The region boasted such a rich ecology of burrowing parasites, viruses, bacteria, and insects that no explorer would escape. These included the Guinea worm, whose larvae entered the body in drinking water, then migrated to the tissue beneath the victim’s skin, where they grew, over several months, up to three feet long. If the host survived this agony, intensely painful pus-filled blisters would appear on the lower leg a year later, then rupture as the giant worms forced their way out. The blood-sucking tsetse fly, meanwhile, carried sleeping sickness, whose initial symptoms of fever and weight loss gave way to personality changes and narcolepsy as the disease migrated to the brain, killing its host only after several years. Intestinal infections such as amoebic dysentery could be lethal too.
The most dangerous sickness by some margin, however, was malaria. The commonest form of this parasite in West Africa, Plasmodium falciparum, is also the most deadly: it still kills hundreds of thousands a year. The mosquito that carries it thrives around humans, and its larvae can grow in a puddle as small as an animal’s footprint. Once injected into the body, malarial microorganisms enter the bloodstream and are carried to the liver, where they grow inside cells that pop eight to twelve days later, releasing tens of thousands of offspring, which then start to invade the host’s red blood cells and eat them from inside. When each cell implodes, the parasites move on, until the host’s blood is being eaten on a massive scale. Victims begin to vomit up bile, and their skin, fingernails, and eyes take on a yellow hue. Finally, their stools and urine turn black, by which time death is not far away.
In 1788, neither malaria nor its vector was understood: the disease was blamed on bad air, or “miasma.” Though the bark of the cinchona tree was a known treatment, it wasn’t used effectively and the quinine it contained wasn’t isolated until 1820. West Africans had at least some resistance from being exposed to the disease in childhood; Europeans had none.
Like their explorers, the members of the fledgling African Association in London were largely unaware of these hazards. James Bruce’s sojourn in Ethiopia had proved that African travel did not have to be lethal, while Cook and others had shown that the world was open to the right sort of cautious investigation: Why should traveling in Africa prove any more difficult than, say, navigating the Great Barrier Reef? For the right sort of character, with the right sort of constitution, blessed with faith and good luck, anything was surely possible.
They were not short of volunteers. Within days of their first meeting, the African Association committee had found two highly suitable recruits.
Simon Lucas, the son of a London wine merchant, had been sent to Cádiz as a boy to learn his trade, but was captured by a mob of Barbary pirates, the Salé Rovers, who sold him as a slave to the imperial court of Morocco. He remained there for three years, and after his release went back to serve for sixteen years as a British diplomat, before finally returning in 1785 to England, where he was made Oriental interpreter at the Court of St. James’s. He offered his services to the African Association on condition that the committee secure paid leave for the duration of his mission.
Lucas was sick in June 1788, so the first departure fell to the association’s second recruit, the thirty-seven-year-old American John Ledyard. Ledyard was also highly qualified, though in a very different way. Everyone who encountered this fine physical specimen appears to have been overwhelmed by his steady eye and his open countenance. He was “an extraordinary man,” Beaufoy noted, who “seemed from his youth to have felt an invincible desire to make himself acquainted with the unknown, or imperfectly discovered regions of the globe.”
Ledyard had been raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and showed an early penchant for adventure by escaping from the newly founded Dartmouth College and paddling a forty-foot dugout canoe 150 miles down the Connecticut River. He quit Dartmouth for good after that, joining an Atlantic merchantman that took him to Europe, where, in 1775, he enlisted as a marine in order to secure an introduction to Captain Cook. Cook took Ledyard on his third and final voyage, during which, it is sometimes claimed, Ledyard became the first recorded Euro-American to get a tattoo. On his return, he deserted rather than fight with the Royal Navy against his own country, and settled down to write an account of the circumnavigation that became a bestseller.
