The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  I sat scratching my head for a while, remembering what Yusuf the pastry seller had told me in Fez: ‘You see things too literally.’ If a butchered camel could act as a symbol, even more so a carpet. Long after the others had gone to sleep, I sat there, holding my phone to light up the loom, wondering and thinking … imagining an epic of fecundity and fucking all over the world.

  The School for Nomads

  Lesson Three: Tracking

  THE FIJAR, THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAWN, HAS CRESTED THE HORIZON. I SHAKE myself free of my blanket and clamber up the dune, pulled towards a burn line of pale orange. Hovering on the crest is a silhouette, still and squat like a monolith. Slowly, this resolves itself into Jadullah. His face is a bearded mask, sealed against the expressive muscularity of his body.

  ‘Sabah al-khair, good morning.’

  ‘Sabah an-nur,’ he replies. ‘Morning of light.’

  Underneath him, at the bottom of the slope, is a white pavilion tent. Tugged by the wind, the flaps flare around its west-facing entrance like the hood of a cobra.

  ‘Do you know them?’ I ask.

  Jadullah turns, his small brown eyes hidden deep in their hollows.

  ‘Let us find the camels.’ He springs down the slope, down towards the well and the silvery waste beyond.

  The animals have roamed far in the night, driven by hunger between the wide-spaced acacias and the odd patch of bristlegrass. Standing at the foot of the dune, we can’t see them across the plain, so Jadullah bends to the earth, disentangling the web of heart-shaped hoof tracks by what he knows of their habits. I am a fast walker usually, but I have a job matching him. Years of practice have taught Jadullah to slide and trench his heels, shifting his weight according to the surface. It is like trying to keep up with a goat in the Atlas. Where the earth is firm I find it easier, but the sand is sucking my feet like a marsh and my heavy breathing seems to be the only sound for miles. I can feel the blood sloshing in my head, pulsing in my fingers and toes.

  ‘Here,’ says Jadullah.

  He gives no other sign. It is a good 50 metres further on before my eyes pick out what he has already detected: two of the camels, munching on an acacia bush. Approaching the nearest of them, he curls his lips, forming the magic sound ‘oooooshhh’. The creature’s legs buckle, his belly plunges and his knee briskets shift across the sand.

  ‘I’ll look for the other one.’ Jadullah throws down a couple of ropes; his foot kicks against the swerving camel’s side. ‘You tie Naksheh.’

  The light holds him for a lingering moment, as if he is still beside me, when I know he is already halfway across the plain. I close my eyes against the brightness and kaleidoscopes blaze inside the lids. When I open them again, Jadullah has shrunk to a dot. I turn back to Naksheh, fizzing with an uncomfortable mixture of pride – at the responsibility with which he has entrusted me – and terror. Better not screw this up.

  Holding the rope, I slide towards Naksheh. I take a deep breath, click my teeth and lunge for his mouth. The camel’s response is unequivocal: he swings out of reach and bats me away with his backside, uttering a deep-throated bray. I try again, with no more success, so I change tack, tiptoeing to the other side like a pantomime burglar. The work is painstaking, somewhere between trial and error and blind chance, but eventually the rope snags between his muscle-thickened lips. A furious, intestinal gurgle blasts my cheeks while I am tying the halter; his pink throat sac, the doula, glistens in his mouth like some putrid monster in a cave. Rolling under imperious brows, his enormous eyes flash disdain, as if to say: ‘Who the hell are you, upstart? You think you could possibly take charge of me?’ I remember the trouble I’ve been having when we gallop; the embarrassment when I have to rely on Abdul-Hakim. Naksheh’s legs still need to be unhobbled, but I can see them twitching, signalling an imminent kick. Crouching between front and hind quarters, I reach in, grabbing a braid of twisted grass-rope.

  ‘You didn’t finish?’

  Well before he reaches me, Jadullah’s face is as crisp as the camel beside me. He is riding at a trot, the stray lolloping beside him like the sidecar to a motorbike.

  ‘I’m nearly there,’ I say, a bit tetchily. I finish the job and draw myself up. No response from Jadullah, and for a few moments I hate him. He swings off his mount and busies himself around the rope I’ve tied, fastening the noose much tighter at the jaw.

  ‘Next time it must be perfect,’ he says, flexing a rope to tether the stray.

