I used my time in Timbuktu to buy some essentials for the trip through the Sahara, including a set of nomad-style clothing that would help me fit in with the azalai and make me more comfortable as I faced the sun, wind, and sand of the desert (a pair of baggy pants; a boubou; a shirt; and three meters of cloth for a turban—all made from the same lightweight sky-blue cotton fabric). I bought a kilo of tobacco to pass out as a gift to men I’d meet along the trail. Perhaps most important, I picked up a few supplementary kilos of dates and peanuts, as well as a box of black tea. I took seriously the warning that John, the archaeology professor, had given me about the Spartan caravan diet. I was startled by the dramatic amount of weight John had lost; I didn’t have twenty pounds to spare.
While at home, pondering how best to prepare for weeks of undernourishment, I developed two completely contradictory theories of physical training. The first was that I should promptly halve my normal food intake, so that by the time I was on the caravan my body would be accustomed to functioning on less and wouldn’t torture me with hunger pains. The second was that I should begin eating all the time, in order to enter the desert with more weight to lose.
I polled all of the doctors I knew, asking which approach was most medically sound. They unanimously advised me to eat, a lot, since bulking up would give my body more time before it went into “starvation mode.” Since the last biology class I had taken was seventeen years earlier, and I had been encouraged to drop out rather than fail, I had no idea what “starvation mode” was, but it sounded bad. I imagined it as a form of cellular cannibalism, as though my body would be throwing a molecular Donner-themed party at which my cells would draw lots and the losers would sacrifice themselves to the winners, becoming microscopic martyrs for the cause of my survival. I hoped the peanuts and dates I bought would help stave this off as long as possible.
The day before I was scheduled to begin the journey across the desert, I met briefly with my guide on the shaded patio of a coffee shop next to the tourist agency office. Walid, an azalai by trade, had the typically slight frame and leathery skin of Saharan nomads. His face was lean, his cheeks angular and clean-shaven. His black mustache curved down around his lips and joined with a close-cropped goatee. A black turban was wound atop his head and under his chin, so it could easily be pulled up over his mouth and nose. Contrary to Alkoye’s promise, Walid couldn’t speak French. Though I was confident we’d be able to communicate in Arabic, which I’d once studied in Cairo, it was a disappointing revelation nonetheless, since I spoke French much better.
Walid was accompanied by his uncle, Lamana, who was fluent in French, which he’d learned over the course of many years of guiding tourists into the desert around Timbuktu. He was Walid’s mentor, and was helping him build a guiding career for himself—one that was easier and paid better than shuttling salt across the desert. Walid was relatively new at leading foreigners and had only taken a handful out on short excursions before he got the call to accompany me on the most grueling trek that either tourist or nomad could make.
Sitting around the wooden table on the café’s patio, Lamana warned me about the hardships I was going to face. The heat would be insufferable. The caravan would march fifteen, maybe twenty hours at a stretch with no rest. Walid and I, Lamana said, would have some flexibility in our daily schedule before we met the caravan at the good grazing grounds where it was mustering six days to the north, but once we joined up with it, I’d have to keep up or be left behind. If I fell ill or got injured, there was no way out. I shouldn’t underestimate the dangers of the crossing, he continued; most local people would think I was nuts for voluntarily embarking on this trip. He said he was nervous for me, and felt responsible for my safety.
I was nervous for me, too, and wondered to myself if I was nuts for signing on to a caravan. Before heading to Mali, I’d scrutinized the risks of the journey—from starvation to injury to murder—through a mental magnifying glass, blowing them up to terrifying proportions. For a week, I forgot everything that drew me to the caravans; I lost my curiosity about the exotic culture in which I was going to immerse; I just wanted to come back alive. I finally broke out of this neurotic eddy, putting the dangers back into a more rational, manageable perspective. They were still substantial, but I was nonetheless swept forth again by visions of camels and nomads and desert.
Trying to ease Lamana’s concerns, I told him I knew what I was getting into and that I’d traveled many a mile through other deserts. I’m not sure I convinced him that I could in fact hack it, but he certainly got the picture that my mind was made up.
