In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  “You, Trish, and I will have to travel together someday, Kate.” I sipped my coffee and breathed in the scent of smoke, tanned leather, and spices.

  Kate smiled and turned a page. “‘At the end of the last Ice Age when the glaciers began to melt, the southern limit of rainfall moved northwards, drying out the Sahara. As the Joliba and Quorra rivers dried up, they altered their courses and captured each other and the Niger was born, a great looped river, flowing 2,600 miles: The Cradle of West Africa.’ Look at this map.” She turned the book. The bend where the two rivers came together was about 200 miles directly north of Dori.

  A gang of birds chirped from the trees surrounding the porch of the campement. In the crisp air, our breakfast of fried eggs and buttered bread, the first full meal we’d eaten since the train thirty-six hours before, was the best I’d ever tasted. Sunshine, coffee, food, and the promise of a bed—we clinked our coffee cups and laughed out loud.

  Around noon, we made our way to the ticket kiosk near a river quay crowded with people, donkeys, and stray dogs.

  “Bonjour!” I smiled at the man behind the ticket window. “We have reservations for a second-class cabin.” I gave him our names.

  A pleasant, round-faced man opened a ledger and ran his finger down the page. He frowned and my stomach did a pirouette. “Your names are not on the list.”

  “But we sent in our reservations from Ouaga over a month ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Mademoiselle,” he clucked his tongue, “but we never received them.”

  By this time, people were jostling one another behind me in their own efforts to secure a place on the boat. I got someone’s elbow in my back.

  “I assure you, Monsieur…?”

  “Culibali.”

  “Monsieur Culibali, that we sent in our reservations. I’ll just wait here until you find them.”

  Mr. Culibali shrugged. “I will keep your names, Mademoiselle, and see what I can do.”

  Steel mesh surrounded the booth window. I took a quarter-step to the side and looped my fingers through the wire, ready to wait all day if need be. Kate stood back away from the crowds. The longer I stood there, the more her face drooped.

  The crowd surged around me. The sun climbed to midmorning, and the air thickened with the smell of sweat and fish. Men in loose cotton pants and long shirts bought general boarding tickets for a place on the deck. Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers from different countries bunched together with everyone else to beg for tickets. Breakfast faded into an empty stomach and my feet hurt. Refusing to budge, I hung onto the wire, intermittently smiling and asking Monsieur Culibali in my most patient French if he had found our tickets.

  After about two hours, the crowd thinned and I still hung onto the grate. My stomach growled so loudly, Monsieur Culibali finally turned to me.

  “Heureusement, Mademoiselle, j’ai encore deux places.” He smiled, telling me that, happily, he had two bunks left in a second-class cabin.

  After a hearty “Merci, Monsieur!!” I walked back in triumph, waving the two tickets at Kate, who had taken refuge on a bench under a tree.

  We celebrated at the Bonzo Bar near the quay with cold Somalibo beers, spicy riz Senegalese, and grilled capitaine, a mild-tasting river fish and specialty of Mopti. The quay teemed with fishermen and dockworkers loading fish from their boats into trucks and wooden carts. Groups of small boys ran about with outstretched palms, offering to carry bags and boxes for the people boarding the riverboat.

  Sipping my beer, I sat back to absorb the surroundings. The quay presented a timeless scene. Except for the sprinkle of white faces in the crowd, the year could have been 1101, 1601, or 1981—wooden boats pulled onto the banks, donkeys, goats, chickens, and dogs, camels dressed in silver bangles and leather tasseled saddles. Shining black skin wrapped in robes of colorful cloth. The air was fat with a rich cacophony of language. Here I was, sitting at the crossroads of ancient Saharan trade routes, on a river the Tuareg had named N’ger-n-gereo, the River of Rivers.

  I was about to travel that river, 400 miles into the heart of Africa, following the same route as Mungo Park, Scottish explorer and hero of The Strong Brown God. Never mind that Park and other explorers had all gone mad, drank their own blood to stay alive, and drowned in an ambush. I was smiling so much, my cheeks hurt.

