Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  He looked at me pityingly. It was not what had been buried, he said, or what herbs had been used, it was the words spoken over them, the incantations, that gave power. "Hausa word for power be iko" he added. "Some person have much iko here. Amina speak to medicine?"

  I nodded.

  "There—thou see? She call spirits to heal."

  This was too much. By now I had adjusted to the strange occurrences at the hill of rocks near Abalessa; it had become plain to me that I'd been hungry, tired and frightened, which made me easy prey to nightmarish imaginings, and since then I'd learned of Sahara dreams and fevers of the mind, but this ... ! I said peevishly, "Bakuli, all this talk of spirits—show me one, just one that I can see."

  "Missy, what place thou come from?" He shook his head in despair over me. "Thou cut down a tree and it cry. There be rocks to sit on full of sadness and rocks to sit on full of blessings. They not know this in place you come from?"

  "No," I snapped, and might have been drawn into argument again if Shehu had not suddenly appeared to interrupt us.

  "Bako," he said shyly to me, and hesitated. His white cotton robe was dustier than it had been yesterday but his eyes were calm, and I was glad to see him because I had apparently offended everyone else in the village. Glancing furtively around him he sat down beside me and drew from under his robe a sharp knife—this alarmed me, but having placed this on his lap he brought out a small block of wood that had been trimmed and chiseled into the rough shape of my finger puppet. Although it was a very bumpy wooden egg shape there was already the beginning of a hole in it in which to insert a finger.

  I looked at him in surprise, not expecting this.

  He spoke and Bakuli, translating, said, "He asks to see thy magic finger."

  It was the blond Isabelle that I drew from my pocket and held out to him. I watched as he gently grasped it with two long slender fingers, and there was no laughter this time at seeing it, nor was he interested at all in the yellow string curls and black lashes on the girl-face. He gave all of his attention to the smoothness of the surface and to examining the slant and depth of the hole that had been drilled, studying the size and craft of it like a serious scholar.

  Or like an artist.

  Very gravely he returned it to me, nodding, and looking closely into my face he stood up, pointed behind me, smiled and said, "Zô nân. "

  "He wants us to go with him," said Bakuli.

  The village was nearly deserted, for both men and women were in the fields beginning to harvest guinea corn today, and only a few of the very old remained. Shehu led us through his compound and into a hut, at the back of which hung a screen of matting that he pulled aside to reveal a dark anteroom. Beckoning us inside he fumbled with a lantern, lighting it, and as the flame in it grew brighter I saw what the room held and I gasped.

  It was filled with wonderful carved figures with strange primitive faces, two of them taller than Shehu. There was a totemlike pole leaning against one wall with serpents and faces carved on it; there were lovely small fun carvings of life in the village: a man beating a drum, a woman carrying water, a woman weaving, a child playing, all of these last carved or whittled with much humor. But the large figures were awesome.

  "Oh, Shehu," I murmured.

  Bakuli nodded, his eyes huge. "Kai!" he whispered.

  Shehu beamed at us, a wonderful pleasure lighting up his face as he watched us.

  And yet ... "Bakuli," I said, "he hides these? Why are they kept here like a secret?"

  He shrugged sadly. "Like Bakuli's village long ago, Missy, the man who carve wood in village must be son of man who carve wood and forefather be man who carve wood, and this man be Sallisu. And that be that."

  "Waste," I sputtered angrily. "Absolute waste."

  Several days later when I was well enough to join Amina at work in the fields, I would see how hard Shehu worked there, too, this man who had to look and act like every other farmer in his village, obey the customs, obey his father, marry and sire children, put food in their bellies and appease his spirits while all the time there burned in him this great flame of creativeness that had to be hidden.

  There was a hunger in him to learn as well. 'To fill his head," said Bakuli dryly, for Shehu was curious to know what language I spoke. To everyone except Bakuli I was bakn, the stranger of a different color and habits, and even worse a mere woman and tolerated only because of Bakuli and my healing of Shehu. But to Shehu, for all these reasons, I was of vast interest. He was not afraid to speak with me in this village where women were regarded of little importance. Holding up a stone he would say, "Dütsé. "

  Repeating this carefully I would nod and say, "Stone."

