The empty bucket was tossed down the well. When it hit the water, one of the men gave a few tugs on the rope to make sure the bucket had opened and filled. Then another man gave a loud grunt and led the camel out into the desert. As the camel trotted away, it pulled the rope over the dowel, raising the bucket from the depths. When it emerged, Walid and one of the well men grabbed it and shouted. The camel stopped, and Walid and the well man hefted the heavy, sloshing leather sack over to a trough. They dumped the water in, and three camels plunged their heads into the metal drum. They sucked up the water so quickly that within moments only a shallow puddle remained in the barrel’s bottom. The bodies of the camels swelled before my eyes.
Camels can go for many weeks without drinking anything at all. The notion that they cache water in their humps is pure myth—their humps are made of fat, and water is stored in their body tissues. While other mammals draw water from their bloodstreams when faced with dehydration, leading to death by volume shock, camels tap the water in their tissues, keeping their blood volume stable. Though this reduces the camel’s bulk, they can lose up to a third of their body weight with no ill effects, which they can replace astonishingly quickly, as they are able to drink up to forty gallons in a single watering. Such a feat, even in relative terms, would be impossible for any other mammal, since all but the camel have round red blood cells, which would explode if suddenly forced to absorb so much water; the camel, however, has oval red cells, which can expand as needed without bursting. Regardless of how much water is available, the camel will only drink what it needs to replenish itself.
Walid beckoned me to the side of the well and invited me to peer down into what looked like a pipeline to Hades. Far, far below, I could just discern a pool of rippling, reflected light. The voices of the men around me were drawn into the well, ricocheted around its walls, and bounced back out, amplified. Water from so deep in the earth, I thought with relief, was probably safe to drink.
The men at the well were gruff and unfriendly. They clearly had no use for me and made no pretense of welcome. I was taken aback by their brusqueness, since I’d never before met a nomad who shunned a stranger. I tried my best to stay out of their way.
Walid helped the others with a few rounds of watering, then it was our turn. Lachmar and L’beyya slurped heartily from the barrel, downing an entire bucketload and half of the next. Then Walid, using one of our metal bowls, scooped the leftover water directly from the trough into our inner tubes, which I held open as they were filled with camel backwash and floating cud particles. So much for bacteria-free drinking.
At the bottom of the mound on the side opposite where Walid and I had left our things, three men were lying down in the shade of a ten wheeled cargo truck. The truck was an old mechanical beast that bore the scars of scuffling with the desert year after year. The light blue paint on the cab had been sandblasted down to bare metal in places. The low walls that enclosed the flatbed were dented and bent. The bed was empty, save for a few large drums of fuel. It was the first vehicle I’d seen since leaving Timbuktu. Though perhaps faster than a camel, this truck was neither graceful nor exotic. While camels feel like an integral part of the desert, their presence amplifying its innate character, the truck seemed alien, like a malignant mutation in discord with its surroundings. While I faulted no one for preferring a truck to camel, it struck me that the day the camel caravans finally die will be the day the Sahara loses a piece of its soul.
It would also be a triumphant comeback for wheeled transportation in a centuries-old contest with the camel that camels had once seemed certain to win. In fact, though chariots and carts were commonplace in North Africa and the Middle East in ancient times, they were universally abandoned in favor of the camel, which proved so much more practical than anything with wheels that the wheel completely disappeared from those regions for more than a thousand years.
Between 3000 and 2500 BC, while the Egyptians were busy creating their most enduring legacy to future generations—the Great Pyramid—the semi-civilized people across the Red Sea, in southern Arabia, were also producing theirs: the domesticated camel. Initially prized only for its milk, centuries passed before the camel was used as a beast of burden. Though the exact year that they were first loaded with goods is a subject for scholarly debate, it’s clear that sometime around 2000 BC (give or take a couple of hundred years) the incense traders of southern Arabia rigged their dromedaries with bundles of frankincense and myrrh and headed north toward Syria in the world’s first caravan.
