The Caravan of White Gold

by Michael Benanav

  We couldn’t linger long; the sun was setting behind a swirling sheet of cirrus, casting a smoky orange light. And I had patients to tend to.

  Abdullai walked back to camp with us, where we found a group of injured miners already waiting for treatment. I arranged myself on the blanket, unwrapped the tape from Abdullai’s thigh, and lifted the Band-Aids I’d applied the previous evening. The bandage had remained intact all day and his wound looked remarkably good. I covered it with fresh supplies and told him to leave it alone, promising to examine him one more time before leaving Taoudenni. The other miners got a few dabs of New-Skin before I sent them on their way.

  Abdi joined us for dinner and, through him, Walid laid out the options for our return. We could wait about a week and head south with the same caravan with which we’d arrived, or we could join his friend’s caravan and leave two nights hence. His friend, he explained, was driving twenty-five camels with one young assistant, and would be grateful for our help. Though I was somewhat hesitant to trade the glory of riding with an armada of camels for a string so small, I also saw the possibilities for a more intimate experience, and the chance to be more involved with the operations of the caravan. I told Walid I’d be willing to do so on one condition: that he teach me everything about being an azalai along the way, so I could play an active, useful role on the caravan, which I already knew would be impossible with the larger one. And, I reminded him, I wanted to travel with the caravan all the time, waking, sleeping, riding, and eating on their schedule, never leaving them. Walid agreed, and made sure I knew what that meant—that we’d be traveling even longer hours than on the way to the mines, never eating more than one meal a day. Was I sure I wanted to do that?

  Given the chance to change my mind, I paused for a moment, taking stock of myself. The trip to the mines had been hard enough as it was. Riding more and eating less would up the challenge significantly. But I had come here to experience caravan life, and there was no other way to do it. Though I’d surely be hungry, it was a sacrifice worth making. It’s not like the food was all that appetizing anyway. I told Walid not to worry, that I could handle it, and he said he’d finalize the arrangements the next day.

  I spent most of the following day in Mohammed Majnoon’s hut, along with Walid and a rotating crew of miners who came and went. One of these, a young man also named Mohammed, spoke French well, and with him as a translator I talked with the others. Until this point, I’d been so absorbed with learning everything I could about Taoudenni, and the miners had been so generous with their answers, that we had rarely talked about life in the United States, about which I imagined they were probably curious. This felt like the perfect time to field their questions, so I asked if there was anything they wanted to know. Expecting queries about the number of cars people owned or what the average yearly salary was, I was taken by surprise when one of them asked what kind of animals inhabited our deserts; were there cows and sheep and camels? There were cows, I said, and some sheep, as well as snakes, lizards, antelopes, and raptors. But there were no camels.

  They could hardly believe that a desert without camels could exist, and reacted as though something was fundamentally out of order in my part of the world. They urged me to export some and begin breeding and herding them back home. Aside from being an infallibly profitable venture, eating their meat and drinking their milk, the miners all agreed, could cure any sickness; camels were, they said, like a walking hospital.

  “If you were traveling in the desert there,” Walid wondered, “and you came across a cow, would you kill it and eat it?”

  I laughed, realizing that these guys had no conception of the way Americans obtain meat. To them, meat was alive until they slaughtered it, then it was skinned and hung up to dry. They only ate fresh meat immediately following a slaughter. I told them about supermarkets, and they nodded soberly as I explained the concept of refrigerated steaks wrapped in plastic. Even to my ears, in this context, the practice sounded bizarre and exotic.

  Still stuck on the subject, they then wanted to know if I would kill and eat the big birds and the antelopes that lived in the desert. No, I said, telling them that, normally, Americans eat only cows, chickens, and pigs.

  This proved more difficult to explain than the meat department in the grocery store. Since eating pig is forbidden by Muslim law, none of these men had ever seen one, and Mohammed, who was translating, looked at me blankly when I repeated the word cochon. Quite reasonably, he’d never had occasion to learn it, as I’d never learned the word in Arabic, though I could name most other barnyard animals. I drew a picture of a pig, which obviously didn’t help, but at last, by telling them it was an animal banned for consumption by the Koran, I was able to achieve an abstract kind of comprehension.

