Hold the Enlightenment (12 page)

In the building nearest him, and farthest from the fires and the people, there were several very small rooms with bars on the windows. It was, Gigi assumed, the old prison. He chose a cell and lay down. The brick building held the heat of the day and it was all quite pleasant. The sky had now cleared, and Gigi could see the stars.

He lay on his back and formulated a plan. His friends had to get to Timbuktu to catch a flight to Bamako and then to Italy, where their families would be waiting. He expected that we would be searching for him, but he hoped we’d leave by noon, so as not to miss the flight. He didn’t want to have a lot of families worried on his account.

And if we did leave, Gigi would simply walk over to the Arabs by the well, introduce himself, and ask if he could tag along on the five-hundred-mile trip back to Timbuktu. He’d be home in a couple of months.

Satisfied with his plan, Gigi fell into a sleep so profound that he didn’t hear the Land Rover pull into the prison compound at eleven that night. He didn’t hear Alberto and Chris and Pepino conversing with the Arabs. He’d hid himself well, and none of the men had seen him.

He woke refreshed just before dawn. As soon as the sun came
up, he walked out of the prison, on his way down to the well, to make friends with the Arabs. That’s when he saw me and Mossa and Pepino. All these people sprinting over the desert in his direction, crying and shouting. It was strange.

We’d lost a day looking for Gigi, but there was a chance the Italians could still make their flight out of Timbuktu. However, there were thank-yous to be offered, and that would delay us. Alberto stopped at the
marabout
’s salt-block house and called off the morning’s search. The men he’d hired could keep the money that had been given them. Most of them had searched for Gigi yesterday afternoon anyway, without compensation. We were very grateful.

Alberto thanked the
marabout
for his prayers and asked if there was anything he could do: Would the
marabout
accept a
cadeau
? He would not. The cleric was just happy that everything had turned out well and that our friend was safe. The
marabout
’s refusal made him all the more impressive in our eyes. We’d been bombarded by cries for
cadeaux
for weeks.

But no, after a moment’s reflection, the marabout said there was something we could do. There were two Arab men who had been stranded at the mines and were unaffiliated with any caravan. Could we take them back to their homes about two hundred miles north of Timbuktu?

Yes, of course.

Both the Arabs were thin, desiccated-looking men, with strong, coppery planes in their faces and high-arched noses. They looked like Moorish versions of Don Quixote, as drawn by El Greco. The man who rode with me in the Land Rover was named Nazim, and he carried a twenty-pound bag of dates. If his good luck evaporated and he had to walk, the dates would sustain him for the three-hundred-mile trek.

Nazim had never ridden in a car before. He had to be shown how to work the door latch and the handle that rolled down the
window. In thirty seconds, he had pretty much mastered the technological intricacies involved in being an automobile passenger.

The Arabs navigated. They rapidly figured out what sort of terrain was best for the vehicles and chose areas where the wind had packed sand tight to the ribs of the dunes. We flew over a roller coaster of smooth sand at 55 miles an hour. Every few hours we converged on the main camel track leading toward the mines. I counted twelve caravans heading in to the mines and eleven going out, about sixteen hundred camels in all.

It was near noon, and Nazim was getting nervous, looking around and fidgeting.

“Prayers,” I shouted over the rattle of the diesel engine.

Alberto stopped the car, and Nazim, an old hand with door latches by now, jumped out and knelt in the sand, facing east. While the Tuaregs and Arabs prayed together, I scanned the line of dunes ahead, which rose and crested like so many ocean waves about to break. Bright, flashing lights seemed to be moving over the summit of the highest of the dunes, a dozen or more miles away. Although I couldn’t see the camels, I guessed it had to be another caravan, fully loaded, the salt blocks glinting in the sun like a long line of signal mirrors.

We drove until well after dark and then set up camp at the base of a high dune that had the rolling sensuality of a line-drawn nude. The sand was cool and seemed luxurious. The constellations spun above, almost impossibly bright, and for a moment the Sahara seemed the most romantic spot on earth.

