Timbuktu is moving?
Its the Sahara thats moving. Going south like a homesick bluesman. Even as we speak, the deserts sucking the toes of Timbuktu, although hardly as adoringly as Id suck yours. The fact is, the Saharas gradually swallowing Timbuktu. As delectable as you are, pussy cakes, Id never eat you alive.
Youre a gentleman, Larry. I admire your restraint. Can we please get on with it?
Youre always wanting to get on with it. Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? Its no coincidence we call them deadlines. The Saharad be good for a hustler like you. If the sea teaches us humility, the desert teaches us patience. Timbuktus never in a hurry. And you and I arent going to rush into Timbuktu. We agreed, I believe, that Id show you the slides in the exact sequence that I showed them to Q-Jo. Which means, Im afraid, our entry into Timbuktu is at least a quarter hour away. First we have to spend some time with …
Snickersnee. Diamond changes slides, and a broad, shallow river comes into view.
… the Bozo.
EIGHT FORTY-FOUR A.M.
Mali, not to be confused with Bali, and certainly not with Malibu or Maui, is a largish, generally arid, landlocked nation in northwestern Africa. For six centuries, roughly from 1000 until 1600, Timbuktu was Malis richest, most powerful city; one of the richest, most powerful-and learned-cities outside of the well-traveled, civilized world. The success of this remote oasis was entirely due to its position at the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan caravan routes combined with its proximity to the Niger River. Upon the Niger, salt, spices, slaves, cloth, and manuscripts that the camel caravans exchanged for gold in Timbuktu could be transported by riverboat all the way to the Atlantic.
The Niger, intones Diamond, the mighty Niger looks like a question mark drawn by a left-handed octogenarian dipsomaniac, a most fitting shape since European geographers went batty questioning its source, its mouth, and its course. The Niger is eccentrically shaped and flows in the opposite direction from what a knowledgeable person might expect. I assure you, many an explorer landed in an early grave trying to make sense of the Niger. Their efforts werent helped by the fact that this baby is twenty-six hundred miles long and there was a fresh disease and a new hostility waiting around every bend. What were seeing are views along the five-hundred-mile stretch that runs from Bamako, the capital, northeastward to near Timbuktu. This is Bozo water.
Bozo water, you mutter under your breath. A perfect name for that artificially carbonated tap water many U.S. bottlers pass off as eau minErale. As Diamond advances the slides, you are treated to picturesque scenes of natives in long, low dugout canoes, each one poled, rather than paddled, by a solitary poler who stands in the stern. Some of the pirogues appear to be means of public conveyance, others are cargo vessels, and others, perhaps the majority, fishing boats. There is much casting and drawing of nets.
Theyre Egyptians originally, the Bozo are. For some reason, they gave up on the Nile and migrated all the way to the Niger about five thousand years ago. A tiny nation of riverine folk who brought with them an Egyptian language that they continue to speak and a complex animistic, highly ritualized religion that despite Islamic inroads they continue to practice. The hub of this religion is the Dog Star, Sirius.
Sitting trouser.
Yes. Ha-ha. Sitting trouser. He regards you with genuine admiration. Lately, though, Ive started to wonder if that wasnt a mistranslation. Maybe the Bozo called Sirius sitting bowser.
Wuf, you bark, prompting Diamond to reward you with a smile that could paint a doghouse.
Up close, the Bozo are nothing if not disappointing. Apparently, you were expecting a race of displaced Tuts and Cleopatras, but with the exception of their relatively fine features, they more closely resemble Mississippi sharecroppers than mystic Egyptians. The men are in dirty Tshirts, plastic sandals, and cotton pants that might have been plucked off a bargain counter at Kmart and run through a shredder. Although the women wear the traditional, long, brightly patterned dresses of West Africa, the garments are wrinkled and torn. Sacred robes and celestial adornments are nowhere to be seen, and if there are temples, they are indistinguishable from the poor huts that cluster on the riverbanks, awash in a secondary river of naked children, skinny chickens, and mud.
I can see youre less than knocked sockless, Diamond says. Soon well be moving along to the Dogon, whom I suspect youll find more impressive. Almost everyone does.
