Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

by Frank T. Kryza

  But there was no rain now. They plodded on. On January 26, Laing wrote the Colonial Office that the caravan had come under the aegis of some friendly Tuareg, and “Timbuktoo began to appear within our reach, the merchants began to calculate their gains, and apprehension having entirely subsided, [there was] a profusion of thanks and benedictions. I have little time at present to say more than that my prospects are bright and expectations sanguine.”

  In a postscript added January 27, Laing noted ominously:

  I had just finished the above when two Hookgar [Hoggar] Tuaric arrived at our encampment with accounts that a party of their tribe had fallen in with the Ghazi [Muslim fanatics] … yesterday, at a well about 30 miles West from us, & engaged them with advantage, killing several, and taking from them a hundred and sixty two Maheries [mehari* camels]. This intelligence is extremely satisfactory, but the Ghadamis Merchants are much afraid that the victors, whose arrival we are compelled to await, will make exorbitant demands upon them for the service performed….

  The fears of Ghadames merchants proved justified. Twenty heavily armed Hoggar Tuareg joined the caravan, appearing out of nowhere. Their blue veiled faces evinced no acknowledgment of Laing’s party. They were greeted with distrust, but no one dared turn them away. They had simply materialized through the veil of sand. One evening, a few days after their arrival, Laing fired at a crow. Sheikh Babani told him not to reload his rifle, suggesting that since they were out of danger, Laing should turn his gunpowder over to him. Inexplicably, Laing agreed, and Babani later gave the powder to the Tuareg. The next day the caravan stopped by a well at a place called Wadi Ahnet* to water the camels.

  The travelers were approaching the center of the stony plain, caught in an undulating savanna of shallow sand. Wadi Ahnet, when at last they reached it, seemed sick unto death. Its palms were raddled and threadbare; below them lay a narrow marsh covered with a fetid brown crust. Mosquitoes swarmed in voracious profusion. The remains of a pitiful fort, gutted and crumbling, occupied rising ground behind the marsh. This was the Saharan oasis at its worst—a salt-caked malarial swamp. The sun at midday weighed on the caravan like lead. The mosquitoes thrummed.

  Wadi Ahnet was strangely filthy for such a remote place. Outside oases, damp, dirt, and decay were not found in the Sahara. A man or animal might collapse, and whatever the reason, the immediate cause of death was nearly always thirst. The body was desiccated even before life had passed out of it. Long before flesh decomposed, vultures would pick bones dry. Within hours, all moisture was gone. Clean again, pure again, the dry sand would sparkle.

  Laing knew of only two other environments where one was conscious of this aseptic quality, that of lofty mountains and the Arctic, the realm of his friend the explorer Bandinel. That is why he compared the desert to Melville Island in winter, “as flat as a bowling green and destitute of verdure.” The ambience of the Arctic and Sahara were strangely similar, and so was the state of mind they engendered. Polar snows and desert sands: both immaculate, untouched by humanity and indifferent to it. Explorers came to them if not as trespassers, then strictly on their own terms—terms which, if not accepted unconditionally, led to death.

  After Wadi Ahnet, Laing and his party faced many waterless days across an inferno of rock, but they were buoyed by the thought of their impending arrival at the great caravan city. The merchants thought of nothing else, unless it was the possibility of attack from hostile Tuareg. In this desolate passage, they faced their greatest danger; a looming, unseen threat that made everyone restless; a danger they were helpless to redress, one that whittled away at their composure. They could not deviate from their route, and they could not trust their veiled escorts. To stop meant certain death. But not to stop possibly entailed death also—at the hands of marauders.

  The travelers became numbed by the void, by the vast distances that remained, the heat, thirst, hunger and discomfort yet to be endured. It required a mighty will to load the camels and strike out each day. Men retained their sanity by sinking into a dream world. The imagination took over, substituting fields and forests where only baked hamada loomed, preparing gargantuan meals to ease the pain of hunger, inventing clear, cool streams to slake tormenting thirst. Laing grew sick of

  these desert, forlorn, black looking plains, these Libya deserta. The eye of the traveller roams in vain over the wide, unvaried superficies, in search of some object to rest upon, till at length wearied by a repetition of the bleak and tedious sameness, he is willing to pull one of the folds of his turban over his eyes, and to shroud his head in his Burnoosa, allowing his mind, which refuses to expand upon the exsiccated objects around him, to shrink within itself, and to anticipate in imaginative hope, more genial and enlivening scenes.

