She stopped his speech with her hand. ‘I know. I, too, would have him refrain from this journey. But how would he think of himself, did he stay? How would we live, Umar and I, if between us lay this thing that I had stopped him doing? It is only to Taghaza. It is nothing.’
‘It is not nothing,’ Nicholas said. ‘Zuhra, I am a child of Umar’s strength as much as your children are. I would not exist but for him. And you are for him what he has been to me. I know he feels he must come, and I cannot stop him. But his force comes only from you, and he will return to renew it. He will return.’
He was not sure. He had to seem sure.
He spent the last night alone, walking the lanes of the city, and finding one lamp lit, in the gateway of the imam, the Katib Musa. As he hesitated, the porter’s voice spoke. ‘Lord. The Katib is asleep. He asked, if you passed, that you would enter, and sit in his library.’
He sat until dawn, with the books under his hands, and his cheek on them. Then he rose, silent and stiff, and went for the last time to his house.
There are few wells in the Sahara, and the journey between them depends on navigation as exact and as strict as that employed by a captain at sea, venturing out of sight of his port, and into waters unknown. In time of clear skies, the Sahara caravan makes its way as the birds do, and the captains: by the sun and the stars, and by whatever landmarks the sand may have left. But the winds blow, and dunes shift, and the marks left by one caravan are obliterated before the next comes. And so men will wander, and perish.
The guide Umar had chosen for Nicholas was a Mesufa Tuareg, and blind. For two days, walking or riding, he turned the white jelly of his sightless eyes to the light and the wind, and opened his palpitating black nostrils to the report of the dead, scentless sand which was neither scentless nor dead, but by some finesse of aroma proclaimed its composition and place. At each mile’s end, he filled his hands with the stuff and, rubbing, passed it through his brown fingers. Then he smiled, and said, ‘Arawan.’
‘Umar,’ Nicholas said. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
To begin with, they spoke very little. With the rest, they walked through the first night and part of the day, halting rarely. Sleep was brief, and taken by day. During the worst of the heat, they lay with the camels under the white, shimmering sky, and ate, and rested.
Their drovers made tents of their mantles, but Umar’s hands erected the light, makeshift awning that sheltered Nicholas and himself, and arranged the cloths, coated by Zuhra with mercuric paste, which they wore against the sting and bite of the pests of the desert. Then, mounting while the sun still glared upon them, they rode until dark, each man his own tent, alone under his own cone of shelter. The chanting, the chatter stopped then, and even the goats became silent.
The nights were marginally cooler. Then the riders revived, and dismounted, and unlashed the bullock-skins of warm water, and drank, and filled the leather bags at their sides. And the camels had their one meal of the day, from the fodder they carried themselves.
The company was congenial enough, and consisted of men and women and children, for there were families going to Arawan. As the heat became less, they grew lively. Every hour, the ropes on the loads needed adjusting: a camel would kick and bite and, roaring, disrupt the procession; the goats would stray; a dispute would break out over some trifle. At such times, the caravan carried its own clamour with it, like a long, narrow household perpetually singing, arguing, quarrelling, cackling. They hardly stopped for food, except during the enforced sleep through the heat, but passed between them gourds of maize and sour milk or rough bread. The fresh food had spoiled by the second day.
On the second day, the blind man came to them both and said, ‘Lord? You have been generous.’ He spoke to Nicholas, but his eyes were on Umar, the katib, the man of learning.
Nicholas said, ‘You have need of something?’ He kept his voice low, like the other’s.
The man said, ‘It might please my lord to know that many horsemen have passed this way to Arawan recently. Not today. Perhaps three days ago.’
Nicholas said, ‘Someone told you?’ The pale, shining sands were everywhere pristine.
‘My nose,’ said the man. ‘The manure has been covered while fresh. It is unusual.’
‘It’s Akil,’ said Umar, when they were alone. ‘Not the commander himself, he was at the banquet. He must have sent his troops on. Arawan is a Maghsharen settlement.’ They sat within their makeshift tent, their clothes soaking. A camel groaned and someone, irritated by their voices, coughed and spat. It was time for sleeping.