The Dogon are cliff dwellers who reside in secluded pueblos, caves, and strange clay towers along a mammoth escarpment that rears out of the sunbaked savanna some hard, harsh miles from the Niger. Their ancestors fled to this forbidding natural barrier to escape foreign influences, and the Dogon have proven fiercely resistant to modern mores, pan-Malian assimilation, and Islamic conversion. It strikes you, from Diamonds pictures, that the Dogon dress with no more flair than the Bozo, and, frankly, you had rather be laid out stiff in any well-maintained American cemetery than be alive and salubrious in a milieu so devoid of comfort and chic. You agree, however, that the Dogons masks and wooden figures, their elaborately carved doorposts and altars, and their bizarre booga-booga dance costumes are more impressive, in a cultural sense, than the muddy fundamentals of the Bozo.
Were these people originally Egyptians, too? you ask, motivated less by curiosity than an attempt to make polite conversation. Diamonds slide show reminds you of an ethnological documentary on public television, and, to be honest, you have always preferred to watch those old movies in which nimble dandies soft-shoe in top hat and tails and everybody sips champagne.
No, as a matter of fact, the Dogon migrated down from Libya, where they might have been descended from shipwrecked Greeks. Theres a theory that they were the lost crew of the Argo, who, when they couldnt get home to Greece, intermarried with black Libyans.
You dont say?
Gwendolyn?
Yes?
Are you by any chance thinking of Fred Astaire?
Why, no. Where would you get an idea like that?
Never mind. The Argonauts, before they wrecked, were searching for the Golden Fleece. Right? You know all this, youre an educated woman. Its rumored you have an MBA. At any rate, the Golden Fleece is a celestial symbol. It refers to the stars in the constellation Canis Major-the hair of the dog, so to speak-which was directly above the oracular center of Colchis when the golden meadow colchicum, or false saffron, an important medicinal plant in the ancient Mediterranean, came annually into bloom there. Sirius A is the big box-office boffo celebrity star in Canis Major, of course, but its Sirius B thats important to the Dogon. And the Bozo. They share the same mythologies, the Dogon and Bozo. Among the Dogon, the rituals are more perfectly preserved, and the ritualistic objects more plentiful and aesthetically refined, but my heart ticks louder for the Bozo for the simple reason that theyve remained so loyal to the water world. Theyre consummate river folk. The first toys a Bozo child are given are fish bones and fish heads. They eat what swims and are themselves strong swimmers. A Bozo believes the crocodile is his father, and he claims to have a blood pact with the crocs: a Bozo doesnt hunt crocodiles, and crocodiles dont hunt Bozo. Witnesses swear its true. From that alone, its obvious Bozos have maintained closer bonds with the Nommo than the Dogon have, but I dont suppose you want to get into that.
The Nommo, huh? Well, as a matter of fact, you do have a mild interest in that subject after the fright that ridiculous card gave you and all, but what you truly want is for Diamond to complete his presentation-which so far has afforded not the softest hint of why Q-Jo might have fled Thunder House-so that you can solicit his advice on an oil futures play. Naturally, he will insist that any market play is trivial and a waste of time and consciousness, but he could be quite helpful with the mechanics of the deal. Also, you need to get back to Belfords to check if there has been a nibble on your monkey line. Whether there has or has not, you wish now to turn your own apartment into Rancho Popsicle because of the stronger impact it possibly will have on
Belford should you impound AndrE in your place instead of his.
No? says Diamond. No Nommo? A pity. Well, okay, you can lead a toad to water, but you cant make her think. Lets move along then to Timbuktu.
Good, you say curtly. You would bet your last battered share of Union Carbide that thinking about Bozo Nommo mumbo jumbo was not something he required of Natalie.
NINE A.M.
Timbuktu. A town made of pastry dough and starlight. A mirage you can walk around in-if you can stand the heat. Solitary, sealed, and shuttered, it wears a mask beneath a mask behind a veil. Timbuktu. A dehydrated Venice, crumbling into a plexus of dust canals. Conceived when the sphinx lay down with the goldbug at a campsite half as old as time. The Sahara crackles in every bite of its bread, the ashes of dead books blow through its streets; the lost wisdom of a dozen races is buried under its drifts, never to be jiggled by the archaeologists spade. Timbuktu. A city only an adventurer would risk, only a romantic would forgive, only a nomad would find inviting, only a camel could love.