The mid-1780s found him in Paris, where he made friends with John Paul Jones and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, then United States ambassador to France, was as impressed with Ledyard as everyone else: he was “a man of genius, of some science, and of fearless courage and enterprise,” Jefferson wrote. He suggested that Ledyard try to find an overland route from Europe to the Americas via Saint Petersburg, Kamchatka, and Nootka Sound, and signed up his friend Joseph Banks as a sponsor. The explorer set out for the Siberian wastes and reached Yakutsk before being arrested as a spy, on Catherine the Great’s orders. He was deported, paying for his passage to London with a check drawn on Banks’s name, and showed up at the Royal Society president’s London house in June 1788, dressed in rags. His timing was perfect. Banks immediately suggested “an adventure almost as perilous as the one from which he had returned”—in Africa. The penniless Ledyard was keen, and Banks sent his potential recruit to Beaufoy for a second opinion. Needless to say, Ledyard quickly won him over, as Beaufoy recorded:
I was struck with the manliness of his person, the breadth of his chest, the openness of his countenance, and the inquietude of his eye. I spread the map of Africa before him, and tracing a line from Cairo to Sennar, and from thence westward in the latitude and supposed direction of the Niger, I told him that was the route, by which I was anxious that Africa might, if possible, be explored. He said, he should think himself singularly fortunate to be entrusted with the adventure.
Another promoter of exploration, in a different age, might have asked whether a traveler who had just returned in rags from a two-year, 7,000-mile journey was ready for a mission that, if all went well, would last a further three years. Ledyard was required to travel from Marseilles to Cairo, Mecca, and then Nubia, cross the desert lengthways, find the Niger, and make his way home. It meant covering at least 12,500 miles, mostly overland, through some of the most hostile territory on earth. But Beaufoy recorded no qualms. When, he asked the candidate, would he be able to set out?
“Tomorrow morning,” Ledyard responded.
In fact, the association gave him several more days. He left London on June 30, 1788, telling Beaufoy that he was “accustomed to hardships” and evils that were “terrible to bear,” but they had never prevented him from his purpose. To Banks he said, “If I live, I will faithfully perform, in its utmost extent, my engagement to the society; and if I perish in the attempt, my honour will still be safe, for death cancels all bonds.”
• • •
RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON, writing sixty years later, described the moment of setting out on a journey of African exploration as one of the gladdest moments in human life: “Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.” Ledyard was equally exalted by his departure. “Truly is it written, that the ways of God are past finding out, and his decrees unsearchable,” he wrote to his mother. “Is the Lord thus great? So also is he good. I am an instance of it. I have trampled the world under my feet, laughed at fear, and derided danger. Through millions of fierce savages, over parching deserts, the freezing north, the everlasting ice, and stormy seas, have I passed without harm. How good is my God! What rich subjects have I for praise, love, and adoration!”
His route south took him through Paris, where he stayed for a week, meeting up with his friend Jefferson, who evidently disapproved of his working for the British but helped make arrangements for the onward journey; Ledyard thereafter sent regular updates to his fellow American. In Marseilles he boarded a ship bound for Egypt, which presented him with immediate
difficulties. Alexandria was “more wretched” than anything he had seen, he told Jefferson, filled as it was with “poverty, rapine, murder, tumult, blind bigotry, cruel persecution [and] pestilence!” He reached Cairo in the oppressive heat of mid-August and found it to be “a wretched hole, and a nest of vagabonds,” half the size of Paris, while the mighty Nile was “a mere puddle compared to the accounts we have of it,” no more impressive than the Connecticut River:
Sweet are the songs of Egypt on paper. . . . Who is not ravished with gums, balms, dates, figs, pomegranates, circassia, and sycamores, without recollecting that amidst these are dust, hot and fainting winds, bugs, musquitoes, spiders, flies, leprosy, fevers and almost universal blindness?
