The Caravan of White Gold

by Michael Benanav

  Walid was right. After this point there were no more trees. But for a few that had been planted in the village of Araouane, I wouldn’t see another until I passed this place again, some four weeks later.

  The desert remained as flat as a tabletop. Without the trees, it became even starker. Riding in silence through pure desolation, mile after mile after mile, staring into the face of utter emptiness with nothing to fill the mind but its own raw contents, it seemed we were traversing the earthly manifestation of the existential void. Starved for stimulus, my eyes scanned the vastness and locked on watery mirages that pooled like ponds and flowed like rivers across the sand. They were so tempting, it was easy to imagine delusional travelers madly leaping toward them to quench their thirst. No wonder, I thought, that the Tuareg fear the Spirits of Solitude.

  We had long ago left any remnants of tire tracks behind, yet Walid led us across the desert in an unwavering course. He had neither map nor compass, and the only possible landmark was the sun, which would have been a vague one at best even if he’d had a watch. Yet just a few degrees of error over the distance we were covering would take us fatally wide of our destination. Though I’m an accomplished wilderness navigator, I was utterly baffled by how he knew where he was going without a single topographic cue. It was as though he had the powers of a migratory animal—a salmon that innately knows how to find its spawning grounds; a bird that flies thousands of miles back to the same nest. Awed, I tingled with the sense that I was rubbing up against one of the mysteries of the desert, revealed but not explained. When I asked him later how he did it with no map, no nothing, he smiled, pointed to his head, and said, “The map’s in here.”

  When we stopped at about 1 PM, with no shade anywhere and the sun ravaging us from above, Walid and Sali erected a makeshift shelter, propping a blanket up over a few sticks, and tying its corners out to our heavy bags. The roof was hardly big enough to cover us all, so I decided to enlarge it. There was more to my motivation than creating a shadier space: unfamiliar with the techniques of nomad life, I’d been struggling with feeling totally inept. Sure, I could make a fire, but when it came to most things, even as small as pouring water from the rascally inner tubes without spilling a drop, or tying bags together over the camels, I did them slowly, hesitantly. With speed ever of the essence, Walid (and now Sali, too) would intervene and take over, brushing off my efforts, making me feel useless and incompetent. Having set up tarps probably a thousand times, building an annex onto our shelter was something I knew I could do right; I wanted to do it for my own sake, and to show Walid and Sali that I wasn’t a total idiot.

  When I brought my reed mat over, Walid urged me to sit down and forget about it. I ignored him. Anselm, who had been feeling much the same as me and taking it far more personally, jumped up eager to help. We tied the mat over one edge of the blanket, angled it down to the ground, and weighted the corners. Within minutes we had doubled the size of the shelter and scored a small but satisfying victory. It was better than the way I usually recovered my esteem following a particularly humbling moment, when I would imagine leading a helpless Walid through the streets and subways of Manhattan.

  No food was cooked, which was okay with me, since it was too hot out to eat, and the cool dorno was all I wanted anyway. Sali busied himself deftly twisting a bundle of grasses into an inch-thick rope that materialized before my eyes. I asked to try it myself, and though I could get the individual strands to bond together, when I tried to lengthen the rope by meshing the ends of the grasses together, they fell apart under the least bit of strain. Oh well, I thought of my latest failure, at least our annex was still standing.

  Since we had overslept that morning, we headed out earlier than we had from previous afternoon breaks. The sun still seethed overhead, crippling in its force. I focused my energy on putting one foot in front of the other. Stepping ever farther into the nothingness, with no way to mark our progress, was like walking into infinity. At last Walid paused and asked if I wanted Lachmar to couch so I could get on. I said no, leapt upon his neck, and crawled up his back. Though still graceless, it was a better performance than earlier that morning. I soon found it much easier to mount a standing camel than a sitting one, and within two days was able to do so while Lachmar was walking slowly.

