Other trees were being given away on the street. One afternoon as we watched, the nursery crew handed 15,000 seedlings over the fence to crowds of women. The women seemed delighted. Stingley was skeptical. He had wanted to sell the seedlings for a token fee, and include instructions on how to plant them. I asked him if he thought any would survive. He smiled quizzically and answered, “Inshallah.”
We went to see recent plantings at the northern edge of town. They were mesquite bushes, regularly spaced across the upwind slope of a long, powdery dune. A group of children from nearby houses followed us across a fence, and along the crest. The land to the northeast was a vast eroded plain, the desert shadow of an earlier savanna. A few sturdy trees remained, but the grass was gone, turned to dirt and sand. The land was harsh, but not lifeless. Spiny bushes had taken root along an oued and in the shelter of rocks. A car track led across the plain, and disappeared into the distance, where the main mass of the Sahara stretched in eternal buttes and sand seas.
Here on the dune the mesquite plantation had failed. The sand had kept moving, exposing the roots of the bushes, slowly killing them. The fence sagged where we and others had climbed over it. Soon it would let in the goats. I asked the children which way the dune was drifting. They pointed here and there. But I could see for myself that it threatened their houses. The sand was slipping into town. The sun pounded the earth.
26
THE
RIVER
THE RIVERBOAT GOT to Gao at night, and while it refueled it loaded. The town woke up for the event. I left the Atlantide and joined the throng heading through the dark streets to the port, where a noisy market had sprung up around the boat’s lowered gangplanks. After forcing my way onto the crowded lower deck, I found a staircase by the light of a caged bulb, climbed to the crowded middle deck, found another staircase, emerged onto open-air portion of the bridge deck, and secured a place by the railing that faced the town.
Steel cables held the boat against the river’s sluggish current. The fuel hose snaked like an umbilical cord into the hold. Heavily loaded pinasses floated in the strip of water by the muddy bank. Thousands of people moved about on the shore by the light of kerosene lanterns. Piles of cargo materialized and vanished as porters streamed through the town. The gangplank sagged under the weight the mob. People lost their balance and fell into the water. Men and women, the young and the old, they all went in. The crowd noticed, laughed, and pulled them out. Sodden cargo was retrieved just as willingly. Only the police seemed to be in a bad mood. One of them waved a riot-control stick and shouted because no one would listen. A pinasse capsized, and filled with water. From the boat’s bridge, the silhouette of a man watched quietly, pulling on a cigarette. I assumed he was a river pilot.
Minutes after the fuelers withdrew their hose, the deckhands raised the gangplanks and cast off from the shore. The engines rumbled, belching black exhaust, and the boat shuddered out into the current. Thieves dashed to the railings and dove away. Gao soon disappeared into its black haze. By dawn we had pushed two hours upriver.
The boat was built in the old East Germany, and had a plaque that called it a gift, in solidarity, from those people to these. It was 150 feet long, thick hulled, and of shallow draft. Its three twelve-cylinder diesels were capable in theory of driving it at fifteen miles per hour, in practice at less. But the Niger here is a sluggish river, rarely flowing faster than three miles per hour, and more important than speed was the boat’s ability to carry passengers: designed for a maximum of 350, it regularly carried three times that. I won’t guess the number aboard now, so dense was the humanity. We moved up the river, stopping at settlements along the way. More people boarded. The boat teemed.
It functioned like a concentration of Africa. The lower deck, which lay only inches above the river and had open sides and communal cabins, was where the poorest passengers were expected to remain. In its misery and squalor it was like a Brueghel painting come to life—the tangled mob of people and goats living among their bundles; the accumulation of the blackest filth; the smoke drifting from cooking fires built directly on the deck; the sharp stench of diesel fuel, sweat, and human feces; the sounds of argument and laughter; the bawling of children, the splash of water, the constant drumming of the engines. I heard that Europeans sometimes traveled this way, participating in lower-deck life as an expression of their love for Africa. But this was hardly the native life to admire. It was not loving or picturesque. A woman and a small boy died during the trip upriver.
The middle deck was smaller, and contained second- and first-class cabins along outside passageways. The cabins were little cells with just enough room for bunks, but they had lockable doors. I was unlucky, because mine was by the communal toilets, which had quit working. The passageway was crowded by refugees from the lower deck, who soon created similar conditions here, too. The police were supposed to control that sort of thing, but accepted small bribes instead. And they were right—within the confines of a single boat, the attempt to enforce the rules would have been absurd, even dangerous. I felt no solidarity with these neighbors who crowded my corridor, who would not make room for me to pass, who cursed me when I jostled them, who kept me awake at night with their shrill voices and the shuffling of their rubber sandals. But I also recognized the element of chance in their births and in mine. As an act of self-discipline, I would not allow myself to resent their encroachment. When I could no longer stand the smell of the toilets, I climbed to the bridge deck, which grew equally crowded, but was swept by the clean Saharan wind.
