Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  We had walked for three days and two nights, and had nearly exhausted our water, when we met with an old caravan trail. I had grown careless about checking the compass and found that we'd wandered a little to the east, and there it was: a line of clear-cut furrows stretching out ahead of us, a broad path so worn by use the stones had long ago been ground into the earth to strip it bare where caravans had passed.

  "Maybe water soon," Bakuli said, studying it.

  "Maybe," I said wearily.

  We followed the trail until midafternoon when we lost it in a dried-up riverbed, a sandy oued lined with needle-sharp green bushes. Bakuli pointed to them. "Water make grow, and—look, Missy."

  I looked and saw holes dug in the sandy bed from which bubbles of muddy water oozed. This was startling because such holes had to have been dug by people, and at this precise moment I heard drums begin to beat off to the east of us, at a distance, as if warning of our presence.

  "Drums, Bakuli!" I gasped. "Hide!"

  We crept along the bank of the oued and peered through the foliage: miles away we thought we could see the shape of several huts, but in the shimmering light this could have been a mirage. There was nothing miragelike about the tom-toms, however; they interrupted the silence of the desert like thunder, sending out unclear but ominous messages.

  "Think they've seen us?" I whispered.

  Bakuli didn't answer but joined me in looking for shelter. Behind us, beyond the opposite bank of the riverbed, the stony earth rose slowly but steadily toward a long hill that culminated in a great mass of boulders. I pointed, and Bakuli nodded. "Yes, Missy. Fast, Missy." Removing his head scarf he tied it around the donkey's jaw to silence him. Leading the way he climbed out of the riverbed, pulling the donkey up the bank while I pushed the poor creature from behind. We then began a circling of the great hill, a long climb that rendered us frighteningly conspicuous should anyone be watching. Passing a series of neatly piled rock mounds Bakuli said, "Graves," and he stopped to stare at them, and shivered.

  "They're dead," I told him shortly. "People who beat drums are alive."

  We passed three more rock mounds and 1 saw Bakuli cross himself; these graves appeared to circle the entire hill, like a necklace surrounding the great pile at the summit, and since they clearly made Bakuli uneasy 1 suggested we leave the donkey tethered to a rock and climb up to the crest to make camp for the night. I used the word "camp" with irony, for there were no camels to couch and unload, and no companions, only the two of us with no food and no fuel for a fire should we even dare one with the drums still pounding off to the west of us. In this haste to hide we left the donkey below and picked our way over boulders to the top of the great hill. We had just reached its crest when I looked to the south and groaned. "Oh God—look," I said helplessly.

  A dust storm, huge, was building up in the southwest and heading toward us like a brown tidal wave, ready to overpower and take whatever it could into its greedy maw.

  Bakuli stared in terror. "Make cave," he gasped. "Must, Missy—that one big gibleh."

  The rocks were heavy; we worked desperately, not daring to look at the approaching brown wall of sand and dust. We prodded boulders loose, rolled them aside and tore at the next level of stones until we met with a cavity below the surface that eased our work, but there was no stopping Bakuli until he had cleared a hollow deep enough and wide enough for the two of us to enter.

  "In!" he cried fiercely, and I crawled down into darkness. The storm hit us while Bakuli was still hauling into place the slab that would be tilted over us once he joined me. When he dropped down beside me clouds of dust and sand came with him, but we had secured a shelter against the storm. Tightly wrapped in my barracan, with Bakuli huddled beside me, there was nothing to do now but listen to the monster wind trying to reach us, thwarted by the rocks in which we'd taken refuge but exacting its revenge by showering us with dust through every crevice.

  When the wind had changed from a shriek to a steady roar I thought it time to express my opinion. "This is a crazy place to hide, Bakuli, there could be snakes here. Or scorpions."

  "Big, BIG storm," he said, shivering. "Bakuli never see one like mountain walking."

  "But there could be scorpions" I pointed out.

  "Y-y-yes, Missy," he said humbly.

  There seemed no point in emphasizing how ill-advised this seemed to me now that we were here; we had probably seen the last of the donkey and with it our goatskin waterbags, and a few scorpions were minor in comparison. I was wrong, there was more to come, for after a long silence Bakuli spoke again.

  "Missy," he said uneasily, "there be spirits here."

  "Nonsense," I told him sternly, "that's your imagination again, because of the graves down the hill, but they're far away, Bakuli. Go to sleep."

