The Caravan of White Gold

by Michael Benanav

  In his most famous exploit, Sindbad finds himself shipwrecked on a deserted island that happens to be the nesting ground for the Rukh, a bird so huge and terrible that it blocks the sun when it spreads its wings and “feeds its young on elephants.” Its eggs are as big as a house. Sindbad concludes that his only way off the island is with the Rukh, so while the great bird sleeps, he lashes himself to its talons with his turban. The next morning, the Rukh takes off in search of food, soaring high above the earth while Sindbad prays for his life. At last it lands in a valley teeming with serpents the size of palm trees. When it touches down, the terrified Sindbad quickly unties himself before the Rukh soars away with a snake in its claws.

  As it is told, the floor of the Valley of Serpents is littered with precious gems. Men from the surrounding area have learned to harvest the riches without having to face the snakes—they slaughter sheep on the mountain above and cast the skinned animals down into the valley, where diamonds stick to the meat. Eagles and vultures swoop down and carry the jewel-laden carrion up to the mountaintop, where the men chase them away and pick the diamonds from the flesh. Sindbad, desperate, binds himself to a carcass and is lifted along with it to safety by an eagle. With the help of the gem dealers, he finally makes it back to Baghdad.

  In the midst of adventures like these, Sindbad’s only thought is returning home alive. He is always grateful when he arrives there safely, but sooner or later is inevitably infected with the urge to set sail again.

  In the novel Arabian Nights and Days, which is loosely based on 1001 Arabian Nights, Nobel Prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz points out Sindbad’s greatest flaw: As Sindbad is about to leave on another journey, a wise doctor says to him, “Go in peace, then return laden with diamonds and wisdom, but do not repeat the same mistake.” A puzzled expression crosses Sindbad’s face, and the doctor continues: “The Rukh had not previously flown with a man, and what did you do? You left it at the first opportunity….”

  “I hardly believed I would make my escape,” Sindbad replies in defense.

  “The Rukh flies from an unknown world to an unknown world,” the doctor says, “and it leaps from the peak of Waq to the peak of Qaf, so be not content with anything for it is the wish of the Sublime.”

  Sindbad’s mistake was his failure to appreciate the rarity of his circumstance, so preoccupied was he with saving himself. It was a message that resonated deeply with me. Reflecting on my own adventures alone in the Mongolian wilderness, I saw I’d made the same one. While the experience was deeply rewarding in many ways, I had failed to squeeze everything possible out of it. I struggled with a gnawing anxiety over being so far from civilization for weeks on end, with no possible aid but that which nomadic herders—who didn’t even have aspirin—could provide. I felt rushed, as though the sooner I could complete the trek, the greater chance I’d have of emerging safely from the mountains. I could have explored its canyons, meadows, and ridges for weeks more, but was compelled by this low-grade fear to get out sooner rather than later. Once I returned home and slowly evaluated my experiences, I regretted the opportunities I’d forsaken due to my own preoccupation with escaping alive.

  I took to heart the advice given to Sindbad by the doctor; I was determined not to repeat my mistake in the Sahara. I likened traveling with a caravan to flying with the Rukh; I set myself not only to survive, but to enjoy and derive value from the journey, to appreciate being exactly where I was, no matter how difficult it became.

  Struck with fever, feeling like my head was packed with lead as I walked my first miles in the Sahara, I couldn’t help scaling back my lofty goals. Not even an hour into the forty-day voyage, I already felt like I was in trouble. I just wasn’t sure how much.

  CHAPTER 2

  After an hour or so on foot, Walid decided it was time for us to mount our camels. We stopped, and Walid grasped Lachmar’s lead while softly uttering, “Shhh. Shhhh. Shhhh.” The camel complied by kneeling to the ground. I clambered onto my blanket, but before I was settled, Lachmar took to his feet, steeply lurching forward and back, nearly pitching me off. Half panicked, I instinctively grabbed for the rope that crisscrossed the cargo pads in front of me. Once Lachmar was standing and I’d regained my composure, Walid told me to take off my sandals—for true cameleers ride barefoot—which he then tied onto a dangling piece of cord.