Many women, I knew, especially French women, travel to the desert hoping to kindle a romance with a proud desert chieftain, with someone, I imagined, exactly like Mossa. Ah, the handsome features, the noble warrior’s heart, the strong, slender hands stroking underneath cotton robes with the hard stars burning overhead …

“I heard two American women talking about their affairs with Tuaregs,” Alberto told me. “I was driving a tour. They didn’t know I spoke English.”

“What did they say?”

It was pretty much as I had thought. The women agreed the Tuareg men were physically beautiful, and they took these women, there in the sand, as if by right. They took them brashly and with a breath of contempt, which made it that much more exciting.

Just one thing about all that ravishing, Alberto added.

“What?”

“They said it was quick.”

Alberto pronounced the word “queek.”

“Queek,” I repeated, secretly pleased.

“Yes, both of them agreed. Queek, queek, it is all over.”

We exchanged a glance, Alberto and I. The glance said, “Maybe we are not the most desirable specimens of masculinity in this desert, but—in contrast to every offensively handsome Tuareg male alive—we would, given the opportunity, conduct this ravishment-under-the-stars business with a good deal less efficiency.”

Such delusions are the salve of wounded pride.

Gradually, grudgingly, the sand began to give way to a sparsely vegetated plain that, after miles of
erg
, seemed incredibly lush. There were a few camels feeding on acacia trees, and then, as we slowed to negotiate a path through a large herd of goats, Nazim pointed to a pair of blue-and-beige open-fronted tents. He said, “Ah, ah, ah.”

We stopped. A woman huddled in the nearest tent, protectively pushing a pair of youngsters behind her. Cars never came this way. Her expression seemed to say, “Nothing good can come of this.” Nazim stepped out of the Land Rover and carefully closed the door behind him, as if to demonstrate new skills. The woman stared at Nazim in a kind of awed astonishment. She rose slowly to her feet, stupefied, then ran to him and hugged him tightly while the two small children pulled at the folds of his tunic.

So we delivered the
marabout
’s
cadeau
, and thank you, Nazim, but no time for tea. It was still ten hours to Timbuktu, and sixteen hours until the Italians’ flight.

We ran hard. Omar, the surly Malian driver, blew a shock absorber, there was a flat tire or two on the other vehicles, and our security bandits’ gasoline drums were running low, which didn’t actually stop them from chasing gazelles.

We were slaloming up and down a series of sloping dunes in the dark, about fifty miles north of Timbuktu, when the bandits finally and irrevocably ran out of gas. Mossa, Baye, and Baye got out and surrounded their vehicle. They stood with their arms crossed over their chests, staring hard at the Toyota as if it owed them some sort of an explanation.

It was a tableau I’d entitle “The Revenge of the Gazelles.”

Alberto took a GPS reading while Mossa, Baye, and Baye discussed their options. It was decided that Baye and Baye would stay with the car while Mossa would come with us, continuing to provide high-class security all the way to Timbuktu, as agreed. There he’d arrange for another car and would be back to pick up Baye and Baye by and by.

The two men gave everyone a hug in the abrupt, bone-crushing manner of the desert. And then we were off again.

“Bye-bye, Baye Baye,” everyone shouted from the windows. I imagine we sounded like a pack of dogs all suffering from the same strange speech impediment. “Bye-bye, Baye Baye.”

“Hi-eee, hi-eee,” shouted Baye and Baye.

The vehicles slipped and slid across the shifting sand. They got bogged down. They got pushed out on sand ladders. They slowed near the top of most every dune, engines roaring, slowing, slowing, stopping. We had to back down every third slope and try again. And then, at the summit of a dune that had taken us four tries to climb, I saw our destination only ten miles away. It was spread out below us in all its glittering magnificence, such as it was (I counted twenty-seven lights): the historic and formerly forbidden city of Timbuktu, where there was a reasonably comfortable hotel, cold beer for sale, a post office, and a jetport that was forty-eight hours from any major airport on earth. Some of which, I thought, were not entirely secure.

