The Storied City

by Charlie English

  It was no Le Havre or Marseilles, but there was a buzz about Kabara. The quay was busy with men and women carrying goods back and forth, while shipwrights worked to repair canoes that had been hauled out to the foreshore. The narrow streets of the town itself were filled with a hubbub of people selling fish, milk, cola nuts, and pistachios, while strings of donkeys and camels passed continually, carrying merchandise to Timbuktu. It was the last day of Ramadan, and at dusk the town celebrated with dancing and festivities.

  At half past three the following afternoon, Caillié joined a small caravan assembling on the road to Timbuktu.

  The path north was white with shining sand so soft it made walking difficult. It led past unexpected lakes whose banks were overgrown with vegetation, and through a dwarf forest of palms, mimosas, and gum acacias. For much of the journey they were followed by a Tuareg man mounted on a superb horse who eyed him narrowly and asked the caravan drivers where he had come from, but the horseman lost interest after being told Caillié was a poor Egyptian. Two and a half miles along the track, at the halfway point between Kabara and Timbuktu, they reached an infamous murder spot known as “They Hear Not,” since from there cries for help could not be heard at either town. The caravan moved safely through it. The sun was touching the horizon when, two miles farther on, the track climbed a bare dune. From the top, at last, Caillié could see his destination.

  The city lay long and low before him, stretched between an immense sky and an immense desert. “Nothing diminishes the vast landscape which is lighted by the throbbing glare of the veritable sun of the desert,” a later traveler wrote of reaching this spot. “Truly she is enthroned upon the horizon with the majesty of a queen. She is indeed the city of imagination, the Timbuctoo of European legend.” Caillié was overcome:

  I now saw this capital of the Soudan, to reach which had so long been the object of my wishes. On entering this mysterious city, which is an object of curiosity and research to the civilised nations of Europe, I experienced an indescribable satisfaction. I never before felt a similar emotion and my transport was extreme.

  He was unable to share his joy for fear of giving away his identity. Instead he silently gave thanks to his God: the obstacles and dangers had appeared insurmountable, but with the Lord’s protection he had achieved the object of his ambition.

  As he approached more closely, however, his excitement began to fade. Timbuktu was not quite as magnificent as he had expected:

  The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish white colour. The sky was a pale red as far as the horizon: all nature wore a dreary aspect, and the most profound silence prevailed; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard.

  Its buildings were not tall or especially large; most consisted of a single story. The town had no walls. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and when he lay down to sleep the oppressive heat made him more uncomfortable than ever. The following morning, examining the town in daylight, he found it wasn’t nearly as big or as busy as he had been led to believe. Its vaunted market was a desert compared with that of Jenne. Its atmosphere was soporific. “Everything had a dull appearance,” he noted. “I was surprised at the inactivity, I may even say indolence, displayed in the city.”

  As Baron Rousseau had suspected, the great city of gold-roofed houses was a chimera. “Exaggerated notions” of this “object of curiosity for so many ages” had prevailed, Caillié wrote, including its population, civilization, and trade with the Sudan. It was small, three miles in circuit, and roughly triangular in shape, and it had been raised on soil that was “totally unfit for cultivation” and had no vegetation but stunted trees and shrubs.

  Still, the city had a few redeeming features that would leaven his disappointment. Its streets were clean, and its inhabitants neat and—contrary to what Park had been told—gentle and obliging to strangers. The women were not veiled like those in Morocco and were allowed to go out when they pleased and visit anyone they chose. There were seven mosques in all, two of which were large, and each was surmounted by a brick minaret. Climbing the tower of the great mosque of Jingere Ber, Caillié could only admire the fact that a town had been built here at all: “I could not help contemplating with astonishment the extraordinary city before me, created solely by the wants of commerce, and destitute of every resource except what its accidental position as a place of exchange affords.”

