CHAPTER 7
In the morning, for the first time since the trek began, there was no reason to get up early. I lingered in my sleeping bag, dreaming of a leisurely big breakfast of pancakes, bacon, and coffee. The usual handful of peanuts and dates was a bit of a letdown.
When we were ready to head to the mines, we once again piled our belongings and covered them with our blankets. Then Walid led me to Abdi’s quarry.
Abdi was glad to see me, and welcomed me down the cut stairs that led into his mine. He introduced me to his mining partner, Ali, a tall, lanky Saharan with a chiseled face and a goatee sprouting from his chin, who was wearing a T-shirt that said WWF SMACKDOWN and featured a faded image of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin flexing ferociously. Ali’s pants were knockoffs with the letters NIKF on the side pockets. He was busy doing the finishing work on a block of salt, hewing a thick tombstone-like slab down to a width of about two inches so it would be ready for transport and sale.
Like all the mines, Abdi’s was a pit about twenty feet square, hand-dug directly into the ground. I marveled at the care that had obviously been taken to make the walls, which were scarred with pick marks, so very straight. The colors of the cross section of exposed earth merged from rose to buff yellow before abruptly striking a hard, glassy layer of noncommercial salt—called sel gemme—that is the bane of the miners’ job to cut through, and is discarded as garbage. Below that, the dirt is a deep brown, and below that, some six feet beneath the surface, is the salt that the miners prize, for which men and camels travel weeks across the desert to retrieve.
Three strata of rock-solid commercial-grade salt run horizontally beneath the entirety of Taoudenni. Once all the rubble is removed from above them, the top layer of valuable salt gleams from the floor of the mine like the surface of an icy pond. Using their hands, with spread fingers, as measuring rods, and calling the distance between the tip of the thumb and the tip of the middle finger 25 centimeters, the miners use picks to cut the salt into blocks 50 centimeters wide by 125 centimeters long. The thickness of each block is determined by the thickness of the strata, which is about 15 centimeters. Each weighs about three hundred pounds before being hewn down to its finished size. After the three layers of salt are harvested from the bottom of the mine, the miners tunnel out to the sides beneath the layer of sel gemme, which is dense enough to support all the dirt above it with no buttressing, even as the caverns grow into enormous underground rooms.
All the salt had already been extracted from the floor of Abdi’s mine, and he was working on a new tunnel that, at this point, was only a meter—or two block widths—deep, and a meter and a quarter—or one block length—wide. He invited me to watch everything he did, so I stepped over chunks of broken salt and around a row of unfinished blocks that were propped on their sides and leaning against each other. With his hand, Abdi measured twenty-five centimeters from either side of the tunnel and etched vertical lines in the crumbly brown dirt on the wall in front of him to mark his place. His tool could hardly have been more primitive; it was a tapered wooden club, like those carried by cavemen, with a metal pick-head jammed into the fat end. He sat on a stump of salt covered with a folded rag, pressed his bare feet against the wall, and hacked away at the dirt to the outside of one of his marks—between it and the tunnel wall—grunting with each swing the way Jimmy Connors used to when he hit a tennis ball. When he’d cleared a narrow vertical space between the sel gemme and the good salt to the proper depth, he handed the pick to me, instructing me to do the same on the other side of the tunnel.
I sat down on the salt stump, grasped the rough handle of the pick, and went to work, grateful for the shade provided by the tunnel’s roof. Though I was accustomed to chopping round after round of firewood back home, I felt like a weakling. I had to pause frequently to rest my arms and, by the time I’d cleared the gap to the proper depth, they felt like rubber. I was sufficiently humbled, and had gained the kind of respect for the miners that can only be acquired by laboring, if only for a short time, in their place. I remembered being told as a child that if I didn’t do well in school I’d end up becoming a ditch digger; and here I was, momentarily sinking below my father’s worst predictions.
When I breathlessly handed the pick back to Abdi, a pillar of earth stood between the spaces we had made. By hacking away at its base, just above the good salt, the entire pillar fell in one chunk, fully exposing the surface of the uppermost layer of commercial-grade salt.
The three layers of salt were of varying quality. The top, called Al-Beidha, was the middle grade; the middle, called Al-Bint, was the lowest grade; and the bottom, called Al-Kamra, was the highest grade and worth the most. Moreover, whereas one raw slab of Al-Beidha or Al-Bint could be trimmed down only to a single bar of finished salt, the Kamra could be split in half, yielding two bars from one raw block.
Though there were visible differences in their textures—the smoothest, finest-grained being the best—I was amazed by how quality conscious Malians were about their salt, from the miners to the old women who sold small pieces of it at the market in Timbuktu. People spoke of Kamra with the same reverence with which a wine connoisseur might talk about a special vintage from a certain year. For a culture in which this now common place mineral has played such a central role for more than a thousand years, all salt is definitely not the same.