“One last thing,” Lamana said. “Do you eat meat?”
When I said yes, of course, he laughed and said he never knew what to expect from foreigners’ dietary habits; many, he continued, inexplicably engaged in a bizarre practice called vegetarianism.
As we rose to leave, I shook hands with Lamana and Walid and said, “See you tomorrow.”
“Ensha’allah,” Lamana replied—meaning “God willing”—the standard Muslim reply to every statement about the future, even the most mundane.
Moments after leaving the café, I was approached by a black man in a Polo-type shirt, jeans, and sneakers, who asked if I was the American who was going to Taoudenni.
“Yes,” I said, surprised that my plans were known by people I had never met. The old adage about news traveling fast in a small town seems to be a universal truth.
“Why didn’t you come see me?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?” I wanted to know.
“You e-mailed me from your home, asking about joining a caravan, and you said we’d discuss it when you got to Timbuktu. My name is Alkoye Touré. And now I learn that you’ve already decided to go with someone else.”
“You are Alkoye Touré? Then who did I arrange my trip with?”
“That was the other Alkoye Touré. There are two of us here in town. Everyone calls him ‘Le Petit’ because he is smaller than me. Did he tell you he was me?”
“No, no,” I said. “I thought he was you because your names are the same, but he never pretended to be you.”
Alkoye “Le Grand” didn’t believe me and chided me for breaking my promise to him. How was I supposed to know, I asked him, that there could possibly be two guides with the same name in the same town? But ignorance of Timbuktu’s unwritten laws was no excuse; guides there lay claim to tourists as though they are property—whoever makes first contact owns them. While I was in the desert, Alkoye “Le Grand” actually complained to the local authorities about this simple matter of mistaken identity, basically accusing Alkoye “Le Petit” of tourist theft. And he won his case—“Le Petit” had to pay “Le Grand” about thirty dollars in compensation for what amounted to trademark infringement.
With everything set for my departure into the great desert, all my nervousness and excitement disappeared. I felt, essentially, blank. Despite all that I had heard and read about crossing the Sahara, I recognized on the deepest of levels that I had no idea what to expect; that the experience of doing it would be so altogether different from reading about it that I wouldn’t really know what it’d be like until after I had done it. I accepted that my course had been set and found myself naturally adopting a calm, open-minded attitude, in which I felt prepared to receive whatever lay ahead, as ready as I could be without knowing exactly for what.
Then, that evening, I felt myself getting sick. Suddenly, starvation was the least of my concerns.
I awoke in the morning with sinuses swollen and tender. My nose was so clogged, I had to gulp for air like a beached catfish. Mucus trickled steadily from my nostrils; I was chain-sneezing; my neck and shoulders ached. And I was hot, really hot, and not just because of the ambient air temperature. I felt like the NyQuil poster boy.
Had I been at home, I would have lain around nursing myself. I was hardly fit to strike out into the Sahara. I briefly and seriously considered delaying my departure for at least a day. I’m no reckless adv
enturer; I like to come back from my trips alive. But I knew that the caravan wasn’t going to wait for me. If Walid and I arrived late at the grazing grounds where we were supposed to meet it, it would likely be gone. It was a risk I didn’t want to take. After getting final approval from my internal actuary, whose job it is to coolly weigh the probabilities of all possible disasters, I decided to go for it. By the time I reached Lamana’s house on the northern edge of town, sweat was seeping from my every pore and through my clothes.
Lamana, Walid, and I followed the cratered dirt lanes past the last of the mud-brick houses and into a dusty clearing strewn with torn plastic bags, scraps of fraying, fading fabric, and the heaped remains of slaughtered goats. Thorn trees quivered in the hot breeze under morning skies milky with haze. Children pumped water from a well into bright green and-yellow buckets, pausing to shout, smile, and wave their dark, skinny arms as we passed. This was the shore of civilization, where the sands of the Sahara washed up on the outskirts of Timbuktu. The children, I thought, were like the throngs that bid farewell to cruise ships, tossing confetti from the docks, only this ocean was made of sand and our ships had four legs and humps.
