by Téa Obreht
I had a little French off the Louisiana balcony girls and I put it together that he was suffering from sea-teeter. I asked if France was where he’d come from. But no, he said: Greece. “Hellada.” George was a pointer. Always aiming that big-knuckled finger toward the ether or the weather or into the faces of strangers, as though you need only turn in the suggested direction to find some obvious truth. He pointed at Jolly and said “Grèce, aussi!” and howled with laughter.
“Vieux,” Jolly said to me. “A very ridiculous old man.”
Always at George’s heels was the soft-faced Mehmet Halil—called Lilo by all—the last son of a wayfaring line, a quiet, spindly kid blighted by the stubborn politeness of country folk. Looking at him, I remember thinking his only certain prospect was to come to harm. He preferred camels to people, and a bull he called Adnan to any of the rest of you. He couldn’t have been more than twelve, and just having him around made me lonesome for Hobb. It’d been a long while since I’d felt older than someone.
With us, too, was Jolly’s cousin, Mico Tedro, a wiry, battlesome kid who likewise spliced his native tongue with French at speed. He was a slight, petulant man, and the journey seemed to have made him slighter and more petulant still. Careful of his toilet, he took pains to outfit himself in a vest embroidered with gold birds—from which I succeeded in lifting a button for Hobb. Mico was just vain enough to notice it gone. He raged about its disappearance, but never did manage to track it to me. He was a passable enough rider, but complained all the time about everything. I couldn’t blame him, for he contended daily with a mean, labile old gal called Saleh. He was generally disappointed, George told me, because he had expected more from this adventure: more excitement, more deference, and certainly more pay.
“There’s pay?” said I.
“Not for you, misafir.”
George liked to say that his camel, Maida, spoke all the languages he did. In truth, she knew a handful of words in three and was learning more as he now made his way through the world’s features in English: sun, road, tree, star, plain. It delighted him to hear the few merhabas and mashallahs I had left over from my father. “Between us, misafir, we’ll be asking God to bless every tree and rock between here and the sea.”
George was keenest about rivers. He mapped the trail as we went, comparing his scribbles to a stack of ancient charts he’d got off some shoreman in Izmir. At every fording place, George would hunt around for our stream on paper. “This is the Guadalupe, misafir,” he said, following the wild crooks of that river with a careful finger. “See how it is one of a few short streams? They all begin here.” He pointed to a blank space on the map where the black lines met. “Nobody has drawn it in yet, but here we will find a—how do you say? Escarpement.”
“Escarpment.”
He beamed. “You see, misafir? It’s all very easy.”
He navigated by thumb as much as by compass, and though Hobb wanted after the sharp gold points of his drafting tools, I knew I could take nothing from George without raising suspicion. Hobb settled for a little silver clasp that dislodged one evening from George’s left shoe.
You were a much easier mark, Burke, I’m sorry to say. It was far simpler to rob a tassel or bead from the tack of a nameless yearling. You were a good sport about it, too, pretending not to notice, putting up with my laughable packing practice in the cold blue of three in the morning. I believe you regarded me as a kind of tolerable idiot—but a certain rapport, I thought, was firming up slowly between us. You were patiently benevolent and immensely curious of all goings-on. You lipped the greasewood bushes as we went and announced yourself every quarter mile with a fearsome, gargling buuuurk. You had a loathsome habit of twisting your neck back to worry the fleas that worried you. Stirred up, your fleas soon became my fleas. Their bites shot out in angry red blotches all over me. By the third day’s riding, I was raging through fever-dreams, visions of standing side by side in an ocean with Hobb, who skipped mati after mati, nazar after nazar, across the glittering waves and bade me follow them into the current.
* * *
—
I’ve been trying to remember what I said of cameleering to that little writer we met in Nevada some years ago. His name escapes me, but I remember being pleased with what I eventually told him.
“No living man can mount a camel without degradation. No sooner has the rider figured where to place himself than he is pitched overboard. This will happen, to the amusement of witnesses, on at least the first several attempts.”
