That’s right: I was brewing the tea.
Yisslam’s grandmother made sure I did it correctly. Her face was seamed and riddled with so many grades and textures, it recalled the mountain cliffs we had passed on the journey from Atar. It brought out all the more vividly the delicate beauty of her eyes, which were a shade of brown so pale they could almost be described as gold.
She had started the fire, dropping lumps of charcoal onto a brazier, stoked with dry leaves. Following her guidance, I scooped a handful of tea leaves into a metal pot, poured a few drops of water from a guerba and placed the pot on the coals. When bubbles of water started wrestling with the lid, I took three glasses, filled them with water, then emptied the water back into the pot. This process was repeated three times. When the pot was bubbling over again, I tipped sugar into one of the glasses and poured it back. Then I filled the de-sugared glass with water, raising my arm high over my head to increase the froth, before knocking back the lid and emptying the glass again.
‘Jawdah,’ said the old lady. ‘Quality.’
She wasn’t one for short-cuts. When I decided the water was ready, she wagged a finger, nudging me to fill the glasses again, until she was satisfied with the level of saccharification. Pinning her mouth with a narrow silver pipe, she tilted her head at the pot until the tea was steeped; and only when the required standard was met did she let out a triumphant puff, her lips curling in a narrow arc around the smoke. I set the glasses before her and she poured out three servings, calling over to Amina, Yisslam’s wife, so we could all have a sip.
‘The first glass,’ said Amina, ‘is bitter, like death. The second is strong, like life, and the third is sweet, like love.’
I had heard the same ritual saying in Timbuktu; and I would hear it all the way back there. As Noël Coward once said, ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful to live in a country where they didn’t have tea?’ All across the Sahara, there is no fear of that.
Yisslam’s grandmother spent her days making silver bracelets, using metal from the mines of Zouerat. Unplugging the lid from a painted wooden box, she showed me bead necklaces, camel-hair bowls and satchels made of painted goatskin. I wondered who she made them for: we were an hour’s drive from the main road, in a country that was hardly thronging with tourists.
‘Chinguetti,’ she said, as if reading my mind.
The seventh most sacred city of Islam, storehouse of learning and pilgrims’ launchpad for the region. On the route map I’d squiggled into the back page of my diary, it was marked by a big red star, matched only by the ones for Timbuktu and Djenné. I asked her to tell me about it.
‘Medeeena kabeeeera, a big city.’ She stretched out the words, her brown-gold eyes glittering against her wrinkles. ‘Everything is there. Vegetables and fruit … tobacco, silver, cloth …’ She listed several other items I couldn’t fathom, before completing the account with a marvelling slide of the head: ‘Makan al-dhahul, a place of amazement.’
When Yisslam awoke from his nap, we all sat around to eat. Oil was poured into the couscous so we could fasten it in our hands. The girls were allowed to use spoons to avoid ruining the decorative henna patterns on their hands and arms, but I tried to follow the men. As usual my place was the messiest by the end of the meal.
At least I was in good company. In 1828, travelling in disguise on his journey to Timbuktu, René Caillié told his hosts he had escaped from Christian captivity. Without this excuse, his food handling would have been a giveaway. ‘Though I had been accustomed to take my food by handfuls,’ he wrote, ‘I was still far from being as expert as they. I sometimes let part of the mess fall on the ground which gave them great offence, and made them vent their anger in maledictions on the Christians, who, they observed, had not even taught me how to eat decently.’
I wasn’t conscious of maledictions, but a few amused glances were certainly exchanged. If anything, they helped me feel more welcome. Like my Arabic howlers, they were a great way to entertain my hosts.
After dinner the girls gathered around me, asking my name, the size of my family and various other questions. One of them, Yisslam’s 10-year-old niece Hady, showed me her Al-Kafi Arabic textbook and I read a few sentences with her. Her school was near the road but she was staying with her grandfather for Eid, while her parents were in the bush. Like the other girls, she was thrilled with her henna decorations. They were all keen to admire each other’s patterns, which had been applied to celebrate the imminent holy day.
‘It is a blessing for us’, said one of them, ‘to have a guest for Eid.’