Our two camels were loaded with enough rice, millet flour, biscuits, green tea, and sugar, plus a few kilos each of peanuts and dates, to last two people for forty days—a biblical-sounding length of time. All of our food fit into two watermelon-sized rice sacks, except for the meat—half of a raw, freshly skinned goat carcass that was lashed to the outside of our cargo. Four rubber inner tubes, cut in half and with their ends tied off, would hold just enough water to sustain us between wells.
Our supplies were divided between our camels; each had a load slung over its back, resting atop pads made of desert grasses that equalized the baggage over the camels’ ribs. We carried neither a tent nor a tarp. We had no saddles, just the blankets we would later sleep on tied over our camels’ humps. I had my backpack, while Walid brought a knockoff nylon duffel printed with the word ABIDAS.
For a journey of nearly a thousand miles across some of the toughest terrain on earth, it looked like we had underpacked.
The tail of the lead camel was tied to the lower jaw of the second with a rope of handwoven grasses. Another rope was cinched around the lead camel’s jaw, which Walid carried over his shoulder. We marched north, into the open desert. Thinking superstitiously of Orpheus and Lot’s wife, I didn’t look back.
Lamana accompanied us over the first series of dunes. Before he sent us off and returned to town, we paused. Lamana called Walid aside and gave him a few minutes’ worth of hushed, last-minute counsel, like a concerned coach about to watch a young athlete take the field for a big game. Then he turned to me.
Shaking my hand warmly, an expression of true caring on his face, he cautioned me one last time about the dangers ahead. If I wanted to back out, he said suggestively, this was the time. Seeing I had no intention of doing so even though I was obviously physically unwell, he advised me to meet the desert with courage and offered a final, perplexing warning: “Allah is compassionate, but He doesn’t speak French.” I didn’t bother to ask if He spoke English.
Lamana, his blue robe flapping in the wind, turned back toward Timbuktu. Walid and I continued north, side by side. I was wearing my new blue pants, a light, long-sleeved buttondown shirt, my turban, and a pair of sandals. Walid wore his black turban, lime-green plastic flip-flops, and a blue, green, and white striped caftan that hung to the middle of his calves. We made small talk in Arabic to break the silence. Since I hadn’t spoken it in five years, I had to keep things simple.
Walid, I learned, was thirty years old. He had grown up in the desert among the Berabish tribe, living in cloth tents, moving with herds of goats, sheep, and camels from one sparse pasture to the next, and had ridden with the salt caravans since he was fifteen, making two or three trips to Taoudenni each year. Like most nomads, Walid was completely unschooled. I found he did know a tiny bit of French—the phrases C’est bien, Ce n’est pas bien, and the words grand, petit, and chameau.
Walid’s camel was aptly, if not creatively, named L’beyya, which means “white” in Walid’s dialect. Mine was called Lachmar, which means “red,” though he was more of a rusty brown with a tuft of white on his hump and a little under his chin from age. At fifteen, Lachmar was five years older than L’beyya. Neither was old for a camel—they can live to thirty—but L’beyya was at his physical peak. Lachmar, on the other hand, had slid into middle age. He had at most a few more trips to Taoudenni left in him, and this, Walid said, might be his last.
Our simple dialogue required more effort than I like to admit. I was forced to improvise with the random remnants of my Arabic vocabulary that remained accessible; the bulk of it lay buried beneath the sands of forgetfulness like ancient Egyptian relics, which I hoped I’d be able to dredge up before too long.
