We rode through the day at a good pace, without stopping, and made camp just before sunset. Traveling a mere eleven hours was like being on vacation. As I gathered dung, the broken clouds of the mackerel sky blazed with fiery reds and pinks while the streaks of cirrus farther to the west looked like a golden horse’s mane blowing in the wind. The sky behind the clouds was a penetrating, incandescent blue that faded to indigo and black before my eyes. The light show more than compensated for a day of scenic ennui. Dinner was fortified with a hearty helping of the goat that had been killed the day before.
Since we’d talked about birth and marriage, I asked Lamana what nomads do when someone dies. He said that Koranic prayers are recited, then the corpse perfumed, covered in a shroud, and buried in the sand.
“Is the place marked with a stone or anything?” I asked.
“No. But we remember. And that’s not so important anyway, since once someone dies, if they’ve been righteous, they join Allah in Paradise and leave their body behind. We know where they are even after the body disintegrates.”
Their ritual struck me as elegant in its simplicity and lack of sentimentality.
My companions asked if our practices were the same in America, and I laughed and shook my head. I explained that, typically, a dead person was buried in an expensive, cushioned box, dressed in his or her finest clothes. Sometimes, I said, the corpses were made up to look like they were still alive. Lamana and Walid couldn’t comprehend the reasoning behind any of this. They thought that putting cosmetics on a corpse was ridiculous, and were flabbergasted that people would spend more money on a fancy box than many Malians earn in years, only to bury it in the ground.
“Can you dig the box up and use it again, once the body decomposes?” Walid asked. This, he suggested, would make a little more sense.
I was wakened in the dark by an urgency in my stomach. I got up, fast, and hustled barefoot across the cold sand as far from camp as I could before dropping my pants and squatting. Back in my blanket, just as I was about to fall asleep, I felt it coming on again. Again, I hurried off, clenching, until I could clench no longer. Time after time, into the dawn, long after I believed my body must’ve expelled every last bit of food that was in it, I was forced to rise and relieve myself without delay. By the time Walid and Lamana got up, I was dizzy and lethargic, and still making trips away from camp.
I packed my bag slowly, putting each item in with effort. Determined to do my share of the work, I went to load the camels. Seeing I was struggling, Lamana came over to help me lift the heaviest bag. While we lifted it together, he slipped and quickly moved to regain his balance, smashing his heel down, hard, on two of my middle toes. I yanked my foot back and stumbled away in agony. As I recovered my composure, I tested my foot. I couldn’t put any weight on it at all without buckling from the pain. I was sure the toes were broken. Lamana was profusely apologetic, and I told him it was okay, that I was fine, but it’d probably be better for me to ride than to walk out of camp as we usually did. Then, just before mounting up, I felt that telltale watering in my mouth and hopped a few feet away. I knelt in the sand and vomited up two chunks of solid goat fat, each about the size of a marshmallow. Unable to chew them, I’d managed to swallow them whole the night before, and had obviously been unable to digest them. I hoped that with the poison out of my system, I’d start to recover.
I was weak and light-headed. Timbuktu, which just hours before seemed to be only a few quick days down the trail, now felt very, very far away. Remembering how Gordon Laing had been strapped to his camel after being attacked his Tuareg assailants, I felt I had little to complain about in comparison; I also realized that he was about as extreme a baseline as I could possibly refer to. I rode on in a daze, watching the desert pass as though through a steamy window, grateful, at least, that the Imodium had started to work.
Before long, we came upon the first tree, where Walid, Sali, Anselm, and I had stopped to gather one last bundle of firewood on the way north. Ahead of us loomed the edge of the illusory forest—the miles’ worth of sparsely scattered trees that looked like a dense wood, thanks to a total lack of depth perception.
We rode until we reached the well at Harseini, where the boy had been sent down after the lost bucket weeks earlier. Since we didn’t have a bucket of our own, we had to wait about half an hour for someone else to arrive. I was thankful for the rest, and forced myself to drink some of the dorno Lamana mixed up, trying to rehydrate myself. I inspected my toes, which were swollen and tender, then lay down in the sand, my face covered by my turban, hoping to gather some strength for the rest of the ride. I was nudged awake by Walid once our guerbas were full and it was time to move on. I wobbled as I climbed atop Mabrouk, and braced myself to face the miles ahead.
