The Caravan of White Gold

by Michael Benanav

The alarm on my wristwatch went off at 2:45 AM. In the darkness behind me, the camels bellowed loudly as the azalai loaded them and strung them together with handmade ropes of twisted grass, joining the mouth of each to the tail of the animal in front of it. After a windless night, the sky was remarkably haze-free. Stars gleamed like diamonds spilled on a black velvet tray. As my eyes adjusted, the waning moon, still high above, cast enough light to create shadowy silhouettes. The humps of the seventy-five camels, standing together, looked like a mass of dark, restless dunes.

  “Good,” I thought. They hadn’t left yet. At long last, Walid, Baba, and I would depart alongside the caravan rather than trailing it across the desert. We’d all arrive at the mines together, ensha’allah.

  I rose, gathered some camel dung and a few strands of grass from the remnants of the fodder that our camels had eaten during the night, and lit a fire. I filled the teapot with water, set it on the smoldering pile, and packed up while it heated. Baba was helping the azalai load up; Walid had not yet stirred.

  Within minutes, I was organized, my bag sheathed inside its protective rice sack, tied up and ready to be loaded. I went back to the fire to prepare the tea, having decided on a pot of Lipton because it would take less time than performing the green tea ritual.

  “Yeh, Walid, Baba,” I shouted, “kess,” alerting them that there was something to drink. Walid groaned and rolled over. “Kess, kess,” I repeated insistently, until he sat up and shuffled over to the fire, his blanket draped over his head to shield him from the chill in the air. He drank, gave the glass back to me, and slowly nibbled some peanuts from the bag I had opened.

  The groans of the camels in the background were now accompanied by the inarticulate grunts of the azalai and the slapping of wood on flesh, as the men urged their beasts forward. They were leaving. Since we were probably no more than a few minutes behind, and would catch them quickly, I wasn’t distressed. In fact, I felt great, surprisingly energized, and while Walid sat staring into the glowing dung pile, I tied up our guerbas, put away the teapot and our metal bowls, and suggested that we, meaning he, get moving. Then I walked away from camp, into the privacy of darkness, to go to the euphemistic bathroom.

  When I got back, I saw that Walid had reignited the fire and had put the teapot back on to boil. The green tea box and the leather sugar bag were open beside him.

  I couldn’t believe it. Before we went to sleep, I had yet again impressed upon him how important it was for me to wake with, leave with, and travel with the caravan all day—especially on this day, since we were due to reach Taoudenni in the early afternoon, and I wanted to arrive there with the caravan. He clearly understood, and had promised me as much. Now, with the caravan already gone, he was just beginning the tea ritual. Then we’d have to load our camels, which together would put us close to forty-five minutes behind. Quickly doing the math based on estimates of our speed, I knew it would take about four hours to close the gap. My cheery mood was swept away by a tsunami of frustration.

  “Y’allah!” I prodded, “let’s go,” motioning upward with my arms. “Forget the tea. Let’s go!”

  Walid waved me over and told me to sit, have some more tea, and then we’d leave. He was in no hurry to get anywhere. But I wasn’t about to sit down.

  “Come on,” I said, “It’s time to leave.”

  Walid didn’t budge.

  His indifference made me furious, pushing my normally well balanced temper over the edge. “This is bullshit!” I yelled, switching from Arabic to English, “Fucking bullshit!”

  I’d had enough. For two weeks, I’d handed control of my daily destiny over to Walid. My ignorance of camels, of nomad ways, of the Sahara and the route through it had made me completely dependent upon him for my survival. And though he didn’t wield it authoritatively, he was obviously aware of his power. But in this moment, sick of the helplessness that had kept me from asserting myself, my anger urged me beyond it. I decided to leave Walid and Baba and strike out into the desert on my own.

  From where we were camped, I knew the general direction in which we were traveling, and figured that the North Star would more or less point my way. I also imagined that the fresh tracks of the caravan would have been easy to follow across the sand. It was an undeniably rash course of action, but in the moment, it seemed better than sitting impotently while Walid and Baba drank the mandatory three glasses of tea.