  "Yes, Missy," he said in a scared little voice, but it seemed a long time before I felt him sag against me in sleep, his head on my shoulder. The wind had lessened but no light seeped through the crevices; I judged it to be past sunset now, and night. I wondered if there were stars in the sky .., wondered if the donkey had survived the storm .., wondered if 1 should wake Bakuli to begin walking again, but I was too tired to stir.

  And now, abruptly, it was I who sensed we were not alone.

  10

  There were two op us huddled together in this small space into which no one else could fit and yet there was someone else with us, I knew this with a certainty beyond all rationalization: we were not alone.

  What atavistic sense had come into play I couldn't guess, for I saw nothing and heard nothing and yet I knew. It was as if a sense organ long atrophied, unknown to me and deadened by civilization had surfaced from the deeps to feel what could only be called a Presence.

  Beside me Bakuli had stiffened, awake. "Missy," he whispered in terror.

  "Yes," I said.

  We sat trembling; something cool as a wisp of fog, soft as silk, brushed past me and was gone, and slowly the sense of Presence faded. I drew a deep breath and grasped Bakuli's hand and held it tight.

  I said shakily, "At least it wasn't a scorpion."

  "Yes, Missy," he whispered. "You too?"

  "Yes." There seemed nothing else to say and now that it was gone I went over and over it, determined to explain it away, to name it fantasy, hunger, hallucination—but why then, as I denied it, were Bakuli and I both trembling still? My rational mind rebelled at believing, yet my senses could not reject what I'd felt. I told myself to go to sleep, that I could ill afford a night spent flirting with madness, I needed sleep. "That knits the ravel'd sleeve of care," I told myself, forgetting the rest of my Shakespearean quote. 'That knits the ravel'd sleeve of . .." The wind had quieted outside and I was calming with it. "That knits the ravel'd . .."

  I fell asleep but the Presence was not done with me yet, for I dreamed a strange dream. Great clouds of pale mist rolled toward me, endlessly, in waves, until out of the mists there came toward me a tall, thin figure, almost Egyptian in appearance and wearing a simple garment and a headdress of ostrich feathers. This figure—surely a woman despite her height—smiled and spoke to me, but without uttering a sound, the words transmitted and translated to me in some uncanny telepathic manner.

  "I sleep below you, Stranger from the North," she said. "Do not be afraid—I too was once a stranger from the North and felt the beating of your heart in my grave below. ..."

  The specter stretched out her hand to me; it held a stone that I saw more clearly than her face, it was flat and oddly shaped with a hole near its center. It resembled, I had to confess, one of the misshapen muffin or gingerbread men that Mum had struggled to bake at Christmas. I reached out to touch the hand but the figure was slowly dissolving back into the mists. I cried out, "But who are you? Who are you? Who—"

  Bakuli was shaking me. "Missy, Missy," he whispered. "You make noise—ssh, we be heard."

  I could see his face, it was morning. It had been a powerful dream and I felt dazed and disoriented, the weight of the roc
ks surrounding us were stifling and the space we'd occupied a tomb. "Let's get out," I said with a shiver. "Please, let's go. We can still get out, can't we?"

  With both arms Bakuli sought to heave aside the slab he'd tilted over us but it wouldn't move. In a panic I knelt beside him to help, and when at last it was lifted aside and I saw blue sky again, I felt like kneeling to give thanks to Bakuli's God. With a last glance at the hollow in which we'd spent our stormy night I was about to follow Bakuli into the sunshine when 1 stopped. Behind me in the place where I had lain all night I saw a flat carved stone made white by a ray of sun, with something green shining dully in its center.

  It seemed that I was not to forget my dream after all, for I recognized the stone by its odd, distorted muffin-man shape.

  "Hurry, Missy," Bakuli said, his head silhouetted against the sky, one hand extended to help my exit.

  Well, I thought, trying to make light of this, there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy.... I leaned down and picked up the carved rock shape, reminding myself that she had been gentle, even kind, and in some strange way had known me, calling me Stranger from the North; the stone fitted neatly into the palm of my hand and I climbed up and out into the sun, sneezing and coughing at the dust. The heat of morning hit me hard, and so did reality, which was unchanged and harsh, for we still had no food and little water. I saw Bakuli looking at what I held in my hand, and I showed it to him. "I lay on this all night."