  Once again, night came like a blessing from the Merciful One. Rejuvenated and clearheaded, I reflected on some of the things I had seen thus far. As the nomad tents were pitched ever farther apart, as the vegetation became ever more scarce, it occurred to me that the way Saharans live closely mimics the patterns of the natural desert ecosystem they dwell within. They camp away from one another so their herds won’t have to compete for sparse pasture, just as thorn trees and clumps of grass are spaced far apart to avoid overconsumption of precious water. There is even a rootless plant, the rose of Jericho, that blows across the desert from place to place, bearing tiny fruit and spilling seeds where it stops, like a biological metaphor for nomadism. Only by working with the desert on its own terms, just like other plants and animals, have Saharan peoples been able to survive. The key to their success is an ethic of mutual sustainability: If the scant resources are overused, everyone dies.

  This, of course, makes perfect sense, but as I tossed it around in my mind, a question began to nag: Why bother? The environment is so unrelentingly brutal, it’s hardly the optimal place for anything to live. Why then are plants, animals, and people so driven to eek out an existence in such a place? What’s the point? Certainly neither money nor glory. The answer, it seems, is survival simply for its own sake. The deepest urge of all. And by adopting strategies that adhere to the laws of the desert, they can.

  This, I saw, was about as far as one could get from the American proclivity for outsized consumption. Unlike the Saharans, who know the need for balance with the natural world because they live in it, we live as though we’re separate from it, immune to the repercussions of overusing it. Yet with looming environmental catastrophe on a planetary scale, our circumstances are not all that different from the Saharans.

  If their ethic of mutual sustainability is a survival strategy, then ours is a suicide strategy. If survival is the most hardwired biological impulse of all, we’ve got a short in our system. Our craving to consume, which in healthy amounts is critical to sustaining life, has hit pathological proportions, like a grossly obese person who not only can’t stop eating, but justifies every bite. In other words, our culture is ill.

  While gazing up at the celestial chandelier, rocking back and forth atop Lachmar’s hump, I decided that the source of our collective malady was living lives ever less connected to or affected by the natural world. Barring extreme shows of force, such as tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like, we control our daily environment more than it controls us. If it’s hot, we turn on the air-conditioning; if it’s cold, we crank the heat. We humidify and dehumidify; we sit in bright light in the middle of the night. Most of us live apart from animals except for pets (and pests). As we have lost touch with nature, we have also lost touch with the instinctual intelligence that promotes survival through balance—the kind of balance so evident in the nomad culture. As Carl Jung once wrote about the human condition, “Too much civilization makes sick animals.”

  But what, I thought, of the environmental movement, the calls to conserve, to explore renewable sources of energy, to reduce pollution and greenhouse gases, to save animal and plant species from extinction, to preserve wildlands? It seems that there are still active vestiges of our archaic animal intelligence that know the need for balance. Really, it’s like we’re trying to save ourselves as we try to kill ourselves, as though Freud’s Eros–Thanatos conflict has erupted on a collective scale.

  Saharans don’t have this problem. They have no misconceptions about their place in the order of things—not because they are “noble savages,” but because with so few resources they reap immediate consequences if they abuse them. And they have learned from past mistakes, such as overgrazing a
nd overhunting. By living as subjects of the natural world, their awareness of the need for balanced consumption has remained astute. Rather than viewing them as poverty-stricken semi-primitives, we might do well to appreciate them for what they really are—masters of survival, from whom we can learn to reconnect with our own instinctual intelligence simply by realizing we have it, and whose ethic of living in balance with the natural world we can emulate, not just for its sake, but for our own.

  We rode on and on, late into the night. When we finally stopped and got the camels unloaded, Sali built a tea fire and Walid said he was leaving.

  “Leaving?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

  “My wife’s family is camped near here, and she is there with my sons. I’m going to see them, but I’ll be back in the morning.”’

  He mounted L’beyya, reached behind himself and slapped the camel’s rear with his stick, and shot off at a gallop into the darkness. Again, I was astounded. Not only were we in the midst of a featureless landscape, but it was nighttime; how could he possibly know exactly where we were, or how to find his wife’s family, whose tent, when measured against the size of the desert, was proportionally smaller than the proverbial needle in a haystack? And, more important to me, how would he be able to find his way back?

  Sali roused Anselm and I at first light. We finished our morning routine, and when the camels were loaded and up, we started walking. There was no sign of Walid. I was a little concerned.