  Still cursing loudly in English, I stormed over to where our three camels were sitting. I picked up a lead, threw it over Lachmar’s neck, slipped it smoothly over his snout, put the loop into his mouth and cinched it down over his lower jaw, surprising myself by how expertly I’d done it. Walid yelled at me to stop, but I paid no heed. I was going to catch the caravan with or without him. With the slurping/clucking command, I told the camel to stand, and he did. But when I began leading him toward my bags, he didn’t move. I yanked on his rope, but he recoiled and let loose with a Chewbacca-like roar. I clucked and I slurped and I even spoke to him in words. But he wouldn’t take a step. Was it possible that Lachmar understood what was going on and was in cahoots with Walid?

  Walid shouted something at me that I didn’t understand, and pointed in the direction of the camel stick that was lying on the ground. I thought he was telling me that Lachmar would shut up and move if I gave him a good whack. It seemed a little excessive but, as riled as I was, the thought of hitting something had some appeal. I went for the stick. Before I could raise it, Walid was at my side, still pointing. He had never meant to indicate the stick at all, but to show me why Lachmar wasn’t following me. In my fury, I’d forgotten to unhobble his legs.

  Too worked up to be deflated by embarrassment, I quickly freed Lachmar’s feet and led him to my bags; he followed me willingly, removing all suspicion that there’d been an interspecies conspiracy against me. I shushed him to sit and threw his cargo pad over his back. As Walid and Baba watched, I hefted the two large bags that Lachmar carried, which together weighed about a hundred pounds and were tied to each other such that they would hang on either side of his hump, and slung them over the pad. Once they were properly balanced, I lashed on the other items for which I was responsible. When I secured my blanket on top, my audience snapped from their trance; Walid slugged his glass of tea like he was doing a tequila shot and Baba hurried to the fire and kicked sand over it. They hastily loaded their camels while I began walking, and were just minutes behind me leaving camp. Even in the heat of my outburst, I suspected that they’d never let me take off ahead of them, partly because it would have been a shameful dereliction of duty, and partly because of their genuine concern for my safety.

  Eager to catch the caravan as early in the day as possible, I marched rapidly, keeping Walid and Baba a couple of hundred yards behind me. Like most mornings, the predawn hours passed surprisingly quickly.

  As a golden glow seeped from the eastern horizon and Walid and Baba stopped to pray, I was able to see that we were traversing a landscape of rose-colored dunes that swelled, crested gently, fell away, then swelled again, giving the impression that the earth was breathing peacefully while it slumbered. The air was still, the silence perfect, the earth and sky aflush with radiant dawn. Any residual frustration that I carried with me from camp instantly evaporated.

  I paused to take off a layer of clothing and allow Walid and Baba to catch up. When they did, we mounted our camels and rode on without speaking, up a rounded hill and down the steep slope on the other side. As though we’d entered a different room in the desert, the scenery changed dramatically. Here, rows of red sand ridges poured like ribs from both sides of a spine of ancient black rock. A few flat-topped mesas abruptly broke the northern horizon line, jutting more than a thousand feet from the desert floor. And we could see the caravan in the distance—they were still quite a way ahead, but at least they were in sight.

  As we rode up and down and up again, I wanted to break what felt like an uncomfortable silence to let Walid know that I was no longer angry. With
out the language to really explain myself, I couldn’t address the subject directly. Instead, I initiated a simple conversation. Since we were in the midst of the most stunning terrain we had yet crossed, I asked Walid and Baba if they, too, thought it was beautiful.

  They each grimaced involuntarily, looked at me as if I were crazy, and simultaneously said “No.”

  I’m sure I looked at them as if they were crazy, and Walid asked, “Why? Do you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s very beautiful. It’s my favorite place so far.”

  Walid shook his head in befuddlement and the three of us laughed in mutual disbelief at the vast discrepancy between our impressions. For them, the most beautiful places in the Sahara are those where enough vegetation grows to support herds of goats and sheep and camels. Everywhere else is the region of death, too terrible to be beautiful. This was as profound as any other cultural difference between us, for I thought that the landscape surrounding us made a powerful case for the objective nature of beauty, which nobody could deny. We grew to appreciate this difference in each other, and it became the source of a comedy routine we’d enact when Walid wanted to make other people laugh: He’d mention this place and ask me what I thought of it. Happy to play my part, I’d praise it in the most poetic terms I could muster. Without fail, our audience would widen their eyes in surprise, then crack up at the fool ideas of a foreigner.

