Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  The name of the man who had bought me was Achmet el Kazza and he turned out to be more of a merchant than a slave-trader. Much as any European traveler would pick up gifts to carry home to his friends he seemed to have made his purchases with apparent casualness, and he had added to his caravan thirty Hausa who caught his eye on the way; this struck me as more callous than if he made his living at buying and selling human beings. His caravan was of good size, with nearly two hundred baggage camels, but he had come to Fachi to negotiate with the Kel Air Tuareg for fifty of their cream-colored camels to sell in the north. His caravan had started out in the south, near Lake Chad, and the freighted camels carried ivory, kola nuts, cloth, hides and salt as well as food, water, fodder, sheep and goats—and thirty-one of us not there by choice.

  Among el Kazza's collection of slaves there was one young woman who apparently had possibilities for Constantinople too, because while the other slaves walked she and 1 were given donkeys to ride, and goat's milk to drink. Her name was Ramatu and she was a Fulani, her skin a pale tawny brown and her features almost European except for a tribal scar at each comer of her mouth. She wore huge silver circles in her ears and beaded necklaces, and had small pointed breasts, quite bare during the day, her only covering a bright cloth tied around her waist and extending to her knees. I thought her stunning, but although she spoke Hausa she was proud and not given to talk. The men were Hausa and looked strong, which was no doubt why el Kazza had selected them; they had already walked a great distance and there were many more days of travel ahead, although later I would learn that five had died on the way to Fachi and had been left behind for the vultures, which sickened me to hear.

  Thus we left Fachi one day after the el Subr prayer had been said at sunrise. At midday we stopped for the el Duhr, in midafternoon for the el Asr, at sunset for the el Mogh'reb and each night for the el Aschia. Until now I'd not met with such devoutness among the desert Arabs, who might pray once or twice a day on the march, but this caravan was accompanied by a muezzin who marked the hours and at each stop pointed the men to the East, and Mecca, with great preciseness. I was not unmoved by this. We would be plodding across the plains under a blue enamel sky when suddenly there would ring out the melodious cry of "Hya alla Salat! Haya all fallah! " A hundred men would dismount from their camels and begin their ablutions, ardently washing themselves with sand after which they would prostrate themselves in prayer, their words rising and falling in a muted chorus that ended, always, with a great and joyous cry of "Allah Akhbar! Allah Akhbar! Allah Akhbar!" until the sound of it echoed among the dunes and must surely have penetrated even the low-lying cliffs in the east.

  We stopped only briefly at Bilma, camping outside of its walls while the camels were watered and the guerbas filled, and then we turned north to head toward an oasis they called Seguedine, a five-day march from Bilma, Inch'Allah. Soon we were exchanging desert sand for the gravelly plains of a reg. There was no hope of escape, for a man was appointed to keep an eye on us, and in any case where could one go? Some very inhospitable cliffs were surfacing to the east of us and to the west there lay only a wasteland of dull red gravel.

  I had begun to notice one of the Hausa men who walked near me, he was stumbling often and had several times come near to falling toward the night of each endless march. If I had recovered physically now from the crossing of the Tenere my emotions remained fragile and it pained me to watch the man; I found myself suffering with and for him. I guessed that he had fever, and one day in guiding my donkey closer I saw that this was so; I asked his name but he only looked at me with distant bloodshot eyes so that I knew all of his concentration to be fixed upon the next step to be taken, and on survival. Once I gave him water, which startled him out of his reverie and he became aware, but briefly. There came a day when his eyes were glazed and each step torture for him and I could endure this no longer; I slid from my donkey and told him, "Dauk! Take it! Huta—rest."

  He looked frightened, his eyes still unfocused, vision blurred, but he mounted the donkey and I walked beside him. For several hours he rode until the overseer saw this and pulled him off the donkey, angrily gesturing me to mount it again.

  Ramatu gave me a reproachful look. I made trouble, she said—Wahala! Did I want to live or mutu—die, she asked.

  "Kayya, but you are hard," I told her.

  She only shrugged. "With tsauri I will live, they say I will have silks and many jewels."