  “Where is he?” I asked Sali.

  “He’ll be here,” he answered.

  “But we won’t be here,” I pointed out.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “He’ll find us.”’

  We marched into a brilliant morning, the cool sand trickling between my toes, the sky a field of lavender. I imagined Walid sleeping in, loath to leave the comfort of his wife’s side, and wondered what would happen if he didn’t find us. Every few minutes I looked back over my shoulder to see if he was trailing us, and saw no one.

  About an hour after we started, four figures appeared on the horizon directly ahead of us. Two were camels, two were humans. One was Walid.

  The other was a man named Baba. He was short and slight of frame, with a black mustache, a beard that grew in a narrow swath along the bottom of his jawline and came to a point in a short goatee, and a prominent nose with a bulbed tip. Dressed in a loose, forestgreen boubou and a meticulously wrapped black turban, he looked like an elf with a regal demeanor and a serious tan.

  Sali and I greeted Walid and Baba as required by custom, though I dropped out of the redundant dialogue early while the three nomads kept it up. Walid seemed happy and refreshed, and I was glad he’d taken the opportunity to see his family.

  We soon emerged from the monotonous flats into an area that was like a macrocosmic washboard road, crossing one long, rounded ridge of sand after another. Dunes rose against the horizon, cutting glowing ivory silhouettes against the gunmetal sky, looking like rends in the otherwise solid seam where heaven and earth met, through which streamed a noumenal light. I was transfixed by their sudden beauty after so much nothingness, and rode on in a meditative reverie.

  This was abruptly shattered when a fennec—the desert fox—popped out of its hole and scampered away in front of us. Sali and Baba jumped off their camels and gave chase, Baba running with quick efficiency, Sali leaping and hooting like a madman. Like everything else in the desert, these men were opportunists, and weren’t about to pass up the rare chance to hunt an animal that normally at midday would be sleeping in its den thirty feet below ground, where the temperature remains cool and constant. The little furry fox with tall pointy ears raced off like a turbocharged Muppet, and Baba and Sali kicked up a squall of sand trying to catch it but lost ground by the second. In a last-ditch effort to nail their prey, Sali hurled his camel stick at the fox; it flew end over end, and to my relief landed harmlessly in the sand.

  I could hardly believe they had bothered to exert themselves like that. By this time the heat of the day was simply unbelievable—hotter, it seemed, than it had been since I’d left Timbuktu. Before long, Walid decided he’d had enough of it himself, and we parked atop a ridge of sand. Sali, however, wanted to keep going and make it all the way to Araouane, which was just four hours distant. Walid argued with him over the prudence of this course, urging him to get out of the sun, but Sali’s mind was made up. They were leaving, and we were staying. Baba, Walid, and I said quick good-byes to Sali and Anselm, then got to work building our sunshade. Watching the two camels disappear to the north, Walid shook his head and declared that Sali was nuts.

  While we waited for the tea to brew (it’s never too hot for tea), I learned that Baba was Walid’s cousin. He was thirty years old, had a wife and a child, and had been an azalai for half his life. He was coming along to join the caravan, so would be with us for the rest of the trip to Taoudenni. I immediately had a good feeling about him; his manner was relaxed, he laughed easily, and seemed surrounded by a halo of peacefulness.

  We set off after a few hours of lounging, but stopped again just as it got dark. Except for the dorno and some peanuts and dates, we hadn’t eaten all day, so Walid decided to break for dinner, then continue on the last hour or two to Araouane. After we ate, however, none of us was particularly motivated to load the camels and get moving again, so we stayed the night where we were.

  It was the first chance I’d had to bask in the glory of the Sahara at night, neither trucking along on the back of a camel nor so exhausted that I wanted to pass out. And it was wonderful. The sky was enormous, and there was nothing to break the silence except the crackling of the fire and three stations competing against each other and a high pitched squeal for dominance of the shortwave radio.

  In my mind, we were as good as in Araouane, and making it that far felt like a major achievement. Though it was only one-third of the way to Taoudenni, and one-sixth of the entire journey, it was our first significant milestone. I had conquered my debilitating sinus infection, each day was getting easier, and I was finally beginning to enjoy myself, starting to thrive rather than merely survive. I thanked Allah that I hadn’t been sick to my stomach, and prayed I would stay healthy.

