by Tim Cahill
Alberto turned and nodded to the white Land Cruiser behind him, where Mossa, Baye, and Baye were smoking cigarettes and monitoring the conversation. Mossa snapped on his headlights, and the tall Arab stood there blinking in the sudden glare. All three Tuaregs stepped out of the car, their black chêches worn up, in mask mode. The tall Arab, half blinded and confused, now looked as if all his internal organs had suddenly collapsed. I have seldom seen such outright fear on a man’s face.
Mossa shouted three harsh words, and the tall Arab, along with his entourage, disappeared rapidly into the night.
No one slept. People kept wandering into camp with another tidbit of information. About four in the morning, a young Arab appeared and said that earlier in the evening he’d seen a white man walking toward the well at Taoudenni. This didn’t seem right. The well was ten miles away and almost 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Gigi knew how to get around outdoors. Plus, Alberto had already been to the well, and none of the men there had seen Gigi.
Still, the young Arab seemed guileless. He was about eighteen and knew nothing about our offer of a reward to anyone who found Gigi alive. The Arab said he had seen an older man walking alone and a spotlight beaming in the distance.
Now, a white man walking in the desert at night was an extremely odd circumstance. So was the light. The young Arab had put the two together instantly: the light was for the white man. He had tried to tell him that, but the man just kept walking, staring at the ground and smiling vaguely. He had touched the man’s arm and tried to turn him so he could see the light. But the man would not turn. He only made this strange gesture: the Arab dropped his hands to his sides.
“Wait a minute,” I said, nearly shouting. “Do that again. Do it the way he did it.”
The Arab turned his hands and moved them lightly up and down, as if patting two small children on the head. It was Gigi’s futility gesture.
Goddamn! Gigi, still alive, was somewhere near the Taoudenni well.
Gigi in the Tormentosa de Sable
Alberto, Pepino-Roberto, Chris, Mossa, and I sped overland in the eerie silver light of false dawn. We skidded to a stop at the well. There was a ruined French fort, an abandoned prison, and a defunct armored personnel carrier parked nearby. The sun was just rising, an enormous sphere balanced on the horizon, and its light, in the lingering haze of the sandstorm, was the lurid red of flowing blood. When I looked back toward the prison, there was a man walking our way. He cast a shadow thirty feet long, and it rose high and red on the whitewashed walls of the prison.
“Gigi!” I screamed.
Mossa had already seen him and was running over the sand, with me sprinting behind and steadily losing ground. Mossa hit Gigi like a linebacker and nearly knocked him over with an embrace. The car sped by me. Alberto was hugging Gigi when I got there, so Mossa hugged me. His eyes were tearing over. He wasn’t crying—I couldn’t imagine Mossa ever crying—but he was overcome with emotion. Pepino, walking in his heavy, dignified way, was sobbing openly, drying his eyes with a clean white handkerchief.
We offered Gigi some water, and he took a small sip, as if to be polite. He’d been lost in the Sahara, without a canteen, for twenty-two hours. He drank two more sips, then patted some children on the head to indicate that, no, no, he didn’t want any more.
Back at our camp, Alberto paid the Arab the promised reward. Dario and Clint Eastwood–looking Roberto were taking turns embracing Gigi. Their gestures were elegantly expressive, fully Italian. Roberto, weeping, hugged Gigi, patted him on the back, and then pushed him out to arm’s length and cocked a fist as if to punch him in the mouth.
Gigi was smiling his vague smile, staring at the ground, and every time Roberto gave him a little room, he began weighing a couple of melons in explanation.
After this orgy of emotion, while everyone else was packing up for what now had to be a doubly high-speed run over the dunes to Timbuktu, Gigi and I spoke for a couple of hours. I wanted to know what happened. We spoke in Spanish, our only common language.
Gigi told me:
He’d been walking, taking pictures, dithering around as usual, when the sandstorm hit. He’d marked his position by the various oddly shaped formations on the horizon—the many-footed sphinx, the pyramid, and the cone—and felt he would be able to tell where he was at any time by using the process of triangulation. Did I understand about triangulation? Gigi began weighing some melons in his hands. “Por exemplo,” he said, “if I move from here to the west, the cone would change its position on the horizon.…”
“Sí, sí, entiendo,” I said, a bit impatiently. I understood about triangulation.
