I felt I had to deal delicately with Omar. He was energetic and charismatic and could be quite charming. But he was capricious and would turn suddenly, becoming obnoxiously dismissive or mildly menacing. He reminded me of one of those classic teenage types, one of whom I imagine everyone knew back in high school: They’re popular, athletic, and good looking, usually in a Nordic kind of way. They treat you like a buddy one day and a loser the next, drawing you in then putting you down. This was similar to the game Omar played, keeping me ever off balance—such as the time he asked me to take his picture, then aggressively demanded that I pay him for the privilege after I did (he calmed down only when I reminded him about the lighter I gave him). But there was one big difference between Omar and those high school kids, and it was me—back in high school, as an insecure teenager, I’d really wanted those jerks to like me. In the desert, I wanted to be able to like Omar but didn’t really care how he felt about me—though I figured it was important that he not dislike me too much.
For the most part, though, I felt very much at ease among the azalai. Sidali and Bakar were funny and kind. Dah and Hamid were quiet and usually kept to themselves in camp. Of the two, I became particularly friendly with Hamid, who came to me every day for medical treatment for his hands, which were covered with lacerations he’d acquired when harvesting the bales of tall desert grasses carried and cached for camel fodder; the edges of the grasses were so sharp, they’d cut into his skin like razors when he yanked them from the ground. Seeing me apply New-Skin to Hamid, Baba, naturally, wanted some for his own cracked fingers. Since I had plenty of the stuff to spare, I happily doled it out, but convinced him that his wounds weren’t bad enough to require the Band-Aids I gave Hamid. Though his perpetual pleas for tea and food were occasionally annoying, Baba, too, was easy to get along with, and I had a sense that, in a pinch, he’d have my back. He gracefully tolerated my imitations of him: I’d mimic the call he often uttered while driving his caravan—which was a wordless chant similar to Tarzan’s trademark cry—and I’d ape the way he shouted to his partner, a high-pitched “Yeh, Aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” The other azalai loved these impersonations, and would ask me repeatedly to “do Baba, do Baba,” after which they’d break into hysterical laughter.
We arrived at our second camp in the full heat of midafternoon after fifteen hours on the trail. We unloaded the camels, made tea and dorno, then I collapsed for an hour or so under the shade of our blanket shelter. After dinner, I passed out again, getting in about three hours of sleep before being woken around 10 PM to start packing for the evening march. This time I kept my socks handy.
Though it was easier on the camels to march through the cold nights than to face the afternoon heat, I found it even more demanding than traveling during the day. With a late-rising moon near the end of its cycle, the desert was usually pitch dark. Unable to see the ground before me, I slammed my feet into countless rocks, which would’ve resulted in many broken toes had my sandal soles been a few millimeters shorter. If I had to go to the bathroom while riding, I’d slide off Lachmar and step to the side as the caravan continued on, all sight of it quickly absorbed by the night. At times, when it would get far ahead, I feared I’d wander off course, completely alone, while trying to catch up to it. I’d only find it again thanks to the call-and-response system Walid and I had practiced since our first day on the trail; I would shout, an azalai at the back of the caravan would shout back, and I would follow the sound, moving as quickly as I could, until I could hear the soft shuffling of hundreds of camel feet and the exotic melody of Baba’s chants. Fortunately I’d become deft at mounting a moving camel, and could do so in the dark without disrupting the camel train.
Most challenging of all, by 2 or 3 AM, having snuck in only a few hours of sleep at camp, it was nearly impossible to stay awake. Exhaustion posed no problems for the azalai; having grown up in the saddle, they could slumber for hours at a time while we rode. Often they slept sitting upright; other times, they’d lie down and curl up on their blankets; the only ones who had to stay partially alert were those at the front of the line. But every time I’d start to drift off, I’d wake with the terrifying jolt of my body righting itself just as I was about to topple off my camel. The scare would be enough to keep me awake for a few minutes, but I was so tired that sleep soon seduced me back into its sweet caress. Again, I’d be jarred awake moments before tumbling from my perch. I tried lying down like the azalai did, but couldn’t; my head and feet hung down over the slopes of Lachmar’s hump, and the camel rocked like a rowboat on rough seas. Aware that falling would result in serious injury, I had no choice but to fend off sleep with all my will. After flirting seriously with it for a while, as with a woman I found irresistible but knew I’d best keep away from, I’d muster my resolve and renounce it.
