The Caravan of White Gold

by Michael Benanav

  Walid asked what time it was at around eleven o’clock. When I told him, he said we’d take a break at noon. At eleven thirty, with my body revolting against the impact between it and the camel, I decided to get down and walk the last half hour. I told Walid, who guided Lachmar to his haunches, and I dismounted.

  The camels walked about half a pace faster than Walid and I normally did, but every ounce of extra effort was worth it for the relief of not riding on one. And despite the soaring temperature, the uneven terrain, and my runny nose, if there was one thing at which I knew I could push myself, it was walking long distances.

  By the time it was noon, however, I was thirsty and overheated. Here, the trees were few and far between, so when I saw one ahead that offered good shade, I told Walid the time, hoping he’d take the hint. He said we’d continue for another fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes came and went. Half an hour passed. We didn’t even slow down. The sun pounded through my turban, sapping my energy, bringing to mind those old anti-drug ads with the frying egg—this is your brain in the Sahara. Thinking we’d break at any time, I didn’t want to ask Walid to stop the camels so I could get on. I began imagining the unlikely possibility of running into a convoy of tourists in Land Cruisers with coolers of cold drinks. So much for having this caravan thing licked.

  We didn’t stop until after one. Exhausted, I managed to help unload the camels and gather an armload of firewood before collapsing in the pool of shade cast by a tree. Small birds that looked like miniature falcons had taken shelter in its branches. Legions of grasshoppers alit on my arms and face, sucking invisible amounts of moisture from my skin.

  I greedily downed the dorno Walid mixed up, its saltysweetness slaking my thirst, its sheer quantity sating my hunger. While the tea was brewing, I lay down with my eyes closed, thinking. One of the reasons why the last hour had been so tough was that I had only prepared myself to walk until noon. Trusting Walid’s word, I hadn’t saved any mental reserves, which are far more crucial to endurance than physical strength. Had Walid told me we weren’t going to stop until one, I could have paced my expectations and walked it willingly, rather than as though every step taken past noon was an effort beyond the call of duty.

  It dawned on me that one of the most challenging aspects of this journey was going to be my total lack of control. Not only was I conclusively not in control of my circumstances, I hardly even knew what was going on. I had only the vaguest sense of where we were; I had no idea what the lay of the land looked like up ahead or how far we needed to travel in a day. It would have helped if Walid could’ve explained it to me, but obviously even when he tried to in terms of time, his estimates were unreliable. I wondered if this was what it felt like for the groups of teenagers I led in the wilderness before they got used to the routine and learned to read maps; I was filled with empathy for them.

  Accepting the reality that I was not in control, I saw that I had to mentally steel myself to travel onward forever. I couldn’t afford to hope that we would stop to rest or eat at any given time, since when that hope is dashed, desperation sets in and endurance wanes. I decided then and there that the only way to survive this trek without going insane was to be prepared to continue on into eternity, with no known goal, never allowing false expectation to drain my will again.

  We set out again at around four. Nashuf struck off to the west, leaving Walid and I to head north alone. My spirits were rejuvenated by the rest and the water I’d consumed, like a parched plant sprung back to life after a rain shower. Walid and I talked while we walked. He told me he had a wife, who was twenty-one, and two sons, ages one and three. Usually they lived in the desert, he said, but sometimes they stayed in Timbuktu, when he was selling the salt he returned with from the mines. Right now, his wife was at her family’s camp a few days north of where we were, where she and the kids were spending the month of Ramadan.

  “Which do you like better,” I asked, “the desert or Timbuktu?”

  “Ah, Timbuktu,” Walid said without a shade of doubt.

  “Why?”

  “It is easier there. There are houses and stores. I hope one day to live there, mostly so my sons will be able to go to school.”

  “You don’t want them to be azalai?”

  “No,” Walid said, shaking his head. “That life is hard and dangerous. I want them to have good jobs and live long.”

  After a pause, Walid said, “Maybe in a few years you can take one of them to America with you so he can learn to speak English? Then he could surely have a good life.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, knowing it would never happen.

  As the sun began to set, slipping behind a gauzy curtain of haze that hung over the horizon, Walid and I took to our camels once more. In a final show of strength, the sun amped up its assault, blazing intensely before finally giving up and dropping below the rim of the earth. The searing breeze turned deliciously cool. The desert breathed a sigh of relief. At last I could let down my guard and revel in my environs, watching happily as the sky turned into a swirl of pink and violet and bronze as darkness slowly seeped from the east. I realized that the safest place in the Sahara was not a place at all, but a time: night. Making it to sunset, I thought, was the one goal I could pin my hopes on every day, since it would never disappoint. I unbuttoned my shirt to let the refreshing evening air wash over as much of my skin as possible.

  We rode late into the night. Again, with each passing hour, it became increasingly painful to stay on Lachmar’s back. But my new attitude of riding on forever was already serving me. I accepted my suffering as yet one more thing to ignore, refusing to let it break my spirit. I sang songs to pass the time and tried to identify the constellations that appeared in the clear, haze-free circle of sky directly overhead. So far, we had been following relatively distinct tire tracks much of the time. When they disappeared in sandier ground, as they surely would, which stars would be our markers? And how would we be able to stay on course if the whole sky was obscured? I was eager to learn.

