Hold the Enlightenment (10 page)

In the seventies, Alberto, like many adventurous young Europeans, had made a living of sorts shipping cars from Europe across the Mediterranean to Africa and then driving them two thousand miles south through the Sahara and selling them in Mali or Nigeria or Togo or Burkina Faso. At the time, the salt mines were still operating up at Taoudenni, or so he had heard. No one he knew had ever been there. After independence from the French in 1960, the Malian government had used the mines as a political prison. Dissidents, generally from Bamako, were sent to the desert, where they were ill prepared to survive. To be condemned to work in the salt mines was tantamount to a death sentence.

Alberto became obsessed with the Taoudenni salt-mine prison
during his car-running days. As a political prison it was, of course, off limits to foreigners. Forbidden. The only outsider Alberto ever talked to who had even gotten close to the prison was an International Red Cross worker who’d driven up from Timbuktu to check on the welfare of the prisoners. A guard stopped the man at gunpoint. The relief worker, staring into the business end of the rifle, explained the concept of international law and reminded the soldier of the strict neutrality of the Red Cross, called the Red Crescent in Muslim Africa. It was his duty to see that political prisoners were treated humanely, in accordance with international law.

“Imbecile,” the guard said, “there is no law here.”

Alberto hatched an ill-conceived plan to dress as an Arab and try to see the mines. Good sense finally got the better of him.

In 1991, the prison was shut down. Mali, once aligned with the Soviet Union, was now moving toward a multiparty democracy. The elimination of human-rights abuses, such as forced labor in the salt mines, was a first step in securing international aid money. In 1996, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department declared Mali’s human-rights record for that year “a bright spot on the African continent.”

But, Alberto had heard, there were still people working in the mines, on their own, for money, and since there was a thin red line on the map but no real roads from the mines at Taoudenni to Timbuktu, Alberto figured there still had to be camel caravans, carrying salt across the flowing dunes.

Seeing this medieval anachronism—the Caravan of White Gold—well, Alberto thought and the Italians agreed, it could be the experience of a lifetime. You just didn’t want it to be the
last
experience of a lifetime. And so Alberto gave us a choice: we could go back down south of the Niger River and see, oh, the Dogon cliff dwellings, a nice, culturally captivating trip with no security problems at all—a trip, in fact, that Alberto guided frequently for the company Mountain Travel-Sobek. Mali south of the Niger was safe.

Gigi and Dario wanted to wait a bit. See what happened. The two other Italians were both named Roberto. The Roberto everybody called Pepino had the heavy, ponderous dignity of a Roman
emperor, and he was leaning toward retreat, as was the other Roberto, a man who reminded me of Clint Eastwood.

We decided not to decide.

The next day was
eid-al-fitr
, a feast day marking the end of Ramadan. The streets of Aguelhok were thronged with people wearing resplendent new robes, all of them moving toward the mosque, where prayers were said outdoors. There were, I noticed, no cars other than our own in town.

After prayers, several families invited me into their homes, where I was invariably served tea, brewed on a charcoal brazier outside the front door. Tuareg tea is heated with an enormous amount of sugar until it boils up out of the pot and then served in a shot glass, which is always refilled twice. The first glass is said to be “strong like a man,” the second “mild like a woman,” and the third “sweet like love.” The convention seemed to be that one shouted “hi-eee” several times during the ingestion of the tea.

So there were people shouting “hi-eee” and drinking tea, while four teenage girls, using a pair of washtubs for drums, sang a series of hauntingly melancholy songs. Two polite boys, about eight years old, had befriended me and were teaching me to say something in Arabic that they obviously considered to be just a bit naughty. Something, I imagined, in the nature of “Hello, my name is Mr. Poopy Pants.”

I figured it out by the time they got to the proper name.
“Lahidahi ilalahi Muhammad …”

I was laughing along with the boys and saying the naughty words—“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet”—when a shadow passed over. I looked up. A man in an iridescent green robe stood above me. He wore a black chêche and gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. It was Colonel Yat’s man, the human sword. He turned and walked swiftly away.

