| CHAPTER 1 |
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The boat coasted slowly into the port at Kourioume, on the Niger River, maneuvering its way into an open space among the other wooden crafts already moored there. It was ten o’clock on a late-October night. Only a few scattered lights glowing in the houses onshore broke the total darkness. The air was hot and still except for the faint wakes stirred up by circling swarms of mosquitoes.
Hand-hewn canoes were poled alongside the boat—which itself looked like a canopied canoe the size of a subway car—to carry people, luggage, and cargo to land. Passengers mobbed to the lip of the ship, queuing as if in an experiment in natural selection. They thrust nylon duffel bags, cardboard boxes tied with string, and bundles wrapped in rice sacks into the outstretched hands of the shuttle boat drivers, then climbed quickly down into the shallow hulls of the leaky dugouts. The man I’d been sitting next to for the previous two days waved for me to follow him, so I passed my backpack over and stepped aboard the wobbly little canoe. Once on land, I waited with other passengers for a shared taxi to arrive to take me the last eleven miles of my nine-day journey to Timbuktu—the southern terminus of the Caravan of White Gold, which I hoped to join on its trek through the Sahara along the ancient but still active salt-trading route.
I’d flown first to Dakar, Senegal, where I spent one night in a cheap hotel that doubled as a local brothel, then hopped a plane to Bamako, Mali’s capital. I spent a week making my way across the country to Timbuktu, traveling by bus, minivan, pickup truck, and, lastly, cargo boat down the Niger River. In all, it was a slow, cramped, dirty, sweaty journey—a fairly typical third-world public transportation experience. I looked upon the discomforts as a good opportunity to stretch my tolerance in advance of traveling with the caravan, which I knew would be leagues more demanding.
Along the way, I quickly saw that Mali is a very poor country. Close to 70 percent of the land within its borders is covered by the Sahara, and is known as Mali inutile (useless Mali). Most of the rest of it lies within a swath of semi-desert savannah-land called the Sahel, a transitional zone between true desert to the north and forest to the south that is particularly vulnerable to the whims of climate fluctuation. Eighty percent of Malians rely on the marginal lands and erratic river flows to sustain simple agricultural lives of small-scale farming, fishing, or herding. Most work is performed by hand, whether planting and harvesting, casting fishing nets, doing laundry, or crushing the millet that is the staple of the Malian diet. Food, even in many restaurants, is cooked over charcoal or wood. The hands and feet of nearly everyone I’d seen were cracked and callused, tough as hide. It was readily apparent why Mali is placed fourth from last on the United Nations Human Development Index, which ranks the standard of living of 177 countries based on a combination of factors, including per capita gross domestic product (Mali’s is about $250 per year), literacy rate (about 45 percent), and infant mortality rate (a quarter of Malian children die before age five).
But I also quickly realized that it’s the type of country in which I like best to travel: one in which much of daily life takes place outside; where things function with no concern for liability lawsuits; where the local version of order closely resembles the Western notion of chaos; and where poverty does not equal shame, partly because so many people are poor, partly because riches don’t increase one’s status in the eyes of Allah.
The cacophonous, colorful markets; the sense of solidarity that forms among passengers crammed together in the back of a battered pickup truck that sputters like a wounded turtle along rutted roads; the groups of men arranging prayer mats on the sidewalks at sunset, kneeling and casting long shadows before them as the calls of the muezzins roll from minarets; even the littered streets and putrid gutters that are a regular feature of towns in the developing world—all these reminded me of other places I’d been, other places I’d loved. I felt an instant fondness for the country, a sense of homecoming, though I’d never been there before.
I approached Timbuktu filled with anticipation. It was a destination of mythic proportion, whose name had been part of the popular lexicon since at least 1863 as a synonym for “the most distant place imaginable.” Arriving at Kourioume, with Timbuktu a short taxi ride away, I was tired but excited. I was a little anxious, too. The thing was, I had no idea how easy or difficult it was going to be to join a salt caravan; if it would take me a day, or a week, or if it was even feasible at all. If it wasn’t, my trip to the proverbial end of the earth was going to be a bust.
I tried to address this critical uncertainty before I’d left home by contacting a Timbuktu-based tour company whose e-mail address was listed in my guidebook. I told them I wanted to ride with a caravan round-trip to the salt mines at Taoudenni, and asked if they knew how I could arrange such a thing. The agency director wrote back, telling me it would be no problem; he could easily find me a place on a caravan for a mere five thousand dollars.