  The ruler of Timbuktu was a merchant named Osman, who had inherited a considerable fortune from his ancestors, and was, gratifyingly, “very rich.” He received Caillié while sitting on a beautiful mat with a luxurious cushion:

  The king appeared to be of an exceedingly amiable disposition; his age might be about fifty-five, and his hair was white and curly. He was of the middling height, and his colour was jet black. He had an aquiline nose, thin lips, a grey beard, and large eyes, and his whole countenance was pleasing; his dress, like those of the Moors, was composed of stuff of European manufacture. On his head was a red cap, bound round with a large piece of muslin in the form of a turban. His shoes were of morocco, shaped like our morning slippers, and made in the country. He often visited the mosque.

  Trading was the lifeblood of this, “one of the largest cities” Caillié had seen in Africa, and “the principal entrepôt” of this part of the continent. There were many Moroccans here, who stayed for six to eight months to sell their goods and buy more to carry north. In trade, wrote Caillié, the people were industrious and intelligent; and the merchants were generally wealthy, occupying the finest houses in the city and owning many slaves. Merchandise consisted mainly of salt and other goods that reached Timbuktu by caravan or boat. There were even articles from Europe: Caillié found double-barreled guns with the mark of the state-owned French armament factory at Saint-Étienne, as well as European “glass wares, amber, coral, sulphur, paper &c.” “Paper &c” was the closest Caillié came to mentioning manuscripts.

  The Frenchman stayed a fortnight. He devoted his last few days to trying to work out what had happened to Laing, whose name he had heard in Jenne, and was shown the spot where he was said to have been murdered. Caillié secretly shed a tear—“the only tribute of regret I could render to the ill-fated traveller.” He left Timbuktu on May 4, 1828, traveling with a caravan carrying ostrich feathers, ivory, gold, and slaves to the markets of Morocco. His host, Sidi Abdallahi Chebir, an “excellent man,” gave him enough merchandise to fund his onward journey and awoke early on the day of departure to accompany him for some distance, before he affectionately pressed Caillié’s hand and wished him well.

  The men of the caravan were less hospitable. The drivers showed no mercy to the penniless traveler, and were worse with the slaves. Water was always so short that Caillié felt constantly to be on the verge of death, and the drivers refused to give him more even when he begged. Sandstorms threatened to bury the whole caravan, forming at times into great dust devils. Yet as they trekked beneath the burning sky, he couldn’t help being awed by the immensity of the desert landscape, with its boundless horizons and immense, shining plains.

  • • •

  CAILLIÉ REACHED the French consulate at Tangier on September 7, 507 days after setting out. He was exhausted, ill, and dressed in rags, but was able at last to remove his disguise, put on European clothes, and find a ship bound for Toulon. There he wrote to Jomard at the Société de Géographie, who immediately sent five hundred francs to cover the cost of his journey to the French capital. In Paris, Jomard and his colleagues interrogated the explorer in order to verify his account, which they pronounced to be genuine: he had achieved “every thing possible . . . more than could have been hoped for with such resources,” and had “completely succeeded.” Despite British objections, Caillié was awarded the prize money and, in 1830, the gold medal, although it was agreed that this should be shared with Laing.

&nb
sp; Caillié’s victory was met with triumphalist crowing in France. “Here we have a subject of glory for France, and of jealousy for her eternal rival!” declared one French newspaper. “That which England has not been able to accomplish, with the aid of a whole group of travellers, and at an expense of more than twenty millions, a Frenchman has done with his scanty personal resources alone, and without putting his country to any expense.” The British responded with fury. How could a humble, ill-educated Frenchman reach the goal they had been pursuing for decades? The intensity of Timbuktu fever had produced numerous false claims in recent years; surely Caillié’s account was just another lie. Most likely he had been shipwrecked on the coast of Barbary and heard some vague intelligence about the interior that he had pretended was his own. His Muslim disguise only added to the British outrage: If an explorer was prepared to swap religion willy-nilly, how could his observations possibly be trusted?

