Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  We went on, leaving the dead to the vultures and leaving me to marvel at what an astonishing man this Musa was. He carried a long stick, for instance, but rarely used it and he certainly had no need of a compass. There would be moments when he would stop, stand very still and listen to the wind, feeling the course of it on his face, and then he would drop to the ground and smell the sand or gravel, after which he would change our direction ever so slightly and later, checking my compass, I would find that unerringly he kept us heading southeast. This in itself saved our lives, as I was to learn later, for if Bakuli and I had continued to the southwest we would have entered the Tanezrouft, one of the most fearsome stretches of the Sahara where no water hole existed for almost 200 miles.

  Nor did Musa appear to need much water or food. He carried a guerba laced to the stick across his shoulders, as well as a leather bucket from which he produced kola nuts and a green-colored millet called gem that needed no cooking and could be mixed with a very small amount of water to quench both thirst and hunger. He carried many charms strung on a leather thong around his neck, and a rope, and five Maria Theresa thalers, or dollars. He did not speak much at first, as if the silence of the desert had entered him, but he led us without eyes to the well he called In Attel that was no more than a pinpoint in that vast wasteland. We hid near the well for a day, while a large caravan watered their camels there, and it was while we camped and waited that he began to tell his tales: of the caravan he'd guided to In Salah, from which he was returning; of hunting gazelle and gwanki—antelope—before the sun had stolen his eyes, of licking dew early in the morning from the coarse grass afazo or tashrah when his guerba was empty. He said the finding of the wells was in the hands of Allah but he had been taught by his father, and even without sight he knew the desert like the back of his hand. His greatest fear was that a well might have dried up since he last visited it—and of course there were the djinns, he added, one could hear them calling on many a night.

  After the stop at In Attel we headed due south until the rocks and stones began to thin, and ahead of us loomed a flat, sandy plain. We made camp late that night and when I wrapped myself in my barracan and lay down to sleep the five stars of the Southern Cross shone with polished brilliance, looking almost near enough to reach out and touch. They had become a great comfort to me but someday, I vowed, I would travel toward the Northern Cross, which the Tuareg called Elkelzif, and I would go home.

  At some distance from us I heard Musa stir uneasily in his sleep; he suddenly gave a sharp cry and thrashed about for a moment before he turned silent: Sahara dreams, I thought, closing my eyes, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.

  In the morning Musa lay in the sand cold and still. We stood over him shocked by the look of anguish on his face. Bakuli whispered, "He be dead, Missy, O Yesu, he be dead."

  "But how?" I cried. "He mustn't be dead, Bakuli, what can have happened to—"

  I stopped because Bakuli had taken a step back in horror, pointing. "Look," he gasped, and then I saw it too: the long lazy curve of an S in the sand next to Musa, the one danger that in his blindness Musa couldn't see. Keeping my distance, I reached for his outflung arm and dragged him from the hollow in which he'd slept and now it was my turn to recoil: Musa had made his bed on a nest of vipers. The shapes of half a dozen of them lay coiled just below the surface of the sand, stirring and wriggling now as they sensed our presence.

  "Oh God," I whispered, remembering his one sharp cry in the night. He must have been deeply asleep when the first viper stung him, its poison not quite enough to kill, perhaps, but as he struggled toward consciousness the others had surfaced to bury their fangs in his flesh and to do their terrible work. He'd not had a chance. Just that one cry before the flood of venom halted his life.

  And we had lost our guide.

  To bury him was impossible, for we lacked both tools and stamina, and so we returned him to the hollow that he'd scooped out for sleep and in which he'd met his death. To wish him a good journey Bakuli said in Hausa, "Sanu da tafiya, " and then, gravely, "iyaka ya hare "—the end; it is finished.