Even if I had that kind of money to spend on a trip, it was an insane amount to pay for what promised to be six weeks of Hell. I wrote back, telling him there was no way I could afford it. He responded, asking what I could pay. I felt like I had stepped into a cyber-bazaar. Rather than haggling via e-mail, which would have robbed me of seeing the all-important body language cues that are so much a part of the bargaining ritual, I told him I’d wait until I got to Timbuktu to talk to him, though I didn’t know when exactly that would be. I imagined he was giving me the “tourist over the Internet” price, and believed it would drop significantly when I arrived in person and had the option of shopping around. If it didn’t, I’d be out of luck. Five thousand dollars was about twice my entire savings.
The taxi that arrived at the port was a decrepit white Toyota Land Cruiser. The seats had been pulled from the back, replaced by wooden benches fitted against the sides. The only way in was through the back door. Among the others inside was a young man who introduced himself and asked me if I knew where I was staying that night. When I named a cheap hotel from my guidebook, he told me I could stay at his family’s house for half the price, claiming that many tourists, especially Peace Corps workers, did so. Since it was late, and I’m never one to turn down a bargain, I took him up on his offer.
I’m not sure what I expected to experience upon first arriving in Timbuktu, but because it was dark and quiet when we got out of the Land Cruiser, I felt like I could have been just about anywhere. Any mystique would have to wait until morning. My companion and I walked along dirt streets, zigging right then zagging left, the lanes becoming narrower and the buildings more densely packed. Just as I began to wonder if I’d been lured into some sort of a scam, we were at his house.
He opened the heavy wooden door. We stepped into a large unlit foyer with a round, defunct fountain in its center, then went up a stone staircase that could have been in a medieval castle. While we ascended, he told me that he was a tourist guide. If I wanted to arrange any kind of sightseeing trips, or spend a night or two in the desert, he could set it up for me.
What I really wanted, I said, was to ride with a camel caravan to Taoudenni and back.
“I can arrange that, too,” he said.
I set my backpack down on the terrace where I was going to sleep.
“Tell me your name again,” I asked.
“Alkoye. Alkoye Touré.
I pulled out my guidebook and found the page I was looking for, the one with the contact information for the guide I had e-mailed from home. And there, circled in red pen, was the name Alkoye Touré,
Alkoye was about five foot five, with a head that was shaped like a peach pit and topped with black fuzz. His skin was dark brown, and his droopy-lidded eyes always seemed half closed. In the morning, he recommended that we go over to the tourist agency office first thing, find out when the next caravan was leaving, and get me on it. It sounded simple. I could hardly believe how smoothly things were falling into place, though I steeled myself for what was sure to be a rigorous bout of haggling.
We walked down lanes lined by houses like Alkoye’s, two stories tall and as solid as fortresses, whose carved, heavy wooden doors lent them a deceiving air of affluence. We cut through twisting adobe-walled alleyways that resembled severely eroded sandstone slot canyons. Some of the mud-brick buildings, thanks to unusually heavy rains in the previous months, had recently collapsed into ruin; others had lain that way for many years. The dirt streets, even the nice ones, were rutted by wastewater runoff from the houses, which collected every so often in murky, smelly pools.
The office he led me to was like a windowless walk-in closet whose door opened onto the main paved thoroughfare into town. It had high ceilings, but was just big enough for a desk and a few chairs. Rudimentary xeroxed maps of routes in the Sahara were taped around the room at eye level. I shook hands with the chief, a well-weathered yet well–groomed Tuareg who looked to be about sixty and wore a long, loose robe called a boubou, and a turban, both white. When we were all seated, the games began.
The chief said there was a caravan leaving the day after next, and I could get on it for $1,750. This would include a guide, one camel for each of us, and all the food for the trip. I asked how much it would cost without a guide, saying that if I was traveling with a caravan, I wouldn’t need one. No, I was told, I absolutely needed one. No caravan would accept me without a designated minder—someone, essentially, whose job it was to make sure I stayed alive and out of trouble, so the rest of the azalai—the local word, both singular and plural, for “camel driver”—could focus on their jobs rather than on the foreigner who got in over his head. Besides, Alkoye pitched in, the azalai only speak Hasinaya, their Arabic dialect, but the guide would speak French and could translate for me. And $1,750 was the best price I could get.