  To the physical stamina and mental toughness required of a caravanner in the Sahara, there was a third important quality: courage. Everyone in the caravan viewed the Tuareg escorts with increasing apprehension. The discontent of these swarthy riders seemed to grow as the journey’s miseries increased. They were bored; they wanted plunder. Asking no one’s permission, they sometimes disappeared for hours or days.

  At night, they seemed to stalk the camp, moving silently on the periphery of sleeping men and camels. A brief creaking of leather, the breathy burping of their animals, and then they were gone, vanishing into the shroud of the desert, nothing to mark their passing.

  Tensions in the caravan grew; nerves were taut; there was a sense of impending disaster.

  Laing’s presence further complicated matters. Equal relationships did not exist among Saharan caravanners. Desert society was a narrow ladder upon which everyone had a place, and no two people shared the same rung. This hierarchy was a necessary part of caravan life, integral to its ability to function as a cohesive, moving village. In normal circumstances, Sheikh Babani would have had no difficulty finding the correct place in his caravan for a passenger. But the presence of a nasrani made the circumstances highly abnormal, complicating everything. On the one hand, as a traveler who was undoubtedly rich (in Babani’s eyes, all Englishmen were rich), Laing occupied a place near the top of the ladder. On the other hand, as an infidel from a country populated by unclean kafirs, Laing was lucky to be tolerated at all, and surely merited the bottom rung.

  And then there were the Tuareg. They were armed, and this was their country. One traveled through the Sahara at their pleasure. Could the band of twenty Tuareg escorts be trusted?

  “The sacred word of a Targui,” Laing recalled Yusuf Karamanli warning him, “is like water fallen on the sand, never to be found again.”

  And yet, Laing and the caravan depended on the Tuareg, for only a Tuareg who had lived in the Sahara all his life could differentiate one boulder from another.

  FIVE OR SIX DAYS after departing the squalid oasis of Wadi Ahnet, on the night of February 2 or 3,* Laing retired to his tent early, his servants nearby. It was twilight, the desert swept by a cold, steady wind. The land was a neutral tawny color, spreading under a darkening sky. Loose canvas on Laing’s tent flapped with disquieting monotony. In the dark, Laing could feel the tarpaulins trembling overhead. His cot was shaken as if at sea in rough weather. Around the camp, camels moaned with stentorian, unearthly cries.

  Under cover of this noise and the darkness, the Hoggar Tuareg surrounded Laing’s tent. In one volley, they fired into it with muskets. They cut the canvas and cords and fired again into the gloaming, rushing at Laing’s cot before he could reach his sword. Struck in the hip by one of the balls and surprised in his half sleep, Laing was barely able to sit up before Tuareg were hacking savagely at his body. He fell to the ground, bloodied and unarmed. With curved scimitars, the Tuareg slashed. Laing stopped moving.

  IN A SHIVER OF PERCEPTION, Laing understood that Sheikh Babani had betrayed him. This had been a long time coming. In a letter to Warrington dated December 13, 1825, from In Salah, he wrote that he had “some hints respecting the Sheikh Babane, whom I did not consider as acting up to the agreement which h
e entered into with you at Tripoli…. This circumstance has caused me a good deal of uneasiness as well as dissatisfaction.” Babani was plainly unhappy and felt he had been cheated. The bashaw had allegedly paid Babani handsomely to protect Laing (though Babani denied ever getting a penny). Laing had taken note of the sheikh’s growing resentment for weeks, but he failed to anticipate its terrible result: motivated by his own frustration and avarice, Sheikh Babani had apparently come to an “arrangement” with the Tuareg. Probably in return for some of Laing’s camels and a portion of his merchandise and presents, the Tuareg gang agreed to murder the Christian explorer. Sheikh Babani would pocket the rest, and be rid of the troublesome white man and an uncollected debt that was driving him to distraction.

  ROUSED BY THE NOISE of the attack, Laing’s servants tried to help him, risking their lives. Having subdued Laing, the attackers went after his assistants with their swords, instantly killing one of the carpenters and the interpreter, Abraham Nahun, and wounding the remaining carpenter in the leg. Hamet, the camel driver, was crippled by a saber cut but survived. Laing’s West Indian servant, Jack le Bore, and Bongola, the freed slave, ran off and hid in the dunes.

  After stealing what they found in Laing’s tent, the Tuareg gang of twenty fled on their camels, shrieking and shouting in manic triumph. Sheikh Babani, paralyzed with fear, huddled near Laing’s tent, where he had been silent witness to the butchery. The Ghadames merchants now joined him as spectators. None was molested; none tried to help Laing.

