The Caravan of White Gold

by Michael Benanav

  The gusts persisted for the next two days while we traversed terrain so changeless that we might have been walking on a treadmill for all the difference each mile made to our eyes. In the wind, the desert floor came alive; broad snakes of sand slithered swiftly over the ground in long, sinuous patterns. The sky hung low, aswirl with a hundred shades of gray. Rain fell one drop at a time, each drying before the next hit the ground, yet there was enough moisture to fill the air with that scent unique to wet desert—the pungent breath of parched soil sighing with relief. For hours at a time we crossed zones so barren that not a single plant grew. There weren’t even any rocks. It seemed like we’d entered a two-dimensional world, in which the flat orange plane of the ground met the flat gray plane of the sky at the flat, hard line of the horizon. The cloudy sky appeared more substantial than the earth, creating the illusion that the ground hovered above us and we were treading upside down on air.

  We had entered the Tanezrouft, the ancient “desert within a desert” some four times the size of England. Known as “The Land of Thirst” and “The Land of Terror,” it is feared and respected by all who pass through it, a great dead zone that might have inspired the old nomad adage, “One does not live in the desert. One crosses it.” From here on, we’d see no tents, no birds, no signs of animal life but for the rare beetle track. We traveled longer and longer hours, pushing through this comfortless land as fast as we could.

  With sand whipping through the air, I wrapped my turban around my head and over my face, covering my nose and mouth. With my sunglasses on, I was completely concealed in my helmet of cloth. I looked down at myself and over at Walid and Baba. Our faces were mysteriously swaddled; each of us wore dirty boubous bulging with wind; we rode bizarre creatures through a mist of orange dust, occasionally passing creepy piles of camel bones—we could have been starring in a B-grade post-apocalyptic sciencefiction movie. Cutting through the storm with no possible refuge and nowhere to go but deeper into the Sahara, it dawned on me that this was the real thing, and I was doing it. I smiled beneath my turban, aware that I was starting to appreciate my flight with the Rukh.

  Out of nowhere, lyrics popped into my head. “Cosmic Charlie how do you do? Truckin’ in style along the avenue. Dum de dum de doodeley doo. Go on home your mama’s calling you.” I ran through the entire Grateful Dead classic, fudging a few words here and there, then started again. And again. And again. The song stayed in my head for days, running as though the REPEAT button had been pressed in my brain. But I didn’t mind too much—after all, even low-budget films need a soundtrack, and Lord knows I could have been cursed with something far worse.

  One of the qualities that draws me to deserts is their sparseness. I go to be scoured by their winds, purged by their silence, humbled by their searing sunsets. The desert dirt, which accumulates in the chapped cracks of my fingers and the pores of my face, brings me solace. It somehow stills the subtle anxieties produced by living in a culture in which what you do is so often mistaken for who you are, where artificialities obscure essences. Immersing in the desert’s simplicity is akin to a ritual purification. As the earth stands naked, so I am stripped to my unadorned self, with little to distract me from the truths of my life.

  The glaring truth I confronted while riding for many a mute mile was that of my four-year-long relationship. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t miss my girlfriend, Karen, because I knew she would have been miserable on this journey, that I was glad she wasn’t with me for her own sake. But I knew that that was just a small part of the truth. As I assessed the many facets of our life together and searched my heart for its most honest feelings, every train of thought ultimately traveled in the same direction: It was over for me. Something as unnamable as it was essential was missing from what we had. Try as I did to rationalize my way out of this conclusion, the desert was like an opaque mirror reflecting the workings of my soul, and I could not deny what it showed me. Back home, I had tried for a while to evade this reality, in part because I dreaded hurting Karen, in part out of the hope that we could eventually find a way to return to the halcyon days we had once shared. I knew that Karen wanted to be married, and over the course of our relationship, even in the best of times, when I asked myself if I could marry her, the answer had always been “not yet.” Now the quiet voice within, the one that ultimately demands to be heard, changed that answer to “no.” While there were many reasons, there was also no reason at all, except that this is what that little voice said. Despite all the things that made us a good match for each other, I intuited, simply, deeply, in a way that defies logical explanation, that she was not my destiny. And it was this truth that I knew I’d have to obey.