As we traveled on under a seething sun, the hours melted into one another. Having practiced it countless times before on this trip, I disconnected my brain from my body and rode as though outside of myself. We camped a few hundred yards past the big well at Douaya, just after dark. As though triggering an ingrained Pavlovian response, when the sun went down, my energy level and optimism suddenly rose. I felt my pluck returning, not fully, but enough so I knew that I was conclusively on the mend. Though still a little shaky, I could think straight and laugh again.
By morning, I felt like myself, except for my toes. I taped the injured two together, using them to splint each other and buffer them somewhat from impact, which allowed me to walk without hobbling too much. I’d years ago trained myself to ignore severe foot pain, so I used that ability to push through and forget about it.
We were south of Douaya. Timbuktu was in striking range. If we traveled as many hours as we did on a typical day with the caravan, we could sleep in town this very night. The thought stunned me. I can’t say it made me happy, or even relieved. I didn’t really know how to feel about it. Rather than thinking about how my life would be different once we arrived in Timbuktu, I was swamped only with a deeply emotional recognition that my reality was about to drastically change. Though I’d only been in the desert for five weeks, they were some of the most intense weeks of my life. The daily experience of facing the Sahara had been so completely consuming, had demanded the total investment of all my physical and mental resources, that leaving it would be like leaving the self I’d become, and become familiar with. Contemplating this impending, radical shift left me disoriented and a touch nostalgic—less for the specifics of the life I’d led than with the vague but overpowering sense that I was leaving what had become home, even if it had been a hard place to live.
Traveling back across the landscape I had first traversed on only my second day in the desert, I realized just how accustomed I’d grown to life in the Sahara. The gently sloped landscape, lightly dusted with grass, speckled with thorn trees, seemed downright lush after the sheer desolation my eyes had grown used to. Herds of camels and goats browsed their way slowly across the range that now appeared rich with fodder. Tents were pitched in shallow basins and on open plains, still widely spaced but with greater frequency, giving me the feeling that this was a densely populated place. And why wouldn’t it be? I now knew that this particular piece of desert was a relatively easy one in which to dwell.
I recalled how I felt the first time I’d crossed this terrain. I was battling that sinus infection, had an aching back and raw sores on my ass, thought the heat might drive me insane, and was dismissed as useless by Walid. I smiled with knowing empathy at the vision of myself struggling along, as though that greenhorn I remembered wasn’t even me.
I thought back to why I had come to the Sahara in the first place: to get a glimpse of an age-old culture reported to be on the brink of extinction. What I had gotten instead was something that felt far more valuable: a glimpse into an age-old culture that had successfully assimilated some features of the modern world—most notably, trucks—without sacrificing its traditional way of life.
Though I couldn’t deny being glad that the salt caravans were ali
ve and well, this feeling was accompanied by a twinge of compunction. In order for the caravans to survive, there have to be men to drive the camels and dig the salt. I had the uneasy sense that cheering the caravan’s survival implied, by logical necessity, that I was glad that men have to endure the hardship inseparable from it. But that wasn’t the case.
It would have been one thing if the azalai and the miners loved their jobs despite their superhuman demands, and while I imagine that some azalai are fiercely attached to their lifestyles, most of the ones I met didn’t seem to be. Walid was actively trying to work less as an azalai and more as a guide, and if he had his way, he’d be sitting in Timbuktu behind the counter of a boutique. He dreamed of sending his son to me, in the United States, so he could learn English and live an easier life. Lamana had already traded his career as an azalai for that of a full-time guide. Abdi certainly didn’t want to return to the salt mines year after arduous year. Even his sister Hannah, who didn’t have to trek to Taoudenni or cut salt, craved a change, praying she could one day escape the isolation of Araouane. None of them was sentimental over the prospect of leaving behind the lives they’ve known. The latent threat to the salt trade is not the introduction of trucks, but future possibilities for education, economic development, and social mobility in the Sahara.