  At last, some seven hours later, we stopped to camp. We performed the typical tasks of unloading the camels and foraging firewood.

  Joining Walid by the fire, my butt was so tender I had trouble sitting down. I put a hand down my pants to inspect myself and discovered two sticky, bloody wounds the size of half dollars, where the friction had been most constant. Never having been much of a horseman, I always thought the term “saddle sores” referred to muscle pain, not actual sores. Though they were distressing enough as they were, my main concern was preventing them from getting worse.

  While waiting for the rice to cook, it occurred to me that this scene—two men sitting around a small fire in the Sahara after traveling all day with nothing but their clothes between them and the elements, moving at a pace no faster than a camel’s—could have been lifted, virtually unchanged, from any time over the past thousand-plus years. It was as though I’d crossed a bridge spanning a millennium into a land hardly touched by the passage of time. The minor modernizations that had been adopted, like the stainless-steel bowls that had replaced hollowed gourds, or the rubber inner tubes that sometimes replaced goatskin water sacks, were small refinements to the existing culture, changing nothing essential about it. And many of the technologies—handmade ropes, fire, the camels themselves—were the same as they’d always been. Though I had hardly begun to immerse myself in it, there was an obvious air of permanence about this way of life; change was gradual and served to fine-tune a system of survival that had worked for so long in the world’s harshest inhabited lands. The roots of this age-old lifestyle were hardy and deep.

  Only a radical intrusion from the modern world, I thought, could shake its foundations—like trucks taking over the salt trade.

  CHAPTER 3

  Pain. Melancholy. Resignation.

  These were the stages I passed through in the minutes after Walid woke me, as I lay wrapped in my blanket staring blankly at the cool slate sky. The pain was purely physical, twisting the muscles
of my lower back and stabbing through the sores on my ass. Knowing I would have to get up, melancholy set in; I longed to return to sleep like a lover parted from his beloved. Finally, I resigned myself to the reality that this was my reality. Accepting it grudgingly, I steeled myself for the day and rose. The teapot was already on the fire. I packed my bag while it brewed, then sat with Walid and ate our humble Tuareg breakfast.

  Walid told me we were about twenty kilometers south of the well at Douaya, where we would refill our inner tubes and let the camels drink. Then he stood and said he was going to round up the camels. They had disappeared out of sight, yet Walid walked off confidently, as though he had long-distance X-ray vision that enabled him to see beyond the horizon line formed by a low ridge of sand. Of course he must have followed their tracks, but there were so many camel tracks from others that had passed this place that discerning those of Lachmar and L’beyya was a feat nearly equal to that of seeing through the earth.

  While he was gone, I chugged a liter of water, then refilled my two bottles. I fumbled with the mouth of the inner tube, trying to tie it securely. No matter what kind of knot I tied, water still leaked from between the tube’s pursed lips. When Walid returned with Lachmar and L’beyya, I asked him for help. He quickly assessed my work, untied my knot, then folded the open end of the tube over so it capped itself. He rolled it tightly across the fold, then tied a knot like a clove hitch, but not quite. He made no effort to show me how to do it; he was only concerned with doing it fast.

  Speed is an ingrained value in Saharan travel, since the faster you move, the better your chance of making it to your destination alive. Everything Walid did, apart from making tea, he did quickly, and the same held true with the other camel drivers I would soon meet. It was as though they had two settings—High and Off. Thus Walid, adhering to the desert ethos of “the quicker the better,” didn’t take the time to teach me anything. This was no outward bound course; he clearly thought of himself as a guide, not an instructor, and had little interest in developing my self-sufficiency (and even less in facilitating my personal growth). If I wanted to learn how to travel like an azalai, I realized, I was going to have to watch Walid closely, then try things myself and learn from my mistakes.

  When we loaded Lachmar, Walid arranged the bags and positioned my blanket farther back on the camel’s hump. This, he assured me, would be much more comfortable. Once our gear was slung, we headed north.

  Here, rather than flat plains broken by hills, the ground was pitched at a low incline, forming gradual mile-long ramps that fell sharply on their lee sides, then slowly rose again. Thorn trees were scattered more sparsely than before, but enough grass still grew to tinge the earth a faint green. As the vegetation thinned, nomad tents became fewer and farther between.

  My head, though still dripping slightly, was much improved. And once we established a rhythm, the pain in my back disappeared and my sores itched but didn’t hurt. Even so, when Walid suggested we mount up after a couple of hours, I told him I was going to stay on my feet. I felt I had to play to my strength—my ability to walk—and compensate for my weakness—my tender butt. Walid shrugged and leapt atop L’beyya.

  Immediately I had to double my pace in order to stay even with the camels. I walked as fast I could without breaking into a run, my legs whirling in a blue blur of motion, my heart a race, my feet sinking into the soft earth before striking ground solid enough to propel me forward. I realized that the previous day, when I had walked while Walid and Nashuf rode, Walid had slowed our camels’ natural gait to match the pace of Nashuf’s string of loaded animals. On their own, L’beyya and Lachmar moved at the limits of my ability to keep up.