I
t was the greatest flood the earth has ever known: a cataclysm that literally shook the earth along a thousand-mile path. It happened this way: during the last ice age, a finger of glacier reached down into Montana and Idaho, blocking the Clark’s Fork River. The river backed up, filling the deep mountain valleys of Montana and forming a lake larger than Lake Ontario. It was nearly two thousand feet deep, and when the ice dam failed, Lake Missoula drained in forty-eight hours. A wall of water moving at 65 miles an hour and carrying two-hundred-ton boulders encased in ice thundered through what is now Spokane, and blasted down the path of the Columbia River.

Starting about 15,300 years ago, there were over 40 such floods in a 2,500-year period. Human beings almost certainly occupied the Columbia River basin in that era, and stories of the flood must have passed from one generation to the next. In the manner of humans confronted by deadly forces beyond their comprehension or control, they must have regarded flood-scarred land as both terrible and sacred.

I thought about this as I stood in the path of the ancient flood and filled out form BC-3000-002 (Radiological Area Visitor Form), which I handed to an attractive young woman at the Richland, Washington, Department of Energy operations office. She gave me a radiation-measuring device called a dosimeter, a visitor’s name tag to be displayed on the outer layer of my clothing, and an orientation
booklet outlining security requirements and safety measures at the Hanford Site, which contains the largest repository of waste in all the hemisphere. It was my responsibility to “read and comply with all the information identified on radiological postings, signs and labels, and follow escort instructions.” On page ten, there was a series of schematic drawings illustrating responses to the various emergency signals. In case of fire, for instance, a bell would ring. The bell was depicted as having eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a single, stringy arm holding a hammer. The bell was banging itself on the head with the hammer, producing a sound written as “gong, gong, gong.” In another illustration, positioned above the bell, a crosseyed siren emitted a steady blast—“HEEEEEE”—which meant “evacuation,” in this case to the “staging area.” The top illustration, labeled “HOWLER,” was a siren with worried eyes and a megaphone for a mouth. It’s “Ah-OO-GAH” sound meant “criticality” and the required response was “RUN,” though no particular destination was given. Just run.

So … all those James Bond films were perfectly correct: when the evil scientist’s lab is about to blow, the AH-OO-GAH horn really does sound. I followed my DOE escort, Eric Olds, out into the parking lot, along with the poor excuse for an evil scientist I had been corresponding with for over a year. Randy Brich was a “Tanks Focus Area” physical scientist working for the DOE, and not much into world domination. He was, in fact, an obsessed windsurfer with a minor preoccupation in mountain biking.

Randy had offered to set up a raft trip down to the Hanford Reach, inarguably the most pristine and unspoiled stretch of the Columbia River. It was, Randy said, very much as it had been when Lewis and Clark camped nearby in 1805. There were elk and salmon and sturgeon and egrets and herons and white pelicans and peregrine falcons and ferruginous hawks, along with pygmy rabbits and several varieties of rare wildflowers. In fact, because the area was restricted for fifty years, biologists had only recently begun an inventory of flora and fauna. In 1996, for instance, two plants previously unknown to science and dozens of new species of insects, including seven new species of bees, were discovered.

Before the float trip, however, Randy thought I might want to tour the Hanford Site. The irony was that the unspoiled stretch of river and the toxic waste dump were one and the same.

We piled into a DOE van. Eric drove us to the restricted site, where we presented our credentials to armed men at a gate and rolled out onto the flat, arid landscape along the Columbia River.

The remains of a few dry orchards, untended for over fifty years, stood gnarled on the sage-littered steppe: arthritic shapes against a baleful gray sky. Apricot trees. Cherries. The people who planted the orchards back in the late 1930s and early ’40s believed that the basin of the Columbia River could rival or surpass California’s Central Valley in food production. Yes, the land was a steppe-shrub environment—a desert, most would say—but the Grand Coulee Dam, just upriver, had been completed in 1941. Irrigation water would be plentiful. The low-lying basin, set in the rain shadow of the Cascades, had a growing season that started two weeks earlier than California’s. The future was bright.

But then, in January 1944—in the midst of the Second World War—the government claimed the cities of Hanford and White Bluffs. Over 1,300 people were given 30 days to evacuate, and the government confiscated 560 square miles of land along a 52-mile stretch of the Columbia River known as the Hanford Reach. Massive work crews—more than 150,000 men and women—hired to “do important war work” began breaking ground.