Thankfully, I could already tell that Walid and I had a natural linguistic connection. When speaking a foreign language, I find that some people are much easier to talk to than others, for no reason I can explain. I’ve been in situations where I’ve sat with two people, one of whom I can communicate easily with, the other hardly at all. At such times, the person to whom I can relate serves as a translator of sorts: I’ll say something in Arabic (or whatever language I’m trying to speak), he’ll repeat the same Arabic words I’ve just spoken, and the third person will then understand. That person will reply in Arabic and the translator will repeat those words to me, again in Arabic, which I then understand. It makes no sense at all. But the fact of the matter is that the connection is either there, or it isn’t. That Walid and I could already communicate as well as we did was a good sign, considering that I was speaking a crippled Egyptian Arabic and his native dialect was Hasinaya. We also shared silence comfortably. When our first conversation ran its natural course, I retreated into my own mental world, which revolved entirely around my health, or lack thereof.
Walking briskly alongside Walid, my nose demanded perpetual wiping and blowing. The inside of my mouth, which I had to keep open in order to breathe, was parched from the arid air. Though the overcast sky buffered us from the glare of the sun, I felt dangerously hot from the inside out.
Thus my long-dreamed-of odyssey began. Rather than feeling the thrill of setting off on a great adventure, I just felt like crap. Instead of contemplating the immense desert I was entering, I was busy hyper-scrutinizing my physical state, trying to divine whether each minute change in my body foreshadowed an imminent recovery or a slide into full-blown illness. I tried to assuage myself with rationalizations: If Gordon Laing could traverse the desert after being hacked up by his Tuareg assailants, surely I could survive a sinus infection. But I couldn’t talk myself out of the fear that I’d made a potentially fatal mistake by starting the trek in such a debilitated condition. I was already breaking that perfunctory promise I’d made to loved ones to “be safe.”
My girlfriend, Karen, was less than thrilled with this undertaking to begin with, but since she’d stuck with me four years already, she understood that there was no holding me back and was as supportive as she could be. A year or so earlier, when I had set out to pioneer a solo trek through a remote mountain range in Mongolia, she was less so. Then, since I was completely alone for weeks on end and had no way of contacting home, she was afraid I would die in an accident and simply vanish in the wilderness.
This time, even when considering the objective dangers involved in crossing the Sahara, she was much more relaxed. “At least you’ll be with other people,” she said, explaining her attitude. “In the worst-case scenario, someone will know what happened to you, and I’ll be able to find out.” Thus I learned that my death wouldn’t be such a tragedy to her as long as she could have some closure around it.
Some of my friends and family had urged me to carry a satellite phone, or at least a GPS, in case of emergency, but since the camel drivers never used them, I felt like that would be violating the spirit of the adventure. I rem
embered an interview I’d once read, given in 2001, by the then ninety-year-old Wilfred Thesiger, author of the classic Arabian Sands and arguably the most intrepid desert explorer of the twentieth century. At one point, he was asked what he thought of biologist J. Michael Fay’s two thousand-mile-long trek through the jungles of Africa with a bunch of pygmies. Fay, Thesiger was told, carried a satellite phone and could have supplies air-dropped if he needed them. “Well, you see, that wrecks it!” Thesiger pronounced. “Then you know he’s in no danger.” Referring to his own excursions through Arabia’s Empty Quarter in the 1940s, during which starvation was more than once a looming possibility, he said, “A telephone would have ruined the whole thing.”
I agreed with Thesiger wholeheartedly. Part of true adventure—and the way explorers traveled by necessity until recent times—is pushing beyond the reach of outside aid, managing situations with the resources one has, being smart while praying for a touch of divine grace. You perceive your environment and yourself differently if help is merely a phone call away. I didn’t want the safety net. But feeling as miserable as I did heading into the desert, I wondered if I’d end up regretting that decision.
I also began to question whether the personal goal I’d set for myself was laughably unrealistic.
One of the essential tensions in my life is the conflict between the love I have for my home and the insatiable wanderlust that provokes me to leave it for the farthest corners of the earth. I find my kindred spirit in the character of Sindbad the Sailor, who revels in his life in Baghdad surrounded by family and friends, yet can’t resist the lure of travel. Time and again he is drawn to the port city of Basra, whence he sets sail across the sea. Inevitably, he stumbles into the most fantastic and calamitous of adventures.
The Caravan of White Gold Page 3