Though it was more than I wanted to pay, it was much less than the five thousand dollars I’d been quoted over the Internet—which I refrained from mentioning—and was low enough that I knew we’d be able to come to terms. I was excited but tried to hide it, not wanting to weaken my bargaining position by appearing over eager. Instead, I feigned shock at the price and lowballed the chief with a counteroffer of less than half the amount he’d named. He reacted as though I’d just blasphemed against Allah Himself. Back and forth we went. Despite my efforts to keep a poker face, I couldn’t quite corral my feelings. Riding with a caravan was the reason for this entire trip, and I was being offered a chance to leave with a string of camels in two days. My long-held dream was nearly within my grasp; I badly wanted it to be in my pocket. So I lost my cool. Somehow I forgot the part of the ritual where you stand up and say, “Thanks, but it’s too expensive and I’m going to go see if I can get it cheaper somewhere else.” I made the deal then and there for twelve hundred bucks (which I later learned was a fair price).
Once we settled on the specifics, we drew up a contract. Alkoye, the chief, and I all signed it. Though I couldn’t help thinking this was little more than a procedural farce, written contracts have been a part of Saharan trading culture for centuries and have always been legally binding. Merchants used them to record the terms of the deals they made with each other and their employees—the traders who actually shuttled the cargo across the desert. As the nomad saying goes, “What leaves the head does not leave the paper.” The importance that Saharans attached to their contracts is evident by the fact that they bothered to write them at all, since paper was rare, very expensive, and never used frivolously.
Paper had such power that something like traveler’s checks had been an integral part of the Saharan trading system. Rather than crossing the desert with the wealth required to purchase goods in a far-off place and potentially losing it to bandits en route, a trader often gave money to a merchant in his hometown who had connections with another merchant in the destination city. In return, the hometown merchant gave the trader a handwritten note—called a suftaja—redeemable for that amount once he reached his destination. A suftaja could also be exchanged with other traders like money, and could pass through countless hands before finally being cashed in. Thus, traders could successfully cross vast distances, including entire continents, carrying little more than an IOU. Unlike traveler’s checks from American Express, however, if a trader lost his suftaja, he was out of luck.
I spent the rest of that day and the next getting ready to leave. Timbuktu felt like a true frontier town, a place ever conscious of its smallness and vulnerability beneath searing heat and desert gales. Accessible from the rest of Mali only from the Niger River, by air, or over hours’ worth of dirt tracks, it exudes an island-like sense of isolation, giving the impression that one has come to both the metaphorical and actual end of the road. With its dusty streets, general stores filled with provisions for life in town and on the range, and swarms of dubious—though generally harmless—characters, each trying to hustle a few bucks, I felt like I had stepped into an African version of the Wild West, with cowboy hats replaced by turbans, boots by flip-flops, whiskey by green tea, and horses by camels and beat-up Land Cruisers.
Timbuktu was founded around 1000 AD. Situated on the southern border of the Sahara and along the northern bend of the Niger River, which flows in a twenty-six-hundred-mile arc through West Africa, Timbuktu could have been the prototype for the aphorism about location, location, location. It became the trading nexus for goods traveling between black Africa and the Magreb, Europe, and Egypt, beginning in the eleventh century. Among the slaves, ostrich feathers, ebony, and salt exchanged in its markets were boggling quantities of gold.
Its legend began in 1324, when Mansu Musa, the emperor of Mali, traversed the Sahara en route to Mecca, making the hajj required of all faithful Muslims. When he arrived in Cairo, accompanied by perhaps the richest caravan the city had ever seen, tales of the staggering amount of gold he carried from Timbuktu quickly spread across the civilized world. Accounts by the great Arab explorers Ibn Battuta, who visited Timbuktu in the 1350s, and Leo Africanus, who visited in 1526, further stoked the European imagination. In his book A History and Description of Africa, Africanus wrote that the king of Timbuktu “owns great wealth in gold piastre and bullion, some of which weigh 1300 pounds” and that the residents “are exceedingly rich … in place of money, [they] use pieces of pure unadulterated gold….”
In Europe, Timbuktu became mythologized as an African Eldorado. Its houses, rumor had it, were sided and shingled with gold. But for centuries, only one white man had ever been there: a Florentine merchant named Benedetto Dei, who made it to the city in 1470 when it was near the peak of its prosperity. Dei, however, left little record of his experience, and Timbuktu remained shrouded in such mystery that European geographers didn’t even know where to draw the fabulous city on their maps.
Lured by its wealth, hundreds of explorers died trying to find it between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those who approached from the west, attempting to follow the Niger River, succumbed to disease or were killed by hostile natives. Those who came from the north were thwarted by the vast desert and the tribal warriors who dwelt there.