Well, in a sandstorm, Gigi explained reasonably, a tormentosa de sable, a man cannot see the mountains on the horizon and therefore cannot use the process of triangulation in order to fix his position. He’d been concentrating on his photos, because in the sand there were bits of clay that he was interested in and …
“So,” I said, hurrying the story along, “when you looked up from your photo …”
The sand, Gigi said, was blowing and he couldn’t see, so he just began walking but he must have gotten turned around taking the photos, and he walked the wrong way. He was walking almost directly into the wind, to the northeast, the direction of the harmattan, and he should have known that was wrong, but he was thinking about other things.
I almost asked what he was thinking about but quelled the impulse. At this point we’d been working on the story for an hour.
It was actually painful, walking into the blowing sand, so Gigi sat down for an hour or two, with his back to the wind. By late that afternoon, the storm had blown itself out, but the distant mountains, his triangulation points, were still obscured in the harmattan haze. Gigi walked in a large circle, hoping to see the rubble and excavation of the salt mines. But it was just a level plain of sand. He sat down to think again, admired the sunset, and then got up, picked a direction at random, and began walking.
It was dark when a young man came up to him and began speaking in a language Gigi took to be Arabic. Gigi tried to project the image of an Italian gentleman out on an evening stroll, preoccupied with his own thoughts and unwilling to be bothered. The young man grabbed his arm as if he wanted him to turn and go the other way. Gigi had some preconceived notions about Arabs in the dark and so he refused to turn and see the light. In the day, Gigi said, it might have been different. He continued walking, smiling at the ground and making his it-is-useless gesture of patting children on the head. The Arab shrugged and left him. Gigi felt he’d handled the encounter well.
He walked for several more hours until he saw the lights of some campfires reflecting off a whitewashed building in the distance. As he got closer, he could see figures moving around the fires, then he could hear the shouts and laughter of people conversing in Arabic. They seemed to be camped around a well.
In the building nearest him, and farthest from the fires and the people, there were several very small rooms with bars on the windows. It was, Gigi assumed, the old prison. He chose a cell and lay down. The brick building held the heat of the day and it was all quite pleasant. The sky had now cleared, and Gigi could see the stars.
He lay on his back and formulated a plan. His friends had to get to Timbuktu to catch a flight to Bamako and then to Italy, where their families would be waiting. He expected that we would be searching for him, but he hoped we’d leave by noon, so as not to miss the flight. He didn’t want to have a lot of families worried on his account.
And if we did leave, Gigi would simply walk over to the Arabs by the well, introduce himself, and ask if he could tag along on the five-hundred-mile trip back to Timbuktu. He’d be home in a couple of months.
Satisfied with his plan, Gigi fell into a sleep so profound that he didn’t hear the Land Rover pull into the prison compound at eleven that night. He didn’t hear Alberto and Chris and Pepino conversing with the Arabs. He’d hid himself well, and none of the men had seen him.
He woke re
freshed just before dawn. As soon as the sun came up, he walked out of the prison, on his way down to the well, to make friends with the Arabs. That’s when he saw me and Mossa and Pepino. All these people sprinting over the desert in his direction, crying and shouting. It was strange.
The Marabout’s Cadeau
We’d lost a day looking for Gigi, but there was a chance the Italians could still make their flight out of Timbuktu. However, there were thank-yous to be offered, and that would delay us. Alberto stopped at the marabout’s salt-block house and called off the morning’s search. The men he’d hired could keep the money that had been given them. Most of them had searched for Gigi yesterday afternoon anyway, without compensation. We were very grateful.
Alberto thanked the marabout for his prayers and asked if there was anything he could do: Would the marabout accept a cadeau? He would not. The cleric was just happy that everything had turned out well and that our friend was safe. The marabout’s refusal made him all the more impressive in our eyes. We’d been bombarded by cries for cadeaux for weeks.
