I had a second day to spend in Timbuktu awaiting Jeanne’s arrival. The day before, I had walked around looking conspicuous in a faded yellow T-shirt and cotton twill khaki trousers.
The people of the town were virtually all Muslims, I was told.
Owing to that, I am guessing, the women did not look at me. At least not directly. The men and children, however, watched and smiled at me as if I were as large a curiosity to them as they were to me.
Someone who had no firsthand knowledge told me in Baltimore that all the women of Timbuktu hid their faces behind burqas. But this clearly was not the case. In fact, I saw more men covering their faces than women. The men turban-wrapped their colorful sheshes around their heads, and then either pulled them long below the waist across their bodies, or brought them across the lower half of their faces around and again. The women, as far as I could see, more often than not, wrapped their heads and not their faces. In all cases, however, the colors and patterns of their garments were stunning. The long robes shifted, sweeping and proud, frequently with white and periwinkle represented.
I should not have listened to anything that I was told before leaving America. For the little bit that I had been told quickly proved thin, if not flat wrong altogether upon my arrival. The Morgan library had had nothing of usefulness on Timbuktu, and nothing at all on the Dogon beyond the reference materials I’d read years before in my high school library.
The white reference desk librarian at the Baltimore city library had thought I was joking when I asked him for materials on Timbuktu.
“I always heard people say, you know, From here to Timbuktu, but it’s not a real place, is it?”
I had said yes, it was a real place, and handed him the withdrawal slip I had completed from the lone card catalog entry the library had on Timbuktu. The librarian’s search produced nothing of consequence, save his incredulous “I’ll be damned” imprecation upon seeing the name Timbuktu printed on a card from his own card file.
Having seen no pictures, and having read virtually nothing about the city, may have been a good thing, inasmuch as the resultant void of expectation rendered my first glimpse of the place indelible.
It was literally like nothing I’d ever seen before.
I was first struck by how old and earthen the city was.
In America, the cityscape is young, mathematically perpendicular, relatively colorless, and massively nonbiodegradable, as if the sheer tonnage of it, the cold concrete fruit of its builders’ will, had been violently, rudely piledriven into the naïve green earth, and imposed upon nature without nature’s consent. In America, one could not look at the arrow-straight sheathing of the buildings and know the natural materials from which it had been derived. The Western cityscape, indeed, was nature’s relentless enemy, an enemy that, whenever it took a mind to, caused nature to all but disappear.
In Timbuktu, the ancient irregular red-clay buildings were nature. Nature, reformulated into grand mosques and university buildings and homes and the like. The structures were not so much on the Earth as of the Earth. I found this harmony surprisingly settling, although I doubt this would be the assessed effect on most Americans, who are bred to appreciate slick, unforgiving exactness.
In any case, the much-fabled city was barely a shadow of its grand old self. Not long after it was established 900 years earlier by Tuareg nomads, it became the center of trade and scholarship for much of Africa and the Muslim world as well. When Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, Timbuktu, poised near the great northern turn in the Niger River, was, during the 1300s, one of the world’s most advanced cities. Mansa Musa, king of the Mali empire, erected his royal residence, the Madugu, here. Gold and salt trade routes crossed here with caravans of heavily laden dromedaries that traveled from West Africa to Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, and beyond.
At its peak, as many as 100,000 people lived in Timbuktu. More than 25,000 students and scholars journeyed from the far reaches of the Muslim world to study and teach at its famous university, Sankore.
In 1354, the great explorer and writer Ibn Battuta, following his visit to Timbuktu, described the city as a marketplace of gold and great wealth, the African El Dorado.
By the time I arrived in June 1970, scarcely 19,000 people remained in what was then little more than a town. This was up from a low of 5,000 said to have been living there as recently as 1940.
In its ineluctable decline, the city was now much like a stubborn and aged night watchman defiantly peering into the face of death’s final quiet summons.
Waiting patiently on fate at the parched southern edge of the Sahara desert’s implacable approach, Timbuktu holds out as the misunderstood dying father would for the last long-anticipated visit of his wandered issue. To divulge to them an important and final bequest. To light forward their darkened paths from a bright past’s failing stores before the ultimate and inevitable darkness arrives.