  Following this we had nothing to do but take stock of our own future, which had suddenly become even more precarious. We had Musa's gero, his Maria Theresa thalers and the silver Hand of Fatima, but none of these held any value at all in the desert when we had water for only two days at the most. No flags or cairns marked the wells of the Sahara, they were often only holes dug in the sand, and the knowledge of where they might exist had died with Musa. Wearily we slung the guerbas over the donkey's back and set out to the south again toward the sandy plain ahead, wondering just how long we might outlive poor Musa.

  Book 2

  11

  There is a pale sun shining in London today, and Deborah has interrupted my writing of these pages with one of her whirlwind visits of inspection. She arrives every few days to be sure that Bertram and Minna are not taking advantage of me, that mantels have been dusted, the furniture polished, my diet obeyed and my health still reasonably sound.

  "Minna hasn't dusted your books lately," she says, running her fingers over them.

  "Minna and Bertram are growing old," I tell her, "and a little dust never hurt anyone."

  When she sees the bouquet of roses on my desk her lips, as usual, tighten in exasperation. Since the greenhouse in the garden was closed four years ago I order flowers from a florist, but she is remembering that until our gardener died it was he who brought roses to me each morning, a ritual that I still mourn and have insisted upon continuing. Deborah always accused me of being too familiar with John, constantly reminding me that it was not good form to be friendly with a gardener, and a one-eyed gardener at that, with a patch over his eye, but what she was really saying all those years was that she resented John, and when I chided her for her snobbery I was really saying, Beware, don't trespass. ... I find Deborah an interesting combination of environment and heredity, and proof of how perverse genes can be, for I meet in her all of Mum's ambitiousness in a more sophisticated form, and this is heredity, but from Linton, whom she believes to be her father, she has acquired a certain coldness and all of his fastidiousness, and this is the effect of environment, let scientists make of this what they may. When Deborah was still very young, for instance, I knew that she would never marry purely for love—Linton had taught her too well the values of a title, money and position—and I was right, I think, for certainly her marriage proved a chilly and ill-fated match.

  I feel a deep compassion for my daughter: her son died young and she was nearly forty when Sara was miraculously born—lovely, ardent Sara—except that Deborah has seemed determined ever since to not release her, seeing in her all the color and laughter she's missed. But if I feel compassion for my daughter it's kinship I feel with my granddaughter Sara. She has much of me and of Deborah's father in her, so that it never surprised me that she loved the stories our gardener told her by the hour when she was a child. She would have delighted in Grams, too; it is even possible that she would have felt at home in Laski's Carnival.

  I collect such ironies now, it's the only form of humor that pleases me. I find it ironic, for instance, that my travels began with Jacob, who had studied many languages, whereas I, who knew only one language, would eventually make myself understood in half a dozen. Should I call this his legacy to me? How many times I used to speculate on what my life would have been if I'd never met him, only to find myself leaning heavily on tiresome what-if's, such as what if I'd never been sent to Boston, or had not been so young when I met him; what if he'd never proposed marriage, or had already been married or, failing these, what if he'd chosen another country, another desert or had never spent an evening in Algiers talking with a French White Father from Ghadames. The strings that bind us to our fates go too far back in time to untangle, and what I am left with in the end is a mosaic with each of its pieces cemented unalterably together, incapable of separation or removal.

  But the brightest of the tiles in the mosaic is Ja
red, whom I will love to the end of my life, and there is Amina and the strange circumstances that taught me Mind Magic .., and always there is Bakuli.