  After lunch, we collected our bags from the campement and boarded the riverboat, “Tombouctou.” Our second-class cabin was on the second tier of the boat, the first being the deck, and the third being a kind of penthouse, with one first-class room that looked to be inhabited by some ambassador’s family.

  Kate and I deposited our backpacks onto one of two sets of bunk beds. As we turned to leave, two young Frenchmen met us at our door. They wore the caps of the French Green Berets and introduced themselves as Rémi and Thierry. Seemed they were to be our roommates. Kate flashed her big blue eyes, Rémi bowed, and the trip began.

  It was December 24th and I sat in a folding chair on the top deck of the Tombouctou. The sun shed the friendly warmth of winter solstice as the banks of the Niger slowly passed. Once again, as on the Gambia, I was able to relax, sitting still, yet moving with the boat, the water, and the river banks. How wonderful to be away from work and all that came with it. I would leave the world behind except for this magic wand of water that stretched across the Sahara.

  I would not think of Jack. So what if he was spooning with the lovely Lori with her tiny feet (mine were a size nine) for the next six weeks. I would not think of the outside world. Forget that, over the past few months, the government of El Salvador (backed by the U.S.) had used toxic gas against rebels and civilians, and the apartheid government of South Africa (backed by the U.S.) had invaded Angola. Never mind that the U.S. government had just broadened the power of the CIA to spy on American citizens and had managed to rack up a record deficit.

  Never mind that I’d been the Wicked Witch of the West for the past two months, peevish, jealous, and off-track, with no idea where I’d go when my contract ran out.

  At that moment, the river had found me. All I wanted was to watch the sand dunes flow down to touch the waters of the Niger. The population of my world was a motley group of WTs (World Travelers) that included our two Green Berets roommates, a French couple, two Swiss, a Canadian and a Brit who were volunteers from Sierra Leone, and two fellow Americans from Upper Volta.

  On Christmas Eve, we all gathered in the tiny cafeteria on the second tier, ate macaroni and mystery meat, and shared a bottle of warm wine. Each of us, Swiss, French, and American, shared our holiday traditions.

  My mother had always made Christmas beautiful: butter cookies and coffee cakes, the scent of pine throughout the house, a tree hung with silver tinsel and lights. Santa Claus always brought presents no matter how old we were. Wreathes hung on mantles and mistletoe over the doors. A small wooden shelter with the figures of Mary, Joseph, the three kings, shepherds, the Baby Jesus, and an angel held a place of honor. In Idaho, Christmas was clumps of snowflakes that fell with quiet determination until snow banks covered the fields like so many dunes on a white desert. Winter holidays were ice skating in the park with games of Red Rover and Crack the Whip, sledding, building snowmen, and snowball fights with the entire neighborhood. Recollections of Christmas as a child would be gifts under my memory tree for the rest of my life.

  Up on the top deck, wrapped against the cold in Mali blankets woven from camel hair, we talked of home and watched the stars. My memories warmed me, but I did not miss home. The last time I was home for Christmas, I had realized that the magic I had known as a child would not be mine again until I had my own home and my own family. So, for that Christmas, I was content to be on a boat, on a river, in the Heart of Africa.

  Around midnight, the boat stopped at the tiny port town of Rarhous. Even at that late hour, the quay was busy with crowds of people. The village flickered with the flames of kerosene lamps and cook fires. Wood smoke and desert air blended into an incense found nowhere else but
the Sahara.

  We stood in a group on the top of the riverboat. Like the angels that called to the shepherds, we sang Christmas carols in French and English to the crowds of people on shore. Instead of a heavenly host in white gowns and wings, we were a scruffy crew in blankets of red, yellow, and green. Above our heads, the white fire of the Milky Way was our only halo. But our voices, strong and harmonious in the night, must surely have sounded as though angels themselves had descended from the heavens.

  The crowd quieted. Though as Moslems the people of this village did not believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, they held him in high esteem as a great prophet of al-Lah, the one God. We all, Moslem, Christian, agnostic, and atheist, bid him Happy Birthday.

  Christmas day, we arrived at the entrance to a shallow canal that led to the port town of Kabara. We hired a pirogue to take us to Kabara, where we chartered a taxi.