  ‘Ah, Yusuf, you are making good tea now.’

  Although he didn’t say so at the time, now Lamina admits my first attempt was a disaster: ‘You had the wrong amount of sugar and the top was very short.’ He went soft on me because he didn’t want me to feel discouraged.

  He and Abdul-Hakim are both laughing: apparently they’ve been joking about my terrible tea making for the last couple of days, so it’s a good thing I’ve moved up a grade. Jadullah doesn’t join in the banter. He just drains his glass, passes it to Abdul-Hakim and strides off to feed the camels.

  I am still finding Jadullah hard to crack. He is the broody one, like the Clint Eastwood character in a 1960s Western. Basilic veins wrap his forearms like rope, giving him plenty of muscle to swing himself onto the camels. Sometimes in my more paranoid moments at night, I imagine a rival tribe attacking us all, Jadullah leading our defence and picking off our assailants one by one, breaking their necks with a steely look and a ruthless twist of his wrists.

  His movements have a clockwork precision: he epitomises the value of energy conservation in the desert. When he saddles the camels, each flick of his wrist secures another binding, each step propels him to another knotting point. I am in awe of the way he mounts his camel. He kicks his heels and ascends in a whip-like swirl, shaping his body to the dromedary, landing over the hump. With a hum in the mouse-like ears, he rubs the beast’s neck and turns them both into a shrinking keyhole on the horizon.

  Among his many skills, Jadullah is an expert tracker. Today, after we have eaten our lunch, I wander across the dune with him, on our way to unhobble the camels, and he points out some of our neighbours in this patch of desert. Judging by his burly tone, they are more welcome than the strangers in the white tent.

  ‘Shuf, look!’ The embroidery of scarab tracks. ‘Shuf!’ The scratchy indentations of a scorpion. ‘Shuf!’ The tracks of a hare (after forensic analysis of the sand, Jadullah locates a burrow and the likelihood it is still there – there are no tracks on the other side). ‘The ground is all memoranda and signatures’, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, and nowhere is this more true than the desert.

  One afternoon, we spot sand-coloured carapaces flecked with brown, like miniaturised soldiers in camouflage gear: grasshoppers in an acacia bush, with very little grass to hop. Another day shows us the shallow heart prints of someone else’s camels, slung between the dunes like endless valentines. I learn later that Jadullah can estimate, by the depth of the prints and the distances between them, how fast the camels are travelling and how much luggage they’re carrying. We find deep-fronted hoof marks near a grove of acacias and wild donkeys braying nearby; hieroglyphic birdfoot, inscribed in the sand with the enigma of clandestine coding; the ridged wavy lines of snakes. Added together, they represent a secret survival manual for anyone who can read them.

  Morning’s apricot deepens to terracotta; noontime’s cinnamon darkens to umber. I wander around the dunes by myself, trying to see if I can pick out the tracks, to consolidate what I have learned. Disappointingly, the sand never seems as crowded when I am alone. A few camel tracks and some donkey hooves later, I stroll back to the others. The land has withered to an ashy grey and my companions are performing the evening prayer, etching the sand with knee divots and handprints and the grooves of their smooth, domed brows, signatures left behind for the next travellers who pass by.

  Tonight we are making for Lamina’s encampment in an area called Dar al-Beida. Night-time riding requires a different kind of tracking – and it’s one in which L
amina is especially skilled. Every once in a while he stops, twitching his fingers, recalibrating our position according to the stars. These blink and flash, their lights squealing at the tips of our noses, occasionally blurred by clouds of solar gas. I remember a line from René Caillié’s Travels: ‘though without a compass or any instrument for observation,’ he noted of his Saharan guides, ‘they possess so completely the habit of noticing the most minute things, that they never go astray.’ Lamina points out Alnilam, listing to one side like the mast of a boat, and Al-Kaïd, at the head of a bridge of five stars. The names are familiar from books on Arabic science – the appellations used by medieval pioneers like al-Khwarizmi (who introduced Ptolemaic concepts into Islamic astronomy) or al-Shatir (whose model of the cosmos influenced the star gazers of Renaissance Europe). The stars are ‘translucent, luminous, pure, free from turbidness and any kind of vileness,’ wrote Ibn Tufail in the twelfth century, in a passage that reads like an ideal of nomadism, ‘… some of them moving around their own centre and some around the centre of another’. No wonder the people of the desert understand them so well.