Then, in July 1825, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a thirty-two year-old British army officer of Scottish birth, set out from Tripoli, intending to caravan-hop his way some twenty-six hundred miles southwest across the Sahara. He began his expedition with an Arab guide, a Jewish interpreter, a servant from Sierra Leone, and a couple of West African boatbuilders who, if all went well, would help convey him down the Niger River after reaching Timbuktu. But all did not go well. In the middle of the desert, Laing was double-crossed by his guide, who sold him out to a group of Tuareg bandits. Armed with guns and sabers, the Tuareg pounced upon Laing and his small entourage while they slept. Laing was jarred awake by a bullet in his side moments before a sword sliced into his thigh. Defenselessly absorbing a flurry of blows, he was slashed repeatedly across the face and neck, which left him with a broken jaw, a severed ear, and a fractured skull. One strike to the back of his neck penetrated so deep that it scratched his windpipe. He either lost the use of—or completely lost—his right hand, with which he had shielded his head. His left arm, wounded in three places, was broken.
A mangled, bloody mess, he incomprehensibly survived, owing no small debt to the sterility of the Sahara. So feeble he had to be strapped into his saddle, Laing trailed the caravan for four hundred merciless miles to the village of Sidi Mukhtar, where he was struck with a yellow feverlike illness. After nine days hovering near death, he recovered, then set out to cross the remaining two hundred miles to Timbuktu. By this time, all of his original companions were dead.
When I picture Laing limping through the gates of Timbuktu on August 13, 1826, I like to think that he had enough of a sense of humor to laugh through his tears at the cruel joke he must’ve felt had been played upon him. For, after completing his Herculean quest, he became the first European to discover that Timbuktu was a greatly overrated destination. Between the time of Benedetto Dei’s visit and Laing’s arrival, Timbuktu had been sacked by Moroccan forces. Then, European nations longing for direct access to sub-Saharan markets began establishing ports along the West African coast. As a result, the sea replaced the Sahara as the primary trade route between Europe and black Africa, diverting the lucrative intercontinental trade away from Timbuktu. Though it remained an important center of intra-Saharan trade, especially in salt, it had long since fallen from riches to ruin, and was a city of crumbling mud. The Timbuktu I arrived in wasn’t all that different from the one discovered by Laing, though it did have intermittent Internet service.
Laing headed home after spending nearly six weeks in Timbuktu, traveling north with a guide and a small caravan. He didn’t get far before his new guide betrayed him; three days into the journey, Laing was beheaded and buried beneath a thorn tree. He was not alone in his fate; numerous other explorers en route to Timbuktu, both before and after Laing, were turned on by their guides, stabbed or strangled to death by the very men they had trusted to see them safely across the sands.
I was a bit uneasy about the historical precedent of guides killing their clients in the middle of the desert. I reckoned I would be in the same position as the explorers—a lone white man, rich by nomad standards, wholly dependent on my native companions in a place beyond the reach of law. Moreover, this was the fall of 2003. Six months earlier, the United States had invaded Iraq and was actively waging war on terrorism—which many Muslims (and some evangelical Christians) perceived as a sequel to the Crusades. It was a new low point in Arab–American relations. Images of Arabs burning the Stars and Stripes and threatening death to America saturated the media. My father, who had a friend in the U.S. State Department, relayed warnings to me about anti-Americanism in Mali, particularly among the Arabs and Tuareg in the north—precisely the people to whom I’d be trusting my life. Though I knew that most people in most places easily distinguish between individuals and their government, I was wary of how I’d be received as an American at that time; it’d be best, I concluded, not to let anyone know that I was Jewish, too.
I used my time in Timbuktu to buy some essentials for the trip through the Sahara, including a set of nomad-style clothing that would help me fit in with the azalai and make me more comfortable as I faced the sun, wind, and sand of the desert (a pair of baggy pants; a boubou; a shirt; and three meters of cloth for a turban—all made from the same lightweight sky-blue cotton fabric). I bought a kilo of tobacco to pass out as a gift to men I’d meet along the trail. Perhaps most important, I picked up a few supplementary kilos of dates and peanuts, as well as a box of black tea. I took seriously the warning that John, the archaeology professor, had given me about the Spartan caravan diet. I was startled by the dramatic amount of weight John had lost; I didn’t have twenty pounds to spare.
While at home, pondering how best to prepare for weeks of undernourishment, I developed two completely contradictory theories of physical training. The first was that I should promptly halve my normal food intake, so that by the time I was on the caravan my body would be accustomed to functioning on less and wouldn’t torture me with hunger pains. The second was that I should begin eating all the time, in order to enter the desert with more weight to lose.