No trace remains of the Madugu, the king’s royal palace. Now and again, in winter, a small salt caravan would arrive from Taoudenni. But trans-Saharan trade by way of the great Timbuktu was little more than ancient history. Gold was no longer the coin of commerce.
The city’s greatness was done and would never return. But still, the city would not die. It had something yet to say. Something important. Particularly to those who had long before been stolen away.
“Jeanne will get here in the morning.”
“Thank God,” my grandmother said. This time, she sounded far away. The connection crackled and faded and then strengthened again. I had a passing vision that she was speaking to me from the deep well of the antiquity I had come all the way to Mali to explore.
“Grandma, you should see this place.”
“Well. Maybe I can, son.” She chuckled as she said this. “Tell me what it feels like.”
“I don’t know, Grandma. I know what it kinda makes me feel like. It’s something I’ve never felt before. It’s like the rest of the world no longer exists. Even though I know in my head it’s out there, this world seems more natural. Close. Easy. Very easy. I don’t know or care about what time it is, or what day or what year it is. It’s as though I’m standing here a thousand years ago with funny-looking clothes on. Everything seems to be living—you know what I mean? The earth, the buildings—not just the people, but even the people’s clothes. The people’s talk in the streets, the shops. Everything’s open and moving and mixing. Everything’s touching. Everything’s a part of everything else. I know I’m not making sense, but there are no separations … wait a minute. Wait a minute, Grandma. Two elderly men in robes just walked by and greeted me. I did not know what I was supposed to say, so I just bowed and smiled … What did you say, Grandma?”
“I said, what is the weather like?”
“Warm. Sunny. In the middle of the day, the sun makes the orange-red earth look like it’s on fire. In the evening, the Earth’s color softens.”
The connection crackled and hissed.
“When I was a girl, I worsh … sun.”
“What did you say, Grandma?”
“I said I loved the sun on my skin.”
“You’d be right at home here in your gowns. There are all kinds of people here. Of course, I can’t tell them apart or know what they are saying, but right around Timbuktu, the Tamashek, Songhay, Moor, and Fulani people live.”
“Have you met any Dogon people there yet?”
“No, but the Dogon live near here. Jeanne and I are going to visit an old library here first and then we’ll go to the cliff that was in your dream.”
“Tell me, Gray. Tell me what it looks like. I have this picture from my Dogon childhood in my mind. Tell me what the place looks like—the streets, the buildings. Do they have anything sticking out from them?”
I did not know at first what she meant by this, but then something occurred to me. “You mean the buildings?”
“Yes,” she said expectantly.
Many of the sand-colored masonry buildings had timeworn wooden timbers protruding helter-skelter from them. One such building that had drawn my attention was sculpted in the shape of a pyramid, its four sides shot through with old beams that stuck out from the clay façades at odd angles and lengths. I thought of the timbers as heaven’s handles put there by prescient builders to expedite the assistance of the gods in keeping the old structures standing right-side-up throughout eternity.
I described to her the beams that perforated many of the buildings in this way.
“I know—” And again, as if with swelling astonishment, “Gray, I know what it looks like!”
“You do?”
“Are the buildings the color of the ground? Like red sand?”
“Yes.”
“I know what it looks like. In my dreams I have seen what you are seeing.”
I did not try to test her further on this. For there was nothing that she wished to prove. She was interested mostly in having me describe to her the small details of everything I saw. Colors. Shapes. Structures. Smells. Sounds. The visuals of this timeless and different place.
“How are you being treated?”
“Fine. I feel a little guilty because I can’t speak anything but English and people are struggling to speak to me in the few English words they know. But they’ve been very warm to me. Like they’re trying to take care of me. I probably look lost.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“There’s this tea shop near the little guesthouse where I’m staying. The guesthouse doesn’t have a telephone. The woman who runs it is Fulani. She speaks English pretty well.”
For a while she said nothing.
“Grandma, are you still there?”
“Yes, I am still here, Gray.” She changed the subject. “Do you have the old notes and drawings with you?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“And you remember what my name was in the dream, and what my father’s name was?”
“Yes, Grandma, I brought everything with me.”