Nicholas said, ‘Would Akil’s men dare to attack us?’
Umar was repairing the thong of a slipper. The needle slipped in and out, as it had done when, manager of a large household, he still contrived to keep his master’s garments in order. In Cyprus, in Trebizond.
He said, without looking up, ‘He would perhaps tell them to hold our six camels. Let the others go on, and then send us off alone on some pretext. We should be reported murdered by wandering bandits.’
‘You think he wants that?’ Nicholas said.
‘I think he knows the Koy wouldn’t mind. Akil has shared the power with the Koy for thirty years. I think he doesn’t want competition from Europeans and Christians traversing the Sahara. He wants to trade with them at the coast, on his terms. Now,’ Umar said, ‘you are going to ask me why I didn’t think of that, before I brought you to Guinea.’
‘You didn’t know. I’m going to ask you something else. Must we stop at Arawan?’
Umar put down his needle. His thread had broken. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m not. Answer the question,’ said Nicholas.
‘We could avoid Arawan,’ Umar said. ‘But the rest of this caravan won’t. Some are staying there. The others only came this way to pick up protection. It’s late in the season. Two or three hundred camels are rather few against troops of armed Berbers.’
‘Six would move quickly,’ said Nicholas.
‘Until the nomads observe them,’ said Umar. ‘And it means only six camels to carry food, fodder and water, our belongings and us, if we tire. It leaves no margin for sandstorms or straying or accidents. And lastly, if we don’t get to the water at Arawan, there are exactly two hundred miles between the first well after that and the next one.’ He had rethreaded his needle. He said, ‘I think we should avoid Arawan.’
A large smile overcame Nicholas: he felt his beard creaking inside his dimples. He said, ‘You’re just trying to get us both killed. Let’s go and talk to the rest. Perhaps there are a few others who don’t fancy Akil.’
In the end, fifty camels separated from the rest and chose to carry on to the north without calling at the Arawan post of the Maghsharen Tuareg. They left within half a day of its gates, carrying with them (for a price) all the surplus water the remaining travellers could spare and also the guide, who received, and counted, a hundred gold mithqals for his services. Then they set off, rather fast, for the nearest oasis.
Later, Nicholas realised that Umar had been afraid that Akil would damage the springs. In fact, the Maghsharen had not been so prescient. It was the winds of the previous week that had silted them up, so that when their camels raced towards the green of the palms, there was no broad sheet of water to see; only stretches of mud, with pools of sluggish water lying between them. There was enough, perhaps, for the camels. There was not enough for fifty camels and forty men with a waterless journey before them.
The chief merchant turned to Umar. ‘Katib. We must take what there is, and turn back to Arawan.’
‘You must turn back,’ Umar said. ‘We shall go on. But, from your kindness, allow our beasts to water first, and let us share out what drinking water there is. Your journey will be shorter than ours. Also, there is the guide.’
‘Take him. We know the way back,’ said the merchant. He looked relieved. He had agreed to come in the first place, Nicholas thought, only to show respect for the katib. The mercha
nt said, ‘Will all your men wish to continue?’
Two of them didn’t. It left four, and himself and Umar to deal with six camels. He paid for some goats, and took what food could be spared. It was mostly millet, and kola nuts. He didn’t comment on that. He said. ‘Do we need all these camels?’
‘Yes,’ said Umar. They set off that night.
Now there was silence, for worried men did not talk for too long, especially as the night deepened and walking became automatic; the feet of men and camels travelling up and down the long, curving dunes, leaving them ploughed but unplanted behind them.
Above, the stars hung, enormous and glittering. Nicholas knew their names now: the names he’d learned on his first, ecstatic voyage; the names Diogo Gomes had used; the names in the books he had left behind, in the city where he had just spent part of a lifetime. The drovers had other names for them as well. Some were cheerfully obscene. Some were beautiful.
