Since we’d run out of the cooking wood we’d carried from Araouane, Walid instructed me to collect dried camel dung, about the size and shape of robins’ eggs, with which the ground was littered. Nearly dry when they drop, after a short time on the ground they are ready to burn and are so hard that they leave no stain upon your hands. They light easily and smolder well; all in all they’re an excellent substitute for charcoal. I formed a basket with the front of my shirt and carried a pile of poop back to our camp.
Meanwhile, the azalai had unloaded their camels, working in fast motion to free them from their burdens. They threw bales of grass on the ground, which the camels huddled around, lowering their necks to grab a mouthful, then raising their heads and chewing contemplatively, as though in deep thought.
Rather than cooking all together, Walid, Baba, and I had a fire of our own, and the azalai had three separate fires among themselves. In fact, this large caravan was a coalition of three individual caravans that had linked up and were traveling together for safety. The leader of the camel train we had planned to accompany came over and joined us around our fire. Named Bakai, he was twenty-two years old and a cousin of Walid and Baba. His beardless face made him look younger than his years. Over his blue boubou, he wore a blue Nike sweatshirt. He greeted me enthusiastically, and was quick to laugh given the slightest cause.
While our rice was cooking, I asked my companions about their names for some of the constellations. Since we often seemed to be heading straight for it, I pointed first to Cygnus, then drew its pattern of stars in my notebook, which I lit with my headlamp. Baba said that, to them, it was a big bird. “Okay,” I thought, “we’re seeing basically the same images in the night sky.” But then I asked them about Cassiopeia. Baba explained that it was a hand, and not just any hand, but that of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima—a common symbol in the Muslim world that protects against the evil eye.
“For us it’s different,” I said. Along with telling them it was a woman in a chair, I sketched a rudimentary picture of a sitting woman, with a few long lines for hair and a pair of round breasts to emphasize her gender. When I showed it to them, Bakai chortled with laughter, pointing at her well-endowed torso, like a schoolboy seeing his first copy of Playboy. Walid and Baba cracked up, laughing more at Bakai than at my drawing.
The last time I’d talked about the stars had been at the port at Kourioume, while waiting for the taxi that took me to Timbuktu. I was sitting with a fifteen-year-old Ghanaian boy I’d befriended on the boat, whose name was Issifu. He’d asked me if I knew the constellations, so I pointed out Cygnus, Hercules, and Delphinius the Dolphin. When I came to Cassiopeia, I said that she’d been a great queen, who had once bragged she was more beautiful than the sea nymphs. Poseidon, the sea god and father of the nymphs, was offended by her boasts, so he loosed a sea monster to terrorize the coastline of Cassiopeia’s country. The only way to sate the beast, according to an oracle, was with the flesh of Cassiopeia’s daughter, Andromeda. She was chained to a rock at the edge of the sea and left to become monster food. Meanwhile, I told Issifu, a prince named Perseus was on a mission to slay the gorgon, Medusa, a woman with snakes coming out of her head who was so ugly that anyone who saw her face turned to stone on the spot.
Excited, Issifu jumped up and exclaimed, “I know that movie!”
“Movie?” I thought, puzzled for a moment. Then it dawned on me. “You’ve seen Clash of the Titans?”
“Yes, yes,” he shouted. “He takes the flying horse, cuts off her head, and holds it up like this!” He lifted his clenched fist high in the air. “Then he flies over and saves the princess!”
I couldn’t believe it. The ancient Greeks had made it to modern day Africa by way of Hollywood.
After dinner I went to bed and read for a few minutes, escaping to Europe and the sinister world of occultism in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, before fading off to sleep. When Walid woke me in the morning, it was still dark. But the caravan was already gone.
There was a change in the weather. A brisk, frigid wind blew steadily from the north, chilling me through my clothes. For the first time since arriving in Africa, I was cold. While we waited for the tea to brew, Walid, Baba, and I sat around the fire, our blankets draped over our shoulders. As we rode, the sun baked our backs, while our shadowed fronts froze, giving me newfound sympathy for the planet Mercury. The wind tossed loose grit into our faces. Streams of sand raced across the desert floor. We passed desiccated camel corpses with ever greater frequency. And the caravan was nowhere in sight.