I polled all of the doctors I knew, asking which approach was most medically sound. They unanimously advised me to eat, a lot, since bulking up would give my body more time before it went into “starvation mode.” Since the last biology class I had taken was seventeen years earlier, and I had been encouraged to drop out rather than fail, I had no idea what “starvation mode” was, but it sounded bad. I imagined it as a form of cellular cannibalism, as though my body would be throwing a molecular Donner-themed party at which my cells would draw lots and the losers would sacrifice themselves to the winners, becoming microscopic martyrs for the cause of my survival. I hoped the peanuts and dates I bought would help stave this off as long as possible.
The day before I was scheduled to begin the journey across the desert, I met briefly with my guide on the shaded patio of a coffee shop next to the tourist agency office. Walid, an azalai by trade, had the typically slight frame and leathery skin of Saharan nomads. His face was lean, his cheeks angular and clean-shaven. His black mustache curved down around his lips and joined with a close-cropped goatee. A black turban was wound atop his head and under his chin, so it could easily be pulled up over his mouth and nose. Contrary to Alkoye’s promise, Walid couldn’t speak French. Though I was confident we’d be able to communicate in Arabic, which I’d once studied in Cairo, it was a disappointing revelation nonetheless, since I spoke French much better.
Walid was accompanied by his uncle, Lamana, who was fluent in French, which he’d learned over the course of many years of guiding tourists into the desert around Timbuktu. He was Walid’s mentor, and was helping him build a guiding career for himself—one that was easier and paid better than shuttling salt across the desert. Walid was relatively new at leading foreigners and had only taken a handful out on short excursions before he got the call to accompany me on the most grueling trek that either tourist or nomad could make.
Sitting around the wooden table on the café’s patio, Lamana warned me about the hardships I was going to face. The heat would be insufferable. The caravan would march fifteen, maybe twenty hours at a stretch with no rest. Walid and I, Lamana said, would have some flexibility in our daily schedule before we met the caravan at the good grazing grounds where it was mustering six days to the north, but once we joined up with it, I’d have to keep up or be left behind. If I fell ill or got injured, there was no way out. I shouldn’t underestimate the dangers of the crossing, he continued; most local people would think I was nuts for voluntarily embarking on this trip. He said he was nervous for me, and felt responsible for my safety.
I was nervous for me, too, and wondered to myself if I was nuts for signing on to a caravan. Before heading to Mali, I’d scrutinized the risks of the journey—from starvation to injury to murder—through a mental magnifying glass, blowing them up to terrifying proportions. For a week, I forgot everything that drew me to the caravans; I lost my curiosity about the exotic culture in which I was going to immerse; I just wanted to come back alive. I finally broke out of this neurotic eddy, putting the dangers back into a more rational, manageable perspective. They were still substantial, but I was nonetheless swept forth again by visions of camels and nomads and desert.
Trying to ease Lamana’s concerns, I told him I knew what I was getting into and that I’d traveled many a mile through other deserts. I’m not sure I convinced him that I could in fact hack it, but he certainly got the picture that my mind was made up.
“One last thing,” Lamana said. “Do you eat meat?”
When I said yes, of course, he laughed and said he never knew what to expect from foreigners’ dietary habits; many, he continued, inexplicably engaged in a bizarre practice called vegetarianism.
As we rose to leave, I shook hands with Lamana and Walid and said, “See you tomorrow.”
“Ensha’allah,” Lamana replied—meaning “God willing”—the standard Muslim reply to every statement about the future, even the most mundane.
Moments after leaving the café, I was approached by a black man in a Polo-type shirt, jeans, and sneakers, who asked if I was the American who was going to Taoudenni.
“Yes,” I said, surprised that my plans were known by people I had never met. The old adage about news traveling fast in a small town seems to be a universal truth.
“Why didn’t you come see me?” he asked.
“What are you talking about?” I wanted to know.
“You e-mailed me from your home, asking about joining a caravan, and you said we’d discuss it when you got to Timbuktu. My name is Alkoye Touré. And now I learn that you’ve already decided to go with someone else.”
“You are Alkoye Touré? Then who did I arrange my trip with?”
“That was the other Alkoye Touré. There are two of us here in town. Everyone calls him ‘Le Petit’ because he is smaller than me. Did he tell you he was me?”
“No, no,” I said. “I thought he was you because your names are the same, but he never pretended to be you.”
Alkoye “Le Grand” didn’t believe me and chided me for breaking my promise to him. How was I supposed to know, I asked him, that there could possibly be two guides with the same name in the same town? But ignorance of Timbuktu’s unwritten laws was no excuse; guides there lay claim to tourists as though they are property—whoever makes first contact owns them. While I was in the desert, Alkoye “Le Grand” actually complained to the local authorities about this simple matter of mistaken identity, basically accusing Alkoye “Le Petit” of tourist theft. And he won his case—“Le Petit” had to pay “Le Grand” about thirty dollars in compensation for what amounted to trademark infringement.