One night when the crew invited me forward to the bridge itself, I discovered there the same sense of competence and sober duty I once knew in the cockpits of airplanes. The bridge was dark except for a small charcoal fire kept alight for tea. Three Songhai river pilots in robes and desert turbans stood by the helm, peering steadily into the night. We shared no language beyond nods and a glass of tea. The boat trembled beneath us. The steering mechanism clicked softly. The bow wake splashed. There was no moon. Beyond the faint green glow of the engine controls and the occasional flaring of a cigarette, the river ahead lay in blackness. The thinnest trace of a shoreline slid by, blotting the stars. Only from the work of the pilots could I tell that the water was shallow, that it braided through shifting channels, that it required many small turns. The boat ran at full speed. The pilots navigated without map or depthfinder, by confident feats of memory.
They made mistakes, of course. Anyone would. Late that same night they ran us aground in midriver, and the boat came to a jarring stop. I got up from my bunk and went to the bow, where deckhands had opened a cargo hatch and were shining lights down into the hold, listening to the echo of water. One of them spoke English to me, explaining that an existing leak had grown stronger, but that the pumps and perhaps the occasional bailing brigade would keep up. His English was thick and strangely ornate. “One grows accustomed to decrepitude,” he said. He was more worried about the depth of the river. “If their excellencies on the bridge cannot find the channel, we shall be obliged to return to Gao.” He was a university student in Bamako, and had taken a leave of absence to support his old mother. He himself did not look like a young man. I asked how long his leave had been. He said, so far about twelve years.
It took only minutes to back off the shoals. The boat shuddered in reverse, stirring sand and mud, then smoothly slipped free. Leaning from the bridge above us, the pilots allowed it to drift backward with the current before starting upstream again, closer to the shore. With crew members positioned at the bow to pole for depth, we felt our way slowly, nudged a shoal, drifted back, tried again, and after an hour found a way through. The pilots called again for maximum speed.
In the morning I visited the engine room, which occupied the aft section of the lower deck. It was a deafening place, choked with exhaust and hot fumes, filthy with black oil. The engines churned under metal grates, on top of which slept the engineer’s wife and two children. You could not imagine a more poisonou
s home. I admired the furnishings, then went back to the bridge, where I discovered that the pilots had brought their families as well: Children and chickens scurried about; women lit cooking fires, talking shrilly; blue smoke drifted into the helmsman’s bloodshot eyes; there was hardly room on the bridge to stand. One of the pilots hauled up a tethered pot of river water and did not quite boil it before he made tea. I drank the tea reluctantly, and later fell violently ill. But even then I knew it was the suffering of those others who could not leave that mattered.
Day after day I watched the banks go by. The river changed constantly, narrowing between barren bluffs, widening to a mile across open land. We moved up one side or the other, working the turns and channels. The desert was sandy and pale, and rolled in low hills to the water’s edge. Here and there, a tree or bush had taken root and survived. We passed Tuareg encampments with goats and camels and animal-skin tents, and small Songhai settlements of one or two mud houses. People bathed in the river, and washed their clothes in it. Children swam, and fisherman fished. But aside from the occasional vegetable patch, there was no attempt at irrigation or farming. The Niger should be the Sahara’s greatest oasis, but because of Mali’s poverty, it is not.
A passenger in a business suit had a different theory. He said, “It’s because these northerners are lazy. They are nomads. They would rather starve than work.”
He himself was a southerner, an unhappy traveler, a hard worker, a big eater. He bottled soft drinks in the capital, and was rich. He spent the trip in the deckhouse behind the bridge, sitting with his wife, who was thin and elegant and had beads in her hair. They had taken the boat on a mission which he described only as his wife’s family affair. I asked her if she came from the Niger, and he answered for her, yes, from Timbuktu. She looked as if she would feel at home in Paris. She spoke to no one but her husband, and even to him barely murmured. He complained to me that for lack of customers the Malian national airline had stopped flying to Timbuktu. He and his wife had driven all the way from Bamako to Gao, and had taken the boat from there because the overland route to Timbuktu was arduous and was threatened by the Tuaregs. Getting out of Timbuktu would be difficult now if this boat was, as he too had heard, the last of the season. “But the wife …” he lamented. I could not get him to finish that sentence.
He was determined at least to suffer in comfort, and had brought along a servant to prepare his meals. Twice a day he took his wife below to their cabin to eat in private. The rest of the time he sat in the deckhouse with her, expressed his disgust with the desert, and allowed himself to be fawned over by the boat’s official jester—a barrel-chested man crippled by childhood polio, who was known as the “animateur.”
The animateur was a Bambara with family connections in the capital. He had been hired by the Malian boat company in a mimicry of national development, as if this river trip might be made into an inland pleasure cruise. His job was to keep the upper deck amused—a difficult mission which he undertook with insistence and desperation, as if his family connections might fail him. If they did, and he lost this job, he would end up like other African polio victims, condemned to the streets, forced finally to sell his crutches to buy food. His immediate problem was that so many passengers faced similar worries. It was like this on every trip. The people who took this boat were usually not in the mood to be entertained.