Beauty was what surrounded them now. It had been there from the beginning, but made indistinct by the host of people about them. Now they were but seven pepper-seeds upon an ocean which stretched, white as curds, to the rim of the universe; specks as remote as those he had watched from a sea-spattered cliff-top in Europe. And as the sun rose, disclosing the scalloped forms of the dunes, and sank, a vast glory at night, Nicholas experienced the liberation he had not so far been vouchsafed in his life: an emotion of awe and of thankfulness that he had felt nowhere else.
He said little that day or the next, but walked, and sat alone swaying for hour after hour on his beast, the two sticks of his tent in his fists, his shadowed eyes blind, while his mind began to make sense of many things. Whatever it was he had found, it was not the Sea of Obscurity. It was light, and self-knowledge, and peace.
On the third day, Umar roused him. ‘I have taken a decision.’
The world returned. Nicholas said, ‘Never mind your decision. What is this place, your desert?’
Umar smiled, ‘A place to go, when one has feasted with wise men, as you have. Do you want to hear of the problems of the flesh, instead of the soul? We cannot reach the wells by Taodeni as we wanted. Our water is low, and the guide, the takshif, says he smells a storm coming. Therefore we are travelling towards the wells of Bir al Ksaib instead.’
‘We’ll reach water much quicker that way?’ Nicholas said. For two days, he hadn’t felt hungry. Now he did.
‘Three days sooner. Perhaps two and a half. It may make all the difference.’
‘But it’s out of our way. So it will take longer to reach Taghaza afterwards?’
‘It will add two days to the overall journey,’ Umar said. ‘But the storm may add many more. We shall need to be prepared, that is all, and in good heart. We are eating. Come and talk to the men.’
The sandstorm, when it came, was the first, but not the worst. During it, nothing could be done but sit cocooned in its path while it belaboured the back and tore and whipped and stung its way through to the flesh, so that every man’s body was heavy with sand, and the eyes, the mouth, the ears became choked with it. The camels stamped: ropes broke and burdens went swinging; the objects of most vital necessity – their water-skins, the carcasses of the goats they had had to kill – required constant and desperate protection.
When it was over they were exhausted, and had lost two days’ travel. And all about them, the slopes, the valleys, the outcrops of fine sculptured sand had radically altered. They were where they had been, but the desert had reformed about them. Then the takshif, silent throughout, stirred and rose to his feet. ‘Katib?’
‘Yes?’ said Umar.
‘I will guide you by the shift of the sun, and the wind. In a little, the sand will speak louder. But it is speaking already. Tell your men not to fear, and be strong.’
The men were strong, and also experienced. Nicholas thought that, given the choice, they preferred the natural perils of the desert to the black camps, the sudden attacks of the winter. Now, they were unlikely to be troubled by brigands, and were beyond Akil’s power.
Success depended on how long it would take to reach Bir al Ksaib, and on their strength, and that of the camels. All the desert was strewn with the bones of long-dead camels, and often those of the men who accompanied them. The sands round Timbuktu were threaded with ivory rib-cages, and it had been the same at the oasis and Arawan. Their owners had died within sight of water, as if joy itself had stopped their tired hearts.
They walked and rode for three days before the next storm, and after that, walked more than they rode, to save the camels, for whom there was little food left. They killed a camel the day after the storm, and cut up and dried its flesh in the sun, seething some of it in the liquid wrung from its own stomach and bladder. The rest they poured into their empty water-skins. One of the drovers fell sick and had to be carried. The desert contained, in tidy piles, the discarded loads from both camels.
Umar had counted the days, as well as Nicholas. The second night after the storm, Umar said, ‘If we had gone to Taodeni instead, we should be there.’
It was not really the case. The sandstorms would have held them up just the same. But it was true that their food was nearly finished and their water so reduced that they were perpetually parched. Umar said, ‘Do you wish me to bring out the goro?’