I devised activities, physical and mental, to help me stay awake. I took the loose rope dangling in front of me and challenged myself to tie different kinds of knots in total darkness, pretending I’d gone blind. I bit my dirty nails and the cuticles around them. I sang. I made lists: the best meals I ever ate, letting my mind travel from Cairo to the Loire Valley to Houston Street; the worst meals I ever ate: the festival of guts on the way to Araouane; the dinner I’d had a few hours earlier. I tried to run through Descartes’s ontological argument for the existence of God, which, as a college philosophy student, I would review in my head while I was having sex, since I didn’t know any baseball statistics. (In the desert, I couldn’t remember it all—obviously I hadn’t gone over it enough times back in school.) Sometimes I would remember particular scenes from my past, trying to recall them in supersharp detail, down to textures, smells, and shadows, unsure how many of those details my mind was inventing. One night, in groggy delirium, my mind wandered back to the night of a concert I’d seen when I was a teenager, and I made the terrible mistake of listing all the Billy Joel songs I could think of—for days afterward, I was cursed with verses of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” playing in my head, and came to rue the day I ever heard the names Brenda and Eddie.
When nothing worked and sleep seeped through me like a drug, I would get off and walk. At least if I fell over then, I’d be much closer to the ground.
Between camps we never, ever stopped and hardly ever slowed, moving anywhere from fifteen to nineteen hours at a stretch. That men did this was impressive; what the camels did was astonishing. Many of them carried more than four hundred pounds. None of them drank a single drop of water for twelve days.
We reached our next camp in mid afternoon. It was at the small well called Ounane, the one at the base of a low hill at which Walid, Baba, and I had briefly stopped on our way north. Our arrival was followed by a frenzy of action—unloading the camels, then rushing to fill our guerbas. Since it would take hours to water all the camels and they could survive without it, we only drew enough for ourselves. My job was to scoop water from the trough into the inner tubes, and as usual, I didn’t do it fast enough to meet azalai standards. As Walid and Baba hauled up the water, Ali knelt by the side of the trough, “coaching” me with all the compassion of a drill sergeant. For the first time in his camel-driving career, Ali wasn’t the low man on the totem pole. Finally there was someone he could boss around, and he never missed an opportunity to do so. At first, thinking he was trying to tell me how I could best help out with whatever job was at hand, I followed his instructions. But after a day or two, when I realized he was simply exercising the little bit of power that he had and that what he told me to do was sometimes ill advised, I felt free to ignore him. As I poured water into the guerbas at the well, Ali peppered me with criticism and finally, to demonstrate what a poor job I was doing, took the metal bowl from my hands. I bristled, then after a minute of standing dumbly, stalked back to where Walid and I had left our bags and started a fire and a pot of green tea.
Meanwhile, Sidali, Bakar, and Omar were busy branding some of their younger camels. The camels seemed to sense something unpleasant was about
to happen to them and resisted couching on command. Together, the three azalai would muscle one to the ground and lash its front feet close together so it couldn’t get back up. Omar held the camel in as much of a headlock as can be managed on a creature with a yardlong neck. Bakar pressed the weight of his body against the front of the camel’s hump. Sidali drew his knife and cut into the camel’s hide on its front flank, deeply enough to draw blood and, ultimately, create a scar.
