Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  I decided in a panic that it was time for that youthful optimism after all, no matter how treacherous. I had a compass now and someday there would simply have to come a way to escape; it was either that or spend the rest of my life wearing a bathrobe and washing my hair in camel's urine.

  I watched Bakuli's hasty retreat, his dark legs flashing.

  his nails kicking up clouds of dust. He looked very small beside the camel he was about to lead, and very small to burst with such enthusiasm over his papa-God and Jesus but I wondered at his not seeing what a hard and luckless life his God had given him.

  It took us five frigid nights and six scorching days to cross the Ajjer. When we stopped for a day to water the camels at a well they called Zaoatallez, it was to look across a desolate, sun-baked plain to a pale frieze of mountains that punctured the sky with sinister peaks and towers.

  "What are they?" 1 asked Bakuli, pointing.

  'Tassili Hoggar," he told me.

  The Hoggar Mountains ... I remembered that to these people the Hoggar was home, and therefore would have to be home to me, too. It did not look a hospitable place, not even softened by distance.

  9

  I was to live in the Hoggar mountains with the Tuareg for a length of time that I could only guess to be six or seven months. There were neither calendars nor clocks for telling time, nor familiar seasons to judge it by, except that by desert time the dry season was nearly upon us when everything would soon turn brown and sapless and the men move the animals north to pasturage.

  The Hoggar was a wild place, a true witch's lair with its tortured rocks and black volcanic peaks—black like mourning, like widows weeds, like hell, or so 1 thought at first, although later we camped more sensibly (but only briefly) in a valley where patches of alwat had not yet withered, and my eyes drank in color as thirstily as water, which there was not much of either in the dry season. Still, as I learned more words of their language, I understood the Hoggar to be like a fortress for these people, and this I could certainly believe. But I never stopped feeling dwarfed by the towers of stone around me, no matter how grateful for their shade, nor cease being startled by the explosive shattering of rocks as the temperatures sharply dropped at night and rose again in the day.

  If I was to survive and remain sane the adjustments needed were unending and I had to lean heavily on Marcus Aurelius. Over and over I muttered, How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything that happens in life, how ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything that happens in life, but the sorest loss was my hair.

  I could tolerate the fleas that lodged in my barracan but the lice in my hair were a constant torment and not even camels urine discouraged them for long. Seeing me scratch my head until I drew blood Bakuli urged me to have it shaved.

  The enaden, it seemed, were also barbers.

  Thus I was taken to his master Bukush and my head shaved, for which service I paid with my abundance of hair, which must have made a fine pillow when sewn into leather skins. It scarcely altered my appearance since I could wear a headscarf, as all the women did, but its loss affronted my vanity. Still, this was assuaged by the crusts on my scalp healing and by the absence of lice, so that my period of mourning was brief.

  There were small groups of the Tuareg living all through the valleys of the Hoggar, and the enaden, or blacksmiths— Bakuli among them—frequently moved their tents to another camp to work but mercifully they always returned. Once in a while our camp was visited by neighbors for what was called an ahlah, and at such times I found myself eyed covetously by the young men and again feared my future. There were no mirrors but I could see from my hands and arms that my skin was a deepening brown and not so different from Marsaya's, but she kept a strict watch over me, and apparently it was explained to them that 1 was not a Targuia, and that they had yet to learn whether I was a danger to them.

  It was Bakuli who told me of this. From speaking English with me he had begun expanding his sentences more confidently, which was ironic because as his sentences grew longer mine had grown shorter to accommodate him until I was flinging away adjectives and adverbs and reducing my speech to nouns and verbs. What he had to tell me, however, was all too clearly expressed.

  Very solemnly he explained that of course I possessed magic, the Tuareg knew this because I had two wooden fingers with faces, but if it turned out that I practiced bad magic they would abandon me to the desert or simply kill me in an unpleasant ritual way.

  I protested this vigorously. "They wouldn't do that," I told him. "I've been with them for months and they've grown used to me, haven't they? And Marsaya is kind to me!"

  His glance was almost pitying. "Tuareg have words, 'It be wise to kiss hand thou dare not cut off.' "

  This was scarcely comforting.

  On the other hand, he continued, if I turned out to have good magic they would ask of me spells and amulets and charms and my presence would protect them. All was well now but he worried about me, he said, because if anything bad happened in the camp—if someone grew sick or died—they would know I caused it.

  "How on earth could they blame me?" I cried.

  He looked at me in astonishment. Although he began a garbled reply he was obviously surprised that I didn't understand why of course I would be blamed. From his tangled explanation I could only piece together the fact that I was tolerated but suspect. They were waiting.

  He added dolefully, "And soon my peoples go."

  "Go!" I cried in panic.

  He nodded. "Go many places, Missy. Make spears, make saddles, make swords, go. To village next, far north—" He pointed. "Where there be alwat and tamat to feed goats."

  My heart sank in dismay. "Oh, Bakuli!" Until this moment I felt I'd become relatively stable and was doing very well, not resigned but at least accepting the sameness of a life that once would have appalled me, still carrying anger at my fate but no longer hating the Tuareg for what Reason told me was Jacob's doing. But to lose Bakuli! This was too cruel and it hit me hard.