  When the attack was over, Laing was unable to lift a finger, but he was not dead. In the first hour after the attack, the desolate night grew colder, wrapped in silence and solitude.

  Laing’s wounds were beyond ghastly. He took five saber cuts to the head—three on the left temple, from which bone was chipped; one on the left cheek, which fractured the jawbone and split his ear in two (portions of which dangled by bloody ropes of tissue); and another over the right temple. He also sustained a horrible gash on the back of the neck, a musket ball in the hip, five saber cuts on the right arm and hand, and three broken fingers. The carpal bones of his right wrist had been crushed into a gravelly mush, and the hand itself was cut three-quarters across. There were three cuts on his left arm, the humerus of which was broken, and a deep gash on his left leg.

  Within the hour, Jack le Bore came back to his master’s side and began dressing his wounds. The loyal West Indian soon had a great blaze of desiccated acacia branches roaring by the camp, helping to keep Laing warm. One of Babani’s nephews, Alkhadir, perhaps motivated by shame for what his uncle had done, helped Jack tend to the wounded and bury the dead. Slumped that night against what remained of his baggage, Laing was beyond responding to his fears. He could not think. When the camp-fire went out, lamps pierced the darkness with a wan, fatiguing glare.

  During all those dreary weeks in the desert, Laing had been revived by the magical half hour of the sun’s decline. Most beautiful of all were those evenings when the horizon glowed with green, yellow, and blood-red rays, in which the thin crescent of a new moon barely cleared the ground before slipping back again in pursuit of the sun. The evening he was attacked had presented just such beauty, the colors staining wisps of high, stratospheric cloud. Henceforth, Laing would recall the Tuareg attack just after dusk—and the twilight held magic no longer.

  Though desperately ill from his wounds and near death, within hours of the attack he decided to go on with the expedition. The next day dawned cold and clear. Stunned and dehydrated from loss of blood, Laing realized the extent of his wounds and that he would need help, but none of the caravanners rendered aid. Terrified at the bad luck the nasrani had attracted, the Arab merchants left without him. Only the survivors in Laing’s entourage—Jack le Bore, Harry the carpenter, the wounded camel driver Hamet, and Bongola—stayed with him. So too, against all expectations, did Sheikh Babani, who belatedly remembered that he was responsible for Laing’s safety, and that the bashaw’s wrath could be lethal.

  Swathed in bandages, Laing had to be lifted onto his camel and tied down with leather straps to keep him upright in the saddle. The desolate world of the Tanezrouft still loomed endlessly ahead. Before the attack, they had been marching close to a rocky massif that ran northeast in the central Hoggar, but now this compact group of mountains curved away in a great arc to the right, off course. They were confronted with passage across an eternal plain whose dimensions reduced Laing’s tiny party of men and camels to infinitesimal proportions. They were like microscopic insects creeping forward toward a rim of the world that might never be reached, across unbounded space. They had no hope of encountering anything that might offer comfort.

  Laing’s powers of recovery, strong in the Ashanti wars in West Africa, were diminished by the strain of his journey, but still formidable. He had twenty-four wounds, of which eighteen were severe. He feared he would be disfigured for life and dreaded Emma’s reaction when she saw him again, if he survived. His moods changed alarmingly, moving between extremes. Sometimes he was unruffled, almost apathetic, then he would be overtaken by interludes of agitation and hysterical crying.

  We do not know what Laing wrote in his diary, for it was later lost, but a diary is often the last place to look if you seek the truth about a person in great distress. Laing’s letters may have held more candor, and many of these, from the days just after the attack, have survived. After resting a day or two, he had recovered enough to write to Emma, a letter he penned laboriously with his left hand.*

  “I have stopt in the sun to write. Pray excuse it, for I am in great haste. I write with only a Thumb & Finger,” he mentioned casually, “having a very severe cut on my fore Finger. You will, I am certain, excuse me for addressing you upon so sorry a piece of paper when I tell you that it is the last piece which I have out, everything being shut and tied up for this long, tedious Journey to Timbuktu, which appears, thank God, now drawing to a close.” Laing explained that a friendly Tuareg who was going to Tuat would take the letter, which would show that he was safe and in good health. “I am now in Latitude 23,” he added, “and with God’s help I shall be in Timbuktu in twenty days’ time, and in two months’ time I hope to reach the coast.” He said nothing at all of the attack, fearing that it would needlessly frighten his wife.