  For me, it was a lazy, uneventful day of napping and reading. Everything was set for Walid and me to leave the day after next, so I relished the opportunity to do nothing but rest.

  The following day, my last at the mines, was busier. Baba had made a somewhat unusual decision to stay, dig salt for a few weeks, and return with another caravan. (Usually miners and azalai stick to their roles.) Walid and I helped Baba move into a partially finished room adjacent to Mohammed Majnoon’s, running rope above the space and scrounging for scraps of metal with which to make a ceiling. Since he wouldn’t be there long, Baba didn’t want to spend the time excavating a mine of his own, so we scouted out old, abandoned pits, looking for any whose tunnels could be dug a little deeper, some of which were used as makeshift outhouses. Then, in the afternoon, as if in response to the conversation I’d had the previous day, I saw how the miners purchased their meat.

  Since we had finished the goat carcass we’d been eating for the previous two weeks, Walid suggested we buy some camel meat for the return trip. I had eaten camel a number of times in Egypt, and found it succulent and flavorful, so I thought it was a great idea.

  There is no regular meat market in Taoudenni, but when enough miners get together and pool their money to buy an aged camel, the butcher brings out his knives. Walid and I arrived too late to witness the slaughter, which I had believed I wanted to watch, but after seeing the severed head of the camel lying on the ground with glazed, lifeless eyes, next to a dagger and a bowl full of blood, I was glad we had missed it. Unlike the killing of a goat, which I can watch with little emotion, I felt that witnessing the murder of an animal for which I had fondness and respect would have been upsetting. I had no problem eating camel; I just didn’t want to see one suffer and die.

  The animal had already been skinned by the time we showed up. The hide was laid flat on the ground, hairy-side down, serving as a drop cloth on which the disassembled body parts were heaped. The bearded butcher—the only fat man I’d seen at Taoudenni—and his helpers carved away, stripping muscle from the camel’s legs, which were as tall as many of the miners who stood around watching, waiting for their portions.

  The meat men, dressed in turbans and blood-soaked boubous, crouched around the edge of the hide, working quickly and methodically, grasping the slippery flesh with bare hands as they sliced it from the bone while bantering with one another and the miners. The cut meat was divided into fourteen piles, which, for fairness’ sake, were equal in both size and contents, so each stakeholder would receive the same amount of red meat, intestine, stomach lining, and vital organs. When the job was finished, the butcher filled the bowls and rice sacks that the miners brought with them, and the meat was carried away. To my great relief, the share we bought included no guts or organs, since they would rot while we traveled.

  From the meat market, Walid and I went over to Abdi’s mine, where, in preparation for our departure, Walid collected from the floor shards of salt too small for sale but perfect for cooking with; he filled a rice sack to bring back to his family. Abdi gave me a fragment about as big as his huge hand, which looked remarkably like a representation of the African continent. Though it caused some confusion when going through airport security in Europe and th
e United States, since none of the inspectors had ever seen anything like it, I got it home in one piece, where it’s displayed as one of the most cherished mementos I’ve returned with from any of my travels.

  When Walid and I returned to our camp, a group of wounded miners had already lined up on what everyone knew was the last night the medical clinic would be open for service. After doling out another round of New-Skin, I examined Abdullai. Removing his bandage, I saw that the wound on his thigh was still clean, but that it really needed to be stitched. I had heard that Krazy Glue was an effective substitute for needle and thread, and though I had never before used it as a surgical tool, it was something I’d always wanted to try. With the little tube I carried in my repair kit, I drew a thin line of glue around the edges of the laceration, careful not to get any of it inside. I pinched the skin together and held it closed until the glue dried. I don’t know whether Adbullai or I was more surprised when I let go and we saw that his wound was so perfectly sealed it seemed to have vanished. I spread a thin layer of glue over the seam, for extra protection, told Abdullai to stay still until it hardened, then pronounced him cured. Abdullai, Walid, and the other miners reacted as if I’d performed a small miracle, praising and thanking me effusively.