I couldn’t believe we’d lost it again. By this time, I knew that Walid understood my goal. Miscommunication was not the issue. Walid simply loved his sleep. I was frustrated and baffled, not sure what I had to do in order to have the experience I’d come for. The problem was that I felt fundamentally powerless, reliant on Walid for my very survival.
Though exacerbated by the fact that we’d caught them and lost them again, this kind of frustration was by now familiar territory and I was able to stop myself from repeatedly (and silently) cursing Walid after a few healthy rounds of internal ranting. I distracted myself with thoughts of food.
Normally, wherever I travel, I have no problem eating the same thing, day after day, if that’s what the local people eat. For a time I grow tired of it, then I cross a threshold and feel as though I could go on eating it—whether “it” is beans and rice, mutton stew, or eggs—forever. But not only was our food monotonous, it got worse every day. The goat butter, which had been hanging in a clear plastic bottle in direct Saharan sunlight for going on two weeks, became more rancid by the hour. Every bite of rice was gritty with sand, and though I was usually able to ignore it, it was like a form of slow torture that every so often made me want to scream.
Not to dwell too long on things I couldn’t have, I’d allow myself to engage in food fantasies for ten minutes a day. Without fail, I’d imagine drinking a perfect cup of strong black coffee, vividly savoring the flavor of its rich, edgy brew, while being transported by its aroma to a far-off olfactory paradise. Then, nearly every day, I’d eat a burrito smothered in red chile from my favorite Santa Fe restaurant, slowly feasting on the hearty, spicy sauce, succulent roast beef, and melted cheddar. Occasionally, I caught myself moaning from a combination of pleasure and desire. It amused me that of all the tastes in the world I could’ve possibly conjured, a burrito was what I craved most, but I guess it’s true that we don’t choose our fantasies, they choose us.
To combat the monotony of hour upon hour of travel, I finally trained myself to read while swaying back and forth as I rode, after many nausea-inducing attempts. I took a small measure of pride in being able to do something on camelback that even Walid and Baba couldn’t do—though only because they couldn’t read at all. Not wanting to simply bury my head in a book all the time, I read for only a fraction of the day, just long enough to give myself a break from the numbing scenery and my own thoughts.
Despite the unbelievable physical demands and our loss of the caravan, I found it relatively easy to keep my sense of humor—after all, how seriously could I really take the scene of a Jewish guy raised in suburban Connecticut chasing a camel train across the Sahara with a couple of Muslim tribesmen just to pick up some salt? My sense of gratitude, too, remained intact, though sometimes only because my stomach was holding firm, for which I gave thanks frequently and fervently.
We rode through the day and deep into the darkness, seventeen hours in total, without seeing a trace of the caravan. When we finally made camp and sat around the dinner fire, I again talked with Walid about finding it and sticking with it all the time. He clucked with understanding, and again explained how much longer our days would be. I told him I was prepared for that, and wanted to do it. He said okay, and told me to set my alarm for 3 AM. To my great surprise, when it went off, he didn’t tell me to reset it, but got up and started moving. Our conversation, it seemed, had had its desired effect.
For all practical pu
rposes, when we started off again, it was still night. The clear sky glittered with stars; the Great Bear, which was usually below the horizon, as though hibernating in some astral cave, hovered toward the north. Orion stood in the southwest, leaning to the side, his Great Dog beside him. The wind persisted. It was cold but refreshing, and I felt like I could walk forever.
As the rim of the sun peeked over the edge of the earth, Walid handed me the camels’ lead. He pointed in the direction we wanted to head, and I marched on while he and Baba stopped to pray. They had been inconsistent in their devotions, praying a few times a day when it was most convenient. Usually we broke camp just late enough to allow them to worship before we hit the trail, but on the mornings when we left before any light was in the sky, they always stopped at sunrise. Due to the lack of water and the sterility of the desert, they were allowed by Muslim law to use sand for their ablutions before kneeling in supplication to Allah.
