by Tim Cahill
Gigi and Dario wanted to wait a bit. See what happened. The two other Italians were both named Roberto. The Roberto everybody called Pepino had the heavy, ponderous dignity of a Roman emperor, and he was leaning toward retreat, as was the other Roberto, a man who reminded me of Clint Eastwood.
We decided not to decide.
Security Bandits
The next day was eid-al-fitr, a feast day marking the end of Ramadan. The streets of Aguelhok were thronged with people wearing resplendent new robes, all of them moving toward the mosque, where prayers were said outdoors. There were, I noticed, no cars other than our own in town.
After prayers, several families invited me into their homes, where I was invariably served tea, brewed on a charcoal brazier outside the front door. Tuareg tea is heated with an enormous amount of sugar until it boils up out of the pot and then served in a shot glass, which is always refilled twice. The first glass is said to be “strong like a man,” the second “mild like a woman,” and the third “sweet like love.” The convention seemed to be that one shouted “hi-eee” several times during the ingestion of the tea.
So there were people shouting “hi-eee” and drinking tea, while four teenage girls, using a pair of washtubs for drums, sang a series of hauntingly melancholy songs. Two polite boys, about eight years old, had befriended me and were teaching me to say something in Arabic that they obviously considered to be just a bit naughty. Something, I imagined, in the nature of “Hello, my name is Mr. Poopy Pants.”
I figured it out by the time they got to the proper name. “Lahidahi ilalahi Muhammad …”
I was laughing along with the boys and saying the naughty words—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet”—when a shadow passed over. I looked up. A man in an iridescent green robe stood above me. He wore a black chêche and gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. It was Colonel Yat’s man, the human sword. He turned and walked swiftly away.
I followed at a cautious distance but lost him in the crowd. Two blocks away, parked by a curb, I found the bullet-scarred white Toyota we’d seen at Yat’s house. It was the only other car in town, and now we knew who the bandits were. And why Muhammad, the security consultant, had turned down a year’s wages for two weeks of work.
Alberto, who’d independently discovered the identity of the bandits, formulated a simple plan, modeled in part on the Malian solution to the Tuareg rebellion: We’d hire the bandits themselves to provide security.
Intarka, a Tuareg desert guide we’d hired on our first trip through Aguelhok, arranged a meeting, and we squatted in the courtyard with Colonel Yat’s man and his two shadowy companions. The bandits wore their chêches in mask mode. The human sword was named Mossa ag Ala (Mossa, son of Ala). His two buddies were both named Baye. (This is my brother Larry and this is my other brother Larry, I thought). And yes, for the right amount of money, they could get us to the salt mines and then safely down to Timbuktu. Negotiations began in earnest. The would-be security bandits bargained fiercely but finally agreed upon a price. We walked to an administrative center and typed out what I thought was a fairly impressive-looking contract. Mossa scrawled his name, pulled his chêche down over his mouth, and actually smiled.
And then, our security problems presumably solved, we were off to the salt mines, about five hundred miles to the north and west. Intarka navigated while Mossa, Baye, and Baye led the caravan in the white Toyota, which was essentially a rolling bomb. The bandits chain-smoked, all three of them in the front seat, while two leaky fifty-five-gallon drums full of gasoline banged around in the back of the car.
The Tuaregs decided to run overland, off the tracks in the sand that were the Trans-Saharan Highway. They wanted to avoid traffic, because traffic meant cars and cars meant bandits. Once, when we crossed some fresh tracks, the bandit car sped ahead and pulled to a stop just below a rise. Mossa jumped out and lay on his belly in the sand, glassing the plain ahead. There was a car in the distance, but no—focus, focus—it was simply a rock, glittering in the sun.
I wore a blue chêche to filter sand out of the air I was breathing. There are many ways to wrap a chêche, but I preferred the romantic Tuareg bandit look, which left a three-foot-long tail of fabric hanging from the left shoulder. Stand in the desert wind, and the thing blew out behind you, Lawrence of Arabia style.