  When the caravan stopped that night in the moonlight to feed the camels and rest and make a fire I saw the Hausa man fall to the ground and lie motionless, gasping for breath.

  Going to him I said, "¡na gajiya?—how is the tiredness?"

  He did not answer and I saw that he was dying. I touched his cheek and he opened his eyes, purged of fever now, and smiled at me. He said in a clear joyous voice, "Za ni gidà. "

  He had said, "I am going home."

  His eyes widened, his breath came hard and stopped; he was dead. There would be no more fever, no more struggle; instinctively my fingers sought the hard red seeds in the pocket of my barracan and then, reassured by their presence I leaned over and closed his eyes for him.

  There is a dangerous way of removing oneself from reality, and this I began to practice now, cutting myself off from all feeling. I could look without seeing: at tufts of grass beginning to soften the hard edges of the reg, the appearance of a tree—an acacia I decided without caring—at rocks that rose sharply out of the gravel like monuments, some of them huge, and once a rock that I thought at first to be a very tall man wrapped in a cloak. There began to be a tilt upward in the earth, we were climbing toward a rocky plateau and leaving behind the gravel plains, and with this there came a merciful change to cooler air. This almost brought me back to life, but not quite, for I still remained ... I could not say the word "slave." In my previous world slavery had been outlawed years and years ago and now I cursed people in Boston and London for being so complacent as to believe it was no longer alive in these faraway places. Such thoughts were dangerous because I could afford neither rage nor fear nor sorrow nor awareness of any sort, I could only finger the red poison seeds in the pocket of my barracan and numb myself to what lay ahead.

  By evening of the sixth day we were discovered by a dozen small black boys who romped along beside us as we made our way into Seguedine. It was a larger settlement than 1 had expected, but if it was shabby and poor it had water, and while el Kazza greeted the elders of the village the camel drivers headed for the well where they would spend all night watering so many camels. I stared at two young women carrying jugs of water on their heads; their smiles startled me, as well as the large silver rings each wore in one nostril, but Ramatu and I were immediately hurried off to a mud hut, denied even the sky and the stars for this night.

  The flimsy door closed and we sat, each of us scratching flea bites, a smelly oil lamp throwing out a feeble circle of light between us. "1 don't like it here," I said angrily, "why can't we sleep outside?"

  "He hides us," Ramatu said. "Did you not see there is another caravan here?"

  "Who are they?" I asked.

  She only shrugged, having neither conversation nor curiosity; she was much given to shrugs, which I found tiresome. Soon the door was set aside and a boy brought us bread and a bowl of lentils with shreds of lamb in it. We ate with our fingers, scooping up juice with slabs of bread, and then lay down on the palm mats to sleep. This did not come easily for there were continuing noises from the village, the sound of a peculiar raspy instrument being played, shouts of men, a laugh or two and a rise and fall of talk in Arabic and Hausa; el Kazza was obviously making merry at a campfire after six days of the desert. I had nearly fallen asleep when the door was suddenly removed and el Kazza walked into the hut with another man.

  "Tashi—stand up!" he ordered, and in Arabic 1 heard the word gameel, or beautiful. Then I understood as I rose that he was boasting, showing us off to a friend, that too many kola nuts had overstimulated him or that p
erhaps, despite his devoutness, he had been sampling palm wine. I heard the words Sultan and Constantinople, and walking over to Ramatu he patted her breasts and smiled at his companion: he was showing his merchandise.

  His friend said in Arabic that we were beautiful indeed but it was a long way to Murzuk, and longer still to Constantinople and would he consider selling one of us now?

  El Kazza roared with laughter; he was truly a changed man this night. He said that was out of the question but weren't we beauties?

  His friend moved to Ramatu and looked into her face, and then with a glance at me he said, "That one looks a Targuia. I can offer gold, Sidi."

  Oh God, I thought drearily, and gave him a look of hate. El Kazza's friend was muffled against the cold in burnous and draped headscarf but his eyes had a strange sheen, he looked younger than el Kazza and yet his eyebrows were white.

  "La, la," el Kazza said, laughing. "Whatever she is, she too is for the harem."