  As night cloaked the desert in darkness, the miners with whom I’d become most friendly came to say good-bye. While we sat around the fire, talking and joking, a miner whom I’d never met approached, carrying a tube of something in his hand. He had bought it believing it was nasal medication, but said that when he’d applied it inside his nostrils, it had felt funny. He wanted to know if he was using it correctly. Abdi glanced at it, then handed it to me, the doctor, for inspection. The label read SENSODYNE.

  “C’est dentifrice!” I declared, and Abdi burst into hysterical laughter. He translated for everyone else, and they literally rolled on the ground with glee, pointing at and mocking the poor fellow who had tried to cure his cold by squirting toothpaste up his nose.

  After about half an hour, Abdullai, Abdullah, Baba, Horshack, and Mohammed Majnoon rose to go back to their village of salt and rock. I shook their hands in warm farewell, promised to send photos to them through Walid, and gave them a pound of the tobacco I’d purchased in Timbuktu to share with one another. Walid nodded his approval of my gesture, and said he was going to leave me with Abdi while he said goodbye to his other friends. He told me pack up as much as I could before going to sleep, since we’d be rising at 2 AM to leave with the caravan.

  Abdi asked if I’d deliver two letters for him, taking one to his mother in Araouane and another to his uncle Lamana. I gave him my notebook and a pen, then asked if he wanted to sit in my Crazy Creek camping chair while he wrote. He had never before seen this marvel of American ingenuity, which is essentially a flat pad that folds in half and clips into an L shape, providing a thin posterior cushion and some back support. All the nomads I have ever met have been impressed by this simple form of portable furniture and, as Abdi sat down in it, he started giggling. “I feel like the president!” he said, and launched into a speech, imitating Mali’s leader, Amadou Toumani Touré, in a deep, aristocratic voice, extending his hands in sweeping gestures of benevolent authority. He welcomed all foreigners, especially me, to his country, extolled the virtues of peace among men, and promised to give cars to every Malian citizen. With a total lack of inhibition, this impoverished salt miner momentarily assumed the presidency from a throne of foam in one of the most desolate places in the world.

  I stoked the fire under the cooking pot as Abdi settled into writing his letters. When he was done, perhaps because his mind was filled with home, he looked at me and asked if I would accept his sister’s hand in marriage.

  “What is she like?” I asked.

  “You know what she is like,” he said. “You told me you met her at my house.”

  I thought back to the afternoon I’d spent in Araouane, realized he was talking about Hannah, and started laughing, getting the joke.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked, not laughing with me.

  “She’s nine!” I said.

  “So?”

  “I’m thirty-three!” “So? Did you like her?”

  “Sure I liked her, but I can’t marry a nine-year-old!”

  “Don’t be silly,” Abdi scoffed. “You’ll just make the contract now, but you won’t marry her until she turns thirteen.”

  It was no joke. I learned then that Abdi himself was engaged to the nine-year-old daughter of his mother’s cousin. The union had been arranged by their parents, and Abdi had approved, since he found the girl to be smart enough and cute enough. They would wed soon after her thirteenth birthday, when he’d be twenty-two. His uncle Lamana, he said, had married a fifteen-year-old when he was thirty-six. From the sound of things, that girl’s family may have feared she’d end up as an old maid.

  There have been moments in my travels when I’ve met young women so beautiful that I’ve been seized with the fantasy of marrying them and moving into a Berber village or a Kazakh tent. But no matter how cute Hannah might have been, even my unleashed id would not be drawn to a girl who hadn’t yet hit double digits. For Abdi and his people, however, marriage has little to do with desire.

