A 1,6OO km odyssey through the Sahara desert
Michael Benanav
JAICO PUBLISHING HOUSE
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Published by Jaico Publishing House
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© Michael Benanav
Published in arrangement with
Michael Benanav
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NM 87527, USA
THE CARAVAN OF WHITE GOLD
ISBN 978-81-8495-075-5
Maps reprinted from the original book Men of Salt
© 2006 Michael Benanav
First Jaico Impression: 2010
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
for my parents
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Acknowledgments
Author’s Notes
Bibliography
PREFACE
For the past thousand years, the Caravan of White Gold has plied the desolate sands of the Sahara. Its mission: to penetrate deep into the heart of the world’s largest desert and return to civilization bearing gleaming slabs of solid salt. Men clad in turbans, threadbare robes, and the occasional sports jacket lead strings of camels over some of the most severe terrain on earth, from the fabled city of Timbuktu (in the West African nation of Mali) to the remote salt-mining outpost of Taoudenni, nearly five hundred miles to the north, in the middle of nowhere. There they load their animals with tons of edible ore, then travel back across the desert to bring it to market. Their ancient, arduous way of life has hardly changed in the millennium since the salt caravans began.
Today these men and camels work one of the last of the caravan routes still active in the Sahara. The rest of the complex caravan network that once crisscrossed northern Africa has virtually vanished, victim to modern means of transportation; most goods, which in centuries past would have been carried across the great desert on camelback, are now flown over it, driven through it, or shipped around it by sea. Yet the Caravan of White Gold marches on, spared by its isolation.
The caravan route passes through one of the most notorious stretches in the Sahara, known as the Tanezrouft—the oldest and driest part of a desert bigger than the continental United States. Along the northern two-thirds of the trail, there are no human habitations or even nomad camps; the earth is simply too parched to support life. There are no oases, just a few solitary wells spaced days apart. Temperatures regularly surpass 120 degrees. Sandstorms sweep unchecked for hundreds of miles across the flat expanse. Entire caravans have left their bones there, including one time, in 1805, when some two thousand men and their camels arrived at a dry well and didn’t make it to the next.
Taoudenni itself is in arguably the harshest spot in this harshest of regions. On an utterly barren plain hundreds of miles from the nearest village, miners hack tombstonesized blocks of rock salt from hand-dug pits using semiprimitive tools. Living in Stone Age–style huts, they survive on a meager diet of rice, millet, and briny water; they have no medical facilities, no electricity, and no way of contacting the outside world but through those who travel back to it with salt.
Though I’m a great lover of deserts, I had never heard of the Caravan of White Gold or the salt mines of Taoudenni until one night while I was surfing the Internet, researching the evolutionary advantages of one-humped versus two-humped camels in their respective environments. Having recently returned from a trip to Mongolia, home to the Bactrian camel, I wondered how its two humps could possibly serve it better than the single hump of its cousin, the Arabian, or dromedary. I eventually discovered that the Arabian evolved from the Bactrian, and had fused two humps into one for the same reason it had developed shorter hair, longer legs, and a leaner physique—to keep its body temperature a few critical degrees cooler in the extreme deserts of the Middle East and Africa where it lives.
It was while following a divergent trail of camel-related web links that I stumbled across an article about the Caravan of White Gold. The caravan, the article asserted, was in its dying days, as trucks had recently begun competing for the salt trade. With their superior speed and carrying capacity, they would soon drive camels into obsolescence. It sounded like a Saharan John Henry story with a predictable ending—the death of the caravans and the iconic, age-old caravan culture. The noble ships of the desert, it seemed, were bound for dry dock.
As I read, my mind filled with exotic scenes of deserthardened nomads leading camel trains over a vast, undulating landscape. Enthralled, I read the piece again, my thoughts racing headlong into the Sahara. I hurriedly searched for more information on other websites, but was too excited to really focus—not because the caravans were doomed, but by the thought of joining one before they disappeared from the planet once and for all. Suddenly, my mental image of the caravans included me, galloping on camelback alongside the nomads, my head and face wrapped in coils of cloth like some archetypal Desert Man. I sensed that before long this vision would come true, even if I wouldn’t ride as well as I had in my imagination. It was that feeling known by those of us who don’t so much take journeys as are taken by journeys: hearing the call of a particular place for a particular purpose that will not be denied. And I was hooked. Too hyped up to sit at my computer any longer, I told myself it was the kind of trip I was born to take.
When I was nine, my father gave me an old hardbound biography called, simply, Lawrence of Arabia. I read it over and over, entranced by the deeds of a man who seemed to transcend the limitations of the possible, both culturally, by integrating with a fierce foreign people, and physically, by leading a band of underdogs to victory over the Turks and beating the British to Damascus. My desert traveling fantasies had been ignited.
In my twenties, I picked up Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s autobiography. After reading it, I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Wadi Rumm, in Jordan, partly to walk in Lawrence’s footsteps, mostly to see with my own eyes the stunning desert corridor that he described as a “processional way greater than imagination.”