  After four years together, the thought of traveling through life alone once more was daunting. But, I figured, if I could endure the physical and mental hardships of this relentless journey into the heart of nothingness, I could survive a life alone without knowing if or when another woman would appear on my horizon.

  My mind cycled in and out of its review of my relationship, and I finally forced myself to stop thinking about it. I didn’t want to come to any irrevocable decisions before seeing Karen again, wondering if and hoping that the sight of her would remind me of why we had gotten together in the first place, renewing the passion for her that I had once felt. But deep down, I sensed that wasn’t going to happen.

  When we came upon a mass of camel tracks, my mind left the topic of my love life and returned to the task at hand: finding the caravan. Walid declared that the footprints were left by the very camels we were seeking. They were partially filled with sand and looked less than fresh, though with the wind it was possible that they’d been formed only an hour or two before.

  I had no idea how Walid could tell that our caravan had made them, but if he was right, I thought, it was bad news. If they were now ahead of us, it meant that they had completed their long detour. And if that was true, they were making significantly better time than we were. Suddenly, it seemed like our chances of meeting them at Foum el-Alba were dashed. I wondered if we’d catch them at all before Taoudenni. With the speed at which they were obviously moving, it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that we’d arrive at the mines just as the caravan was about to return south—or worse, after they already had.

  I was furious—at Walid, at Alkoye, but mostly at myself. Here I was, having taken myself into the middle of the Sahara the hard way, and I’d screwed up completely. I kicked myself for failing to urge Walid to return to the caravan’s camp on the night we first passed it. I walked with a fast, angry pace, cursing myself and my stupidity. I envisioned returning home and telling people that I’d been inches from achieving my dream, and had blown it. I was convinced we’d lost the caravan for good, that I’d risked my life and forsaken all comfort and would have little to report on but some fool errand into the desert.

  That night—the third since we’d passed the caravan—the clouds began to break, and my anger finally cleared along with them. Riding toward the tail of Cygnus the Swan, whose celestial body soared low in the heavens before us, I regained my emotional equilibrium. I decided to talk with Walid and, without blaming him for anything, explain how important it was that we catch the caravan—and that I was willing to travel as long and as fast as we had to in order to do so.

  We surged deep into the night. The moon, which had been obscured for the past few evenings, was now a day past full. It slid across the sky, ever higher, as we continued on. Exhausted from the day’s physical strain and the internal abuse I’d heaped upon myself, my mind was a weary void when we entered a field of dunes that rose abruptly from the flats. In the eerie moonlight, it looked as though we were wending our way among massive snowdrifts, the sheer lee sides of the dunes resembling glacial bergschrunds. It felt like we’d been transported to a place out of time, an ancient world of black and white before color was invented. Its pristine beauty seemed delicate, fragile, as if a sudden burst of noise could scatter the moonshadows and shatter the elega
nt, ice-like architecture.

  We camped among the dunes. Awed by the other-worldly beauty that enveloped me, I forgot about my failed agenda; I brimmed with gratitude at being exactly where I was. So stirred, my weariness left me; I felt fresh again, as though I could travel many hours more. When I lay down, however, I fell asleep instantly.

  We rose before the sun. As we were about to hit the nonexistent trail, Walid pointed to some nebulous place in the distance and said, “The well is right over there.” This was good news, since we had less than one guerba of water remaining.

  A pale, predawn light bled across the sky, erasing the stars one by one. The silvery moon still shimmered above. We wove our way through a labyrinth of dunes, around their curling tails and up soft slopes, to saddles between converging ridges. Our feet plunged deep into the cool, loose sand. As the glow from the east intensified, the dunes blushed with color, like life returning to the pallid cheeks of a waking Snow White. Long shadows fell from sharp, serpentine spines, accentuating the hard angles and voluptuous curves that flowed into one another.