I sat and watched as Abdi worked to loose the salt from the grip of the earth. The mine was filled with the sounds of grunt-thud-scrape, grunt-thud-scrape, repeating itself in a steady, entrancing rhythm. Abdi sang as he swung—“Pour le courage,” he explained. When he had successfully cut around the edges of the top block of salt, he gave three powerful whacks into the thin line of sediment that separated it from the layer below it; the block popped free, and he used his pick-blade to lever it off and onto the ground. After another hour and a half, he had three hefty slabs to show for his morning’s labor. Later, once he had a substantial stack of salt, he would begin the finishing work, trimming the salt with a simple adze-head pounded into a wooden baton, like his friend Ali was doing at that moment.
The miners work two shifts a day, one in the morning, one in the late afternoon, breaking during the hottest hours for lunch, tea, and rest. Abdi and I walked back to his hut, where the pot of rice he had set to simmer that morning was ready to eat. By this time, my clothes, hands, feet—and probably lungs—were coated with fine salt dust.
We sat on reed mats on the floor of his simple abode. Since there were only two of us, we ate from the same bowl. Abdi shared his quarters with another miner, who was reclining while listening to Arabic BBC on his shortwave. When he learned that I was from the United States, he informed me that an American helicopter had recently been downed by Iraqi insurgents. It was the first news I’d had in nearly three weeks.
Fearing I might be upset by the report, Abdi reprimanded his roommate for telling me about it, and a heated debate ensued. Abdi asserted that I had a right to my ignorance, while his roommate maintained that I had a right to know what was going on in the world. I personally didn’t care that much either way; from this outpost in the midst of the Sahara, events in the rest of the world might as well have been happening on the planet Pluto. Fortunately for my sake, these sentiments were shared by virtually all the miners and nomads I met. The troubles of the Iraqi people—and even the Palestinians—seemed too remote to upset these West African Muslims, especially when they had their own immediate difficulties to deal with. Even so, Iraq was a topic upon which I preferred not to dwell, so I steered the conversation back to life at the mines.
Since there was no form of civil government or law enforcement at Taoudenni, I asked Abdi about the crime rate in this community of a couple of hundred povertystricken men. Judging by his expression, I might as well have inquired about Internet access. There was no crime at all, he said, no robbery, no violence, nor was there any alcohol. When the rare disagreement arose between miners, they took their complaints before the acknowledged chi
ef of the mines for arbitration. A religious leader respected for his wisdom and fairness, the decisions made by this Solomon of Taoudenni were accepted by all as final, without complaint. The ethics of Islam clearly served to create a stable society in conditions where lawlessness could have easily reigned. Peaceful and crime-free, Taoudenni seemed like the most unlikely of utopias.
When I asked why there were no women at the mines, I was given two answers: that the miners would get less work done if there were women to distract them, and that, because of the severity of conditions and the poor quality of the brackish drinking water, women would become sick. There seems to be some truth to the latter explanation, since prior to 1968, women and children did live at Taoudenni with their husbands and fathers. Illness was such a problem, particularly among the kids, that a collective decision was made to keep women away from the mines for the greater welfare of the families. Since then, men have performed the household tasks normally assigned to their wives, mothers, and sisters, such as cooking and cleaning.
The only all-male society I could think of in the United States was within our prison system. Based on what I knew of that, I asked Abdi directly if the miners ever had sex with one another. He laughed, vigorously shaking his head, assuring me that they didn’t. It was the only thing he told me that I had trouble believing.
During this lunchtime conversation, Abdi debunked a number of the misconceptions I had about life at the mines, which I’d acquired from the preparatory reading I had done. I’d expected Taoudenni to be filled with debtslaves, toiling for meager wages in an impossible effort to repay loans made by mining financiers. While this was once true, Abdi said, times had changed over the past decade, and most miners now worked for themselves.
The critical development in liberating the miners from their debtmasters was the introduction of trucks into the salt trade. Before, transportation of miners and the supplies they needed to survive was difficult to arrange and terribly expensive; the financiers fronted miners the money for transport, and for months’ worth of victuals, at a steep interest rate. Now that trucks come and go from Taoudenni with relative frequency, miners pay the truckers reasonable fees—in cash or salt—to take them to and from Timbuktu, and they can have supplies brought to them as needed, rather than buying and stockpiling huge stores in advance.
Thus, thanks to the trucks, most miners are now selfemployed, enjoying both the financial and emotional rewards of working as free men. Their average salaries have more than doubled, to a whopping $150 or so for the six-month-long mining season. Since trucks are not going to displace camels, I realized that the Caravan of White Gold is that rare instance in which the introduction of modern technology into an age-old commercial system has yielded great benefits without destroying the traditional way of life.
As Abdi was explaining this, Walid entered the hut and sat down. He was wearing a new army jacket that he had just bought from one of the few merchants who drive across the desert from Morocco in old Land Rovers to sell clothing, blankets, and green tea at the mines. Though Walid said he paid only one thousand CFA (West African Francs) for it, he could have meant ten thousand; because he didn’t understand numbers, he thought that anything he paid for with a single bill cost a thousand CFA, regardless of the bill’s denomination.
Through Abdi, Walid told me that we might have to return to Timbuktu without the caravan. Feeling my hackles start to rise at what would be the complete frustration of my mission to really experience caravan life, I checked my emotions and calmly asked what was going on. Walid explained that the caravan we arrived with might have to wait at Taoudenni for a week before it could leave with a full load of salt.