  The tension between us lifted, and I thought back to the events of the morning. Aside from producing the desired effect of hastening our departure from camp, my tantrum had other unforeseen benefits. The entire episode proved to be nothing less than a rite of passage, in which I graduated from dependent neophyte to experienced Saharan traveler, in both my eyes and Walid’s. For the first time, I had shown that I could load a camel by myself, a task so tricky that even the azalai help one another when possible. Moreover, by expressing my willingness to leave Walid behind and follow the caravan’s tracks, I had seized the reins of responsibility for my own experience. Through my defiant self assertion and my display of competency, I had finally earned his respect, which would soon prove key to the fate of the journey.

  We caught up with the caravan in a valley between two of the red sand ribs. The azalai riding at the end of one of the camel trains gave a welcoming shout and a wave. Walid pulled up alongside him, and the two of them exchanged the traditional minutes-long greeting like they were reading from a script. As if to complete the ritual, the azalai passed his antelope-horn pipe to Walid, who packed it with tobacco, filling his own at the same time. They rode on side by side, trailing plumes of sweetly acrid smoke behind them while they talked.

  The caravan, with ours now seventy-eight camels strong, was strung into three more or less equal lines. As we descended a sandy slope and wheeled in grand formation around the tail of a dune, we could have been a legion of desert cavalry riding proudly toward a battle choreographed by Cecil B. DeMille. I gasped with awe at the majesty of the scene, and at the fact that I was a part of it.

  Now on the flats, heading toward a gap between two mesas known as Foum Alous, and just a few short hours from our final destination, the mood among the caravan turned giddy. The azalai were talking and shouting excitedly with one another. Baba slid off his camel and tied it to L’beyya. He took a hand held brazier, about the size of a small lantern, from one of the azalai, and scurried around filling it with camel dung, which he lit. Walid produced the teapot, filled it with water, and passed it to Baba, who placed it atop the burning pellets. Holding the smoking brazier by its wire handle, Baba looked like a Catholic priest swinging an odd-smelling censer.

  Fortunately, this was one of the few times of the day when the light was good for taking photographs, so I grabbed my camera, slipped off Lachmar, tied him to Baba’s camel, and walked among the caravan, taking shots. Eventually, I made it up to the head of the pack, where Bakai was leading one of the strings. He greeted me warmly, and I countered with the expected phrases.

  “Taoudenni is that way,” he said, pointing ahead. “We’ll be there soon.”

  “Ensha’allah,” I replied.

  “Ensha’allah,” he confirmed, laughing, amused that I had given him the appropriate response.

  One of the other caravan leaders, named Najib, walked beside Bakai. Though I had met all the other azalai, for some reason we were still unacquainted. I had seen him from a distance—his posture expressed a certain aloofness, his manner was one of superiority. He was the only azalai on any of the salt caravans I saw who had a real leather riding saddle rather than a blanket folded atop a cargo pad.

  I introduced myself in a friendly way, thinking there was probably a really nice guy hiding beneath his cloak of pride. Najib promptly asked me to give him my watch. I was taken aback by his brazenness, especially because it was the first time (but not the last) that any azalai had asked for anything other than my friendship. At first I thought he was kidding, but when I realized he was serious, I became uncomfortable. Najib was the most powerful figure on the caravan and I knew it would behoove me to be in his favor. To deny him this gift could be tantamount to an insult, and I was fully aware that, to him, I was nothing more than a dispensable hanger-on. I tried to play it off by acting dumb and pretending I thought he asked what time it was—since the words for “watch” and “hour” sound identical in Arabic—hoping he’d think it fruitless to pursue the issue with a moron. But he was undeterred. Finally, I had no choice but to give him a straight answer. No. He grew irritable, ordering me not to take any pictures of him or his camels. Making a mental note to steer clear of Najib in the future, I decided it was a good time to drift back toward my friends.