  I expected us to stumble upon the well at any moment but wasn’t worried when we didn’t, since I’d learned that Walid’s “right over there” could mean a couple of hours distant. But a couple of hours later, we still weren’t there. Walid looked puzzled, as though the trusty map in his head had a piece torn off it. He thought we should’ve reached the well by now, and was confused that we hadn’t. Maybe we were off course; maybe it was farther than he’d predicted; he didn’t know. For the first time, my confidence in him was shaken. Though Walid wasn’t yet willing to concede that we were lost, the possibility loomed over us, unspoken, like a monster that we hoped would leave us alone if we ignored it.

  Walid handed me command of our camels and pointed in the general direction toward which he wanted me to head. He and Baba split up, climbing different dunes and walking along their ridges, scoping the vistas for a familiar sign. I imagined that one of them would soon shout and wave, indicating that they’d found the well. But they didn’t.

  Minute after uncertain minute passed. My thoughts turned to our nearly depleted guerbas. We probably had enough water to last us the rest of the day, but no more. Suddenly, everything changed: My concerns about finding the caravan evaporated in the face of the much greater problem of finding the well. We had no way of calling in help, and it was hardly likely that anyone would randomly happen to rescue us; caravans steer clear of dune fields at all costs, due to the dangers of getting lost, the possibilities of injury to their animals, and the time it takes for long strings of camels to negotiate them. I remembered tales I’d heard of lost desert travelers forced to kill their camels, squeeze the juices from their stomachs, and drink their blood in an effort to buy themselves a few more days of life. Fending off visions of shriveling to death while the Saharan sun sucked the moisture out of me, I tried to convince myself that there was no need to panic until Walid did.

  After about half an hour, Walid and Baba joined me again and paused for a minute to talk. Neither had seen anything recognizable; neither had any idea where we were. We were officially lost among the dunes. So, pursuing the only sensible course of action in one of the worst possible desert scenarios, we unloaded the camels and made a pot of tea.

  When we’d finished the three rounds, Baba mounted his camel and shot off into the desert on a solo scouting mission. I lay down with my turban over my face, protecting me from the now blazing sun. For a few minutes, I wished I’d had a GPS and the well’s coordinates, but I quickly banished this heretical thought. Nomads never travel with technological aid; they have to work their way out of difficult situations with nothing but themselves to rely upon. It was one aspect of their lives that I’d wanted to experience first hand, and this was my opportunity, if an extreme one. Ultimately, my curiosity about how they’d manage our escape from the dunes overpowered my desire for an easy way out. As a result, I lay there, neither agitated nor optimistic, waiting for Baba’s return—though some might attribute my odd sense of calm to that ever-helpful defense mechanism known as disassociation.

  In fifteen minutes, Baba was back. He hadn’t found the well itself, but said he’d spied the telltale tracks that led to it. Though there is no single trail that the caravans follow, their paths converge near wells, forming highways of trampled sand that eventually thin to invisibility the farther one gets from the watering holes.

  We packed up quickly and continued through the dunes, trying for a shortcut to the well now that we supposedly knew in which direction it lay. Cascading crescents of sand formed a magnificent maze. Frequently, we worked our way down an alley between towering, sculpted fins, only to dead-end at a sheer, impassable wall. Forced to retrace our steps, we’d try another avenue, hunting for a navigable route. I felt like we were in a laboratory experiment, with humans instead of mice for subjects, and water instead of cheese as the prize at the end of the course. For more than two hours we wandered thus. I began to wonder whether Baba had, in fact, found the way, or if we were going everfarther astray. Yet I was so entranced by the beguiling patterns formed by the sand—a breathtaking synthesis of chaos and order blown by the wind into perfect aesthetic harmony—that I relished every moment we were among these dunes, my worries about being lost mitigated by the realization that if we were, it’d allow us to spend more time there.

  At last we emerged from the mouth of a narrow, winding gully onto a broad open plain. A freeway paved by countless camel prints ran directly past us, which we followed for a few minutes to our longsought goal. The heaps of decomposing camel carcasses scattered around the well—their bones bleached and brittle, their hides withered and hard—underscored how fortunate we’d been to make it there.