Massive gray clouds swept in from the west, like an armada of warships steaming across open ocean. The leading edge sprayed us with a gentle drizzle, which suddenly exploded into a raging deluge. Rain poured in torrents. Gusts of wind ripped through camp, battering us with waves of airborne sand. Hail the size of grapes fell like shrapnel, chasing us under our blankets to protect us from their stinging, bruising impact. Lightning shot from the clouds. Thunder echoed across the sky. Parked as we were in a vast, open plain, we were in one of worst possible places to sit out an electrical storm. Of the many ways I’d imagined dying in the Sahara, being struck by lightning wasn’t one. I was glad that the camels were so tall, thinking they might act as lightning rods.
In fifteen minutes, the heart of the storm had passed, though rain fell intermittently into the night. The azalai decided we would lay over the next day to make sure the salt bars and the leather tie straps had a chance to dry completely and regain their integrity before being transported. I greeted the news gladly.
Our things had been so thoroughly drenched that nothing had dried by the time dinner was over. Wearing my damp clothing, I headed for a clammy night’s sleep, slipping between the folds of my dirty, soggy blanket that reeked like wet camel—an odor not unlike wet dog, but much more gamey.
By morning the clouds were gone. Blankets and clothing and salt all dried quickly. With nowhere to go, we enjoyed a day of leisure. I took out my map of Mali, which actually showed the main wells between Timbuktu and Taoudenni, and upon which I’d been marking the general location of our camps each night. Omar and Sidali were intrigued, so I showed them the route we were following. Since they couldn’t read, I listed off and pointed to the wells, while they nodded in excited recognition, thrilled that the features of their isolated world had been published on a map. I explained how to estimate distances using the kilometer scale, then gave them the map; they spread their fingers between Timbuktu and Araouane and Taoudenni, then compared it with the scale, then debated how many kilometers actually lay between each place.
When they tired of that, Sidali decided it was time for some personal grooming. He lay on his stomach in the sand, still dressed in his trench coat. Bakar pulled out a pair of old metal scissors, crouched by his father’s head, and proceeded to crop Sidali’s hair nearly down to the scalp. Walid criticized the unevenness of the cut, so took the scissors and finished the job. He then asked to borrow my Swiss army knife and used its small scissors to prune Sidali’s beard. When Sidali was cleaned up to everyone’s satisfaction, Walid trimmed his own beard, then used a razor blade to shave his cheeks—no water, no soap, just steel on skin. Omar borrowed the blade afterward, and shaved himself. I felt like I was hanging out with a bunch of guys playing beauty parlor in the middle of the desert.
The late-morning heat rose quickly, so I set up a blanket for shelter, which Walid and I crawled under for a mid day nap. We woke after a couple of hours and I read for a while, now Kipling’s Kim. I restitched my shirt, which had split along the seams between the sleeves and the shoulders, and sewed up a few tears in my pants, then helped Walid with dinner and tea. I was able to sneak in another two hours of sleep before being wakened and told to start packing. It was only 8 PM.
The next five days and nights were a grueling exercise in endurance. Each evening we broke camp between eight and nine, meaning that every day I was only able to get an hour or two of sleep in the afternoon and an hour or two after an increasingly disgusting dinner. We walked and rode and walked and rode for what seemed like forever, through freezing nights, into blistering days. Though I had many years of wilderness experience behind me and had often pushed myself beyond my perceived limitations, nothing I had ever done came close to comparing to the endless rigors of traveling with the caravan. Walid had been right—it was far more challenging than traveling on our own schedule. When not on the move, I closed my eyes at every opportunity and, regardless of how hot it was, who was talking around me, or whether or not I was even feeling tired at that moment, I could throw my internal circuit breaker and shut myself down as fast as if I’d injected sodium pentathol.