At one point, a herd of Dorcas gazelles bolted past our car. They were sand-colored animals about the size of elongated Brittany spaniels, sporting rabbity ears and a pair of inward-curving horns about two feet long. The gazelles ran at speeds of over 40 miles an hour, making comical straddle-legged leaps every few seconds.
Here’s a fashion hint concerning chêches and wildlife photography: Suppose you pull to a stop when a herd of gazelles goes leaping by, jump out of the car with your camera, and slam the door behind you. If you are wearing your chêche in the fashionable Tuareg-bandit mode, the tail will catch in the door and abruptly pull you to your rear as you attempt to move forward.
A chêche pratfall is a source of great amusement to Tuaregs and Italians, to people from Togo like Daniel, the cook, and Amen, the mechanic (the one indispensable man in our party). An event of this nature will even draw an outright laugh from someone like Omar, the sulky Malian driver, who generally never smiled. Slapstick is universal. Brotherhood through comedy.
We sped over a flat desert plain where pebbly rocks were imbedded in hard sand, and our tires left tracks only half an inch deep. The Sahara provides two environments: reg, which is coarse flat sand, like the pea gravel we were driving through, and erg, shifting dune sand, which we expected to hit near the mines.
Just before dusk, Intarka had us pull into a large basin behind a low, rocky butte that would hide our campfires. The bandit car had veered off into the distance and was running inexplicable patterns across the sand—wide, curving turns, abrupt stops, sharp, ninety-degree corners. The bandits rolled into camp after dark with a gazelle they’d run to exhaustion, a method of hunting that didn’t entirely appeal to my ideas about sportsmanship. Still, they ate the whole animal, which they grilled over a brushfire, and they gave the rabbity, horned head to Daniel, who felt he could use it in some fetish ceremony.
I asked Intarka, who had worked for the army during the rebellion, if he thought Mossa and his pals had really been planning to rob us. He shrugged. Would they have killed us, or merely taken the cars? Intarka said it didn’t matter. “They’re with us now,” he said, “and their word is good.”
Over by the Tuareg fire, Mossa threw down a shot glass of tea and shouted, “Hi-eee!”
The Salt Mines
Two more days of driving, while reg turned to erg. The dunes sloped gently upward where they faced the wind, then dropped off sharply on the other side. Omar couldn’t seem to get the hang of driving the dunes. He’d race up the shallow slope, hit the crest of the dune, see what amounted to a cliff face dropping away below, and slam on the brakes, burying the front end of the truck two feet deep. Then it was sand-ladder time.
We dug out the wheels with shovels and hands and placed two three-foot-long tire-width metal rails in the sand underneath. Everyone pushed. Sometimes the car got going again and we ran after it, carrying the sand ladders, hoping there was some solid sand in the near distance. Often we had to dig out a second time, and a third, and a fourth. We were motoring through the Sahara three feet at a crack.
As we worked, a strong wind out of the northeast drove scouring sand before it. The seasonal harmattan winds carry sand from the Sahara all the way across the Atlantic and dump it on various Caribbean islands. A good blow seems to start low: it comes toward you pushing snakes of sand along the belly of the dune. Look around, and the world under your feet is alive with twisting, streaming sand snakes.
And then, half obscured by the ankle-deep sand snakes, I spied a series of tracks that looked like they had been made by three motorcycles running abreast. A closer look proved that these were camel tracks.
We saw them coming toward us:
sixty camels walking single file, in three pack strings of twenty apiece. Each of the camels carried four blocks of pure white salt. The blocks were rectangular, about two inches thick, two feet high, and three feet wide. They weighed about eighty pounds apiece. Four young Tuaregs walked along with the caravan.
In exchange for cadeaux of tea and sugar, the Tuaregs explained the economics of the Caravan of White Gold. Salt cost about $4 a block at the mine. If you were lucky, that same block might sell for $30 in Timbuktu. This sixty-camel caravan carried about ten tons of salt and might fetch a price of $6,200.