I sympathized with the animateur, and insisted that I enjoyed watching the desert, and even promised to write a nice letter to his employer. But he could not be reassured. He thought I needed stimulation. One night to my embarrassment he organized a dance in my honor. A hundred people crammed into the deckhouse. I don’t know who they were, or how they were invited. They were not the poor of the lower deck. The animateur had put on a polyester party shirt that made him sweat. He introduced me to a fat woman who clearly expected to be my partner for the night. She wore a full-length print dress and a matching turban. We had to take the first dance, while the others watched. The animateur played the stereo at high volume. My date danced fluidly. I did not. I was grateful when, with the second song, other dancers joined in. Eventually I managed to stop dancing by offering my date a beer. We discovered we had nothing to say to each other. When I did not ask her to dance again, she grew offended and walked away.
The animateur came up to me looking worried. Over the music, he shouted, “You’ve made her upset. She was yours for the night. Look at her body—she’s made for the bed. She has meat on her. I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I have a wife at home,” I answered apologetically. “I have a family.”
He stood beside me watching the dancers, thinking through my case, then frowned and said, “You’re worried about AIDS. A man can’t tell about Africans.”
The dance was not his only disappointment. In the days following, as the bridge deck filled with illegal passengers from below, he abandoned any hope of providing a cruise ship atmosphere, and retreated into the deckhouse, where he sat beside the soft-drink bottler and his wife, and cursed the insolence of the poor. He blocked the door to the deckhouse with the stereo’s cabinet speakers, and blasted the passengers outside with the songs of a man and woman known as “the blind couple from Mali.” The song he hurled again and again was an accusation springing from the bitterness of his own experience. It had a French refrain that observed, “Il’y a toujours des menteurs, des trompeurs, et des traîtres.” The song was backed by a melodic guitar. “There are always liars, cheaters, and traitors.” That is the real desert now. Through a deepening Sahara, the refrain propelled us upriver.
27
TRUTH
AND
FALSEHOOD
TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD were both traveling, though for different reasons, when by chance they found themselves on the same path. Falsehood saw Truth ahead, and hurried to catch up with him.
“Hello, traveler,” said Falsehood.
“Hello to you too,” answered Truth. “How was your night?”
“It was peaceful. May I ask who you are and where you are going?”
“My name is Truth, and I am on my way to collect a few debts from those who owe money to me.”
“My name is Falsehood, and I am on my way to give hope to people, and to tell them whatever will please them. Shall we travel together?”
“Yes, of course,” said Truth.
“Since you were ahead of me already,” said Falsehood, “I will ask you to be my guide.”
Truth accepted, and the two companions continued on their way. At every village they came to, Truth approached the people honestly, to collect his debts. The people answered by chasing him away. This went on for days. Truth and Falsehood grew steadily hungrier, until finally Falsehood could stand it no longer.
“Truth, you are not a good guide,” he said. “Everywhere we go we are turned out. If we keep going this way, we will both die of hunger, and thirst, and fatigue. Let me be the guide now, and you will see, at the first village we will have plenty to eat.”
With a light heart, Truth agreed to let Falsehood become the guide. When they came to the next village, Falsehood spotted a hut from which old women were emerging. The women were bent over, somber, and very quiet. Falsehood understood immediately that something had happened. Bringing Truth with him, he found a place to sit by the hut, not far from a freshly dug grave. Truth sat there quietly, and with dignity, but Falsehood began to cry loudly. The mistress of the hut, a peasant woman, came outside and asked, “Stranger, why are you crying so?”
Falsehood answered, “We are on our way, my friend and I, to resurrect a dead child, but we have not eaten for days, and our genie has stopped us here because he is hungry. He says if he doesn’t get his food, others will die too.”
The peasant woman was astounded. “I have just lost my only son, who was just twelve years old. Maybe you could resurrect him?”
“Resurrecting the dead is our job,” said Falsehood. “But we work with a genie who eats all the time.”
The wo
man finally understood. She prepared a large meal for the travelers. After they had eaten, Falsehood asked her to build a small hut over her son’s grave. She set about doing this, and while she was working she mentioned that the king’s father had died only two days before. Falsehood asked her to send word to the king of their presence.
The king was overjoyed, and promised a hundred horses, a hundred cows, a hundred slaves, clothes, silver, and many other things to anyone who could bring his beloved father back to life.
After the Friday prayer, at two in the afternoon, Falsehood entered the hut over the boy’s grave. He dug open the grave and climbed in, and after a long and muffled conversation emerged covered in sweat.
To the mother of the dead boy he said, “Your son wants to return to life, but the father of the king is holding him by the hand. Go tell the king that his father will only return if he can return with the child.”
The peasant woman went to tell the king, who in turn now consulted his mother. The king’s mother was categorical. “And if your father returns, who will occupy the throne? Is there enough room in a pond for two male crocodiles? Leave the old king in peace. Pay the magicians what you owe them, and be done with this.”
The peasant woman returned to her hut in tears. Falsehood was paid his fortune. He mocked Truth, who as yet had received none of the debts owed to him.
After a long silence, Truth sighed and said, “He who purchases with lies must someday pay with the truth. Today you may laugh, exalt, and beat your chest. But when people realize that you have tricked them, they will make you suffer dearly.”
Sahara Unveiled Page 23