  For Lamina and Jadullah, the stars’ names are less important than the shifting patterns. They are hazy on nomenclature, but they know which formations will guide them. Except tonight their usual expertise is failing them. Signposts may stay put, but stars and tents are rarely so obliging. The brothers shrug at each other, click their teeth and swing the camels back along our track, tacking between the dunes before a shake of Jadullah’s finger shows a squat black shape in the distance. They have been away for a couple of weeks, so the camp has moved in search of new grazing: the grass is too sparse to stay in the same place for a fortnight.

  Dismounting, I stroke Naksheh’s flossy mane and dig out my water bottle. Lamina is clasping his hands together. He bows his head and addresses me in a voice as magnificent as the desert itself.

  ‘Marhaba bek al-usrah. Welcome to the family.’

  One of the tents is already up – low pitched but high peaked, a pyramid of cotton. The other lies collapsed on the ground. This is the guest tent – the nomadic living-room. Two women bustle around, hitching guy-lines with acacia pegs, lifting the T-shaped pole, carrying over a pot for the tea and a blanket for me to lie on. They look like ravens with their black get-up, their dipping, rocking movements. I want to approach them, to introduce myself. Yet a pang of anxiety holds me back. I don’t want to offend Lamina by appearing too forward. Stiff from the ride, I drift into the strange pleasure of aching joints, knowing we have a few restful hours ahead. I lie down to scribble in my diary, fringed in the murmur of chatter, and fall asleep with the pen still in my …

  Part Four

  Dunes

  The lion slumbers in his lair,

  The serpent shuns the noontide glare:

  But slowly wind the patient train

  Of camels o’er the blasted plain,

  Where they and man may brave alone

  The terrors of the burning zone.

  Felicia Hemans, The Caravan in the Desert

  10

  Poets of the Sahara

  IMAGINE YOU ARE A SPANISH SHEPHERD IN THE YEAR 1086 AD, TRUDGING along in your braided espadrilles, your shoulders covered by a dusty cape. You’ve counted your sheep out of the fold, they’ve cropped their way up the hills of Badajoz, and now you’re mounting the crest. ‘Dios es misericordioso!’ you cry. For down below, the Sagrajas river looks like it is on fire.

  Assembled along its banks are 70,000 Christian soldiers. Sunlight sparks off breastplates, elbow cods and the polished cruppers of their horses. Alfonso the Brave, King of Leon and Castile, is riding high, having recently captured Toledo. As for his enemy, the once-mighty Caliphate of Cordoba, it has melted into a stew of 23 antagonistic emirates, whose squabbling is as handy to the Christians as Toledo’s famed steel. Yet a drumbeat is throbbing from the south. A sea of javelins and iron-spiked shields surges forward, catching a flame of its own. Its leader is a black-eyed, curly-haired, eagle-nosed warrior-king.

  His name is Yusuf Ibn Tafshin. He is King of Morocco and chief of the Almoravids (Al-mourabitoun in the original Arabic). With his simple woollen robes, his diet of barley, meat and camel’s milk, his cavalry of camel riders and the pounding beat of his drummers, his identity is nomadic to the core. It is said that his force includes representatives from every tribe in the Western Sahara. They tear the field to shreds, leaving barely a fifth of the Christian forces alive, spilling so much blood the place is renamed az-Zallaqah or ‘slippery ground’.

  Such a victory should bring plenty of spoils, but Yusuf doesn’t bother hanging around. A true nomad, he has no wish to burden himself with excess baggage. ‘I came not to this country for the sake of booty,’ he declares. ‘I came to wage jihad against the infidel and to merit the rewards promised to those who fight for the cause of God.’

  Nearly a millennium later, Yusuf’s capital stands where he built it,fn1 on the site of an old brigands’ lair near the foothills of the Atlas. Its name comes from the Tamazight root mur and translates as ‘land of God’ – ‘Marrakesh’. One imagines the puritanical Yusuf would be shaking in his shroud if he knew what has become of his old bivouac: a hangout for hippies and Moschino-clad revellers, where Brad Pitt and Nicolas Sarkozy celebrate New Year and roadside billboards advertise the latest golf courses. Here is Ibn Khaldun’s theory in action: several generations after sedentarisation, the tough shell of nomadic life has rubbed away, leaving a feathery surface that is easily breached.fn2 It was this process that did for Ibn Tafshin’s successors. Court bred and pampered, they failed to hold his gains. The last of them was decapitated by the Almohads (a tribe of mountain Berbers who formed the next wave of Maghrebi conquest) after falling off a cliff.