With everything set for my departure into the great desert, all my nervousness and excitement disappeared. I felt, essentially, blank. Despite all that I had heard and read about crossing the Sahara, I recognized on the deepest of levels that I had no idea what to expect; that the experience of doing it would be so altogether different from reading about it that I wouldn’t really know what it’d be like until after I had done it. I accepted that my course had been set and found myself naturally adopting a calm, open-minded attitude, in which I felt prepared to receive whatever lay ahead, as ready as I could be without knowing exactly for what.
Then, that evening, I felt myself getting sick. Suddenly, starvation was the least of my concerns.
I awoke in the morning with sinuses swollen and tender. My nose was so clogged, I had to gulp for air like a beached catfish. Mucus trickled steadily from my nostrils; I was chain-sneezing; my neck and shoulders ached. And I was hot, really hot, and not just because of the ambient air temperature. I felt like the NyQuil poster boy.
Had I been at home, I would have lain around nursing myself. I was hardly fit to strike out into the Sahara. I briefly and seriously considered delaying my departure for at least a day. I’m no reckless adventurer; I like to come back from my trips alive. But I knew that the caravan wasn’t going to wait for me. If Walid and I arrived late at the grazing grounds where we were supposed to meet it, it would likely be gone. It was a risk I didn’t want to take. After getting final approval from my internal actuary, whose job it is to coolly weigh the probabilities of all possible disasters, I decided to go for it. By the time I reached Lamana’s house on the northern edge of town, sweat was seeping from my every pore and through my clothes.
Lamana, Walid, and I followed the cratered dirt lanes past the last of the mud-brick houses and into a dusty clearing strewn with torn plastic bags, scraps of fraying, fading fabric, and the heaped remains of slaughtered goats. Thorn trees quivered in the hot breeze under morning skies milky with haze. Children pumped water from a well into bright green and-yellow buckets, pausing to shout, smile, and wave their dark, skinny arms as we passed. This was the shore of civilization, where the sands of the Sahara washed up on the outskirts of Timbuktu. The children, I thought, were like the throngs that bid farewell to cruise ships, tossing confetti from the docks, only this ocean was made of sand and our ships had four legs and humps.
Our two camels were loaded with enough rice, millet flour, biscuits, green tea, and sugar, plus a few kilos each of peanuts and dates, to last two people for forty days—a biblical-sounding length of time. All of our food fit into two watermelon-sized rice sacks, except for the meat—half of a raw, freshly skinned goat carcass that was lashed to the outside of our cargo. Four rubber inner tubes, cut in half and with their ends tied off, would hold just enough water to sustain us between wells.
Our supplies were divided between our camels; each had a load slung over its back, resting atop pads made of desert grasses that equalized the baggage over the camels’ ribs. We carried neither a tent nor a tarp. We had no saddles, just the blankets we would later sleep on tied over our camels’ humps. I had my backpack, while Walid brought a knockoff nylon duffel printed with the word ABIDAS.
For a journey of nearly a thousand miles across some of the toughest terrain on earth, it looked like we had underpacked.
The tail of the lead camel was tied to the lower jaw of the second with a rope of handwoven grasses. Another rope was cinched around the lead camel’s jaw, which Walid carried over his shoulder. We marched north, into the open desert. Thinking superstitiously of Orpheus and Lot’s wife, I didn’t look back.
Lamana accompanied us over the first series of dunes. Before he sent us off and returned to town, we paused. Lamana called Walid aside and gave him a few minutes’ worth of hushed, last-minute counsel, like a concerned coach about to watch a young athlete take the field for a big game. Then he turned to me.
Shaking my hand warmly, an expression of true caring on his face, he cautioned me one last time about the dangers ahead. If I wanted to back out, he said suggestively, this was the time. Seeing I had no intention of doing so even though I was obviously physically unwell, he advised me to meet the desert with courage and offered a final, perplexing warning: “Allah is compassionate, but He doesn’t speak French.” I didn’t bother to ask if He spoke English.
Lamana, his blue robe flapping in the wind, turned back toward Timbuktu. Walid and I continued north, side by side. I was wearing my new blue pants, a light, long-sleeved buttondown shirt, my turban, and a pair of sandals. Walid wore his black turban, lime-green plastic flip-flops, and a blue, green, and white striped caftan that hung to the middle of his calves. We made small talk in Arabic to break the silence. Since I hadn’t spoken it in five years, I had to keep things simple.