  On a golden afternoon, we entered Timbuktu, a city of sand streets and mud buildings. Carved wooden and silver-plated doors lined narrow alleyways, closing off gardens and courtyards we could only imagine. And that smell again, the same I had tasted in Mopti—smoke, tanned leather, and spice—the rich perfume of history.

  Timbuktu: a magical name I had heard since childhood; a name that meant the farthest place anyone could go. Typical goods of an African market filled the marché—bolts of cloth, dried figs, nuts, mounds of ground spices, henna leaves, and cans of mackerel and green olives. But it also contained treasures: brass and silver bracelets, small brass coffee pots with silver coins on the lids, and brass plates embossed with design. All reminiscent of the ancient meeting point where caravan routes crisscrossed the Sahara, where trade, art, and music thrived when Europe was in its darkest age.

  We wondered around the worn walls of three mosques built in the 14th and 15th centuries after Moslem invaders penetrated the Great Sahara and set up centers of scholastic learning in Timbuktu. It had been a magical place for hundreds of years.

  High walls banked the narrow streets near the house where René Caillé had lived for two weeks in 1828, the first European to visit Timbuktu and live to tell about it. Gramont wrote of René Caillé in The Strong Brown God:

  This uneducated son of a Breton baker, traveled entirely on his own, without backing from either the government or any private association, and without any scientific purpose. He was an example of the pure traveler one sees in great numbers in Africa today, disaffected young people of modest means who find any kind of aim or ambition spurious, and who stay on the move for the sheer sensation of movement.

  Monsieur Gramont, a graduate of Yale, head of the New York Times Herald Tribune Rome bureau, and a man of more than modest means, obviously did not appreciate nor approve of WT’s such as ourselves. We were not soldiers, government paid explorers, or even, at that moment, aid workers. We were just travelers, sharing wine, stories, and friendship with one another, putting one foot in front of the other for the pure love of freedom and discovery. Poor Monsieur Gramont, he just didn’t get it.

  As we flowed east with the river, the land changed to tree and brush studded dunes that dipped down to the water. A cold Harmatton wind blew, but the sun warmed our bones. We reached Gao, 400 miles down river, on December 27th, just in time to miss our flight back to Mopti.

  A week later, after an uneventful return to Mopti, New Year’s Eve in Bamako, a visit to Ségou, and a taxi back to Bobo where two of our bags disappeared as we boarded the train, we arrived back in Kate’s house in Ouaga. We slept for two days.

  In the comfort of a real bed, I dreamed of the river and the night I had changed from a witch into an angel.

  Chapter 24

  A Bucketful of Nothing

  February/Rabi Al-Awwal

  The land below lay like a beige blanket thrown over a giant bed—a wrinkle here, a fold there. I rested my head against the plane window and gazed out at the monochrome scene. The green from October’s short rainy season had already burned away to brown. Below the plane, clouds of sand roiled over the land, pushed along by the cold hands of Harmatton. I had been away from Dori for over a month.

  After my return from Mali, Adiza, Nassuru, and Fati had met me in Ouaga for an appropriate technology conference on smokeless mud stoves. Adiza had left her baby with her family for the week she’d be in Ouaga. Fati had brought her baby girl, breast-feeding on demand. We all stayed in the Ouaga staff house where Adiza’s radio and Nassuru and Fati’s constant bickering nearly sent me over the edge. Djelal and Hamidou arrived, and we all traveled to Fada N’Gorma, a town in the southeast, to study the projects of Partnership for Productivity. PFP was ahead of most other agencies with regards to co-ops and income generating projects. After three days visiting village stores and artisan co-ops, and three nights on floor mats at a local guesthouse, we were ready to return to the comforts of the Ouaga staff house.

  Three village elders from Gangaol had come to the Ouaga office the next day to borrow money for a motorized grain mill. They would repay the loan with profits from their new business—grinding grain for the village women. Nassuru and I had spent the previous afternoon with the elders, shopping for their new mill.