  He nodded, saying, "Bakuli too big to cry, Bakuli's heart cries for him."

  "When?" I stammered. "W-when do you go?"

  He shrugged and sighed. "Work grow very small now."

  He gave me a quick unhappy glance. "Bakuli ask Master if thou come, too. Missy, but he very angry and beat me. Thou be useless, he said, but still eat food and there be not enough."

  For this there were no words of Marcus Aurelius to comfort me, for I had never met the man, but Bakuli I had met and he was real and he was my friend. I felt like dying. This was bad but there was worse to come.... The next week it rained, the first rain since the Year of the Lost Caravan, they said, and although rain was a miracle in the Sahara, the Tuareg were ill-prepared for it. Water streamed down from the mountain peaks in torrents, tents collapsed, cooking fires suffocated, food was scarce, there was no way to keep dry and everyone shivered with cold. When the rains ended there was a sudden wealth of green springing up from what had once been rock and sand, but it was now that Sebeki grew sick. Very sick. The little boy had been listless for days, puzzling both Fadessa and Marsaya, but two nights before the enaden were to leave—they were already packing—there came high fever, vomiting and chills. I wondered if a scorpion or viper had bitten Sebeki during the rains, or if it could be typhoid, but Bakuli shook his head, it was tenedee, malaria, he said. Not good, not good.

  Old women huddled around the child, medicines were brewed on the fire, the ancient Marabout appeared in camp again bringing fresh amulets and charms to hang around Sebeki's neck. Remembering what Bakuli had told me I huddled in a comer of the tent and tried to make myself invisible. Toward sunset of the next day the poor boy had a convulsion and I crept out to find Bakuli, hoping he might give me needed reassurance before he left for the north with the enaden, but he was nowhere to be found. When I asked at his tent I was given sour and angry glances.

  "Bakuli?" said an old woman, and she burst into a tirade about him, and spat. Obviously he was
late in returning with the goats from pasture and would be badly beaten for this. They were to leave during the night and I wouldn't even be able to say good-bye to him, which induced even more panic and misery.

  I walked back to Marsaya's tent but it was so crowded with people I retreated. Since the sun was near to setting, I walked some distance from the camp, and finding a sandy patch in the lee of a boulder I scooped out a hollow for sleep. I had scarcely lain down when I heard a sssst from behind the rock.

  It was Bakuli. "Missy, come," he called urgently.

  I was so glad to hear his voice that I flew at once to the rear of the boulder where he crouched, but, "No speak, Missy," he whispered. "Come."

  He grasped my hand and I joined him without question, having not the slightest idea of where he wished us to go or why he was going anywhere. He wanted to show me something, I thought, or to find a more distant place to say good-bye, but in any case it was a relief to remove myself from the tent where Sebeki was so ill, and certainly I had wanted desperately to see Bakuli before he went away.

  And yet ... "Bakuli," I said at last, "we go far from the camp and your people leave soon, and where are we going?"

  The moon was just rising over the Atakor, the high volcanic plateau that dominated the Hoggar to the east of us, and I could see Bakuli dimly now, and see that we were entering a canyon whose silence and shadows made me shiver. A jackal screamed somewhere in the cliffs beside us, turning the silence even deeper when his cry died away.

  "Bakuli!" I said again uneasily.

  He dropped my hand to face me. "Missy," he said anxiously, "Sebeki wear death on his face, he go to die."

  "Don't say that!" I told him sharply.

  "Missy," he began again, "thou know it. Bakuli afraid, Bakuli not want you die, too. You say once escape—"

  "Escape!" I blurted out.

  "Yes, Missy. Once Bakuli say escape NO. Now Jesus-boy say yes." He added in an anguished voice, "My heart full of pain to say bye. Missy."

  "But Bakuli—the desert," I gasped, for I knew more now of hungry dry seasons in the desert, of dried-up wells and thirst, marauding tribes and jackals. What could he mean, how could we ever escape, and to what?

  He said gravely, "This desert be kinder from rain. Missy. My peoples go north in night—" He pointed to the moon slowly rising in the sky. "Thy peoples think you go north, too. Bakuli and thou go south."

  "But water, Bakuli, we have no water. Or food, or—"

  His teeth flashed white in his black face. "Ahhhhh," he nearly sang at me joyously, "Bakuli learn mountains now and think big thoughts, I hide guerbas—" He held up two fingers. "Big rope, knife—salt—dates, and Missy—a donkey!"

  I was staggered by this news, I would have sat down and cried if I gave in to what I felt at that moment: he was offering escape, had even planned escape like a gift to please me. More, he was offering me choice.

  But a choice between two deaths, I realized soberly, for neither of us knew the wells of the desert, and a compass, two guerbas of water and a donkey would come to nothing if we found no more water in that vast and scorching wasteland. It was true the Tuareg would not expect me to flee south, but to go south was to move deeper into the desert and I had already seen the bones of camels and men on our way to the Hoggar, dead of thirst and miscalculation.