  “This eternal cant and whining about the ‘jealousy’ and ‘rivalry’ of England” implied only “a constantly-recurring consciousness of the intellectual and physical superiority of our countrymen over theirs,” thundered The Quarterly Review, before going on to do its utmost to discredit Caillié’s “imposture.” Laing was the rightful discoverer of Timbuktu, while Caillié was “illiterate,” and Jomard had been less than scrupulous in verifying his journey. “We shall offer no opinion whether M. Caillié did or did not reach Timbuctoo,” stated the Review’s anonymous critic, “but we do not hesitate to say that, for any information he has brought back, as to the geography of Central Africa, or the course of the Joliba, he might just as well have staid at home.” The diatribe concluded with a long and well-briefed account of the British conspiracy theory that held that Rousseau and D’Ghies had stolen Laing’s papers.

  Caillié was deeply wounded by these attacks, which affected him more, he said, than “all the hardships, fatigues and privations” he had encountered in the interior of Africa.

  In Tripoli, the fêting of the Frenchman drove Warrington to scour the desert ever harder for Laing’s journals, which now bore the double burden of rescuing his country’s and his son-in-law’s glory. October 1828 found him writing to the War and Colonial Office of the “Miserable Intrigue” in which he had “cause to suspect the French Consul may have purloined the Papers of Major Laing.” By May 1829, he was informing the British government that D’Ghies was expecting not only a copy of the “History of Tomboucto” but also the arrival from Tuat of its author “Sidi Ali Baba d’Arowan.” (This despite the fact that Ahmad Baba had been dead for more than two hundred years.)

  At first, Warrington said, he had been inclined to ridicule the idea of a history of Timbuktu being produced in Africa, because he did not believe any African would be interested in his country’s past. “Is it likely,” he asked, “that this Sidi Ali Baba should have examined the Records and written the History of Tinbuctu—Believe me a Bowl of Cuscusou is more an object of Research to any Moor than such a history.” However, he was now convinced that the “Ali Baba” history must have been obtained in Timbuktu by Laing, and was therefore evidence of the French plot. “We are surely justified,” he announced, “in believing that Laing was in possession of the History of Tenbuctu.” It was a short step from this fantasy to the conclusion that whoever possessed a copy of this “History” also possessed Laing’s journals.

  To force the pasha to produce the documents, Warrington broke off diplomatic relations in June that year and hauled down his Union Jack. The pasha, whose survival relied on playing British power off against the French, was horrified. On August 5 he let it be known that a group of people were coming from the desert who would indeed testify that Laing’s papers had been given to D’Ghies and the French consul. D’Ghies, reading the political wind, decided to run: three days later he was smuggled out of Tripoli on an American corvette. Shortly afterward, the pasha ordered that the French flag be hauled down from Rousseau’s consulate.

  Warrington’s state of mind is revealed in a letter he wrote to the undersecretary of state for the colonies, R. W. Hay, on August 10, 1829, announcing on his honor, “Should you wish to take any steps with the French authorities you may safely do it, as I am apprehensive Mr. Rousseau will fly to America also, as soon as he hears His Infamous Villany is detected. He has not only defrauded the English Government of the journals & manuscripts of Major Laing, but he has stole also Letters to His Wife, to me & my Family.”

  It was, concluded Warrington, “really too horrid to continue.”

  Two days later, Warrington’s deranged assault on Rousseau culminated in the offer of a duel. The baron had already had enough: fearing for his life, he had appealed to the United States for help in fleeing Tripoli and, like D’Ghies, been smuggled aboard an American ship. With l’affaire Laing now a full-blown diplomatic crisis, the French government appointed a commission to investigate Warrington’s claims. Later that year, it pronounced Rousseau innocent of all charges.

  The fallout was not yet over. France had been made to look a fool and needed redress. In 1830, a French squadron arrived in Tripoli harbor and ordered the pasha publicly to retract all charges against their consul and repay debts to his French creditors of 800,000 francs. With his throne room in range of French guns, the pasha had to concede. Short now of both money and credibility, the rule of the Karamanli dynasty was nearing its end: in 1832 the pasha was overthrown and direct Ottoman rule was reinstated soon afterward. The once powerful ruler of Tripoli died in rags in a hovel a short distance from the palace he had occupied for so long.