  "Stoon?"

  "Stone"

  "Stone." He would touch the gnarled acacia tree and say, "Itàcë. "

  I would imitate the throaty sound he made and say, "Tree."

  'Tree." This one made him laugh.

  And later, "Tashl"

  I would grin and stand up.

  "Zaunà. " I would sit.

  "Nine, " he'd say, and point to himself.

  "Nice, " I'd counter, pointing at myself. "It's me."

  "It's me," he would shout joyously.

  I began thus to acquire more Hausa words. They were not Muslim here. When I could understand more of their language, Amina told me that long ago they had fled from the East to preserve their ancient beliefs, led by a wise oracle named Fagaci who had foreseen tribal wars, the coming of white men and the worship of an alien prophet. It was Fagaci's spirit that guarded their village now, and every year they made sacrifices to him. Tactfully I did not ask at what shrines they honored him; by now I'd learned there were other shrines, in particular an acacia tree that was very old and taller than any of the others that were scattered through the village, but the most sacred was the shrine that I'd inadvertently slept inside.

  There would be more offerings and sacrifices once the harvesting was finished, Bakuli told me, and there would be dancing and kadë-kadë. "Kadë what?" I asked suspiciously.

  "Beating of drums, Missy."

  I would have to brace myself for that, but there was no drumming or dancing in the evenings yet, not after long hours of work in the sun. There was only Isa squatting under the acacia tree with his divining board, and someone asking questions of it while Isa tossed cowrie shells across the board in a complicated procedure that would produce an answer. To Isa I was invisible, however; he would not acknowledge my presence, as if he knew me to be a fraud when I healed Shchu.

  This was my life, then, as well as the work in the fields and the harvest that was being gathered before the season of the harmattan began, which here they called the hüntü-rü, and what I assumed was known in Tripoli as the gib-leh, and certainly it should have been a fine harvest this year. With the exception of the short dry spell they called fari, which had ended with our arrival, the rains had fallen at almost precisely the right times for germination and growth, but tragedy struck when only half of the fields had been harvested.

  The locusts came.

  They arrived from the south, darkening the sky until it was like twilight; they descended on those fields that were still golden with ripe guinea corn and they devoured them row by row. The villagers mounted an attack. Drums were beaten, sticks and clubs thrashed away, but all that was left by night were great heaps of dead locusts that crunched under the feet. All during that night by the light of torches the dead grasshoppers were collected in sacks to dry, because with half of the harvest gone this, too, was food to keep away the enemy of hunger.

  There was no celebration and there was no kadë-kadê. What had once seemed a happy village became a somber one now, but what I did not understand just then was the necessity for the village to uncover the cause of this catastrophe. As I would learn later, they believed in a Supreme Being whom they called the Giver of Life and Breath, but apparently their Supreme Being left most of the work to the hierarchy of spirits below it, and whatever technicalities were involved
in their detective work—and Isa's divining board was kept busy—the loss of half their crops implied a punishment to the village. Something was very wrong. A spirit had been offended.

  This led to the bako who had violated their sacred shrine by entering and sleeping in it. Obviously the spirits of the shrine had been angered by this.

  "Who says so?" I demanded of Bakuli.

  "Isa."

  "Isa doesn't like me," I told him. "He didn't like my success with Shehu when he'd failed. He doesn't like a woman and a bako doing that."

  "You sleep in shrine at harvesttime," Bakuli told me reproachfully, and I had to remember that in spite of his being a Jesus-boy, he'd been bred in a village just as cluttered with witch doctors, spirits and medicine men. All this was making him very unhappy, I could see that.

  "I think it's Isa who wants me punished," I said indignantly.

  Bakuli shook his head. "He very fair, Missy, at dawn he make sacrifice at shrine and ask for dream to say what needed."