What else? Camels loft a sandstorm getting to their feet. They rise in sections: the front, the rear, the middle. Any one of these on its own feels like being thrown from a wagon, but all three together could make a man rethink his relationship with the Almighty. Firming the reins is useless. Once mounted, the rider finds the gulf between himself and the camel’s head tracted only by a steep, descending bluff of neck that offers no protection in the event of a fall.
Camels do not take kindly to spurs. They must be addressed only in soft tones, and struck by nothing save the flat of the hand. They will eat any hard or rough foliage, even greasewood, while in caravan and ought not be discouraged from browsing whenever it pleases them, for it does not slow them to do it. A camel can go seven days without water, after which time it will begin to suffer. This will be evident by the sag of its hump sooner than by any change in its disposition. A watering camel can drink fifty gallons at a time and must be given freedom to revive itself. If interrupted, it will exhibit the less amiable aspects of its nature: profound intolerance and incredible strength.
Camels are not for the listless or lowdown. They are faster than one might expect, and twice as rattletrap. They are frowsy and irate. Their fur sloughs off and drifts, filling the air with a sweet, malty stench that frenzies mules and horses, who scatter to outrun their own terror. Those big, rubbery lips hide purple gums, gravestone teeth with which they try for everything in sight: hats, arms, ears, coyotes dogging the herd.
But camelhair is the softest in Creation. Camel’s eyelids are thatched with the finest lashes God ever loomed. They are sturdy from their ears to the soles of their feet. Their hearts belong to their riders. And their great height lays all the horizon to view.
My first day in the saddle, sickened by your rolling, I looked down at our many-legged shadow running out over the grass, lengthening in the dying sun, and found my throat gone tight. It struck me, without doubt, that I had somehow wanted my way into a marvel that had never before befallen this world. And I was lonesome for my father, and for Hobb and Donovan, and for all the flickers of my life before, which seemed to be receding from me now in the wake of this consuming and incredible turn to which they had all led.
* * *
—
The first flat stretch of Texas from Indianola to San Antonio, a corridor of lush river valleys, made for easy riding. We must have still been well east of the Comancheria, but that did not keep us from glassing the hills for hostiles. This was owed to the efforts of our military escort, Gerald Shaw, a sour-faced Irish teamster who was determined to terrify us, and complained endlessly about the smell of the camels, as offensive to himself and his men as it was to their horses and mules. The whole spectacle of our stink and noise disgusted him. “The disgrace of the army,” he said. “And the delight of the hostiles.” He gloried in detailing what would happen if we crossed the trail of a war party. “Dog meat, my hirsute friends.” Our deaths, he wanted us to know, would not be near as terrible as our desecration: our guts pulled out, our heads chopped off, our bravest bits reconfigured, and our camels commandeered only to ride later against Shaw’s own brave lads who, he assured us, would not hesitate to cut them down.
But any sign of water brought us only to some small pueblo of tough-living Mexicans. By the time we sighted these habitations, their streets would already be teeming. Old Sam Morse might have rethought the use of his telegraph,
had he known the speed at which news traveled out here. No victory or massacre was ever so thoroughly heralded as our arrival. Dogs came running to us. Children, arrested in their games, were stunned into silence. From every doorway the enraptured came to marvel and stare: the old ciboleros in their brilliant drapes, shamelessly amazed; the girls with their sunflecked shoulders; the young cowpunchers making like they’d seen everything worth seeing and wouldn’t be stirred to awe by the absurd centaurs now advancing on their town. By and by even they would extend a hand to the passing flanks, and then one of your cousins might flare his nostrils and fire a gob of spit into the crowd, delighting every shoulder-straddling urchin in sight.
But for the most part, you were all as indifferent to the wonder you provoked as you were to the rain.