From Timbuktu, the salt would be ferried up the Niger to the town of Mopti, where there was a paved-road system that could get it out to the whole of West Africa. Taoudenni salt was more expensive than the more plentiful sea salt, but West Africans—truly spectacular cooks who combine French technique with African ingredients and creativity—believe it is the best-tasting and are willing to pay premium prices.
Alberto and I talked about the realities of the salt trade. Camel caravans still existed, as they had in the Middle Ages, because they were the only economically feasible means of transporting salt from the mines to the Niger. “You could rent a Land Cruiser,” Alberto explained. “Say your brother-in-law owns the rental company. You get it for fifty dollars a day, instead of the hundred I pay. Three days at least to drive to the mines from Timbuktu. One day to buy and load. Three days back. Seven days at a rental cost of three hundred and fifty, plus one-fifty for gas. That’s five hundred dollars, not counting what you pay for a driver, food, oil, and maintenance. A Land Cruiser carries a ton. At your best price, you’d make six hundred and fifty dollars, which wouldn’t even cover expenses.”
“What about a ten-ton truck?” I wondered.
“Wouldn’t make it through the sand.”
We were now, we calculated, only miles from the mines. The next morning we rose up over a sandy hillside, crested a dune, and found ourselves staring down into a great yellow-orange basin, an enormous flatland that melted almost imperceptibly into the curve of the earth. Scattered about the sand plain at odd intervals were a number of loony, artificial-looking landmarks: a pink sand-scoured cone, a kind of lopsided pyramid, and, toward the center of the plain, a butte that looked like a many-footed sphinx. There were humans and hundreds of camels—tiny toy figures—moving about under the gaze of the sphinx. A vast area of sand and clay was cratered with small excavations, as if the place had suffered some terrible saturation-bombing raid.
A three-mile drive took us a thousand years back into history, to the periphery of the fabled Taoudenni salt mines. Men—there were no women—cautiously approached the cars. There was no electricity, no town, no road, only the desert all about and these men laboring in the sand and clay. A dozen or more of the men accompanied me as I strolled through the mines. They asked for and accepted cadeaux of aspirin and antibiotics, all the while pointing out the sights, such as they were.
The excavations were all of a size: rectangular holes about ten by twenty feet and perhaps fifteen feet deep. They’d been dug by hand, and the dirt was piled high around the craters.
The basin surrounding the many-footed sphinx, I imagined, had once been completely underwater: a vast inland lake, something like the Great Salt Lake in Utah. As the climate changed and the water evaporated away, minerals were deposited in the old lake bed. Centuries of blowing sand buried the salt about ten feet deep.
The good, glittering white salt was concentrated in a layer about three feet thick. It was covered over in a layer of dirty brown salt that some workers had chopped out in blocks to make small shelters. The men who dug in the pits were mostly blacks, and they used handmade axes and picks to dig out the salt, to file away the inferior brown mineral, and to smooth the edges of the blocks so they could be loaded on the camels, which knelt obediently in the sand and were loaded right at the pits. The camel drivers were Tuaregs or Arabs. Ringing the mines were sixteen different caravans of sixty to seventy camels apiece, at least a thousand animals. In the distance, I counted five more pack strings, three of which were loaded and on their way out.
At sunset, Mossa, in his capacity as security bandit, made a point of gathering everyone up and getting us all out of the mines before dark. We would camp a good distance away from the work crews, far to the northeast, on the edge of an abandoned part of the mine where old excavations were gradually filling with sand. In the morning, we’d walk through the mines one more time and leave early in the afternoon for Timbuktu, so the Italians could catch their flight. Families would be expecting them, Dario told me, and family came first.
By the next morning, the harmattan had kicked into high gear. The goofy landmarks—the cone and pyramid—began to shimmer and fade in the distance. Wind-driven sand snakes raced across the desert floor.
I pulled the neck portion of my chêche up over my face. Visibility was down to two hundred yards, and I wandered off into the desert to relieve myself in the privacy veil provided by blowing sand. I walked several hundred yards, then looked back. I couldn’t see the camp and assumed they couldn’t see me. The wind was on my left shoulder. I did my business and went back, navigating by the simple expedient of putting the wind on my right shoulder.