  Soon I had to measure my breathing, inhaling as I took four steps, then exhaling for the next four. My upper body felt disconnected from my legs; I began to imagine myself with the torso of a man, the legs of a machine; a sci-fi centaur. Meanwhile, though I wasn’t yet overheating, I became unbelievably, unquenchably thirsty. My mouth felt like it was coated with glue. I considered giving up and getting on, but knew that every hour I could stay off Lachmar gave my sores another hour to heal.

  Each successive ramp of earth was virtually identical to the one before it; there were no prominent landmarks. I had no way of judging how much progress we were making, and there were certainly no signs indicating how many kilometers remained to Douaya. To stave off the feeling of hopeless desperation to which I’d succumbed the day before, I began controlling my experience the only way I could—with my watch. Though I couldn’t set geographic goals for myself, I could set temporal ones. If the well was about twenty kilometers from where we had camped and we were covering about five kilometers per hour, that worked out to four hours of travel, which would put us there a little after 11 AM. Figuring in the distinct possibility that Walid had been less than exact in his estimate, I imagined we’d more likely arrive between noon and 1 PM. Without investing much in reaching the well at any particular time, I decided I would walk until eleven, then ride the rest of the way, however much longer that was. This allowed me to set a mental destination for the speed-walking portion of the morning and, after going for about four hours non-stop, would give me a needed break just as the day moved into the hottest hours.

  As I struggled to keep up, I told myself that this was the last trip I would need to take that was even close to this physically demanding. From here on out, I’d be content to travel to places that were fascinating and foreign, but not so tough. As I mused about where those places might be, I laughed silently. I was sure Sindbad had said the same thing to himself many times.

  Precisely at eleven, I told Walid I was ready to ride. He stopped, couched Lachmar, and I got on. Sitting farther behind the peak of the hump made all the difference in the world. The friction between my body and Lachmar’s was drastically reduced and my legs fell naturally into positions of relative comfort. Perhaps, I rationalized, it was good that I had suffered so for the first two days, since now, in comparison, the ride was nearly tolerable.

  As the sun neared its zenith, some divine hand cranked the cosmic thermostat all the way up. The heat battered me around the head, and though my turban softened the blows, I was soon reeling like a boxer after a rough round. Gradually overcome with lethargy, I swayed back and forth limply, as though my bones had begun to melt. Once noon passed, I stopped looking at my watch. Time didn’t matter anymore; we would get there when we got there.

  At last, as we gained the crest of a ridge, a deep valley of sand stretched before us from the eastern to the western horizon. This was Douaya. It was completely barren, grazed to the last blade of grass by animals that came to drink—hundreds of which were clustered together in groups, camels with camels, goats with goats, sheep with sheep, donkeys with donkeys. They kept a respectful distance from the mound that rose in the middle of the basin, waiting to ascend and take their turn at the troughs.

  The wells between Timbuktu and Taoudenni were originally dug by nomads hundreds of years ago. They were known to run dry, to collapse, or be buried by sand according to the whims of the weather. Among the other uncontrollables of traveling this route, the wells were perhaps the wildest cards of all. In earlier days, caravans rationed water strictly in case they had to travel farther than expected before arriving at a good well. This strategy was far from foolproof, as many a desert traveler perished when wells they relied upon proved unreliable. In an effort to increase safety in the region while winning a few Saharan hearts and minds, the French dug the wells deeper and lined them with cement.

  Walid and I stopped about fifty yards from the well. A few gangly men in black turbans and threadbare boubous scampered over to help us unload. They knew Walid, shook his hand vigorously, and launched into the ritual Saharan greeting. Composed of a series of prescribed queries and responses, the greeting can literally last for minutes as the same questions and answers are repeated over and over:

  “No problems?”

  “No problems.”

 
“Are you well?”

  “I’m well.”

  “Praise be to God.”

  “Praise be to God.”

  “What’s the news?”

  “Praise be to God.”

  “No problems?”

  “No problems.”

  “Are you well?”

  “Praise be to God.”

  “What’s the news?”

  “I am well.”

  “No problems?”

  “No problems.”

  And on and on and on it goes until, at some subtle cue, both parties agree that God is to be praised and they can move on to talking about other things. When there are more than two people saying hello, the questions and answers overlap—which hardly seems to matter, because it often seems like the greeting is being read from a script without any true interest in how the other person is actually doing. When I asked Walid why they repeated themselves over and over, he said you couldn’t trust a man who only asked each question once.

  I carried our depleted inner tubes while Walid led the camels to the top of the mound, in which the well was set. One group of thirty-odd camels, including a few babies, was queued behind troughs made from sawed-off fiftygallon drums half buried in the sand. Around the well’s foot-high cement rim, four pairs of stripped tree limbs stood at angles over the hole. The tops of the limbs were forked. Resting in the forks between each pair was a grooved wooden dowel that spun around a smooth stick and served as a pulley. A long rope of braided goat hide ran over the groove. One end was tied to a collapsible, round, goatskin bucket that flattened when it was empty, expanded when it was full, and seemed a lot like a leather jellyfish. The other end of the rope was attached to a camel that stood near the well.