The sand was littered with chunks of broken rock, and I had to look ahead and pick out a clear path so the camels could walk without stumbling. Seeing the camel carcasses along the way had impressed upon me how thin the line was between a successful desert crossing and a disaster, especially if traveling with few camels. On a large caravan, the death of a camel could be compensated for with only a small financial loss. For individuals or small parties, every camel counted. There is an old African saying, “You travel faster alone, but farther together.”
We climbed a series of gentle rises, each capped with tables of fractured, worn rock. Here and there we passed shards of solid salt that had fallen from caravans on their way back south. It was the first sign that we were closing in on our goal, though it was still a few days away.
Around 10 AM, some seven hours into our day, we came across the smallest well I’d yet seen. We unloaded the camels and gathered some dung for a fire, then Walid and I went to fetch water while Baba made tea. To the north, west, and south, the desert stretched beyond the limits of our sight; to the east a small hill lent us a sense of having our backs covered. As at Foum el-Alba, heaps of grass had been left behind by mine-bound caravans. I wondered if any belonged to our caravan, which I was beginning to think of less and less as “ours.”
The well was shallow and had no pulley supports, which was just as well since we had no pulley. Smooth grooves had been worn into the cement rim by years of friction with ropes. With no leather bucket, Walid tied our cooking pot to the end of a rope, lowered it, and pulled it up hand over hand, his bare feet pressed against the well for leverage. Metal drums, like those at Douaya, were placed here as troughs, which Walid filled. As he hauled the water, I used a bowl to fill our guerbas. I appealed to Walid to pour directly from the pot into the tubes to prevent the ubiquitous sand and cud particles that covered the bottom of the barrel from tainting our water supply, but he brushed me off, saying it would take longer. As far as I could tell, there was no reason to rush, but of course that was simply the azalai way.
When we were done, Walid and I went over to where Baba tended the teapot. Before the second round had been brewed and served, a dark mass appeared on the southern horizon, growing larger by the minute. While we sat there watching, our caravan trundled past slowly, methodically. The azalai waved and shouted greetings from their mounts, apparently glad to see us again. Walid yelled that we’d be right behind them. Though I was antsy to get going, with our superior speed I knew we could quickly close the small gap growing between us. Again, I was deeply relieved that our paths had crossed. I felt that Walid must have known what he doing to place us smack in the middle of the trail, and believed that now that we’d caught the caravan for a second time, we’d stay with it. Naturally we had to drink a third cup of tea before we could leave. When we finished, we loaded our camels quickly, as we always did. By this time, once the heaviest bags were slung atop Lachmar, Walid trusted me enough to secure the smaller items myself while he and Baba loaded the other two camels.
When we joined the caravan an hour later, we were in the midst of yet another great, featureless expanse. The desert floor was a hard mosaic of black and gray pebbles, a classic example of the vast, stony flats, called reg, that pervade the Sahara, making up over 50 percent of its surface—more than twice the area covered by dunes. Free from the effects of blowing sand, which quickly erase evidence of those who pass over it, the earth was marred by row after row of tire tracks, some faint, some deep, stretching into the distance side by side as though someone had run a giant rake over a gravel bed. As bleak as this place would have been in a purely natural state, the tire tracks made it look used, damaged, like even more of a forlorn wasteland.
As we trudged along, I was struck by the functional simplicity of the caravan. The system of carrying fodder—which balanced in unruly brown bundles over the camels’ ribs—and caching it for the return trip captured the essence of ages’ worth of cumulative knowledge for crossing the desert. The blankets upon which the azalai sat, under which they slept, and with which they made shade; the camel dung over which they cooked; the improvised ropes they used; their ragged, dirty robes and turbans—all these made a mockery of the expensive, hightech gear promoted in outdoor magazines as must-haves for wilderness travel. And everything the azalai use is better suited to this environment than new fangled gadgetry would be: A dung fire will never clog with sand as a stove would, and fuel is free; blankets are more durable and serve many more purposes than a pricey sleeping bag; their clothing is cheap, easily repairable, super functional, and, most important, distinctively stylish.