Babble, hypnotic crackpot babble. But Diamond is right about one thing: Timbuktu does look as if its made of cookie dough and starlight. Which is not to say it is sweet or radiant or even slightly appealing. It has a definite mystique, all right, due primarily to the audacity with which it occupies the void, boldly existing where no city ought to be; and to the sheer exoticness of its architecture, the oddly organic jumble of boxlike clay houses, stacked atop and against one another like something a compulsive child might construct, a child who could not imagine spires, arches, or domes, yet is imbued with enough childish whimsy to paint every third or fourth door a brilliant blue. But undercutting that mystique is the sheer empty starkness of the place, the tan monochrome relieved only occasionally by a winking blue door, the stillness so still that even the slides convey it: had Diamond employed a movie camera the effect would have been the same-a ghost town that will not quite give up the ghost, a place where people spend their lives listening to the wind blow.
Youre not the first to be disappointed, says Diamond, as if reading your mind again. All through the Middle Ages, Timbuktu signified to Europeans some kind of tantalizing out-of-reach magnificence, a magical but entirely tangible city of wealth, sophistication, intrigue, and learning; a dreamy shopping mall, as it were, where you could buy salt, pepper, unicorn horns, tarot cards, books, virgins, eunuchs, dwarfs, and carpetbags of unrefined ore; where you could cavort in luxuriant roof gardens with your newly purchased slave girl and speak with scholars or holy men on every street corner. Ah, yes. But when the first white men began to actually zero in on the place in the nineteenth century, it was at least three hundred years past its prime. The palaces had crumbled, the bazaars had closed, the library and university had been torched. Fully expecting to be rolling in gold dust, the honkies got a faceful of hot sand instead. The African Eldorado. Yes, indeed. Are you aware, my dear, that Marlon Brando called the inside of a camels mouth the ugliest thing in the world?
Why?
Why? Peel back their lips and youll soon enough… .
No, no, Larry. For Christs sake. I mean, Timbuktu, if it was so rich and glamorous, why did it turn into this, this-boneyard?
You might ask the same thing about Wall Street. Things run their course in the material world. Specifically, if you must know, Timbuktu started to decline after European traders landed on the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century and provided an alternative to the trans-Saharan caravan routes; and then the town got its brains knocked out, literally, when it was overrun by Moroccan mercenaries and fundamentalist bushwhackers in 1591. But events such as those are just the vehicles change likes to ride around in. Evolution drives a bulldozer disguised as a stationary bike. With history, its the other way around.
Could it be, you wonder, Diamonds non sequiturs aside, that you are, indeed, like those European explorers? That you set out optimistically to partake of the wealth of a fabled land, only to arrive, after much hardship, when your destination was well past its prime? Obviously, the days of giddy prosperity are over, but is the decline by any chance permanent? Are Americas once-powerful financial centers destined to sink deeper and deeper into a spreading economic Sahara until one day, ten, twenty years from now, they are, relatively speaking, mud-ball villages whose inhabitants, including you, have nothing better to do than contemplate their obsolescence and listen to the wind blow?
Or watch the stars.
Pardon?
Listen to the wind blow-Im reading you like an ad in the personals today, arent I-or watch the stars. Diamond refills your teacup. You know, even these days travelers arrive in Timbuktu expecting, I dont know, something epiphanic, phantasmagorical, and leave feeling cheated, bitching that theres nothing there. But maybe it isnt a matter of there being nothing there. Maybe they just dont know what to look for.
Everybodys not a mind reader like you, Larry. What could they realistically look for? Where could they look?
Oh, they might begin with the university. Timbuktu does have a university again, and I can assure you, its in a class by itself. Taught me a thing or two. Yes, indeed. A genuine thing or two. Snickersnee, snickersnee. He advances the slides rapidly in a staccato blur, finally pausing at a scene of a high, dun-colored wall. Timbuktu is not a walled city, a fact that surprises you, considering its legendary mysteriousness, but on the outskirts of town, there are several walled compounds, one of which, evidently, is some kind of school. A subsequent scene depicts an elaborate wrought-iron gate, opening on a courtyard resplendent with banana plants, flowering trees, and, believe it or not …
A pond?