  It was nearly noon. The sun blasted from above. The sand scalded from below. We set up a blanket for shelter and crawled beneath it. We would wait to get water, Walid said, until the caravan arrived.

  “The caravan?” I said, stunned. If the tracks we’d passed the day before were theirs, they should be long past us by now.

  “Didn’t you see them as we were coming through the dunes?” Walid asked.

  See them? I wanted to say, Everything I’ve thought might be a camel for the past three days has been either a bush or a rock, so I’ve given up on seeing the caravan until it’s right in front of my eyes. But all I said was, “No, I saw nothing.”

  “Well, they’re on their way,” Walid maintained, pointing in the direction we’d come from. “Give them half an hour.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I checked my elation, though, knowing by this time that until we were with the caravan, we weren’t with the caravan.

  While we waited, Baba walked over to the bales of grasses cached by Taoudenni-bound caravans so their camels would have fodder on their southbound return. He snatched a handful from one after another so our camels could snack, and carried a sheaf back to our shelter, with which he made some repairs to his cargo pads. Though I wasn’t sure if this unapproved appropriation counted as stealing, it seemed in line with the nomad ethic of sharing, and he took so little from each pile as to hardly deplete any one stash. When the camels finished eating, they stood motionless, heads high, facing straight into the sun. Though they do this to minimize the amount of direct sunlight on the bulk of their bodies, it looks as though they’re receiving silent signals from outer space.

  Sure enough, in half an hour, a dark stream of camels poured over the ridge to the south. Two of the azalai broke ranks and trotted ahead to meet us. The greetings were ardent and long, and when they were over the five of us filled guerbas and poured some water for the camels. Before we finished, the caravan, seventy-five camels strong, was upon us. They were loaded with food sacks, ropes, goatskin buckets, inner tubes, and many bundles of grasses—a few of which they dropped about a hundred yards from the well before marching on. The two azalai we’d hauled water with hurriedly left to join their convoy, while we loaded our camels and set out after them.

  A de
ep sense of relief swept through me. My worries, my self flagellation, had been premature. I would get to ride with the caravan after all.

  The camels were strung in three rows that marched side by side, as though in a military parade. One azalai rode at the front of each train, one at the back. We hung toward the rear, and Walid bantered with the camel drivers, exchanging news.

  I instantly understood why Walid preferred traveling on our own. Contrary to what I’d imagined, the caravan moved surprisingly slowly. Though I was glad to be riding alongside it, I felt constrained, like finding myself behind a slow-moving car after cruising along at high speed. The caravan compensated for its pace by traveling long hours with no breaks. Some of the camels were so big, so impassive, they bore a resemblance to the ships to which they’re so often compared; their solid front flanks and stout chests looked as sturdy as any boat’s hull, while their slight pitching mimicked the motion of a waterborne vessel steaming forward, gently rocked by waves. Other camels were young and irresistibly cute, just old enough to make the journey for the first time and begin learning the jobs for which they were bred; as with an adolescent azalai on his virgin voyage to Taoudenni, it seemed like a rite of passage for these camels, too, as they left the pasture and their mothers to set off into the world with other males.

  Though females are more manageable, male camels are stronger and endowed with greater endurance, so they alone compose the caravan corps. The females are left behind to breed, nurse the young, and provide milk for nomad families. Similarly, no women accompany the caravans; they stay with the tents and tend to the herds and their children while the men strike out on the salt trail. Rather than the result of sexism, this tactical division of labor between the genders, both human and animal, is simply another strategy to promote survival.

  We climbed atop a lifeless plateau, barren but for an occasional boulder that seemed to have dropped from above. Plodding forward through dizzying heat and overwhelming desolation, relief for body and soul came only with the sunset, which painted the cloudless sky inluminescent watercolors, all shades of the rainbow washing into one another. When we made camp at dusk, heaven and earth glowed in a purple light.