To my surprise, the caravan pulled to stop with a couple of hours of daylight remaining. We unloaded our animals in a rare feature in this part of the desert—a wide, dry streambed cut three feet into the earth by water, which flowed here no more than a few times each century. They had chosen this as the night’s camp because, thanks to the recent storms, just enough grass grew on the wadi’s banks for the camels to graze upon. The grass was so short, so sparse, each blade hardly thicker than a strand of hair, that it was practically invisible; it looked like the camels were eating dirt. With too many animals to hobble, the azalai scampered around, trying to keep the camels from straying too far in too many different directions.
The floor of the wadi was a fine, rust-colored sand. Since the wind still blew fiercely, we built a wall from our bags and cargo pads to shield us from the clouds of dust it drove down the streambed. As on the gusty night when I slept behind the bush, sand slowly began to pile up around us and atop us.
Though the cut walls of the wadi appeared to offer natural protection from the elements, this was illusory. I quickly noticed that the open, stony ground above the banks, though no less windy, kept the sand in its place. I took my blanket, my water bottle, and my day pack and left the arroyo for a spot on the plateau. Returning to Walid and Baba, I suggested we move all our stuff up there. At first they resisted, but after a particularly violent blast of sand, they gave in. Clearly a superior location, I swelled just a little at having shown them a better way to do something. It was another small step, I felt, toward earning their respect.
Once again, when we woke in the morning, the caravan was gone. I was speechless, but felt like letting loose a loud AAARRRRGGGHHH—like Charlie Brown tricked into letting Lucy hold the football for the hundredth time. I complained bitterly to Walid, reminding him that he’d promised to stay with the caravan all the time. He told me we’d catch up to them soon. I hoped he was right: We only had one more night in the desert before we’d reach Taoudenni, ensha’allah, and I wanted to be there when the caravan arrived at the mines, to see what that moment of accomplishment was like for the azalai and share it with them.
After continuing for a few hours across the featureless gray landscape we’d begun traversing the day before, the trail descended a few hundred feet down a ravine. Like Dorothy leaving her colorless home in Kansas for the brilliant land of Oz, we were suddenly cast into a world of red, pink, and yellow. Mesas with flat tops and steep, creased slope
s rose from the desert floor, hovering nearby and breaking the distant horizon.
I was filled with a mixture of anticipation and reservation at the thought of nearing the mines. I looked at our imminent arrival there the way I would view a successful ascent of a major peak: It would be a great achievement, worthy of celebration and a moment’s pause to breathe deeply, but getting to the top of a mountain is only half the job—one still has to get back down safely, and things are even more likely to go wrong on the descent. This awareness kept any inclination toward cockiness or undue jubilation in check.
We didn’t see our caravan all day. We did, however, cross paths with a small caravan returning from the mines: fifteen camels burdened with gleaming slabs of salt, tied with leather straps and balanced over the camels’ humps, led by one man and a boy perched perfectly atop his mount, looking like he couldn’t be older than ten. It seemed incredible that someone so young would make this journey, and I wondered at the power of the experience this father and son shared (assuming that’swhat they were), alone in the vastness together, confronting the elements, managing their animals, handling their precious, fragile cargo, one teaching the other about the ways of the desert.
After some twelve hours on the march, we found ourselves amid a field of low ruby-red dunes with sharp contours, their sides streaked with mesmerizing ripples. Walid pointed to a lone butte that towered a couple of miles to the north. “That’s Gara,” he said. “We will find the caravan there.” And sure enough, in a basin of sand at its base, we joined them at their camp. I was determined not to lose them again.
The Caravan of White Gold Page 12