But no, after a moment’s reflection, the marabout said there was something we could do. There were two Arab men who had been stranded at the mines and were unaffiliated with any caravan. Could we take them back to their homes about two hundred miles north of Timbuktu?
Yes, of course.
Both the Arabs were thin, desiccated-looking men, with strong, coppery planes in their faces and high-arched noses. They looked like Moorish versions of Don Quixote, as drawn by El Greco. The man who rode with me in the Land Rover was named Nazim, and he carried a twenty-pound bag of dates. If his good luck evaporated and he had to walk, the dates would sustain him for the three-hundred-mile trek.
Nazim had never ridden in a car before. He had to be shown how to work the door latch and the handle that rolled down the window. In thirty seconds, he had pretty much mastered the technological intricacies involved in being an automobile passenger.
The Arabs navigated. They rapidly figured out what sort of terrain was best for the vehicles and chose areas where the wind had packed sand tight to the ribs of the dunes. We flew over a roller coaster of smooth sand at 55 miles an hour. Every few hours we converged on the main camel track leading toward the mines. I counted twelve caravans heading in to the mines and eleven going out, about sixteen hundred camels in all.
It was near noon, and Nazim was getting nervous, looking around and fidgeting.
“Prayers,” I shouted over the rattle of the diesel engine.
Alberto stopped the car, and Nazim, an old hand with door latches by now, jumped out and knelt in the sand, facing east. While the Tuaregs and Arabs prayed together, I scanned the line of dunes ahead, which rose and crested like so many ocean waves about to break. Bright, flashing lights seemed to be moving over the summit of the highest of the dunes, a dozen or more miles away. Although I couldn’t see the camels, I guessed it had to be another caravan, fully loaded, the salt blocks glinting in the sun like a long line of signal mirrors.
We drove until well after dark and then set up camp at the base of a high dune that had the rolling sensuality of a line-drawn nude. The sand was cool and seemed luxurious. The constellations spun above, almost impossibly bright, and for a moment the Sahara seemed the most romantic spot on earth.
Many women, I knew, especially French women, travel to the desert hoping to kindle a romance with a proud desert chieftain, with someone, I imagined, exactly like Mossa. Ah, the handsome features, the noble warrior’s heart, the strong, slender hands stroking underneath cotton robes with the hard stars burning overhead …
“I heard two American women talking about their affairs with Tuaregs,” Alberto told me. “I was driving a tour. They didn’t know I spoke English.”
“What did they say?”
It was pretty much as I had thought. The women agreed the Tuareg men were physically beautiful, and they took these women, there in the sand, as if by right. They took them brashly and with a breath of contempt, which made it that much more exciting.
Just one thing about all that ravishing, Alberto added.
“What?”
“They said it was quick.”
Alberto pronounced the word “queek.”
“Queek,” I repeated, secretly pleased.
“Yes, both of them agreed. Queek, queek, it is all over.”
We exchanged a glance, Alberto and I. The glance said, “Maybe we are not the most desirable specimens of masculinity in this desert, but—in contrast to every offensively handsome Tuareg male alive—we would, given the opportunity, conduct this ravishment-under-the-stars business with a good deal less efficiency.”
Such delusions are the salve of wounded pride.
Revenge of the Gazelles
Gradually, grudgingly, the sand began to give way to a sparsely vegetated plain that, after miles of erg, seemed incredibly lush. There were a few camels feeding on acacia trees, and then, as we slowed to negotiate a path through a large herd of goats, Nazim pointed to a pair of blue-and-beige open-fronted tents. He said, “Ah, ah, ah.”
We stopped. A woman huddled in the nearest tent, protectively pushing a pair of youngsters behind her. Cars never came this way. Her expression seemed to say, “Nothing good can come of this.” Nazim stepped out of the Land Rover and carefully closed the door behind him, as if to demonstrate new skills. The woman stared at Nazim in a kind of awed astonishment. She rose slowly to her feet, stupefied, then ran to him and hugged him tightly while the two small children pulled at the folds of his tunic.