Walid, I learned, was thirty years old. He had grown up in the desert among the Berabish tribe, living in cloth tents, moving with herds of goats, sheep, and camels from one sparse pasture to the next, and had ridden with the salt caravans since he was fifteen, making two or three trips to Taoudenni each year. Like most nomads, Walid was completely unschooled. I found he did know a tiny bit of French—the phrases C’est bien, Ce n’est pas bien, and the words grand, petit, and chameau.
Walid’s camel was aptly, if not creatively, named L’beyya, which means “white” in Walid’s dialect. Mine was called Lachmar, which means “red,” though he was more of a rusty brown with a tuft of white on his hump and a little under his chin from age. At fifteen, Lachmar was five years older than L’beyya. Neither was old for a camel—they can live to thirty—but L’beyya was at his physical peak. Lachmar, on the other hand, had slid into middle age. He had at most a few more trips to Taoudenni left in him, and this, Walid said, might be his last.
Our simple dialogue required more effort than I like to admit. I was forced to improvise with the random remnants of my Arabic vocabulary that remained accessible; the bulk of it lay buried beneath the sands of forgetfulness like ancient Egyptian relics, which I hoped I’d be able to dredge up before too long.
Thankfully, I could already tell that Walid and I had a natural linguistic connection. When speaking a foreign language, I find that some people are much easier to talk to than others, for no reason I can explain. I’ve been in situations where I’ve sat with two people, one of whom I can communicate easily with, the other hardly at all. At such times, the person to whom I can relate serves as a translator of sorts: I’ll say something in Arabic (or whatever language I’m trying to speak), he’ll repeat the same Arabic words I’ve just spoken, and the third person will then understand. That person will reply in Arabic and the translator will repeat those words to me, again in Arabic, which I then understand. It makes no sense at all. But the fact of the matter is that the connection is either there, or it isn’t. That Walid and I could already communicate as well as we did was a good sign, considering that I was speaking a crippled Egyptian Arabic and his native dialect was Hasinaya. We also shared silence comfortably. When our first conversation ran its natural course, I retreated into my own mental world, which revolved entirely around my health, or lack thereof.
Walking briskly alongside Walid, my nose demanded perpetual wiping and blowing. The inside of my mouth, which I had to keep open in order to breathe, was parched from the arid air. Though the overcast sky buffered us from the glare of the sun, I felt dangerously hot from the inside out.
Thus my long-dreamed-of odyssey began. Rather than feeling the thrill of setting off on a great adventure, I just felt like crap. Instead of contemplating the immense desert I was entering, I was busy hyper-scrutinizing my physical state, trying to divine whether each minute change in my body foreshadowed an imminent recovery or a slide into full-blown illness. I tried to assuage myself with rationalizations: If Gordon Laing could traverse the desert after being hacked up by his Tuareg assailants, surely I could survive a sinus infection. But I couldn’t talk myself out of the fear that I’d made a potentially fatal mistake by starting the trek in such a debilitated condition. I was already breaking that perfunctory promise I’d made to loved ones to “be safe.”
My girlfriend, Karen, was less than thrilled with this undertaking to begin with, but since she’d stuck with me four years already, she understood that there was no holding me back and was as supportive as she could be. A year or so earlier, when I had set out to pioneer a solo trek through a remote mountain range in Mongolia, she was less so. Then, since I was completely alone for weeks on end and had no way of contacting home, she was afraid I would die in an accident and simply vanish in the wilderness.
This time, even when considering the objective dangers involved in crossing the Sahara, she was much more relaxed. “At least you’ll be with other people,” she said, explaining her attitude. “In the worst-case scenario, someone will know what happened to you, and I’ll be able to find out.” Thus I learned that my death wouldn’t be such a tragedy to her as long as she could have some closure around it.
Some of my friends and family had urged me to carry a satellite phone, or at least a GPS, in case of emergency, but since the camel drivers never used them, I felt like that would be violating the spirit of the adventure. I remembered an interview I’d once read, given in 2001, by the then ninety-year-old Wilfred Thesiger, author of the classic Arabian Sands and arguably the most intrepid desert explorer of the twentieth century. At one point, he was asked what he thought of biologist J. Michael Fay’s two thousand-mile-long trek through the jungles of Africa with a bunch of pygmies. Fay, Thesiger was told, carried a satellite phone and could have supplies air-dropped if he needed them. “Well, you see, that wrecks it!” Thesiger pronounced. “Then you know he’s in no danger.” Referring to his own excursions through Arabia’s Empty Quarter in the 1940s, during which starvation was more than once a looming possibility, he said, “A telephone would have ruined the whole thing.”