All eyes turned to the grandmother, the way eyes in other parts of the world turn to the television screen when a favourite show is about to start. She pressed her wrists in the sand, levering herself back from the bowl. Clasping her hands together, she looked up towards the roof of the tent and narrated the story behind Eid.
‘The Prophet Ibrahim wanted to have a son. But for many years God did not grant his wish. His wife was barren and she had reached the age when women no longer bear children. But God is all-powerful and one day a son was born to Ibrahim and they named him Ishmael. When Ishmael was old enough to work, Ibrahim had a dream that God wanted his son as a sacrifice. So he told Ishmael and asked if he agreed, and Ishmael said he would do as the Lord commanded. So Ibrahim took his only son to the top of Mount Moriah to kill him. But God stayed his hand at the last moment and told him to keep his son. A ram appeared nearby and Ibrahim took it to the altar to sacrifice instead.’
Looked at with a modern eye, this is a troubling story: it reads like child abuse and an early example of the Nuremberg Defence. But it is understood differently in Muslim societies. So absolute is Ibrahim’s submission to God that he is prepared to give up the most precious thing in his life. However crude the story’s narrative elements, they provide the framework, as stark as the desert in which the story takes place, for a parable about humility. Coming from a society that emphasises individualism, I found it hard to engage with the story in the same way as Yisslam’s relatives. They listened to the telling with glowing smiles, their admiration for their fellow nomad renewed by their grandmother’s crackly voiced rendition.
Time’s elastic stretch can give an impression of universality to scriptural stories. It is easy to forget they were written and recorded in a particular time and place. In the case of the Quran, this is the mercantile world inhabited by the Prophet Mohammed. The surat are rife with references to ‘accounts’ and ‘balances’, to men’s deeds being ‘weighed’, the Last Judgment as a ‘reckoning’. If this is the word of God, it is the word specifically directed at the merchant class to which Mohammed belonged.
Yet there is another world, underneath this one, which inspired many of Islam’s most enduring symbols and ideas. This is the world of nomadism. We see it in the mention of wells, caravan routes, herds, blood revenge. We see it in the theme of fatalism, accepting cruel twists of fortune, be it marauding tribes, dried-up wells or vicious sandstorms, which is rooted in the practicalities of energy conservation in the desert. And we see it in the faith’s most abiding symbol: topping every mosque, curling across the flags of Islamic states or the sides of their ambulances. Nomads are lunar people, grateful to the kindly beacon that lights their caravan trails. Their hearts are with the moon; and so, it follows, is Islam’s.
Yisslam’s family emphasised their religious credentials with their interest in the story of Ishmael’s almost-sacrifice. But a lighter form of entertainment was awaiting us, and the first stirrings of its music had already breached the tent. When the meal was over, Yisslam led me across the plain, yelling through the awning of a neighbouring tent. Taking care not to trip over the guy-ropes, I followed him inside.
Imagine bright lights, a dark vault above you, the performers shining in the glare. The lights are torches held by the men, a ring around the edge of the tent; the performers are four girls in patterned gowns and sequinned headscarves. They have an upturned couscous bowl and a water barrel between them, wh
ich they rap in sharp, rhythmic hand beats. One of them has loosened the shift around her chest, her baby suckling while she leads the beat.
Was this the ‘pleasant and jocund life’ that Leo Africanus noted? One of the girls beckoned me over to play with them, so I knee-walked across the rug and crouched behind the couscous bowl. I don’t think anyone could accuse me of injecting any rhythm into the tune, but I thumped with plenty of enthusiasm and that seemed to please them. They were indulgent hosts, trilling me along while they tattooed the other side of the barrel, conjuring lyrics out of the air, chanting an old rhyme that, according to Yisslam, was ‘a praise song for the blessing of a stranger in our tent’.
Later, some of the men punted me to the middle of the tent. ‘Raqs!’ they commanded. ‘Dance!’ I was a novelty for them, and they wanted to see my moves. Oh dear, if only they’d asked for something else! I managed a few pirouettes, an arm twist or two … I jangled my wrists and twerked my shoulders. I tried out some of the moves I’d learned from Najib in Fez – stutter-stepping and arm chopping like a hip-hop robot – but I was running out of ideas. Can somebody help me out here?