  He peered more closely and shook his head. "No like, Missy." He touched it and made a face. "This maybe bwanga, maybe bubi. A charm, maybe evil, maybe prayed to, maybe full of spirits. No like."

  At least he recognized it as something unusual and apart. Looked at in the light I could see that it was no mere rock but had been shaped by a tool; a topknot had been carved on its crude head and there were small protuberances that had to have been chiseled into its funny distorted body by a human hand. The surprise was the lump of dark green crystal embedded in the stone near the center of the figure, giving it a rather exotic navel. "Well," I said, "I'll keep it for a while. As a souvenir."

  "Souvenir?"

  This was hard to translate. "A charm," I finally said. "At least until I learn if it is a charm. I like it." I tucked it into the pocket of my barracan and brought out the compass, sighing as the full weight of our lostness fell on me. The Hoggar Mountains still towered behind us, three days away but still oppressively there, to remind me we dared not turn north, at least not yet. Beyond the oued, to the west, had come the ominous drums just before the storm, and neither south nor east promised anything but desert. And I was hungry.

  "Missy!" whispered Bakuli, looking suddenly alarmed.

  I thought for a moment that he was fearing spirits again, and felt a flash of exasperation but then I heard it, too: a faint murmuring below us, the rise and fall of a human voice. We picked our way over the rocks to gaze down from the hill at the western side of its base. A man was kneeling there in a patch of sand, his back to us. Abruptly he dropped forward to press his forehead into the sand, then straightened and after a second of repose prostrated himself again. The tashah-hud, I thought, he is saying his prayers to Allah, and then my gaze wandered and I saw that he had found our donkey and tied it to a rock close to him.

  "He prays," Bakuli whispered.

  "Yes, but he has our donkey. And our waterskins."

  "Yangu. But he prays, Missy."

  We looked at each other, weighing the risks, and then Bakuli grasped my hand. "Come, Missy."

  I knew that he meant there was no choice. Looking me over sternly he said, "You be boy, Missy. Cover head tight."

  We began our climb down the rocks but I found it strange that the man heard us at once, as soon as we began our first steps down the hill, for we were still at a distance from him and we walked carefully. As we approached him he stood up to face us, a man with a face as black as Bakuli's, not veiled, his head neatly wrapped in a soiled white turban. He wore ragged trousers and was barefoot. As we drew even closer I saw that his face bore a pattern of knife-cut tribal scars.

  "He be Hausa," whispered Bakuli.

  '"How know?" I whispered back.

  "Tribe marks." To the man he called in Tamahak, "Mahulid, " and then, "Sannu kadai. " And to me, "Many peoples speak Hausa, I know a little much."

  The man did not look dangerous; his face was round, with a somewhat beaked nose, but what I thought curious was that his intense gaze was fixed upon a point beyond us.

  "Wane ne?" he said quietly, his glance remaining focused over our shoulders, and then I saw that both his eyes were filmed over with white and I realized that he was blind.

  "Bakuli," I said, "he's—"

  "Yes, Missy, he no see. Salem alaik," he said politely, and told him that it was our donkey he'd found.

  I decided it was time I entered into this meeting, and in my clumsy Arabic I told him there were two of us, Bakuli and Missy.

  He seemed to understand; he nodded and beckoned us closer, and when we walked up to him he stretched out both hands, seeking to touch Bakuli; I had to smile as he found nothing until he dropped a hand to Bakuli's nine-year-old height. He smiled then, his teeth a brilliant white against his dark skin. Very gently his fingers ran over Bakuli's face and his smile deepened. He turned to me, his fingers tracing the shape of my face, then touching nose and mouth and pausing at my eyes. I remembered how acute his hearing had been to sense us from so far away and I hoped he wasn't equally as acute in discerning that I was female and an infidel.

  His name, he said, was Musa and he was a Bàhaushe, or Hausa. He spoke a little French, some Arabic and understood some Tamahak, all of which we were hard pressed to discover and which took time. I assumed that he must live nearby, perhaps in the village where we'd heard drums—he was blind, after all—but I was literally staggered to hear that he'd been traveling many days and was on his way from In Salah in the North to his home in the South....

  "Alone and blind? How can this be?" I asked in astonishment.

  Bakuli was looking at the man with great respect. He said, "My smitt peoples have spoken of such men, Missy. There be such, yes, they have desert-eyes."

