuries. Each guide operates by dead reckoning, keeping careful track of days and distances. To miss a watering hole means almost certain death. The young drivers, sometimes mere boys, act as “pullers.” They head each column of beasts under the charge of the guide. However young, they are well aware of the hazards of the featureless landscape with its ever-shifting horizons and dunes. The big problems are forage and water, so each caravan drops loads of hay every few days, to be used on the return trip. They also tend to travel in the early morning; later in the day, to avoid the midday heat; and quite often, at night. This journey of great isolation is far more than a journey back to a medieval world of camel caravans. For the young pullers, it’s a spiritual journey, a kind of pilgrimage that takes them closer to Allah. Their suffering and fear give them a powerful spiritual awakening, a chance to see themselves in a landscape that some Islamic sages call a mirror of the soul.
Camels on the Silk Road
Around 2500 BCE, NOMADS living in the mountains and plateau regions between Iran and Turkmenistan domesticated the two-humped Bactrian camel.15 The art of breeding this animal spread across the Iranian Plateau, into Central Asia, and into Mesopotamia, where the Assyrians depicted it on bas-reliefs as war booty. Many of these camels hauled carts.
Bactrians are better adapted to colder landscapes and became a staple of the Eurasian Silk Road, especially during the first century CE, when trade between the Han Dynasty and the Parthians of northeastern Iran expanded dramatically. Somewhere in the breeding ranges of southern Mesopotamia, some herders interbred one- and two-humped beasts. The resulting hybrids were powerful single-humped camels that were formidable load carriers. According to the Greek author Diodorus, some of them could heft loads weighing nearly 410 kilograms (900 pounds). The Silk Road caravans ultimately depended for the most part on hybrids in warmer landscapes and on hardier two-humped Bactrians in cold regions such as the Altai and the Hindu Kush.
What Was Eurasian Caravan Travel Like?
The traveler and writer Owen Lattimore gives us one of the few firsthand accounts of what it was like to travel in a Eurasian camel caravan before motor vehicles diluted the experience.16 In the 1920s, he joined caravans traveling from eastern China through the Gobi Desert to Mongolia. The Bactrian camels traveled in rows of about eighteen beasts, with a puller for each file. A caravan master led the way, the equivalent of a ship’s captain, whose word was law. On the march, the puller led the first camel in his row with a guide rope attached to a wooden peg in the lead beast’s nose. Similar ropes linked the lead camel to the ones behind it.
Being a puller was not an easy job. He was responsible for the health of his beasts, which required keeping them away from poisonous plants and finding the best grazing for them. Pullers coped with camels’ pack sores and minor injuries, ensured the loads were distributed properly, and prevented the camels from drinking too much water. They also secured their beasts for the night and checked they had adequate protection from wind-blown snow in winter. Loading a camel was an art unto itself, well described by missionaries Mildred Cable and Francesca French, who traveled widely in the region during the 1920s: “In the loading of a camel its grumblings commence as the first bale is placed on its back, and continues uninterruptedly until the load is equal to its strength, but as soon as it shows signs of being in excess, the grumbling ceases suddenly.”17
The caravans carried food and tea for the drivers and any passengers, also dried peas or barley, the cheapest camel feed available. Lattimore heard estimates of thirty loads of fodder for every one hundred of merchandise. The paid cargoes were commodities such as cotton, wool, and tea, and manufactured goods for sale. There were exotica, too: jade from Khotan, elk antlers that were prized in Chinese medicine, and even the remains of dead caravaners and merchants, which traveled in special caravans—or at least their bones did, for the bodies were temporarily buried until the flesh had fallen off the bones. There was opium, too, carried surreptitiously at night. During the summer, when camels molt, their owners would pick up extra profit by selling the wool. In Lattimore’s day, the pullers had learned to knit from White Russians in exile after the Russian Civil War. When they needed wool while knitting on the march, they would simply pluck some from the nearest beast, turn it into thread, and continue knitting.
Lattimore found that the caravans traveled between sixteen and forty kilometers (ten and twenty-five miles) a day, moving at the walking speed of the pullers. The distance depended on the topography, weather, and availability of water supplies. Chinese caravans were slower than Mongol ones, who had the advantage of being able to draw on fresh camels from their herds close at hand. Lattimore reveled in the life: “I had been getting used to breaking camp at anytime of the night, eating anything that came handy, and sleeping where I could lie down.” He also had the priceless gift of sensing landscapes in all their subtlety. “A good Mongol can tell at once whether a camel comes from a nutak, a homeland or orbit of migration, that is a little too hot in summer for the preference of a camel, or whether a cow was bred in high alpine pastures, on a wide, rather sandy plain or in the deep green pasture of a well-watered valley.”18
Over many centuries, camel nomads acquired subtle ecological knowledge about their environment and the animals they managed. Lattimore learned of this from older men, who could recognize “the smell” of the earth of a road or region when traveling at night. They could dismount, take up a handful of earth, sniff it, and say, “No, this is not our road, which should go in that other direction.”19 They knew their roads, even at night, and their relationships to patches of soil and vegetation.