After they had seen enough of my solo turn, the girls sprang up, melting my staccato dance with the languid sway of hips and curling, coiling arms. One of them lassoed my shoulders with a folded turban and towed me towards her, then minced backwards, her feet covered by the hem of her dress, her scarf held tight over her face, like a yashmak. Is she flirting with me? There was a ritual atmosphere to the choreography, as if it contained layers of hidden meaning – a courtship dance, perhaps – matched by the slower, more deliberate tempo of the drumming. All around the tent I could hear the clapping and laughter of the men and the other women; it was the perfect balance of high spirits and relaxation. It was one of those miracles that, if you travel long enough, occasionally pulls you in – a magical evening in the bosom of this welcoming nomad family.
As Yisslam led me back to his tent, deep into the night, I felt like I was drunk. When I started looking into the world of nomads, I never imagined I would be dancing with them in the middle of the Sahara. The beat of the couscous bowl, the lassoing of the turbans, those marvellous girls and their flashing, toothy smiles, would all stay with me, long, long into my journey through their desert.
‘Congratulations for Eid!’
All over the village, there was a merry exchange of good wishes and hard-boiled sweets. Yisslam took me on a morning strollabout: we extended our hands and pressed them to our hearts, batting the greeting phrases back and forth. Each extended arm, each swaying of our robes, was echoed on the ground, where the sun stencilled our shadows with the black precision of steel etchings.
Between the tents there were patches of vegetation, shrivelled capers on twisting pink stems and fleshy honeycombs of euphorbia. One old woman presided over a bed of colocynths (or ‘Sodom’s apples’), the toxic green fruits ballooning from wide-lobed leaves. She was boiling their seeds to make flour. She offered us untreated goat’s milk – bluish and rancid smelling but much esteemed by everyone around me – while her husband lay in the shade of their tent, whooping at some unseen vision.
‘He is crazy.’ The woman’s shoulders lifted in a flinty shrug. ‘The djinn ate his mind.’
Crazy – majnun. Literally ‘bedjinned’: taken by the magical spirits that haunt wastelands and ruins throughout Islamic culture. I had heard plenty about the djinn in Fez – one of Mansur’s friends had described being possessed by a djinn, after loitering in an abandoned house to drink alcohol and sleep with tourists. He was only exorcised when his father slaughtered a sheep, distributed the meat to the poor, and read the sura of the djinn from the Quran. After passing out, he woke up, feeling ‘cleaned out, like a cooking pot’, and ever since he had been a passionate, born-again Muslim.
Desert dwellers are just as vulnerable as city slickers. The old lady’s husband may not have stooped to drinking alcohol or picking up foreign girls (fat chance round here), but he had exposed himself to the djinn all the same, in a way that makes nomads especially susceptible: he had spent too much time on his own.
‘He was always in the desert with his camels,’ said Yisslam later, in the unforgiving tone of an Old Testament patriarch. ‘It is not good to be alone in the desert, away from other men. Everybody knows that.’
We were back at his tent. His wife Amina had pulled a plate off the kitchen shelf (a hammock swinging from the roof) in preparation for lunch. After another round of goat’s milk, we were given goat’s cream with dates, followed by goat’s stomach. I think, during my stint as Yisslam’s guest, I tried every part of a goat you can eat. Leo Africanus would not have been surprised by the way we ate them: he notes of the Saharan Arabs that ‘for supper they have certain dried flesh steeped in butter and milk, whereof each one taking his share, eateth it out of his fist’. Despite my earlier lessons in bare-knuckle banqueting, I remained a rank amateur. I fumbled my crouching, struggled to use my right hand as a spoon, and unlike everyone else I still had nerves in my fingertips, so I kept dropping the meat back on the platter.
‘What is the problem?’ asked Yisslam, giving me one of his right-to-left scans. ‘Do you not like the food?’
‘Oh, I do.’ I threw him a pleading look, but he didn’t catch it. ‘It’s just … very hot.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘No, I do, honestly.’
‘Then please eat it, Nicholas.’
I bit my tongue and dug in, trying to hide my winces. I could feel the heat burning through my palm. Presumably, after a few years in the desert, I too would be able to pick up these pyroclasts of flesh as nonchalantly as everyone else. But for now, I was an embarrassment: the clumsy foreigner who dribbled his couscous and couldn’t even hold a morsel of freshly cooked goat without having to suck his fingers.