  Rousseau fared little better. No copy of the Tarikh al-sudan, the manuscript that could have made his name, seems to have reached him. After the French intervention, he returned to Tripoli, but suspicions remained in Paris and London about his conduct, and he died soon afterward, in 1831. Caillié’s story ended a little more happily. He was made a member of the Légion d’Honneur and was awarded a pension, and the three-volume account of his travels, published at public expense in 1830, made him a famous man. Though he was unsuccessful in gaining support for further expeditions to Africa, he lived with his wife and children on a farm in western France until May 17, 1838, when he succumbed to tuberculosis. Warrington meanwhile remained in Tripoli until 1846, at which point he was forced to resign after arguing with the consul of Naples over a box of cigars. He moved to Patras, Greece, where he died the following year. Laing’s journals had not been found.

  As for the object of European lust: Timbuktu had been attained, but not in the way anyone would have wished. Caillié’s public deflation of the gilded myth that had endured since the Middle Ages did, however, inspire a nineteen-year-old Cambridge undergraduate to verse. In 1829, the year after the French explorer’s return, the young Alfred, Lord Tennyson, entered his poem “Timbuctoo” into the university’s poetry competition. It told the tale of how “Discovery” had punctured the dream of argent streets and tremulous domes that were once thought to have existed in the Saharan city:

  O City! O latest Throne! Where I was rais’d

  To be a mystery of loveliness

  Unto all eyes, the time is well-nigh come

  When I must render up this glorious home

  To keen Discovery: soon yon brilliant towers

  Shall darken with the waving of her wand;

  Darken, and shrink and shiver into huts,

  Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand,

  Low-built, mud-wall’d, Barbarian settlements.

  How chang’d from this fair City!

  By the end of the poem, “The Moon / had fallen from the night, and all was dark!”

  7.

  ISMAEL’S LIST

  APRIL 2012

  It looked as if Timbuktu had been bombed with paper. Outside each state building—the mairie, the governorate, the banks—lay a carpet of typed, printed, or handwritten documents, the achievements of a hundred years of state bureaucracy. Adminis
trators had worked since colonial times to collect details of every aspect of Timbuktien life, but in their trashing of the city’s offices, the rebels had pulled the files from every bookshelf and cabinet and chucked them into the roads and alleyways, where they now lay trampled underfoot. Ismael Diadié Haidara, out near the southern entrance to town one day, passed a dune covered with sheets of paper that riffled in the warm wind. Houday Ag Mohamed, himself a government official of long standing, recalled: “The town’s soul was laid bare. Its most closely guarded secrets lay in the streets.” For those who viewed the world through the lens of manuscripts, it was a warning of what might come.

  After his long drive north, Haidara remained with his wife and five children at their home in Hamabangou. During those days he spent much of the time on the phone, talking to his friends and colleagues, and occasionally to journalists too. Since the jihadists’ arrival, the chaos in the city had been largely brought under control, he told a reporter for the magazine Le point. There had not yet been any serious threat to the libraries, but these were uncertain times: “The problem is that we do not know really what is happening, and still less about what tomorrow will bring,” he said.

  Heritage organizations outside Mali were growing increasingly alarmed. On Tuesday, April 3, the day after Ansar Dine’s takeover, the director-general of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, issued an alert for the city’s historic buildings: “Timbuktu’s outstanding earthen architectural wonders that are the great mosques of Jingere Ber, Sankore, and Sidi Yahya must be safeguarded,” she said, calling the city “essential to the preservation of the identity of the people of Mali and of our universal heritage.” Others foresaw serious danger for the manuscripts. “I have no faith in the rebels,” said Shamil Jeppie, the head of the University of Cape Town’s Tombouctou Manuscripts Project. “They may have an educated leadership, but they are sending in footsoldiers who are illiterate and if they want something they will take it. . . . They won’t have any respect for paper culture.”