  I wondered what Araouane would look like, and imagined the three of us riding camels through the gates of a desert Xanadu, standing tall and gleaming among the dunes. I knew, naturally, that that wasn’t what I would find, especially since this town supposedly didn’t even have Coca-Cola. As the importance of caravan trade in the Sahara has diminished, so has the significance of this once major commercial center along the route from Timbuktu to both Taoudenni and Morocco.

  The wells around Araouane—reputed to hold the best water in the region—have been a stopping point along this trail for some thousand years. The town itself was founded in 1575 by Ahmed ag-Adda, a famed religious scholar and renowned merchant of the Kel Es-Suq clan. His presence drew students—called talamidh—and disciples from far and wide, and Araouane, which was named for the length of rope it took to reach the bottom of the wells there, grew into a prosperous center of trade and Islamic learning.

  The Kel Es-Suq belonged to the Qadiriyya, a Sufi order that became the predominant form of Islam in the western Sahara, including the Azawad—a wide swath of territory between Timbuktu and Araouane, which I had just traveled through. Their scholars were mystics who emphasized both prayer and meditation, balancing adherence to Koranic law with direct, personal contact with the divine. One of their guiding precepts was: “He who follows fiqh (Muslim jurisprudence) and does not possess mystic knowledge is a freethinker, while he who is a mystic and does not follow fiqh is in error and commits a sin. He who combines them arrives at the truth and is in true faith.”

  As part of their mystical legacy, the Kel Es-Suq shunned violence and conquest. They supported their pacifist convictions by referring to the Koranic Sura “The Table,” in which the Cain and Abel story is retold. When Cain tells Abel he’s going to kill him, Abel replies, “God ac
cepts only from the pious. If you stretch forth your hand to slay me, I will not stretch forth my hand to slay thee; for I fear God, the Lord of all worlds…. You will become an inhabitant of the Fire.” Better, the Kel Es-Suq thought, to avoid the Fire than to vanquish others, whether on an individual or tribal level. Instead, they devoted themselves to the peaceful pursuits of rhetoric, calligraphy, prayer, trade, and herding.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, the Es-Suq had been displaced by the Kunta, an “Arab” tribe who also belonged to the Qadiriyya and adhered to similar principles of mysticism and non-violence. Led by their great scholarchief Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kabir al-Kunti, the Kunta spread their influence throughout the western Sahara and assumed the religious leadership of Araouane.

  Sidi al-Mukhtar had worked in the salt trade as a young man, then traveled through the desert solidifying his reputation as a teacher and holy man. His wisdom, generosity, and charisma drew “multitudes of disciples.” The Kunta’s spiritual hold over the Azawad became nearly absolute after they played mediator between the Tuareg and the settled people of Timbuktu, and once they could count the Berabish, as well as a number of Tuareg tribes, among their adherents. The association of the Berabish and the Tuareg through the Kunta was no doubt responsible for the eventual alliance between these two powerful hasani peoples.

  Sidi al-Mukhtar asserted that it was appropriate for the Kunta to involve themselves in the political arena, since mediating treaties between warriors was a way to promote peace among the “people of the sword” while winning hasani allies for needed protection from rivals. His interest in expanding the Kunta’s sphere of influence came less from a belief that theirs was the one true word and more for financial reasons. Based on the fact that “trade was the profession of the Prophet,” Sidi al-Mukhtar sanctioned the accumulation of wealth. And the talamidh were the foundation upon which the Kunta economic system was based. Aside from paying for their education and religious guidance with cows, sheep, millet, cloth, and the like, the talamidh served as a massive, usually wage-free workforce. They ran the trade caravans, oversaw the salt mines, worked date-palm plantations, herded livestock, bred camels, dug wells, and performed other forms of manual and clerical labor. Thus the Kunta’s economic base grew in direct proportion to the number of talamidh they could attract. And they came not only to learn the Koran; once the talamidh had completed their work-study internships, they were positioned to join the ranks of the Kunta’s wealthy traders.