First impressions - interiors lit by bare bulbs, donkeys swaying down the street with bales of hay ballooning around them, tall figures in indigo robes caught in the glare of our headlights.
Our hotel, the Relais Azalai, is on a low rise on the western edge of town, overlooking what until recently was a river. We unload and carry our bags in through a now familiar line of salesmen, only this time they are Touareg, lean, olive-skinned faces swathed in black and indigo headdresses. And they’re not just outside the hotel; the staff at reception are also swathed in black or blue headdresses. This is the first sign that Timbuktu is not like other places. Up to now, nomads have always been on the fringes of urban life. In Timbuktu they run the place.
Enjoy a few luxuries - a shower, cold beers, a hot meal and a bed. My air-conditioning sounds like an overladen truck on a very steep hill. But what the hell, I’m in Timbuktu.
Day Fifty-Two
TIMBUKTU
Walk out of the hotel to look around, but it’s quite impossible. The only reason a foreigner would walk out of his hotel unescorted is clearly to buy something, and the Touareg know nothing of the soft sell.
By the time I’m driven back in by the rattling of silver rings and the cries of ‘I give you good price’, I have time to take in a pretty depressing landscape. The walls of Timbuktu look fine, but in front of them is another Timbuktu, a city of semicircular huts set in thorn bush stockades and covered in sheeting of rattan or plastic. Its trees and bushes are hung with plastic bags and children and animals share the sand.
It seems the Touareg, who founded Timbuktu 900 years ago, are still coming in from the desert.
My spirits rise when we’re driven into town. A city that seems almost determined to be decrepit still has some beautiful buildings. One of the finest is the catchily named Djingareiber Mosque. It’s also one of the very few buildings that would have been here in the golden age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Leo Africanus described Timbuktu as a city where the king ‘kept a magnificent and well-furnished court’, with ‘a great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king’s expense’. Irregular walls run round the mosque, curved and crenellated with rounded Sudanese outlines and supported with well-cut buttresses. The banco plaster that covers the walls is so recent that it’s patterned with the handprints of those who applied it.
We are allowed inside. At the main door two boys offer their help.
‘We will guard your shoes,’ they promise solemnly, laying my travel-stained sneakers one beside the other with great tenderness, as if they were new-born children.
What strikes me immediately is how cool it is inside the walls, and how dark. Narrow arcades run through a forest of rough-plastered columns, 130 of them, receding into the gloom.
It has an ancient, unostentatious feel to it, enclosed and protective, intimate and impressive at the same time. There is little decoration. Long timber beams, said to be cut from Dom palms 60 miles away from the city, support the ceiling. The walls and columns are a mixture of local limestone, mud bricks and plaster. The extra strength of the stonework probably accounts for why this mosque has proved more durable than its counterpart in Djenne. It has stood here since 1327, when it was built by a man called El Saheli, credited as the inventor of the process by which mud bricks are made to this day.
I stroll amongst the columns, savouring the silence. Every now and then a shaft of sunlight breaks through, piercing the darkness like a silver blade, or a door opens, briefly silhouetting a figure against a shining wall of heat.
The imam of the Djingareiber Mosque is coolness itself. He arrives for Friday prayers decked out in a swirl of airy, white, cotton robes and a matching turban. A neatly trimmed white beard contrasts sharply with the deep ebony of his skin. After prayers he invites us to his house nearby. It’s odd to walk in off the street and find yourself in a house carpeted with sand, albeit of much finer quality than the public sand outside. Also odd that in such a substantial property the interior doors should be faced with corrugated tin.
We sit in the sand and take tea together, whilst in clear and careful French he explains the history of Timbuktu. He’s at great pains to emphasise the intellectual and scholarly achievements of the Middle Ages and the sharp and sudden decline that followed the Moroccan invasion at the end of the sixteenth century. Scholars were deported and killed he says, with grave concern, as if it had happened yesterday.
Talking to this wise and educated man, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Timbuktu has been in steady decline since the time of William Shakespeare.
Even when Europeans finally braved the hostility of the desert to reach it, there was a definite hint of anticlimax. Rene Caillie, who came here in 1828, found ‘this capital of the Soudan, which had for so long been the goal of all my ambitions’ to be little more than ‘a jumble of badly built houses, ruled over by a heavy silence’. On the other hand, Alexander Laing, the Scot who beat him to it by two years, wrote that ‘in every respect except in size … it has completely met my expectations’.
Laing’s achievement in reaching Timbuktu at all becomes the more admirable, or insanely foolhardy, when you consider that in the 250 years following the Moroccan invasion, forty-three Europeans set out to reach the city and only four succeeded, of which he was the first. He crossed the Sahara from Tripoli in Libya, a 2000-mile journey during which he was brutally attacked and severely wounded by tribesmen on the way and murdered by them, for refusing to renounce his Christianity, on the way back. He was thirty-three.
During his five-week stay in the city, though, Laing was well looked after by the trading community and the house in which he stayed still stands.
On the wall above the door is a plaque to his memory, whilst in front of the house, stuck in the sand, a less discreet signboard announces in loud stencil that this is ‘Mission Culturelle, Site No. 2. Gordon Laing’.
By the standard of the time, this slim two-storey corner house must have been quite substantial. Inside, the rooms are clean and empty. I’m told it’s up for rent and consider putting down a deposit for the address alone.
An 8- by 5-foot downstairs room with yellow washed walls leads, via a flight of narrow stairs, up to another low room with delicately carved arabesque shutters, and from there onto a flat roof.
I stand out here for as long as I can bear the scorching midday heat, taking in the view.
Stretched out beneath me is a pale, dusty city with the colour bleached out of it. There are few modern buildings, and, apart from the pyramid-shaped minarets of the mosques, the overall feel is of flat roofs and iron-grilled windows, broken up by the occasional colonial touch: a stone arch, an attempted balustrade. There are satellite dishes on the walls but open sewers down the centre of the streets. Many buildings are either crumbling or derelict and the tents, families and livestock of the nomads have taken over the corpses of abandoned houses.
I shade my eyes and stare out beyond the walls to the desert, which has the city in an ever-tightening grip. Due north, the direction that both Laing and Caillie took when they left Timbuktu, there is no accommodation for the traveller before the town of Taoudenni, more than 400 miles into the desert. And you would not be welcome there. Taoudenni is a Saharan Siberia, an unimaginably hostile place, where Mali sends her criminals and troublemakers to work the salt mines, out of the sight of foreigners.
Back down amongst its narrow streets, Timbuktu feels tired, as if the effort of just being here at all is using up all her energies. There is none of the brash bounce of Mopti or the fragile charm of Djenne. The shops have little to sell, and though the Mission Culturelle does its best to direct you to interesting places, it does so without much conviction.