I agreed with Thesiger wholeheartedly. Part of true adventure—and the way explorers traveled by necessity until recent times—is pushing beyond the reach of outside aid, managing situations with the resources one has, being smart while praying for a touch of divine grace. You perceive your environment and yourself differently if help is merely a phone call away. I didn’t want the safety net. But feeling as miserable as I did heading into the desert, I wondered if I’d end up regretting that decision.
I also began to question whether the personal goal I’d set for myself was laughably unrealistic.
One of the essential tensions in my life is the conflict between the love I have for my home and the insatiable wanderlust that provokes me to leave it for the farthest corners of the earth. I find my kindred spirit in the character of Sindbad the Sailor, who revels in his life in Baghdad surrounded by family and friends, yet can’t resist the lure of travel. Time and again he is drawn to the port city of Basra, whence he sets sail across the sea. Inevitably, he stumbles into the most fantastic and calamitous of adventures.
In his most famous exploit, Sindbad finds himself shipwrecked on a deserted island that happens to be the nesting ground for the Rukh, a bird so huge and terrible that it blocks the sun when it spreads its wings and “feeds its young on elephants.” Its eggs are as big as a house. Sindbad concludes that his only way off the island is with the Rukh, so while the great bird sleeps, he lashes himself to its talons with his turban. The next morning, the Rukh takes off in search of food, soaring high above the earth while Sindbad prays for his life. At last it lands in a valley teeming with serpents the size of palm trees. When it touches down, the terrified Sindbad quickly unties himself before the Rukh soars away with a snake in its claws.
As it is told, the floor of the Valley of Serpents is littered with precious gems. Men from the surrounding area have learned to harvest the riches without having to face the snakes—they slaughter sheep on the mountain above and cast the skinned animals down into the valley, where diamonds stick to the meat. Eagles and vultures swoop down and carry the jewel-laden carrion up to the mountaintop, where the men chase them away and pick the diamonds from the flesh. Sindbad, desperate, binds himself to a carcass and is lifted along with it to safety by an eagle. With the help of the gem dealers, he finally makes it back to Baghdad.
In the midst of adventures like these, Sindbad’s only thought is returning home alive. He is always grateful when he arrives there safely, but sooner or later is inevitably infected with the urge to set sail again.
In the novel Arabian Nights and Days, which is loosely based on 1001 Arabian Nights, Nobel Prize–winning author Naguib Mahfouz points out Sindbad’s greatest flaw: As Sindbad is about to leave on another journey, a wise doctor says to him, “Go in peace, then return laden with diamonds and wisdom, but do not repeat the same mistake.” A puzzled expression crosses Sindbad’s face, and the doctor continues: “The Rukh had not previously flown with a man, and what did you do? You left it at the first opportunity….”
“I hardly believed I would make my escape,” Sindbad replies in defense.
“The Rukh flies from an unknown world to an unknown world,” the doctor says, “and it leaps from the peak of Waq to the peak of Qaf, so be not content with anything for it is the wish of the Sublime.”
Sindbad’s mistake was his failure to appreciate the rarity of his circumstance, so preoccupied was he with saving himself. It was a message that resonated deeply with me. Reflecting on my own adventures alone in the Mongolian wilderness, I saw I’d made the same one. While the experience was deeply rewarding in many ways, I had failed to squeeze everything possible out of it. I struggled with a gnawing anxiety over being so far from civilization for weeks on end, with no possible aid but that which nomadic herders—who didn’t even have aspirin—could provide. I felt rushed, as though the sooner I could complete the trek, the greater chance I’d have of emerging safely from the mountains. I could have explored its canyons, meadows, and ridges for weeks more, but was compelled by this low-grade fear to get out sooner rather than later. Once I returned home and slowly evaluated my experiences, I regretted the opportunities I’d forsaken due to my own preoccupation with escaping alive.
I took to heart the advice given to Sindbad by the doctor; I was determined not to repeat my mistake in the Sahara. I likened traveling with a caravan to flying with the Rukh; I set myself not only to survive, but to enjoy and derive value from the journey, to appreciate being exactly where I was, no matter how difficult it became.
Struck with fever, feeling like my head was packed with lead as I walked my first miles in the Sahara, I couldn’t help scaling back my lofty goals. Not even an hour into the forty-day voyage, I already felt like I was in trouble. I just wasn’t sure how much.