  Nevertheless the Almoravids’ legacy has survived, retaining enough juice to interest North Africa’s most notorious jihadist. In 2013, after falling out with Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, the one-eyed bandit chief Mokhtar Belmokhtar needed a name for his new faction. He chose Al-Mourabitoun, invoking Ibn Tafshin’s victories against the West and his austere Islamic principles. Whether Ibn Tafshin would approve, however, of a hot-tempered ex-cigarette smuggler who sends his minions to slaughter unarmed civilians (27 hotel guests at the Radisson Blu in Bamako, for example, murdered in November 2015) and never places himself in the crossfire is another matter.

  Marrakesh may be Morocco’s modern-day Land of Cockaigne, but in Ibn Tafshin’s day it still had the atmosphere of a nomad camp. Animals whined in the dust and knobbly ridge poles held up goat-hair tents, stabbing the ferruginous soil that gives the region its name – Blad al-Hamra, the ‘Red Country’. But urban development is hardly a keynote of nomadic culture: Ibn Tafshin’s Marrakesh has long fallen under the dust and only one Almoravid structure ranks high on the roster of Marrakeshi architecture. I was itching to see it.

  Rolling down the Atlas, I made my way towards an interlude of urban sloth. Juniper hills bristled below sawtooth mountains seething with cloud like cannon smoke. Cedar forests slid aside for bald cliffs and canyons where the state slogan was inscribed in white stone and chalk (Allah al-Malik al-Watan, ‘God, the King, the Country’fn3). Blue rollers wheeled over the palmeries and chaffinches hopped around dusty fields. They looked more stimulated than the people in the flaky pink villages, where the boredom level could be measured by the volume of pistachio shells on the stoops of the houses.

  At times, the slopes were so steep that whenever we stopped, the bus boy ran out and piled stones behind the wheels; and so sinuous that he handed round plastic bags in case anyone was sick. Stumbling out at the other end, I teetered like a sailor on shore leave, keeling between mud-plastered walls, and entered the city under a groined arch. Scalloped and ribbed hemispheres framed the gateway, curves joining concave to convex, communicating a drama of opposition, a suggestion of movement as dynamic as a caravan. The gate was built under the auspices of Yusuf Ibn Tafshin and is the only architectural residue of his era still standin
g in Marrakesh. But there is another Almoravid gem, on the other side of the lively Djemaa al-Fnaa, and after putting down my backpack in a dusty riad I went to seek it out.

  The marble domed tomb or koubba rises from a courtyard several feet down from the current level of the city (testifying to the depth of urban development since Ibn Tafshin’s day). It was built under the direction of his son, Ali, who had grown up in the courts of Andalusia, so the vitality of its design – lobed and horseshoe arches smearing the sides with light and shadow, honeycomb squinches seizing attention when you stand inside – owes as much to the sophisticated urban culture that produced the Al-Hambra as any desert influence. But I was struck by the abundance of vegetal imagery – knotted over the dome and spandrels, creeping up the walls inside.

  During my trips in the mountains and across the desert, people pointed out dozens of plants to me. They were alive to vegetation, to every visible root and branch, in a way I struggled to emulate. With its palm and acanthus leaves and its pine-cone motifs, its dome sprouting between stepped merlons like a bushel rooting out of the ground, the koubba is a celebration of fertility. It has been identified as a prayer fountain, drawing water from the upland aquifers for worshippers’ ablutions. Its design celebrates that most precious of resources, through a dizzying range of motifs associated with it.

  The rest of Almoravid Marrakesh is lost. Like stones added to a desert cairn, succeeding dynasties made their mark, although none matched the military achievements of Yusuf and his clan. By the time Leo Africanus wandered through in the early sixteenth century, the city’s prime was past and, being from Fez (which is famous across the nation for its snobbery), he was unable to resist a sneer:

  I have heard that in old time here was great abundance of students, but at my being there I found but five in all; and they have now a most senseless professor, and one that is quite void of all humanity.