There were times when thinking about the rest of the day, the rest of the journey, became overwhelming. As I fought to put one weary foot in front of the other, to bear the sun staring me in the face, or to stay seated atop Lachmar when ready to drop from exhaustion, it was impossible to imagine making it to the next camp, let alone all the way back to Timbuktu. In order to slip from beneath the crushing weight of future thoughts, I adopted a technique of focusing solely on the moment I was living. In itself, removed from the time line that stretched forward and backward from the present, no single moment was that bad. Perhaps I was walking under a starry sky at 2 AM; forgetting that we’d already been on the move for five hours, and probably had another twelve to go, I could find pleasure in being exactly where I was, right then. Maybe because I was so tired it was easy to achieve an altered state of consciousness; with a little focus I was able to travel through the desert as though in a temporal bubble, totally immersed in the present, as though past and future no longer existed. It became something of a spiritual practice—the transcendence of suffering by meditating on “the now”—and I nearly signed on wholeheartedly to the clichéd mantra of “Live the moment.” Then I realized that, while I spent half my time doing just that, I spent the other half of the time escaping the moment—distracting myself with mind games, reading while I rode—and that that was just as crucial to maintaining my sanity.
At times, when all else failed and I felt myself succumbing to exhaustion, doubting that I had it in me to reach the next camp, I’d gain strength by thinking about my grandmother.
She had grown up in Romania, and was sixteen years old when that country’s fascist regime, complicit with the Nazis, ordered the deportation—or death—of the entire Jewish populations of Bessarabia and Bukovina in 1941. In many ways a trial run for the mass exterminations that followed in other parts of Europe, Jews were rounded up in towns and villages and sent east on forced marches into an area of Ukraine between the Dniester and Bug Rivers, known as Transnistria. Rather than leading the deportees directly to the Transnistrian camps, German and Romanian soldiers herded them in circuitous routes. My grandmother and her family marched, at the prodding of Nazi rifles, every day for more than two months. The roads were knee-deep in mud. Typhus raged unchecked through the convoys. No food was provided, so the Jews scavenged what they could from fields they passed or traded diamonds for onions with local peasants. Regardless of the weather, they slept in the open—and they were walking straight into the Ukrainian winter with little more than the summer clothes they had on their backs when they first left their homes. My grandmother’s group only stopped when waist-high snowdrifts made further travel impossible. While some deportees were shot by the soldiers for lagging behind, most were simply left to die. Of the estimated 190,000 Jews who lived in the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina in the spring of 1941, some 65,000 died before ever crossing the River Dniester—some in orchestrated massacres, many more while in transit. Another seventy-five thousand perished on the roads and in the camps of Transnistria. If my grandmother could survive such a nightmarish trek as a teenage girl, I thought, surely I could meet any challenges this caravan posed.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t always miserable. Though the tough times were barely bearable, at other times I felt energetic, even inspired. Without fail, sunrise filled me with new life, with relief, with humor. As the morning tea was made and we could see each other again, the azalai and I reveled in
one another’s company like men who’d been separated and spent a lonely night traversing some mythic Underworld. We talked and joked—once, spying a piece of wood that had fallen from another caravan, I went to pick it up. It would burn hotter and longer than dung. But little Ali snuck up behind me, trying to steal the prize for himself. We raced, and when I beat him, I held the fat stick over my head in triumph while everyone else hooted with laugher—except Ali.
Our eighth day out from Taoudenni was first day of the Muslim month of Shawwal—the holiday of Eid-al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. Being a time of great celebration across the Islamic world, during which prayers are offered, charity is given, families visit one another, and feasts are held, I wondered if the azalai would do anything special for it. Just because they hadn’t observed the fast, I thought, was no reason not to take advantage of a good excuse to party. But the day passed just like all the others, as though there was nothing special about it.
Two nights later, we left camp at nine. After about four hours, Walid and I, whose camels were hitched together, veered away from the caravan, striking off from it an angle. At first I thought he wanted to give us a little bit more space, but the distance between us kept growing, so I asked what was going on.
“Araouane is this way,” he said.
“Well, why are they going the other way? Don’t they know the route?”
“Sure they do, but they aren’t going through Araouane.”
“What do you mean? Aren’t we all traveling back to Timbuktu together?”
The Caravan of White Gold Page 18