  After making sure that Lachmar was still tied securely to L’beyya’s tail, Walid took L’beyya’s lead and walked a few steps to get his camel moving. Then he grabbed the animal’s left ear with his left hand. In a sequence so smooth and rapid that all the motions blended into one, L’beyya lowered his head to the height of Walid’s, and Walid sprang gracefully up onto the camel’s neck, landing on it with his shin. L’beyya raised his head, and Walid along with it, while Walid turned to the right so he faced backward, the front of his body pressing against the camel’s. He rode like that for a minute, making a few adjustments to his improvised saddle, then slid effortlessly up on top of the hump. It was a feat worthy of any trick rodeo.

  Thanks to Lachmar’s long legs and arched back, my head was twice as high as it had been when I was on the ground. From my new perch, I had commanding views of the landscape around me. The desert spread out in all directions like a giant rumpled carpet, its patterns woven with green and beige. Long, low rolling ridges broke up the flat desert plains, running parallel to each other and giving the level areas between them the feel of shallow basins. Clumps of tall, slender grasses sprouted from the sand, speckling the sandy earth like leopard spots. Here and there, thorn trees grew; their bony branches spread from twisted trunks, forming crowns that resembled cumulus clouds with flat bottoms and bulging, rounded tops. In each of the valleys between the hills, nomad tents were pitched. With broad roofs flaring out like wings from a peaked center and one side open like a gaping mouth, they looked like giant white manta rays. Herds of goats wandered untended. Lone camels lifted their heads to watch us pass. Though I knew that the southernmost part of the desert—called the Azawad—was the most livable, I was surprised to see the earth dusted with a fine layer of grass—a blessed result of the recent rains. But even it was far more arid than the Sahara of ages past.

  In prehistoric eras, parts of the Sahara were covered by rain forests, mangroves, and swamps. Rivers flowed, emptying into large inland seas that expanded in wet years and retreated in dry ones, leaving behind layer upon layer of mineralized sediment with each major cycle—the process responsible for creating the salt beds of Taoudenni. All of this water was a key contributor to an ecosystem that, until the first millennium BC, teemed with life.

  Dinosaurs thrived in their day, including the plant-eating Paralititan, the second largest dinosaur ever discovered, whose skeleton was pulled from the sands outside Bahariyya Oasis, Egypt, in 2001. Prehistoric fish eaters have been unearthed in regions that now are among the driest in the world. In the barren wastes of Niger, a Tuareg chief once told a paleontologist that he knew “where a lot of big camel bones were lying around.” For generations, the Tuareg had told their kids that the bones were the remains of a fabled monster called Jobar; in tribute, the newly discovered dinosaur species was named Jobaria tiguidensis.

  In times closer to our own, elephants, giraffes, lions, ostriches, leopards, and gazelles—among many other animals—roamed the lush Sahara. Crocodiles, hippopotami, and fish filled its waters. Many of the early Saharan peoples were hunters, as depicted in Algeria’s primitive rock art. Others were fishermen; bone fishhooks and harpoon tips have been discovered deep in the desert. When in Dakhla Oasis, in Egypt, I came across fossilized shark teeth scattered among the surrounding plateaus, and found fossilized snails atop the mesas near Siwa.

  Today the bulk of the Sahara is so dry that annual rainfall is measured in millimeters, and some places wait many years between showers. Of course, the Sahara’s aquatic life has all but disappeared; now even few large mammals can survive there. Jackals stick close to water sources; gazelles have a much greater ra
nge, but the only large wild mammal truly fit for life in the heart of the desert is the addax antelope. Like the camel, the body temperature of the addax can surpass 110 degrees before it breaks into a sweat, helping it conserve water. Also like the camel, the addax’s respiratory system is designed so that the air it inhales through its nose cools off the blood flowing to its brain to prevent it from overheating. Blessed with an ability to glean all the moisture it requires from the vegetation it eats, an addax has no need to drink water, ever. The one element of Saharan life to which the addax cannot adapt is its hunters, who prize the animal for its long, black, spiraled horns, its hide, and its meat.