As Semitic tribes spread from the Levant into southern Arabia during the second millennium BC, they took over the incense trade and shared camel technology with their kin in the north. By the eighth century BC, camels were toting supplies for Sargon II’s Assyrian army and had become popular pack and herd animals across the Middle East.
Camels were introduced into North Africa at a much later date. Beginning in the first or second century BC, their range gradually expanded westward from Egypt and Sudan. The people of the Sahara and its border regions recognized the animal as the ultimate form of desert transport, appreciating its stamina, speed, and strength; a camel could travel farther in a day while hauling twice as much as a mule or oxdrawn cart. Since they were more efficient than anything with wheels, the enthusiasm for building and maintaining roads—upon which wheeled transport was dependent—fell with the Roman Empire.
Thus, before the seventh century, and possibly as early as the third, the wheel vanished entirely from North Africa and the Middle East (except for isolated pockets in Tunisia). Great cities, such as Fes, were built with no consideration for the needs of wheeled vehicles; its streets are so narrow and twisted that, today, goods are off-loaded from trucks at the old medina’s gates and transferred to the backs of mules, which successfully negotiate the maze of alleys.
Far from being a backward culture, the wheel-less Arab civilization made countless contributions in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and many other fields from architecture to literature to optics. While wheels were still used as pulleys and for other mechanical purposes, as a means of transportation they were simply outdated.
European colonists reintroduced the wheel perhaps twelve hundred years after their disappearance, but their adoption by local peoples was far from instantaneous. According to historian Richard Bulliet, streets in nineteenth-century Cairo were still being built based on the width of two loaded camels standing side by side, a dimension too narrow for the easy maneuvering of carts or carriages. Bulliet also points out that, to this day, wheelbarrows are conspicuously absent from Middle Eastern construction sites, even in urban areas; loads are instead carried on litters or in buckets, which he identifies as a throwback to the “pervasive non-wheel mentality.”
The French brought the wheel back to the Sahara. This time, however, it wasn’t pulled by horses or oxen; it was pushed by the internal combustion engine. On January 7, 1923, a team driving ten-horsepower Citroën half tracks made the first successful crossing of the Sahara by automobile, completing the journey from Algiers to Timbuktu in three weeks. They averaged nearly a hundred miles a day, about three times what a camel would cover. Today cars, trucks, and motorcycles racing across the desert in the annual Paris–Dakar Rally drive daily stages more than four times that distance. Perhaps more surprising than the fact that trucks now operate along the ancient salt route between Timbuktu and Taoudenni is that it took them until the end of the twentieth century to do so.
With our tubes filled and properly tied, we balanced them over Lbeyya’s back for the short walk back to our bags. We thanked the well men, loaded up, and said good-bye. It was a little after two when we left. I was hot, hungry, and tired. Fortunately, we stopped to rest after only half an hour, at the first tree we came across.
As usual, by the time we hit the trail again I was rejuvenated. Walid and I walked side by side at an easy pace, talking. Wondering how far American pop culture had crept into the Sahara, I asked Walid if he had ever heard of McDon
ald’s. To my great satisfaction, he hadn’t.
“But you know Coca-Cola, yes?” I continued.
“Sure, there is Coca everywhere in Timbuktu.”
Though I rarely drink the stuff at home, thinking of it in these circumstances made me crave it.
“Can I buy it in Araouane?”
“No,” he said. “There’s no Coca there.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
I could hardly believe it. I’d been in isolated mountain hamlets in places that never see foreigners—where children burst into tears when they saw me, where even adults hid behind trees and peered out curiously at me—and Coke, like a corporate Kilroy, had been there first. Of all the remote villages I’d been to in the world, the only ones where Coke was absent were in the farthest reaches of Mongolia—and getting there before Coke felt like a major triumph. It seemed reasonable to think that someone could easily throw a couple of cases in the back of a truck that was going from Timbuktu to Araouane.
“What about at the shops?” I asked.