  "Well," I said angrily, "he can make up any dream he pleases, can't he?" But underlying my anger was a growing fear of helplessness as I realized that my life was suddenly in the hands of a witch doctor, of all people, and a hostile one at that; it was not an agreeable feeling. Bakuli went away looking worried and Amina avoided looking at me. I supposed, rightly, that we were all waiting for Isa to produce his dream.

  By midmorning Isa's dream had been produced—rather quickly, I thought—and Amina began looking at me again, but with compassion. It needed Bakuli to explain the outcome to me: Isa had been advised in his dream to turn this matter over to the spirits of the shrine and to ask for a sign from them as to whether I should be punished or forgiven for the desecration of their sacred home. I was to be taken there and I was to stay at the shrine until—but here Bakuli became vague, mumbling something about a clay bowl and looking depressed. After this Amina further alarmed me by heaping charms in my lap and telling me in words and signs that she would bury more charms in the earth to protect me, but protect me from what was not clear.

  So it was that when the sun was almost noon-high Kadiri, Isa and half the village came for me.

  "Zô, " Isa said, and Bakuli reminded me he meant "come," and Amina said, "Rânkà yà dude, " which Bakuli said was her wish that my life might be prolonged, which was not reassuring, and after this we all streamed in a procession out of the village and across the scrub to the distant solitary acacia tree and the shrine. Once there my uneasiness increased when I saw thin leather ropes brought out. It seemed that I was to be tethered like a goat to one of the posts of the hut, unable to stand or walk and apparently capable of creeping only as far as the hole they were digging several feet away from me, which was dug for what might be called bathroom privileges.

  "Zauna, " said the chief gently.

  I sat down and glared at the two men as they distributed the ropes around me, measuring the slack in them and tying knots. I was shown a clay bowl, not understanding why, and politely looked at it; a drab object with a thin crack on the outside that had not penetrated to the smoother clay inside. The bowl was then placed on the earth some eight or nine feet in front of me.

  "Why there?" I asked. "What's that for?"

  Bakuli, subdued and a little frightened, translated Isa's words for me: it was through the bowl that the spirits of the shrine would speak.

  "How?" I demanded. "You can't be serious!"

  I swear I saw tears in Bakuli's eyes. If the spirits forgave me, he said, the crack in the bowl would open and the bowl would break into pieces. "If they forgive thee," he repeated.

  I gasped, "But that's impossible, I'll be here forever!" Certainly if this was a test it was one I couldn't foresee ever passing; looking at Isa suspiciously I said, "How long must I be tied here, surely there's an end to this?"

  Bakuli spoke haltingly to Isa who said, "Biyu, " and held up two fingers.

  'Two days, Missy," Bakuli said.

  "And nights? This was in his dream?" I asked bitterly. Seeing the look on the witch doctor's face I did not ask what would happen to me when the bowl remained intact, as it must; this question I swallowed since it not only had a bad taste but I refused to give Isa that much satisfaction. He was certainly looking very smug. Conceited, too, I thought, in his dazzling white robes that gave him the look of a black king. Kadiri, on the other hand, who was the chief of the gari, looked precisely what he was, a farmer with a worn kind face that had endured drought and abundance, hard and good times. Isa, I decided, had experienced only power. Or iko, as Bakuli named it.

  As for me, I could see that I had made a powerful enemy. "And when it's dark," I pointed out coldly, "and there are snakes and jackals?"

  Bakuli said uneasily, "He say spirits be with thee. Please, Missy," he begged, reading the thoughts on my face. "Bakuli pray hard to Jesus-God for thee."

  "You will have to pray hard then, Bakuli," 1 told him, "for I know of no way to break a bowl I can't touch."

  Bakuli said with dignity, "I pray hard to spirits of shrine too, Missy."

  Placing a jug of water near me, they all walked back to the village, leaving me alone in this hot bleak landscape, ostracized and abandoned—and abandoned was how I felt, tied to a heathen post in the middle of Africa and all because I'd slept in their blasted shrine and desecrated it. For a little while I cultivated this anger but it had little nourishment when it did nothing to alter my situation, nor did I feel playful enough to bring a finger puppet from my ragged barracan to share my stormy thoughts.