He spent three months in Cairo, preparing for his role as a Muslim traveler dressed in a “common Turkish habit” and gleaning what he could about the route ahead. He abandoned his plan to go to Mecca and instead began researching the route west via Sennar, a sultanate in the north of the modern state of Sudan. His greatest source of information was the slave market. Twenty thousand slaves would be imported to Egypt that year, he was told, and it was from these people that he began to get an idea of the scale and danger of his journey. “A caravan goes from here [Cairo] to Fezzan,” he discovered, “which they call a journey of fifty days; and from Fezzan to Tombouctou, which they call a journey of ninety days. The caravans travel about twenty miles a day, which makes the distance on the road from here to Fezzan, one thousand miles; and from Fezzan to Tombouctou, one thousand eight hundred miles. From here to Sennar is reckoned six hundred miles.” If he were to remain healthy and unmolested and to travel nonstop—three enormous suppositions—it would take at least six months to reach Timbuktu.
There was great promise in the countries along his route, however: “Wangara is talked of here as a place producing much gold,” he noted. “The King of Wangara (whom I hope to see in about three months after leaving this) is said to dispose of just what quantity he pleases of his gold; sometimes a great deal, and sometimes little or none; and this, it is said, he does to prevent strangers knowing how rich he is, and that he may live in peace.” Nevertheless, the strain of the Cairene environment and the task ahead was apparent as he prepared to leave the city on November 15. By the time of his final letter to Jefferson he was in a very different mood from the one in which he had set out:
I have passed my time disagreeably here. . . . I assure myself, that even your curiosity and love of antiquity would not detain you in Egypt three months. . . . From Cairo I am to travel southwest, about three hundred leagues, to a black king. Then my present conductors will leave me to my fate. Beyond this, I suppose I shall go alone. . . . I shall not forget you; indeed, it will be a consolation to think of you in my last moments. Be happy.
Ledyard never reached the black king. He was still in Cairo when he fell ill with a “bilious complaint,” probably stomach cramps caused by dysentery or food poisoning, later that month. The sickness didn’t kill him, but the treatment did: he took the common remedy of vitriolic acid, but consumed so much that it produced “violent burning pains” that threatened to be fatal. He tried to cure these with tartar emetic, a potassium salt that was intended to induce vomiting but instead made him much worse. “All was in vain,” recorded his biographer, Jared Sparks. “The best medical skill in Cairo was called to his aid without effect.” Three days later, Ledyard was dead.
A correspondence ensued among Banks and Beaufoy, Jefferson, and Banks’s acquaintance Thomas Paine. The men of the African Association told Paine that the caravan with which Ledyard intended to travel had been continually delayed, and at last he was thrown “into a violent rage with his conductors which deranged something in his system.” Several years later, Banks reflected that they had been unlucky with this first mission, “for it failed by the death of Our Traveller Ledyard, whose health when he left England appeared to promise a long life, and whose strength of Body to overcome the fatigues of Travel . . . had been before fully tried.”
In a eulogy, Beaufoy noted that Ledyard had been “adventurous beyond the conception of ordinary men, yet wary and considerate, and attentive to all precautions.” He appeared, Beaufoy wrote, “to be formed by Nature for achievements of hardihood and peril.” It was impossible to gloss over the truth, however: the African Association’s first wandering hero had died by accident, in extreme pain, without getting farther than Cairo.
3.
HELL IS NOT FAR AWAY
MARCH 2012
By 2012, the Timbuktu of Haidara’s youth had been transformed in the usual modern ways. It was now a place of snorting trucks and diesel fumes, 4x4s and flatulent motorbikes, electric lights, and fifty-four-inch flat-screen plasma TVs with a hundred satellite channels showing Star Trek reruns. Billboards advertised Coca-Cola and pay-as-you-go cellphones, while shoppers in jeans and T-shirts browsed the streetwear in Almadou Dicko’s Harlem Shop and the Victoria Emporium with its “Prêt-à-Porter Fashions.” The kids playing in the streets were as likely to be wearing Barcelona and Real Madrid strips as the red, green, and gold of Mali.
Even now, though, some things remained as they had always been. The festivals were still counted by the cycles of the moon, and the days were governed largely by the height of the sun and measured out in calls to worship. An hour before dawn, the muezzin announced the fadjr prayer, and the faithful washed the sleep from their eyes and bent their heads toward the east. The women who ran the city’s bakeries loaded the communal ovens built on every street corner with flat rounds of dough, filling the air with the ancient aromas of wood smoke and baking bread. Donkeys still pulled wagons, and sheep and goats still grazed among the scraps in the street, having been released from pens made of sticks and string and—an innovation, this—old automobile fan belts.