* * *
—
Our cook was a freedman called Absalom Reading, whom the soldiers called Old Ab—though he was probably no older than ourselves. His chuckwagon—heavy with chicken cages and rainbarrels and the loathed cornmill we called “Little Giant”—groaned along behind the packtrain with Ab following along on foot. He had a mustache so thick it might as well have been ambulatory. Sheening his right hand was a web of scars, got, according to some of the soldiers, in some long-ago altercation with a slaver. Others had it that the wound was self-inflicted so he might keep his hand near a hot pan without flinching when the oildrops hissed against his flesh, an ability that seemed pointless save for being incredibly impressive. Which, in a company of dragoons and roughriders, is frankly purpose enough.
Ab was the warden of our sustenance, and by his hand were wrought the few comforts to which we looked forward at day’s end. But he was a changeable provider. He and Jolly became enemies right away, for Ab wouldn’t leave off staring at the saltpork left behind, night after night, on Jolly’s plate.
“Something the matter with that, boy?”
“Ali don’t eat pig,” George told him.
“Well. Ain’t he just as fancy as the duchess’s doilies?”
Few habits could’ve been more ill-suited to that march than Jolly’s abstaining of pig. I’d say it cost him about ten pounds in the first week alone. I remember watching him flush the scrub for quail in clothes loose as a scarecrow’s. The few birds he did manage to scare up were dangled furtively over our campfire while Ab’s back was turned, in and out, in and out, till they were reduced to ash. There wasn’t much eating in them, but Jolly rolled those black bones around his mouth like they were sweet as liver.
No pig, no tanglefoot, nor gambling nor whoring around—all of which accrued distrust from the infantry entire, but Shaw in particular. Jolly didn’t give a damn. His indulgences were solitude and the blank page. Riding along, he rested papers on his knees and scratched away. From my place at the back of the train were visible only tracts of darkness, but upon closer inspection whole worlds could be found on those pages. Sunsets. Vistas full of caravans. The ruins of an overgrown homestead.
“Where’d he learn that?” I asked George.
“When he was riding with the Turks.”
“I thought all you lads were Turks?”
I’d learn soon enough what calling Mico a Turk got you, but George didn’t seem to mind.
Jolly prayed palms up, like my father, but in those days relied on Lilo to tell him when to pray and how often. It was strange to see him defer to a soft, quiet kid. But Lilo had grown up praying this way, and the details of worship were rooted deep, while Jolly could never quite trust himself with his own devotion. When still a child, he had ended up the ward of a Turkish trader and his family. The particulars of this varied depending on who was telling the story; Mico had it that Jolly was stolen; George said he’d gone of his own will. He had grown up surrounded by the necessary recitations, but never quite one with them—they being led in Arabic, of which he had even less than the Turkish he could hardly read. So, George told me, he bowed and touched his forehead to his carpet, and managed, in this way, years of distant following by the time some bedbound elder bade him to undertake the hadj on his behalf. Whoever that man was, Jolly never spoke of him. But it was the pilgrimage by which his name was got that first bound Jolly to the God he’d worshipped from afar. After that, his devotion was entirely his own. Having found God, Jolly next went looking for silver. He chanced upon some in Syria, but was cheated of his share. So he went looking for gold, minerals, salt. What he found was war: all along the sea, and then in Algiers, where he rode Seid into battle for the French. The summer after this bloody venture he learned the camel trade driving a caravan back to his birthplace, where he found his mother dead and his cousin Mico bankrupt and very aggravated by the changes life had demanded of Jolly.
All that while, Jolly had managed to go forward feeling that he was set right in the ways of Allah—save for those occasions when terror of his own possible ignorance seized him. Thus overcome, he would sull and darken.
“What a thing it would be,” he’d said to George one night, in the early days of their friendship, “to go through life believing myself devout and discover only at the threshold of death that I’d gone about it all the wrong way!”
Not long after, Henry Constantine Wayne drifted into the harbor on the Supply with talk of deserts of a different kind. Jolly went, never quite able to rid himself of feeling that his recitations were misremembered, his rituals corrupted by some deficiency—and the further his journeys took him from people who seemed to know, the warier he became.