This, I learned, was the one major complication posed by the introduction of trucks—since they can carry hundreds of bars of salt, if a few arrive at the same time they can virtually buy out the mine, requiring the caravans (and other trucks) to wait until the miners dig more. Waiting is no problem for truckers, since their vehicles use no fuel while sitting. But the camels must eat in order to maintain their strength for the return journey and, since nothing grows at Taoudenni, the only food they have is the grass they bring with them. Once this is depleted, the caravans can only linger a short while longer. On very rare occasions, caravans have been forced to turn back emptyhanded.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the miners no longer work year-round, as they did in the days of debt-slavery. Back then, vast surpluses of salt accumulated during the summer months, since the miners kept digging even though the caravans only ran from October to March, as they do still. Now that they are free of their debtmasters and earn more money in less time than before, the miners, too, break during the hottest months of the year. Between the capacity of the trucks and the shortened digging season, salt shortages are a growing problem.
After I returned to Timbuktu, I spoke about this issue with Sidi Mohammed Ould Youbba, a historian who is an authority on the salt trade. He said that soon an agreement would have to be forged among the truckers, the azalai, and the miners to resolve the matter. Wondering whether the truckers would concede to tinker with a system that currently works to their advantage, I asked if he thought it was likely that the three groups could come to mutually acceptable terms. “Of course,” he replied, without a drop of doubt. Such pacts are commonplace, he said, and no one wants to drive anyone else out of business—which was a shock to my American ears. The truckers, miners, and azalai recognize the importance of the system as whole, he continued, and, as long as their own survival isn’t threatened, will make agreements and even sacrifices to promote the welfare of the others. This is due in part to the familial ties among all three groups, as well as to the ethic of mutual sustainability that permeates Saharan culture. Again, it seemed like a perspective plucked directly from the desert ecosystem, in which resources are shared such that no one gets fat but the whole is able to survive, which in turn supports the survival of its members.
At that moment in Abdi’s hut, I was concerned only about the survival of my dreams to travel with a working caravan. I had accepted the inconsistency with which we’d done so on the way to Taoudenni by telling myself I’d get my fill on the return trip. Still cool-headed, I firmly told Walid that heading back to Timbuktu by ourselves was not an option. I didn’t care if it took a week or more, I would wait for the caravan. After the incident two mornings earlier, when I’d threatened to leave Walid behind, he knew I meant it.
Walid then said there might be another possibility: We might be able to join a different caravan, led by one of his friends, that he believed would be departing in a day or two. I asked him to find out, and he said he’d let me know that evening.
After a few hours’ rest, Abdi and I went back to his mine. While he dug, I carried rubble up the stairs in a wooden crate, dumping it on the piles that ringed the mine’s perimeter. Abdi urged me to leave the dirt where it lay, trying to convince me that it was an insult to him for a guest to perform such menial labor. But his protests seemed perfunctory. I wanted to help him out as well as show him and the other miners that I was willing to get dirty right alongside them.
As afternoon turned to evening, I decided to head back to camp. On the way, I ran into Walid, Mohammed Majnoon, Horshack, Abdullai, Baba, and Big Baba standing at the edge of one of their mines. They greeted me enthusiastically, inviting me to join in their horseplay while they hoisted finished salt bars to the surface. Like the evening before, their animated mood proved irresistible; I was soon laughing with them and feeling as though I’d truly been accepted into their clique.
Horshack motioned for me to follow him, and led me down into an abandoned mine. A hole about two feet deep had been dug in the corner, into which he plunged an empty jug. When he lifted it, it was full of water. I dipped my finger in, then licked it; even the Dead Sea was less salty. We went back to the mine where his friends were, and Horshack poured the water over the salt bars. With its high saline content, it acted as a hardening agent, making the
slabs more durable for the long journey to market. Meanwhile, Walid and Abdullai secured strips of damp goatskin around the bars—one lengthwise, two widthwise—which also helped keep them intact, like taping windows during a hurricane. Then they joined the bars into pairs, fastening the widthwise straps one to another by inserting wooden cotter pins into loops at the ends of the straps. Just enough slack was left between the salt slabs so they could be slung over each side of a camel’s hump, balancing each other out. The salt was now ready for shipping.
Before returning to our camp, Walid and Baba took me to see the Taoudenni blacksmith. A dozen miners surrounded him, watching as he sharpened old tools and forged new ones. The forge itself was a primitive yet effective contraption, which lay on the ground. Two goatskin sacks, which looked like a pair of brown lungs, served as bellows. Their mouths—or really necks—were fitted into the hollowed prongs of a forked piece of wood. This was joined—at the foot of the Y—to two metal pipes about eighteen inches long that led to a heap of coals. As the blacksmith’s assistant squeezed the bellows, alternating between them in a rapid, panting rhythm, the coals glowed then faded, glowed then faded. Upon this beating heart of fire rested eight pick-blades, arranged in a circle like iron flower petals. The blacksmith hammered away, then plunged his finished work into a can of water to cool it.
The Caravan of White Gold Page 15