Down by the river, transporters disembarked from the boats carrying cargo destined for the Grand Marché. On the way into town they passed farmers tilling their fields and women beating their washing and arranging it on bushes to dry. Although they were brought by truck these days, slabs of salt were still for sale in the Petit Marché, alongside fresh and dried fish, goat, mutton, beef, and camel.
After the duha prayer, the people of Timbuktu went home to eat, and after that, as the sun reached its brutal zenith, they found a shaded place to sleep. At asr they woke up and worked again until maghrib, at dusk. Their habit then, in the cooling evening, was to go to meet their friends, to gossip, drink tea, make music, play games, and talk politics and poetry until isha, when they would prepare for bed.
For weeks, these evening gatherings in Timbuktu had been dominated by talk of the crisis. Few people in the early days of the year had believed that the fighting would reach Timbuktu. In January, Mohamed Diagayeté, a senior employee at the Ahmad Baba institute, asked a soldier friend for advice: should he keep his family here or head for safer country in the south? There would be no problem in Timbuktu, the soldier had said. The town itself would remain secure. More recently, though, the soldier’s opinion had started shifting. Things had gone awry, and like everyone else he now had a “little bit of fear.”
Then things had begun to move very quickly. To Diagayeté it seemed unreal, like a dream.
On Thursday, March 29, a week after the coup in Bamako, the city leaders announced a meeting in the broad acre of sand by the Sankore mosque to try to pull the different communities together behind the town’s ragtag Arab militia, Delta Force. People of all Timbuktu’s ethnic groups—Songhay, Fulani, Bambara, Tuareg, Bella, Dogon—were invited to bring forward whatever they could spare to support the fighters who were now their best hope. They gave money, cereal, cattle, and bolts of cloth, all of which was handed over with a great show of solidarity, and they felt a little more secure.
The next day, the news again took a bad turn. The garrison town of Kidal in the far northeast had fallen to the rebels. A new ripple of fear ran through Timbuktu, and people started packing up to move so
uth. That morning, the director of the Ahmad Baba institute, Mohamed Gallah Dicko, told his seventy employees to take as much of the organization’s office equipment home as they could. If Timbuktu fell, at least the computers, cameras, and hard drives wouldn’t be looted. Some, like the researcher Alkadi Maiga, didn’t bother: Kidal was a far-flung town in a hostile region, a much more vulnerable outpost than world-famous Timbuktu.
Other people said the city was already surrounded.
At six that evening, just as the sun was setting, a small convoy of 4x4s set out from Timbuktu, heading east along the river into the desert. Word had been passed through the Arab militia that the MNLA rebels wanted a meeting, and so a delegation of city elders had been chosen, along with a number of fighting men from Delta Force. Among the four delegates was Kader Kalil, a sixty-five-year-old with a long Lee Marvin face whose gravel voice and lively opinions were often heard on Radio Bouctou, the community station he ran out of a brick box behind the mayor’s office.
As the vehicles bounced along the rough track, Kalil was deeply unhappy. He was tired and scared, his ulcers were playing up, and he thought he and his fellow Timbuktiens were being led into a trap, but they had no choice: if the people wanted you to do something, you couldn’t refuse.
At seven-thirty p.m. they stopped in the village of Ber to await the rebels’ instructions, and Kalil called his wife to tell her he would not be home for dinner. “This may be the last time you hear from me,” he said.
It was almost midnight when the little convoy of 4x4s set out again, driving now to the northeast. Six miles from Ber, the militia leader’s cellphone rang and the suspicious Kalil listened to the tone of the conversation. Was he a bit too polite, a bit too eager to please? They must douse their lights, the militiaman said when the call was finished, so the position of the rebel camp wasn’t given away. The blacked-out vehicles continued for another three miles, coming to a halt in an area of soft sand, desert grasses, and acacia thorns.
The Storied City Page 4