  We came very near to losing our lives, Bakuli and I, but the worst of times came after Musa died. Two days following his death we had to abandon the donkey, and rather than leave him alive for the vultures, Bakuli, tight-lipped, slit his throat, and from drinking his blood we gained another night of travel. By sunset of the next day, however, we had finished our last drop of water and although we walked all night across the moonlit sand we met with no water hole—the gods were not smiling—and after the moon set the sun rose to gild the sky and then to torture us. There was no shade, not so much as a shrub or stone in this sandy waste, and the hot dust clogged our nostrils, eyes and lips. Once, long ago in Tripoli, Mohammad had described how people die of thirst, how the body, demanding water, begins to steal it from tissue and fat, the blood slowly thickening until it can no longer cool the body, and as it congeals the temperature soars and it all ends in delirium and death. He had failed to mention the stomach cramps, or the raw parched throat and the tongue so swollen that speech becomes impossible. Our strength dwindled quickly; when Bakuli stumbled and fell I would help him up, we would stagger a short distance and then it would be I who stumbled and fell, and Bakuli who helped me to my feet. It was noon when we gave up and lay down to die, no longer caring except that one last flicker of feeling moved me to reach out and cover Bakuli's eyes, remembering the vultures.

  Our savior in no way resembled a heavenly angel, he was an Arab merchant traveling alone with a string of pack-donkeys piled high with trading goods, and he smelled of goat. Opening sand-encrusted eyes I saw a dark bearded face close to mine and realized that a hand was pressing the nape of my neck and lifting my head to give me water. It was a mirage, I knew this, but obediently I parted my lips, which he brushed with a few drops of water and then, holding me firm, placed a cup to my lips. I choked as water met my swollen tongue, gagged and gasped and swallowed painfully. Not a mirage, then, I had died and this was heaven. I lay back, dazed, and watched him move to Bakuli and give water to him, too. Glancing beyond him I saw the same unchanging sands, the sky still bleached white, and hope stirred: it was possible that I was not dead, it was possible that in this huge desert so empty of living human beings we had been miraculously seen by another living human being.

  A donkey brayed, and then another: my glance swerved until I saw their beautiful, funny heads and I loved each one of them and smiled a little in spite of the pain of cracked and swollen lips. When the man returned to give more water I struggled to sit up but he gave me only a little. "La," he said sternly, withdrawing the cup, and returned to Bakuli. I loved this man as well as his donkeys but at that moment, seeing Bakuli lift his head, I most of all loved Bakuli; even then, only half-conscious, I knew I was being taught something new and important by this odd little Jesus-boy, but I was too weak to think what it might be.

  Once we could stand—we could not speak yet—the man carried each of us to a donkey, and with ropes tied us to the bales of trading goods so that we'd not fall. He was a knowing man: before setting out he gave us each a wet rag to suck on, and twice stopped to give us more water. I was feverish and ill and noticed little until sunset-time when we crossed a broad dry riverbed and I glanced up to see that the sky that had nearly killed us at noon was ablaze now with tender shades of gold, cream and plum. At dusk we passed an acacia tree, and beside it a thatched hut with posts of wood carved with intricate figures. Beyond this, before darkness dropped like a curtain, I could see the brushwood fences of a settlement rising out of the earth. It was to this cluster of huts that our good Arab was delivering us, calling over his shoulder to say that here lived a woman named Amina who would make us well again.

  We rode through a gap in the high brushwood fence and into a cleared space of beaten-down earth where a fire burned in the darkness like a lamp, with dim shadows surrounding it. Our entrance was accompanied by a roar of thunder and the sky suddenly blazed with lightning that illuminated dark faces turned toward us in surprise. Even Laski's Carnival couldn't have arranged a more dramatic entrance, and to top it off the sky opened up and we were deluged with rain. Blessed rain! There were joyous shouts of "Ruwa! Ruwa!" We had brought with us a storm, it seemed, but I had no idea what this meant for them or for us because upon being lifted down from the donkey I fell to the ground in a deep faint, to wander in and out of consciousness for the next few days.

  Yet I was aware ...