The caravan masters and their pullers used a rich vocabulary to describe their landscapes and the animals they used. The age, color, and individual characteristics of a camel or, for that matter, a horse could be recited by Mongols with uncanny precision. There was, and still is, a lexicon for different kinds of hills, for ridges, plains, bodies of water, streams and springs. Oral directions guide travelers from one of these often-inconspicuous landmarks to the next, across landscapes that have few obvious features. The same landmarks had sacred geography, marked by stone cairns known as obas, landscapes defined by watersheds and not valleys, because grazing grounds are defined that way.
Thus it was that desert caravans, wherever their locations, used subtle indicators to make their way across barren landscapes. Those who handled the caravans read the heavenly bodies to navigate their way, just as Pacific canoe skippers used the same kind of knowledge when out of sight of land. The comparisons with traditional sailors are irresistible: a deep conservatism in behavior, an intimate knowledge of the environment and its moods, encyclopedic knowledge of grazing and water supplies in remote, little-traveled terrain. Camels truly were the ships of the desert, but instead of wind and current, they responded to their human guides. The beasts carried the loads; the humans led them to graze and water. This simple partnership, born of a pragmatic need for survival, has endured for at least two thousand years.
If the donkey began the globalizing caravan trade on a large scale, the camel extended it, helping to bring the riches of Africa and Asia to Europe and beyond. That the camel trade survives today, even in the age of automobiles and cargo planes, shows how well adapted this partnership is to the extreme conditions of remote desert transport.
“Mild, Patient, Enduring”
CHAPTER 14
Dominion over Beasts?
Western England, late winter 1380. The file of packhorses plods steadily through the endless rain, heads down, hooves splashing in the mud of the narrow trackway. Stout ropes hold large bundles of grain on their backs, and laden panniers hang from their flanks. The packers walk ahead along the meandering lane, saying little, huddled in their leather cloaks in the wet. Dripping trees press on the defile that leads to a constricted masonry bridge across a fast-moving stream. A young man leads the way. The patient animals follow in single fi
le between the low parapets that stand clear of their loads. This is an easy crossing compared with the more common timber bridges that would be lethally slippery on this dank, wintery day. The smell of wood smoke, barking dogs, a church bell tolling for a dead woman. The packers turn their beasts into a courtyard and unload them. They pile the bundles of grain in a nearby barn, ready for market day on the morrow.
No one living in the small market town would have looked twice at the weary pony train. Like everyone else, whether artisan, farmer, or merchant, its inhabitants depended heavily on animals for food, clothing, and transportation, especially on the ox, the sheep, and the horse. One estimate has it that, with their animals, medieval Europeans had five times the motor power of Chinese civilization of the day.*
Figure 14.1 Pack horses transporting timber in Northumberland, northern England, c. 1812. SSPL/GettyImages.
Warhorses were the most valuable animals in medieval Europe, a society where agriculture and feudalism supported mounted warriors. The owner of a trained warhorse was an individual of status, defined by myths of chivalrous warfare, of devotion shared by knight and steed. Theirs was a very different world from that of the working horse, which, by the twelfth century, had taken over most plowing in France from the much slower oxen. The shift occurred later in England, where plowmen deliberately went slowly while plowing under feudal obligation to landowners.1 The changeover involved significant innovations in nonchoking collar harnesses and nailed horseshoes, essential in the damp climate of Northern Europe. The adoption of the three-field rotation system also made the changeover easier. This allowed farmers to produce oats and other forage for their animals as well as rye. Horses worked faster than oxen; moved well on steeper, stonier ground; and could handle all manner of tasks, from plowing and harrowing to hauling loads. But they were more expensive to feed and maintain and had no value at the end of their working lives, unlike oxen, which could be fattened and sold for food. At first, oxen pulled the heavier loads, but over time, horse breeders developed bigger, stronger creatures, capable of handling greater weights. Equines were especially useful on larger farms and on the lighter chalk soils of southern England. Where there was plenty of lush pasture and heavier soils, oxen prevailed, while horses merely hauled carts and did the harrowing. Meanwhile, cattle and sheep provided flesh, leather, and wool. The insatiable demand for fine English wool in Europe led to meadows replacing plowed land in many places. This made economic sense. A few herdsmen could manage large numbers of sheep at a fraction of the labor involved in cereal cultivation. Wool provided no less than 5 percent of the English Crown’s revenue by the mid-fourteenth century. Everyone in England ate mutton, but not horse meat, especially as influential people considered horses they had ridden both noble and too close to humans for either clerics or lords to consume. It was almost as if their prized mounts were human.