Hospitality is one of the great provisions of the desert; but ‘the dues of hospitality extend for three days’, as The Thousand and One Nights reminds us. I had read enough stories about the subtle measures taken by put-upon hosts, so on the third day I asked Yisslam if he could help me back to the blacktop.
‘Of course,’ he said confidently. ‘We will make sure you reach Chinguetti.’
I was glad at the prospect of continuing the journey, but a little saddened by his readiness to help me on my way.
The next afternoon, as I was saying my farewells, he presented me with a boubou, full sleeved with a V-line of gold thread around the collar. I felt like Alice when she offers her thimble to the dodo: I didn’t have anything adequate to give in return. So I tore a sheet out of my diary and scribbled a thickly dotted thank-you note. It was handed to 10-year-old Hady. She scanned it carefully, mouthing the words to herself, then read it aloud to the assembled gathering, looking up through her eyelashes to see if her elders approved. Yisslam’s wife and aunt bowed their heads, and his grandmother spread her hands in benediction: ‘Alhamdulillah, thanks to God.’ I could wish for no greater seal of approval. Although, as Yisslam escorted me to the edge of the village, he did point out that I had misconjugated one of my verbs.
‘I think you are only a beginner in Arabic,’ he said.
Mohammed-Amin was an old friend of Yisslam’s family. His ridged face looked like it had been made out of the local mud by a moulder whose nails needed paring, and he wore a 4-metre-long turban that could double as a mattress. He was heading to the road that afternoon with his donkey, so he would be able to point me in the right direction. I was in luck: it wasn’t every day someone from the camp ventured this far.
‘How long do you think it will take us?’ I asked, while Mohammed-Amin was strapping my backpack onto his donkey.
The animal’s mane was short and springy, threaded with sand. Boils pustuled on the skin at the top of his hind legs, tracking the bitter history of previous burdens.
Mohammed-Amin shrugged. ‘One hour, God willing.’
God was not willing. Three and a half hours later, with only a slither of moonlight to
show the way, we were still deep in the bush. We kept behind the donkey because, as Mohammed-Amin explained, ‘The donkey always wants to be the leader.’ If you walked in front, he stopped; and whichever side you went, he veered towards the other. Occasionally Mohammed-Amin gave the animal a tap with his stick, but mostly he communicated by clicking his tongue between his teeth and making groaning sounds.
‘I don’t like to hit the donkey,’ he said. ‘You can talk to a donkey, just as you can talk to a man. You only use the stick when you failed at talking.’
More problematic than the donkey’s stubbornness was the lack of a path. Fortunately, Mohammed-Amin had a solution for this. He would stop at a caper bush, running a hand down the springy leaves; or let out a whoop when he spotted a familiar hanza bush, its marble-shaped fruits hidden under leathery fronds. There was enough vegetation to tow us all the way, recognised from countless traverses, each shrub or well like a knot in Theseus’s thread through the labyrinth.
‘People will come,’ Mohammed-Amin said when we finally made it to the road. ‘There are always people coming this way.’
He was right. We only had to wait two and a half hours before a pair of headlights burned through the horizon like low-hanging stars. It was a pick-up truck, with a full cab and a dozen sheep in the bed, squeezed under a cargo net.
‘Have you got … space?’ I asked.
Of course they did! Within moments, I was ensconced in my seat: a dozen ovine heads for cushions and a couple of rams’ horns poking between my legs.
‘May God protect you!’ called Mohammed-Amin.
He glowed in the taillights, hands clasped over his head.
The road was only tarred for a mile. After that it swung across the curving surface, lurching over rogue boulders, sucking me down among the sheep. It was cool outside, but the heat of the animals scorched through me, like I was bouncing on top of a bread oven. Every time I pulled myself upright, another lurch siphoned me into the net, then a bump and I was a flipped pancake. Sometimes I rankled – from the lurching, a crossbar digging in my back, the tupping of the sheep at my arse. But I only had to remind myself ‘I’m riding a sheep truck on the road to Chinguetti!’ and I couldn’t help smiling.
The Timbuktu School for Nomads Page 17