  Too sensible to leave the perpetuation of families and tribes to the whims of romantic love, the Saharans, like many others in the world, marry for purely practical purposes. In context, the age discrepancy between husbands and wives makes some sense: In order to fulfill their roles as husbands and fathers, men must be old enough to provide for their families; in order to fulfill their role as wives and mothers, women must be old enough to bear children. And given the startlingly high infant mortality rate (Mali’s is the highest in all of Africa), it’s no wonder they start as early as they can. Though completely contrary to Western ideas about love and partnership, not to mention statutory rape, I find it hard to criticize, especially when considering the questionable success rate of marriages based on romantic love.

  “This is how things are done here,” Abdi said, “so if you want to marry my sister and become part of my family, it’s no problem.”

  “Maybe not here,” I said, “but back home, I’d be thrown in jail.” I explained that each state has laws defining at what age men and women can legally marry, adding that in most it was sixteen or eighteen. Abdi said that by those standards, most men he knew would be criminals.

  When we finished eating, I readied my bedroll, hoping to get as much sleep as I could before my departure. I gave Abdi ten dollars worth of Malian francs to thank him for the time he spent with me, but he refused to say good-bye. He’d sleep out at our camp, he said, waiting until we walked out of Taoudenni to say farewell.

  Wrapped in my blanket, gazing up at Orion and the Big Dog, I was inundated with a mixture of emotions, eager to be on the move once more, yet saddened at the thought of leaving Taoudenni. I’d been deeply affected by my contact with the miners, not only because of their kindness, but because they’d taken this potentially hellish place and made it, if not heaven, at least human; through their simple rituals of eating, drinking tea, smoking tobacco, praying, playing, and talking, they’d created civilization in one of the most impossible places to imagine it. And what seemed like a miracle to me was, to them, just another day at work.

  CHAPTER 8

  My alarm woke me at 2 AM. I roused Walid and, to my surprise, he rose without resisting. With help from Baba and Abdi, we loaded Lachmar and L’beyya quickly. Since it felt like we’d said our real good-byes the night before, our final farewells were brief. I promised Abdi I’d deliver the letters he wrote and thanked him again for everything, then shook Baba’s hand and said, “May Allah watch over you.”

  “Safe travels,” he replied. “Peace be upon you.”

  “And upon you, too,” I answered.

  Walid grunted, slapped L’beyya lightly with his stick, and we set off toward the south. I’d thought we were going to rendezvous with our new caravan before departing, but something about
Walid’s manner implied that we were hitting the trail for real, not casually sauntering to a meeting place. I wanted to know what was going on.

  “Where’s the caravan?” I asked.

  “Just up ahead,” Walid said. “We’ll catch it in a minute.”

  Too reminiscent of what I’d heard so many times on the way to the mines, Walid’s words conjured a dread-filled premonition that we were in for a replay of the trip north, ever chasing the caravan and mostly traveling without it. Should I stop and refuse to leave Taoudenni until we were with a caravan, I asked myself, even if it meant waiting a few more days? But what if Walid was right this time? My head spun as I weighed the possible options and outcomes, knowing this was a crucial decision, feeling pressured to make it quickly, and having no actionable intelligence, just hopes and fears.

  Before I could make up my mind, a man who was seeing off another caravan came walking in our direction. He told Walid that ours hadn’t left yet, and if we waited it’d probably pass by in a few minutes. So we stopped where we were and, true to the man’s word, a shadowy string of twenty-six camels soon shuffled up in the darkness. At its head was an azalai named (what else?) Baba; taking up the rear was his helper, a young boy named Ali. We all exchanged greetings as Walid and I fell in alongside them, I awash with relief.

  The waning moon hovered in the east, the constellations shimmered brightly against the inky blackness of a perfectly clear sky. My turban was wrapped around my face for warmth; walking took the chill from my body. As we moved through the night, Baba sang lilting Koranic chants, one after the next, to keep the evil spirits at bay.

  Images of the past few days flashed through my mind. What I’d discovered at Taoudenni was as unexpected as it had been profound. Each memory was a jewel without price and, like a beggar who stumbles upon a treasure chest, admiring them one after another made me drunk with exuberance. I had to deliberately slow my strides if I didn’t want to leave the caravan behind.