I wanted Walid to have his boutique, for his sons to have opportunities, for Abdi to leave the mines and become a guide, for Hannah to move to Timbuktu. How could I ask other people to live lives that I would never choose for myself, nor they for themselves? Yet at the same time, I wanted the caravans to continue operating forever. I felt that their ultimate demise would be a tragic loss to the world.
As the tentacles of globalization creep toward the ends of the civilized earth, the life is being squeezed out of traditional cultures with startling speed. In many regions, environmental devastation—whether the razing of rain forests in South America and Sumatra or the flooding of farmland behind dams in China—has bulldozed cultures dependent upon their land into oblivion. In other places, people have been understandably lured from indigenous ways by the conveniences and comforts of the modern world, as could become the case in the Sahara. One way to gauge the pace of cultural dissolution is to look at trends in language; since a culture’s essential ideas are inextricably bound to the language that expresses them—through story, prayer, or the naming of things in the natural world—the death of a language often heralds the death of a culture. Today half of the nearly six thousand languages spoken around the world are no longer taught to children; they’ll die along with the elders who speak them. Only 10 percent of the world’s languages are said to be “stable and secure.” Though there may not be an exact correlation between loss of language and loss of culture, the overwhelming trend toward more people speaking the same tongues is a powerful example of one way in which humanity is becoming undeniably more homogeneous.
Thinking about this as I rode, I was torn about declaring outright that the loss of cultural diversity is an objectively bad thing (though I have an easier time saying that about the environmental destruction that often contributes to it). Perhaps, my mind said, the disappearance of civilizations and the trajectory toward homogeneity are part of the natural course of human evolution. If so, I wondered, what is the nature of that evolution? Is there an inherent telos, a subconscious wisdom, maybe even a divine plan, to the path we’re on? Is there something good for humanity in becoming less diverse? Might speaking fewer languages help increase cross-cultural understanding? Are we fulfilling our role in some bigger drama by rushing toward the edge of the cliff of total environmental catastrophe—and will we plunge over that edge, taking plenty of other species with us, or will we save ourselves, and the planet, in the nick of time, catapulting ourselves to a new level of awareness? It’s all possible. Of course it’s just as likely, I reasoned, that our current course toward ecological devastation and cultural eradication is inspired by something far less grand: the collective illness of the modernized world that, so far removed from nature, has lost the innate instinct for survival and is swallowing everything up as it gorges itself to death. I didn’t know.
What I did know is that when I imagined the world without camel caravans and all the other age-old practices, rituals, styles of dress, music and dance, as well as forms of housing, fishing, hunting, traveling, and planting that still exist in the less modernized nooks of the globe, the planet looked like a much poorer, more boring place. Each civilization is like a unique color woven into the complex tapestry of human expression and ingenuity that dazzles with its variety of belief, knowledge, and possibility. Many of them inspire wonder and awe, not just because people could or did live and think in ways so foreign from our own, but because they do live in those ways, now, in the twenty-first century—and because they are not aliens from another world, but humans who live on ours. In other words, as different as their cultures are, they are like us. This allows us to imagine ourselves in hues and textures that transcend the limited palette offered by our own culture, to recognize that there is more to being human than buying precut meat at the grocery store, marrying someone over the age of eighteen, and using electrical appliances. As these to-our-eyes-exotic civilizations vanish one by one, the human tapestry becomes more monochromatic, more bland. Humanity as a whole becomes less beautiful. It’s the loss of this beauty that saddens me.