* * *
—
It felt a lifetime, but couldn’t have been more than a handful of days of northwesterly travel that brought us to Fort Green, a straw-thatched adobe barracks with a Comanchero hostler who eyed us up with dispassion: as though every hump and jangling bell that now passed his gate had been foretold to him long ago. A rare greeting, but disappointing nonetheless. The fort was a rough, desolate place, particularly distressing to Mico. Walking the ridge with me at sundown, he took in the pockmarked barrens and the distant mesas, and his eyes filled with tears. He flung his hat to the floor. “Is it all like this, misafir?” I said I hoped so, for I found it bestirred me. He did not share my feelings. “But where are all the people?” he said. “Where are les grandes cités?”
What did he want with grandes cités, I wondered? The little I could recall of the ones I’d seen was drear and noise, rank streets and the proliferate dead. “I thought you were desert people?” I said.
He drew himself up and gave me a look that might have reduced me to dust. “I am from Smyrna, misafir. Smyrna. Do you know it?” I did not. This was counted against me. “It’s a magnificent city by the sea. The port is full of ships and the hills shine with lighted windows. This.” With a disdainful wave of his hand he took in the whole barrens below. “Where is everything?”
I didn’t know. Some of it was probably in San Antonio. Some of it was certainly in New York. And the rest, I reckoned, might be in California. Around us were just ragged trails and oases greened by underground creeks, the occasional dead flitting across the plains, always searching, always moving on in pursuit of whatever it was they could not see.
* * *
—
You may remember two companies came through Fort Green while we were encamped there.
The first was led by Captain Lee Walden. He was taking his cavalry west to Llano Estacado, there to be soundly thrashed by the Comanche. Jolly laid eyes on him and said, “Look at this clown. There’ll be trouble tonight.” He got that way sometimes—he believed he was as much an oracle of human rot as aching joints were of rain. Sure enough, after Wayne and Walden took themselves off to a nearby ranch to sup like civilized folk, the new arrivals gathered round the keg of whiskey Gerald Shaw kept stowed in his saddlebags. They were all pretty well away by sundown, and getting louder by the minute. Jolly, I remember, was sat out in front of our tent. His day had gone sideways enough already: Seid had coughe
d through the afternoon around the foaming bulge of his tongue, and increased by tenfold his usual snapping at the other bulls, so that Jolly’d had to trail along behind us to keep him from derangement. Jolly had taken a fall trying to hobble him, and was now mending the bridle, his whole countenance set like the innards of a fire. “I told you,” he kept saying as the drinking got louder and more profane. “I told you.” George, laid out under a map, spoke without looking at him: “Nothing’s happened yet. Ain’t their racket bad enough for you to be inviting their attention as well?”
It was Shaw, of course, that got up Jolly’s gall. He began wandering the fence with a clutch of wobbly dragoons on his tail. Drink had made them bold. Every so often, one of these thin, blue-eyed men would leap onto the posts and make a grab for a camel’s face—give us a kiss, honey being their general chorus. Well I wish you had, Burke—just like the one you gave those prospectors last week. Goddamn them. Anyway, those spry enough not to get knocked back off the fence by the force of the camels’ revulsion would then fall to bemoaning your tremendous stink.
“You realize,” Jolly said, “that it’s us they mean. Not the camels.”
That he’d said this in Turkish was not straightaway apparent to me. When it struck me, I felt pretty pleased with myself. But nobody was paying any attention to me, least of all George. “Leave it alone,” he said.
But Jolly could not.
“I caution you to stop that,” he called to the dragoons after a time. “They are easily provoked.”
This led to a raucous survey of the dangers of the camel. Perhaps, if one did not drown in its spit, one risked being blinded by its hideousness. “In any case,” Shaw concluded, “I look forward to the day when these formidable deterrents join us in whipping old Lo on the plains. Perhaps their stink will wild the Indians, same as it wilds our mules.”