  "Break, darn you," I shouted to the clay bowl. "Break— BREAK!

  I tried throwing pebbles at the bowl and grew quite skillful but the bowl remained impervious to attack. I stared hard at it, ordering it to break. I sprawled out as far as my leash would allow and talked to the bowl, scolding it, shouting to it to break.

  When this grew tiresome I made little hills out of the sand and then little houses. A spider walked across one of my houses and I watched it. "Hello," I told it, "did you know that in Hausa you're called gizo-gizol" He was not impressed and disappeared under the acacia tree. I returned to staring at the bowl, trying hopelessly to make my stare so piercing it might affect it. In the hot and drowsy stillness I began to notice my breathing, and became curious as to how long I could hold my breath. I counted to five and thought this a macabre way to entertain myself, and so I began to recite aloud what I remembered from Marcus Aurelius, then Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam.

  After this, by a glance at the sun, I saw that scarcely an hour had passed.

  In midafternoon a boy I'd never seen before brought me a fresh jug of water, and food. He did not linger or speak; I slept a little, but when I woke nothing had changed, I was still captive and the earth glaringly hot. Just in case there really were spirits at the shrine I addressed them with authority and then plaintively, asking them to forgive me and break the bowl, but nothing happened. I began to study the carvings on the post behind me and then the lacy shadows cast by the acacia tree. I picked up stones and made designs with them, circles and squares and triangles; I noticed they were not alike in color, which surprised me because they'd all looked the same at first glance. I wondered if I preferred the dull green stones to the gray, or perhaps the brown, and then I saw a pale blue one and named that my favorite.

  As the shadows lengthened, I finally brought out my clown puppet, and then Mr. Jappy, knowing that I'd saved them for this hour when night was coming and I would be afraid, but even they couldn't ease the terrible sense of desolation that kept me company, and after a few words I put them away again. I watched an orange sun slide behind the village, leaving the sky a fiery scarlet, and I took one last look at the level ground between me and the village gate: at the patches of low scrub, the pair of stunted acacia trees and the worn path leading past me to disappear at the gate, but it was what might lie behind me that made me the more uneasy. Darkness fell quickly and there came a great stillness; I sat unhappily and waited for the moon to rise high enough to sho
w me the danger that 1 felt was all around me. Somewhere off in the distance I heard the cry of a jackal. Behind me, behind the sacred shrine, a twig snapped and I tensed, and then came silence, but I felt watched now, and very cold.

  The moon slowly cleared the acacia, desert-bright, so bright that I could see each pebble and even the crack in the bowl so tauntingly out of reach. The last glow of lanterns in the village was extinguished. In the rear of the hut I heard more rustling sounds, something was moving, but animal or human I couldn't tell. As the moon climbed higher my eyelids grew heavy; I curled up against the post and tried without success to stay awake. I woke with a start, trembling as I heard jackals quarreling behind the hut. The sound rose, lifting my panic; I covered my ears and waited for them to find me, the noise subsided into growls and off to my right a dark shape ran into the night and disappeared into the brush. I thought next I heard a laugh and wondered if I was going mad.

  Around midnight I dozed off again but in my dreams horrible demon faces swam toward me and then receded. When I woke it was to hear frightening noises, snarls, movements all around me. It was an endless night, full of shadows, sounds, cries. When dawn came I was exhausted.

  It was Bakuli who brought me goat's milk and found me shivering and crying. "Oh, Missy," he whispered.

  "The jackals," I gasped. "Bakuli they were here; I can't imagine why I'm still alive."

  He sat down on the ground facing me while I thirstily drank the milk. He looked puzzled. "Jackals, Missy? No jackals."

  I said impatiently, "How could you know? They were all around me, I heard them, I even saw one as he ran away."

  "Missy," he said quietly, "no jackals."

  "Bakuli—"

  He shook his head. "Missy, Bakuli watch all night over thee." He turned and pointed to the pair of stunted acacias halfway between us and the village gate. "I sit and watch thee all night, I see thee wake, I see thee sleep."

  "You did that?" I marveled. "But surely you heard how they quarreled and fought near the shrine."