  The people who once dwelt across the length and breadth of the Sahara are now confined to its fringes, where just enough grass grows to support their livestock; along the route to Taoudenni, herding families range no farther than Araouane, an isolated village 150 miles north of Timbuktu. The salt caravans, however, penetrate the desert far past the limits of normal human—and even animal—habitation.

  Figuring out how to get comfortable on Lachmar’s back temporarily distracted me from my obsession with my health. Timidly, so as not to lose my balance while the motion of the camel rocked me forward and backward and up and down, I experimented with different positions. I laid my legs to the right of the hump, then to the left, then tried straddling it. Each shift earned me only shortlived relief from the pounding friction between my camel and my ass. As Lachmar—a promiscuous eater, like all camels—lunged his head toward every small plant we passed, I had to fight to maintain my equilibrium against his sudden thrusts to the side. I looked with envy at the ease with which Walid was nonchalantly perched atop L’beyya, his posture perfect.

  Meanwhile, I was constantly blowing my nose. Concerned that I’d burn through my small supply of tissue, I was as conservative with it as possible. After each blow, I’d hold the soggy paper up in the air, which was so arid that the tissue dried completely and was able to be reused in less than a minute.

  After a few hours, we stopped for lunch in a sandy hollow. We unloaded the camels and loosely tied their front ankles together so they could graze unburdened but couldn’t stray far. By this time I was spent. We spread our blankets under the thin shade of a thorn tree, upon the spikes of which Walid had impaled our goat carcass. He quickly set to making a batch of dorno—the nomad version of an energy shake—scooping handfuls of millet flour into a stainless-steel mixing bowl, then adding water from one of the inner tubes, plus a little bit of sugar. When it had attained the consistency of watery gruel, he stirred it with a cassette-sized chunk of solid salt. He raised the bowl to his lips, sipped it, and, satisfied, passed the bowl to me and urged me to drink. What on this day struck me as a good substitute for papier mâché paste soon became something I loved, even craved. Hundreds of sand colored grasshoppers flecked with tiny brown triangles, as though they were wearing desert-issue army fatigues, swarmed in from nowhere, drawn to the few drops of water that had dribbled on the ground.

  Until this moment, I’d had the fantasy that I would purify all the water I drank with iodine. Realizing it would be impossible to do so and that it’d be pointless to treat just some of it, I handled the threat of waterborne bacteria the most intelligent way I could think of—by ignoring it. I hoped my gut was strong enough to take care of itself.

  Once the dorno was finished, Walid began gathering dead branches over which to make tea and cook a pot of noodles. I made a feeble effort to help him, but was so exhausted I was dizzy. He urged me just to sit and rest, so I went back to the blanket, more than a little ashamed. I felt like the kind of tourist I never wanted to be—useless—relaxing while the native guide did all the work—the quintessential white man. But I also knew that the best thing I could do for both of us was to recover as quickly as possible. I swallowed four ibuprofen and promptly passed out.

  Walid woke me about fifteen minutes later, holding out a small glass and repeating “Kess, kess,” which I quickly learned was the nomad call to tea. Had I been in his position, I would have just let me sleep, but to these desert people, tea drinking is one of life’s non-negotiables, taking precedence over virtually all else. It is such an ingrained ritual, it seems as though it’s been part of their culture since prehistoric times. In fact, tea was first imported into this part of Africa in the early 1800s. For nearly a hundred years, it remained a luxury item, consumed mostly by the wealthy. Only in the early twentieth century was it adopted by the culture at large. It was so popular, and addictive, that Muslim scholars wrote long opinions on whether drinking it was permitted by the Koran.

  Historically and today, the everyman’s brew in this region is green tea from China—though not because the nomads were aware of its myriad health benefits. The British deemed green tea to be undrinkable, so their merchants used crates of it as ballast for their ships. When they docked at the Moroccan port of al-Swaira, the tea was unloaded and sold off cheaply, then the holds of the vessels were filled with African goods.

  After drinking three shot-sized glasses—the number required by the ritual—I fell back to sleep.