  That was one death. If I went back to the Tuareg camp, what then? I knew that as Sebeki had grown sicker there had been murmurs about me and speculative glances sent in my direction. They would test me first, I reasoned. When all the charms and medicines failed and they were desperate for Sebeki's life they would dare taboo and give me the boy to hold, watching closely to see what magic I possessed that would heal him. They would learn then that I had no magic at all to cure Sebeki and was as helpless as they, and suddenly everything would change, for if I had no good magic then the wooden fingers that had spared my life had to mean bad magic, and—as Bakuli had explained to me—it would be thought that I must be the cause of the boy's illness.

  Revenge among the Tuareg, Bakuli had said, was a very terrible thing, and he had shuddered. I'd not asked what he meant. His shudder had told me more than I cared to know.

  All this passed through my mind in only a minute. My thoughts completed, I grasped Bakuli's hand and squeezed it, for to die with a friend was kinder than to die among enemies. Perhaps also I was awed by his lovingness and caring. "You are a real Jesus-boy," was all I could think to say. "We go, Bakuli."

  We climbed up and down and slipped and slid all during the long cold night. Sometimes, from a cliff, I would look down into a valley and see the fires of other Tuareg camps below us and then we would move on. The moon rose higher and whatever it touched it turned as white as if snow had fallen. I could see that we followed a narrow path in and around and past great rocks, but in general we appeared to be moving always downward to reach the encircling desert below.

  It was nearly dawn when we descended to the last plateau and saw the silvery desert ahead, with needle-sharp rock spires rising out of the sand. Bakuli turned back among the boulders and I saw that he'd tethered the donkey in a cave, and with it the guerbas and the small sack of food. I did not ask how many secret trips he'd made to provide for us; I was torn between gratitude and foreboding.

  "Go now, Missy," he said firmly. "Before sun big."

  Before anyone looked for us, too, he might have added. Tired as I was I nodded, and once the bulging waterskins were loaded on the donkey we set out walking across the gravelly sands to meet whatever fate the gods cared to measure out to us.

  Since we had walked and climbed all night to escape to the far reaches of the Hoggar we were not in the best shape to approach what lay ahead. The rocky foothills had dropped away to a treeless plain, utterly flat except for hills of gravel that rose sharply out of the reg, as if a broom had swept the earth bare and deposited debris and dust in huge tidy piles. Now we veered from west to southwest, walking still in the shadow of the Hoggar, for the sun's rise was hidden in the east behind its citadel walls. In this pale light the air was fresh and cool and we walked at a good pace beside the donkey, Bakuli and I grinning at each other from time to time at this taste of freedom and almost capable of forgetting that we were entering what the Arabs called the Bahr belà mà, or "sea without water," and what the Tuareg called the "Country of Dread."

  Soon enough we knew it, though, for the sun cleared the peaks of the Hoggar and found us, two minute figures trudging hour by hour across the desert with a donkey plodding along behind us. The heat of this day was nearly overpowering, sucking everything dry, and the sun so scorching to the earth that it burned and blistered my feet and radiated heat back into our faces. We rested at midday, but even to find a rock large enough to shade us brought no coolness, and we had to drink sparingly of our water just when we yearned for it most.

  It was now that I rued my unexercised life in the Tuareg camp, for while I had plaited mats and only fitfully wandered, Bakuli had been carrying water, learning to bend iron and herding goats; his muscles were strong. With envy I watched him stride ahead in his ragged shirt, the square of cloth below it pulled up into a knot around his waist, his knees mere bony knobs in his sticklike legs, his bare feet blistering but his head high and well-wrapped in a faded blue cloth. My own clothes were scarcely better, my barracan torn and bleached, the nails on my feet flapping loose in need of mending; it was embarrassing to stumble along behind Bakuli and not stride as he did. We seldom spoke; our throats were thick with dust and sand, and after enduring the heat of the day it was necessary to brace ourselves for the cold of the night, when I shared my barracan with Bakuli and we shivered together until sleep arrived, with only the donkey contented for he would find stubbles of grass on which to feed. On one of these nights the moon shining in my eyes woke me from a dream to find the desert all shadow and silver. In my dream I had been seated on a merry-go-round horse at Laski's carnival but something had gone horribly wrong and the merry-go-round was spinning faster and faste
r until I grew dizzy and frightened, and then—but when I opened my eyes I couldn't remember how it ended except that it left its mark on me and I thought. We could pass half a mile from a well and never know it, we're surely going to die of thirst.

  I'd not realized that I spoke the words aloud until Bakuli said hoarsely, "Missy, I have prayed to the good Ycsu and I am Jesus-boy. No fear."

  It was difficult to share in such confidence when my blisters had broken and my feet were a bloody mess. We rose, untied the donkey and walked more miles, the moon illuminating every stone and stick of grass, the sky dazzling with bright pinpoints of stars. When the moon sank to the horizon we stopped to rest again, but each fitful sleep brought new dreams: of Grams, Mum, Umar, Jacob, and once, waking, I was certain I saw a shadow move and vanish. I remembered what Bakuli had said about spirits; I was in Africa now, not Boston, and I wondered if it had been a jackal or a djinn.