Once there, I wandered alone for a week across salmoncolored dunes and among sandstone massifs intricately hewn and varnished by the elements. I spent time under the woolen tents of Bedouin families, drinking tea, talking Arabic, and eating fresh goat meat. Charmed by their hospitality, intrigued by their culture, I became hopelessly infected by a fascination with nomadic peoples.
Though Lawrence never traversed the Sahara, joining a salt caravan would in many ways realize my lifelong dream of traveling the way he had traveled, minus, of course, the Turks, which was one element of his story I was just as happy to do without. The geography was less important to me than was traveling with desert people for a long period of time, and with an actual purpose. Taking a scenic camel tour wouldn’t have satisfied me, since it would have been all too apparent that I was engaged in an act of pretend. By walking and riding step for step with working camel drivers, eating what they ate, sleeping as little as they slept, and helping with their labors, I believed I could get a taste of what their lives were like. I wanted to immerse in their customs,
listen to their stories, and learn about the ways of the Sahara from the bearers of generations’ worth of collective wisdom before they took their final ride.
Aside from my qualifications as a dreamer, I had been a wilderness guide in the western United States for about ten years and had spent weeks at a time roaming its deserts by foot. Without a pack animal, I had carried all my supplies, even gallons of water, on my back, and had become expert at ignoring pain while hiking for many miles with shredded feet. The thought of not showering or changing my clothes for the estimated forty-day camel journey struck me as, at worst, a minor inconvenience and, at best, a chance to set some new personal benchmarks for sustained filth.
Moreover, I reminded myself, I had first ridden camels not long after I learned to walk—though on further reflection, I doubted that being led around a pen at the Bronx Zoo counted for much. In my late twenties, I’d settled for a couple of months in a village at the base of the Giza Plateau, and my friend Omar and I occasionally rode his camels through the desert around the Pyramids for a couple of hours at a time. While I did learn how to get a camel to go faster with a rapid series of slurping sounds, the most important thing I took away from those experiences was a deep respect, even a fondness, for those strangelooking animals so often characterized as ornery or oafish. To me, camels were regal, remarkable, and, when their lips were closed in a Mona Lisa smile, seemed to be laughing inside at some private joke that we humans would never get. Nonetheless, I had to admit that I knew next to nothing about traveling on them.
As my ideas about joining a caravan evolved from an inspired notion to the practicalities of getting plane tickets and vaccinations, my initial enthusiasm was tempered by the daunting realities I was going to face. Despite—indeed because of—my knowledge of deserts, I took the risks of the journey very seriously. I knew there’d be no chance of rescue if anything went wrong, and wanted to be as prepared as possible.
I embarked on a makeshift physical training program that consisted mostly of walking barefoot on the dirt roads near my home in rural New Mexico to toughen my feet, and chopping cords of wood, which my girlfriend would need to heat the house while I was away. I brushed up on my French—Mali’s colonial tongue—which I mistakenly hoped the camel drivers would speak (fortunately, I took my Arabic phrase book plus a sheaf of handwritten vocabulary notes along with me). Seeking background information on Saharan nomads, I contacted an anthropology professor who had spent many years among Tuareg tribes people and who kindly sent me copies of her published papers.
I also looked into the history of salt in West Africa, wondering why people would go to what sounded like absurdly extreme measures to obtain this most common of commodities. But centuries ago, I learned, in the heyday of the Saharan salt trade, rock salt from the desert was exchanged “measure for measure” with gold—hence the name of the caravan. Though some scholars dispute whether the salt was literally worth its weight in gold, as is advocated by others, there is no question that it was extremely valuable. In fact, until French colonizers introduced paper money to West Africa around the turn of the twentieth century, salt was the dominant form of currency throughout the region, thanks in part to its hardness and durability. It served the same purposes as money and “could be bought, sold, stored, loaned or ‘rented,’ inherited and consumed, sharing the same monetary functions and more than as silver coins.” “Everything one finds in the Sudan,” a local historian wrote (referring to Mali by its colonial name, not to the East African country), “is bought with salt: horses, cloth, millet, and slaves.” At various times, the price of a slave was a piece of salt the size of the slave’s foot; later, a slave’s value increased to an entire bar of salt.
Hence, until paper money took hold in West Africa, the Saharan salt mines were literal money pits. What’s more, as I was soon to learn firsthand, there are places in the desert where salt remains the dominant form of currency to this day.
Aside from its fiduciary uses, salt was so valued because, as Cassiodores, the Roman senator, once said, “Man can live without gold, but not without salt.” The people of West Africa needed salt for spicing and preserving food, and to feed their animals. Despite the labor involved in its extraction and transport, the desert was the best place to get it.
While there were other sources of salt, including evaporated sea salt from coastal areas and vegetable salts, which were ashes from burned millet stalks, these were less highly prized than solid Saharan rock salt. Vegetable salts were inherently inferior and couldn’t be fed to livestock. Sea salt was difficult to transport; it changed color and taste when subject to excessive heat and humidity; it didn’t store well over time; and it wasn’t as good as rock salt for livestock.