  "Much gold," said his friend.

  "Nawá—how much?" asked el Kazza curiously, looking him up and down as if he'd not expected his companion to have such wealth, and now I realized the man was not of this caravan but a bako who had been sharing the campfire with el Kazza.

  I did not speak: why should I speak when I was not a human being to these two, merely chattel to be bargained over—but I could hate them both.

  The bako was offering two gold pieces.

  "You call that 'much gold'?"

  'Two gold pieces," repeated the man.

  "For which yârinyâ?" asked el Kazza, resorting to Hausa.

  The man shrugged and pointed to me.

  El Kazza hissed through his teeth. "Bismallah, you offer little. La!"

  "Three pieces of gold then."

  El Kazza shook his head. "Five."

  "Three," repeated the bako.

  "La—forget it."

  The man shrugged and turned away, saying words in Arabic I couldn't understand.

  El Kazza watched him a moment and then spoke. "Show me the gold."

  The man turned his back to us, burrowing through layer after layer of clothes. When he faced el Kazza again he held up a single coin that glittered in the lamplight and I saw el Kazza's eyes widen at the size of it.

  "Four," said el Kazza. "Four of them."

  The stranger shrugged and then, "Naam, " he said.

  I had just been sold for four gold pieces, and to still another man. I thought wearily that at the very least this spared me the slave market in Murzuk or a harem in Constantinople but what manner of man this was I didn't know, and as my spirits plunged I fingered again the handful of poison seeds in my pocket.

  "Zô, " he said to me in Hausa, and I went with him out of the hut into the night. We circled a dying fire and he led me some distance away from the well where el Kazza's caravan had camped. In the thin light of a gauzy moon I noticed that unlike el Kazza's men, who slept on the earth, this man had set up a tent of hides laced to four poles, like the Tuareg, but high enough to stand in and with flaps for closing. He led me inside and lit a lantern that gave so dim a light that I still couldn't see him clearly.

  'Take off your clothes," he said.

  I stared at him, speechless and outraged.

  'Take them off," he said curtly in Hausa.

  Frightened I slipped out of my clothes. He walked over to me and touched my breasts, cupping them, and then he ran his hands lightly down my body. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth; when I briefly opened them he too had discarded his clothes and bid me lie down.

  I lay down. He was no Jacob. My God he was no Jacob, I was played on like an instrument, reaching sensations never dreamed of; I lay spellbound until a wildness rose in me and I met passion with passion, the flames rising higher and higher between us until—ending, I fell limp and utterly astonished. We lay for a moment interlocked, but I did not look at him or even consider him, I was centered on the discovery of an entire universe unknown to me. Poor Jacob, I thought and rolling over and away from this man I said, "Good heavens!"

  He jerked away from me as if bitten by a scorpion. "That's English!"

  I was so bemused it needed a minute for me to realize that when he'd said "That's English," it was English that he'd spoken.

  "Who are you?" he demanded. "You're no Targuia—you said in English, 'Good heavens.' "

  I sat up and stared at him and suddenly all the weeks of fear, anger and bitterness exploded and I cried out furiously, "What does it matter to you who I am? You bought me for four gold pieces and now you've raped me and you'd have done it whether I was Tuareg, Hausa, Fulani or Arab, so why should it make any difference who I am, and I hope you speak enough English to understand that 1 think you a vulture—an ungulu—a monster and a bastard."

  Without hesitation he said in a hard even voice, "I speak and understand English and I paid four gold pieces for you for reasons I don't care to mention just now, and I took you fast to put my brand on you because if you were a Tuargia you'd think ill of me if I didn't, and be out of here by morning. Who are you?"

  "A slave," I said bitterly.

  "Oh?" In the dim light I thought the comers of his mouth tightened in a faint smile. He said dryly, "I wonder which of us is the more surprised and which the slave now. Who are you?"

  I was silent, suspicious and worn out.

  He rose, pulled his burnous around him and rummaged in a leather bag. "I've some brandy, you'd better have some." He handed me a canteen with a canvas cover and I cautiously drank from it. Handing it back I said defiantly, "And who are you? You're not an Arab, you can't be."