“There are no shops in Araouane,” Walid replied.
I paused to digest this information, then, continuing with my inquiry and recalling a report I’d once read that named Harrison Ford as the most seen movie star in the world, I asked Walid if he’d ever seen Star Wars—the seminal film of my youth (okay, and my adulthood, too).
“What’s that?” he said.
“It’s a movie,” I answered, then, wondering if I’d made a huge assumption, I asked Walid if he knew what movies were.
“Yes, I’ve heard of movies.” Hesitantly, he said he thought he’d seen one once on somebody’s television in Timbuktu.
Thinking of quintessential American icons, I took one last stab at naming one he might be familiar with.
“Do you know Superman?” I asked.
“No. What’s that?”
“He’s like a man,” I explained, “but he’s very strong and he flies around.”
“Ah,” Walid said, “he is a djinn.”
“Well, sort of,” I said. “But Superman is good. He helps people and he fights against evil.” “Yes,” Walid said, “he is a djinn. Many djinn are bad and try to hurt people, but other djinn are good and serve the will of Allah. Your Superman must be one of the good djinn.”
“Yes,” I said, “he must be,” figuring this was as about as common a term for “superhero” as we were going to arrive at.
The djinn—whence the word “genie” is derived—are the spirits that inhabit the Muslim world, and dwell in the Sahara alongside the local, animist spirits, called the Kel Essuf (kel meaning “people,” essuf meaning “wild,” “solitude,” or “nostalgia”). Though some are beneficent, most are evil and are deeply feared, since they seek to possess people, driving them insane. “When possessed by the essuf,” writes Dr. Rasmussen, “people are said to be ‘in the wild.’” Thinking about this as I traveled through the desert, the notion of being infected by wildness or solitude struck me as profound; Saharans live in the wild, in the most solitary places on earth, all the time—what they fear is that the wild, the solitude, will live in them.
When someone goes mad, marabouts are called in and given money, livestock, or other goods in exchange for reciting Koranic blessings over the victim. I was told that often, when the spirit is finally exorcized, the sick person will dream of a cat walking away from him or her. If the marabouts prove ineffective, the Tuareg turn to healers known as friends of the Kel Essuf—non-Koranic healers who serve as mediums with the spirit world, and are often women. They might use music or herbs to chase off the Kel Essuf, or perhaps sacrifice a goat while intentionally refraining from uttering any Islamic blessings.
I smiled at the irony of imagining Superman, the protector of Truth, Justice, and the American Way—which at that moment was in an epic cultural clash with Islam—as a mystical servant of Allah.
As the sun slid over the horizon like a weary eye unable to stay open, the sky faded from bleached blue to smoky violet. We mounted our camels. Once again, the night came as my redeemer, lifting my spirits higher than they’d been all day. As darkness shrouded the heavens, the waxing moon cast a pale, diffuse glow that lit the sand the color of snow. I sang an inspired (though not necessarily pretty) rendition of that old blues hymn “When That Evenin’ Sun Goes Down.” I took off my turban and let the breeze tousle my hair with what felt like affection. I was, maybe for the first time all day, happy.
Except for my singing and Walid’s occasional shout, which I answered in kind, the night was silent. It felt like we could have been the only people on earth. We continued on for hours, until Walid’s shout of “Hoy!” was answered by another voice in the darkness up ahead. We veered slightly from our course to check it out and came across two people, one sitting, the other sleeping. Walid dismounted and approached while he and the stranger launched into the ritual salutation.
Once I was down from my camel, I shook hands with the nomad and asked, “No problems?”
“No problems!” he answered glee, surprised at being so greeted by a foreigner.
“You are well?”
“I’m well!”
“Praise be to God!”
“Praise be to God!”
“What’s your name?” I asked, unable to get into the spirit of asking the same questions ad infinitum.
“Sali. And yours?”
“Michael.”
“You speak Arabic?”
“A little,” I said.
“Eeeeee! Praise be to God!” he said, laughing.