He was speaking of kola nuts. Nicholas had seen them. The size of a chestnut and expensive, the most efficacious were white. Chewed, they dispelled in time all sense of hunger and weariness. They were the means Nicholas had used to bring Godscalc back from Ethiopia. They took their own toll. Nicholas said, ‘Soon, perhaps. But not yet.’
Soon, Nicholas began to dream of the pools in the Ma’ Dughu, and of the river that ran past his gardens in Kouklia. When Umar shook him awake, he laughed creakily, and told him that he was thinking of the water-wheel at Bruges, and what he had done to it.
That was the day the sick man went crazy, and Nicholas thought perhaps he himself was affected as well, because there on the dancing, quivering sand was a lake, with palm trees about it, and animals drinking.
‘They tell you it is the sport of demons,’ Umar said. ‘But it is a trick of the light. There is such a place. But it is not there, on the sand.’ Umar had become thin and sunken of eye, as they all were, but he had shown no emotion except when the thread broke. At home, Nicholas knew, Zuhra was already carrying their third child. It would be born before Umar returned. Nicholas didn’t need to be told what Umar was doing for him.
Then the blind man came again, as they rested at noon, and said, ‘Katib, I smell a storm. There is one camel I see you have favoured. Give it to me, and I will take it to Bir al Ksaib and bring you back water. I can outrun the wind.’
‘Tell it to everyone,’ Umar said. ‘We shall all decide.’
They let him go, for the trust they felt in him. Under clear skies, he explained, the strongest might just reach the well in two days. Travelling hampered by storms, none could do it. By waiting for him, man and beast would harbour their powers. They would have four camels left, for six people. When he came back, there would be five between seven. And if there were others for hiring, he would bring them. But the Bir al Ksaib was just a pool.
They watched him out of sight, and then prepared as well as they could for the day, and the night, and the storm. But first, the sick man died, and they gave him a mantle of sand.
The storm came, and they lived through it for two lightless days, and into the dawn of a third. Their food and drink, which was almost nothing, had been apportioned to last precisely four days.
They had the camels, slumped bickering and groaning beside them. These had little urine to yield, and could give no more blood and still walk. If the takshif didn’t come back, it would be necessary to ride them, or to kill and eat them and walk. It would be necessary, but not likely to be very successful.
Nicholas had stopped being hungry, and thought he would vomit if he had to eat camel again. Umar said Nicholas would be surprised what he could do, given a
little discomfort.
They joked when they could. They sat together, five men, and talked sometimes, but talking was painful. Nicholas dreamed a great deal. In some of his dreams, he was with Godscalc, bleeding, retching, striving to climb down some impossible gully. In some he was in Famagusta, where others were starving and he was in a kind of pain that was worse. He was always in pain, waking or dreaming. They all were.
‘Well?’ Nicholas said on the fourth morning. ‘I wager you a piece of camel against a big layer-pasty that he’s missed the way and gone on to Marrakesh. A really big layer-pasty, the kind with duck and pigeon and goose and whole eggs in it. And a girl, all covered with sugar.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ said Umar. ‘You’re thinking of your stomach again. If you must think of something tasty, why not mutton? Or remember the Koy’s last feast, when he tried to serve lion?’
‘Lion suet,’ Nicholas said. ‘Lion suet is good for the ears. Bel was always trying to melt it. Do you hear anything?’
Sometimes, they forgot to listen. Sometimes, their eyes burning and swollen, they couldn’t see. One of the men said, ‘My lord!’ He lurched to his feet.
Nicholas sat with his back to the sun, and didn’t turn. He sat opposite Umar, and let Umar’s face tell him what was happening behind him.
Umar said, ‘Which camel are you going to eat? You’re not damned well going to cheat and eat the fresh ones. I want to see you eat something that stinks as much as you do.’
His face quivered, then steadied. Nicholas took both his hands and held them tightly. Then he got up, for the three others were standing embracing each other and calling, and when he went forward, they put their arms round his shoulders too, and then Umar’s.