  I reached them just in time to take the brazier from Baba as Walid passed a glassful of sugar down from atop his camel. Still keeping pace with the caravan, Baba mixed the sugar into the tea, then handed a glass up to the azalai riding beside him, who slugged it down and passed the glass back. Baba dashed between the camels to the other azalai, serving tea like a waiter in a mobile café, and when the pot was empty, another was brewed. I walked alongside Baba, handing him camel pellets and helping manage the brazier until teatime was over. Then, while Lachmar was still moving, I leapt atop his neck and slid tentatively onto his hump. Though I earned no points for style and few for technical merit, the azalai, who had never seen me do this and expected me to mount in typical tourist fashion by first couching the camel, gave a shout of approval and smiled their acceptance of me; with this successful if graceless maneuver, I’d shown that I was worthy of riding with them, if not with Najib.

  CHAPTER 6

  Before long, the caravan traveled through a pass between two burly, flat-topped buttes whose steep western walls were blanketed from top to bottom with sand. Their eastern sides were practically bare. This was Foum Alous, the gateway to the plains of Taoudenni; the Gates, I thought, of Hell. I remembered once seeing Rodin’s phantasmagoric sculpture of that name, in which he depicted people in relief (an ironic term, in this case) agonized by various forms of Underwordly torture. It was a deeply affecting work that captivated me so completely, it seemed to possess an aesthetic force akin to gravity, attracting my gaze like an apple to the earth and holding it there.

  But here, approaching what I imagined would be the closest thing to Hell on earth I’d ever encounter, I grew uneasy. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see human beings enduring the kind of suffering I expected to witness at the mines. Rodin’s work is so compelling in part because the viewer isn’t looking at real people condemned to the Inferno, but an artistic envisioning of an archetypal realm. Likewise, the idea that men live and work the way they do at the salt mines is fascinating (humanitarian sentiments aside), but preparing to meet that reality face to face was unsettling; it seemed more than a bit perverted that Taoudenni was marketed as a tourist attraction—albeit a rarely visited one—to which foreigners in four-by-fours occasionally came to gawk at less fortunate men. The only mitigating factor in my favor, I thought, was what I had endure
d to get there.

  When we arrived at the mines, we dismounted and unloaded the camels on an open, empty plain that had all the appeal of a giant parking lot. I felt a brief pang of triumph at having made it across the desert, but was quickly overwhelmed by the intensity of my surroundings.

  Despite all I had seen thus far, and all I had imagined, I was unprepared for the untempered desolation of Taoudenni. It is situated on utterly lifeless desert flats; not a single leaf, or even thorn, grows from the parched, crusty dirt, which was so sharp it bit into the soles of my bare feet. The sun pounded the earth like a sledge on an anvil. Mound after mound of mined rubble receded to the eastern horizon. I was overcome with foreboding. I felt intuitively that I didn’t belong there; that no one did. The severity of the Tanezrouft is easier to accept when it’s just a place for passing through. Only when confronted by the reality of people actually living and working there was I struck by its overwhelming meanness. I could see why, until 1991, this place was used as desert gulag for Malian political prisoners; the threat of it surely stifled more than a few dissident voices.

  Walid, Baba, and I piled our bags together and covered them with our blankets, a meager shield from the midday sun. Then we walked north a couple of hundred yards to where the miners lived, seeking shelter for ourselves and looking for Abdi Adurahman, Lamana’s nephew, who spoke fluent French. Our path skirted the western edge of the mines, which were square pits hand-dug straight into the ground; each surrounded by hills of rubble, they looked like gigantic prairie dog burrows. A mile or two to the north, a throne-like bluff rose from the ground, providing a visual boundary for the area called Taoudenni. To the west, the barren, featureless plains rolled into dunes along the far horizon.

  Two cargo trucks were parked at the opening of an alleyway into which we turned, which was bordered on both sides by heaps of broken rock. They were old, brawny tenwheelers, with battered cabs and flatbeds walled with low metal gates. They looked like they could drive through just about anything—if they didn’t break down trying. And though they could obviously carry more than a camel, they completely lacked the romance of the caravans; while they might replace camels in the desert, they would never be able to do the same in the human imagination. As when I first saw trucks at the well at Douaya, I was saddened by the thought that the imagination might soon be the only place where caravans would yet roam.