  There was a woman who fussed over me like Grams except that her face was black, with a thin taut mouth and watchful bright eyes. Her voice was sharp when she forced bitter liquids down my throat, but it was she who was always there, others came to look at me and once—but this was surely a dream?—I heard the flutter of wings and a chicken squawk in outrage, and opening my eyes I swear I saw her slit a chicken's throat while five women crouched in a circle, pointing, talking and glancing toward me. Once I heard drums beating and I was frightened, thinking myself back among the Tuareg; on another occasion, waking, the hut was illuminated by great flashes of lightning, followed by thunder, or did I confuse this with the sound of drums? When it was dark there was a lantern and the smell of peanut oil and shadows that leaped up and down the thatch overhead; by day the smells were of a strange incense, hot earth, spice and dung, and always there was the beehive murmur of voices outside. I drifted in and out of sleep, utterly depleted, feeling a hundred years old and tired beyond words. I had no idea where I was but I felt safe, which struck me as funny in my lucid moments because I could have fallen into the hands of cannibals for all I knew. It was my spirit that was tired, I told myself, and this word struck me as funny, too, because I remembered how Bakuli had talked of spirits in trees and rocks, and hadn't I imagined a spirit when we'd spent the night in that hill of rocks near Abalessa? Bakuli had been with me then, and Bakuli had been in the desert with me, too, but where was he now?

  I opened my eyes the next morning to find him standing over me, and being still very weak, I came near to sobbing with relief at sight of him. When last seen, his face had been a mottled gray, and shrunken, but now he looked restored, his cheeks round again, his smile radiant. "Missy," he said. "Oh, Missy, you be well, please."

  I nodded, smiling. "Yes—better now. Oh Bakuli!"

  "Amina make good medicine," he said, and went away.

  The next time I woke the shadows were long, and the little sparrow of a woman was seated in the center of the hut mixing something in a calabash with a long wooden spoon. "Amina?" I whispered.

  She turned, all smiles. "Sanu! Sanu!" she cried in delight.

  Wild with hope I asked, "Do you—by chance—speak any Arabic? Any English?"

  "Sanu da gajia, " she responded, her eyes bright. "Sanu, sanu, " and pouring water from a clay jug she brought it to me saying, "Ruwa, bako."

  Obviously she did not speak Arabic or English and this reminded me that I must have been sick for days and that it was time to end my convalescence and discover what lay outside, and find Bakuli who might explain where we were. Hastening my resolution even more was the realization that, perversely, and much to my surprise, I was missing the stars and great space of the desert, for lying on my back and looking upward my eyes bumped hard against a low ceiling of thatch. This so irritated and angered me that I wanted to tear aside the roof to see the sky.

  The next morning, being alone, I rose and limped to the door and looked out to see more thatched walls encircling me. These people do not like space, I thought, for Amina's hut was one of many inside a crowded compound. I saw five goats, I saw a bare-breasted woman pounding grain on a stone, I counted four children chasing the goats and nine thatched-roofed huts, the center one the largest. My eyes moved to the sky, the great encompassing sky that for a year or more had pleased, awed, nurtured, guided, tranquilized and nearly killed me, and it was at this moment that I understood how the silence and space of the desert enters the soul, nev
er to be exorcised.

  Standing there thinking of this I saw Bakuli enter the compound and walk toward me, his face surprised and glad to see me standing. "You be up, Missy!" he exclaimed, and to the woman pounding grain he said quite grandly, "Sanu du rana. "

  With the crossness of a convalescent I said, "Bakuli, you're showing off, what language now?"

  He grinned. "Hausa, Missy."

  "And you're wearing a new shirt?"

  "Musa's silver Maria Theresa dollar. You not be angry?"

  "No. Poor Musa," I said. He, too, had been Hausa and now I determined to find out where we were, and with whom, and I asked.

  Piecing together what Bakuli told me I learned that we were in a small Hausa-speaking village, called a gari, that had taken root in a belt of green at the fringe of the desert. It was thorn country laced with dried-up oueds that filled with water in the rainy season, and except in prolonged droughts there was underground water to be tapped for wells, so that the village goats and sheep not only had ample pasturage but I would see later that beyond the thatched walls there were fields of ripening guinea corn.