I followed at a cautious distance but lost him in the crowd. Two blocks away, parked by a curb, I found the bullet-scarred white
Toyota we’d seen at Yat’s house. It was the only other car in town, and now we knew who the bandits were. And why Muhammad, the security consultant, had turned down a year’s wages for two weeks of work.

Alberto, who’d independently discovered the identity of the bandits, formulated a simple plan, modeled in part on the Malian solution to the Tuareg rebellion: We’d hire the bandits themselves to provide security.

Intarka, a Tuareg desert guide we’d hired on our first trip through Aguelhok, arranged a meeting, and we squatted in the courtyard with Colonel Yat’s man and his two shadowy companions. The bandits wore their chêches in mask mode. The human sword was named Mossa ag Ala (Mossa, son of Ala). His two buddies were both named Baye. (This is my brother Larry and this is my other brother Larry, I thought). And yes, for the right amount of money, they could get us to the salt mines and then safely down to Timbuktu. Negotiations began in earnest. The would-be security bandits bargained fiercely but finally agreed upon a price. We walked to an administrative center and typed out what I thought was a fairly impressive-looking contract. Mossa scrawled his name, pulled his chêche down over his mouth, and actually smiled.

And then, our security problems presumably solved, we were off to the salt mines, about five hundred miles to the north and west. Intarka navigated while Mossa, Baye, and Baye led the caravan in the white Toyota, which was essentially a rolling bomb. The bandits chain-smoked, all three of them in the front seat, while two leaky fifty-five-gallon drums full of gasoline banged around in the back of the car.

The Tuaregs decided to run overland, off the tracks in the sand that were the Trans-Saharan Highway. They wanted to avoid traffic, because traffic meant cars and cars meant bandits. Once, when we crossed some fresh tracks, the bandit car sped ahead and pulled to a stop just below a rise. Mossa jumped out and lay on his belly in the sand, glassing the plain ahead. There was a car in the distance, but no—focus, focus—it was simply a rock, glittering in the sun.

I wore a blue chêche to filter sand out of the air I was breathing.
There are many ways to wrap a chêche, but I preferred the romantic Tuareg bandit look, which left a three-foot-long tail of fabric hanging from the left shoulder. Stand in the desert wind, and the thing blew out behind you, Lawrence of Arabia style.

At one point, a herd of Dorcas gazelles bolted past our car. They were sand-colored animals about the size of elongated Brittany spaniels, sporting rabbity ears and a pair of inward-curving horns about two feet long. The gazelles ran at speeds of over 40 miles an hour, making comical straddle-legged leaps every few seconds.

Here’s a fashion hint concerning chêches and wildlife photography: Suppose you pull to a stop when a herd of gazelles goes leaping by, jump out of the car with your camera, and slam the door behind you. If you are wearing your chêche in the fashionable Tuareg-bandit mode, the tail will catch in the door and abruptly pull you to your rear as you attempt to move forward.

A chêche pratfall is a source of great amusement to Tuaregs and Italians, to people from Togo like Daniel, the cook, and Amen, the mechanic (the one indispensable man in our party). An event of this nature will even draw an outright laugh from someone like Omar, the sulky Malian driver, who generally never smiled. Slapstick is universal. Brotherhood through comedy.

We sped over a flat desert plain where pebbly rocks were imbedded in hard sand, and our tires left tracks only half an inch deep. The Sahara provides two environments:
reg
, which is coarse flat sand, like the pea gravel we were driving through, and
erg
, shifting dune sand, which we expected to hit near the mines.

Just before dusk, Intarka had us pull into a large basin behind a low, rocky butte that would hide our campfires. The bandit car had veered off into the distance and was running inexplicable patterns across the sand—wide, curving turns, abrupt stops, sharp, ninety-degree corners. The bandits rolled into camp after dark with a gazelle they’d run to exhaustion, a method of hunting that didn’t entirely appeal to my ideas about sportsmanship. Still, they ate the whole animal, which they grilled over a brushfire, and they gave the rabbity, horned head to Daniel, who felt he could use it in some fetish ceremony.

I asked Intarka, who had worked for the army during the rebellion, if he thought Mossa and his pals had really been planning to rob us. He shrugged. Would they have killed us, or merely taken the cars? Intarka said it didn’t matter. “They’re with us now,” he said, “and their word is good.”