Yes. Did you think in a place where the moon looms so large, there wouldnt be frogs to praise it? Timbuktu is, after all, an oasis.
The next slide reveals a largish, squarish, two-story building, made of clay in the Sudanese style and sporting blue shutters (closed) on the second floor. With its shady green courtyard, it is somewhat of a retreat, you would imagine, from the bleak alleyways and sun-fried sandpile surrounding it (an oasis within an oasis), but its a poor excuse for a university. You are about to say as much when, snickersnee, Diamond pushes the button and brings up another view of the gate, this time with a group of a dozen or more Westerners posing formally in front of it.
The faculty? you ask.
Yes and no. Yes and no. Thats Robert Anton Wilson, front row, left end; and on his left is Terence McKenna, Diane di Prima, and, I believe, John Lilly. You can recognize Timothy Leary in the back row next to Carlos Castaneda-only extant picture of him, by the way-and theres Andrei Codrescu, Ted Joans, uh, Rupert Sheldrake, Fritjof Capra, Gary Snyder, and, well, several mathematicians, quantum physicists, and artists you probably never heard of.
I never heard of the others, either, you say, somewhat untruthfully, because you seem to recall Q-Jo-or was it your parents?-mentioning a few of those names.
Needless to say, these luminaries arent in residence full-time. The non-Africans come and go virtually at random. And always in secret. They do lecture now and then, they present papers, and seldom hesitate to speak out in class-if one could call them classes-but they seem to be there to study as much as to teach. Teachers or students, its hard to draw the line. But they arent faculty per se. Here …
Snickersnee.
… is the faculty.
Same gate, same pose, same number of people, give or take one or two, but this group is pigmented in various shades of cinnamon and asphalt and dressed in various examples of African fashion, from white robes and turbans to white linen suits, from jazzy two-piece patterned ensembles to loincloths, from flowing dashikis to animal skins.
Shamans, soothsayers, griots, and big boohoos, says Diamond. Tell me, how do you suppose this faculty would rate your MBA?
You dont answer because you arent listening. Ever since you thought of Q-Jo, you have been refocusing on the reasons you are attending this stupid Easter morning show-and-tell in the first place. Larry, you say, a few minutes ago you mentioned that
tarot cards were sold in Timbuktu in the, uh, Middle Ages, I believe it was. Did you mention that to Q-Jo, as well? Im just wondering if that mightve sparked something, if theres a clue there or… .
In the semidarkness, you can detect cocktail onions of sweat popping out on Diamonds brow, you can actually feel his sudden fever. I … I cant remember right offhand. He shudders. Youll have to excuse me. Ive got to go to the bathroom, as denatured Americans insist on saying, although their particular mission rarely involves the act of bathing.
He lurches away and vanishes in the gloom.
NINE TWENTY-EIGHT A.M.
Face it, Gwen, you are slow. You are slower than zombies playing Monopoly, a nursing home sack race, Christmas in Saudi Arabia. You are so slow that if you jumped out of a plane, the plane would land before you did. You are so slow that a full five minutes pass before-before what should have been immediately, horrifyingly obvious finally occurs to you. When it does, it sloshes the tea out of your cup and the adrenaline out of your adrenals.
Spell it out, Sherlock, lay it on the table: less than forty-eight hours ago, Q-Jo Huffington was seated on this very same couch looking at this identical slide when Larry Diamond excused himself to visit the toilet, as he has done once again as if on cue, and in his exactly similar absence, something happened to Q-Jo, something drastic, something that caused her to vanish from the face of the earth. This is more than coincidence, beyond dEjA vu, this is history deliberately repeating itself, with one terrible step left to go.
NINE-THIRTY A.M.
For a long moment, you just sit, hands trying to steady the teacup on its quaking saucer, eyes wide and fused to the screen, as if some member of the faculty of the University of Timbuktu might call out and advise you what to do. Then, abruptly, you spring to your feet, dashing the carpet with tea, and like a tai chi novice with both feet in a bear trap, whirl awkwardly around. No one had been creeping up on you. The room is empty. And, except for the faint, nervous hum of the slide projector, quiet. Dead quiet.