  Now, somewhere out the plane window, far below, lay the road from Ouaga to Dori where Hamidou drove Nassuru, Djelal, and the three elders home with the steel framed grain mill and a slightly used motor in the back of the truck. Adiza, Fati, and I had opted to fly up with Luanne, who had just returned from the States with her month-old baby girl.

  The reverberating hum of the Fokker’s twin-engines numbed my brain. I had hoped my vacation on the river would reenergize me for the last leg of my time in Dori. But, looking out the window at the dead earth, I was exhausted all over again. I had reached stage three burnout. A break of a few weeks just didn’t do it. I needed a few months.

  I tapped my forehead against the window. I had work to do. Tucked in my basket was a letter from Volunteers in Technical Assistance. VITA, a Washington based appropriate technology organization, had heard of my peanut oil press experiment and wrote to ask if I would send them a copy of my report. I had sent a letter, promising to get the report to them ASAP, with a warning that they may not like my conclusions.

  Adiza shifted in the seat next to me. Inside the plane, only seven of the twelve seats had passengers. I was one, Adiza, two, and Luanne and Fati, breast-feeding their babies, took up the two seats behind us. Three seats across the aisle were occupied by a soldier and two men in short-sleeved leisure suits. I peeked over the top of my seat at Luanne and Baby Lisa. Dark circles smudged Luanne’s eyes and the lines that bracketed her mouth had deepened, but the set of her face as she watched her baby nurse held a gentleness I had never seen on her.

  I turned back to the barren scene outside the window. Jack was scheduled to return in a week. The plane dipped and my stomach followed. As soon as Jack arrived, I planned to tell him our relationship as lovers was over. Friendship, yes. Sex, fini. I had made up my mind on the river. Our idea of loving each other until something better came along had worked fine—until something better had come along. It had just been too painful. I balled my hands into fists and nodded. Yes, that was the way it had to be.

  The whole idea depressed the hell out of me. I laid my head against the headrest and went to sleep.

  Over the next few days, I tried to write the oil press report, but could only sit still long enough to type a couple of lines before getting up to pace the courtyard and the office buildings. Two letters came. One from Tricia saying she was still not pregnant and very depressed. She mentioned coming again in April or May and could we travel together? She asked what my plans were after my contract ran out. I put her letter in a drawer.

  The second letter came from Don in Somalia. He was working hard and hinted at future job openings there. I stared out my window for a minute while my insides did a jitterbug, then got up and danced around the conference room. I wrote him an immediate response, asking about job possibilities come June or July. The hardest part wa
s waiting three days to send the letter on the Friday plane. My first week back in Dori had felt like an eternity.

  Time passed more quickly when we went out to the villages. Gray returned from the States, healthy from the holiday festivities and happy to be back. The Ouaga office called to tell us Jack would not return for another week in order to accompany the VP for programming on her trip to Dori.

  Laya and the kids came every day. Laya cooked, we all ate together, and the kids helped clean up. I didn’t mention Laya coming to the States with me again. Though I loved the idea, I had no clue as to how I could do it, and I didn’t want to give her false hope.

  I visited Guy and Monique. Luc was fussy with the same nasty cold everybody caught during Harmatton. I took him from Monique to bounce on my lap. He planted one of those open mouth baby kisses on my cheek and rubbed his runny nose all over my face. I sighed, content to sit still and chat with Guy and Monique.

  The second week into February, the western horizon swallowed the moon in the early hours of evening, and the deep dark of cold season settled onto everything like a layer of ashes. At night, I read Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction, by the light of kerosene. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain. A man can be as free and happy as he wants to be because there’s nothing to lose and nothing to gain.

  The wind sucked black smoke out the narrow top of the lamp’s glass chimney, and I hunkered down under my sleeping bag.

  The shade of the neem tree dappled across the face of Julie, the VP for programing who had gotten off the plane with Jack a few days before. She was in Dori to do a program evaluation, but we all knew she was there to check out the now not-so-new director. Julie, Jack, Fati, Adiza, and I sat on a mat in the shade of the town tree. I coughed and blew my nose, having caught the Harmatton cold from Luc. Luc’s cold had moved into his chest and brought a low fever.