  "It seems we're both imposters." He shrugged. "I've been hunting in Abyssinia, trying to make a fortune in ivory, but things grew too hot for a white man so I decided to do some traveling and see more of the continent. I'm a Scotsman."

  "What do you mean 'hot'?" He was stuffing a blanket into a sack now, I couldn't guess why and didn't really care to know, but it was of some interest to me to learn whether I'd been bought by a man wanted for murder.

  "The Emperor's dying," he said. "King Menelik. Some say he's already dead, some say he had a stroke and is half-dead, but when a ruler in these parts loses power—and he's been a damn fine ruler, I liked him—it's every man for himself. Robber bands everywhere, tribes fighting tribes. Pure anarchy."

  Not a murderer, then. "Why are you taking down the tent?" I asked, watching him remove the hides from their poles and roll them into a bundle.

  "Because we're leaving now. I've a suspicion el Kazza may have plans to steal you back once he's counted his four gold pieces a few times and rued his sale."

  "You mean—oh God," I said and hastily drew on my tattered clothes and rolled up the mat on which we'd lain. For just a second I remembered what had happened on that mat and I blushed, but this was no time for thought; when he carried the tent poles out to the camels I followed closely behind him, pausing only to glance back once—out of fear—to el Kazza's shadowy camp, and for comfort to the stars overhead. Four camels were prodded to their feet, two of them loaded with guerbas bulging with Seguedine water, and the third with baggage. When I helped him tie down the bales of fodder, he gave me a quick glance and said, "You've lived with the Tuareg." It was not a question and I didn't answer. A great deal had happened to me in the past few hours and it was impossible to sort out my thoughts and my feelings.

  He said, "We'll walk the first miles."

  "Where are we going?"

  'To Zouar—east. El Kazza heads north." He tied the camels headstall to tail and led them single file in and around the rocks with me following. The mountain air cooled my flushed cheeks and the stars were luminous in a black velvet sky. This was hammada now, littered with stones and boulders and sharp pebbles and he walked the camels slowly, carefully choosing the way. I had no idea what time of night it was but we walked for a long time before the sky in the east began to pale. In this cold predawn twilight he chose a high rock behind which to camp, tall enough for shade at noon and well-co
ncealed from anyone who followed. From one of his sacks he drew out dried camel dung and built a small fire. Over this he set a battered tin pot into which he measured two cups of water and a handful of tea. I looked only at his hands, not wanting to see his face, uncertain of this new situation and of this man, wary, a little frightened still, yet curious. I knew that I'd been spared Murzuk and a slave market but I had also made startling discoveries about myself that threw me into confusion. Tired and hungry, I ate the fresh dates his hand presented to me and found that strong tea was even kinder than brandy for distraught nerves.

  "You'd better sleep," he said, stamping out the fire, and I spread out my barracan, lay down and immediately fell into a deep sleep....

  The heat and the brightness woke me. Opening my eyes I saw my new captor sitting against a rock writing words on paper with a pencil. I had seen neither pencil nor paper for a very long time but my eyes went to his face, which I'd seen only by the light of a lantern and since then had avoided; now I wanted to see what manner of man had bought me for four gold pieces and taken me to bed. It was a deeply tanned face much weathered by the suns of the desert, with a map of thin lines radiating from the eyes and two horizontal lines threading the forehead: a hard strong face but with a pair of startling green eyes under the bleached white brows. It was the eyes that held me as he lifted his head to look at me; they had the look of a very private person and of one who saw things, and I had no idea what I meant by this except they made him different and puzzling. Examining him by daylight, and with interest, I could not help but dislike the manner of his "taking" me, as he'd put it, but I had not been raised on the Elsie Dinsmore books or the pious romances that had been devoured by the girls at Thistlethwaite School. In my situation I could count myself fortunate that I'd not been bedded by a Targui or by el Kazza or a Turkish sultan, and I thought it even more fortunate to learn that passion wasn't foreign to me and that with this man I'd had a perfect moment. Still, as we stared at each other and I remembered the events of the night, I felt my cheeks grow hot with blushes and quickly looked away.