So we delivered the marabout’s cadeau, and thank you, Nazim, but no time for tea. It was still ten hours to Timbuktu, and sixteen hours until the Italians’ flight.
We ran hard. Omar, the surly Malian driver, blew a shock absorber, there was a flat tire or two on the other vehicles, and our security bandits’ gasoline drums were running low, which didn’t actually stop them from chasing gazelles.
We were slaloming up and down a series of sloping dunes in the dark, about fifty miles north of Timbuktu, when the bandits finally and irrevocably ran out of gas. Mossa, Baye, and Baye got out and surrounded their vehicle. They stood with their arms crossed over their chests, staring hard at the Toyota as if it owed them some sort of an explanation.
It was a tableau I’d entitle “The Revenge of the Gazelles.”
Alberto took a GPS reading while Mossa, Baye, and Baye discussed their options. It was decided that Baye and Baye would stay with the car while Mossa would come with us, continuing to provide high-class security all the way to Timbuktu, as agreed. There he’d arrange for another car and would be back to pick up Baye and Baye by and by.
The two men gave everyone a hug in the abrupt, bone-crushing manner of the desert. And then we were off again.
“Bye-bye, Baye Baye,” everyone shouted from the windows. I imagine we sounded like a pack of dogs all suffering from the same strange speech impediment. “Bye-bye, Baye Baye.”
“Hi-eee, hi-eee,” shouted Baye and Baye.
The vehicles slipped and slid across the shifting sand. They got bogged down. They got pushed out on sand ladders. They slowed near the top of most every dune, engines roaring, slowing, slowing, stopping. We had to back down every third slope and try again. And then, at the summit of a dune that had taken us four tries to climb, I saw our destination only ten miles away. It was spread out below us in all its glittering magnificence, such as it was (I counted twenty-seven lights): the historic and formerly forbidden city of Timbuktu, where there was a reasonably comfortable hotel, cold beer for sale, a post office, and a jetport that was forty-eight hours from any major airport on earth. Some of which, I thought, were not entirely secure.
The Terrible Land
It was the greatest flood the earth has ever known: a cataclysm that literally shook the earth along a thousand-mile path. It happened this way: during the last ice age, a finger of glacier reached down into Montana and Idaho, blocking the Clark’s Fork River. The river backed up, filling
the deep mountain valleys of Montana and forming a lake larger than Lake Ontario. It was nearly two thousand feet deep, and when the ice dam failed, Lake Missoula drained in forty-eight hours. A wall of water moving at 65 miles an hour and carrying two-hundred-ton boulders encased in ice thundered through what is now Spokane, and blasted down the path of the Columbia River.
Starting about 15,300 years ago, there were over 40 such floods in a 2,500-year period. Human beings almost certainly occupied the Columbia River basin in that era, and stories of the flood must have passed from one generation to the next. In the manner of humans confronted by deadly forces beyond their comprehension or control, they must have regarded flood-scarred land as both terrible and sacred.
I thought about this as I stood in the path of the ancient flood and filled out form BC-3000-002 (Radiological Area Visitor Form), which I handed to an attractive young woman at the Richland, Washington, Department of Energy operations office. She gave me a radiation-measuring device called a dosimeter, a visitor’s name tag to be displayed on the outer layer of my clothing, and an orientation booklet outlining security requirements and safety measures at the Hanford Site, which contains the largest repository of waste in all the hemisphere. It was my responsibility to “read and comply with all the information identified on radiological postings, signs and labels, and follow escort instructions.” On page ten, there was a series of schematic drawings illustrating responses to the various emergency signals. In case of fire, for instance, a bell would ring. The bell was depicted as having eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a single, stringy arm holding a hammer. The bell was banging itself on the head with the hammer, producing a sound written as “gong, gong, gong.” In another illustration, positioned above the bell, a crosseyed siren emitted a steady blast—“HEEEEEE”—which meant “evacuation,” in this case to the “staging area.” The top illustration, labeled “HOWLER,” was a siren with worried eyes and a megaphone for a mouth. It’s “Ah-OO-GAH” sound meant “criticality” and the required response was “RUN,” though no particular destination was given. Just run.