“Praise be to God!” and I laughed, too.
Woken by our voices, Sali’s sleeping companion stirred and raised his head. I recognized him instantly.
It was Anselm, a nineteen-year-old German traveler who had been the only other tourist on the cargo boat I’d taken down the Niger River. He had wavy, shoulder-length blond hair parted in the middle and tucked behind his ears. Pimples speckled his cheeks and forehead. We had run into each other a few times in Timbuktu, and he’d booked a camel trip to Araouane, also through Alkoye “Le Petit.” Alkoye had asked us whether we wanted to travel that leg of the route together, and we’d decided against it, not out of any dislike for each other, but to immerse more completely in the nomad experience, perhaps to live in the illusion that we were each the only Westerners in the desert.
Anselm had spent the previous two months working at a German run orphanage in Burkina Faso. Now he was getting in a bit of traveling before returning home, where he hoped to enter a university, get a degree in psychology, and use it to work with at-risk teenagers, which is exactly what I had done in my twenties. He was earnest and idealistic, and I saw in him more than a little of myself when I was nineteen. I think back on that period of my life as a time when I was my most pure self, with both a solid sense of my core nature and a yet-untrammeled spirit of idealism. I spent my nineteenth summer hitchhiking around the Pacific Northwest, going from place to place and picking up work for a few days in a cherry orchard and a fish cannery, and for a few weeks at a fruit stand, and then a restaurant. I hiked in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, lived on a fishing boat in the San Juan Islands, and befriended artists and alcoholics. My summer on the road was as much an act of faith as it was an adventure; despite the well-advertised dangers of sticking your thumb out and getting into a stranger’s car, my naive notions of the divine permitted me to trust that the Universe would take care of me if I could align my intentions with its intentions for me. In the fourteen years that had passed since then, I’d come to appreciate the whimsy, caprice, and cruelty that are as essential to the functioning of the cosmos as are order and grace; I no longer trust it as blindly or as easily, and regularly question whether such a thing even exists. It was refreshing to meet someone who hadn’t yet lost his innocence in the world. But the cynic in me couldn’t help wonder what form Anselm’s fall would take and how he would sound after he’d been bruised up a little.
Walid and Sali talked f
or a minute, and decided that since we were on the same route, we should travel together. Walid wanted to make yet more progress to put us nearer the well we would pass the following morning, and Sali agreed that that was a good plan. He tried rousting the dazed Anselm, who wanted to know what was happening. I explained it to him, so he got up. Walid and Sali quickly packed up the camp and loaded the camels, and within ten minutes we were back on the trail, our four camels strung together in a single line led by Walid.
We walked together side by side, Walid and Sali talking in Arabic, Anselm and I in English. Neither of us was disappointed that we ended up crossing paths. We empathized with each other about the daytime heat and our posterior pain. In many ways, we’d had similar experiences, but since Anselm spoke no Arabic, his journey had been a silent one. Sali was nice, he said, knew what he was doing, and was able to communicate the essentials by pointing and miming, but they really hadn’t been able to talk about anything. He was disappointed, since he, too, had been promised a French-speaking guide by Alkoye.
“How did we end up in the same place?” Anselm wondered. “I don’t mind, but we were supposed to take different routes to Araouane.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are there different routes?”
“Yeah. Sali and I were supposed to go the long way by taking a detour through a place called Bou J’beha, then come back the direct way, hopefully with a caravan on its way to Timbuktu.”
“We can look at my map later,” I said, referring to the map of Mali that I carried, on which the major wells and subregions of the Sahara were marked, “but I’m sure that this is the direct route to Araouane, and that it doesn’t pass through Bou J’beha.” Sometimes, when we sat around the fire, Walid would list the landmarks—mostly wells—that we would pass on the way to Araouane, making me repeat after him, drilling me as though for an exam.
Douaya; Harseini; Touerat; Taganet; Sidi Mukhtar; Araouane. I knew them by heart.
The Caravan of White Gold Page 7