  My thoughts circled this, returned to consider it while slowly possibilities acquired shape. "We go south too, Bakuli," I said. "We have only a thirsty donkey, no food and two almost-empty goatskin bags." 1 reached into the pocket of my barracan and drew out the silver Hand of Fatima that Mohammed had given me. "Ask him if for this he would buy food for us where we heard the drums beating, and if he will let us go south with him."

  Bakuli's face brightened at the sight of silver. He spoke rapidly to Musa in Tamahak, with probably some Hausa thrown in, for I understood only the word mouna, or tribute. The silver was placed in the palm of Musa's hand, he weighed it, put it between his teeth and bit it hard, then smiled.

  "I, " he said. "Wallahi, i."

  "I think," Bakuli said, frowning over this, "that in Hausa i means yes."

  "Oui?" I asked, wanting to be sure. "Naam?"

  Musa nodded vigorously and pocketed the Hand of Fatima. Walking over to the donkey he felt the two guerbas, nearly empty, and made sign language for us to remain where we were, he would fill them in the sluggish muddy water of the oued. "Dawa, " he said, and bringing out two pieces of bread he placed them in Bakuli's hand and led away our donkey, abandoning us to whatever faith in him we could manage. We tore into the bread hungrily, but he was gone a worrisome long time. The sun rose higher in the sky, the shadows grew smaller and the heat more searing. But he came back. While he was gone he appeared to have made friends with our donkey for he was talking to it as he approached us from the other side of the hill, and when we softly called out to him he patted the donkey, nodding and smiling. "Bon," he said. "Jukibon." The two goatskins bulged with water, and the donkey, however bon, now carried a bale of fodder on his back as well. Musa proudly showed us the Hand of Fatima so that I understood he had paid with money of his own, for b
esides the leather bag that held his own possessions he had brought back a sack of dates for us and some tea and millet that he gave to Bakuli.

  With a mixture of Hausa, Arabic and Tamahak he told us we must leave quickly now. The oasis was named Abalessa, (I would remember this) and the people there were Haratin, and very poor; he had felt their interest in the donkey and heard their whispers when he produced his coins. We must go fast, he said, and so we set out at noonday, the crudest time of all, hoping this hour of the day would discourage our being followed and robbed. It would be four days to the nearest well—if it had not gone dry, he said—and we must beware of bandits. Neither of these warnings were inspiriting. Nevertheless, when I thought of what the Hand of Fatima had bought us, I felt that if Mohammed could know I was still alive he would be truly glad that his gift was restoring hope and life to me for a little longer, although how a blind guide would preserve us I couldn't imagine. But then I still had much to learn.

  We had not traveled far when we met with a dreadful reminder of life's fragility in the desert; from a distance I saw vultures circling in the sky and was about to speak of this when Musa stopped us. He knelt, placed his ear to the ground, then rose and gestured us on through the scrub. As we drew nearer I saw the ground alive with vultures, ugly black creatures that flapped their wings and screamed their anger at us and flew away to circle overhead and wait, giving space for us to see what they fed on. It was not a pretty sight. We were looking at six corpses not long dead, for the men were still half-clothed. What astonished me was to see that two of the men lying dead in the sand wore remnants of uniforms.

  "French, Missy," Bakuli said, and pointing to the other four, "they be Chaamba."

  French! I had not remembered that when we crossed the Tassili n' Ajjer we had moved out of Turkish country and into French territory. In spite of the horror with which I gazed at the scene, my first thought was French .., dear God if only I can find a live one I may see home again.

  Musa bent over to search the bodies and I turned away at this, sickened, for not even the witnessing of an earlier massacre could inure me to the sight of what vultures did to the bare faces of these men, tearing the eyes from their sockets and the flesh from their bones. When Musa had finished, having found nothing left of value, he dropped to the ground and with his fingers examined the camel prints, sorted over the spent cartridge shells and picked up the dung and sniffed it. When he rose I was amazed at how much he had learned from what looked only a confusion of tracks. The French and their Chaamba guides had come up from the south, he said, and among their camels were two that belonged to the Tuareg; he could tell from the grass in their dung where they had last fed, and by whom they were owned. Here at this place fifteen Tuareg had overtaken them, demanding back their camels; there had been talk for a few minutes but the Tuareg did not like the Chaamba and the Chaamba did not like the Tuareg, and this was how it had ended. "lyaka ya kare, " he said: the end. It is finished.