The salt from Taoudenni, on the other hand, met all the nutritional and culinary needs of both people and animals. It traveled well, and could be stored for so long without deteriorating that slabs of it were commonly handed down from one generation to the next. It cost no more than sea salt, due to the problems with transporting sea salt into the West African interior. One French salt company, looking to strike it big in the West African market and aware of the regional preference for rock salt, went so far as to compress sea salt into bars resembling those mined in the Sahara. The introduction of sel agglomeré was a commercial fiasco—of the first shipment of three thousand bars, in 1897, 20 percent were lost or ruined in transit. Much of the rest arrived damaged, and the cases in which they were stored proved less than weather-tight, allowing rain and dust to further degrade the salt while in storage. What’s more, West Africans could no more be fooled into buying fake rock salt than a rancher could be fooled into grilling up a Spam steak.
Today salt from Taoudenni is still the people’s favorite and is found everywhere in Mali and other parts of West Africa, though its value has diminished so greatly that it’s now more on par with that of the table salt commonly sold in American grocery stores. But because each caravan returns from each trip with many tons of it, the journey remains a profitable one in contemporary Mali, where the average person earns less in a year than a minimum-wage worker in the United States earns in a few weeks.
While digging around for facts about the salt caravans, I came across the name of an archaeology professor who had journeyed with the Caravan of White Gold one-way, from Taoudenni to Timbuktu (he had taken a Land Cruiser to the mines). I phoned him, believing that some firsthand information would be both valuable and reassuring. I was right about the first, wrong about the second.
John began by telling me he’d had trouble finding a caravan that would accept him. Most camel drivers were afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep pace, and they weren’t going to slow down on his account. When a crew finally agreed to take him along, they did so on one condition: that if anything “major” befell him, the camel drivers could leave his body in the desert and continue on their merchant mission with all possible speed.
“There are lots of ways you can get hurt out there. Sure, you might die of thirst or hunger,” he said casually, as though this were a given, “but you’re more likely to fall off a camel and break a leg.” Whether or not such an injury would lead directly to death by infection or blood loss, he gave me the impression that it would qualify as something “major” enough to warrant abandonment.
He cautioned me about the unbelievable heat, the eternally long days and nights on the march, and mentioned that he had become sick from the water. That led me to inquire more or less tactfully about what he used for toilet paper.
“Sand,” he replied.
I knew that many desert peoples did use sand to clean themselves, but I never quite understood how it worked; I always envisioned it as an unpleasantly messy operation. Without prying too deeply into the potentially gross experience of a man I had never met, I tried to get some details on the mechanics of it, but came away from the conversation no clearer—John simply said something about how quickly everything dries in the Sahara. I made a mental note to bring a roll of toilet paper wi
th me.
The camel drivers, John continued, were friendly and helpful. Most important, they understood that he was different—“different,” in this case, being a synonym for “less desert-worthy”—and accepted the fact that he had to eat more than they did. “Bring extra food, like peanuts and dates,” he cautioned. “There’s not a lot on the caravan, and there’s hardly any protein. I lost twenty pounds on the trip.”
“Twenty pounds!” I marveled, realizing I’d be traveling twice the distance he did.
Overall I got the impression that he was glad to have done it once, glad to have only gone one-way, and glad that he wasn’t going back again anytime soon.
When I hung up the phone, I had a clearer picture of what I was getting myself into and was considerably more anxious. Perhaps I should have been encouraged that someone twenty years older than me had survived the voyage without permanent injury. But my mind kept circling around the deal I believed I’d have to make—the one about being left for dead in the desert.
CHAPTER 1
The boat coasted slowly into the port at Kourioume, on the Niger River, maneuvering its way into an open space among the other wooden crafts already moored there. It was ten o’clock on a late-October night. Only a few scattered lights glowing in the houses onshore broke the total darkness. The air was hot and still except for the faint wakes stirred up by circling swarms of mosquitoes.
Hand-hewn canoes were poled alongside the boat—which itself looked like a canopied canoe the size of a subway car—to carry people, luggage, and cargo to land. Passengers mobbed to the lip of the ship, queuing as if in an experiment in natural selection. They thrust nylon duffel bags, cardboard boxes tied with string, and bundles wrapped in rice sacks into the outstretched hands of the shuttle boat drivers, then climbed quickly down into the shallow hulls of the leaky dugouts. The man I’d been sitting next to for the previous two days waved for me to follow him, so I passed my backpack over and stepped aboard the wobbly little canoe. Once on land, I waited with other passengers for a shared taxi to arrive to take me the last eleven miles of my nine-day journey to Timbuktu—the southern terminus of the Caravan of White Gold, which I hoped to join on its trek through the Sahara along the ancient but still active salt-trading route.
The Caravan of White Gold Page 1