  When lunch was ready, Walid woke me again and passed me a metal plate heaped with noodles and slivers of goat meat, drizzled with goat butter and palm oil, sprinkled unintentionally with sand. I was hardly hungry but the food wasn’t bad, so I stomached what I could, prodded by Walid’s Jewish mothering. “Eat, eat,” he urged, “for your strength.” With only one spoon between us, which was used for serving, I began my longest-ever streak of eating only with my fingers. Walid dined directly from the charred metal cauldron; though the Muslim holy month of Ramadan had begun a few days earlier, the azalai and the Taoudenni salt miners are exempt from observing the month long sunrise-to-sunset fast, with no divine repercussions, due to the rigors of their jobs. In the end, my leftovers were dumped back into the pot, covered with a lid, and saved for later.

  Thanks to my nap, I felt energetic enough to attempt a conversation. I pulled out the few photos I’d brought from home, figuring that if they were even close to being worth the proverbial thousand words, we’d be communicating pretty successfully. Since most of the images were of things that were once part of my vocabulary—family members, girlfriend, house, pets, landscapes near my home—talking about them gave me a chance to use the words I remembered and refresh some that had slipped my mind, with the help of my Arabic phrase book. When I showed him a shot of one of my dogs, taken at White Sands National Monument, Walid took it from my hands, his eyes wide with surprise. It looked like parts of the Sahara, he said, hardly believing it was a picture of America. I explained, in the broadest of strokes, that the States were filled with a mixture of deserts, forests, mountains, cities, rivers, and seacoasts. He nodded thoughtfully, as though absorbing something of great importance. At everything I said that he understood, he made a clucking sound from the back of his throat, which I quickly learned was the nomad’s way of signifying comprehension or agreement—like the American uh-huh.

  Near four o’clock, when the worst of the day’s heat had passed, Walid said he was going to round up the camels. Trying to make up for my earlier uselessness, I went with him. They had wandered about a quarter mile away and were munching on a bush. Their split, prehensile upper lips worked like hands, grasping and tearing away prickly leafed twigs, then passing the fodder back between their teeth. I took Lachmar’s lead and guided him back to our gear. For the first time all day I was overcome with elation, looking at myself as though from the outside, towing my camel across the Sahara. This was the dream coming true.

  I helped load the camels, hoisting and holding a bag in place on one side of the hump while Walid held a bag on the opposite side and secured them to each other over the cargo pads. Tied just to each other, not to the pads, the bags relied only on the integrity of the knots and the laws of physics to remain in place. I’d expected the azalai to use specialized knots for rigging their loads, but Walid was content with the simplest twists that would likely do the job. Given
that most of the ropes were split, frayed, mended, and generally unsound, I was glad that there was no rock-climbing component to this adventure.

  We set off on foot, then mounted after a few miles, as would be our pattern. The air was cooler now, and though I was still perpetually wiping my nose, I felt hopeful. The sky had cleared above us. We marched through the glow of a lustrous copper sunset and into the ghostly light cast by the almost half-moon. The world was shades of indigo and steel. The hills before us rose like rollers in a dark sea. To the south, shadowy plumes obscured the stars and lightning flashed, but the storm was far from us.

  While we rode through the night, Walid occasionally gave a shout, an abbreviated “Hoy!” I intuited that I was supposed to answer in kind, and did. I wasn’t sure if this was his way of feeling less alone, or if the call and return was simply his way of making sure that I was okay and still with him. It inspired in me a sense of true companionship, cementing the knowledge that we were in this together.

  By the time we made camp atop a sandy dune, the moon had long since set. We unloaded the camels and laid out our blankets. Walid built a tea fire, and I collapsed, my resources drained and my head still draining. I didn’t bother pulling out my sleeping bag; wearing my boubou, which was like being wrapped in a sheet, provided enough warmth.

  Though I was sure to be wakened for tea, I couldn’t help myself from drifting off. But before I fell asleep, I was jolted by a blaring noise that abruptly broke the absolute silence of the desert; Walid was searching for stations on a shortwave radio. Each one was awash in static, but he was not easily deterred. Because I never carry a radio when I’m in the desert, that Walid had one out here took me by complete surprise. I think of going to into the wilderness as a time to leave the civilized world behind and immerse solely in the natural. Walid, however, had no purist ideals about what it was supposed to mean to be in the desert; to him, this was the civilized world.