At camp, Amen had some bad news. Gigi was missing. Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto was sitting on the ground, beside the Land Rover, and he was literally wringing his hands in an agony of guilt. He’d been walking with Gigi. Gigi had dithered. Roberto had left him somewhere in the mines. Now he was gone.
We put together a search party and, with Dario in the lead, retraced the steps Gigi had taken. Alberto, meanwhile, had hired men on camels to ride in a widening spiral around the mines, looking for a man on foot.
Dario, athletic and decisive, ran ahead, scaling the highest of the excavations, where he’d be more likely to see Gigi, especially if he was lying injured in one of the old pits. Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto trudged through the sand in a hopeless fashion. He was known in Italy as a great hunter, but all his skills were useless to him here. The sandstorm had swept the desert floor clear of tracks. To me, the mines seemed a hopeless labyrinth. Including the abandoned sections, I estimated about five square miles of closely spaced pits, more than a thousand of them.
We straggled back into camp well after dark.
There’d been no sign of Gigi.
Strangers in the Night
After dark, Intarka stood on the roof of the Land Rover with a handheld spotlight and spun the beam through a slow 360-degree circuit. He did this tirelessly and for hours. Perhaps Gigi would see the light and follow it to the source.
Alberto drove around the mines to a small collection of salt-block houses directly opposite our camp. It was the only thing that resembled a settlement that we’d seen. Someone, we all felt, must have kidnapped Gigi. Alberto’s plan was to offer money, diplomatically, for the return of our friend.
There were no police in the settlement, no soldiers, no secular authorities at all. The men of the mines, however, had submitted themselves to the moral authority of the marabout, a minor Muslim cleric who knew the Koran and who settled various disputes. Alberto met him in a salt-block courtyard illuminated by lanterns.
The marabout looked the part: an ascetic man of about fifty with an untrimmed beard going to white. He wore a brown robe and a black chêche, and he carried his authority with a degree of nobility. He told Alberto that he knew the kind of men who lived in the mines and that none of them was a killer or a robber or a kidnapper. He felt Gigi was somewhere safe, perhaps staying with people until the morning. The marabout offered a prayer for Gigi and said, “I think you will find your friend in one day and that he will not be injured.”
Alberto arrived back in our camp and said that he’d been impressed with the marabout. Still, he’d organized and paid in advance for a fifty-man search party to leave at dawn. In the distance, toward the mines, we could see lights moving in our direction. They were flashlights, held by people who wanted us
to know they were coming to talk and were not sneaking up on us for an ambush. There were dozens of men. We interviewed them one by one.
An Arab with a broken foot said he’d seen one of the white men walk out into the desert about noon, just when the sandstorm was at its worst.
“What did he look like?” Alberto asked.
“Blue chêche. He was the big one.”
“Alberto,” I said, “this guy’s a moron. I’m standing right in front of him wearing a blue chêche. I’m the big one.”
“Did you walk out into the desert?”
“To take a crap.”
And so it went, for hours.
Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto sat in one of the cars, chain-smoking cigarettes. He blamed himself, and his eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Pepino-Roberto sat with him, assuring the grief-stricken man that Gigi’s disappearance wasn’t his fault. Things would work out.
At about 2 A.M. a tall Arab mounted elegantly on a sleek camel rode into camp along with four or five men on foot who seemed to be his retinue. The man wore a fine green robe and had the air of a dignitary. “Your friend,” he said, “is staying with some people.” He, the Arab, knew these people. He could buy Gigi back for us. It would cost 500,000 African francs, about $1,000.
Dario said, “You see, the Arab people do their business at night.” It was less an expression of prejudice than one of hope. Dario had agreed with me earlier in the evening: he too thought Gigi was dead. Now, for $1,000, that sorrow could be instantly lifted from his soul.
Alberto bargained with the Arab. He would give only 50,000 francs up front, the rest to be paid when we saw Gigi alive and well. The Arab dismounted, spat on the ground, and stood too close to Alberto. “Five hundred thousand now,” he said. “Then maybe you will see your friend.”