Over by the Tuareg fire, Mossa threw down a shot glass of tea and shouted, “Hi-eee!”

Two more days of driving, while
reg
turned to
erg
. The dunes sloped gently upward where they faced the wind, then dropped off sharply on the other side. Omar couldn’t seem to get the hang of driving the dunes. He’d race up the shallow slope, hit the crest of the dune, see what amounted to a cliff face dropping away below, and slam on the brakes, burying the front end of the truck two feet deep. Then it was sand-ladder time.

We dug out the wheels with shovels and hands and placed two three-foot-long tire-width metal rails in the sand underneath. Everyone pushed. Sometimes the car got going again and we ran after it, carrying the sand ladders, hoping there was some solid sand in the near distance. Often we had to dig out a second time, and a third, and a fourth. We were motoring through the Sahara three feet at a crack.

As we worked, a strong wind out of the northeast drove scouring sand before it. The seasonal
harmattan
winds carry sand from the Sahara all the way across the Atlantic and dump it on various Caribbean islands. A good blow seems to start low: it comes toward you pushing snakes of sand along the belly of the dune. Look around, and the world under your feet is alive with twisting, streaming sand snakes.

And then, half obscured by the ankle-deep sand snakes, I spied a series of tracks that looked like they had been made by three motorcycles running abreast. A closer look proved that these were camel tracks.

We saw them coming toward us: sixty camels walking single file,
in three pack strings of twenty apiece. Each of the camels carried four blocks of pure white salt. The blocks were rectangular, about two inches thick, two feet high, and three feet wide. They weighed about eighty pounds apiece. Four young Tuaregs walked along with the caravan.

In exchange for
cadeaux
of tea and sugar, the Tuaregs explained the economics of the Caravan of White Gold. Salt cost about $4 a block at the mine. If you were lucky, that same block might sell for $30 in Timbuktu. This sixty-camel caravan carried about ten tons of salt and might fetch a price of $6,200.

From Timbuktu, the salt would be ferried up the Niger to the town of Mopti, where there was a paved-road system that could get it out to the whole of West Africa. Taoudenni salt was more expensive than the more plentiful sea salt, but West Africans—truly spectacular cooks who combine French technique with African ingredients and creativity—believe it is the best-tasting and are willing to pay premium prices.

Alberto and I talked about the realities of the salt trade. Camel caravans still existed, as they had in the Middle Ages, because they were the only economically feasible means of transporting salt from the mines to the Niger. “You could rent a Land Cruiser,” Alberto explained. “Say your brother-in-law owns the rental company. You get it for fifty dollars a day, instead of the hundred I pay. Three days at least to drive to the mines from Timbuktu. One day to buy and load. Three days back. Seven days at a rental cost of three hundred and fifty, plus one-fifty for gas. That’s five hundred dollars, not counting what you pay for a driver, food, oil, and maintenance. A Land Cruiser carries a ton. At your best price, you’d make six hundred and fifty dollars, which wouldn’t even cover expenses.”

“What about a ten-ton truck?” I wondered.

“Wouldn’t make it through the sand.”

We were now, we calculated, only miles from the mines. The next morning we rose up over a sandy hillside, crested a dune, and found ourselves staring down into a great yellow-orange basin, an enormous flatland that melted almost imperceptibly into the curve
of the earth. Scattered about the sand plain at odd intervals were a number of loony, artificial-looking landmarks: a pink sand-scoured cone, a kind of lopsided pyramid, and, toward the center of the plain, a butte that looked like a many-footed sphinx. There were humans and hundreds of camels—tiny toy figures—moving about under the gaze of the sphinx. A vast area of sand and clay was cratered with small excavations, as if the place had suffered some terrible saturation-bombing raid.

A three-mile drive took us a thousand years back into history, to the periphery of the fabled Taoudenni salt mines. Men—there were no women—cautiously approached the cars. There was no electricity, no town, no road, only the desert all about and these men laboring in the sand and clay. A dozen or more of the men accompanied me as I strolled through the mines. They asked for and accepted
cadeaux
of aspirin and antibiotics, all the while pointing out the sights, such as they were.