  Even here at its most desolate heart, the desert did not disappoint. Its immensity overwhelmed everything, enlarged everything, and in its presence, beneath the icy purity of a sour sky, the wickedness of human beings was overshadowed. Though Laing had been robbed of his belongings and was desperately weak, he was determined to cross the four hundred miles that remained of the plateau.

  As soon as the letter to Emma was sealed, the tiny caravan set out again. Though it must have seemed at times that they would never arrive at the other end of the Tanezrouft—the march by now was a nightmare of heat and sand and flies, and at night, a merciless cold under glaring stars—Laing felt oddly renewed. He could not go back, and so he dared to go forward, buoyed by some mysterious inner strength.

  CONDITIONS GREW WORSE. In the evenings, camels and men collapsed into a mass of animal wretchedness, men and beasts tangled together on rock and sand, reeking of stale urine and dung. For nineteen days the caravan moved leadenly across the desert, Laing swaying in agony and sickness. At last, sometime in April, the ragtag troop reached an oasis known as Azaud, where they were welcomed by a friendly Arab chief and marabout, Sheikh Mokhtar of the Kunta Arab tribe. The merchants who had abandoned Laing had preceded him, and a week later the main caravan left for Arouan. On Sheikh Babani’s advice, Laing stayed behind with Sidi Mokhtar to rest. In the event, he stayed for three months.

  To get to Mokhtar’s camp, Laing had covered 400 miles in less than twenty days—more than 20 miles a day of travel—a truly staggering achievement for so grievously wounded a man.

  Even in the comparative safety of the camp, a new disaster hit the expedition. An epidemic of dysentery (or yellow fever, as Laing incorrectly termed it—the sy
mptoms included jaundice and black vomit) broke out in Mokhtar’s camp and killed half the population, including Sidi Mokhtar himself, the traitorous Sheikh Babani, Harry, the surviving carpenter, and most painfully of all, Laing’s most valuable assistant and longtime friend, Jack le Bore, who had traveled with him around the world.

  Laing, now utterly alone except for Bongola, was sick himself for nine days with the gruesome intestinal illness. After Mokhtar’s death, Laing was at the mercy of a young sheikh, Mokhtar’s son, Sidi Mohammed, who was the opposite of his father—“fanatically anti-Christian, uncharitable in every way and a thief to boot,” according to Laing. The weeks rolled endlessly by as Laing slowly, agonizingly regained some of his strength.

  As Hugh Clapperton approached the Niger River in early May, Laing was scrawling a note to his father-in-law describing his injuries more truthfully than he had to his wife:

  [Camp] Sidi Mohammed, May 10th 1826

  My Dear Consul,

  I drop you a line only, by an uncertain conveyance, to acquaint you that I am recovering from very severe wounds far beyond any calculation that the most sanguine expectation could have formed, & that tomorrow please God I leave this place for Tinbuctoo, which I hope to reach on the 18th; I have suffered much, but the detail must be reserved till another period, when I shall “a tale unfold” of base treachery and war that will surprise you: some imputation is attachable to the old Sheikh [Babani], but as he is now no more I shall not accuse him: he died very suddenly about a month since, and there are some here who look upon his demise as a visitation: be that as it may, he has by this time answered for all. Since the robbery committed by the Tuaric, I have been very badly off for funds: I have succeeded in getting a small advance of 270 Timbuctoo Mitkallies (which by the bye are a dollar each in value) from the nephew of the Sheik [i.e., Alkhadir], who is a remarkably fine young man, & who has shewn me much attention all along, but more particularly since the death of his uncle. As he will carry my dispatches from Tinbuctoo you will have an opportunity of seeing him, when I shall recommend him to your best notice and attention—When I write from Tinbuctoo I shall detail precisely how I was betrayed & nearly murdered in my sleep, in the mean time I shall acquaint you with the number and nature of my wounds, in all amounting to twenty four, eighteen of which are exceedingly severe. To begin from the top, I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head & three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away, one on my left check which fractured the jaw bone & has divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound, one over the right temple, and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly scratched the windpipe: a musket ball in the hip, which made its way through my back, slightly grazing the back bone: five sabre cuts on my right arm & hand, three of the fingers broken, the hand cut three fourths across, and the wrist bones cut through; three cuts on the left arm, the bone of which has been broken, but is again uniting. One slight wound on the right leg, with one dreadful gash on the left, to say nothing of a cut across the fingers of my left hand, now healed up. I am nevertheless, as I have already said, doing well, and hope yet to return to England with much important geographical information. The map indeed requires much correction, and please God, I shall yet do much, in addition to what I have already done, towards putting it right.