Though I know well that the skin-cracking, sand-eating, sleep deprived, undernourished, unwashed, painful reality on the trail has little in common with the romantic fantasy of riding camels across the desert, there is yet much beauty to be found in the salt trade. There is Walid, antelope pipe fixed in his mouth, setting an unwavering course across the desert with no technological devices or even landmarks to aid him, referring only to the map imprinted in his soul. There is Baba, chanting away in the darkness, defending us from the djinn. There is Hamid, brewing a pot of tea, swinging a dung-filled brazier as he scampers across the sand in a bathrobe. There are the miners, playing, dancing, and laughing after a day of Herculean labor. There is sunset, and sunrise, and turbaned men kneeling in the sand to pray, hundreds of miles from anywhere. There is Cygnus the Swan, soaring low, glittering in the night sky. And there are the camels, swaying one behind the other, cutting an undulating silhouette against the flat orange earth as they perform mind-boggling feats of endurance with nobility, grace, and a mysteriously knowing smile.
What’s perhaps more beautiful, and even more important, are the truths expressed through the humble lives of the azalai, the miners, and the nomads: that wealth is not a prerequisite for joy or self-respect; that commerce does not have to be founded upon greed; that each moment is ours in which to create delight, regardless of our circumstances; that living in balance with the natural world is the key to long-term survival; that it’s possible to embrace tradition and modernity for what they each have to offer, without forsaking either.
If humanity is playing a role in a larger drama, and if it is our fate to save ourselves from destruction and rise to a new level of conscious interaction with the planet and each other, these seem like precisely the truths we’ll have to discover to get there.
I didn’t know how to reconcile my desire for my friends and others like them to live the lives of their choosing with my equally fervent hope to see the caravans march forever into the future. If one happens, it seems likely that the other can’t. If left to me, I couldn’t justify denying Saharans education, health care, and economic opportunity for the sake of preserving the salt trade. But neither would I be eager to contribute to the demise of the Caravan of White Gold. I wrestled with this dilemma, trying to think up a way to have both until my brain gave up, defeated. I hoped that in the future, when the world someday invites the azalai to leave the trail they’ve ridden for a thousand years, the Saharans will prove to be smarter than me.
In the afternoon, we passed the village of Agouni, from where the call to prayer that had so surprised me on my first morning in the deser
t had been broadcast. From here on, we encountered shepherds keeping watch over their herds from beneath the shade of thorn trees and crossed paths with men on camelback heading into the desert. Timbuktu felt close.
At sunset, Lamana proposed stopping for the night, but said that if I wanted to, we could continue on into the city. I asked how long it would take, and he said three to four hours. It was easily doable and hardly would have pressed me to my limits. But it felt right to spend one final evening in the Sahara, knowing it would be the last one. Moreover, from a purely pragmatic perspective, I preferred the thought of pulling into Timbuktu and finding a hotel in the daylight.
We camped on a sandy, flat-topped hill, about fifty yards from the rutted tire tracks that ran between Timbuktu and Agouni. When the camels were unloaded, Walid and Lamana spotted people they knew passing on the road and went to talk to them, while I scoured the area for fuel. The pickings were slim—most of the branches on the thorn trees were still alive, and there wasn’t much camel dung. At last I spotted some piles of dried donkey dung, similar to but much bigger than camel turds; I was sure they’d burn well. When my friends came back up the hill and saw what I was collecting, they told me to throw it away.
“What are you talking about? It’ll burn fine,” I said.
“Yes, it’ll burn, but we never cook over donkey shit,” Lamana said.
“But you cook over camel shit?” I asked.
“Yes. Camels eat only plants. Donkeys eat everything, including garbage and human feces. The camel dung is clean. The donkey dung is poison.”
I threw it away and continued my search for fuel. Even after five weeks on the trail, I was still learning.
The night was cool but not cold. The clear sky, pierced with countless stars, glowed faintly in the light of the waxing half-moon. Our proximity to town had a palpable effect on our mood as we sat around the flickering fire. Rather than intrepid travelers in the midst of an endless wilderness, we seemed like a few friends out on a recreational camping trip. We were each aware that this was our last night together, that the adventure was coming to a close, that by this time the following day we’d have gone our separate ways. We ate, talked lightly, and laughed. At one point, Lamana asked what I was looking forward to most about getting back to civilization. Without hesitation, I replied, “Chicken.”
The Caravan of White Gold Page 22